Kishen Maharaj
Senior Director - Commercial Operations at Valaris Limited
I’m an energy‑sector executive with 15+ years leading commercial operations, corporate strategy, and enterprise‑wide transformation across the offshore drilling and global services...
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- Commercial Operations Excellence: Strategies to enhance business performance
- Mergers and Acquisitions Mastery: Navigating complex corporate mergers effectively
- Energy Sector Transformation: Leading successful change in organizations
- Performance Analytics in Drilling: Utilizing data for operational efficiency
- Sustainable Practices in Oil & Gas: Implementing eco-friendly strategies in energy.
Meet the mentor
blog articles
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- What is budget? What are the actuals for the last 4 quarters? Where are the variances? What are the driving factors contributing to the variances? Are they one time costs or recurring variances?
- I am currently faced with a key employee looking to leave the organization. Determine the stakeholders in this case the employee and subordinates. Identify why the employee is looking for other opportunities and not wanting to continue working with an organization. Utilize the five whys to get the root causes. Used a whole might be framework to get to various possible solutions Implement the solutions and test the effectiveness of employee commitment and attrition rate
- I would use an example of an accident and how when this incident occurs the importance of timely stakeholder engagement along with the use of five ways and getting down to root causes is important has the longest time elapses the less effective investigation can be as human nature tends to configure how they think things occurred vs how did they actually occur. Then after getting to true root causes vs underlying causes is important as it ensure when you explore solutions it’s a sustainable Solution. You then also develop measures if not already present to test the effectiveness of the solution and iterate as needed to maintain sustainability of actions.
- To reflect on her responses and to prepare ahead of any follow up sessions. It’s also a good way to have an ager action review and reflect what worked and what didn’t based on the outcome of the interview process.
- I would give them atleast a week to allow them to work through what they are doing as interviewing processes are not short ones. I would then follow up with another just checking in to see if they got the initial communication or if I have a contact giving a quick call just to follow up.
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- I would say prepare prepare prepare! Research the company and role you are looking to fill understand the mission values and strategy of the organization and how does your role fit into delivering that. Understand how can you express the differentiating value add to this position and most of all practice and get feedback
- It demonstrates commitment to the role Allows your name to be remembered and move to top of mind for the panel after interviewing several candidates. Allows an opportunity to drop in a few salient points that differentiates you if you were to be chosen for this role
- Thank the interviewer(s) for their time. Send the email within 24hours after the interview. Proofread and edit. Include all your interviewers in the email. Mention anything you wish you had said. Use your email to address any issues and concerns that came up during the interview, including topics you didn’t answer as thoroughly as you might have wished.
- It is the first bit of information which helps the reviewer in understanding who the candidate is and a bit about their background. It also assists in checking boxes for requirements and would aid the interview panel with their line of questioning when it comes to the formal interview process. It allows a standard process for categorizing best fit for requirements at a macro level without having to review every single form and help shortlist interviewees if completed in a digital format.
- Competence in the job, Leadership experience, Demonstrate integrity, drive to enableContinuous improvement, Motivated, willingness to travel
- Being able to work and collaborate in groups, critical thinker, conduct analysis and reporting, work within a particular organization structure, deliver designers performance expectations
- Computer literacy, knowledge of safe systems of work, Coaching skills, leadership skills, project management skills,
- 1. Explain how your experience would make you effective in this role and differentiate you from other candidates. 2. How has your formal education shaped your approach to getting work done? 3. What does leadership mean to you and how do you value and demonstrate leadership? 4. Tell me of a time your boss was not there and you were next in line to make a decision. How did you go about making that decision in her/his absence? 5. You are faced with a major change to implement in the organization how do you go about communicating with the stakeholders to be impacted? 6. Tell me how do you manage competing priorities when you have multiple projects with overlapping timelines? 7. In a service business it is said the customer is always right how does that statement resonate with you and how do you maintain high service quality?
- Getting a deeper understanding of why we do not communicate well and modifying the method to ensure it’s more effective. There’s always going to be diversity in opinions views and perspectives and being able to collaborate effectively despite these differences and leveraging these differences to create ideas and creatively build upon each other helps since the approach is less conflicting and it’s to stay cool as I treating in it particular idea to improve it and not critique it
- Experience working for a customer having to collaborate with someone to get project complete when there were internal conflicts. Being able to personal feelings aside and work together towards a common goal to deliver a quality service to the customer was important. Once there was alignment between us were able to do that successfully.
- Silo Mentality stifles creativity, delays decision making, increases complexity in business systems and processes and overhead cost of an organization
- Hello mentalities can be tackled by educating employees on cross functional collaboration on the benefits of it. A review of organization design and structure and moving from a functional structure to metric structure. And creating programs where cross functional collaboration is recognized and rewarded board intrinsically an extrinsically. Creating strategic team goals for the organization that is also across functionally centric as a very good talked on the way I’ve also tackling silo mentalities and moving people Thomas cross functional working style
- Silo mentalities may creat a view of disorganization, disruption and confusion in the mind of the customer and their perception of the organization being one where we are not structured or focused.
- 7 To improve this I would suggest reviewing the current archetype for communication and collaboration and review that against the best in class template then create strategic team goals to address the gaps and began measuring performance through certain key performance indicators to ensure sustainability off the plan
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- I would look at our current marketing performance against our competitors and look at their organizational structure their strategy and their delivery of their plan compared to ours and for competitors who are winning in this area compared to us evaluate the contributing factors for these win rates as it relates to marketing and sales strategies and revert to the best in class frame for effective marketing and sales collaboration to really bring to life and operationalize how we can improve
- Effective collaboration between marketing and sales ensure that there’s proper flow of information from the customer to the sales team to defined requirements of the customer and provide information necessary for the marketing team to shape the content and strategy for the marketing mix. Marketing collaborating with sales on the content developed would ensure that sales teams are educated on the strategy on how to approach different strategic groups to ultimately turn leads into profit
- What was the previous years performance vs this years performance? What is the prior quarters oerformance vs current? What is the budget vs actual? Look at the data and understand the variances for where they have had increased opex
- I would try to understand the issue. Identify the stakeholders who contribute to the current process. Conduct a root cause analysis with key stakeholder engagement. get to the root cause of the problem and utilize the how might we frame work to evaluate potential solutions then test then prioritize the solutions and test effectiveness of the solitons implemented.