Women leaders share their success and failure stories

At the e4m women Achievers Summit & Awards 2022 held recently, a panel discussion was held to reflect on the real-life stories of the success and failures of women leaders. The session chair for the panel discussion was Tarundeep Singh, Chief Growth Officer, The 23 Watts. The panelists were Ruchika Batra, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Ericsson- Amrit Ahuja, Independent PR Consultant- Sudha Sarin, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications, Power2sme, Deepa Dey, head of comms and sustainability, nutrition and special projects, Hindustan Unilever Limited.

The discussion started with Tarundeep Singh asking panelists about the life lessons that helped them carve the most successful path for themselves and their experiences as women professional that have helped them in their personal life.

Sudha Sarin said “There are no absolutes. The goalposts keep shifting. When I began, may be it was about getting the job done. But it no longer is. Maybe at that time it was the paycheck at the end of the day, but it no longer is. Things change, and things shift.”

“How do we engage with the stakeholders, organisations colleagues? There are good and bad experiences while working in an organization. The way we react changes the way we address all sorts of life experiences. The three important things are: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, learn to change one constant that you have gone through your entire journey, and stay relevant.

There will be challenges, there will be days of boredom, but the most important thing is to have courage. We must never try to be superwomen. We don’t have to back every ball that comes our way,” she added.

Taking the discussion further, Amrit Ahuja said, “When I look back at my professional journey, there was one thing that worked for me: that I am answerable to myself and I am comfortable with what I am doing.

Ahuja also talked about mentoring women and the importance of networking for women in the current arena. “The three things that matters are: Being comfortable with yourself, investing in your personal development and skilling, and thinking about what is next," she shared.

Talking about whether professional success has an impact on personal life, Batra said, “Something that impacts you as an individual, considering the number of hours you spend at work, is that there's continuous learning both ways. At the end of the day, what you learn at work, you do carry that learning back into your personal life. And likewise, how you evolve as an individual does impact your work as well. The three things that I would talk about are: Being able to deal with change, carrying your relationships and being able to deal with teams, and being resilient and continuously focus on developing yourself. You do need to continuously learn and develop yourself if you want to stay relevant.”

Discussing the importance of failure in the professional journey, Batra added, “Whether it's failure or success,  what's more important is that you do analyze and pickup from there and move on. It's not going to change your life in a very radical way. I think the important thing is to learn from there. What could you do better? Even when we do a very successful event, I think our team, always gets together and see what we did very well, what we can do better, even for next time. So, for me, it's not the end of the game. You just learn from whatever it is, failure or success.”

Building on the same point, Tarundeep Singh asked about some tips for young people who encounter failure at any point. Answering the question, Sudha replied, “If you look at it in terms of societal terms, it's a stigmatized word. From childhood, we've seen failure has been punished, and success has been rewarded and that's really where we then begin to respond to a similar situation. However, if we look at each one of us in this room, each one of us has possibly not got the desired exam results as we wanted. It is inevitable; at some point of time in your life, you're going to come across failure, but what matters is your response to that. How do you respond to failure?” 

Taking about setbacks setting one on a learning curve, Ahuja added, “Do not sign up for something that you don't believe in. If you have your purpose defined and you sleep at night saying I am doing the right thing, then you'll be able to navigate failure.”

Answering Tarundeep’s question on how to get more women in the leadership role and how do we help them realize and utilize their potential, Ahuja added, “I think before we even get to that, I just want to throw a quote: The McKinsey Institute says that if we want a gender-equal world, we need to invest in them. And if India invests in bringing women into the workforce, our GDP will rise to Rs 750 trillion by 2025.  But to do that every organization needs to design a mentoring program. Mentoring also has to be done at several levels. If your organization is not arranging for mentors, seek out mentors.”

Carrying forward the discussion on research and analysis, Dey shared, “I think research is very important, but I would start with opportunities. I have the privilege of working in an organization which in 2001 started something called Project Shakti. Shakti works for women entrepreneurs in rural India and they are being empowered, trained to be self-sufficient. The second thing is safety. When women come to work, they need a safe environment and we have recently started a couple of projects where we are bringing women into areas that were earlier very difficult for women to come and work in. We have provided policies and support and enhanced their career opportunities. We have also been working with various women groups to ensure that they can come back from their maternity leaves, etc. The other thing I feel for organizations, it's important to have policies that will be supportive of women as well as men. I mean, there should be policies for everybody, but I think policies for women are very important. And finally, having role models. When you have role models, bring them out, talk about them, allow them to engage with a set of individuals who are also aspiring to do something different in their lives and I think the whole combination of all these things would probably have a very winning outcome for women.”

Singh concluded the discussion by summarizing the main takeaways.

Prepare, work smart, have fun, learn to be uncomfortable, have the courage to be disliked, and have a dream & go all out to achieve it and were some of the most common advices given by the panelists for young women leaders.