The View From The Glass Tower
Dr. Renu Khanna, a renowned leadership expert headed the $4 Billion Tech Mahindra’s Leadership Development Practice for over two decades. A snippet of the key lessons that she has shared with women professionals and entrepreneurs, as she gets talking about how she climbed the corporate ladder right to the top. — BY SHRUTI CHADHA
“Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.” — JOYCE MEYER.
This is exactly what Dr. Renu Khanna, a renowned leadership expert who headed the $4 Billion Tech Mahindra’s Leadership Development Practice for over two decades, has aimed at. “Changing lives by driving people towards excellence”. Renu is a well known learning strategist, a certified coach and a learning and development guru with 25 years of rich experience in leading leadership development. She has been recognized a Women Achiever in IT by Interopp in 2014 and has been awarded as one of the top thirty trainers list by Asia Pacific Congress HRM. Renu now works extensively in areas of organizational development, leadership development, engagement and diversity.
SC: Could you please take us through a journey of how you reached the peak of your career, sharing some landmark years, which changed the way you think, and were significant contributors to your success?
RK: My father was in the army, and that made me travel all across India, it helped me meet new people and connect with varied cultures and personalities. This interpersonal exposure helped me a lot in my corporate life as well. I have done my Honours in organic chemistry and wanted to mature into a doctor. However, at the age of 23–24, my family started looking for a match for me. I had sacrificed a career for the wish and needs of my family, however for a life partner; I wanted to be sure about my choice. So, I would tell everyone that I wanted to do my P.hD. after my marriage and that would mean at least 3–5 years of studying, and meant I could not have a child for 5–6 years. Things worked out with my husband who instantly agreed. It left a deep engrained message that if you really want to do something and cannot stop thinking about it, you will attain that, however it is important to just speak up”Speak Up” was my first big lesson for achieving my dreams. I finished my P.hD. on the comparative study of interpersonal relations in UP and Andhra Pradesh. That was when I joined Sriram refrigeration and I was the only women working with 1400 men at that time. I learnt that in a manufacturing line, though most of the people are blue collared, respect was a key ingredient for relations. I moved into concepts of leadership and tem building, where I was completely empowered to design programmes and deliver new products.
In 1996, I was recruited by an upcoming company called Satyam Computers, which had a strength of 700. They were setting up their learning and development operations and ISO 9000 standards. For 20 years, I was with Tech Mahindra with a journey spanning across technical training, behavioural, management and leadership training. My learning there was that it is important to understand the business, which the organization is, the structure, services, and products in various geographies. In all programmes, the emphasis was to connect the learning with what the business demands.
SC: How did you scale your vision across the exponential growth that Satyam witnessed from a 700 member company to 1 lakh in a decade?
RK: In 1996 was the Y2K phase. This was time where we were dealing with mainframes and it was the golden era of IT business. The first assignment given to me was to identify and help the top 150 high potentials and senior leaders to grow. We created a programme called “Working Together Works.” The vision of the organization that time was to become a 10,000 people organization. We were all given a mandate to plan for the 10,000 mark and be prepared to assimilate the same culture across geographies. We started setting up centres across India. To scale our services, we started training managers in a classroom driven mode, we gave generic trainings and aligned with multiple vendors who could help us disseminate this with the same learning objectives, takeaways and same vigour for our vision.
With the millennial change and recession in 2000, the focus shifted on building and establishing products that could manage the slump, since IBM seized to help. That was when several other technologies were booming and we had to make sure we are able to go with the change. Other domains like banking and finance, engineering services, healthcare started emerging. This required a lot of functional training. A complete new organizational structure had to be accepted, the hiring was low, however dealing with change and establishing a SATYAM WAY of managing, building relationships became our top priority. Post 2000, it was very important to establish a learning culture since sessions were done across teleconferencing and virtual training had started picking up. We started developing smaller capsules of content; programmes that could help teams understand the corporate culture and align themselves to the company’s vision. We started looking at behavioural competencies, their definitions and associated behaviours. This was then built into the leadership development and management development programmes. However, it came with an opportunity to explore technology as a learning partner. We built a leadership pipeline and a development centre headquartered in Hyderabad. With extensive travel by all our team members, adaptation of webex webinars, v share sessions and e learning blended platforms could reach out to these large numbers and built a connection between learning and performance management, this helped individuals take charge of their learning.
Learning Lessons
1. Being obsessed with your dream: Speak Up
2. Think Big to grow Big: To have an Impact think about Scale, how can you scale your business, operations and even culture.
3. Accept Change as an opportunity: Go for Growth more than titles
4. Business can and will be un predictable, being Agile takes you a long way
5 Results matter, do what get you results, Listening…really listening matters?
6. Don’t let people’s perceptions about you, change the way you are and feel within.
7. Not all battles in life can be won, don’t give up on the few big wars that you might have to fight.
8. To be empowered, make choices for yourself and take the responsibility of those choices.
When the crisis came in 2009, this taught us a lot. Nothing in life can be taken for granted. That was a time when we had to let go of many people. A huge change management plan had to be brought in. There was fear, anxiety, there was a lot of sorrow, disappointment and heightened emotions to be handled. It was a period of struggle until Tech Mahindra acquired us, where we had to keep the hope that something good will happen. Those 4 months emerged as the changing phase to me and many other trainers who stayed back. This was the most human part of learning, we had live podcasts done on several floors, we had leaders come in and speak to the people.
SC: Did you feel gender diversity came in as a differential factor? Did you see any difference between men and women to handle the tough turfs of recession?
RK: The stress handling abilities of youngsters aged 22–28 years was probably the same. I saw the same zeal in men and women to get the next best opportunity; they were floating their resumes as soon as the news broke out. The age bracket that was worst hit was the mid level managers. Their stress handling capabilities seemed little better. The resilience to get back, the positive approach that something good will come out of this was probably a female gender attribute. I feel that the ability to handle stress has a lot to do with the kind of a personality that we have, and, the upbringing that we have witnessed.
SC: Has there been a time when you think breaking rules and moving away from what you yourself established, delivered value?
RK: Yes after the Satyam fall out, we had to manage the business reality, and so we stopped all our programmes and started a new programme called Reboot to reenergize people. The organization had slipped to half its size, it had about 50,000 people now and we did only Reboot for about 2 years all across the floors. It was not even a programme that was performed in a classroom. We decided to reach out to our employees and their families and make them understand that customers still expected outcome. The senior people were gone, the middle management had to deliver more than any time. At that time, people wanted a human touch. We had to abandon our core work and break away from the normal mode of training. Recruiting and retaining people with a belief that this organization will turn around. We had to listen and be patient authentic, genuine active listeners of what people were going through.
SC: What are some challenges you faced as a women, or do you think they have changed?
RK: People say it is a glass ceiling however, I see it more as a maze. The journey of women entrepreneurs or women in a corporate ladder is always like an intricate maze. Between the age of 25–35, struggling the family responsibilities. Come what may whatever choices they make, for me women empower and disempower themselves. I believe in a formula:
Power= fn (responsibility, choices). One makes the choice but does not take the responsibility of the choice. Which means they do not trust their capability to fulfil that choice? Sometimes we ask others to make choices for us, again we do not feel empowered because we do not have the ownership of that choice. If women do not make peace with the choices they have made in life, they continue to feel disempowered. Compared to a decade back the plethora of choices that women have now is immense from digital marketing, to IT, fashion, construction, pharma and all possible domains today are working towards a diverse workforce. Hence, prioritization is another skill that they should practice to invest their time and energy in the important activities that take them closer to their goals.
Life for women is all about making choices and taking the complete responsibility of our choices, with full confidence and capability, only then they will feel empowered. There are many battles in life and it is ok to give up some of the battles to win those big wars. If you do not know, where you want to go then any road will take you there. It is important to make sure that you are not dissipating your energies and health, early on in life. Hence, I see maintaining good health as a hygiene factor for helping women rise up the ladder. Managing energy and being positive is very important. Let go and forgive is a power that all women have.
When I used to enter a room full of men , I used to wonder will anybody even hear me and about two decades ago it was fairly rare to have a women facilitate learning for top leaders in business units. However, I realized if I do not speak, they would not hear me. Having a belief in yourself helps you find like minded mentors and fuels your career map. The whole idea of opening up and knowing your presence along with networking, being savvy in the organization is important.
A journey that started with a humble background, circumstantial pressures and moved into several battles of proving self led to the creation of a success story, that of reaching the top of the corporate ladder. With leader stories like these we definitely learn lessons that could guide us in our journey ahead. As we experience our own and grow to say the tale, what matters is to learn from stories of grit and determination. While their journey looks effortless as an outsider, their clarity of vision coupled with their strengths of being great listeners, empathetic, big thinkers and challenge driven individuals, are some assets that take them to the top. These women leaders understand survival, renewal and reinvention. They have grit and are not afraid to fight for what they believe in or an opportunity to achieve something of significance. In essence building a state of empowerment for self is taking charge of one’s life.
Shruti Chadha is a Talent Management and Learning and Development Specialist with over 12 years of experience in multicultural environments. She is a certified coach, organizational psychologist and corporate trainer for behavioural and Management skills.
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