Risks & Rewards: 13 Bold Stories

Not many women reach the top corporate echelons. Sneha Agrawal of Banking Frontiers spoke to 13 that did to commemorate International Women's Day. They reveal the varied risks they took, the rewards they earned and the valuable lessons they learnt:

Namrata Sehgal shares 3 risks she has taken in her career. The first risk that she had taken was transitioning from a science background to law. “I almost boarded the train to Bangalore pursue BSc in Biotechnology, but something held me back and I opted to stay at home and pursue law. I think it paid off well in the long run,” she shares.

The second risk Namrata took was that after completing her post-graduation in Constitutional Law, instead of going down the beaten paths of legal practice or working in a law firm, she joined an NGO focused on female foeticide and child rights. “I knew it would not do me any favors like climbing the corporate ladder or pay me the big bucks, but it was something that really called out to me at that time and that's another risk I feel I took at that stage,” recalls Namrata.

Her third risk was taking a break in 2018 to pursue MBA at IIM Bangalore. “I was married, and I was working. I took a 1-year break from family and work. Since, I had completed my post-graduation in 2012, it had been 6 years after which I turned back to books,” she recounts.

Lessons Learnt

Namrata shares 3 lessons that she learnt from taking risks in her professional life. Her first lesson was self-realization. While she had always thought of herself as a cautious person, she found out that she was actually quite adventurous. “I overthink maybe. But at the core of it, I do take risks and I am an adventurous person,” she confides.

Namrata’s second lesson was stepping out of her comfort zone and making things happen. “You can't just get up in the morning, think the same thoughts take the same actions, and expect different outcomes,” she explains.

Her third lesson was that everybody has big dreams, either professional or personal, but they tend to put a lot of conditions on those dreams. “I will pursue XYZ when I reach this age, or I will do ABC once I have attained this degree. But these are simply perspectives at the end of the day.” Namrata believes that such conditions become huge inhibitors for them, and they must be dropped. “We should have clarity and belief in what we want to achieve, and go for it,” she signs off.

In her entire career across banking, Jasmin Ignatius has held many portfolios like operations, risk and compliance, cross assets research, communications and even procurement. At times, she was asked to streamline and at other times to remediate or clean up processes and systems. “I do not see obstacles as difficulties but as opportunities. For example, a hill with boulders may seem insurmountable but when the same rocks are used to find footholds, the entire perspective changes,” she explains.

Failing fast to recover fast and learning new skills to build her portfolio is how she has approached her career journey and it has reaped rich dividends.

Lincy Therattil shares 2 risks she has taken in her career. At the very start of her career, she decided to work with a start-up instead of a large corporate. “At a very early age, within just 3 to 4 months of joining the organization, I was already helping to set up new teams, setting up processes and protocols, hiring team members, mentoring and training others. I think this experience gave myself and my future bosses the confidence that I can be relied upon to handle things beyond my grade and designation.”

Later on, after almost a decade of a very comfortable and rewarding career, Lincy decided to charter into a completely new territory. From a research and advisory role for a professional services firm she switched to be an innovation enabler and fintech influencer for a leading global bank. “While my previous roles were all about structure and preparing and knowing things, in advance, to the minutest of details, my new role was all about constant changes, ability to take quick decisions on the go, interacting with multiple and diverse stakeholders, and forming new strategic relationships with external ecosystem. Most importantly, it wasn’t just about interacting with large corporates, but with the ever-changing dynamic start-up community. Saying that this transition has been very rewarding and biggest learning experience would be an understatement,” she exclaims.

Lessons Learnt

Lincy shares her 2 lessons. First lesson is that what makes risk tasking possible and potentially a habit, is the efforts that one puts to influence the outcome. Risk taking is a process, not just a decision. She recommends: “Reach out, speak with people, gather support and find sponsors. Sitting in a cocoon and expecting the universe to conspire for your success is a fool’s game.”

Her experiences have taught her that taking risks is worth it. “However, one needs to be on their A-game to take risks. For example, in the middle of my career, when I wanted to shake myself out of the equilibrium and forge a new career path, I decided to first go back to school – did a campus based Advanced Management program from IIM Bangalore to be able to interact with and learn from senior executives from other industries. This helped me to make a smooth transition to a new field,” she explains her second lesson.

Noopur Chaturvedi shares 3 unconventional steps she has taken after her graduation. She chose to work with Infosys even though she had admissions from non-premier MBA colleges. “At that time, family and friends thought of it as vanity that I wanted to study at the top 5, or not at all,” she reveals.

Stepping out from Citibank to ING Vysya Bank was another decision with high stakes. The role (which included managing many products instead of just one), the city, the culture (from a foreign to a private sector bank), the size of the bank - everything changed dramatically.

“I think the biggest risk I took was when, after working for 12 years in the banking sector, I chose to join an organization outside the BFSI space (Samsung). A few mentors and consultants actually urged me to reconsider, since re-entering the banking sector could have been difficult,” she shares. “Once you reach a leadership position, you need to take risks more regularly, including decisions around, investments, businesses, people and changes.”

Noopur is a firm believer of the adage ‘no risk, no returns!’ The chances she took fortunately worked out for her and made her more confident as an individual. The same ethos reflects in her work at PayU India as well. “For me, every day presents a different type of risk,” she avers.

Lessons Learnt

Noopur shares 2 lessons she has learnt. Joining and leaving her first job for a premier college boosted her confidence tremendously. From working across various types of organizations and industries, she learnt how to adapt quickly to a new organization and its culture. “Often, being the only woman in a team also helped me in overcoming biases and developing working relationships with very diverse set of people,” she shares.

When she took a chance on changing the industry, she got clarity on what I really wanted to do. “I understood that wasting years of experience is not judicious, and yet, it’s important to get an exposure of how things are done in very unfamiliar set ups. I learnt about new sales structures, got to see cutting edge tech, and leveraged the opportunity to strengthen industry connections,” she explains.

Patima Thomas shares 2 risks she has taken. “I have served in the armed forces and that was the first risk I took in my life. That was more of a personal risk rather than a professional risk that I took at the age of 20. It was very rare for a Mumbai girl to go into the armed forces.” The second big risk she took was quitting the armed forces and coming out after spending 10 years in the army. She took a year’s sabbatical to balance her personal life along with her professional life, and then started her corporate life.

Lessons Learnt

Pratima share 3 lessons. The first lesson is that it is never too late to start something or to jump into something. If you feel that you need to do something, then don’t wait. Her second lesson is that it is always a good time to start something, be it a career, a new habit or something else. It is not difficult to start something, it is difficult to hold on to what you have started. Her third lesson is to take one step at a time.

Sumanlatha Sanghi shares 3 risks she has taken in professional life. She moved from a successful hospital administration and dietician career to banking, when she had no idea about this field and was not sure of the whether she would succeed. “But I had confidence that I would be able to put my mind and effort to learning new things and this will give me a different perspective and it was very crucial to move out of my comfort zone,” she explains.

Secondly, within her career, she has moved across various product streams laterally and vertically that helped her become more knowledgeable and an expert. She also moved between operational and techno functional roles as well as offshore and onshore roles. This broadened her perspective and improved her experiences.

Her third shift is geographical: “I took the decision to move across various locations - Hyderabad, Jaipur, Dubai, Bangalore, Manila and Vietnam. I had the confidence that I would be able to manage both personal and my career. This was also supported by my family that encouraged me to become mobile.”

Lessons Learnt

Sumanlatha reveals 5 benefits she has derived from her risk taking: (i) improved self-confidence (ii) Gain in-depth knowledge of various functions (iii) overcome fear of failure as you learn from every move you make (iv) become more creative and learnt many new skills (v) I have come across many unforeseen opportunities.

Vandana Trivedi shares 2 of her risks: “The first risk was to decline an opportunity to move abroad when I was working with a globally reputed MNC. I took a bet on continuing in India, and at that point in time, without the benefit of hindsight, it did seem like I was risking a big career move.”

Her second risk was deciding to move to her current organization for a role which was a step-down to the role she was doing in her earlier firm. “In my assessment, I thought that my current firm would grow faster, and it therefore made sense to make a short-term compromise for long term gains,” she explains.

Lessons Learnt

She shares 2 lessons she has learnt: “Any decision that seems to be a risk at the time of taking should be backed by informed decision making. A diligent approach to ascertaining the current situation and connecting the dots to estimate what the future would look like minimizes negative consequences from those decisions.”

The other lesson that she has learnt is that once a decision is taken, one has to back the decision with dedicated and high conviction efforts.

For Mabel Chacko, starting an entrepreneurial career was itself was a big risk as she from a family of government servant, and both her parents are bankers. “For me starting out is leaving my comfort zone and have done it 5 times over right now. Each time I transitioned from my comfort zone to the risk-taking zone.”

She started in 2006 in Ahmedabad and was trying to build a biometric payment startup to enable cash withdrawals at local kirana stores. Meanwhile while doing some research she came to know about another startup that was doing something similar in Kerala and she connected with the founder Anish Achutan. He was using another technology to enable contactless payments on mobile phones and using it for branchless banking using cash next.

“The biggest risk would be joining him as a co-founder at that point of time and moving to Bangalore, because I did not have more than Rs 5000 in hand and I had never met Anish in person. That was a very big risk, but we took it because there was an ecosystem in Bangalore, we had a network we could reach out to and there were investors,” she unravels.

She says that the risk that paid off very well because in Anish, Mabel not only found her best co-founder with whom she did another 4 startups. More than that, she also found her perfect life partner.

Lessons Learnt

Mabel shares 2 startup lessons from her journey of doing 5 fintech startups.

First, build things that people want. It's very important as an entrepreneur to know for whom you are building your products or services, who your true customer is and once you realize that, spend time to listen to your customers and see what they are talking about and how they are interacting with your product. If you do that you don't have to worry very much about product market fit

Second, fail fast. When building a product, we want to build everything perfect going out and so what we do is we often land up spending 1-2 years behind building the whole gamut of things and trying to put the most perfect product out. But what happens is if that is not something that the user wants you end up spending 2 years of your life and a lot of money and efforts just chasing something that was really not meant to be. I would suggest all the entrepreneurs to always first put out the very basic framework of your product in the market and see how the users interact with it. And see how that adoption goes if it works go ahead build the rest of it and you have a great use case in front of you. If it doesn't then you would have saved yourself a lot of time and efforts in trying to build something that people didn't want.

In her career journey, Ruchi Bubber has actually switched into 3 big different industries. From media, she went on to do a very long stint in FMCG and then entered financial services. She explains: “These are very different industries so that itself was a very big risk because obviously when you shift your career to another industry, you got can’t carry all your subject matter expertise, and you have to prove yourself from scratch.”

But it occurred pretty well for me because it made me more holistic as a career professional. “I have knowledge about diverse industries now which means I can cross pollinate ideas to succeed in different companies,” she adds.

Another level of risk Ruchi has taken is switching roles. While she is an analytics professional, she took the risk of getting switching roles and getting into a business stint where she was accountable for business KPIs like increasing market share.

“That was very good because it gave me a new perspective of how analytics can be used to drive businesses,” she says.

Sometimes setting up things from the scratch itself is a risk. In her previous company she did take up the responsibility of setting up a center of excellence from scratch. It was a very big responsibility.

Guidance that Ruchi shares for younger women is this: “Don't hesitate to take calculated risks where the data will be helpful for you.”

Lessons Learnt

Do a thorough assessment. That assessment has to be data based. Which means that look at data from an external perspective. For example, is it the right environment to move? Is the economy in the right shape to take the risk? Is the regulation or the competitive environment conducive enough for you to take that decision?

Some of your risks should not compromise on your core value. She refers to life stage such as having kids, ageing family members, etc, when it comes to moving to a new city. “Always have a Plan B, which means if you take a risk and God forbid it don't do well, you should be financially secure enough to fall back on your Plan B.”

Ruchi also feel that women need to have multiple sources of income. She thinks financial literacy is very important for women and the sensitization that hey I need to have multiple sources of income.

She also recommends consulting a mentor before taking a risk. “Tap into your network, get into you network of friends and family, get their perspectives and then take the risk,” she recommends.

Jaya Janardanan started career with Mashreq Bank, then went to ICICI Bank for a longer stint and then worked with banks like Dhanlaxmi, JP Morgan, Bank of America and Ujjivan SFB. She built her expertise in banking operations, technology, digital and customer service. Her career is full of risks. Earlier she took the risks unknowingly; now she takes the risks knowingly. “I will share my 2 biggest risk. I joined ICICI in the corporate banking group where I was comfortable managing credit appraisals. The organization decided to go retail in a big way, requiring skills and capabilities, which I joined voluntarily. I started with the dematerialization of shares, which was my journey into the unknown. Many people told me I am making a mistake in my career by going into the unknown. If I had not done those projects, I would not be here today.”

The second risk Jaya took is taking on a project on six-sigma in ICICI Bank. No one in the banking industry had done six sigma and here I was asked to lead the project. Everyone who heard about it ridiculed me saying this is surely the end of your career as no one ever does six-sigma in banking operations. Not only was the project successful, it was replicated in all parts of the bank, and then other banks followed suit soon. Leading the six-sigma project has shaped the way banking processes have changed and built higher customer experience.

Lessons Learnt

Jaya says she has learnt 2 big lessons: “First, you have to take such risks consciously. Second, you have to learn the pluses and minuses are your own, and you cannot blame anybody else. Your confidence is very important. You cannot let someone else push you into taking the risk; you have to do it yourself. If you are not confident, don’t even venture into it,” she clarifies.

For Purvi Bhavsar, her first risk was to move from a well-established career in banking where she had created enough equity for herself and being a fast-track performer for most part of her career to telecom, a completely unknown sector with no background. The second biggest risk she took, which she defines as a leap of faith, was when she decided to be an entrepreneur after being recognized as a leading woman in telecom.

Lessons Learnt

“Learning has been a never-ending process for me. The lessons I have learnt are: dream and have courage to pursue them. Secondly, fear is more inside your mind or inside you, than outside,” she explains.

Rajashree Nambiar says she has taken several risks in her 29 years career. When her kid was just 3 years old, she moved from Mumbai to Delhi because she wanted to experience a new geography and a new business. “I have made location changes 3 times – each time was beneficial from the work point of view but was tricky from the personal and family perspective,” she reveals.

She worked for 22 years in a multinational bank in a very structured environment. “One day I quit that to join an Indian promotor led company where the culture was very free flowing and entrepreneurial and fast growing. My profile changed from one of many to a leader and CEO. That was a big risk. I would say I survived and even thrived,” she shares, adding: “I have always stuck to jobs that are front line and business lead, which is a risk because your output is tangible and there for everyone to see.”

Lessons Learnt

“When I look back and check when did I grow the most, professionally and for learning, it was when I was in my discomfort zone. I advise youngster to seek out those discomfort zones where you are being are being pushed and stretched. When you are in your comfort zone, after a time you regret with every passing day, you are not advancing,” she shares.

Sunita Rath hails from a conservative family in Odisha. She was pressurized to marry after her father’s death, but she chose to work as the only woman officer in a 35,000 strong work-force in India’s largest open-cast coal mine in faraway interior MP. This brought personal transformation and gained her tremendous confidence to confront variety of obstacles in life.

Her lesson is that setbacks do happen but, fabulous returns await you when you bounce back – so never give up! Also, when you choose to opt out of your comfort zone, you learn and achieve much more.

Her second risk was a simultaneous triple change – job-type, industry and city – when she shifted to Mumbai. Everything seemed to be different, difficult and fast paced. As a result, not only did she become well-networked with the IT industry in Mumbai, but she also moved ahead in her career at a much faster pace. Her lesson is that while change brings in anxiety as well as risk of failure, calculated risk opens up a plethora of opportunities otherwise beyond one’s reach. Since, change is a constant in life, it ought to be embraced than resisted.

Her third risk came around 7 years into her career. “I was called upon to streamline a crisis-ridden operation overseas. In my mind, I was not up for it. It was a completely new context in a new country with new people. Worst part was, I had to travel in a plane for the first time, that to for 36 hours changing 3 flights to reach the destination,” she shares her story. But her husband encouraged her and, she executed the task with aplomb. As a result, she got to hone her trouble-shooting skills and learnt to be comfortable with uncertainties and to take decisions with limited available information than waiting for all desired inputs. She shares her lesson: “When you are given a difficult job, no one expects miracles. The right intent and action-orientation gets you cooperation of even the aggrieved people. Focus on Progress not on perfection. ‘Adopt and adapt’ is key to be at ease with uncertainties in career and life. One always emerges stronger out of the challenges.”

So, these are the stories of the 13 ladies who started going outside their comfort zones into unknown territories at early stages of their lives, and continue to do so. Their stories are varied, but what is noteworthy is the inspiration they individually and jointly bring forth. More women taking such approaches will surely enhance their participation in the upper corporate echelons.

---------------

[email protected]