A summary of the address delivered by Ms Nina Nair, Vice President-HRD, 24/7 Customer Pvt Ltd at MMA Women Managers’ Convention held on 8 Mar 2008 at Taj Coromandel Hotel, Chennai.

For many centuries we have been speaking constantly about women in shackles whether it was in their private lives or professional lives. I am not going to speak about shackles at all. This has been going on for quite some time now and I think its time now to stop talking about shackles that bind us or have bound us essentially whether it was in the work place or in our personal lives. What is special about women? What are the feminine forces that exist within us and how can we leverage these, not just in our workplace but also in our personal and emotional lives? And that’s what we are going to be talking about today.
Why Women Managers? I would like to think of women managers as transformational leaders. They have the potential to be transformational leaders. They have an ability to articulate a vision of the future .They are myth makers, story tellers .We have been doing that from the time we were babies. We can spin stories to our children, to our husbands, to our brothers and sisters, mums and dads as well. We are people who can actually create a complete scenario in front of others and actually get them to move towards that particular vision or dream. And that’s something that is very powerful about women. And that is why I say they have a great potential of being transformational leaders.
I don’t think anybody captures imagination like a woman does, whatever the sphere, and therefore it becomes much more important that when we are at our work place particularly, that imagination is honest to its very best. So that others who work around us, with us, as subordinates or superiors, understand from that imagination and leverage it. Women can instill a belief in people they lead, to do exceptional things and I truly believe that. Before I go on to the next slide, Saundarya was talking about how I began my career.
I think there are some innate characteristics in women and lets just talk about a few. A lot of conversation has been going on about emotional intelligence. In fact, a lot of companies have started hiring people using emotional intelligence tests whereby they see whether an individual, who is coming in, apart from skills and knowledge, possesses emotional intelligence. And one of the companies that have been extremely successful in doing that is L’Oreal. We all know L’Oreal, at least the women do. I think the men do too; it hurts their pockets. So L’Oreal actually was experiencing a really difficult time; they had huge attrition, they were making losses and that was the time they thought, let us look at doing something completely different and they decided to introduce an emotional intelligence test into their recruitment process. Within six months they were able to turn around L’Oreal, actually posed profits and reduced attrition by 42%. So that’s the power of emotional intelligence and you know what the good news is? Women already have that! So emotional intelligence typically talks about intrapersonal which is your self awareness. Are you aware of yourself? Do you know yourself? Do you know what your strengths are? Do you know what your weaknesses are? That’s an intrinsic strength that a woman has.
From the time we were born, the intrapersonal skills come in very early in our lives with our siblings, with our parents, with the extended families, with our teachers ;the interpersonal skills is probably more honed faster in a woman than in a man. And we grow up with those interpersonal skills and we take them into our married lives as well and that’s one thing that we are very good at. Adaptability, I don’t really need to talk about adaptability; you all know how you adapt.
Stress management is something I think that we were born with because like we all know when we are at work somebody or the other calls from home and says there is a problem or that something has been lost or the curry is burnt when there is a dinner tonight at home. Essentially the adaptability is so easy for us. If it’s not this way, it’s that way. And if it’s not that way, it’s the third way and we are pretty good at it. All of these are aspects of emotional intelligence which are intrinsic parts of a woman and stress management of course.
And finally moods – although we have huge mood swings; women do, that’s also part of our charm. I think the men will agree, if they don’t they won’t speak about it. I think mood is something what makes women very charming is what I believe and we leave it at that.
So, typically one of the most important things is less of a need to dominate and demonstrate authority is something that is a strength but is also a weakness; can be a perceived weakness. So I will move from innate characteristics which are the strengths that women may have, to what can be perceived as weaknesses in women, especially all of us at work.
So look at the perceived weaknesses in the graph: Aggressive, dominating and push for a job to be completed is more than normal. That’s simply because most of the times we are in a hurry to achieve and to see that whatever we wanted to do, we want to do well and quickly. The second is that we appear to be extremely competent or use a very dominant style of communication and that is something that we have seen at the workplace: that a woman might show dominance in communication to hide the lack of confidence. So it is not because she is very confident about herself but actually because of the very opposite. She is not confident about herself and so she pushes back with the dominating tone of communication. So as managers or as potential or aspiring managers, we need to know that this could be something that can put off people and how is it that we can rein ourselves in the moment such a communication is taking effect from us. The other is we don’t network; we don’t believe in networking because we think that work will speak for itself.
The other perceived weakness is that, whether it is a political environment, the government or a country or an organization, there is a political undertone that is very much present in an organization. There is politics, you can’t run away from it anywhere. But women are sublimely unaware. We don’t know our own country’s politics, let’s face it. Most of the time we have no clue except for probably Vijaya Raja Sindhya who is wearing a wonderful saree. But most of the time we are not really into politics of our country. So we are not into politics of our organization either. We don’t know what happens; and so we are sublimely unaware which can be very irritating for another comrade because they are probably facing that. And we are so unaware that we just keep going in our own direction without understanding that it might be affecting somebody else. So we need to be aware of our surroundings and what’s happening all the time. We need to learn and educate ourselves constantly. And if we don’t do that, we are left way behind.
Eliminate or dedicate anything that takes your focus. Most of us do everything; we take on everything, whatever we have so that the work can be done but it is necessary for us to ensure that there are certain things that need our focus and there are certain things that don’t and have to be delegated. As a manager, that’s the first thing you need to learn. Because two things will happen if you don’t; one is that you will not grow and two is your subordinates will not grow. And being a manager that is a criminal thing to do to somebody you are trying to be.
Agility - you can change that action anyway that’s how we drive as well. We change directions quickly, we take advantage of opportunity, we try new alternatives but we do that at home. At work we need to bring that same agility to do what we can, find opportunities and go ahead and do that.
Genius - I am not talking about our genius, I am talking about the genius of people whom we work with and I sincerely believe that genius is not fixed. There is nothing called an IQ genius; it is an elastic thing which you can help develop. But you have to be available for your people, you have to listen to them, understand them, observe them and you have to most importantly as managers, listen to what is not said because by and large you will find people not saying things.
Integrity, I think the most important thing is integrity. We can’t compromise on integrity for the simple reason that you are watched with hawk’s eyes, always. And especially women managers. So it’s necessary that everything that we do has an integrity of purpose, always.
Endurance, we all know how to endure or we have to be able to endure and when I say endure I don’t mean enduring something that is unjust, but enduring in the sense, being patient. If we have to achieve something, we have to do it with a lot of patience. We have so much of patience bringing up our children. We have all the patience in the world to watch them grow from 0 -24 yrs. But when it’s at work, we display huge amounts of impatience and that sometimes can result in a belief that we are not there for a long term. So many times my colleagues come and ask me, ‘You know this lady has just got married, do you think I should hire her?’ I said ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh she will have a baby soon and quit’. I said, ‘What makes you think she will quit?’ ‘They all do! And particularly in our kind of environment which is a BPO environment.’ I’ll speak about that in a while.
Enterprise constantly - Assess where you are. I told you about the strategic life plan. Your plan is a practical document, it’s a living organism and it’s not something static. You have to do whatever you have to do; if you have to change the strategies, you have to do it. You can’t say that this is what I am going to do and this is the only thing I am going to do because, as managers, we don’t have that kind of luxury. We have to be extremely flexible and enterprising constantly.
Finally, renew yourself. All the women need renewal; it is like fertilizers. You can renew yourself through yoga, reading, music, movies anything but you have to renew and go within yourselves. It’s extremely important for a woman to do that?