What is the one career advice that you still abide to?
This is a hyper paced world innovating and disrupting at the same time. There are no lifelong employment options and hence to succeed the only mantra is to Develop a Growth Mindset. You must learn to thrive on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities and risk taking. People with a growth mindset take up these challenges, although they feel butterflies every time they invest their time and energy and set themselves up against these uncharted territories in the form of newer challenges. They make you uncomfortable, and your natural reaction is avoiding. But remember, growth and comfort are not friends.
I have always believed that as leaders we are as good as the team that you build and nurture and there should be no hero worship.
Lastly dignity of labor has always stood the test of time for me and therefore for me from taking business decisions to holding a broom to clean the floor can coexist.
Do you believe in having a gender balance in your team? If yes, how do you encourage women in your team to take up leadership roles?
Gender parity in any organization is critical, not only because it is fair, but because it brings enhanced organizational efficiencies, improves the cultural balance as well as performance.
At present, women in business are underrepresented; only around 6% organizations on the Fortune India 500 list are managed by women leaders.
Creating more opportunities for women starts with creating a more inclusive environment. At Progressive we genuinely care about our women associates, we have active policies in place that ensure equal rights for women and we have taken active steps to redress any imbalances. We make our existing female leaders become more visible through social and media outreach, as role models to both students and future associates who aspire to take leadership positions. And as a policy, we are including gender equality figures in the company’s key performance indicators (KPI). At present, we have 7.67% of women employees in Progressive, which is an underrepresentation. I plan to change this gender imbalance and increase it to 25% in next 3 years across all levels.
What’s the next big technology you are excited about?
The cloud, mobile, and social media technologies have changed our lives significantly in the last decade. I firmly believe that AI & ML would have a massive impact in this decade on the future of work. My company has invested in building an intelligent cloud management platform Centilytics, which is leveraging these technologies to help our partners and clients to immensely benefit from it.
Which is the one women personality you admire the most and why?
There are so many women characters and political leaders in our history to be inspired from that it is difficult to single out anyone. But I learnt the most alongside my mother Mrs. Kanan Diwan. Since I lost my father while still in secondary school, it fell upon her to single handedly manage my late father’s business of industrial products and also make time to bring me up along with my two sisters. I learnt the meaning of family responsibilities, perseverance and hard work.
Technology initiatives undertaken in the CY 2019 and the plans for 2020
Since I am responsible for HR , Administration and Governance across all our companies, we had to take multiple process automation initiatives to support high growth and scalability of our businesses globally. We have moved to SAP HANA as our ERP backbone. Besides this we have developed a full 360 degree HRMS for all our associates spanning across the lifecycle from recruitment to exit. This has helped improve our associate satisfaction and engage with them better.
As a workplace transformation initiative in CY2020, we are building a new world class facility for our associates which will go live in April 2020. This facility will play a pivotal role in the execution of Progressive’ long-term strategic priorities, bringing teams together into new and vibrant working environments that accelerate innovation and increase collaboration. This will help us attract and retain the right talent and in turn help elevate the client experience. It will shape the Progressive for this new decade.
Thank you so much for writing this. I’ve never had such an eloquent description for what I do. Much to think about