Women executives need to get out of their comfort zone

Women executives need to get out of their comfort zone, and learn to take risks. They also need to be professional when dealing with unsavoury situations (like sexual harassment), and should not be afraid of confrontations or number-crunching. These are just a few things on Shanti Ekambaram’s to-do list for women who want to make it in the corporate world. Most of all, says the corporate and investment banking head at Kotak Mahindra Bank: “If your are competent and can deliver, gender doesn’t matter.” At a National HRD-organised event on Wednesday, entitled ‘Womentoring’, Ekambaram and two other ‘women of influence’ — Nisaba Godrej, executive director and lead for innovation strategy at Godrej Consumer Products, and economist-MD (research) at Everstone Capital, Roopa Purushothaman — also shared their get-ahead tips and experiences.

To a room full of HR professionals , the fact that women can’t network as well as their male colleagues, or that they need to be supported with various upskilling programmes and flexi- solutions when they return to work after marriage or childbirth, was probably not new. But a healthy debate about whether competence trumps gender-hiring appears always welcome, since both speakers and participants circled back to it several times in the course of the event. The speakers did, however, leave the group with some food for thought. “Companies need to [swap] HR best practices, make it specific, and put examples of successes out there,” Godrej advised. Ekambaram feels “there can be no substitute to hard work; you must be willing to put in your best and work long hours”. And Purushothaman believes that after women executives have kids and take a break, “they must want to go back to work” badly enough to make it happen — but a “systemic change” facilitating this wouldn’t hurt either.