It’s important to stay in a learning process, HSBC India CEO Naina Lal Kidwai says

NEW DELHI: Naina Lal Kidwai, country head and CEO at HSBC India, was married into a conservative North Indian family. “Relatives, especially the uncles, were very dismissive about my career,” she said as she addressed hundreds of women on a professional break attending a P.inc seminar in the Capital. “But I used their negativity to my advantage. Whenever a male cousin in the family would do something good in his job, I would strive to do better than him.I wanted to prove those guys wrong every time.”
Kidwai, who was the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School, recounted many such inspiring anecdotes from her life to egg on women to get back to their careers at the P.inc seminar held at the India Habitat Centre on Saturday.
P.inc, a Times Group initiative, aims to help women reboot their careers through workshops, access to employers and seminars such as these.
Most panelists, including Chandana Ghosh, HR head of FMCG department at ITC and Madhu Singh Sirohi, country head at Vodafone Foundation, stressed on the importance of expectation calibration. “Promotion or growth at an organization is not about ladders anymore. It’s about mazes,” said Ghosh. “When you come back from a sabbatical, you have to keep realistic expectations.”
Echoing her thoughts, Sirohi said: “Imagine keeping away from a yoga class. When you go back after six months, will you be able to match steps with the members of your old batch? It’s the same with your job. You have to start all over again. And, there is no reason why in a span of a short time, you can’t overtake the rest.”
As attendees listened with rapt attention, Sairee Chahal, founder CEO, Applied Life, Fleximoms, quipped: “How many of you have heard of Hadoop?”
When a handful of women raised their hands, she said: “If you guys were Hadoop developers, you wouldn’t be looking for a job today. So, it’s important to keep abreast of technology and have personal clarity on the career choices that you want to make. Entrepreneurial opportunities are more abound now. Investors are ready to pump in money into startups.”
Kidwai joined in by saying that what she learnt at Harvard is redundant now. “It’s important to stay in a continuous learning process. At home, you don’t have to central to everything if you can balance things out. Remember that kids cope with changes very fast. When I asked my daughter recently whether she missed me when she was a kid and I was busy at work, she said, no and asked me why I am not at work. What are you doing at home, mom?”