The People Professional Who Thinks in Systems

I lead People and Culture at Shiv Nadar School, where my work covers the full arc of the employee experience: talent acquisition, employer branding, learning and development, change management, and diversity and inclusion. With eight-plus years across HR functions, I operate less as a policy custodian and more as a culture architect. The decisions I make shape how teachers, administrators, and support staff relate to each other, to leadership, and to the institution we work within. In that context, communication is never a soft skill. It is the mechanism through which culture either coheres or fragments. That orientation is what brought me to ISB Executive Education’s Business Storytelling and Executive Presence Programme.

What Presence Actually Requires

The first thing the programme challenged was my understanding of executive presence. The framework I encountered breaks into three interdependent layers: style, which covers physical signals and professional conduct; substance, which covers domain credibility and situational awareness; and what I call the soul of presence, the alignment between outward expression and authentic self. True leadership presence isn't just about visual cues and business etiquette; the real anchor is the soul - our alignment with our authentic self, practising deep active listening, and maintaining emotional equanimity under pressure. That third layer, the one most presence models omit, turned out to be where the most consequential work happened.

Stories as Neurochemical Events

The insight that restructured how I think about communication came from understanding what a well-crafted narrative actually does physiologically. A story built from genuine experience triggers oxytocin, which drives empathy and social trust, and dopamine, which sustains attention and motivates action. Data tables do neither. Stories aren't corporate fluff, they trigger actual human neurochemistry - it's how we bridge the gap between cold information and shared wisdom.

As HR professionals, we often focus on helping people understand what is changing. Stories help us address a different question entirely: what does this mean to me? The business storytelling certification gave me a working model for designing those conditions intentionally.

Structure as an Act of Respect

The third layer of my learning was about delivery mechanics. In my domain of People and Culture, the ability to navigate a difficult conversation; a performance issue, a grievance, a restructuring discussion; determines whether trust survives contact with conflict. I came away from the programme with a sharper set of tools for both ends of the communication spectrum. For complex information, I absorbed frameworks that translate data into decisions without overwhelming an audience.

For high-stakes conversations, I refined my approach to surfacing underlying concerns, validating emotional responses, and working toward small, concrete commitments rather than demanding resolution. When tension arises, shifting focus to uncover underlying concerns and aiming for small micro-commitments creates a bridge of mutual interest rather than a wall. The structures are not scripts. They are architectures for keeping the listener in the room.

The Story Vault She Carries Back

I return to my team with what I call a "story vault", and the programme helped me realise I had been building it for years without naming it that. People and Culture gives you a front-row seat to defining professional moments: resilience, reinvention, difficult decisions, and growth. Those experiences are inventory. The stories I value most are not stories of success; they're stories of learning. What the programme added was intentionality - not which story to tell, but what the audience needs right now. The story itself is only one part of the equation. Relevance is what gives it impact.

Synopsis

Shweta Advani, Lead – People and Culture, Shiv Nadar School, and a participant of the Business Storytelling and Executive Presence Programme at ISB Executive Education, is an HR professional with eight-plus years of experience across talent, culture, and organisational development. She designs and leads strategic people initiatives that build high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures.