"Women don’t even realise that they have been subjected to gender discrimination"

We, at Adgully, have always saluted and honoured women managers and leaders across diverse fields. W-SUITE is a special initiative from Adgully that has been turning the spotlight on some of the most remarkable women achievers in the M&E, Advertising, Marketing, PR and Communications industry. In the refurbished series, we seek to find out how women leaders have been managing their teams and work as well as how they have been navigating through the toughest and most challenging times brought about by the global pandemic.

In conversation with Adgully, Upasna Dash, Founder & CEO, Jajabor Brand Consultancy, highlights the challenges in building a pipeline of female leadership in organisations, long term lessons from the pandemic period, maintaining a successful work-life balance, and much more.

How do you think the role and scope of women leaders have widened in the current market ecosystem?

The current global labour force participation rate for women is under 45%. The ratio for men mounts up to 72% (International Labour Organization). This gap of 25% holds an opportunity for growing a country’s GDP. Many CEOs do take cognizance of this issue and make gender diversity their priority. However, there is a sentiment of frustration mutually felt by these companies who are trying to build a pipeline of female leadership.

The issue here is that the male perspective lacks the understanding of the fragile process of pushing women to leadership in the public and personal light. It has to do with how women are seen and accepted as leaders. Becoming the face of a high position in an organisation does not only mean acquiring a certain new skill. It’s a fundamental identity shift. When an organisation pushes women to seek leadership positions, a parallel force needs to revamp the company policies and practices that work towards women being perceived as leaders. Most of this has to do with the second-generation bias we carry with us. According to research, most women don’t even realise that they have been subjected to gender discrimination as it is rooted in subtleties. Organisations need to outline these practices so that we see a change in the percentage of women on board tables and decision-making roles.

It makes me proud to say that we have built Jajabor as a women-led company where all of the business units have a female face. We are extremely passionate about bringing women to the forefront, putting them in decision-making positions, and making them independent leaders. While we ensure women are given the platform they deserve, gender is never a barrier to what one can achieve within the company.

What has been your major learning from the pandemic period?

“Trust your craft”. Economists studying how businesses performed during the pandemic have highlighted that small businesses died. Consequently, big businesses got bigger and plunged over to the space created by the exit of smaller businesses. (Source)

Jajabor was set up in 2017. Three years later, we were hit by the pandemic. Yet we’ve grown more than 100% year-on-year. The pandemic really shifted paradigms across the board, as a business we realised the importance of authenticity and impact-driven delivery. We focused on using communications as a meaningful way to circumvent challenges and add tangible value. However, our biggest learning and asset was our people – across the organisation we built systems (that we use even today) to enable and nurture our people. The pandemic truly showed us the resilience of our people. An organisation is not its office or its service, it’s the team that runs and nurturing them is the best investment that a business can make. The foundation of an organisation is set by the leadership. The onus falls on the people within the organisation to take the baton forward. Hence, the most significant learning for us has been acquiring the right kind of talent who can help us further build and expand on the vision and mission statement of the company.

What is your mantra for maintaining a successful work-life balance in the new normal? According to you, what makes women the best in crisis management?

My core mantra for maintaining a successful work-life balance is treating timelines as sacrosanct. More often than not, people tend to prioritise external timelines neglecting internal timelines or timelines they give themselves. The key is to adhere to timelines and compartmentalise things as much as possible. Give yourself specific days and hours to focus on certain areas. I try to judiciously earmark time for deep work, team-building, learning and equally importantly – zoom out and spend time with myself. Most successful leaders that I’ve worked with have this as a common trait – giving equal importance to time at work and time off work. This leads to coming back revitalised and ensuring disciplined output. I do think women do this quite well because of the inherent ability to multi-task and also navigate crisis situations. As women in the workplace, we are often navigating personal and professional challenges from the outset of our careers making us susceptible to handling this with ease.

What are the five most effective leadership lessons that you have learned?

1. Become the coach, not the captain:

The most successful leaders tend to be coaches more than captains. They tend to enable teams including captains to unleash their potential and scale. Therefore the most important attribute of a leader is to be a good mentor. I personally believe that mentorship is not about ‘teaching’ it’s more about doing. In our company we have a golden rule – no one can delegate anything until they’ve done it successfully themselves at least once. That’s the type of mentorship & coaching that builds a strong foundation for leadership & teamwork.

2. Be transparent about success & failures

Leaders need to embody and act on what they expect their teams to do. This also requires leaders to talk transparently about their own failures. It’s statistically impossible for an organisation or a person to not have some failures, therefore there needs to be a culture for addressing these openly. As long as there is a lesson to be learnt – each failure is a stepping stone to success.

3. Action eats strategy for lunch - focus on impact, not the input

Owning the room does not always have to do with an intellectual capacity. The smartest person in the room isn’t always the leader. Most believe that having the title of a leader automatically qualifies them to be one. In my journey as a leader, I discovered that this is simply untrue. Regardless of your position or level, leadership is about enabling yourself and your team to reach your goal. Action eats strategy for lunch – so focus on enabling a team along with a system where this action is scaled & consistent.

4. Behaviour science & psychology - key tenets

As a business head, you sit right at the intersection of leadership and management. Managing people can be bottled down to simple science. Leadership requires fluidity and emotional intellect. I consider leadership to be an art. To lead a team, you read behaviours and values in order to set aspirations accordingly. Management has to do with following procedures. Both are imperative to a business. You as a leader of an organisation need to work parallelly with both wings. Understanding this difference will bring huge clarity into your day-to-day life and help you focus on leadership.

5. Understand your team and delegate accordingly

Any successful sports team has experts, build that for your time. Recognise individual talent and put them in positions where they live out their potential. Quite often, leaders end up building a team of generalists rather than a pack of specialists, while this works in the short turn, in the long-term specialists thrive. Decode and delegate roles basis this.

Gender sensitivity and inclusion in the new normal – how can organisations effectively encourage and groom women leaders in challenging times?

1. Pay special attention to early management-level promotions

Employers have concentrated their efforts and resources on hiring an equal number of men and women, but more can be done to support women in the workplace in order to raise the proportion of women in leadership positions. At the first promotion level, when women are much less likely to put themselves forward or be selected by their direct supervisors for more responsibility, men start to distance themselves from women.

You must establish objectives for hiring and elevating women at all levels, with an emphasis on entry-level management, in order to solve this systemic issue. Include hiring, retaining, and promoting women in the performance standards for all managers and executives in your organisation.

2. Incorporate flexibility into the policy framework for women

Caregiving still falls disproportionately on women, both for children and other family members. As a result, many women are unable to invest the time and effort in advancing their careers that they would like to. Others end up quitting their jobs completely. By providing flexible, remote, and hybrid work schedules, employers can reduce these constraints for all employees who are juggling caregiving responsibilities. Additionally, they can sponsor flexible savings accounts to aid in the cost of child and elder care.

3. Encouraging allyship programs

Co-workers act as allies in the workplace. Sponsoring an employee resource group (ESG) that focuses on gender equality and encouraging males to participate is an even better method to advance gender equality and provide women in your company with a sense of support. The connections made while working together to advance gender equality may have a lasting impact on the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) objectives of a business.