Women, Men & Diversity
After a one hour panel discussion, numerous pages worth of notes to self and I can’t think of a better way to open the article.
“Don’t just have a mentor, have a sponsor” — these opening lines by Arundhati Bhattacharya, former Chairperson at SBI and current CEO of Salesforce, are going to stay with me forever.
She highlights the need for a mentor — somebody who could be 4 or 5 levels higher or outside the organisation — someone you go to for the most difficult questions but what is equally important is to have a sponsor. Somebody who is 1 or 2 levels higher and is able to put you in the right positions based on your ability.
When asked about what the leadership team can do in any organisation to make itself more inclusive in terms of gender or how they can help women, both our leading ladies had very astute answers, both from their own personal experiences and from a general perspective. I managed to document a few.
Zia Mody, Co-founder & Managing Partner at AZB & Partners, highlights the importance of having an open line of communication with women to listen to small pain points and how we need to encourage the women in our organisation to have conversations.
If they are not comfortable talking to a man, it is important to have powerful female intermediaries, but it is important their concerns are heard. She goes on highlight the current state of affairs that is a leaky pipeline where 48% of women dropout of the workforce.
Her advice was not just for the men in the industry but for the women to continue to be resilient, to continue to work hard, to communicate and also put efforts to change the bias in the minds of people around them.
Meanwhile Arundhati goes on to add how she saw the Zia had converted a room in her office to a creche with a day care nurse just for one employee. This sends out such a positive message and that employee would have felt so good that her efforts are valued at the organization.
Arundhati also shared her experiences at SBI where sometimes there were different yardsticks to measure the success of men and women. While having done difficult postings was a factor in deciding the promotions, nobody dug into analysing why the women weren’t taking up the difficult postings. In a conversation with young women, Arundhati found out that young women weren’t taking up rural postings was because of lack of accommodation for single women. The social stigma was something that was totally not in the hands of the employee and this was becoming a factor in deciding their future. So it is important for organisations to try and understand what is causing their employees to not pursue a particular path or to drop out.
“Women are considered the primary care giver and I noticed a pattern that most women drop-out either when they have a kid or have to tend to the needs of their ageing parents. This is when I came up with a 2 year sabbatical for women and single men to use at these stages of life” — Arundhati Bhattacharya
The final and the concluding question by Ashu was a rather difficult one — “ Is leadership gender agnostic?”
Both the ladies giggled but went on to boldly answer the question.
According to Zia, women and men both can make great leaders but women do come with a higher dollop of EQ and they know how to retreat and come back stronger.
While Arundhati points out that women are better listeners not just plain simple words but between the words and coming, inherently from an Indian background women are generally more collaborative.
This was just a small attempt by me to share some really powerful words by two powerful ladies. I fall short of words to express how much I am impressed and motivated to excel in my career. More power to you ma’am.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
