Speaker 1: 0:00

You are listening to Making Sense of Work with Jean Balfour.

Speaker 2: 0:09

Hi everyone and welcome to Making Sense of Work. It's so delightful to be able to welcome Pernita Lal to the podcast today. Welcome, pernita.

Speaker 3: 0:21

Hi everybody and thank you, jean, for having me here.

Speaker 2: 0:25

My pleasure. Thank you for making the time. Based in Singapore, hunita serves on several global corporate boards, including DBS Bank in Singapore and Carlsberg AS in Denmark. Until recently, she was also on the board of Cipa Pharmaceuticals in India and has served on boards of a retail company, a tires company, a media company and a digital company. So fantastic, amazing breadth there.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Vanita has over 35 years of experience in leadership, strategy and marketing. She worked in executive roles in India and China with PepsiCo and Coca-Cola and later has had significant advisory experience with startups and S&Es. Her work experience spans multiple disciplines, geographies and cultures, and I hope we're going to get into this a bit today, this idea of a career that spans a lot of difference and different areas. She's a distinguished business leader and has won many accolades. For example, during her executive role, she was one of India's top 20 businesswomen by Business Today and awarded Corporate Woman of the Year by the Indian FICCI Women's Organizations. Building talent and grooming leaders is Puneeta's personal passion and alongside her board roles, she now works as a coach. She's intellectually curious and a people-oriented person and finds joy in helping people flourish and become the best versions of themselves. Wow. So thank you for joining us today, anita again.

Speaker 3: 2:16

Thank you, and that's a very large introduction for a small person, but thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 2:24

It's all factually correct? I think so.

Speaker 3: 2:29

Yes, that it is.

Speaker 2: 2:31

Well, so we always like to start with this question about how to work at the moment.

Speaker 3: 2:38

Work at the moment. So I'm in one of those lucky places, jean, where I define my terms on what I do. So, really, work has become a bit of an ambiguous term for me. Right, because I don't see it as this clear distinction between work and non-work life. Right, I do things I enjoy doing and I think if you enjoy doing them, they don't really feel onerous, as work is meant to be right. I do things I enjoy doing and I think if you enjoy doing them, they don't really feel onerous, as work is meant to be right, and I think I'm just in that lucky position.

Speaker 3: 3:13

But if I were to look back at the immediate, last week was hard work in the conventional sense, because it was our. You know it's the quarterly board reporting time and so it does get a little heavy in terms of reading. Sometimes you end up reading about, maybe in a week, 1500 pages and it's a lot, and. But this week is a quieter week. So you know it's time where you can catch up on things, you can clean your mind, you can clean your email inbox and you can organise for the next few weeks. So I think this week is slightly lighter in conventional workload but, as I said, I don't really distinguish between work and non-work in the manner that I used to when I did an executive role.

Speaker 2: 4:07

Yeah, so that's amazing. I think we can all aspire to be having a working life that aligns with what's best for us, that we enjoy, and so, I guess, linked to that, what is the work that you enjoy? So, when you have a really good day at work, what is it that you're doing? What?

Speaker 3: 4:26

is the work that you enjoy. So when you have a really good day at work, what is it that you're doing? Of course, you know, thanks to you I've got more entrenched into coaching and it's something I've done for a decade now and really it got triggered because when I left my executive role, I missed building talent and building my team right. It was one of those really joyous things where building a team that you know you go in, you laugh a bit with them, you work a bit with them. Again, it was this blurring of boundaries right that you can bring your whole self to the workplace and you don't need to partition it as some people try and do, which I think just becomes a false partition really, and I think in doing that, it allowed me to just think of the joy I got out of it.

Speaker 3: 5:18

So now helping people through coaching or helping businesses and therefore helping people you know do better, is really joyous for me. So anytime I feel I've added value, I feel such a sense of satisfaction and joy that it just makes me smile for the rest of the day. So I guess that's what a good work day is, or I will add to that, I think, learning, because that's something that I value a lot, and so this hamster wheel of learning right, you'll never know enough, but you know being curious and just finding out something new. So I try and challenge myself every day and read one article on something I technically wouldn't read much about, right, so it could be anything. And you know, if you learn a little more about something, then you come away thinking about that thing and that's what allows creativity to happen in your mind. So I love that.

Speaker 2: 6:19

Oh, I love that too. I love that idea of reading across a wide range and then that stimulating thinking and thought.

Speaker 3: 6:28

Yeah, you know, I worked many years ago. When I started my career. I was in advertising and advertising is a very creative profession and I wasn't creative enough to be creative. But I was in the profession and I remember one of the creative directors saying that creativity is the random connection of two unrelated ideas that come through because there's some pistons firing, there's some neurons firing in your mind and when they attach each other to each other, there's some magic. And I love that thought about creativity because it's not structured right. You can't say, well, today I'm going to be creative, Tomorrow I'm going to be creative, but suddenly there'll be two sparks that connect and some electricity that happens.

Speaker 2: 7:14

Wow, that's fantastic. I think connected to what you've said about that is that we also have to feed that creativity somewhere. So we need to be bringing in new experiences, new thinking, new ideas that creativity somewhere.

Speaker 3: 7:25

So we need to be bringing in new experiences, new thinking, new ideas. Travel is such a good feeder of creativity because the experiences and reading and reading does part of it. But travel and personally experiencing a new culture, a new cuisine, a new area is just so exciting in terms of providing the stimulus you need to randomly connect two dots much later in life, right.

Speaker 2: 7:47

Yeah, oh, fantastic. I think this links really nicely into your career, because I've heard you describe your career as being a bit zigzag, and I'd love for you to share a bit about your career and how you came to be where you are now, and maybe to to talk a bit about the zigzag nature of it, because I think that sits so nicely alongside the piece we've just been talking about I mentioned.

Speaker 3: 8:15

I started off in advertising and I think part of it was because I had this intense urge to be in a creative environment, right, and if you watched Mad Men, have you. Yeah, I think everybody must watch because it's sociologically so riveting. But if you watch that, there was a lot of living in the gutters but looking at the stars really. And I finished business school and instead of going into the banking or the consulting which a lot of my peers did, I was just starstruck with advertising and I wanted to be in this intensely creative kind of profession and it was all of that. I loved it. I think I got some really plum assignments, so I was lucky and I you know, as one of the sportsmen I think said the harder you work, the luckier you get. So you know, right time, right place. I stayed in advertising for about 12 years across two cities in India, which is where I was working then, and there came a point when I thought I knew more than my clients, so it was time to get out of the trying to get them to listen to you. But they don't really listen to you and my husband and I were just moving to Hong Kong at that time and I think with a little bit of what I now look back and say the hubris of youth I decided you know what? I'm going to leave advertising and I'm going to go into marketing, not aware that I was in Hong Kong, nobody knew me there, the equity I had in India was not coming around with me and I had established myself in advertising. But marketing was quite different. But you know, I think not knowing is sometimes a blessing, knowing is often a burden, and so, in that not knowing, it was like, okay, I'm going to try this. And I ended up getting a job in marketing with Coca-Cola, which again was a dream assignment, right, and I would travel into China every week with a translator in tow. And so again, there's this vast growing country of China. I come from a vast, growing country of India and now I was learning about China and it was for the first year. You just listen because you don't know and you just try and absorb and absorb, and absorb. But it was again such an experience, it was fascinating, and this was China in its early days that were just getting to heady growth, so you could smell optimism in the air.

Speaker 3: 10:52

And I worked with Coca-Cola in that role for three years and then, like typical multinationals, they'll tell you it's time for you to move. You should go to Bangkok, you should go to Shanghai. And I said I can't go to any of these places. I had a young family. So I quit working and I had never not worked. I'd been, by then, working about 17 years. I'd never not worked.

Speaker 3: 11:18

But I started doing other things that I realized I enjoyed a lot. So I traveled a lot in the nine months that I didn't work I learned ceramics, so I became a studio potter, because that's something I love doing, and I decided that I'd only go back to work if I got a dream job. And one year or nine months into it I was offered a role back in India, with Pepsi-Cola this time, and it was that dream job that I'd always waited for. So I moved it back you know, bag and baggage with dog to India and stayed with Pepsi-Cola in the marketing role. And then again they start telling you it's time to move on. Time to move on.

Speaker 3: 11:59

I couldn't go to New York again because my you know family requirements at that time where the kids were in high school, and they said move to general management. And I thought how boring is that? You know, I come from the creative end of things, I come from advertising and marketing and I create things. But I went into it and I'm reasonably you know, I have commercial acumen, and so it's always been about balancing the strategic part of me with the creative part of me. And I moved into general management. And it was a big risk, jean, because I had not done that before I'd looked after some P&L and revenue management, but really not done that and I moved in to run a startup. So there was a startup, there was a business, there was things I had never looked at and it was frightening I mean that's the mildest word. It was frightening. I was CEO of a young new joint venture between two very large parents with great corporate pedigree. You know, pepsi and Tata's are both very large companies in India and I was this really lonely CEO and MD.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Right, and it was really lonely.

Speaker 3: 13:13

Being a CEO is a very lonely job. I think people underestimate how lonely it is and I think I had to scramble a lot. There was a lot of learning, there was a lot of imposter syndrome. My best and I was oh my God, can I do this? But you know, every time I'm in this like panic situation it's you try, try, try, try a little harder. And another of my bosses said you have to be like a duck, you have to be serene on the top but you paddle like mad underneath. So that's what I was doing, paddling like mad.

Speaker 3: 13:47

And before I knew it, I started enjoying it because, again, building a business is very creative, right. So it opened my mind to creativity in business, how you unlock different things and come up with solutions. And we talk so much about solutioning as if it's this external thing. But solutioning comes from what you know and what you see and what you observe and, again, how you bring things together. So connecting dots is a big part of solutioning and I felt I was doing this and then, as luck had it, I fell ill and it was quite serious.

Speaker 3: 14:26

So I was about just under 50 and I had to take off from work for about a year, go through some treatment and I went back to working in the classical multinational, which is where I was, but life just didn't feel the same. So it's like you've had a prism shift and in that prism shift I decided then that I would now do things that I wanted to do and I wouldn't be bound by structure. So I guess I was very early in the millennial gig in portioning time and I wanted to work with small businesses because I felt they didn't get enough attention from anybody. And again, as you set up a business, it becomes lonely. You don't know what to do. So I wanted to do some, you know, to get them going. So I started a small consulting Very hard, Very, very hard, Because I had never been in a sell yourself role, right, and you have to go and establish and convince people.

Speaker 3: 15:28

I still hate it, by the way very different yeah, very different and really that's a muscle I still don't have, but I enjoyed the assignments when they came in right, so that was fun. That's when I started missing building talent and so I started doing some consulting and some coaching for, you know, senior CXOs, and so I had these two gigs going. I was quite happy. And then the board role started coming in, which became my third gig, and so I was, you know, quite happy, three pillars, enjoying each of them, and then, as that got more settled, I became a bit restless and so my husband and I decided to move to Singapore because we thought we have one more adventure in us and getting to a new place is a huge learning right Every time you start from scratch. So I moved to Singapore, got some new board roles, got some, you know, coaching assignments, did a course, uh, and now I do that.

Speaker 3: 16:32

You know I sit on, I do some coaching, I sit on some boards, been lucky to get some good board assignments and really just doing things I enjoy doing so zigzag quite a bit through cultures, through geography, through conventional functional work to general management too, and very hard, you know, when you suddenly find yourself without the trappings of a company and you're on your own. It's not easy, but I used to think of myself as a person who couldn't handle ambiguity. But as I look back in my life I think, wow, I have handled ambiguity and it's frightening, but if you stick at it you come out okay yeah, it's a great.

Speaker 2: 17:23

It seems to me that there's something about it's so connected to the creativity, the energy that you have around, creativity and doing something new. And also I am hearing an ambition to have an impact, to make a difference, to lead teams well, to lead organisations well, and also you just used the word I was lucky to get board roles and a lot of hard work which will have created that luck to be in place. Really.

Speaker 3: 17:54

I always say that there are queen bees and worker bees, and I'm just a worker bee.

Speaker 3: 18:00

You know there are people who, right time, right place and you'll get, but for the most of time you have to work at it. So I don't think it comes easy and you have to be planful in gaining skills that you believe would help you get to a point or a position where you could use them and make better use of them. So two years ago we were talking so much about ESG, right, and nobody really knew what ESG meant. So I signed up for a course on ESG and it wasn't as if I'm going to find a role in ESG, but I think I sit on some boards. I have to have some awareness of what's going on, not the answers, but the ability to at least ask some questions, otherwise boom, imposter syndrome is going to kick in again, right? So I did that course. And then I enjoy music. So I did a course on understanding opera, and it's not going to really build me in my work gigs, if you like but you know, who knows, sometimes I'll sit in and understand opera better.

Speaker 2: 19:13

So well, yes, and I actually believe it does help us in our work gigs in some way, because we become so tunnel visioned, if you like, when we're in a job that if we're not stretching our mind outside of that, it makes it very easy just to see the same solutions that are there. I've coached a lot of academic doctors a bit of a niche coaching practice. These are very, very, very bright people who all of them would have these amazing um hobbies that were very eclectic, and I have often looked at that and thought that I believe that that made an impact in their success in their professional lives, because because their brains were being stretched across so many different areas that when we come to a problem in corporate life, we bring opera with us or whatever it is. We bring a different way of seeing the world to solve the problems that we've got sitting in front of us if we bring that kind of eclectic interest to it.

Speaker 3: 20:23

That and the ability to take refuge right, because when your brain is on the boil, you need something that can completely take you away from what's bringing your brain on the boil and therefore immersive, right. So I always say that it's great to have two kinds of hobbies, right. One is a social hobby which you can do with a friend, and it could be walking. I love walking, so you know, oftentimes I'll walk with a friend. We used to walk our dog because it just allows you it's what Nike called walk at the speed of chat right, and it's just random chat, you're just enjoying yourself, but it allows you to talk about things that aren't structured right.

Speaker 3: 21:11

and so I think one social hobby and one immersive hobby, right, whether it is ceramics or reading or carpentry or whatever it is that you know, or it's a's a squash game, whatever gets you, but something that allows you to withdraw and just savour that activity is really important and nourishing right, because we all need to feed ourselves and come back feeling whole.

Speaker 2: 21:41

Yeah, very much. Actually, it reminds me of a story that somebody at Moraid told on the podcast a long time ago. So she was running a big hospital in London and she occasionally would try and take the senior leadership team, which of course included clinicians and general managers, to go and have their meeting walking in Richmond Park. Needless to say, there was a little bit of resistance to this sometimes, but she said on one of those walks they solved a wicked problem because they were all out just chatting and formally chatting with each other. And then somebody one of the more resistant people said wait a minute, I think I've got the solution to this, and it was that getting out of the environment and into that space triggered that solution. Oh, 100%, 100%.

Speaker 3: 22:27

I'm such a strong believer. I think what happens is when you're doing an activity together, you also drop guard, right, yes, and one of the biggest issues that holds us back from being creative is what will people say? This may not be the right answer. So in that common activity, you've actually developed a safe space. You know you're not really in the meeting room, you're not having everybody listen to you and you don't feel so stupid that you just said something. That may not be perfect and I think doing that allowing people to just be easy with each other brings back. They come back into the meeting room and they're easier with each other. So big, big, big believer in doing activities, even for the workplace and in the workplace, that allow you to build your teams, because that's, I think, really the bond that then allows you to trust, to be vulnerable's, I think, really the bond that then allows you to trust, to be vulnerable and therefore to be more creative absolutely.

Speaker 2: 23:31

I'm imagining that some people listening to this will be thinking, wow, I'm not sure I'm the person to take those risks and and make those moves and shifts. And yet it's very clearly served you in. Not only you've had a and are having a successful and fulfilling career, but you've also been able to express yourself and have that difference. And I wonder what you would say to people who were feeling a bit frightened even of stepping into those sideways roles, because they people get very frightened that their career will fall off the edge then if they step outside of what's seen as the traditional ladder. What would you say to people?

Speaker 3: 24:12

I completely understand the absolute sensation of fear at doing this, because change is really hard, right, so I'm not going to say it's not hard for me or for anybody. It is hard, but and I think even more than 20 years ago, when I may have made some changes that were unusual, or 10 years ago, when I moved into just doing things that I wanted to do you never know how it's going to pan out, right, and we're all creatures of our past in some sense. So it's hard to give up what you know you've achieved without knowing what you will achieve. But I will say there has never been more need for us to zigzag our way through life, especially in a career, because of a couple of reasons. The first is the world was always uncertain, but has become hugely, hugely more uncertain and volatile in the last, I think, post-covid. It's just a bit strange. It smells different, right, and we are running the risk of obsolescence every one of us, much more than we ever did because of AI. We are running the risk of not knowing what's going to happen with climate change. And, of course, then you've got geopolitics, and I'm not even going to get into the personalities that are influencing geopolitics today, but you add all these up and the sigma of uncertainty is at an extraordinary high level. So we need to protect ourselves, right. So we need to protect ourselves from incoming change that we cannot dodge, change that we cannot dodge.

Speaker 3: 26:03

So how do you protect yourself from incoming change? You look around, you see your landscape, whatever situation you're in, and you are saying to yourself how do I play defensive, not offensive, here, and therefore, how do I buttress the fortress around me so that I'm not the one that's going to get, you know, swept away when the flood comes because I have done something? So I think that's really a pressing need, especially amongst younger people today. So I laugh and tell my kids that you know I'm done, I'm happy where I am.

Speaker 3: 26:36

If I don't do anything else, I'm fine. But they have to survive, right, and they could risk obsolescence if they don't upskill. Of course they don't listen to me because I'm the mom and I keep telling them. People pay me to listen to me, but you know you could try. But I think just upskilling, reskilling, sideskilling, there's never been a more pressing need as opposed to. So it's not just the opportunity, it is to protect yourself, it is to build the defense so that you don't get, you're not vulnerable to what you don't know is coming around, because we cannot see around corners.

Speaker 2: 27:18

Now more than ever, yeah.

Speaker 3: 27:20

And so is it risky? Yes, but I think, with some thinking and some ask around, ask your mentors, ask people who have spent more years in the business, ask people you know I'd loveencies that can help you become more robust and more resilient in your particular role or ready for a different role that you may not be ready to do. And I think that's really important because it's no longer an option, it's a need to do. It's not a nice to do it was nice to do for me, but I think today it's a need to do the traditional. A nice to do. It was nice to do for me, yes, but I think it's a need to do those traditional careers are no longer going to serve.

Speaker 3: 28:08

Yeah, we can't imagine people are going to have multiple careers, so they may spend the first 10 years being a lawyer and then they may go to a startup and they may have to start much you know and lower down in the rungs and you build yourself up, but you gain a very valuable learning of how business works With that and your legal skills.

Speaker 3: 28:30

Maybe there'll be something else you'll be able to do, so it's unpredictable. But I think continuously challenging yourself to do more has become a necessity. It's really not an option, and the point I was going to make is who do you turn to right? Who do you turn to to ask? Because really nobody's been around this block before. But I think asking people, not necessarily who are in your immediate environment, asking others, you know you meet somebody who says what would you do? What do you think? Is coming around the corner and then trying to put many I'll again say random thoughts together to make a pattern that connects some of them and then deciding your way ahead is a great idea and therefore I think having a mentor is a great idea.

Speaker 2: 29:26

Yeah or two, I think. I think sometimes even just one at the moment is not enough.

Speaker 3: 29:31

Yeah, yeah. And I would say, if you're a working person, woman or man, have at least one at work and one outside of work. You know somebody who's just got more years in sometimes, and maybe a reverse mentoring, where you learn what ai is from somebody who's 10 years younger to you. There's no shame in learning, yeah, right no, I've.

Speaker 2: 29:55

I've um supported a couple of reverse mentoring programs in organizations before and they're hugely impactful. Going and talking to people in a different generation and learning from them can help us, I think, to see a bit more around the corners, because they're the ones looking ahead and seeing that Great, yeah Right, you've. Obviously you've had this career. You've raised a family. How have you handled all of the challenges of that having a career family partner? How have you balanced that the challenges of that having a career family partner how do you balance that? Balance is the wrong word. How has it been for you? How do you cope?

Speaker 3: 30:31

I think it's the right word. Yeah, I mean, I will never run it down. It's hard, um, and if you're one of those insecure people who wants to do better at everything, it's even harder. But I think my lessons were really, if I had any guidance to give, I'd say build a support system. It's really, really important. You can't do it on your own right. So, whether your support system is your partner or your family, or help external, help, build that support system. You absolutely need it.

Speaker 3: 31:17

I will also say don't be hard on yourself, because in hindsight, I think some of my stress which I had was actually because I was just trying to be too much. And I remember I went for one of these leadership programs when I was, I forget, at Pepsi or Coca-Cola one of these companies and they asked me to. You know, they asked you to draw a vision of yourself, and I drew this vision of myself on top of a mountain, juggling many balls right, and so I think you have to realize that you're not going to be that person who can juggle without dropping and therefore be kind. You know, in hindsight I could have been kinder to myself. I could have and I say this now, having been vehemently against it when I was younger. I think mentoring and sponsorship are very important for anybody, but I'd say even more for women, because we tend I mean, let's face it, there's still only 20% or 30% women in the workforce and we are not the majority or 30% women in the workforce and we are not the majority. And so getting a sponsor, as opposed to a mentor, if you're in a corporate environment, could really help.

Speaker 3: 32:36

And I, again, I didn't do this right. I always felt if you work well and you're going to do, you know your work will speak for itself. But no, you know, advertising tells you that you need salience and you need somebody who's going to see you and hear you and bat for you. And it doesn't mean you're brown nosing, not at all. It means it's an almost structured program. And the last I would say is for working women or working mums or caregivers, who tend to take on multiple roles, is deal with the guilt better, because there is inevitable guilt, and so, again, be kinder to yourself. I mean, I think motherhood is fraught with guilt. You can be a working mum or a non-working mum, you're still going to be guilty and therefore, just give yourself, cut yourself, some slack.

Speaker 2: 33:30

Bingo with the guilt. A therapist once said to me that guilt is a wasted emotion. Yeah, I love that. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 33:38

Yeah, wasn't service yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:42

I'm also curious, I guess, about the way you've built relationships, and so you've talked about mentors and sponsors, but I'm imagining that your career has been as it has been because you've also built good relationships along the way, and I wonder if you could say a bit about how you see relationships, how you see the importance of them at work of them at work.

Speaker 3: 34:11

I think having bonds and it doesn't mean work related is by far the most strengthening gift we can give ourselves. I have been lucky and I think you need to invest in those bonds, so it's not one way, right. So any relationship you need to invest in and you know you need to make sure you're giving as much as you're taking. I have been unbelievably lucky with the friends I've made at work, which is probably why I've enjoyed my work so much. Right, but I have friends from workplace that now I holiday with, who will come over and stay with me, and you know, again, it's about dissolving that boundary we create.

Speaker 3: 34:56

About work is work and home is home. Right, because if you allow them into your life, they will know more about you, they'll know about what they could do and what help you need, right. And so it's about trust, and I say the same. I tend to make relationships be there from my hobbies, be there from my workplace, or be there from people who I meet, and you know I'll say, oh, this is a person I'd like to know better, and out out of four, maybe one will stick and three will not. But then I try to invest in them because I'm not very good with acquaintances. I think they're great, but I must have a connection with the people I'm spending my time with, because you don't have that much time.

Speaker 2: 35:42

My view and how have you managed that when managing up? Because you talked about how hard work, uh, is really important and often speaks for itself. But we know in organizations and you have been advertising that it's not the whole story that often we have to manage the relationships up in the organization well.

Speaker 3: 36:03

As I said, I think I should have done better at it. It's a learning. I always thought I should build a great team. I'm managing down, I'm managing sideways and you know, work will speak for itself, and it was a learning. That work doesn't always speak for itself is something that I would do today were I to rework my career, and not just career, right, I mean, it doesn't mean it's a corporate career.

Speaker 3: 36:32

You need people who bat for you, and for that you need to make the first move. They're not waiting around trying to become your mentor or sponsor or anything like that. But I think authenticity, which is really really, really important to me, right. Just be honest in the relationship. If you have to ask somebody to be a mentor, say that that I think I could learn a lot from you and you know I'd really value that and then live up to your side of the bargain, rather than just treating it for when you need it and you know not otherwise. Because, as with every relationship, you have to invest in it. And if it's a sponsor, then even more so because he or she is going to sponsor you into something. So they have to have the courage of their own conviction and you have to give them the courage of their conviction. So I think really important to be authentic and not say things for the sake of saying it, but be in it, committed to it.

Speaker 2: 37:42

I'm hearing a lot about it's. Proactive is the word that I would think. You don't wait for it to happen accidentally. You make it happen and go and deal with those relationships you could go to.

Speaker 3: 37:51

HR and say I'd really value this. Or you could go to somebody you know after a meeting and say I really enjoyed what you said and I would love it if we could chat once in two months. You know, so it starts small, but you could make it meaningful.

Speaker 2: 38:08

I'm noticing that we could probably talk for hours about this and we probably have time to draw it to a close, but, as we do, I wonder are there any books or practices? You've talked a lot about your learning, but are there any books or anything that you go to to help you as you think about yourself and your work and your career and in your leadership?

Speaker 3: 38:34

I haven't been a big fan of self-help books, I must confess. I feel once I read the first chapter I don't get much more out of it. So I often read the Get Abst. You know get abstract.

Speaker 3: 38:55

But one, one book that actually changed how I changed behavior and I think that's really important was written by is the book written by Sheryl Sandberg, I think maybe 1012 years ago, called Lean In. And again, you know, I remember reading it when I was a senior executive in a multinational and this diversity agenda, or women diversity agenda, was getting very talked about. And I'm not talking about the wokeness, which is the over the topness of it, just the fact that you need and you know, having been a working woman, I thought again, you have to do your work and you are not entitled to anything that you know, anything special. But that book awoke in me the insight that women don't do enough for other women and essentially her thesis is you need to lean in for yourself, of course. So lean into the conversation, lean in and ask for a promotion, lean in All things that are very alien to me really, and I'd say almost antithetical to me because of my upbringing, that you just do work and you know God has a life plan and he's going to look at it, but also that you need to help other women. And so till then, you know every company has a diversity council, inclusion, the D&I or DI, then council, and I used to say no, no, not for me.

Speaker 3: 40:22

But the fact that there weren't many women who could be either role models or mentors struck me when I read that book. And you know, jean, I grew up in India, growing up in India. In the 70s there were no working women in the corporate sector. So we had one prime minister who was a woman, not quite my role model, and it was few and far between that.

Speaker 3: 40:48

You would find a working woman, and I used to get a bit almost bemused I think is the right word, not even amused when women would come up and say, oh, you're a role model, and I would think you know why am I a role model? What have I done? I just work hard. But I think that book changed my behavior because I think it opened my eyes to the role I could play in helping even one other woman leader or two, or four or five, and therefore leaning in to helping women who are coming up who may not have had the luck that I had or had all the you know facilities or whatever it is that I had. And so that book is something I tell everybody to read, because you can pay it forward, but you can also open up opportunities for us, for yourself, and that paid forward, I think, is a big part of what I believe in.

Speaker 2: 41:46

Fantastic. I love that, and I'm going to finish by saying, whether you like it or not, you are a role model. But one of the reasons why I love how you are as a role model is because you are yourself. You're very authentic, you're living the life you want to live. You're living that in a very genuine way, and I think that's something that we can all aspire to. Be in our working lives is to be ourselves. We can't do anything else other than that. Really Can't do anything else.

Speaker 3: 42:20

Don't know any other way of being.

Speaker 2: 42:23

But thank you for that, thank you for your authenticity and thank you so much for joining me today. So much wisdom.

Speaker 1: 42:30

And I know people will value it.

Speaker 2: 42:32

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 42:37

Thanks for joining this episode of Making Sense of Work. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe, rate and review. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore in the podcast, please follow the show notes and send me a message.