Back in the 80s and 90s when I was the only female in the group, I would enter a meeting room full of men who would be smoking and chatting. Nobody paid attention to me or what I had to say, and no matter how much I tried I was ignored. But I felt that things needed to change. I wanted to create an impact and I wanted my voice to be heard. I wanted people to know what I was thinking, so I started going to meetings fully prepared and having done my homework really well. As a result the senior leaders started noticing me and observing my actions. They gradually started asking me questions and involving me in the meeting. They solicited my opinion and asked me if I had anything to add even if I had nothing to say. This boosted my confidence. I also had the habit of raising my hand and asking my manager if they were doing anything new and if get a new role. I was always keen on taking up new roles and responsibilities which opened up new avenues for me.

In 2020, when the world was fighting a pandemic, I started a new role as the country head of an organisation in South Africa. I had been warned that in the last two years 5 country heads had joined and left the organisation. In other words, the local team had been managed by multiple managers and things were chaotic. The global team blamed the local team for vindictiveness and politics. This made survival very difficult for me. In my first meeting with the team, I started by talking about transparency. I told them that if they did not surprise me, I will not surprise them. This was the only way to build trust in the team. If there was a big change in the consultation process, I would not do it without informing the team. I had genuine compassion for my team. During the COVID period, nearly 32 of my team members were infected and I felt responsible for taking care of them. I created a WhatsApp group for the team members and kept in touch with them regularly. I found out that those who were infected had to either work from home after they recovered or take a second Covid test and produce a negative report if they wished to return to the office. But most of them did not have the technology required to work from home, nor could they afford the second Covid test. Although this did not come to me as a management issue and none of the staff were complaining, I decided to take the step and arrange for the organisation to pay for the second Covid test for all the team members. This decision brought my team together who not only supported me but trusted me with whatever decisions I took as a leader.

I was hired as the Vice President of an American IT company in the 90s. On my first day, I went to meet the President of the business. I was informed at this time that two out of the three General Managers who were supposed to report to me had resigned. One individual resigned as he could not bear to tell his wife that he was reporting to a woman. Another individual left on the grounds that I was from a competitor’s company and also because he did not want to work with a woman. So, out of the three General Managers, two of them had resigned for whatever reasons, but it boiled down to me being a woman. I was completely taken aback as I had never experienced this before. So there were a lot of challenges in terms of accepting women as leaders. But do bear in mind that this was in the 90s. Things have improved a lot now.

I started my career with McKinsey and my first project was a public sector study that focused on rural infrastructure. I felt very connected to this project. One of the values practised by McKinsey was the “Obligation of Dissent” where we not only had the right but were obliged to raise our voice and disagree if we felt strongly about something. I was very inspired by this value. At one point, while we were working on the project, I felt that if we changed our approach and did it in a different way, then we would be able to double the impact. I spoke to the leaders about my idea. They listened to me and gave me access to the best experts in the world. Working together with them, I came up with a new approach and after adopting this approach, the impact nearly doubled. This was one of the most fulfilling projects that I worked on, and I did not have to wait for a formal leadership position to vocalise my opinion and create impact. This experience truly empowered me.

For some people leadership is a conscious choice, while others develop certain values and traits over time which unconsciously grooms them to become a leader. My realisation came when I was 12-years old. I faced so many ups and downs in my personal life that whether I liked it or not, I came out of all of them much stronger. My family and I were living in a small oil town near the city of Guwahati. When I was 12, one day, my father went missing from the oil company. He never came back, and our world turned upside down. Although my mother was offered a compensatory job, it was nowhere close to what my dad was making. We left the small oil down and moved to Guwahati. It was a completely different place and for 10 long years we struggled. I had to be strong and hide my vulnerabilities so I could stand strong by my mother and my younger sister. All of these were leadership lessons to me. As I started to adjust to the new life a hairpin turn was awaiting me. After 10 years my father’s remains were discovered inside an oil tank in the refinery that he worked in. Everything that we had tried to forget over the past ten years resurfaced. The media was everywhere making speculations and asking  all sorts of questions. Although they could never find the real reason behind my father’s untimely death, life was never the same after this. This taught me that one can never be sure that the chapter of adversities is over. Life could take a U-turn at any time and one ought to be prepared to face any type of challenge.

A colleague from a previous company became my new MD. He once asked me to dine with him and revealed over dinner, much to my shock, that he had no respect for me as he thought I was bad at my job. This made things very awkward between us. I decided to put an end to the awkwardness. I proactively had a meeting with him and sought his feedback on specific instances where he thought that my performance was not up to the mark. He could not come up with any instances. It was clear to me that he had unconsciously formed a bias against me for years without any evidence. This strengthened me and paved the way for me to work collaboratively with him without any fear.

In 2017, I was posted in China, in a city close to Shanghai, to head a company in the BPO sector. The BPO sector is very people driven and business depended on how many people turned up for work every day and how many people resigned. The unemployment rate in this city was very low and the BPO industry was never in the frontline. One of our biggest clients had given us some business, but due to the lack of employees we were unable to deliver on time. This resulted in the client getting frustrated every month. With the fear of losing business, the leaders, including me, had a brainstorming session on how to resolve this issue. I came with the suggestion of raising the salaries of the employees in order to retain them. We were paying them minimum wage at that time and increasing their salaries would mean an investment of $1.5 million. But that was the minimum amount required to be competitive in the job sector. This suggestion of mine was hugely questioned by the global headquarters, but the local team fully supported me. They believed that what I was doing was correct and stood by me even though it took 17 months to get the approval. The trust they showed in me empowered me as I stood firm by my decision.

I always quote Simon Sinek’s story, where he talks about how everyone deserves a Styrofoam cup. I have experienced the situation where at one point I was at the top and at another time, I was at the bottom. When I was working in Shell, and as I climbed the ladder of leadership, I had a lot of people around me who would listen to me and do things for me. I was the prime focus. But later when I joined a Government Commission, despite being the number three from the top and directly reporting to the Managing Director, I did not have any people around me, or people doing things for me. So we need to cope with our changing environment and  adjust our leadership styles accordingly.

Having done a course on ‘Management in times of crisis’ in Australia, I was able to lead my team through the pandemic. I got to implement a lot of the lessons that I learned during the course. Through these skills, I was able to connect with my team. I communicated with them on a regular basis, give them the space that they needed, and tried to understand what was going on with them. I organised online yoga and meditation classes for my team. I always put my people ahead of me in every situation. Although we were all fatigued, we stayed connected and kept up the frequency of communication.

Being a board member is a different ball game altogether. When I joined my first board my chairperson, who was a woman, told me that this was a male dominated environment, and I must slowly ease my way into it. During my first meeting with the CIO, I was presented with a paper that I had to review before it was presented to the board. The paper had many mistakes including how the costs had been calculated and how the paper had been written. I pointed these out to the CIO and the manager who wrote the paper. I thought I was helping but the CIO’s face changed. He was upset that I had found these mistakes and highlighted them in front of his junior manager. I knew at that moment that the CIO was never going to like me, and I was right.