The Elephant in the Room

142: Social Justice, sustainability and innovative pathways for climate action: A conversation with Ashok Sinha

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Shownotes

Against the mounting backdrop of rising global temperatures, record-breaking extreme weather, and the UK's wettest winter on record in 2024, governments and major corporations are increasingly retreating from climate commitments. The EU reported concerning rise in greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, the UK has postponed key net zero targets, Germany has scaled back renewable investments, (let’s not talk about the US) and fossil fuel giants such as Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies have revised or deferred climate pledges and clean energy projects, citing economic pressures and regulatory uncertainty. As we witness the global momentum on climate action wane — particularly in the West, where initiatives have been de-prioritised and progress has slowed — the urgency for innovation and collaboration has never been greater.

In the latest episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, I explore the evolving landscape of climate justice with Ashok Sinha, a prominent climate and social justice activist and current CEO of Ashden - a climate solutions charity. Ashok co-founded the UK Make Poverty History campaign; was a key figure in the Jubilee Debt Campaign; a Director at Stop Climate Chaos (now the Climate Coalition) – playing a pivotal role in securing UK’s Climate Change Act 2008; he was also the CEO of the London Cycling Campaign.

Ashok brings critical insights from his extensive experience at the forefront of landmark campaigns and policy change, offering a pragmatic perspective on the challenges and opportunities ahead for climate action worldwide. We also spoke about

👉🏾 The urgent need for collective action, and the importance of partnerships and coalitions in driving impact

👉🏾 The role of the private sector in accelerating and deepening change and the need for regulatory frameworks that encourage investment and innovation

👉🏾 The significance of storytelling in climate advocacy and how personal narratives can galvanise support for sustainable practices and policies

👉🏾 Climate misinformation/disinformation

👉🏾 AI as a risk or an enabler for the sector; Climate fatigue; Skills shortage in the sector

We also spoke about Just Transition - advocating for equitable opportunities for marginalised communities affected by climate policies and changes. Ashok ended the conversation with an unwavering belief in humanity’s capacity to overcome adversity and foster positive change through collective effort and resilience.

#Collaboration #Inspiration #ClimateAction #Sustainability #SocialJustice #ClimateInnovation #JustTransition #ClimateLeadership #ClimateSolutions #Ashden

#ClimateJustice #ZeroCarbon

Episode Transcript:

Sudha Singh: Good morning, Ashok. Thank you for being a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Ashok Sinha: My pleasure entirely Sudha. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Sudha Singh: Let's start with a quick introduction. Who is Ashok Sinha? How would you describe yourself as a climate activist, evangelist or campaigner?

You do have a great track record for leading some great campaigns including Make Poverty History, Climate Coalition, London Cycling Campaign. Wow.

Ashok Sinha: Well, that's kind of you to say.

I have done a lot of different things, so I, find it quite hard to categorize myself and it's not something I normally try to do actually. I'm not sure how sensible or useful it is.

It all started with me because I loved science and I studied physics and did a Ph.D. in, energy systems modelling and then climate change research and then went into policy and advocacy. So it's a range of activities but focused around energy, climate and broad, more broadly sustainability.

I'll use that term it's a highly interpretable term but at the same time in, in my own personal life, I've always been very concerned about what contribution I can make to you could call it social justice for want of a better word. It started when I was in sixth form and I, I, I volunteered in our local hospital. I just wanted to make a contribution and so I've always volunteered, served on board like Amnesty UK and, and so on. Currently on the board of Friends of the Earth Charitable Trust.

When I get up in the morning, I just want to do something useful, I want to make a contribution and so, chairing the London Sustainable Development Commission as well, broadening out the whole issue around, environmental sustainability connected with, improving people's well-being and increasing the level of equity and happiness and quality of life for people. So I guess, what would I say? I guess science led worker for advocate for sustainability.

Sudha Singh: We tried to put everything into one word. It's really difficult considering your vast experience and like you said, I think stressing on the science based is very, very.

Ashok Sinha

Critical in today's, that's really important to me.

Ashok Sinha: It comes to the social justice side of the, of the, the work that we all do. Evidence, data.

Sudha Singh: So, moving from there, tell me about your current role in Ashden and what its priorities are.

Ashok Sinha: Well, it's a, it's a very great privilege to, to lead Ashden. Ashden was founded 25 years ago this year by a woman called Sarah Butler Sloss and she's one of the group of philanthropists that come together within an umbrella organisation called the Sainsbury's Family Charitable Trust. So there's a variety of organizations there, most of them are philanthropic. Ashden itself started as a grant giver but then it split into two organizations. The grant making was retained in an organization called Aurora Trust. And we, we have to raise our own money to go out and do work in the world.

But it started as an awards ceremony, an annual awards program. And at that point 25 years ago it was based on shining a spotlight and it still is. The awards shining a spotlight on unseen innovators who are tackling the climate emergency. Then it was innovators in the global south, the global majority working on clean cooking and solar in particular.

But over the 25 years the awards and Ashden itself have broadened out to look at clean energy and renewables, nature-based solutions and the ways in which they can be promoted. It could be financial mechanisms; it could be ways of organizing for profit and not for profit. We look at those sorts of organizations and we give them awards and we give them support.

Yes, but we also have programmatic work now and the biggest program is our schools program called ‘Let's Go Zero’, which is across the whole of the UK but in England in particular. We have advisors across the England working directly with schools to help them decarbonize by 2030, and other programs in the UK working with community energy organizations, supporting local and community groups who are finding their way, towards creating new nature-based solutions to help adapt their local communities to the level of climate change that is coming through the system.

Sub Saharan Africa, a big program on clean energy access, a new program that we have working to help indigenous peoples and local community groups raise livelihoods as a means of protecting tropical forests. So it's a range of activity that has been spawned from the initial annual award. But the theme essentially is reducing carbon, adapting to the climate change.

It's already locked in but doing it in a way that delivers for communities, for local people, for local areas especially taking an area-based approach to put it all together. And the final point, I would say is we know that we're not going to change the world by ourselves. We're not going to try. We wouldn't have that level of hubris. So it's incredibly important. Ultimately, we're storytellers fundamentally to tell those stories to people who have the hands on the levers of power, whether it's finance, whether it's policy, whether it's regulation, politicians to say, look, this stuff works.

Ashok Sinha: You can liberate this innovation, you can bring the different components of systemic change together and you can scale and accelerate those solutions. You know, there's great people doing stuff, great stuff out there, but to hit our targets, you've got to support them, and this is how you need to support them.

Ashok Sinha: And we work very collaboratively with others. So lots of organizations who are good at political engagement, good at community engagement.

And so we don't, we don't, we don't try to do everything, but our contribution is, is the great stories.

Sudha Singh: And are there any campaigns that you're particularly proud of?

I tell you what, there's a couple of things that I am really proud of. So going back to 2005, I was, I was appointed as the director sort of at the head of what was then called Stop Climate Chaos, which is now called the Climate Coalition. And at that point the coalition was just five organizations.

Ashok Sinha: Major green groups and People on Planet. And they said, right, go on, build a, build a coalition, broad based coalition. That's going to be popular in, you know, try and drive popular support for, for political action in climate change. And it's a big ask. But because of work I'd done previously, I had a lot of contacts across a variety of sectors. Anyway, so I pulled a team together and we all went out into the world and within a very short space of time, within about, about a year, we were, we had our first event and in that, that was in Westminster Central Hall. And in that event, you had not just the green groups, we called it carbon speed dating.

And I'll explain Why in a second you had the green groups, Friends of the Earth, Green the conservation groups, RSPB, WWF, Oxfam, Christian Aid, xxxxx, Mothers Union, Women's Institute, right. We built that coalition and they were sitting there in that room and we were inviting politicians to come to these tables and do carbon speed dating, to talk to groups of activists, integrated cross sectoral groups of activists at each table to engage with what our ask was, which at that point was, you know, action to keep global warming under 2 degrees C. And the first person through the room was the opposition leader, David Cameron, who would soon be the minister not long after that. And that made me very proud. I sat back and thought, you know what? We, we have, we've done this, we've pulled together people from a huge variety of sectors to work together. We call it climate justice now.

And the real clincher for me was a few months later I was standing at a rally, I was opening and closing a rally in Trafalgar Square. And in front of me were 20,000 people from all over the country. Their starting point may have been anti-poverty campaigners; it could have been conservation. But there they were in Trafalgar Square saying we want action and climate change. People talking across those agendas, that was a great, that was a great feeling.

Sudha Singh: Yeah, that sounds like an amazing campaign.

Sudha Singh: What a success. Right? Not just a one off. Something is, it's still thriving. So that's, that's amazing.

Ashok Sinha: Do we have time? The other one for me is after spending so much time working on national and international questions and frankly, finding it really hard work.

Where progress is so slow. I thought, I want to spend a bit of time working on something, an issue where I can see the change when I get up in the morning and step outside the front door. I've cycled since I was a kid and I had been previously on the board of the London Cycling Campaign and they needed a CEO, so. And they chose me. This really is meaningful to me because at that point. We didn't really have cycle tracks in London, not like the kind of cycle tracks we have now. You had some blue paints on the road, you know, stick on the cycle, on the blue paint, you'll be safe. And I drew all the expertise.

Everything I've learned from previous campaigns to. To say to the cycling movement London, we've got to be popular. We've got to be singular in what we ask for. We've got to make it something that anybody, whether they see themselves as a campaigner or not or a cyclist or not, can get behind anyway.

We created a very populist campaign called Love London Go Dutch around the 2012 mayor election. And we managed to get 10,000 people out onto the street cycling around London.

And we did various other things and we secured a commitment from all the mayoral candidates to a slate of asks. Boris Johnson was elected as mayor and he not only agreed to all of those asks, but he implemented them.

We said we need three big local area schemes to show how the Dutch approach works. They put £100 million against this for three showcase schemes called Mini Hollands, named after our campaign in London, and various other things. And when you see that change directly happening, we asked for this. Now look at London, right? Look at them. Look at the number of people cycling.

Look at the cycle tracks that we have. Things have changed that feel that is so rewarding. It's nowhere near good enough yet, but I see that, you know, where they exist, the safe cycling facilities and people using them. Happily, I Think. Yeah, that was a change.

Sudha Singh: Amazing. And all these things, they are very beneficial for the communities. these are not vanity campaigns. At the end of it, there is infrastructure that changes and helps communities and people to get around in cheap, safer, sustainable ways.

Ashok Sinha: You just see one, one person with a kid on the front of their bike, on the back of the bike, and they're safe and they're enjoying it.

Ashok Sinha: Now, I do it because I'm an environmentalist. Right. And I believe in sustainable cities. But this family, cycling safely is nothing better.

Sudha Singh: Absolutely, absolutely. How important, Ashok, are partnerships and collaborations? You mentioned collaborations for success.

And what is the role of the private sector in accelerating and deepening this change? Also, is there a way to incentivize them to engage with and invest in innovations for local communities? Because all of it cannot be government.

You need money from somewhere.

Ashok Sinha: It's a massive question. So on the point about partnerships, vital. So I was talking earlier about coalition campaigning. Well, that's a partnership.

And within that there were partnerships of experts and campaigners from across the coalition who sat together and we worked through the challenges in front of us together we worked through the, the approaches that we would adopt to, to rise to those challenges. And so that's collaboration.

As I was saying earlier, we can make a contribution through our storytelling to the. So the change we want to see in the world but can't do it ourselves. We're not experts, nor, nor should we try to be across all, all areas.

And when you're talking about working, you mentioned communities.

Sudha Singh: Yeah.

Ashok Sinha: But there's no ethical justification for parachuting in and saying, hey, this is what needs to happen here. Right.

You have to work in partnership with people who have legitimacy to speak for those communities and act for those communities.

Sudha Singh: Yeah.

Ashok Sinha: As I say, ethic, ethical considerations aside, it won't work at really. So partnerships are absolutely critical to any of the progress, achieving, any of the progress we want to achieve. You mentioned the private sector. There is no way on earth that the, the clean energy transition in the UK to, you know, make an entirely clean energy-based power system, transportation, heating and, and communities that are protected from flooding or extreme heat. Yeah, there's weight that's going to be paid for by governments just putting its hand in its pocket through and using tax money. No way.

So even at that very basic level of finance, the private sector has a role to play.

The insurance companies, the pension funds who are able to take a long-term view, I hope and some of them are. Yeah, indeed take a long-term view and have sense look for sensible rates of return over a long term view. We have to have partnerships across the private sector to deliver on those objectives. Even if we were just talking about finance and it goes to. And it's more than just finance. There's the technical expertise, there's the innovation. Innovations about smart demand management, integration of systems, solar EV charging and so on.

The private sector is absolutely indispensable.

And in Sub Saharan Africa the kind of organizations we support and work with in the clean energy access sector in sub–Saharan Africa they're mostly private sector organizations.

They're innovators, who are coming up with ways to get solar onto roofs in some of the most far flung and impoverished parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. and not just supply electrons but agricultural processing, cold food, cold storage and zero carbon transportation, electric transportation.

These private sector actors who are going out into those places and thinking about how you make it work technically, financially.

Ultimately, it'll be private sector money leveraged by the international, the multilateral development banks, the African Development bank and local currency institutions which is going to supply the finance that is required. Yes, there needs to be north, south flows, but it's only going to

141: Cottsbury Founder Ruchi Chawla on navigating challenges of building a sustainable fashion brand

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes:

As a small business owner what does it mean to run a sustainability brand? Is it true that sustainability brands rooted in demonstrable solutions are generally more successful than those that use vague or superficial eco-friendly messaging? And how useful are authenticity and a genuine commitment to addressing environmental and social problems to building consumer trust? What is their contribution to financial sustainability, long-term loyalty and profitability?

Ruchi Chawla, Founder of Cottsbury a GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified sustainable fashion brand was my guest on the 141st episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. In the episode we attempted to answer some of the questions above while Ruchi shared her inspiring journey towards establishing a sustainable fashion brand rooted in organic cotton. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

- Her journey from working in the fashion industry to taking a more conscious entrepreneurial path driven by the desire to bring meaningful change in the industry

- The fashion industry’s overreliance on harmful chemicals and environmental negligence that is responsible for significant pollution and resource depletion

- How Cottsbury distinguishes itself from conventional fashion brands through ethical sourcing, transparency, getting certified, including 100% traceable production and a zero-waste policy.

- How consumer behaviour is driven by levels of market maturity (UK/India) for sustainable products/brands. This in turn is driven by consumer awareness, economic factors and cultural contexts (amongst others)

o Consumer resistance and price sensitivity

- Ruchi emphasizes the importance of mentorship and support networks, attributing her perseverance and success to the guidance she has received throughout her entrepreneurial journey

The episode culminates in a thoughtful reflection on the future of sustainable fashion and the collective responsibility of consumers and entrepreneurs to advocate for more ethical practices. Ruchi emphasizes the need for ongoing education and engagement to shift perceptions about sustainable products, dispelling the notion that such choices are inherently elitist or inaccessible.

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Ruchi. Wonderful to have you as a guest on the Elephant in The Room podcast today.

Ruchi: Good Afternoon, Sudha. My pleasure to be here and talk to you.

Sudha: Brilliant. So just give us a quick introduction before we launch into the questions.

Ruchi: I'm Ruchi. I'm from India. I have studied and worked in India and also in Europe, in Amsterdam and Belgium.

I've been in the fashion industry since my post-graduation and in various functions in the fashion industry with various brands and companies. I've travelled all around the world for work and for leisure and that brings me to my current passion project, which is Cottsbury which I'm running now, for last two years plus

Sudha: Brilliant. So what inspired you to get on this journey into organic and sustainable fashion and launch your brand Cottsbury. Can you share the story behind discovering Pure Certified Cotton and why it became the foundation for Cottsbury?

Ruchi: So I was in the fashion industry. Wanted to do something of my own, questioning everything with the bigger companies, bigger brands, and my bosses always why, how, why we are doing this. So all this led to me be very aware and observant of surroundings around me.

And as I travelled in my sourcing roles to different countries, I realized that what a mess the fashion industry is in, what are we creating? And this entrepreneur spirit just kindled with the thing that I have to do something different. Not just launch another fashion brand or another clothing brand, something different in which I'm actually doing good to the world also, and to myself.

So that's how I started Cottsbury.

Sudha: And what's the story behind discovering Pure Certified Cotton

Ruchi: It is a foundation and it's how it started.

So when I used to work around different fabrics, I would realize that we are all loaded and surrounded only by chemicals. Even if you say I'm a very aware person, I'm very conscious. I mean, the world is such, you are consuming chemicals from your food to everything you're touching and using. And when my child was born, I was like, I am not making her wear polyester you know, onesies and blankets. Not at all. It has to be pure, pure, pure, and that's how my search as a consumer began and I found organic cotton baby wear, very limited availability even in Europe and some in India.

That's how I started hunting for organic cotton. When I was struggling to find it, I felt horrible that how will the average consumer ever find it?

Some of them are not even looking for it. And those were looking, find it very limited availability. I started then looking for manufacturers, this was while I was working with the big corporates, and this question was always at the back of my mind that there are people who are doing the good job. And in that inquisitiveness I found few farms and factories who are actually making pure organic cotton without chemicals `and fertilizers and pesticides. They're growing the cotton, the factories are buying it and making products out of it. And that's when I said I have to do something about this and baby wear or adult wear, whatever, I have to start that.

Sudha: Okay. That was the genesis.

Your brand Cottsbury is based out of the UK. You sell in the UK market.

Did you encounter any challenges when you introduced your brand in the UK market, and how do you compare the UK customers to those in India? Why are you not selling in India as yet?

Ruchi: See the reason I launched in the UK market was, I have lived in Europe, UK, India. I was not very confident of launching it in the Indian market, firstly because like I said, the consumer here is not as aware or as ready to pay for this, or is not asking as many questions as have been asked and answered in the western world, which is the US market or the UK Europe market. Because that's where I worked and lived so I understand that. It's not that Indian consumer is not aware at all and there are no people in India who'd buy my product.

I have loads of queries as of now as well from India market. But India is huge, I'm a bootstrapped entrepreneur. So to launch in India, it requires much, much more capital and teams and resources. So I thought, let me start with European market, and I want to become a global brand.

I don't want this for any country specifically, because what I'm trying to tell through my brand is that, let's live a chemical free life. And it is not possible that one country is chemical free and the other country is not. We are breathing the same air. We are doing this for our planet. The effects of environment are on all countries all together. So the idea was to start in the UK and become a global brand. Not immediately launch here, I will start with Uk, Europe, US, and India, something like that.

Sudha: Based on the volume, the awareness the insight and the ability and the desire to be able to have an organic and sustainable product. So how does Cottsbury differ from larger less sustainable companies in your industry? And are there brands that you admire.

Ruchi: Yes, there are brands that I admire definitely who've done such amazing job in sustainability, recycling. And overall, they are leaders, I mean, very clearly the brand called Patagonia, I admire them, the founders, the people who work there.

So, I would say we are sustainable, and by the word of it, I mean, we are not just making claims here we are a hundred percent sustainable, traceable, zero waste, no plastics. All the definitions we tick for sustainability, it’s not that it was a thought after project that we added in our brand. Oh, let's become sustainable. I'm a successful brand, let me become sustainable now. We are not that. we are a sustainable brand to start with. Most of the brands, even today, what they do is they have a small line in their collection, which is organic cotton line, rest is not sustainable, not organic, not traceable, nothing.

So they have a small line. So it's a project for them. It's like an afterthought. So let's do something sustainable. For us, it was not that, we are sustainable by birth. And that's the DNA, we only go by that and that's what we've been saying to our customers online always, that we aren't making false claims.

We are traceable, I know where this t-shirt is made, which you just bought, how much cotton you have used and how it's not harmed the environment. So I go by that.

Sudha: Do you have a process in place to ensure that your supply chain remains sustainable and transparent. Especially considering that you work across geographies and I mean, your suppliers must be sitting in different places.

Ruchi: Oh, yes, definitely. So that's how we go for worldwide certifications. We are GOTS certified and we are Fair Trade certified. And these are big organisations who have certified the whole process from seed to final finish, to the product, reaching in customers hands.

So everything is traceable. We pay for the certification. We abide by all the rules they laid. On books, we can prove that whatever we are saying is a hundred percent correct and has been done and that's why we have the certification of no toxic chemicals, sustainable farming, ethical labour throughout the supply chain.

Sudha: And where are your suppliers based?

Ruchi: So they're all in India as of now. It's a completely ethical, traceable supply chain and our factories are based in North India, and West India.

We buy from these limited factories, we don't go around buying from a hundred factories, four products here, four here, because we are strict with our rules, with our certifications. It's few suppliers who can meet our requirements, so we go with them only.

Sudha: And what about your customer base? What drives them to buy products that may be more expensive? How do you educate them about your sustainability efforts and encourage them to make these choices?

Ruchi: The price line of Cottsbury we are not expensive, we have kept fair pricing. I was not in here to just make money.

Of course I'm running a business. I have to pay people, I have to pay for the product and all the services I buy. But we are not price expensive. We are not luxury, We call ourselves luxurious by the feeling the product gives you. But we are fairly priced products, and our customer buys us for the ethical credentials. That's been said in most of our reviews as well.

For the ethical credentials, for the quality, for the positive social proof we give that this is where I got this from, this is the service I'm giving you. This is the quality I'm giving you. And I'm not overpriced here, I mean, you can compare our products with other so-called sustainable brands. We are not asking the same dollar as they are.

We are more authentic. authenticity is our first key and people see that.

Sudha: Do you as Cottsbury go about educating your customer base about what you are doing because not everybody is aware and not everybody may be conscious of the choices that they make.

Ruchi: I totally agree. I have a lot of work to do in that area. But from day one, we are not preachy, We are educating in our own silent way.

Like for example, we are only available online when a customer receives our product, we've got many comments, many reviews about them, they were shocked to see there was just no plastic in the packaging. Any online order you receive, you are prepared for lots of plastics coming, even your tape is plastic, everything. And we give products in a waste cotton bag, which is in a paper cardboard. We have no plastic, so we've reused the cotton in the factory and here while shipping, we are not using any poly bags, plastics. We are using paper cardboard bags, which are recycled. Other things, for example, like the buttons we use on our duvet covers, they are not plastic buttons, they're coconut shell buttons. Our bedding is soft and silky, not by a wash given to them because it's pure organic cotton. We do give it a wash, but it's not a chemical wash we give to make it soft.

So people do acknowledge all that in their reviews. That the quality, the packaging, the softness, everything is talking about your brand ethos. It's really in your DNA and we've heard that back from our customers. We get lovely emails and reviews from people who are seeing this kind of a thing for the first time.

Others who've seen with other brands talk about up prices that you are not priced...... I bought a similar thing at like one and a half or double the price from this brand and your quality is even better. So we like to hear that and we think that we are on the right way. We have a, long way to grow big, but I think the start is good.

Sudha: Amazing. So there's a wide spread perception and many cases that is the reality also that sustainable products are more expensive or inaccessible or not meant for everyone.

Ruchi: It is the perception. Very true. But if you actually compare our individual items, yes, of course there are options available.

But then read the labels. If they say we are sustainable, the label will say, 5% organic cotton, and will be loaded with plastics, or it will not have any certification. So how do you trust? I mean, you know a supply chain is, how many people involved, how many organisations involved at the back, how can they all be all sustainable and true in their claim. Certification throughout the chain just gives us that proof that yes, what we are saying is a fact. We are not just claiming it.

Sudha: So what have been some of the biggest challenges along your journey, and how important are mentors and support networks would you say for bootstrap small entrepreneurs?

Ruchi: Keeping our products mid to premium range has been a big challenge.

Because we do have to incur the same costs as everybody. And then it means that you know your pocket is empty many a times because you are living by your ethos by which you started. That I will not overcharge or everybody defines it differently what is overcharged for me. And that has been a very big challenge to keep up prices in control.

And online customer is very price sensitive and they look for offers and sales. So we do offer that, but that is a killer for us. So this has been a challenge. And another challenge of course has been in keeping the full supply chain always on guard that we are what we are. We every day are living by it. So my travels from the UK to India such frequent travels is killing. But I have to do that because I have to be at both the places. So it's just, keeping the sustainability and transparency promise, the pricing and value promise in our complete product range and satisfying our customer.

The whole story is of challenges and lots of challenges, yes. But as long as you're enjoying it, yeah, I'm there in it.

Sudha: And how important are mentors and support networks?

Ruchi: Most important. They've brought me back every time. There are times when I've like given up completely partially, that this cannot be done. Why am I into this? I've questioned myself honestly couple of times, but there are people my mentors who've really stood by me and reminded me why I started this from day one. So asking me to maintain my journal and read it on such occasions, why I started this and what is my end objective, and where am I today. I'm staying here because of them. Completely because of my mentors and because of my family completely supporting me. My brother in the UK and my family here in India.

I mean, without their support, this wouldn't have been possible at all. My daughter, my husband, my parents. My daughter is my biggest mentor. She's 16 now and she is really the mirror in front of me. She shows me the mirror very often.

Mama, why you are doing this? Do you realize that

Sudha: That's nice. What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to build an authentic and sustainable brand in today's competitive landscape?

Ruchi: Come and join me. I need more entrepreneur minded people around me, so come and join me, that'll be wonderful because it's still very rare. To find people with that mindset who are ready to plunge in with all their effort and their sacrifices. So I would say to them that it's still the beginning, this is where the future is, only think of sustainability as your principle, as your key feature.

Sudha: Yeah. And possibly keep a journal so that you can remember why you got on the journey.

Ruchi: Oh, yes. Oh yes. It's so important to remember why you started this, what were the words that made you start this?

Sudha: We've spoken about the challenges, et cetera. What are some of your proudest moments or achievements in this sustainability journey?

Ruchi: So it's both ends of my spectrum. When I receive positive customer reviews, that's like the best...

140: The Role of Communications in Sustainability: Insights from Sangeeta Waldron, Author - What will your legacy be?

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes: On the 140th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast my guest was Sangeeta Waldron an industry veteran with over 3 decades of experience. Sangeeta's story is shaped by both personal and professional transitions, including navigating a recession and shifting her aspirations from advertising to government communications. Her bold decision to leave the security of a civil service role for a not-for-profit organisation working with the developing South marks a pivotal moment in her career, reflecting her commitment to meaningful work aligned with her heritage and values.

In the episode our conversation delves into how these early experiences shaped Sangeeta’s perspective on identity, inclusion and sustainability communications 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

- Her resilience in overcoming challenges as a British Indian woman in a predominantly white industry

- The current state of inclusivity within the public relations highlighting the persistent underrepresentation of diverse voices

- 'What Will Your Legacy Be?' Sangeeta’s latest book where she explores climate change and the role of businesses in fostering sustainable practices

- The importance of representation in storytelling and the necessity for brands to engage with broader demographics to effectively communicate in today's global society

- Our collective responsibility towards creating a more equitable and compassionate world, urging listeners to contemplate their own legacy and contributions to societal progress

The discussion links her individual journey to the broader context of responsible communications, emphasising how personal identity and lived experience can drive impactful change in sustainability narratives and foster greater inclusion in the workplace.

Head to the podcast to listen to the episode (link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good Morning Sangeeta. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Sangeeta: Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited about our conversation this morning.

Sudha: So let's get started with a quick introduction

Sangeeta: So it's a quick one. I mean, I've been over 30 years in this industry. In a strange way, I was born here, but I completed my degree in India, my college and university. So when I left India, I came as a postgraduate thinking I'm just going to, like most postgraduates or graduates, think they're just gonna be snapped up for a job.

I wasn't.

And the country at that time, the UK was going through a recession. And so it was very hard to find work. And I really wanted to be a copywriter in advertising when I was at university. That was my thing. That's what I really wanted to do. So I was trying to desperately get into advertising when I came back to the UK, but the recession had really affected. Well, we know that media and communications is always the first industry to suffer from recessions and knockbacks. So no one really wanted me. And I didn't have any office skills either.

So I sat the civil service entrance exam. And I got through. So I spent the first five years of my career writing speeches for a previous prime minister and ministers, but there is just so much creativity you can do with a minister and prime minister speech. And I thought this is really not what I want to do.

And I decided to resign and at that time, everyone was like, Are you crazy? It's a job for life. You've got a great pension. All those things, that Indian families are always very concerned about. And I said, no, this is not what I want to do and I resigned and I went to go and work for a very small, not for profit organisation working with the developing South, which kind of fitted all my background knowledge, my growing up and my experiences of living in India.

And I was there and that was really, I would say, while I had those first five years, in government, I would say my career really started when I went to work for this small not for profit. So this is becoming a very long elevator pitch. So just from there, I went to go work for some fantastic organisations.

I was the first global director of comms and marketing for the Economist Group, working at that time for the CEO, which was a huge privilege. She was the only woman in the square mile at that time. I went to work for the first mayor of London, Ken Livingston. So lots of firsts. And then in 2009, just before I set up my own PR agency, Serendipity PR and Media, I was working at a breast cancer charity.

And when I started there, it was just, a team of myself and two others, the time I left, we were an award-winning team of 10 and I was director of comms. And then 2009, I set up my own agency

And during that course of that time, we've also had the advent of social media. And so I've got more strings to my bow. And as you've read my second book very kindly, I'm a published author. So, that's me in a nutshell.

Sudha: That's such an amazing journey. So varied and the depth of experience and like you said, civil services. Do you regret it? Do you ever think that, oh, it might've been nice to still be working there?

Sangeeta: No.

Sudha: Short answer.

Sangeeta: So it's a good question. It's an interesting question. And I was speaking to a friend of mine over Christmas and we were talking about life.

When you get to a certain age, you look back on life and you think about, do you have any regrets? And no, I've got no regrets. Everything I've done has taken me to where I need to be and it's taken me to where I am today. So no, I'm pleased I left.

Sudha: I don't think everybody is able to do this with the conviction that you are able to speak about it.

Coming back to being a British Indian, what has your journey been like in the industry? How easy or difficult was it to assimilate? You have had so many firsts to your credit. On the face of it, it looks like it was all very smooth sailing and, very easy for you to progress, share with us the actual story.

Sangeeta: The question has made me think a lot and I have to acknowledge the people that gave me the opportunities. So when I applied for the job with the small not for profit after leaving the civil service, they gave me my opportunity.

At that time, it wasn't always easy. I still think it's not easy. Sometimes you're the only woman in the room. Sometimes you're the only British Indian woman in the room. And that, I'm talking about 30 years ago. And it's still like that now. So not a lot has changed, but I have to give a lot of credit to people who saw me, who saw my potential, who gave me the breaks, the opportunities.

And then I think a lot, like a lot of British Indians who are maybe first, second generation who've grown up in this country. My mother always used to tell me when I was little, when she used to get me ready for school here, she always used to say, you've always got to be better. You know, you've got to work harder because you're Indian, you've just got to work harder. And she always used to tell me, you're a girl, so you've got to work three times as hard and always have financial independence. So those were things that were always drilled into me and my mother was a working woman.

And so I would say it was also breaking a lot of stereotypes, how people see you, perceive you. I didn't fit into any boxes. So when I was working in some places, people naturally thought I was living at home with my parents. And I was living this... I don't know, whatever their stereotype was of a young British Indian woman.

And I remember going into work one day and I was a little bit late, and I said, oh, I had to ring my landlord because something wasn't working. And my boss said to me, landlord? He said, where are your parents? And I said, my parents? I said, my mom’s in India. He had to get his head round this whole story he had in his head on how he thought my life was.

It's breaking lots of stereotypes, and I think we're still breaking those stereotypes. And I think one thing I just want to say, I think people are discovering, and I think this is the joy and the positives of social media. People are also discovering that Indian women can be very funny, that we have a sense of humour.

Like the next person that's, all these stereotypes are all portrayed by the media or by film.

Sudha: Yeah, absolutely agree with you. But I also agree with what your mother drilled into you as a young child that you have to work harder. You have to be financially independent. I think that's some great advice. Actually, all women should be, everyone should be financially independent as far as possible. And of course when people are not able to put you into a box, it's very difficult for them to really decide on how they should behave with you.

It's easier to just slot people into different identities and stereotypes. From there we're moving on to this very important thing about identity, as somebody who's lived across two countries how important is your identity to you and how would you define it?

Sangeeta: That's another good question. I mean, my father was from India.

Sudha: Yeah.

Sangeeta: And when we went to India, it was our first time in India. And as a family, we only spoke English. So we didn't speak any of the Indian languages, no Hindi. My father was from the Punjab, no Punjabi. So when we went to India, I was about just 14 and a half.And so all our communication was through my dad and he was getting fed up because we couldn't communicate. So he just said he's not doing it anymore, which was like sink or swim. And I was too old to learn Hindi or Punjabi. So I did French.

Sudha: Yeah.

Sangeeta: And all my Hindi is the Hindi I've learned from TV, from films, because in India you have, well, servants is not a nice word, but you have home help.

Sudha: Yeah.

Sangeeta: So the home help that we had growing up, I learned from them, but I can't read or write. When we went to India my father wanted, I have a younger brother, wanted us to learn about our Indian roots. And in India, I wasn't accepted. I wasn't Indian enough.

So, I hated my nine years in India. And India was a very different place at that time, I was bullied, I was ostracized for the way I spoke Hindi, for all those stereotypes that Indians had of what an Indian young woman should be. And so after nine years, I said to my mom, look, I've done everything that's been expected of me and I'm now leaving.

And she didn't try and stop me. She understood, and in fact, when we went to India for the first time, when we arrived for the whole month, I refused to unpack my suitcase and my mum thought, Oh my God, if she doesn't unpack it today, then I'll have to bring her back. I'll bring her back because she's just not settling.

And that day, my mother thought that was the day I decided to unpack my suitcase. then when I came to the UK. I had this other story that everyone thought I was Indian, and I was just trying to find myself, I was in my 20s trying to find out who I am.

Yeah, so you're breaking those stereotypes here. And it was only recently somebody said to me, somebody I admire in the British Indian community. He rang me and we were just chit chatting and he said to me, you know, you're really respected in the Indian community. And that was like a, I don't know, it was like a big moment for me because I thought, wow, all this time I've always felt like I've been on the outskirts of everything.

And now suddenly people think, no, she's not a bad role model and she has a voice for the community. So my heritage is important, but I think it's who I am that defines me more than anything and I think that goes for everyone.

Sudha: Yeah. It must have been terribly difficult for you at 14 and a half to shift to a new country, when all you knew was, this way of living It must have been a huge culture shock. And of course, there is so much of resistance at that age. So, I have empathy for you. And of course when we talk about racism or stereotyping, it's not just that it happens here.

It happens everywhere. So it's about being conscious about how to accept people for who they are.

Sangeeta: One hundred percent. You're absolutely right.

And in India, sometimes I used to just stand there and not even open my mouth, but people know you're different. Just by the way you stand, you know, in this country, as a child, you are empowered to have a voice. In India, it's a different culture, it's a different setting. So yes, I was targeted a lot, never accepted. And then also not reading and writing Hindi was also a disadvantage. And my parents didn't set any boundaries. My mother didn't know India. She's Indian but wasn't from India.

And my father didn't sort of explain, this is what you do and this is what you don't do.

And I always, I was 15 and my parents put me in this co ed school. And what I didn't realize in India at that time was when the teacher said make groups. I would go and make groups at the boys and groups there is only boys together, girls together. At 15 you're discovering the other sex and, I was falling in love.

And I got into so much trouble at school. But no one explained to me that the culture is so different. My parents didn't sit me down. All my father said to me, the only advice he gave to me was don't smile at every boy

That's all he said to me. Don't smile at every boy because they all think they're Romeo. And that was the advice. And I had to navigate all of that on my own.

Sudha: That's a really tough thing for a young person to do. I'm sorry about that. But I will also just like to say that I grew up in India and different parts of India are very, very different.

So Northern India is definitely one of the places where all of this is so stark and so everyday kind of, it's not unusual to, have gone through that experience, but in other parts, I'd say in maybe some parts of Eastern India, if you were in Bengal or you were in Western India or in Southern India, your experiences would have probably been different, but you don't know, I mean, for a 14 and a half year old kid, 15 year old kid to be put in a situation like that, it's wrong and it's difficult. I mean, this is all hindsight.

I guess your parents didn't realize and I think our generation of parents didn't think too much about these things.

Sangeeta: They didn't think at all. I don't think they thought at all. But India is very different today, and I love going to India today. I have a different relationship now with the country.

Sudha: Yeah.

Sangeeta: And I always say when I meet incredible women like yourself. I always say, if I had met you when I was growing up in my twenties, I would have stayed. I would have felt there were other people like me, but I never met those women. And also in India at that time, there were very few careers you could have. You either were a teacher or a teacher.

Sudha: Well, again, this is what I'm saying is, depends on where you were and where you grew up. And I think you also grew up in a hill station or a smaller town, which can have its own challenges, not to justify any of the stuff that you had to go through.

Moving on to our industry in the UK as a senior practitioner, do you think the industry is inclusive? I just gave up my role as the chair of the PRCA equity and inclusion advisory council in Feb last year, I'd been there for three years, and I thought that I could better serve the industry from the outside rather than inside. What are your thoughts?

Sangeeta: I mean, I've been over 30 years in this industry and when I started out, there were very few women in senior positions and no women, I would say, no women of colour in senior positions. We've just entered 2025 and last year, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations published their census and it showed, I think it's something like 84 percent or 87 percent of people in the industry are white, 5 percent are Asian, Asian.

I don't know what that means because we're all just put together, whether that's Indian, Chinese So 5 percent Asian, 3 percent black. I think it's something like 4 percent of people are mixed heritage. That is still not enough for an industry. I don't believe it's representative of everyone. And that is a problem for brands.

That's a problem for communications because we're living in a global society.

Brands need to be able to talk to everyone. And if you've only got one demographic setting the campaign, setting the messaging, defining what a campaign is. You're not inclusive enough. And we've seen those kinds of mistakes being made by big brands, including luxury brands.

Sudha: I think that it persists because I started at the PRCA in my role in 2021. And, I felt like moving the agenda it's like, trying to move a mountain especially when you look at the bigger agencies, I quit the industry in 2018. Because I struggled to really find my place, and after that I struggled to find anywhere to get to because people could not see where I would fit or whether I had the experience or the right experience. And I think that a big factor of that was to do with my age that I was in my mid-forties and also to do with the fact...

139: Empowering Women in the Climate Sector: A Conversation with Shalini Bharat, Founder & CEO, Nadhi 'She-for-Climate' initiative

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes:

The global climate movement/industry is not very inclusive; amongst other things it struggles with gender gap. This is especially true in a country like India where the climate industry, particularly the clean energy sector, suffers from a significant gender gap, with women severely underrepresented in technical and leadership roles. While women disproportionately bear the burden of climate change impacts, social and systemic barriers limit their participation in the very sectors that could offer solutions and economic empowerment.

In India there are several government initiatives focused on women’s participation, along with several grassroots and third sector initiatives that are working to build skills and capacity. One such initiative is #Nadhi -SheforClimate a women led initiative building climate resilience through human capital development. #Nadhi is the brain child of Shalini Bharat a banker turned climate entrepreneur and social leader.

After a 17-year career in finance, including serving as the COO of Corporate Bank at Deutsche Bank India, Shalini founded the climate community platform with a vision to empower 100,000 women to become climate leaders by the year 2030.

So, what inspired this banker to leave the safety of 9-5 for climate entrepreneurship? In the course of our conversation, we spoke about....

- Her motivations for creating a platform dedicated to increasing female representation in climate leadership

- The overwhelming lack of women in decision-making roles in this critical space

- Initiatives that facilitate capacity building, fostering community, and provide career support for aspiring female climate leaders

- The importance of partnerships in advancing these objectives, highlighting how collaborations with various

organizations can amplify the impact of their mission

- Authenticity and purpose as

critical drivers for meaningful change within the climate space

#Nadhi works at the intersection of gender equity and climate adaptation by enabling women to enter and thrive in green careers building long-term individual and community economic resilience. They also support micro-entrepreneurs in climate-aligned sectors such as sustainable agriculture, clean energy, circular economy, and low-carbon services and help create community-driven knowledge network.

ShaliniBharat is also the founder of the circular economy startup The KindBusiness

#WomenInSustainability #ClimateLeadership #BreakingBarriers #BreakTheBias #GenderAndEnvironment

#RepresentationMatters

#AmplifyHerVoice

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Shalini. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Shalini: Thank you. My pleasure to be here and thanks for inviting me.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction. Shalini, what inspired you to start a business focused on climate? What is Nadhi She for climate? And is that the right pronunciation?

Shalini: It's Nadhi. Like river.

I'll talk about the inspiration behind Nadhi

So, Nadhi, it's been about, I think 16, 17 months since I started Nadhi, but the backstory to this is I used to be a corporate banker. And in 2021 I left my job a CXO level person, quit the job without a plan, wanted to, get into the climate space. But I started with a little bit of social leadership fellowship. But when I kind of entered the climate space, I. It was very overwhelming.

First of all, you didn't know whether it was a scientific or a science based, you know, skill or experience you need, or is it something that I can use my existing domain expertise to get in there? It was just overwhelming. And climate is a huge space, right?

So I remember how overwhelming it was for me and I think over the past four, five years I tried to build a few things on the side, but one of the common questions or topics where whenever I used to speak to anybody used to be, hey, how do I get into the space? And that prompted me to start Nadhi.

I could also say it was also for selfish reasons that I also wanted to be part of something where I can meet like-minded people, you know, exchange ideas, exchange thoughts, and also feel that you're not really out of place in any of your conversations.

I could have kept it open, but I also realized that having been part of so many networks and conferences, there's always a little bit of not being heard in the room kind of.

Shalini: And you know, usual mansplaining. All those things also happen. So I thought, why not do this only for the den? So it all started with a Google form last year, February. I just rolled it out in Bombay. I didn't really expect the response I was getting.

And that is how Nadhi's journey has also been that it was completely impromptu without too much of planning or anything.

And then it kind of became into a venture or a social business, Nadhi's primary goal is how do we enable more and more women to come into the climate space. Now it will be interesting to also see that, or rather it was for me very interesting that I have been part of so many conversations with women.

But it was when I read a report from OECD, it said less than 30% women. There are only 30%, less than 30% women leaders in the climate space who are decision makers and senior level leaders.

So all these things I would say kind of prompted me to kind of put a structure which was pretty much can I enable more women to the climate space?

So the focus is on three aspects which is climate fluency through capacity building and of course a whole community of like-minded women and and providing them career support by partnering with organizations. That became like the core of Nadhi. So the mission is to enable 100,000 women to become climate leaders, decision makers, change makers by 2030.

Sudha: Amazing. I think this journey to transitioning and taking that leap of faith.

It has to be a leap of faith when you leave something without a plan because we are so conditioned culturally and socially to not take risks. And this is definitely; this definitely sounds like a risk.

So this plunge into entrepreneurship, Shalini, was there an aha moment or was it a gradual. Gradual sort of, you know, awakening to the possibilities as you sort of explore and then you find that oh, you know, this is what is me or this is what I'd like to be doing.

Shalini: So to be honest, if you had asked me five years back if I would even ever think of become an entrepreneur, I would have said no. That was something I didn't really plan or even remotely thought about.

But what happened I think was, I would say it was gradual, but I think they were also that aha moment for me to kind of jump into that space.

So gradual because you know, when I, like I earlier mentioned coming into the climate space, having had a very, very, how do I say, broad experience in the corporate sector, I thought getting into climate would be also easier and it wasn't easy. So which means I was also very clear that I'm not going to start from scratch.

All the years of experience I've, I built I don't want to just go to Cash, so. And that's where I thought, why not do something on my own? Honestly, after being through the journey, I realized how hard it is.

But I think the point in time was if I don't do it now, I would regret it later. Yeah, might as well try it now and see where it takes me.

So I think it was also a little bit of, I would say, risk taking on my part, thinking that, okay, let me try it at least.

Shalini: But that moment was for me to try, build something on my own came about because I found it extremely difficult to find anything, how do I say, suitable for my, you know, experience and what I was trying to look for. So I think that that kind of requirement need also pushed me to kind of do this.

Sudha: Amazing. That sounds like. Yeah, that sounds like. So such an interesting journey.

So what, what does a typical day look like in the day in the life of a founder? Can you walk us through it?

Shalini: One thing I can tell you for sure, No two days are the same. So there are days which are really full of energy. You are literally peaking. There are days where you want to kind of literally dig your head in the ground and, you know, think about, why am I doing this? So there are both kind of days.

So typically I would say, you know, it's all, it's all about spending a little bit of time planning for the next set of things you want to do. So in my case, what I also realized is I don't plan too far ahead because this one, this sector is changing for me.

It's also kind of keeping three months or six months as a planning goal and start planning for that and also having conversations with lot of companies, individuals to understand what is needed and where is the gap. I think it spends a lot of time in just talking to people, individuals and companies. And then there's the doing part.

Because you're a founder, you do everything everything is all your baby.

But I'm also kind of, how do I say, kind of a grateful to have a very trusted set of people who I can always go back and brainstorm and have them as my sounding board. So for me, a day is typically more on, you know, engaging with people, companies and understanding that and then planning.

To be honest, earlier in a corporate life, you're done with Monday to Friday. Here it is not. So I, I kind of even sometimes if I feel like I even pick up my laptop and do work on a Saturday or a Sunday. But off late, I've also been very conscious that having that mental space for yourself is very important. So I consciously take one day off in a week where I don't think about anything. But primarily, you know, it's all about planning.

Then there's a lot of doing and then there's a lot of engaging with people.

Sudha: Yes. Yeah, yeah. And I guess as a founder you also have to be very hands on. So all the things that you have to do. Yeah, it really keeps you busy.

But then how do you draw the line? So I think that's an interesting thing that you mentioned that at least one day in a week you're not going to be working. Yeah, that's brilliant.

What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've encountered so far, Shalini? And perhaps unexpected opportunities arising from those?

Have you had challenges in accessing funding for the, you know, funding for the initiatives that you are like planning or taking up?

Shalini: So to be honest here, unlike a product or even to a certain extent a service deck where you could say, hey, this is my product, you know, can we, can we get funding for it, A grant or, or you know, equity, whatever it is. Right. It's much easier.

When you're building a network and there the network has lot of programs, funding is a challenge.

So that's why this conversation with, you know, different partners of corporates and organizations is a probably one way to go forward where, you know, you engage them, show well that you're adding, could add value to those organizations. But yes, for an organization like ours, it's always looked at as little soft. But, but I think one thing people forget is while you may build product or service, you still need people who are conscious, who are intentional and have them by your side. And that network is also something where people are going to leverage at future points. Right.

So I don't think that, I don't think the investors or funders look at it such long term because for them it's a long term investment. So I would say that that continues to be a challenge. So I mean working on it, we'll see where we kind of land, see opportunities.

I'll tell you there are two interesting things which kind of happen.

Or rather I would say I wouldn't call it challenges turning into opportunities but it just because the, how do I say, the objective or the overall mission aligns with people and hence they want to kind of partner or give you opportunities.

So one of them being because we kind of sit at the gender inclusive climate intersection. There are organizations who want to say that, hey, I want to kind of also position my organization as, you know, very women focused. Or I want to kind of bring in more women into, say, climate entrepreneurship. So I want to kind of work with you. So these organizations who see this as a very aligned partner, those kind of opportunities definitely pop up.

But other apart from that, it's all about, you know, I'm kind of completely keeping funding off the table because it's a little of a longer kind of conversation. But typically this is how funders work.

But there are opportunities because people definitely look at us as potential partners because we sit at the conversation.

Sudha: So the next question sort of neatly segues into this is, you know, so you're nurturing the skills and the talent of, you know, women to enter the space and to sort of engage in the opportunities. How exactly are you doing that? How are you making this space more inclusive and representative? What are some of the initiatives? Probably.

Shalini: Like I mentioned at the beginning that we have these three verticals, right? Capacity building, community and the career support. So think of this as a launchpad.

So I might be a marketing person, finance person, technology person who has absolutely no clue about anything to do with climate. But it's also become very important when we have, when you're within the organizations or when you're looking to shift to have that climate fluency.

So what we do is we run all these programs to help people build their climate currency. I can probably share a couple of examples where you're probably able to see what that means.

So I remember one of the sessions which we did, which was a very high level ESG kind of a, I would say like a cohort based thing. And here we got people who were working with high net worth, you know, individuals or officers, family officers, and they said, okay.

They came to me and said, look for me, when people ask me about ESG and how does it apply to the family, office or high net worth individual? It's very important for me to have that knowledge of how can I advise them about what does it mean for you?

Now I'm not going to become an ESG specialist myself, but this kind of an introductory information or information or knowledge helps them to build that. Yeah, right. So kind of helps them to also understand the different players, how different sectors look at ESG.

So I'm saying that is how the fluency part of it comes.

Sudha: Yeah, yeah.

Shalini: We also have done a Mentorship program. So which means for entrepreneurs or MVP stages, the pilot mentorship program. How do I go about finding my product market fit is my, is my problem statement clear? And I mean do I know my customer better? How do I go about raising money, funds, runs, you know, all those things. So I would say it's a combination of all these things.

When people come to us, when people join the community, they get a overall or kind of an ecosystem support which kind of address all of it. So it's more like a. You come in. Absolutely.

As a newbie or a novice, you have like-minded peers who also just generously share knowledge or make the connections for you.

And, but also you have these kinds of programs or some, you know, the, or the mentorship or the other things which we run also helps them to, you know, get plugged into different things which is of their interest. Yeah, so that's how I would summarize it of nurturing.

Sudha: What, what do you think are the specific skills that are lacking and that you know, the future change makers, female women, change makers that you're looking at, what should they focus on developing? Because like you said at the start, you know, you have worked for maybe 20 years in the banking sector and you don't want to start from scratch.

You have experiences that you can sort of, you know, re train and sort of use a different way in different situations. You know, after 20 years you don't need to go back to the drawing board, you need to get fluency.

But you have already have so many skills exist that can support you. So from your experience, what are these, you know, specific skills that women need that are really important when they're transitioning?

Because a lot of them is about, a lot of it is about transitioning.

Shalini: So I would rather in instead of skill I would say probably I would talk about two things to focus on. I mean it can be a skill building exercise or it could be just polishing it or you know, sharpening your existing...

138: Alicia Solanki, Team Lewis on breaking barriers, cultural stereotypes and leading with authenticity

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes:

Black and Ethnic Minority representation in leadership positions in the UK PR Industry leaves much to be desired and is well below FTSE 100 @11% and FTSE 250 @9% (Parker Review 2025). However, I am an optimist and do believe that direction of travel has been set by advocates and agencies… Collective progress may be slow, but equity & inclusion is mainstream and there are more role models than ever before…

Alicia Solanki, Senior VP EMEA @Team Lewis is one such role model challenging cultural expectations and stereotypes to make space for herself in the UK industry. In this fast-paced conversation on The Elephant in the Room podcast we spoke about the dynamics of leadership and representation in the industry from the perspective of a woman of colour.

Alicia also spoke about the importance of mentorship in fostering resilience and empowerment amongst underrepresented communities.

- Authenticity and cultural sensitivity

- Work life balance decoded

- Codeswitching – life saving hack or demotivating burden?

- Evolving definitions of leadership and empathy in leadership

- DEI alive or dead? Are clients continuing to prioritise DEI initiatives or are they backtracking on their previous commitments?

Each and every time I hear somebody speak about their lived experiences, I am blown away by how unique our experiences are to each one of us. How important it is for us to understand that Black and Ethnic Minorities or the global majority are not homogenous. That understanding context and intersectionality are key to informed equitable interventions for inclusive workplaces and thriving communities.

Her advice to young Black and Ethnic minority professionals entering the industry - ‘make your own magic’.

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Alicia. Wonderful to have you on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

I'm delighted because I've been following you on LinkedIn for some time and it's a great pleasure to have you here today.

Alicia: Thank you, Sudha. It's a pleasure to be here today.

And yes, my friends and family always laugh about how obsessed I am with LinkedIn, so I'm glad you found me on there too.

Sudha: Brilliant. So let's start with a quick introduction.

Alicia: So I'm Alicia Solanki. I'm SVP EMEA at Team Lewis. Team Lewis is a global marketing agency here in London, but we're also global. We're around the world in 25 offices. I've done my whole career agency side. Before that I was in the Omnicom family. So, yeah, I guess I love the buzz of agency.

I love the discipline of PR and how it's really expanded now. I have two children, Ella, who's 11, just started high school. So lots of change came going on in our house at the moment.

And then I have a little boy called Ethan, who's eight. So, yeah, married, busy life, juggling loads of plates. But I kind of like it that way. So that's a bit about me.

Sudha: Yeah. Oh, my God, it sounds really busy and with life changing stuff.

I mean, moving from primary to secondary is like a huge change and of course, agency life. Tell me about it. I love the buzz. I was agency side, moving on. As an ethnic minority woman with an amazing career in PR, I need to ask you this. Did you choose to get into the PR industry? And how did your family respond? Because, I mean, a lot of Asians really don't get it.

Alicia: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And you're going to laugh when I tell you that I bought the ‘Dummy's Guide to PR’ before I started my career because I knew nothing about what this industry was about. But what I did know is that it ticked loads of boxes. So I love politics, I love the media, I love writing and reading and being with people.

And there were very few careers, I guess, that ticked every single one of those boxes. And then I came across PR and started looking into it and realized that it could do that. So that was where it ended up. My family had no clue what this was. My mom still thinks I'm a pa, I think. So I just kind of let anyone believe that which is fine.

And I really remember one time when I think it was a cousin of mine, who I won't name, said to me, what are you supposed to do with a career with a degree, sorry, in English. And I remember thinking, oh God, I've really gone against the grain here. When you know, lots of my cousins and grew up in a really big Indian family. Right. Lots of people around the house and most of them did, you know, either economics or math. So I was definitely an outlier.

And so yeah, it wasn't easy and I definitely sort of went left when everybody went right. From a studies point of view.

Sudha: Good for making your own choices. I can understand. I mean I didn't tell my kids, they didn't know what I did for the longest time and I was okay with that.

So during your career, considering that, you come from a background which is not in PR and where there's little awareness of the industry, did you have access to mentors and allies and role models? How important is it for you to see people like ourselves as role models?

Alicia: Yeah. I'll take the first part of your question first. I started this career in 2005 and there definitely weren't that many role models, particularly Asian female, in really seeing positions.

I think fast forward 20 years where we are now, there are definitely lots of brilliant examples and each one of us hopefully trying to lift each other up and become more visible and use our platforms and our voices. But there wasn't back then.

But what there were, I would say is that loads of allies in other places that either saw a talent that you had, that maybe you didn't realize that you had advocated for you and gave you opportunities. And I started my career at Ketchum and there were some amazing leaders, colleagues there that, you know, played an instrumental part in my career.

And they know who they are. So I won't name them all because I don't want to miss anyone. But yeah, the ability to see something, I guess that you didn't see in yourself. So allies are important everywhere in your life. Sometimes they're obvious allies, sometimes they look like you have the same background as you, but that's not always the case.

And I think being open minded and looking around and networking like crazy and finding those people that can lift you up and can occasionally like throw you the microphone or give you the spotlight. I think for me those are the people that have been real jewels in the story. As I look back over 20 years. So yeah, they weren't there back then. I'm so pleased to say that there are definitely way more now.

Sudha: Agree. I totally agree with you. And you know, we just spoke about agency life and the buzz of agency life. So is there a thing such as work life balance and what are the strategies for staying grounded and avoiding burnout considering you have a life beyond work?

Alicia: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's one of the hardest things I think about being in this career. It is always on. There is a nature, a degree to which you have to be present with your team, with your clients and that's challenging.

Yeah, I mean I have a really long commute to get to work. It can take up to two hours each way, children to sort out in the morning, to feed in the afternoons.

But the way that I like to look at it I guess is that there isn't such a thing as work life balance because you just have one life and you just have to work out how do you turn the volume up and down every single day? So sometimes the volume at work is a bit louder, other days it'll be louder at home.

I like to keep it broadly in equilibrium because I find that that makes me happiest, it makes my family happiest, my colleagues happiest. It's not always easy, but I think you have to be quite disciplined about the way you look at work life balance.

You know, you can't always have your cake and eat it. There is sacrifice everywhere you look and often personal sacrifice is - definitely things that I'm not able to do in the week.

Do a yoga class or there just isn't the time. But I'd hope that in time when the children are older and things settle that you'll get to do some of those things.

But yeah, I think it's just being open minded about that, respecting your boundaries, having that self-respect as well and not being afraid to say no every now and then that I'm not going to stay late or you know, go for that extra drink or. Because actually getting home early today is really important to me. So yeah, that's how I try and look at it.

Sudha: Yeah, I think identifying what is important for you both personally and professionally. Like you said, no two days are same and you need to prioritize and probably plan things down to the last minute.

Alicia: Definitely. And people love.. I have a holiday spreadsheet for the summer holidays and to the point where I just send it to my friends and say just self-serve yourself a date when you want to do a play day or you want to see me? Because unless I do that, I feel totally like eight weeks. I feel totally out of control.

So things like that, although they're practical, very Virgo, I'm very organized. Like things like that really help me.

And other people will have other techniques and crutches that they use, but I think without them it can feel like a free fall and there's nothing feeling like you don't have a plan. So wherever possible I try and put some like scaffolding around me, my family, to protect us and also to enable us to do the jobs that we do.

Sudha: Absolutely. And I think we are, we perform better at work if we are personally also in a good place. So I think makes sense to look out for both.

Alicia: Yeah.

Sudha: So moving on. I think this is something that a lot of black and ethnic minority employees feel. The pressure to code switch or assimilate in the workplace. And if yes, how has that experience influenced your leadership style today?

And are there facets to your identity that you wished people were aware about because it would make navigating the workplace easier?

Alicia: Yeah, that's a brilliant question. And yeah, I code switch all the time. I think you have to because you wear lots of different hats.

You know, when I'm at work and I'm in a boardroom or running the daily stand up meetings with my team. You know, they're looking for you to, to stand up, to tell them what's happening, to reassure them, give them confidence, laugh together, do all of these things. you know, But equally, you know, say if I'm out of the office with a different group or even at home, my own family and my in laws side, you know, you code switch all the time. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I think it's being aware that you're doing it and also the energy expense that it sometimes can take to code switch. Because if you do it beautifully, nobody will ever know that you're doing it. Only you will know the extent to which you're having to either mask or to amplify a kind of characteristic. But yeah, it happens. And I wrote a blog recently about - I'm quite petite. So, you know, it's easy to be the shortest person in the room or around the table. Things I do every time I'm in a room, for example, I immediately pump my chair up around a meeting room table. I take up physical space with my laptop or my books. I talk naturally very loud, which I find gives me authority.

So there's things like that that I've learned to do very naturally now because I know that by doing that, I'm gonna perform at my best.

And, yeah, and some of that just happens autonomously, I find, as you grow through your career and get comfortable with your own kind of personality and your own delivery.

And then on your second question. In terms of facets of identity, I think, you know, being from, you know, the Indian subcontinent, I definitely grew up in a big Indian household with, with loads of, you know, family, uncles, aunties, cousins. And, you know, you were one of a big number. You did have to find your way in that.

I do think of our generation, you know, those born in the kind of 80s who were in between the parents generation where, you know, they were really serving in laws often and trying to find their identity. We had a little bit more of that, but we don't have as much, I would. I would say, as the kind of Gen Z, which is great. You know, there's definitely some freedoms that have been found. So, you know, I've read a lot with, you know, Jaspreet Kaur.

She wrote that book, Brown Girl Like Me, and she talks a lot about that intergenerational trauma that sometimes people, certainly women like me of my age, you know, early 40s are. I have grappled with. And I do think that can play out that sort of quiet Indian girl stereotype or she's gonna be subservient. She's not gonna cause fuss. She's gonna do what she's told. Right. All of these things do exist. And I think, you know, you have to kind of counter some of that every day. And people might turn their head and go, oh, she's not at all like. I thought so. Yeah. I think there's things like that that play into our sense of who we are.

Sudha: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so interesting to hear because, you know, it's like.

I mean, it's about processing essentially your various experiences, and people have various experiences and sometimes, you know, they can be very negative.

This thing about get your whole self to work thing it never worked for me. I was never going to get my whole self to work ever. Right. So I. I don't believe in that. Yeah.

But I want to get my professional best self to work and be empathetic person. So it's about knowing where and what you want to be doing and who you want to be known as.

Alicia: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. And I think we can get really hung up on. On fighting things.

And you put all your attention on disproving or, you know, that's not like me. And. And then you kind of lose the plot line because then you're not doing or advocating for the positive things that you can do. It's sort of. You become quite defensive about all of the challenges in your way. So I can try and approach it with a more positive attitude to say, well, actually, I'd love to surprise this person in the room.

Or when you tell them that you're head of the UK market, they sort of go, oh, you know, And I still get that. I find it just tremendous when you introduce yourself. And I don't know what they expect me to say when I put my hand out to shake their hand, but when I say that I definitely have had more than my fair share of oh.

Which I love now, I use it like dynamite because I kind of go, great, I've either proven you wrong or a stereotype that you've had that just hasn't lined up for you. And I use that to kind of charge myself up. So again, it could be a negative thing that you go, why are people looking at me in this way?

I. I'm not doing something right. It's all about me doing it wrong. But flip it around and go, actually, none of this is on me. And kind of prove them wrong. So you've got to be careful.

Because I think actually for women in our position, that can be quite a heavy load and a burden to carry if you don't find a way to make it more of a dynamite and less of a kryptonite kind of analogy.

Sudha: Yeah, I love the dynamite kryptonite analogy. Love it.

But discomfort is a good place for people to be. They don't know. So that's great. So the definition of leadership has, you know, evolved dramatically in the last few years. What does it mean to you?

How have your experiences shaped it, if at all. And what is your leadership style?

Did you think when you were like, you know, 10 years ago, you were thinking, my God, I mean, it would be helpful not to have this kind of behaviour from a leader?

Alicia: Yeah, definitely. It's a question I get asked a lot, and it's an important question. I think it. It does change.

It changes depending on where you are, what the kind of macroeconomics are, what's needed of you as a leader.

And I think for me, you know, the yardstick of a good leader isn't like, and I've learned this through the hard way, isn't how much you are liked, but how much you are respected. And that's something I had to learn because I am a real people pleaser at heart.

I love being with my team in the trenches all the time doing work I probably shouldn't be doing because I just love being in the weeds. But as you grow up the ranks, I think you have to learn quickly that you have to show, yes, empathy, of course.

That kind of servant leadership model, I think is really important.

And these days, actually kind of leading by example, but also giving the teams a level of clarity, inspiration, the space to, like, do some introspection as well. And they kind of look to you for that. So. But yeah, I think you need to know how to code switch again as you.

As you are a leader and know that you have to sometimes wear masks that are not your natural...

137: The Crucial Role of Nature in Climate Mitigation Strategies: A conversation with Swapan Mehra, Founder, CEO Iora Ecological Solutions

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes: Shifting political priorities and economic pressures over the past couple of years have seen several countries scale back climate commitments contributing to the growing gap between climate pledges and real-world emissions (still rising).

What does this mean for a ‘Just Transition’ and Net Zero? While there is no silver bullet, IUCN and UNEP emphasise Nature based Solutions (NbS) can be pivotal for climate mitigation and adaptation, when pursued alongside rapid decarbonisation globally.

To discuss NbS, and climate change I recently caught up with Swapan Mehra a global leader in climate action and ecosystem conservation. In this deeply insightful conversation Swapan spoke about how NbS is a holistic approach to addressing the climate crisis, through a spectrum of actions designed to protect and restore ecosystems while simultaneously delivering co-benefits for biodiversity, communities and individuals. We also spoke about…

👉🏾 How NbS are fundamental in agrarian contexts like India, where communities are inextricably linked to their natural environments.

👉🏾 The practical implementations of NbS in India's Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), that highlight the ambitious targets set for increasing forest carbon stocks by 2.5 to 3 billion tons by 2030

👉🏾 The challenges to adoption by the private sector

· Lack of standardised financial mechanisms, regulatory hurdles, and insufficient data and knowledge about NbS performance and returns

👉🏾 NbS frameworks including IUCN; Voluntary carbon markets integrity initiative

👉🏾 Investor expectation vs reality

👉🏾 Voluntary carbon markets, carbon credits and greenwashing

We also spoke about India’s carbon trading and green credit scheme, leadership commitment, the impact on SMEs, projects he is particularly proud and being a climate optimist……

“To me, just transition means ensuring that climate action doesn't come at a cost of life, livelihoods, equity, inclusion, but rather climate action promotes life, livelihood, equity, inclusion. In the context of the global south, especially India, where our communities have such a direct relationship with nature, with our landscapes, this means putting farmers first, indigenous communities first, it means ensuring investments which are locally contextualized to the needs of the communities and ensuring that a large part of the benefit flows to them. These are communities who have not played a major role in actually causing climate change, and now yet we are dependent on them to solve the problem for us.”

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Swapan. Wonderful to catch up again after a long time

Swapan: Good afternoon, Sudha. Very good to catch up.

Sudha: Let's get started with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about yourself and IORA Ecological Solutions.

Swapan: Sure. So, firstly, thank you for having me on your podcast Sudha. I'm Swapan Mehra, I'm the founder and CEO of IORA Ecological Solutions. IORA Ecological Solutions is a leading developer of nature-based solutions, policies, implementation plans and action on ground in India. Over the last 15 years, we worked across 200 projects in the areas of forest conservation, forest restoration, and sustainable agriculture, while also helping India and many other countries develop leading policies to not only plan action on climate change, but also execute this action through financing and technology. Our mission is to make nature count, our mission is to ensure that there is holistic conservation of nature, of biodiversity and the communities who depend on nature.

Sudha: That's very, very interesting.

So, from our previous conversations and what I've read about IORA, I understand that, like you said, nature-based solutions for climate mitigation adaptation are pivotal to the work that you do. So what counts as nature-based solutions and why are nature-based solutions crucial to tackling climate change?

Swapan: Well, that's a great question. So nature-based solutions is a broad category of actions which in summary are actions that can protect, sustainably manage, and restore modified ecosystems while providing the core benefits of biodiversity, climate mitigation, climate adaptation, human wellbeing. Some examples of nature-based solution include afforestation, reforestation forest conservation, mangrove restoration soil and sand, enhancement, et cetera.

Now, why are nature-based solutions gaining a lot of traction? I think there are multiple reasons. One is that it's mildly accepted that nature-based solutions have the capability to deliver close to 30% of all mitigation actions, which are needed to stay below the two degree levels, which are enshrined in all of the global NDCs by 2030, a third of the actions.

The second reason is that nature-based solutions, like I mentioned earlier, deliver a lot of core benefits, versus any other solution, I'm not saying that our nature-based solutions are more important or less important than technology-based solutions. But as compared to other solutions, these core benefits of nature-based solutions are immense, especially in an agrarian vulnerable country like India.

If you're able to restore lands, restore water bodies, aforest, it can help tremendously in reducing climate risk for communities, helping creating jobs, help in ensuring livelihoods are sustained. Lastly there are two kinds of climate actions that we broadly have been all working on in the last few years.

One is actions that lead to avoidance of emissions. Second, which lead to, removal of emissions, which are already out there. While renewable energy and such categories, which have gained a lot of investment in the last few years, which is critical to the global pathway of decarbonisation, we all agree that there is already a lot of emissions out there, which are already starting to warm the globe, the process has already started. This is now a well-established fact, which means that we also need to balance this out with a lot of removals.

In the removal space, nature-based solutions have a distinct advantage also of being cost effective. Industrial removals, carbon capture are still very expensive, given that nature-based solutions have the ability to remove at a fair price locked carbon for periods of 30, 40, 50 years, which is what the world needs to move towards, net zero technologies and their core benefits. This is the reason why nature solutions are gaining a lot of traction and attention now.

Sudha: Yeah, my, first interaction was at the Planet Cognisphere event and so it's interesting to see, that it prioritizes not just, removals, but it prioritizes communities, and it looks at community impact and the cost of doing this entire process, because who's going to finance, where's the money going to come from?

So I think we definitely need low-cost innovations, and this sounds like a great way, to approach and, address the challenges. So, the NBS have been, incorporated into the NDCs as a part of the country's strategies, and you have helped develop India's National REDD+ strategy.

Tell us a bit more about it.

Swapan: So, yeah, Sudha most countries now have a major component of nature-based solution in their NDCs, this includes major budgets for afforestation, for reducing deforestation, and even in some cases for reducing emissions from agriculture.

So those components are there in various NDCs. India where we've had the pleasure and the privilege to be helping the Ministry of Environment Forest, making a roadmap for the NBS part of its NDC, has a major target to increase carbon stocks in India's forest and tree cover by two and a half to 3 billion tons by 2030, which is a major target.

Now, NDC targets are also slightly related to this instrument called REDD plus. REDD plus is an instrument which is being developed by the UN, in an effort to reduce emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and also to enhance the quality of the forest, the plus stands for Sustainable Forest Management and Enhancement.

REDD Plus has been under development for many years, the World Tree Carbon markets have adopted REDD plus in various forms, and there have been many projects, many initiatives. We had a chance to develop India's National REDD Plus policy and guidance document back in the day. Now there are also some challenges when it comes to REDD plus.

REDD plus is a very critical instrument. I especially feel that it needs to be promoted more and more because there is a distinct advantage of conserving existing good forest over creating new forest. I'm not saying creating new forest is not a good strategy, it is, but the true system service is the biodiversity, and very importantly, the culture and heritage enshrined in existing forests.

In order to regain that, the process for a new forest can span century.

I'm not remembering the number exactly, but from what I recall, I think less than 10%, 15% of the worlds intact forest is left now. Most of it is gone. These forests also play a very major role in regulating very major climatic and and weather cycles around the world. Water cycles, et cetera. And which is why REDD Plus as an instrument continues to be in dialogue, in discussion, and various people try to figure out how we can, promote this further.

In the context of India one of the reasons why India takes a very strong view of NBS and its NDC and has this major goal on increasing forest tree carbon stock - is also a recognition of the fact that firstly India's land, has high productivity can grow forest, traditionally has had a lot of forest, still maintains a large amount of forest, close to 25%. It's critical for India's biodiversity, it’s critical for India's water, but very importantly, India has close to anywhere between three to four hundred million people who are still directly dependent on a forest for their livelihoods. For us, maintaining this forest, enhancing this forest is critical for our social development, for our social growth and inclusion of our communities as well.

Sudha: Absolutely. I think I was staggered when I realised the scale of the population that is dependent on forest and forest-based livelihoods.

So it's good that there is a strategy that exists at the national level. Swapan what has been your experience of adoption by the private sector and what are some of the challenges of adoption of NBS by the sector?

Swapan: We interestingly with the World Economic Forum and CII did a survey of the Indian private sector a few months ago on their appetite and challenges in adopting NBS as a strategy central to their sustainability, climate change, et cetera. So I'll summarize some of the results from that survey, but also some of my observations over the years.

One thing that I can clearly mention is that there is growing interest in the private sector to look at NBS, either as a strategy to help them offset their climate and biodiversity footprint, or to offset some value chain risk. But a wide majority of corporates, especially in India, still view NBS as something that they need to address or they can address as part of their corporate social responsibility and not core strategy. Which is a challenge and I think that this is also where our community, the community of nature profession, needs to do a lot more to get these companies to mainstream nature on their balance sheet. To value the liability of negative nature impacts, but also value positively the gains from positive nature stewardship, which in our experience, far outweigh investments because the gains from nature are so multifold.

I also feel that even to head in that direction, while there is interest from companies, there are also certain systemic barriers, some institutional barriers that we need to take care of, amongst them, one is just the availability of tools data metrices.

There is a wide range of different standards available, but there is no standardisation. That's something that we need to work on. India actually is taking a leadership role in that space, with the government firmly taking control of sustainability, reporting standards, et cetera, but we need to do more.

There needs to be data and metrices available today if there is a company which wants to put biodiversity impact on its balance sheet, where do they get the data for? We don't have site specific information easily available. Then there is also a challenge of, I would say talent in this sector, more and more people need to be trained on how to account for all of this. In terms of investing in nature, in the survey that I mentioned earlier, there were some very interesting responses that finally, when you deal with investments in nature, you're dealing with land, with communities, with governments, and there needs to be more regulatory clarity changes in policies that allow the private sector to invest in nature, which at the moment is not very straightforward. Then of course, even if those things are clear, the one thing that the private sector needs to reorient their investment systems around is just the way you invest in nature, the system of investment in nature, because these investments are very long term. If you want to invest in a forest, you need to wait for 15 years for it to grow.

There is some uncertainty. Uncertainty about and risks of nature, which at the moment our corporate systems are not tuned to value, you know?

There is mortality, there is pest, there is a climate event. So I think that's where we are right now. There is to summarize increasing interest, but still on the margins, looked at as some companies have taken a leadership role and are investing heavily, but many look at this as sort of an additional corporate social responsibility, investment versus core strategy.

And that's what we need to now push nature towards.

Sudha: I think, you've made some really good points there, especially about understanding and getting it to be as a part of the strategic business decision rather than a CSR initiative and an add-on that you do to just talk about philanthropy or your piecemeal efforts.

And it has to be probably at the design stage and the C-suite have to be involved in discussions around how they adopt it and how they showcase the liability on their balance sheet or show stewardship of what they're doing. And how it, aligns with their business purpose because at the end of the day, you're not asking them to do something that doesn't align with how they're doing their business. It has to be aligned and integrated with how they're doing their business for this to be sustainable, and to be successful in the long-term.

Right?

Swapan: Absolutely. Absolute.

Sudha: So is there a framework or best practice? You mentioned, you know, India's taken a lead on setting standards and sustainability reporting. But is there a framework or best practice for organisations that want to adopt NBS as a part of this strategy, to offset GHG emissions?

And how do you ensure then that the communities benefit from projects and programs? Like you said, when companies look at community programs, it is through the CSR lens and it is not strategic at all.

Swapan: So firstly, at a meta level, there are some, global frameworks for NBS, amongst them the one that is most widely referred to is the IUCN framework, which actually lays out quite well what are the components of NBS, how to approach NBS and how to develop NBS solutions. Then in the carbon market, there are good practices which are laid out by the carbon standards, but also bodies like the, Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity initiative in which we are involved, and the ICVCM, et cetera, which are trying to focus on good practices to ensure that there are high standards of carbon removals from nature projects in general. A good NBS strategy must integrate firstly, robust baselining assessment of local contextual needs of a specific side that you want to invest or work in. This is very critical.

This requires comprehensive thinking and planning, small things such as which species you're planting, where in combination with which is something that has to be thought through, has to be suitable and beneficial to the community there.

The projects have to ensure that there is fair benefit sharing with communities, with long-term interest, and their priorities are taken into account when taking decisions on designs of these programs. For us at Iora benefit training is not merely a checkbox that you just do an activity, get consent and move on, it's actually the foundational centrepiece of these projects. As an example, in our project in Meghalaya, where we just done the first carbon payments to communities and mind you the highest prices in India, 40 Euros. We've spent two years in engaging the communities, getting the priorities and planning the agroforestry model, and we ensure that, a very large portion, a wide majority of the carbon benefits goes to farmers. In fact, it's IORA's policy that piece is centred to design of the project.

Sudha: As a climate finance expert, what has been your experience of what attracts investors to these projects? Because investors are critical, right?

Swapan: So investors are looking for scalable, verifiable high-quality nature-based projects, which can have both sound, environmental and financial returns. That's what investors are looking for and in defence of the investors, the project pipeline also is thin. Like projects which combine all the elements of proper planning, proper baselining, the right science parameters, the right financial parameters are also difficult to come by, but that's what investors are looking for. One of the mismatches I think that's happening a lot is the investors expectation of the time horizon of return versus where actual projects can return. The really good quality nature projects require a much longer time...

136: What business Purpose, inclusive culture and ESG reporting mean in global citizen services businesses: A conversation with Shikhar Aggarwal, JMD, BLS International

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

5 years post COVID I continue to ask the question – Do organisations need to have a business purpose? And what does having a business purpose mean in practice?

For the 136th episode of The 🐘 in the Room podcast I spoke with Shikhar Aggarwal, the Joint Managing Director of BLS International one of the world’s largest global service delivery company (visa, passport, consular, and citizen services).

Themes covered in the episode include 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

- What it means to be a purpose driven business providing citizen services and facilitating mobility

- Insights on global cultural integration for a listed Indian entity (the only one in the industry) with 60,000 employees and a footprint across 70 countries

- Lessons from the pandemic: agility, empathy and building trust

- Evolving challenges in the industry including geo-political crises, cybersecurity and inclusivity in service delivery

- Commitment to Sustainability & ESG reporting: The aspiration to set global benchmarks in citizen services

- Role models in the industry and beyond #TCS #L&T #Wipro #Azim Premji

To learn more head to the podcast, link in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

#BLSInternational #CitizenServices #GlobalMobility #ShikharAgarwal #Leadership #Sustainability #ESG #Innovation #PurposeDrivenBusiness

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Shikhar, thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in The Room podcast today.

Shikhar: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Sudha: Brilliant. So let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do..

Shikhar: My name is Shikhar Aggarwal. I'm the joint Managing Director of BLS International. I started in Delhi; I'm a chartered accountant. I worked in a couple of companies before joining BLS International in 2014. So it's been an 11-year wonderful journey. And here we are, listed company with presence in 70 plus countries today.

Sudha: Awesome. Since I'm from a comms background, and Bhavya is also I'd like to hear your elevator pitch for BLS International. What is your mission and vision for the company? It's quite a huge business.

Shikhar: At BLS International, we are a trusted global tech enabled service provider to governments worldwide, committed to simplifying access to essential citizen services. We are operating in 70 plus countries and have processed more than 360 million applications till date. Our mission is to be the world's most trusted and efficient partner for government to citizen services. Also, our mission is to be the largest Indian company in global service delivery. There have been a lot of IT companies out of India, global IT companies, but I feel that a global service delivery company out of India, we are probably the primary one and we want to be the largest one.

Our vision is to touch the lives of a billion people across the globe by delivering citizen services that are seamless, secure and powered by innovation. We aspire to be the global benchmark for inclusive technology driven service delivery that empowers individuals, supports governments, and creates lasting societal value.

Sudha: Very interesting. So in the last couple of years, purpose has become a buzz word. So how important is it for you as you move on this journey to becoming, one of the largest or a global company which is much admired. How important is it for you that BLS International should have a business purpose?

Shikhar: See when someone applies for a visa, it is to unite with a family or needs an identity service to start a new chapter in life. It is much more than just paperwork. It is deeply personal. That's the space we operate in and that's why for us, purpose isn't a trend. It is a responsibility. At BLS, we don't see ourselves just as a service provider.

We see ourselves as an enabler of mobility, connection, and dignity. Our purpose is woven into every application processed, every identity verified, and every life made easier through our technology and presence. It guides us how we innovate, how we collaborate with governments and how we stay human centered in an increasingly digital world.

Beyond enabling access, we're also building livelihoods, empowering over 100,000 individuals, not just with jobs, but with tools, training and opportunities to become successful entrepreneurs in their own right. We are proud to foster a growing ecosystem of people who don't just work with us they are like business partners, they have learned how to run a business. They're making money with us. While others may talk about purpose as a brand statement, for us, it is the reason that we show up every day.

Sudha: Very interesting and it segues into my next question about culture. As a global business, with the footprint across, many countries, how do you go about creating one culture, getting employees or as you say, your business partners across the world to reflect your values.

Shikhar: When you are operating in a global environment, you know we are operating in 70 plus countries across borders, time zones, cultures, building one cohesive culture isn't about uniformity, it's about unity. For us, culture is the thread that connects thousands of employees around a shared purpose and core set of values, passion, customer orientation, entrepreneurship, result orientation, integrity and respect and being process driven.

We have built the cultures with intent through strong training programs, open communication and digital platforms that bridge distances. We keep everyone aligned, no matter where they are, and while we are united by values, we never lose sight of local strengths. Our teams are empowered to bring their unique perspectives while staying anchored in common framework of service excellence.

That's how we create a culture that's global in spirit but grounded in the realities of the people we serve and the people who serve with us.

Sudha: So that's about culture. And do you travel a lot to these countries to actually see what the culture, what the integration is like?

Shikhar: Definitely me my senior team, we want to be on the ground. We don't want to operate a company from our head office or our office. If you have a touch and feel of the ground, the different cultures, values of the people, then you understand where your company is really at.

Not only cultures and values, you also understand delivery, business opportunities, capabilities. So it is a must.

Sudha: That's the best way to learn.

So Shikhar it's been like five years since the pandemic and, that was such a moment in time, moment in history where, everyone was impacted global travel and tourism of course was heavily, heavily impacted. We couldn't travel, I was stuck here in the UK, couldn't go to India. What were the learnings for people in your business? Particularly around, adaptability, agility, and also to be able to continue to serve customers and clients, who were stuck in crisis.

Shikhar: I think for us, since we are a company that gives visas, definitely pandemic had hit us the hardest, but it has been a learning curve. Pandemic for us was more than a crisis, it became a real time test for our resilience, and for us it brought three powerful lessons to the forefront.

First, agility became non-negotiable, practically overnight, we reimagined how we work. Digitizing operations enabling remote support and ensuring business continuity in the face of unprecedented disruption. We also learned how to operate business at a lower cost, and we are still taking some of those learnings till today.

Secondly, we learnt empathy isn't just a value, it's a strategy, while we kept services running, we made sure that our people were protected. We prioritized safety, flexibility, and wellbeing for our frontline staff as well as the customers we serve. And third, the trust made all the difference. Our long-lasting partnership with governments gave us the credibility and collaboration needed to co-create solutions that balanced public safety with service continuity.

These lessons didn't just get us through crisis. They have reshaped how we operate today: faster, more human and more connected than ever. If you see our growth after COVID, if you see our profitability growth, If you see our margins growth, if you follow our financials, everything is at a different trajectory.

And there were very few employees that we actually let go of, we deferred salaries, we reduced salaries, we brought it back after COVID. Most of our offices we were maintaining. I think five years down the line this is what has paid off. So that trust, which is where we stand as a company because of our commitments that we made sure we had adhered to during that time.

Sudha: Very good to know. So in today's world, what are some of the biggest challenges you face as an industry?

We spoke about COVID now we seem to be in a state of permanent crisis. Mobility is a huge issue, for people to travel. How you grant access or do not grant access to people, there are lots of questions around that? So what are some of the biggest challenges you face as an industry?

Shikhar: First of all, we are a global company operating in 70 countries. First geopolitical shifts, visa policies and cross border regulations can change quickly and we have to remain agile, ready to realign our operations while maintaining service continuity. And obviously, you have to keep in mind that it is an interest of governments to facilitate travel for tourists to come into their country as it is a big part of the GDP. While there might be short term setbacks in the world, but we have seen on an annual basis, we've always grown. Second is cybersecurity, data privacy. We handle very sensitive personal data. So safeguarding the information is not just technical requirement, it is also co responsibility and we continue to keep on investing in latest system protocols and training.

We follow very strict protocols. Third is striking the right balance between digitisation and inclusivity. While we embrace technology to ensure efficiency, we are equally focused on making sure that no one is left behind, especially individuals who may not have easy access to digital tools. Inclusivity remains a key design principle in everything we build. So if you see a lot of people from developing world, or older people, they need to be trained, they need to be assisted, in getting these services. These challenges keep us focused, adaptive and also committed to delivering secure and human centred services. How we manage the global challenges is how we do our business.

Sudha: Moving on to the next question. How would you define sustainability at BLS International? What does it mean in practice because it's very people focused business.

Shikhar: So at BLS international sustainability means delivering citizen services with accountability, resilience and deep respect for people, communities and the environment. It is about creating long-term value while upholding the highest standards of governance, reducing our environment footprint, protecting data privacy, and driving inclusive growth.

The commitment is also reflected on how we operate from maintaining global ISO certificates in anti-bribery, data security, occupational safety, to empowering the underserved communities, through focused CSR in education, livelihoods and women empowerment. We are also digitizing processes and optimizing energy use to build a more responsible and an efficient global service network.

Sudha: And as a listed company what are your thoughts on ESG and reporting and BRSR? With the reporting requirements that have been evolving in India, how are you aligning your business purpose and sustainability priorities with ESG reporting? If you're doing it at all? Or if you have the ambitions to do it.

Shikhar: Definitely, we work in a global environment with so many foreign governments across the world. So ESG reporting for us is no longer a box ticking exercise. It is a strategic lens. And in India, obviously BRS reflects the shift.

We see it not as an obligation, but as an opportunity to benchmark our impact surface gaps and drive real progress. At BLS International the BRSR aligns well with global ESG standards we already follow. It helps us connect the local expectations with international best practices, whether it's strong governance with board level ESG oversight, safeguarding citizens data through ISO 27001 or driving inclusive growth through gender diversity and ethical training.

Our CSR efforts focus on digital inclusion, education and skilling, directly feeding into the BRSR social lens. And with ESG risks integrated into our enterprise risk framework, we are not just reporting, we are anticipating, adapting and acting. Simply put the BRSR framework helps us stay transparent, accountable, and future ready while keeping sustainability at the heart of how we serve citizens around the world.

Sudha: Yeah, so people definitely are right at the forefront of what you're doing. When we consider ESG reporting Shikhar or sustainability best practice, are you looking at peers in the industry or across businesses? Which are some of the companies that you admire?

Shikhar: See, definitely at BLS International our approach to ESG blends both industry benchmarking and cross sector learning.

We track peers in the visa and government tools, citizen service space, especially around data privacy, inclusive access, and public trust. But we also look beyond our sector because best practices don't come with borders. We draw inspiration from companies like Infosys and TCS for their ESG leadership and digital inclusion growth. The Tata Group for the values driven stakeholder engagement and L&T for the structured ESG roadmap. Globally, we admire how Master Card and Accenture embed inclusive tech and social impact into their business models. For us, ESG isn't just about compliance, it's about evolving continuously learning from the best and creating long-term value that's both globally responsible and locally relevant.

Sudha: Any leaders that you admire specifically Shikhar, they could be within your circle of people you saw while growing up or admired or you admire now?

Shikhar: I would say Wipros’ chairman Azim Premji, I deeply admire the kind of institution he has built.

I meet a lot of world leaders at Davos, I go every year. So there are multiple world leaders, from India, from abroad that I admire. we aspire our company to benchmark with them or surpass them also. To me leadership isn't just about skill. If you talk about what does being a leader mean to me, it's about setting the standard, it means leading with trust, with innovation, and the commitment to create meaningful social value. For BLS International being industry leader means we are constantly evolving to stay ahead of the needs of citizens, governments, and communities we serve.

It's about being agile, responsible, and purpose driven in everything we do. So if you talk about what's next for BLS, we are deepening our digital transformation, expanding our partnership into new and emerging geographies, and embedding ESG more deeply into every layer of our operations. The future for us is about shaping how global mobility is delivered and more seamlessly, more securely and more inclusively.

And I feel that this is just the start.

Sudha: Oh, that's nice. It's great to have ambition and what makes you wake up every morning? What drives you and motivates you?

Shikhar: The main fact that drives us and motivates me and the company is like for India based company, a Delhi headquartered company facilitating global mobility and travel. We are in 70 plus countries, working with more than 40 client governments, and we are generating employment for Indians. We are upskilling Indians, sending them abroad, teaching them in high value jobs. We are delivering services to people who did not have access to these services before. They had to travel miles to city centres to avail basic services, you know so I feel the sense of purpose, the sense of scale, the sense of commitment, that is what, brings us to office every day.

Sudha: That's brilliant. That's a wonderful way to end this conversation, Shikhar. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your ambitions and where you are going to in the future.

Shikhar: Thank you so much.

Important Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shikhar-aggarwal/?originalSubdomain=in

Website: https://www.blsinternational.com/

https://youtu.be/RleX-g9Ypsk?si=RcJ08Eb2IAeXMd8u

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/bls-international-services-plans-rs-2000-cr-investment-jmd-shikhar-aggarwal/articleshow/101359804.cms

135: Transforming and building trust in Carbon Markets : Insights from Shreya Garg

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

There is research to show that climate washing is on the uptick along with a growing trend by companies worldwide to utilise carbon credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions. The trend (carbon offsetting) is driven largely by companies making net-zero pledges. However in the absence of standardised frameworks and regulations claims of greenwashing can undermine the credibility of carbon mitigation efforts examples: overstating the impact, under reporting harm to communities or environment

To understand the ecosystem better I spoke with Shreya Garg, a seasoned climate professional and auditor to share her expertise on the dynamics of the carbon markets. Independent auditors are key to building trust in carbon markets by provide objective assessment of projects, prevent misrepresentation of data. In our wide-ranging conversation we spoke about additionality, permeance, community impact…...

👉🏾 The evolution of the Indian carbon market from niche, compliance driven model to a more dynamic and voluntary environment

👉🏾 The burgeoning international interest in Indian carbon credits and what is fuelling the demand

👉🏾 How global net-zero commitments and increased scrutiny around climate disclosures are major factors driving the evolution of voluntary carbon markets

👉🏾 The difference between compliance and voluntary carbon markets and how they can shape corporate reputation and sustainable practices

👉🏾 Why greenwashing remains a huge challenge

👉🏾 The need transparency, integrity and community engagement and technology in the evolving landscape of carbon markets.

In our conversation Shreya highlighted the necessity for equitable benefit sharing and community engagement to restore trust in climate initiatives. We also spoke about the need for more women in the climate space, emphasizing the unique perspectives they bring to community engagement and project sustainability.

To know more about carbon markets and climate washing head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Shreya, Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Shreya: Morning Sudha. it's totally a pleasure.

Sudha: Brilliant. So let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Shreya: So I'm Shreya, I'm a climate professional for about 14 years and I've been working in the carbon markets. Right now I'm associated with different organisations, gold Standard there’s FCF, India and Isometric. And my main work is guidance around the carbon credit quality strategies and market synergies. Prior to this, I was vice president operations at Earthood where I led a team of auditors who were working on validation and verification of climate projects.

Sudha: Brilliant. How has the carbon credit market transformed over recent years and what are the main factors contributing to this change? Especially when we consider a diverse country like India. I read a recent report that the carbon credit market in India is booming.

Shreya: Definitely. I think the carbon markets have evolved to a great degree. They've evolved from a niche compliance driven market to a broader, more dynamic voluntary markets. We have seen that there are no commitments per se, that are being made by the countries, but there are global players that are making their move towards climate action. So I would say the growth has been driven mostly by net zero commitments and also there has been huge demand in the voluntary market. And not to forget the heightened scrutiny around climate disclosures that all have played a role in shaping the markets.

When we come to the state of carbon markets in India, I would say there has been a combination of factors that has influenced. We have our own carbon credit trading scheme that is now shaping the market these days. And of course all the corporates are taking their sustainability targets that is providing the demand for the carbon credits and there is international demand for Indian carbon credits also. And there has been an increased awareness amongst the Indian businesses on how to utilize carbon finance to fund their decarbonisation strategies.

Sudha: That's very interesting. So are there big differences between the voluntary and compliance markets and why are they important for businesses?

Shreya: Yes, they are I wouldn't say diametrically opposite, but compliance market as the name suggest they're government regulated. So they're more like cap-and-trade systems.

So they're mandated by the law and involve legal obligations. However, voluntary markets are kind of self-driven and it's more like self-motivation, how you go to the gym every morning. It is not a hostile or it is not a regime that somebody enforces on you, but it's your own action and your drive towards a goal that takes you forward. So, both of them are equally important because the compliance market gives you the flavour of the requirement. So they help shape influence the mindset on what's good and what's bad. And the voluntary markets, of course take the step forward into doing the right things.

I think in terms of businesses voluntary markets do offer the flexibility. We also get influenced by the reputation. We have a certain notion about a company which says it is climate focused versus a company which is not making any such statements. I think compliance market, we can say we present the regulatory risk management. Like, India has its own targets and we are focused on certain things more as compared to other nations. So I think compliance market gives an overarching framework.

Sudha: And then companies can choose to go beyond compliance and of course it will help with their brand. It helps the business mitigate future risk but also I think in terms of reputation, like you were saying, it adds a huge halo to organisations. I think a lot of them are compliance driven rather than driven by altruistic or thinking about the world and society.

How do you evaluate the quality of carbon credit projects? Seems so deeply difficult to do and how do the criteria impact the credibility of organisations? Because in today's world, like you spoke earlier, everyone says that we are climate friendly, we are signed on to net zero and we want to achieve certain targets.

And a lot of people put targets that are in 2040/50 where probably nobody is going to be there to check them on accountability.

Shreya: Or nobody would remember.

Sudha: Yeah. Or nobody will remember. So, how do the criteria impact the credibility of these organisations?

Shreya: Very valid question Sudha and I would say that quality is always multidimensional.

And when we talk about carbon credits, there's certain aspects like additionality, permanence, leakage, monitoring rigor, not to forget, the community impact, and also the alignment towards science. When I say alignment towards science it's basically the adherence to the methodology that is checked when we are doing the quality checks.

And I say this because I've worked as an auditor for most of my life. So, I would say it's credibility of a credit mostly hinges on to these criteria. And how well are they integrated in a project. A project with a weak additionality, there were couple of cases earlier, a company would have gone for solar panels, with renewable energy anyway, with or without carbon credit. So how additional is that project? So if you were going to go for that, what is the benefit or should you have rightfully received the carbon credits for those projects or not?

And these kind of are the bigger questions and they form the general impressions on what should be done, where is climate finance more suited to be used, for example, maybe community-based projects where the same amount of money can benefit a larger number of people.

So a lot of these are qualitative issues, but issues like permanence, leakage, and monitoring are quantitative, which can be seen and kind of set in black and white.

Sudha: So have you seen poor criteria impact credibility of projects. Like , you say that there is a project that is happening and there are criteria for measuring the quality and when somebody does, I'll use the G word greenwashing, then they are just, like you said there is a solar project that's already there, it's a part of the business and are you really doing something in order to contribute or is it something that's there as a part of your business?

Shreya: I think that is the unfortunate part of being an auditor is that we are bound by the standards. So we are limited by the scope of the standards which sets the requirements.

So I was just having a call yesterday where I was saying that, as auditors, when we visit the communities, we do check if they are aware of the carbon project, if they are aware of a grievance mechanism in place. However it does not fall into our purview, how much money have they received from the project? What is the frequency of money that they have received? So there's certain aspects which do not fall under the scope of a carbon audit. So I would say there you can say a poor criteria. I mean, I wouldn't say poor, it is like a canvas which keeps growing.

I think the time we are going to see more added criteria as to auditing in scopes, I hope.

Sudha: And what are the biggest challenges you see Shreya in ensuring the accuracy and integrity of carbon credits? And how can these challenges be addressed? What have you seen so far in your career?

Shreya: Based on my career I mean, there's a lot of literature out there open for public right now. So I would say overstated baseline and emission reductions is like the biggest elephant in the room. Which accompanied by poor monitoring and verification, if you are saying something and which is not backed up by data is definitely questionable.

Then, another issue that I saw with the growing, land-based projects was the issue of double counting. Where same land parcel could be part of more than one project. So, I mean, double counting goes on very different levels, but this is probably the simplest example that I can give right now.

And, also, the local community education seems to be what is impacting the credibility of carbon right now, carbon projects rather. They have very little understanding of the project and as an auditor I see that as the integrity question also, because if they don't understand the importance of doing certain things, it's very difficult for them to follow that practice.

Sudha: How do you ensure it is sustainable Right? And it continues with their buy-in and not just keeping them on the sidelines. So you are an auditor. I mean, what is the role of auditors in verifying the quality, of these carbon credits and what are the key aspects of a robust carbon auditing process?

Shreya: Definitely. So I think, I wouldn't say these carbon audits is something new that has incorporated in the system, and few people may question that auditing has always been there, so how, how does it add value then? With it's existence, the quality has been low but I think it is always driven by the requirements. So whatever the ask is that becomes part of the checklist of the auditor. So if the ask is elaborate, then the checklist will be elaborate. And audits are very important to identify if the projects are real, if they're measurable, and if they're verifiable.

So I think auditing is very important and the important aspects of auditing, I would say that the baseline assumptions like you would say that before the pre-project scenario, like what was happening before the project came into be, and how has a project modified that practice, which is going to lead to emission reductions.

And ground truthing. So the physical site visits where the ground truthing also happens.

Sudha: That's very interesting because when I came for the Planet Dialogue Cognishphere event, I just read up on I think is it Verra where they had done a lot of double counting and they were called out for lack of transparency, et cetera.

Shreya: That's true. So Verra is a registry, it's a voluntary carbon registry based out of the US which is the largest in the world. So Verra takes up about 60% of the total carbon projects share. And there have been certain malpractices which have been highlighted for the projects. Like, I wouldn't say Verra’s malpractices, but the projects that had over hyped up there, numbers in terms of impact on the community's, impact of land and they will have inflated baselines also. So if I can give you an example.

There is avoidance of deforestation projects where, a company goes and say like, okay, this forest, no intervention is going to degrade because of all these factors. And there's a rate of deforestation that is presented which becomes the basis of their emission reduction calculation.

In certain cases, it was found that those rates were taken very high. It was presented that these forests are going to degrade in the next five years, if not intervened. So they led to inflated emission reduction. So those kinds of projects came into being, I mean, like every market there are bad players, but, I think Verra can take some of that blame by letting these projects go through you know, not having enough reviews.

But times are changing now all the registries have increased their scrutiny. I would say that there is more transparency in the market, so all the project documentation are available for public view on the registries now.

Sudha: That's very, very interesting and this is something we can speak about for a long time.

But let’s proceed to the next question. So, regulation across the world is like evolving and changing so rapidly and most organisations are still on the learning curve. Do you believe there is need for standardisation and if yes, where are we on that journey? Like on ESG reporting there's so much call for standardisation because companies are having to do a GRI, you do BRSR, you are doing something else SASB, and TCFD what is the process for standardisation? Are we trying to make it easier for people or more complex?

Shreya: That's very difficult question [Laughter] and I can just give you my opinion which might be in agreement with some of the industry people and may not. But I do think that there's no one size fits all approach or solution, because when it comes to regulations given the diversity of the country, the geographies, the capabilities and priorities, they're so different.

So how can we have one thing that is the most important you know, globally. So I think, that way standardisation may not work in the global scenario, but that said, a common ground is essential for building trust and, interoperability, like you said, are we making it easier or difficult?

So in order to make it easier we should all speak in the similar language. It's not like, each registry having its own terminology and making it more confusing, it is only going complicate matters. If a project can be named project in all the registries, that would make a project developer's life much easier, and easier for the buyers to understand.

But, I could think of recent times we have frameworks like I-C-V-C-M or Carbon Principles and we have voluntary carbon market initiatives, claim codes, which are kind of setting the priorities and the common principles that should be part of every standard.

Sudha: That makes a lot of sense. Shreya, you've worked in the carbon markets right from the start of your career. Right? So can technology be used to increase transparency and traceability and efficiency of these markets?

Shreya: Yeah, I think technology has come long way into, helping projects, how they report.

And now in the last five years we've seen this increased interest in nature-based projects, which were very complicated. But with technologies like satellite monitoring and when we talk about double counting and traceability. There are blockchain for registry traceability you know, carbon credits, like how do you tell if something which has been retired does not enter the market again. So, blockchain has also come into play for easier monitoring and verification. There are digital monitoring MRB platforms right now that are available. And there's certain companies that are specializing and have AI driven anomaly detection models.

So I would give examples of these land-based projects, again nature-based projects. So there are companies which can just through satellite images can differentiate an eligible piece of land from an ineligible piece of land, which required a huge amount of manpower to assess earlier.

Sudha: Wow. that's amazing.

Shreya: Yeah, so I like to believe that the carbon market is going through the growing pains right now. And I think with technology definitely is going to help it. And there are a lot of players which are focusing on integration of technologies into providing solutions, and I think which are going to help in integrity and accountability.

Sudha: Yeah. I think technology as an enabler, in this process is a great opportunity. We spoke about the carbon registry inflated claims, double counting, reporting, and this has sort of undermined the integrity of carbon markets and reduced public trust.

The rhetoric from the US on climate change, of course is not helping. They've rolled back so many things and other countries have seen and they're doing the same. How can we increase trust and make people see that what is being done currently is genuine climate action

134: A conversation with Akashdeep Bansal CEO SaralX on redefining accessibility in society

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Show notes:

Are there people who inspire you, make you want to be better and do better?

I have been fortunate to meet with amazing and inspirational people from all walks of life through my podcast The Elephant in the Room. Individuals who refuse to be defined by their circumstances or the challenges they encounter in life.

Akashdeep Bansal, CEO of SaralX, and my guest for the 134th episode of the podcast is one such person. Diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at a young age, Akash's path took an unexpected turn when a conversation with his master's supervisor prompted him to consider the challenges faced by visually impaired individuals in pursuing STEM education. This pivotal moment not only reshaped his academic trajectory but also inspired the creation of SaralX, a startup focused on enhancing digital accessibility for people with disabilities.

In this episode we spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 How this led to the setting up of a collaborative network aimed at breaking barriers and fostering inclusion

👉🏾 Discovering purpose and becoming an entrepreneur advocating for inclusivity in the digital realm

👉🏾 Misconceptions that digital accessibility is solely for people with visual impairments, emphasizing that it encompasses a diverse array of disabilities, including motor impairments, cognitive challenges, auditory limitations……

👉🏾 The need to shift from a complaint-driven approach to accessibility towards one that inherently integrates inclusive practices into the foundational design of products and services.

👉🏾 Societal awareness and acceptance in facilitating a truly inclusive environment for all individuals, regardless of their abilities.

We also spoke about stigma, role models and what motivates him. Akash believes that it is not just one person who inspired his journey, it is the collective influence of those he has engaged with on his journey. His commitment to creating awareness and fostering inclusivity with SaralX is rooted in the notion that true empowerment stems from dismantling societal barriers rather than imposing limitations on those who are excluded.

Thank you @Prateek Madhav, Assistech Foundation for the introduction 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

To learn more about Akash’s inspirational journey head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Akash. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in The Room Podcast today.

Akash: Good morning, Sudha. It's my pleasure to be here.

Sudha: Brilliant. So let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. I heard a little bit from Prateek of AssisTech Foundation. Let's hear from you.

Akash: What I can say about myself is, right now I'm doing this startup called SaralX, where we are basically helping in making the digital world inclusive for person with disabilities. Prior to this, I've done my master and PhD from IIT Delhi And I'm born and brought up in a small town which is called Gango, which comes under the district xxxx.

So that a small brief about me.

Sudha: Oh, wow. From UP straight to Bangalore. That's good.

Akash: Yeah,

Sudha: It requires a fair amount of bravery to become an entrepreneur. Did you have an aha moment and what propelled you to get into this journey?

Akash: Okay. So I can tell you like how I ended up in entrepreneurship.

There was no plan, when I was in childhood there was no plan that I will be doing any sort of entrepreneurship. If you met me 10 years back and asked me what I want to be in the future, my answer at that time should have been, I want to be in the teaching profession. I want to be a professor. So I did my BTech in electronics and communication. Then I got admission at IIT Delhi for Mtech. So when I was pursuing my master's at IIT Delhi, the same question was asked by my Master's supervisor. He asked me what do you want to be in the future?

So I told him like, I want to be the professor.

He then said, okay, that's fair enough, I can give you another problem statement. As you're doing your master's thesis, you can continue the work in the similar domain and you can pursue the PhD. I'll be happy to take you as a PhD student.

So one background is that I got diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 2003 when I was just 10-year-old. Due to which, I was losing my eyesight gradually. And when my Master’s supervisor asked me, tell me one thing, what will happen if during your PhD you are not able to read anything on the printed documents or anything on the computer screen?

How will you continue your research work? And at the time I was dealing with equations, which used to be three to four lines, even when you are typing on a A4 size sheet.

My Masters was related to electromagnetics EM wave, if you've heard about.

He asked me how will you manage you're dealing with such a complex equation right now. how will you continue working on your research during your PhD itself, if you lose your eyesight? And that was a trigger point for me.

I was not having any answer at that time. I said, give some time. Let me think about it. And then after a couple of days, I revisited him. I asked him sir can I do PhD with a topic that, how a blind person can do electrical engineering?

So then he said, yeah, that sounds a good topic, but I am not from this domain, so let us talk to someone who works in this domain.

So then we met another supervisor.

He immediately accepted me as a PhD student. He said, if you want to work on this problem, how equations can be read out for a person with blindness, I will be happy to take you as a PhD student. So that's how I entered the PhD.

I started networking with multiple persons with disabilities, multiple NGOs to understand what kind of challenges they're facing, what kind of practices they're adopting right now.

To pursue the different STEM content, like equations, tables. Yeah. What kind of practices are there and what kind of challenges are there? So, at the time we formed an informal group of different persons with disabilities who were doing engineering from ITTs, or even the foreign universities.

We started catching up on monthly basis. Basically we used to help out each other and I used to join that call to understand, these are the alternatives everyone is adopting. And this is the gap, which is there.

So, during the conversations which we used to have on monthly basis a discussion came up, the point was, we eight or nine people are able to help each other We somehow was able to break the barriers and able to come to the engineering domain.

But we know the ground reality. Even if you go to a lot of NGOs the blind person is always guided that you shouldn't pursue STEM education. Because that is not something which is accessible to you. You should one of the arts subjects. So then we thought, okay, let's join hands and maybe enter into some sort of an organisation where we can collectively work towards and utilize our own technical abilities and do something for the entire xxxxxxx

So that was a moment when we switched into an entrepreneurship mode, four of us we started first company, we ran it for around three years. We learned a lot of things, we did a couple of things for the community. And then during this time itself, there was a time when my eyesight reached to that level that now I can't read anything on the computer screen.

I needed to rely on the assistive technologies. I was the one who used to manage everything online in my family. Like if my father wants anything, I was the go-to person. But in 2021 when I lost my eye sight to the level that now I can't read anything on the computer screen, I felt like I lost my freedom.

Now I need to even rely on someone else to get the things done. So that was the trigger point. And then I said, okay I need to solve this problem. Anyway during the PhD I learned about all different kind of digital accessibility, like let's solve this problem at a larger scale. And that's led to the development of this service

Sudha: Wow, that's quite a story, quite an experience for anyone. So you've said about, why you started SaralX and it is about accessibility, for people with disabilities visual impairment probably, or anything that they have.

So what is your ambition for SaralX and how did you get to the name SaralX?

Akash: Before answering your question, I just want you to help with one thing because that is something which I find a myth. That people think digital accessibility is just for visual impaired. But that is not true. Digital accessibility is for multiple disabilities. In the visual disability, you can understand blindness, low vision, colour contrast.

Now let's talk about the other spectrum. Think about a person with deafness. You're posting an audio - video content, like you're posting this podcast now. Now think about a deaf person.

Think about a person who is a XXXXXXXXXX disabled, but the problems are in the upper body parts. Like maybe hands are not there or the fingers is not there, or the movement is very limited or the hands are always shaking to which they can't use the mouse pointer.

Then comes to the Neuro divergent spectrum. So in the neuro divergent spectrum, think about the dyslexia, you may be able to recall the movie Taare Zameen Par. If you remember that movie there was a child that child, whenever that child was trying to read anything in the book, all the characters were dancing, due to which he was not able to make out. what is the text written. So same problem a person with dyslexia is going to face when they're reading something on the digital screen.

So now what kind of things can be done for them so that they can easily read whatever is coming on their mobile screen or the laptop screen? So it's not just visual impairment. It's actually a very wide spectrum which get affected due to digital and in accessibilities.

Now, if I try to answer your question why the name SaralX. So SaralX is basically a combination of Saral and X. Saral means easy, it's Hindi word. Now X is a variable, it may be accessibility, it may be experience, so what we're saying is we are making the accessibility process easy. We are making the experiences. So that's how we came to this name SaralX.

Sudha: And what have been some of your biggest learnings on the journey?

Because I can't imagine that it has been very easy. A couple of years in, are their things you would have done differently and what are some of the biggest learnings from this?

Akash: So, one of the learning is you have to be patient.

You have to keep patient in what you're doing. If I even tell you, like when I started SaralX, the first one year even I myself was in a fear that will the company be sustaining or not? Will I be able to pay next month or not? But then a turning point happened, due to which the company got changed.

Now we are already into the growth stage. Where we are rapidly growing the team. every month. Every week the new members are joining in the team. So that kind of growth is what like one is like you have to keep patience You have to put the hard work. If you believe in your idea, just keep patience and things will happen. Other thing which I learned about this space specifically talk about the disability space. So the point there is, try to think of a B2B business model.

That was a mistake in my first startup This is basically the second startup. We were doing one mistake that we were focusing more on a B2C model. And in India, when you are trying to focus in a B2C model, that is something which is very hard. But if you can change your business model to a B2B model, then things can change drastically. That is what I even used to share with everyone else who are working in this space, that whether you have a product for a B2C, but still try to think of a B2B one, don't directly just focus on B2C. So that is one thing which I learned during my entrepreneurship journey.

Sudha: If you want to be sustainable, I think that is something that you have to think of. So I've heard about the social definition of disability and a couple of years back I've worked in the disability space as the chair of the PRCA, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Board. but at that stage I was still using people first definition of disability and then there is this organisation in the UK that they'd posted something and I wrote to the CEO then we had a conversation post that and she spoke about the social definition of disability So I knew about it, but I didn't know how important it was for people to adopt that model.

So, for our listeners, what is it exactly, and why is it important for you? Because I have seen in some of your, articles that I've read about the social model for definition of disability.

Akash: So point comes as when you're looking at disability, there are two faces of it.

One is you're seeing the problems which are there with the person. Another way is the barriers which are there in the infrastructure. Now, if you can remove those barriers in the infrastructure, the person who is not able to do the task right now will be able to do that.

I came across a video I'll narrate this by explaining video which I saw around a year back, in which what they displayed is - there was a town in which the only persons who sit on the wheelchair were staying. There was no one who walks or ran, without the wheelchair. So all the infrastructure, which was built in that town, was as per the requirement of the person with wheel chair. Like all the ceilings were not that high. Now then what happens is, when there was a person who was not having any disability, that person came to this town and was trying to enter into the house he was not able to, because ceiling was too low for him. His head was continuously getting struck with the ceiling. In this environment, what we call is a person not disabled, that person got disabled?

That person is not able to travel in this infrastructure. But the person who's sitting on the wheelchair has no problem. They can go around, they can do everything. There is no barrier for them because the infrastructure was designed, only keeping persons was on the wheelchair in the mind not everyone else.

So the same thing is there, like if you are designing any infrastructure, if you start thinking about everyone and you come up with a universal design of everything, whether it's a product, whether it's a software, whether it's infrastructure, then even a person, if there are problems in the different body parts, they will be able to do the things independently, and they'll be able to live independently without, depending on anyone else.

So that is what my learning from the social disability model, that it is not just putting the burden on the person. But putting the burden also on the society, because that is what is making them disabled.

Sudha: It is not catering to their specific requirements, so it's excluding people.

Akashdeep, what are your thoughts on the state of accessibility in India? How can we accelerate change? I know there is a lot of conversation and policies, etcetera but a lot of things don't translate from policy into real action, we are not seeing the change happen as rapidly as it should in order to enable everyone to participate in our society,

Akash: So, the bigger problem there is in India right now, the condition is improving, but I won't say it's very good. There's significant work which need to be done. The initial step which is happening is due to the legal pressure. There are a lot of lawsuits happening against the different organisations due to which they are putting effort and trying to make their systems accessible.

But if you see, what happens is when something is happening due to the pressure or due to the legal combats, that may happen for a month but that will not survive.

As soon as someone gives a green signal, they will stop focusing on it.

But if you can make it more sort of a sustainable model for them, make a more sort of business model for them.

Why they need to focus on disability, where they need to make sure that, their infrastructure or their digital infrastructure or physical infrastructure, whatever it is, that should be accessible, then this will go up. So you have to think beyond legal. Legal will push for a moment. And it'll get done for a moment, but it'll not survive. What I generally say is, when I discuss anything about digital accessibility with anyone. I generally ask them to think about when you are making your digital infrastructure accessible, first you need to get outta that met that the person with disabilities are very less because the census data is very inappropriate. Census data says that hardly, 2.2% of the population of India is a person with disability, which is highly inaccurate. There are multiple records which says that at least 10% of the Indian population is a person with disabilities,

That changes the narrative. That 2%, the 10%, if you're not focusing on accessibility.

Then the question comes as is you improving the user experience for that or also for everyone else? So the question is, it improves the user experience for everyone. The one simple example, which I generally give to the people is many of us nowadays started using the dark...

133: The Role of Companies and Investors in addressing the Nutrition crisis: Insights from Vivek Arora, Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI)

Mon, 26 May 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Show notes:

Did you know that ultra processed foods (UPFs) make 57% of the average British diet and up to 80% when it comes to children and people with lower incomes. And that the major food and drink companies lobbied to block the UK government’s efforts pushing for discounts on healthier and minimally processed products 

In the Indian sub-continent meanwhile, an average household derives more calories from processed foods than fruits (The Lancet study 2020). What is staggering is that this diet has been reshaped over the course of a single generation. While regulations around ultra-processed foods are tightening in both the UK and India, food regulations in India are considered weak, ambiguous, and industry-friendly, leading to a lack of strong front-of-pack labelling and effective advertising restrictions.

Last year I reached out to the Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) in India - a pivotal global foundation dedicated to transforming the food industry to learn more about their work and the ATNI’s India Index. The India Index 2023 assesses the performance of the 20 largest food and beverage manufacturers of India. The findings based on 1,901 products are not unexpected but still staggering 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The average Health Star Rating for all companies’ products is a shocking 1.9 out of 5, well below the ‘healthy’ threshold of 3.5

👉🏾 Sales of packaged F&B in India have surged by 15% every year since 2011, outperforming total food sales. Spending on F&B increased at a rate of 9% per year between 2011 to 2021

👉🏾 76% of sales are derived from less healthy products. Nineteen of the 20 companies derive most of their sales revenue from less healthy products.

👉🏾 The positives seven of the 20 companies have responsible advocacy plans and five institutional investors and shareholders of food companies in India have now signed up to nutrition frameworks such as the Investor Expectations on Nutrition, Diets and Health as part of their responsible investment strategies.

Another disappointing fact, specifically highlighted in the index is that products sold in low-income countries like India tend to have lower health star ratings than those sold in high-income countries, indicating that the nutritional value of products may be lower in lower-income markets.

The findings are an eyeopener for the food industry, consumers, regulators, investors and activists and reveal the need for reform and greater transparency.

And should we not be asking as to how and why is it acceptable for multinational companies to offer products with low nutritional value in poorer countries compared to their offerings in high-income countries?

Head to the podcast to listen to the episode 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Vivek. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room Podcast today.

Vivek: Morning Sudha. And thank you for giving me this opportunity to come to the podcast, The Elephant in the Room and share my thoughts with you.

Sudha: So let's get started could you introduce yourself for the benefit of the audiences?

Vivek: I'm Vivek Arora and I work in the area of food and nutrition. So right from the beginning in the career I was involved with the food production. And there was a turnaround in 2008 when I got the opportunity to produce therapeutic and supplementary foods, and that's how I got introduced to the space of Nutrition.

And since then, I found a purpose, earlier I was producing fast foods and now I'm producing food for a purpose or contributing towards nutritious foods. So that's the transition that has happened. Of late after that stint I worked with development sector like Tata Trust and then went on to be an advisor in the space of nutrition, where currently I am advising ATNI and GAIN. ATNI is access to nutrition initiative and GAIN is Global Access for Improved Nutrition. So both are, global foundations and I provide my advisory services to them.

Sudha: Amazing. So you've also made a transition from the private sector to the development sector and found your purpose with what you are doing with your experience to use your experience for the next stint. So tell us a bit more about what the ATNI is or Access to Nutrition initiative is.

Vivek: So basically Access to Nutrition Initiative is a global foundation. What we do is, we challenge the food industry, the policy makers and the investors to produce, nutritious food or, create food systems that are more nutritious.

So what we actually do is we analyse data and come out with actionable points that helps them to take on the decisions basically.

Sudha: Very interesting considering that the world is struggling with hunger in some places, and obesity in some places. And I read a news report yesterday that India is also on the cusp of struggling with, an obesity crisis. However, that's another conversation to be had.

So what do and sustainable investment look like for nutrition, and do you have examples of where it has worked? And what is the scale of investments that is being made in this industry and what is needed?

Vivek: So basically sustainable investment is like the investors and the bond holders.

They invest in food companies, which drive a sustainable change in the companies. So basically it is nudging the investors, and it is being done through different means so right from collaborative approach to we need to take shareholder resolutions.

We work with the companies we analyse; we share the data with them, and then they take action. So either the companies take it or we then provide the reports to the investors. Who then take it to the board or the CEO to take actions and produce more nutritious or sustainable food and healthier options to the population basically.

So the motto of ATNI is providing healthier diets for all so we are nudging the companies who are producing food in the market to provide and give healthier options. Just to give you an example, we worked with Unilever and there were certain, board resolutions and there was a collaborative approach where we had three rounds of meetings with them. And they later started disclosing data on healthier options that they provide. So there are different profiling models available across the globe. And there are government recognized standard profiling models. They started disclosing the data on it and that's the way you come out in public, you commit in public, and then you improve. Unilever is a very, very good example. They almost, kind of stopped marketing unhealthy food to the children. So it was a big achievement I would rather say.

Sudha: Yeah that's a big thing. My interest in this question is because I look at the intersection of equity and inclusion and ESG and sustainable development and I understand from some of the information that you have shared that there are at least 88 financial institutions who manage like 21 trillion in assets who are working with you to invest more responsibly in nutrition. So all of this conversation around ESG being dead or sustainable development should not be a priority, I think, sounds more and more like rhetoric.

Vivek: You are right. See there are people who want the healthier option, and that's what our approach is because where do you consume food from? You consume food from markets. Now imagine if the markets are not able to provide in any case would consume food. So the objective here is to drive that market and transform them into healthier options and more sustainable options.

That's what we are working for, basically.

Sudha: And you have sufficient traction on this from investors. I can see.

Vivek: Definitely 21 trillion of assets under management and 88 investors on our side and growing. So, it's almost one third of the total investment by the company. So significant and with more popularity, where the index gets recognized and used by more investors, we see a good progress here.

Sudha: That's great, so ATNI released the Indian Index in 2023. What was the focus of the index and what is the methodology of the research?

Vivek: So basically this ATNI index 2023 is not new to India. So the first index was in 2016 where we analysed 10 companies. And the second index came in 2020, where 16 companies were analysed. In 2023 in total, 20 companies were analysed. These 20 companies produce about, say, 36% of the total processed food available in the Indian markets, which is significant.

So how do we analyze? There is a set methodology, and under each section there are several questions and the companies are asked these questions and each question is marked, and then the then a ranking is published. Just to give you an example the different sections.

So the first section is, the methodology. So the first one is nutrition policy, so do they have a policy? Do they have a written policy? The questions are like, do you have targets under this policy? Suppose they have a written policy, but they do not have targets, they will not get full marks.

That is one that we analyse. The second is the products, so whatever products they're producing. So this is analysed based on the Australian star rating. So if it is having a more than three and a half star it is a healthy product or if it is below three and a half star, it is a less healthy product. So in total, out of this 20 companies, 1,901 products were analysed to come out with the results.

The third section is the responsible marketing, section where we ask them questions like, unhealthy products are not being marketed to children, or they are not using certain advertising means to consumer to consume, products which are unhealthy.

The fourth focus is on the labelling, so how are they labelling their products? Is it easy for the consumers to read the labels or judge from the labels. Is proper information provided in the labels. So that is also analysed.

And the fifth is the governance. So what is their governance mechanism? How transparent they are with the governance. So that is analysed.

And the sixth section is the workforce nutrition. So for their own employees? if they are providing the food or what is their policy, are they doing nutritional checks on their xxxxx. Is breastfeeding space provided in their factories. So such questions are asked and analysed.

And the last section is affordable diets. So do they take steps to make their food affordable and accessible for all? The biggest example is like having smaller packs of biscuits available so that it's more affordable. Or a small pack of oil.

The daily labourers in India, they buy oil every day, they don't earn money to buy one litre of oil. Initially they used to buy a loose oil, which was adulterated, not safe to consume. So now small pack of oil, they're available in the market so that they can procure this packaged oil and get safe oil. So those kinds of initiatives are appreciated.

So that's the whole methodology and once that scoring is done, then the ranking is published.

Sudha: And what were the key findings from the India Index? Were there some things that were startling and surprising for you?

Vivek: Yeah, so the biggest surprise, not a surprise because our indexes from last 10 years also showed similar trend. But the biggest revelation was that 76% of the products available from this 20 companies were less healthy.

Sudha: Oh my God.

Vivek: So this was the biggest finding I would say. And the sales that were being derived by the companies. So 19 of the 20 companies were deriving more sales from unhealthy products or less healthy products, I would say.

Sudha: Wow.

Vivek: So that was the clear finding that we could see and over these years, I would say that there was a slight change, so about a percent, of the company's producing more healthier products. But it was not, what we had expected.

Sudha: So one is about how unhealthy products are being marketed and that most products that are marketed are not the healthier ones.

Vivek: The healthier is 3.5 and about unhealthy, 76% is below 3.5 rating.

Sudha: Below 3.5. Was there an urban, rural, divide.

Vivek: No, it's difficult to find the data of urban and rural divide because we are analysing the companies and the sales from the company.

So on the affordability, yes, there is some data available as to what initiatives the companies have taken to capture the rural market because it's a very price sensitive market in India. So that data is available and they're making their products more affordable to reach the rural market.

Sudha: So more affordable but less healthy or more affordable and more healthy?

Vivek: Both. The nudge to the companies actually is to provide healthier options at affordable prices. So that's the nudge.

Sudha: Is there a difference between how local companies and multinationals behave? Because I feel personally having worked across the UK and India, that there is a stark difference, on how companies may behave in the UK, and then how they come into India and they behave differently.

Vivek: So, in that sense, yes, I would say that, if a multinational company is coming into India, then I would say that they should also bring in the global standards. But one stark difference that I observed, during the assessment was that the multinational companies are more organized in their documentation.

So they're able to present themselves better than a comparative Indian company. The Indian company might be doing things or taking lot of initiatives, but they have never documented that. So while assessment was being done, by ATNI, we also observed that there were certain companies which realized that, we are doing a lot, but we are not doing it in an organized manner.

We're not monitoring our progress over the years. So because of our assessment that also kind of a development or initiative, those companies who participated in the 2020 Index for the first time. They started now documenting.

Just to give you an example, one of the companies. So they, had a data of 250,000 people. Health data because they had developed an app, which was helping their employees for say consultation on health issues and XXXXXX data of their employees, plus their families. So imagine how much impact can they create, because they have a tool that is available with them to, disseminate good information and provide education to their employees plus their families.

Sudha: That's an opportunity to speak more about healthy choices. A lot of the Indian companies have not been very structured in capturing data, and so they may not have legacy data on where they started and what progress they may have made. But the good thing is, like you say, that they are getting on board and understanding the importance of capturing that data for the future.

Vivek: And, to everyone's surprise. This is an Indian company, so very progressive.

Sudha: Yeah. that's amazing. , Vivek, I have a question.

Should it be illegal for companies to be greenwashing to the extent that they do? Because if you look at , I don't want to name companies and all that, but if you look at some of the major, packaged food producers in the country, they all have some mandatory requirements, because of legislation to report on, what they're doing.

But in the recent past, a lot of people, instead of presenting specific data, they have used like vague sort of things to say, oh, we sell nutritious, or we believe in healthier, or they advertise about healthier. But they're not necessarily healthier products So there is a lot of greenwashing that is happening in the sector. First of all, should it be illegal and does India have policies and laws that require these companies to ensure that they comply with, best practice, nutritional standards? In the last response, you said, that when multinationals come into the country, they should bring in global standards that are good or best practice? What are your thoughts?

Vivek: See, in India, all the food companies, they are governed by the food regulator, which is FSSAI, Food and Safety Standards Authority of India. And there are standards laid down. Plus, the claims also are very well defined by FSSAI, so they need to follow and all of them do follow the regulation, but the gray area here is that there is no clear definition for unhealthy food.

So in want of that definition, there are certain gray areas where, the companies do go in for greenwashing. I would rather say. Also with multinational companies, the standards being adopted, say for example, an EU standard is more stringent than the FSSAI standard, but the companies are the experts. If the company or the manufacturer believes that this is a good standard, then whether it is the law of the land or not, they should bring in the global practice to the country. That's what I believe.

Sudha: That's true. They have a responsibility and an opportunity to do so.

And of course with, changing consumer behaviours, consumers are getting more and more conscious about what they're buying, I think that would be the way forward for them.

Vivek: I would say currently the consumers are ignorant. And, the manufacturers are the experts.

So the manufacturers should not take the benefit of the ignorance.

Sudha: That's very kindly put, I'd say,

132: The Taylor Bennett Foundation's Vision for Diversity in PR: In conversation with Koray Camgöz CEO Taylor Bennett Foundation

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Show Notes:

The current negative sentiment and noise around equity and inclusion can feel overwhelming. At such times it makes sense to step back and celebrate the work of organisations steadfast in their vision (there are many of them around). The Taylor Bennett Foundation (TBF) is one such organisation dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the communications industry that has been doing some stellar work to deliver on its purpose. I recently took the opportunity to invite Koray Camgöz, the new CEO of the TBF and one of the nicest people I know in the UK PR industry to talk about his priorities and focus.

Koray has been a staunch advocate for building a fairer and more inclusive industry from his time at the PRCA, including championing the work of PRCA REEB and the EIAB. Always extending himself to support the cause. So, it was great to hear him reflect on his experiences including his recent stint at Ketchum and how it has shaped/prepared him for his current role as CEO. We also spoke about 👇🏾 👇🏾 👇🏾

👉🏾 Systemic barriers that have historically hindered diversity, such as reliance on unpaid internships

👉🏾 The need to cultivate a supportive culture that welcomes and nurtures diverse talent

👉🏾 Koray argued for a steadfast commitment to DEI initiatives, linking inclusion to organizational success and innovation

👉🏾 Why leadership accountability is paramount for driving meaningful change within organizations

👉🏾 He shared examples of successful alumni and partnerships with leading organizations, illustrating the transformative impact of the foundation’s work.

The new CEO of Taylor Bennett Foundation envisions a future where the stories of diverse individuals are celebrated, positioning the Taylor Bennett Foundation as pivotal in reshaping the communications landscape.

To learn more, head to the podcast, link in comments 👇🏾 👇🏾 👇🏾

And keep tuned future episodes where I spotlight TBF and its incredible alumni.

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Hi Koray. Wonderful to meet with you after such a long time. It's been a couple of years, I think, since we last met. For the benefit of our viewers, let's start with a quick and a brief introduction.

Koray: Thank you Sudha, yes, and it's amazing to be with you.

I'm a huge fan of it. So, thank you, for inviting me back on. My name's Koray Camgöz. I'm the Chief Exec of the Taylor Bennett Foundation, which is a charity that exists to increase ethnic diversity in communications. I've been with the charity for just over four months now, and prior to that, I've been in communications for around about 15 years, most recently as a director at Ketchum and formerly with the PRCA and the CIPR.

Sudha: Congratulations on your role as the new CEO of Taylor Bennett Foundation. So how did the role come about and how has it been so far?

So tell us about how the role came about, how it has been so far.

Koray: Yes, I was with Ketchum for just over a year and a half in total. I worked principally with Adobe, but also with Samsung. But as you say, much of my focus was on corporate reputation.

I was in the corporate team at Ketchum. But everything that I approach when I was working both with client work and prior to that has always been through an inclusion lens and that carried over with a lot of work with clients as well. I was involved with a campaign with Samsung called ‘The Fine Line’, which helped kind of shine a light on issues around name bias. Inclusion, has always been a huge passion point of mine, and it was something that I was privileged to be part of at Ketchum but also prior to roles PRCA as well.

But in terms of how it came about, it was rather unplanned, I think is the best way of describing it. I was having a conversation with a friend. I'm sure he won't mind me mentioning it was Stephen Waddington. I was having a chat with him, and he mentioned that he'd seen this role advertised on LinkedIn. And as soon as he said it, I hadn't actually seen the role, so I didn't know there was a vacancy, but as soon as he said it, I thought that it was a really strong fit and just something that would align really well, and the more I went through the process, and the more I spoke to the trustees, it just became clear that this would be a brilliant opportunity, and obviously I've had the good fortune of working with the foundation, In different capacities, both when I was at the PRCA and CIPR.

So, and I know very well the impact that the organisation creates. And that above all was the big draw. It was the impact that it makes for people in our industry. So, it's an immense privilege to be in the role.

Sudha: I think we've had an opportunity to work on some impactful work with you leading the way at the PRCA. At the TBF, Koray, what are your priorities for the next two or three years? As a leader, what would you like to change? And where do you see the Taylor Bennett Foundation going?

Koray: The mission, I think, has been consistent since the organisation was founded.

So, the charity was founded more than 15 years ago now, and the mission remains the same. We're about increasing ethnic diversity and communications. It's a very straightforward and clear vision. I think for me the ambition over the next few years is to really scale our programs and expand our impact. I think there are 2 sides to that.

I think traditionally the foundation have done this amazing job of inspiring young people to pursue careers in communications and something that I'm genuinely passionate about is working with employers on the culture that exists in our industry and because you will notice that, but we can continue to hire people from diverse backgrounds until the cows come home, but unless there are real changes to cultures and to systems and environments in which these people are working, we'll be in a perpetual state of a lack of diversity. So it's all about supporting employers and helping them navigate their way through their transition to create more inclusive environment.

So I'm really, really focused on that. We've got lots of activity, which serves that purpose and we've got a round table coming up in May, which will be a first step towards that. But ultimately, yes, it's about inspiring young people and ensuring that the environment exists in our industry is genuinely inclusive and allows them to belong and to thrive.

Sudha: Yeah. Because I think the industry, per se, even as per the new census, there is more representation from Black and ethnic minorities. But like you said, if the culture isn't there, they'll probably get in and then get out after some time because they don't see themselves fitting in the industry and fitting in

Sudha: That has been a big challenge.

Koray: I agree entirely. And I think that is the most current and present challenge facing the industry. It's about making leadership accountable and guiding them towards creating genuine change in the organisation.

So I think that's the big picture. And I want the foundation to be part of that. There are some other brilliant organisations doing work in this area as well. But from my point of view, I'm really passionate about ensuring we play a positive role in that challenge. Something which I came to appreciate before the role was just how profound the impact was that this organisation, that the foundation has on people's lives. And that has become more apparent in my first few months, I think speaking to people right across the career trajectory and hearing from them firsthand about just what a tremendous impact the foundation has had on them has been truly inspiring.

So when you asked me about, the foundation and what we're going to be focusing on going forward, a huge part of that for me personally, is about showcasing those stories. And it's about giving our alumni and the people who've gone through our programs, a platform to tell their story, because there have genuinely been some incredible stories, and we want to make sure that those are told.

Sudha: I've just recently met with two of your alumni Hannah and Shanil. And of course, Kuldeep, we work very closely with, we're at the PRCA Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council, brilliant people. Koray, considering your background and you've now moved into, this is definitely a charity sector role. Have you been able to leverage your experiences and learnings from the PRCA and Ketchum? And how different is it to working in a charity?

Is it more consensus driven? Is it slower? Is it more fast paced? Because agency life is so deadline driven.

Koray: It's very different. I'll be honest. Particularly from consultancy life and to be honest, working at a large consultancy is very different from working at a professional body as well, so they're all very different from one another.

I think the one thing I would say about the foundation is that it's very much a mission driven culture. We've got a brilliant team and everybody who is part of that team is really clear on why they turn up for work. And I think that it's inspiring and it really helps ground you in the decisions that you make.

I think that's probably the first difference that I would point out. I think from a practical point of view, working at the PRCA and the CIPR was very useful for this role. I think getting to know the industry, getting to know the people, work in the industry at all levels, I think has been hugely valuable.

And obviously I've had, you could say the fortune or perhaps the misfortune of working really closely on studies, which evidence the scale of the challenge that we [00:08:00] face when it comes to diversity and inclusion. So, whether it was the state of the profession or the PRCA census, I've done lots of work that highlights the issues that we have.

But I think now in this role, we can make real efforts towards improving the situation and to making this industry more inclusive.

And the other thing I would also say is just generally about the differences and thinking about my experiences that working at Ketchum was genuinely, a brilliant and fascinating career experience. I think that the opportunity to get under the hood of the industry was, interesting. And I think, when you're working at the PRCA or the CIPR, you're often commenting or reflecting on industry issues, but you're not actually seeing them first hand

And so, whether you're talking about things like pitching or, the importance of mental health or whatever industry issue might be talked at the moment, it's just really illuminating and interesting to see that firsthand at an agency. And I'll always be grateful for my time, particularly for the opportunities that I've got to work with some clients and work with some brilliant people.

Sudha: I think your experience actually, with the CIPR and PRCA, I think it has prepared you for this, role in the sense that if you had come to it from an outsider perspective or from agency or somewhere else, you wouldn't know the industry as well.

And now, like you said, you've also worked on the agency side. So you understand that I'd say career life cycle or the challenges of running a business day to day, how it functions.

That's amazing. Koray, so I think we met before COVID definitely, but I think we started working together because of the PRCA. with what happened, the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter. And at that time, there was a crescendo around it and it gained a momentum that didn't exist before, people used to speak about it, but it was not front and centre.

And that's what COVID did is it brought it front and centre. But we've seen, from even my time at the PRCA Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council is that in 20, 22, 23, we were seeing the interest petering out and now with the kind of politics that is there across the world, the rhetoric that is happening we are seeing a lot of peddling back. I wouldn't presume to know all the reasons but of course, it's all exacerbated because of the cost of living crisis and there are so many issues, right?

The industry is not moving, not everybody is able to get the job that they want, etc. So in this sort of scenario, would you agree that we'll see momentum on DEI only if agencies are committed, but agencies have sort of stalled or stopped or pulled back because they think they can pull back or they are prioritizing business because they think this is something that is separate.

Would you agree?

Koray: To be honest, I'm, in two minds about it because it's impossible to ignore what's happening in the world. There are large multinational organisations who are terminating DEI efforts. And yes, there's a lot of headlines and news coverage and the sea of distractions when it comes to DEI at the moment.

But I'm yet to see a real impact in the day to day. And it may well be that that plays out over the next few months. But to be honest with you, from the conversations that I've had with agency leaders and comms directors those who appreciated the value of what inclusive strategies deliver for organisations are not dissuaded.

And to be honest with you, I think it would take quite an incompetent leader for you to think, okay, well, I no longer need to focus on inclusion now because of some headlines and things that have happened in the press, to be honest with you. Organisations and businesses always rely on people, and they rely on people to perform roles to deliver value, irrespective of what the organisation's goal is or a sector.

If you want productive people, if you want a loyal workforce, if you want to reduce churn, if you want to improve the decision making process, if you want a more creative, more innovative team, all of that is dependent on having a team, which it's comprised of people from diverse backgrounds and diverse lived experiences.

So my honest assessment on that is that I think, we just need to stay the course and not be distracted by headlines, which at the moment are seeming to never end.

Sudha: I think there's a lot of rhetoric and it's like tabloid journalism and people are just talking a lot about what shouldn't be done around DEI. And as you mentioned, the rollbacks that we have seen some prominent organisations do, but then there are others who've not rolled back, and these are big multinationals that are sort of leading the way and are thought leaders.

Koray: Yeah, just on that, I would say that you're spot on. The headlines are everywhere at the moment. I mean, DEI has been blamed for everything from forest fires to aircraft disasters.

And so I think we just need to be sensible and to stay really focused on the value that these strategies deliver for organisations and also just not be distracted or dissuaded from what we know to be true. There's an analogy which I heard when I was at Ketchum from a guy called Mike Doyle, who was the global CEO at Ketchum at the time. He still is the global CEO, and he spoke about the importance of kind of, if you look at a, a barometer kind of emotional responses with like one being the worst day ever and 10 being the best day ever, and he spoke about always staying in the four, five, and six.

So, irrespective of whether you think things are going particularly well or whether you think things are going disastrously, it's really important that you just stay consistent.

And it's the same concept that, even if things are going very well, register those victories, and, be proud of yourself, but don't get carried away, Stay in the four or five or six and I think that mentality can be applied to the challenges that we're seeing now that can be applied to your own personal life. I think it's a really important principle to adhere to, particularly in a world where things are changing all the time and there's a lot of noise.

Sudha: Yeah. I agree like you mentioned that when you're speaking with leaders, it doesn't seem like they are giving up on the prioritisation of equity and inclusion.

But I'd say that, with all the rhetoric and all the conversations that are happening and also with AI and technology and new tools, the people most likely to get impacted are people at the lower levels and I guess there'll come a stage where others also do get impacted.

How do we get leaders to continue to make a concerted effort to attract not just for the sake of representation, but also when they invite people in, they're inclusive enough. Do you think that leaders have that mindset at this point in time where they have that much of energy because it's so much harder to do business in the industry at this point?

It's not easy, right? Even for agencies, I don't want to mention the name of a agency leader, but they did, talk about technology and how in the future we are going to see in the next one or two years that they'll be employing more freelance and associate sort of models to get people in. Because they're not sure, clients are not signing up for the long term and they are more like short term projects and the retainer stuff is not as steady as it used to be. You knew earlier, I'd say maybe five years ago, you knew when the retainers were coming and they were going to stay for some time.

In that environment, how do you make sure that, the thing that is the easiest to do away with, you don't do that?

Koray: Yeah, I think, to be honest, if you're looking at it in those terms, it's almost impossible to prioritize inclusion to the extent that it needs to be.

I think you need to take a step back and think about why the organisation exists, what the mission is and what needs to be done in order to...

131: The Rise of Foodhak. Empowering wellness through intelligent nutrition with Sakshi Mittal

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

The businesses most likely to succeed are those that are born to solve real life problems. Would you agree?

For Sakshi Mittal, a Wharton educated, investor at Softbank, a health crisis during her first pregnancy was the trigger to her entrepreneurial journey. The result was Foodhak – a physical and digital ecosystem that challenges the food industry and makes 'food as medicine' accessible to all. Technology and AI are used at Foodhak to gain insights from the latest research and empower consumers in their dietary choices.

The first time I heard Sakshi (her child was in the audience with a minder) speak at the India Week in London, I was intrigued by Foodhak (the name), her ‘food as medicine’ mantra, her decision to move away from a highly successful career at Softbank etc…. So I decided to dig deeper and invited her to be a guest on The Elephant in the Room.

In this free flowing conversation we spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Why it required courage to transition from a career in finance to entrepreneurship? We also spoke about the accompanying discomfort and uncertainty
How Foodhak is leveraging technology, including machine learning, to interpret clinical research on nutrition, with the aim of empowering consumers with personalized dietary advice through an innovative app
Sustainability as a core principle at Food Hak, using healthier and sustainable ingredients, like millets, while also optimizing packaging to reduce environmental impact
Why work-life balance, is integral to her well-being and family time is an opportunity to recharge from the demands of entrepreneurship
The crucial role networking and mentorship play in fostering connections that can lead to collaborations and support in developing a successful business.

She also spoke about the unique challenges faced by female founders, the influence of her family on her work ethics, her career trajectory, her partnership with Deepak Chopra…….

I am in awe of all entrepreneurs, the belief, hard work, commitment, dedication, the relentless nature of running a business – it is inspiring. And women entrepreneurs who navigate the intersectional demands of their personal and professional lives deserve especially to be recognised and celebrated.

So, here to celebrating risk taking in the pursuit of one’s passion.

To learn more about Sakshi’s journey head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Hey, Sakshi. Wonderful to finally have you here today as a guest on my podcast, The Elephant in the Room.

Sakshi: Thank you for having me.

Sudha: Let's get started. Who is Sakshi Chhabra Mittal? I saw you on the panel discussion at India Week earlier in the year, and I saw you have a very rich and varied experience, also of geographies, not just industries.

Could you share your experiences from childhood, school, college, family of what has probably shaped the person you are today?

Sakshi: I think that's such a big question. But it's a lovely question because it actually takes you back and helps you recap your life. And helps you be grateful for those who've had a good influence on you and be grateful for those who challenged you because it's the combination of the two that kind of makes you and defines your life story.

I grew up in Delhi, family of five, there's three of us kids, I'm the eldest. Both my parents were very hardworking. So I feel like that hardworking element in me comes from just growing up in a family like that. I studied biotech. First job was at Pfizer, and I've always found the world of science and healthcare, life sciences, interesting. I've been always very excited about new technologies but always had a business brain. When I was in Pfizer, I kind of kept stepping outside of the box of my full time job and just kept studying the sort of commercials of things, even though it wasn't really necessary.

That's when I realized that, maybe it's time for me to combine my scientific knowledge or degrees with a business degree. That took me to Wharton and for the first time lived in the U. S. East Coast for a couple of years learned a lot from that experience. I'd had the exposure studying in India, studying in the UK and this time I was studying in the US. India and UK have a very similar education culture, I would say, and US is completely different. It's a really good complement, to, the English and the Indian style. I feel that that was a life turning moment for me. One of the many life turning moments, because I think the way you tell a story, America really teaches you that, whereas I don't think England and India teach you that necessarily. I think England is a very sort of humble way of storytelling and so it's not the most effective in my opinion, whereas I think the American way of storytelling is super effective.

And, had a really great time at Wharton. The first six months were very challenging, just given the different cultures. But, made amazing friends, my best friends for the rest of my life, still from Wharton. Overall had a great experience and it was important. I realised that I love technology, and I wanted to get into that.

And so moved back to England into the world of investments, because I felt that it gave you the biggest exposure into new entrepreneurial energies and technologies that are trying to disrupt and build the future of tomorrow. Started out with early stage investing. Invested in the likes of Deliveroo, Dark Trace, Babylon, that kind of stuff. These are all big companies now, and then got recruited by SoftBank, and that took me to Silicon Valley. So lived there for a couple of years, which was the West coast. It's a whole different world compared to the East coast and compared to my other experiences in life. It's a whole crazy bubble of technology, lifestyle, and it's just a completely different world. And that was amazing. Again, one of the life turning moments, I would say. And there I really got to hone in on life sciences and technology. I was at Softbank for six years, first couple of years in California, and then in London, I would say majority of that time kind of went into this life sciences, food sciences, future technologies, obviously did other stuff as well, logistics and this and that.

But I really enjoyed, looking at every single innovative technology that's touching healthcare and food from different angles. And it was during this journey, I was married, I was now pregnant. Unfortunately, I had developed a liver breakdown, during my first pregnancy, it's quite rare and the doctor said nothing can be done. And if it wasn't done properly, it could have resulted in a stillbirth. And it's the doctor's call, but if they take out the baby too early, then you have to deal with premature related side effects. Right? So, there was a lot of back and forth and different opinions and a lot of stress, let's just put it that way. I just didn't take no for an answer. I started looking at clinical research because that's what I do best. And I changed my nutrition, food along with other things, I mean, there was a lot of other stuff as well, but I managed to reverse it, control it all together, which like never happens.

Even the doctors were quite surprised. And so that's how the journey of FoodHak started. And even when I was at Softbank, to be honest, I was finding this more and more that, when you look at a disease, by the time you get a disease, it's often too late, right? And we don't die of age, we die of disease, which is very unfortunate. I believe that in the future, we will manage to die of age and not disease. What does that mean? That means like you and me we're gonna age, we'll be 120, and one fine day we pass away. We're not gonna be withering away with chronic disease, slowly dying a bad life. Do you know what I mean?

And the problem is that doctors don't study nutrition. To solve chronic disease, which is what we die off, chronic disease is all lifestyle. 80 percent of your lifestyle is food, but like I said, doctors don't study nutrition. Someone has to break this cycle. Someone has to bring intelligence to food. And today we live in the world of AI. We can easily use technology to our advantage, bring it to your fingertips on the go in the form of an app.

That's what we're doing at FoodHak. Build food products intelligently by swapping out the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. You're actually surrounded with a better choice for the first time. And this way you kind of create an ecosystem of health and wellness which enables you to age and not get diseased. You know what I mean? It helps you live a good life, but also good health span. That's what Foodhak is all about. It obviously started from my own journey it was a personal passion, and I just thought the whole world also deserves this because there are other women who are probably suffering or other men who are suffering, but they don't come from a life sciences background. They probably, can't do what I can do. this was my calling.

Sudha: You've answered my second question about Foodhak and how it came about,

I was going to ask you whether there was an ‘aha’ moment when you decided, that okay, it's time to jump ship. The work that you did before that, that is a well-paid, well recognized, profession. Taking that leap of faith, becoming an entrepreneur, that clearly was accelerated because of your own situation.

Sakshi: Yeah, I mean I get asked this question quite often because you're right, like the job I was in I was an investor at the world's biggest fund, SoftBank. The most exciting place to be. It was a very well-paid job.

I had a great reputation and a great track record, had a lot of autonomy because I was doing life sciences, which was something that not anyone else in the fund could do, because it requires a lot of training, specific kind of training. And so, to leave such a comfortable spot and jump into entrepreneurship, which is basically, forever being uncomfortable, because it's dynamic, fast changing, challenging, oftentimes lonely. It's really satisfying when you find a passion and you turn it into business, which also has a ‘better for you’ element, where you feel that you are doing something good for the world, for the planet, for the people. I think that for me, luckily, I have that trio, where I can see the business it's in the biggest trend in the world for the last, five years has been health and wellness.

And I think it's only going to continue. I'm passionate about it through my own story and I feel like I'm doing something good. I think that's what really helped me take that leap and that's what really drives me every day today as well.

Sudha: Is the name Foodhak significant? And you've spoken about business purpose, you've spoken about your passion., So was purpose and passion an important consideration for you when you were starting off?

Sakshi: I think so. To be fair, like when I was starting off, the most important thing for me was that there is a gap in this market.

And I had been looking at trends, across life sciences and food sciences for five years now. I'd seen everything from gut microbiome to blood testing, to DNA testing, from technologies in Israel, to, West coast, to UK, to India. I'd seen it all. Right? And I think when you're in that position, you can almost look into the future and be like, I know this is it, like there is a gap, I know we're moving in this direction, and I was right. After I'd started Foodhak, like I'd heard, there were other food as medicine companies. So, I think that was the biggest thing for me where there's definitely a market.

And, when I was at SoftBank, I tried out the product, as a side hustle, I would spend evenings and weekends cause I was so passionate about it. I did a lot of testing as well, prior to jumping into this full time. And I learned a lot about the product, the packaging, the distribution, the delivery, the logistics, the challenges. I spoke to a lot of customers, my early adopters to understand if is this a small niche or is this a massive niche, so that also gave me a lot of comfort. But I do think the purpose and passion, I'm sure, it's the secret sauce that really drives you because it's really challenging to be a founder. The only thing that kind of keeps you going on a day-to-day basis, is the passion.

Sudha: Yeah. In your previous, avatars you have Sakshi, worked in an aggressive, male dominated industry. Did your experiences sort of prepare you for this journey? Like you say, challenges are the norm, discomfort is something that you need to face all the time and be prepared for every single day. How has that contributed to this journey that you have been on?

Sakshi: I think you've nailed it. It a hundred percent has. To be a founder, sole founder, female founder in a male dominated industry, world, whatever you want to call it, you need to have a training of a warrior. Which means you need the stamina, which means you need the thick skin. I don't want to use the word aggression because it's viewed negatively when it comes to women, but you need that passion and assertiveness to make a point when you know you're right. And I think you learn all that when you are put in this discomfort, where you are the minority, where you are the different voice on the table. And you have to make your voice heard.

And you learn that in a male dominated work environment. So I'm quite grateful for it to be fair. Like when I was at SoftBank, did I ever feel like I was disadvantaged? Maybe sometimes, like when it came to times of promotion and titles. But like most of the time I felt that when you're working on a deal we're all presenting our smartest analytics, we're all trying our best to analyse and predict, is this going to be a good multiple of investment, like there's a lot of math, there's a lot of diligence, there's a lot of hard work, sincerity and I feel like we're all doing that and presenting our best. I would say that I honestly look back at my time at SoftBank and really enjoyed it. That was also one of the changing moments, like we touched upon previously.

Sudha: What are the upsides to starting your own business and the downsides, of course, especially as a woman led founder?

Sakshi: That's a great question. I mean, the upside hopefully will be that your passion and purpose turns into a big business that's globally recognised and people are benefiting from it. People are thankful that your product exists on the shelves, where they can now have a better pantry, when you open your cupboard for snacks and your kids, they are surrounded with a better choice. And more and more kids are suffering from obesity. And if you feel that you've played a part in helping resolve that in the future, these are all parts of the upside, right? But I would say like the upside takes a while, whereas these early years, most of the time, there are just challenges in the hope that one day you will see the upsides, right? And you believe you will. I believe I can. I believe I know I'm going to do it.

But it's just these initial years, there's a lot of day-to-day challenges. There's challenges in team building, there's challenges in being a female founder, and having a team. And I think just generally females are more empathetic and we like to hear other people's voices around the table because that's just how we are genetically. But then the challenge is when you heard other voices, and you still want to put your voice forward, right? There's challenges around that, there's challenges around building a team for the long term. There's challenges around raising money, because people have biases in their minds.

Sudha: I hear these all the time. Absolutely. And how important would you say Sakshi are networks, mentors, collaborators, and support systems when starting a business? Congratulations on the collaboration with Deepak Chopra. That's huge.

Sakshi: Yeah, it's huge, I think if you build an authentic business with a real purpose, I think these kind of like big collaborations happen and I do believe in energies and the universe's way of us being connected. Trust in the universe, putting out your positive best self and good stuff will come back to you. I do think network mentors, I would say for me, these are the most important things, and to build a network, you have to be out there telling your story, out there meeting people. And that's not easy, actually. People think it's, oh, you're out partying. It's not a party. It's quite the opposite, because you've just worked all day, you've now gone out at night and you're working, you're `selling the story, And that's how you build networks and relationships and collaborators.

And I think they're very important in my opinion, probably the most. I think above that would be the strength in your product. I've always believed in building an amazing, technically superior product, because I think once your product is strong, like for me in the food space, it has to taste amazing.

And of course it has all the scientific health benefits. Once I've cracked that, I would say it's all about, where can you get it? And how do you do that? It's through your network. So, it's extremely important.

Sudha: Absolutely. I mean, I think women often struggle to make that time, to build networks. And people don't realize that it's a slog, it's just a slog. So, as a business, how are you using technology, including AI to create an advantage, if at all, if you're using AI?

Sakshi: Yeah, so when I started, the biggest problem was that the clinical research on food is very noisy. It's a very biased data set because the large trillion-dollar food companies that are poisoning us today, they tend to bias this data by funding research or whatever. And that's very hard for like a average human to like pick-up a clinical research and understand which one's a good piece of research or a bad piece, right? Which is why there's a lot of confusion in the food market, a lot of fads and trends that come and go because, no human brain can keep up, with...

130: The Power of Collaboration: Sudhir Sahani on Lessons from the Development Sector

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

2018, was a defining year for me career wise, it was also the year when I was able to live up to my aspiration to contribute a percentage of my time pro-bono to the third sector. I had the opportunity to align and engage with PRADAN, a leading Indian charity working in the livelihoods space. This opened the door for some wonderful collaborations and strategic work with the organisation in the last 6 years. The person who enabled this partnership was Sudhir Sahni – our paths had intersected briefly in the past.

A veteran of the Indian Advertising Industry, Sudhir made a deliberate shift to the non-profit sector after three decades, in the quest for work that aligned with his beliefs. At PRADAN Sudhir leverages his experience to foster partnerships and amplify PRADANs impact amongst external stakeholders.

In the 130th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, Sudhir talks about his transformative journey from the corporate to the social sector; the intrinsic motivations that guided the move; his desire for a collaborative approach to work focusing on individual potential; challenges faced by the development sector; the evolving funding landscape; equity and inclusion in the third sector; a community centred approach to delivering projects; women in leadership; ….etc.

We also spoke about the impact of Transformers an interview series featuring leaders and best practice from the third sector and Samagam, a multi-stakeholder platform conceptualised and hosted by PRADAN to facilitate dialogues and collaboration amongst the third sector, private sector and governments.

It is great to call a fellow champion and ally for women in the workplace, a friend.

To hear more about Sudhir’s transition to the third sector head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Sudhir. Welcome to the Elephant in the Room podcast today. Thank you for being a guest.

Sudhir: Hi Sudha, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Happy to be with you today. Thank you.

Sudha: So let's get started. My first question to you is how did this move happen from advertising to the social sector or the impact or the development sector? Was this a planned move the? Last time I'd met you before you were with Pradan you were at Ogilvy?

Sudhir: Yeah. I've had a wonderful career in the advertising world over almost about 28 odd years and I loved what I was doing. And I loved, the kind of influence it had on people, on consumers. So that was great. At some point I felt that my style of working and engaging with people was I would say far more collaborative than competitive, which is required in the corporate world. And for me, I think getting the work done was more important than getting credit for it.

I was beginning to wonder whether at a certain point I may not be so fit for the corporate world going forward. And my learning curve was beginning to plateau. And I would especially find pleasure in helping people achieve their tasks and realize their potential the underdog performing was far more exciting, than the champion team delivering a winning campaign I felt that maybe I may have a far more, if I may say, you know, within quotes, socialist outlook. And was happier to create more equals within the team than, create or deal with unequals.

So that was beginning to fester in my mind.

A couple of campaigns that really excited me. One was The Pulse Polio Immunisation Campaign wherein you had to mobilize almost the entire population that had kids up to five years of age repeatedly on the immunisation days and get them to the booth and get their children given the polio drops and it was a remarkable kind of success. We managed more than 98 percent of the population coming to the booths. So that was very exciting, inspiring.

The other one was VDIS, which was the voluntary disclosure of income scheme, which was actually way back in 97 which was basically inspiring a nation to actually come into the mainstream and pay taxes. Not too many people were wanting to do that, and there were a lot of people who found reasons not to pay taxes. How to get people over a six month period to actually join the mainstream by paying taxes was quite a task. The success that we achieved over that six months period was quite exciting. And I thought that, you know, these kinds of things of mobilizing people and having a large impact on the audiences that we deal with was something that was exciting. And I was beginning to therefore look at the social sector as an option going forward.

So I started looking around, I initially went into something else related to advertising and communication and even sports marketing for a while. But again, I felt that I was looking at creating more new talent and helping the marginalized people coming into mainstream rather than just dealing with champions. And then in conversation with my wife, I felt that I would look at some social causes. I looked at garbage recycling, I looked at other issues, but essentially my wife then kind of inspired me to say that, I've always worked well with people in a good organisation. So I might benefit more by joining a large organisation that is already doing some good work rather than try and create some small niche for myself. And that's how then I started talking to more people within the sector.

And I think by a happy coincidence frankly, I met Naren who was my batchmate from school. He had been in Pradan for over 28 odd years or so. He later became the executive director of the organisation. So I kind of chatted with him and I was telling him that I was looking to do something in the development sector. And he said, you know what? I've been around here for about 28 odd years. And I said, okay, so I really want to know what you do.

I understood what Pradan did, I had an eight-day field visit, and I was absolutely thrilled, amazed at the kind of work that the organisation was doing in the sector. And I thought that this was something that would interest me. So that's how finally entered the development sector. And I've been in the same organisation for over seven years now.

Sudha: Wow. What I really like, Sudhir, that you are very self-aware about where you were headed and where you were going because often we are not self-aware and I think despite being deeply unhappy, or despite recognizing that we are not actually using our strengths or talents to go where we should be, we continue to exist in the same sort of ecosystem and struggle there in the short and long term.

So that's an incredible journey. You've answered some part of the second question, what caused you to take that leap of faith? And what drew you to the sector? I think you could elaborate more on what drew you to the sector. You knew Naren, which is a very happy coincidence. it is like quite a seismic move for somebody moving from the corporate to the development sector.

Sudhir: I was closing on to 50 years of age then, and I was thinking that even in my earlier days, both at work and even earlier days in school and college, I was always very interested and excited by helping some of my colleagues or some of my students who are not doing so well.

Even in Ogilvy, I was very keen and there was a time when there was a business that was coming our way. And I felt that the direct marketing team would do a better job of managing their business.

And I offered that business to that team and the head of that stream Ogilvy XXXXX XXXX, he says, why are you giving me this business? Is that a lemon? I said, no, no, I just feel that your team would do a far better job of managing that business and delivering on it rather than, the advertising business.

As I said, that the development sector, social sector gave much more opportunity for that kind of thinking, that kind of collaborative working. Also, I think Pradan is an organisation, what drew me to that was that it also believes strongly on realizing individual people's potential. That always felt that and my thinking also was that financial resources and in fact, even time resources, that time wasted can be made up. But if professional resource, human resource talent is wasted, then that's the biggest miss that we have.

And to that extent, this organisation, as I mentioned, Pradan kind of seemed to echo the same thought. And that's why got more interested in joining the sector.

Sudha: That's why you gravitated towards it. And how has the experience been, was it a shock to the system?

Was there a difference in how people operated?

Sudhir: Yeah Sudha, so frankly, I think for me both the initial months and almost now seven and a half years that I have been there in the sector and in the organisation, I would say quite surreal at one level and I would say extremely fulfilling on the other because frankly, and I consider myself still as a bit of an outsider from the sector.

And I think I'm quite in awe of the development sector workers and professionals, and I strongly believe that, the work that they do is far more complicated than selling soaps and shampoos, but even selling IT products and financial products. So the work that they do, commitment that they have is, something that really overawes me.

You know, it really beats me how young people can commit their lives to work for others and the society rather than look for personal material gains and comfort. So I think this approach of being more collaborative and inclusive is something that really excites me. But on the other hand, I think at times I feel that there might be a lack of commitment in terms of deadlines and timelines, because I think a lot of people within the sector believe that good work needs to be done. It doesn't need to have a timeline. It doesn't need to have a deadline. And that sometimes used to frustrate me and at times even frustrate me now. But overall, I think the fact that I entered with the idea that I would have to pick up things and I was willing to join even as an apprentice in the organisation.

So because I think I came with an approach that I would learn and then take things forward. I thought I had a pretty kind of seamless entry and kind of carried on in the organisation for such a long time.

Sudha: Some of what you say I have experienced whenever I visited Pradan and the field visits.

And for those of us still on the outside or on the margins, it seems like, a big sacrifice because there is a sacrifice in terms of material gains.

So, at Pradan what is your role, Sudhir, and how do you leverage your corporate experience, if at all, if you get a chance.

Sudhir: Yeah. So I think that was really the idea. So even when I looked at the organisation and I was talking to the people around there, I think the idea was that I should leverage some of the skills or experience that I bring from the corporate world.

The starting point of course, was that I said that the organisation does some great work. Why don't people from outside know about it or why don't we talk about it? And the people in the organisation that have xxxxxxx xxxxxx said that, no, we are very good at our work. We focus on our work. We really don't know how talk about it. So if you think this is worth talking about and it is useful to talk about, please go ahead and do that for us. It was more about talking a lot more about their work and showcasing it and putting it in the form that could be shared.

Because I had a corporate experience, I had networks, I could then bring in more corporate partners. So even as Pradan was growing as an organisation and wanted to increase its reach and impact, it needed many more partners corporate partners to support its funding efforts.

So first in terms of communicating their work and two in terms of getting more corporate partners was essentially the area that I was working with. My sense is because, over the years, I had developed certain level of credibility with the people that I worked with on the corporate side. They were willing to consider the organisation that I was working with, even though they may not prima facie have had too much experience or awareness about the organisation. So that helped a lot. And I think both the organisation and I benefited from each other’s association.

Sudha: And I think the start of the journey, I remember we did a huge stakeholder mapping exercise around the brand and how they were engaging, et cetera. My next question actually leads into, some of the challenges facing the sector and because the world over the sector is facing, issues to do with funding. Funding is getting squeezed, there is changing expectation from donors, partners, stakeholders. There is a need for more transparency and of course the sector suffers from lack of inclusion. And the perpetual challenge about the inability to attract the best talent because of how they are remunerated, and also the perceived problems that the sector faces.

So there are two questions here that I have for you. One is, is the sector prepared to face some of these challenges or all of these challenges? And two is what are the steps it's taking to address?

Sudhir: I think fair question Sudha, I think a lot of us are still grappling with those issues.

But I think if you look at it on a larger scale and go to the basics of it, I think as a sector, and many of the organisations, including the organisation that I work with, has tended to stay away from communicating the work that they do. And how does that work happen? So there is almost a sense of mysteriousness, and almost a shadow on what the organisation and what the sector does and how does it do it.

And as I said that, because a lot of the larger organisations and the sector overall has not invested too strongly in communicating or talking about its work, there is always been an unknown factor. People say, we don't know what you're doing and whether there is any evidence of proof of the impact that you create, what is the process that you follow.

And there is almost a, I must say, you know, reverse snobbery in the sector. They say, no, no, there is no point telling you because you will never understand. And I keep telling people that, you know, that's not the way to happen because if you need more people to come and work with you, you need more talent to come within the organisation, then you have to be far more open and communicative about what you do, even though it might seem a little difficult to do it.

So I remember I met a development apprentice once in Pradan, a person had joined only about six, seven months back. And I said, okay, so how are things, how does your family take the fact that you have a professional engineering degree and you are now in this sector? So he said, you know, whenever I go back home and I will say that this in Hindi, he says, "jab bhi main ghar jaata hun toh mera ki mera babla beta aa gaya".

So this almost mad guy. I don't know what does he do? Where does he work? I really don't understand what he does. And he said, you know, I've tried a couple of times to explain to him, but now I've given up. And he almost kind of half broke down, he says, because I think my father will never understand and I don't want to explain it to him. And I said, no, you need to understand that your father has a right to know, and also it's important for you to explain, because frankly, I think your dad, his network, his people, and a lot of people outside the sector need to be your allies. They need to understand what you do and you need to explain it to them because how on earth otherwise will they kind of come around to supporting the work that you do.

And you need all people to work with you. So you need to collaborate with a lot of more people, you need to educate some of the key stakeholders. And this I would think, imagine goes with the corporate sector, with the funding stakeholders, and lots of times, even the government sector needs to understand what the sector brings in to make impact on a scale, how important it is to get good talent.

This is a matter, not just for the heart, but it means a lot of good head and good thinking to make the change happen and therefore it requires that kind of talent. Also the fact that it needs a certain level of time and investment in communities, relationships, building that confidence for us to help make that change happen.

So overall, I think there needs to be a far more openness and a sharing collaborative kind of approach where a, you talk about the thing that you do, what is the process it takes to bring about change. The fact that it could be time consuming and therefore people need to stay invested in it, the fact it needs very good talent and resource to be put in and therefore good talent should be remunerated.

I think the areas broadly that I think. If we were to look at would be very useful for the sector to benefit from and for overall development program. Because frankly, I think the development sector the NGOs organisations actually help the government programs work far better. A lot of organisations like Pradan and others who work with communities at grassroots, I think, bring to the table what the communities really need.

And therefore, in that sense, help governments and other institutions design their programs far better. And two is, once those programs are designed, I think it also helps them to implement them far better. If the government is the biggest development stakeholder and has huge amounts of money, then that money needs to be used well, and I think in that sense, the NGOs or the development sector stakeholders are very crucial, and people need to understand the role that they play.

Once they understand that, and the more they are understanding that, I think there's far more openness now and acceptance of the roles that stakeholders play in the process.

Sudha: Whether it's the government or the private sector or individual public, if you're speaking about a country like India to solve some of its biggest problems, the government cannot do it on its own. It needs the...

129: The Role of Organizational Culture in Women's Advancement: Lessons from Ashima Tyagi

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

As a podcast host one of my biggest joys is celebrating incredible people making a difference. People who I know through my work or because of my podcast or from my networks who have raised the bar either in their personal or professional life.

My guest on the 129th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast is Ashima Tyagi, our lives intersected briefly in the late 2000s when we worked in different divisions of one of India’s largest PR and PA agency. At the time Ashima was a rookie, getting to grips with operating in male dominated and patriarchal metals and mining industry in India. Fast forward to 2024 when I bumped into her on LinkedIn. I was chuffed to see Ashima Tyagi was Economics Associate Director, at S&P Global Market Intelligence unit in Singapore.

I had a lot of questions for her – about the move from Delhi to Singapore, her experience of living and working in a new country and culture away from her family. I was curious to understand how she was navigating work-life balance and what it meant to her, especially considering that we have it drilled into us, that hard work (long hours) and sacrifice is the route to success.

We also spoke about her leadership style has evolved over the years, the impact of imposter syndrome, how organizational culture can drag women down or enable them to thrive, her role in WINS S&P Global, networks and networking, her advice to young women joining the industry today, what motivates her and ambition……

While Ashima’s may not recognize it her move to Singapore was a brave decision at many levels a) She had never moved cities before b) She was leaving behind her husband and one year old son c) Her motivation was personal growth. Not many young women in this part of the world are able to priorities their personal and professional ambitious and it continues to stymie and disadvantage them. So, kudos @Ashima Tyagi, every little step counts……

To hear more about Ashima’s personal and professional growth head to the podcast (link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Ashima. Wonderful to have you finally as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast. We've been like talking about this for some time, but it wasn't quite working out until now.

Ashima: Thanks Sudha. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Sudha: So, for the benefit of our listeners, I know you from our time together at Vaishnavi, where we interacted briefly. let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Ashima: I've spent nearly, I think, 16 years plus in the commodities world and currently I share my expertise, insights as an economist, primarily in the metals and mining sector. In my current role, of course, we're helping clients navigate the volatility that we see in the supply chains. And we do this by embedding all of that in our pricing forecast and buying strategies and that helps our clients also achieve cost savings, on all the things that they source.

Sudha:

Not everybody understands the commodities market, so you've explained it very well in layperson terms. So Ashima, you moved a couple of years back to Singapore. What has been your experience of living and working in a new country and culture?

And of course, Singapore has a huge expat community.

Ashima: Yeah, I relocated to Singapore around six years ago, but because of the pandemic, it just seems even smaller. And I've experienced remarkable personal and professional growth, I think this time. And the context to that is that I literally never even moved cities within India during the first three decades of my life, let alone moving countries.

I was born in New Delhi, brought up in NCR, which is the National Capital Region, always stayed with my parents, and then after marriage, in my husband's home with my in laws. So, it was a very protected and sheltered life. Primarily worked in Connaught Place also where we worked together, and everything was largely in my comfort zone.

Moving to Singapore was a big step, was a huge step, but I wanted to take it for my professional growth. I had been working in India for a decade and was feeling very stagnated. But the challenge initially was more on the fact that I was leaving my one-year-old son behind. So emotionally, it was very wrecking.

The work that I was also doing was completely different from what I was doing in India, though I was within the steel industry, but the work profile was totally different. So again, it was a huge learning curve.

Plus, when I moved, it seemed the work experience of 10 years in India just didn't matter because you have to prove yourself all over again and It was very difficult. I realized that we sometimes tend to be in a small bubble of our own and when you move countries you realize that the world is much larger. I think back in India, I considered myself one of the really smarter ones, I always had that confidence, but when I moved here and was surrounded by talented people from like all over the world in my company, I just was a little unsure of my own talent for a while. And I also realized how rigid I was, how set in my own ways I was. And being a vegetarian also didn't help much, I think. So in the first couple of months, it was quite difficult. There was a little bit of crying. There's a little bit of helplessness. I thought I made a mistake by moving because your life was comfortable back in India.

I contemplated returning but a friend in Singapore that time told me, just hang on for a year, experience things, and she was of the view that Singapore is going to spoil you because it's so comfortable and easy to live in, and you will never want to return. And her words came out to be true.

So here I am, for the past six years and not wanting to go anywhere.

Sudha: Oh, how interesting you’ve spoken about how the experience was, moving to a new country and how it made you question yourself. As women, we tend to question ourselves constantly. We suffer from the imposter, we have self-doubt, with the best of qualifications, you can still be very worried about whether you will fit in or whether you're capable enough. So how do you as a senior woman professional, how do you find the balance between your personal and professional?

Especially since you're in a new country you have to prove yourself again. That experience, like you said, that decade long experience just doesn't count because people don't know you and you have to start all over again. You also mentioned you left a one-year-old back home and that's a very difficult thing to do. So how did you manage to create that balance where, you are able to focus on your priorities both personal and professional?

Ashima: Yeah, I, to be honest, never been thinking about this too much until recently.

And I'm glad we're recording the podcast right now where I'm having a little bit more clarity rather than a year back. I'm not proud to say this, but I think this year is really the first time in my life that I'm focusing on my health and focusing on the time I'm spending with my two kids now, which are seven and three, instead of just hustling away and trying to achieve more and more professionally.

Obviously, the thinking that time was that you are achieving professionally so that you can provide your kids with the best of education. But now I'm realizing that the kids need your time and attention as well. So, I'm hearing a lot of stories on how, teenagers sometimes are not connecting with parents. And that has primarily to do with the fact that parents didn't have conversations since the beginning. You don't speak to the teens when they grow up, you speak to them when they are young, when they are toddlers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I think you cannot have a perfect balance for sure.

It's always tilting on one or the other side and still you have to actively plan, and you have to constantly try to balance things out. And you could do it by, sometimes setting boundaries, sometimes prioritizing self-care or utilizing your support networks. So, in my case now, there are trips that I've taken, with a group of friends so leaving my kids, spouse, everyone behind, so which means that it really allows me time to myself.

So I do that once in a while also, but at the same time I have to manage the kids as well. So it's a constant, everyday a balancing act, but it's never in a perfect state of balance for sure.

Sudha: Yeah, definitely there's no such thing as a perfect balance, your priorities keep changing I think day to day, week on week, month on month, year on year as children go through various stages. And yeah, there is no right way to do things. You just have to wing it. And like you said, you just have to set some boundaries at some point to give yourself also the space to be able to do everything justice, everything that you have on your plate.

So Ashima, I speak a lot about women and leadership, and this is something that I want to ask you also about different styles of leadership specifically to do with women, what has been your own leadership journey like, and do you have a specific style and what does it mean actually to be a leader?

Because in the past couple of years, we have new definitions, we've redefined what leadership means. what are your thoughts on this?

Ashima: Again, it's a very good time that you're speaking to me now, because as I said earlier, I used to be all about hitting goals, targets, being ambitious, super driven, ready to put in the hours. Working during the weekend was never a big deal for me. I never understood why people make a big deal of it, you know, used to do it quite often. And where I was coming from was the fact that back home in India, I like sometimes see your maid coming to your house, going to 10 different houses, doing the cleaning, working so hard.

So I used to think that my life is still comfortable, I don't have to work as hard as millions of people are working in India. And if I work over the weekend what's the big deal about it? I could do that much and, we are very resilient. So even in the pandemic, I think I was literally pouring myself into work, unlike many people who were baking banana breads or, experimenting with skin care, which I now think was the right thing to do, you know, for self-care in those stressful years.

For me, I would say the style was more performance driven in the recent past also. It was more about, executing and deciding to go after things and get them done and the sense of accomplishment that you get after that. But now again, I'm leaning to the more empathetic style, given my, again, own circumstance where I have young kids, diverse responsibilities.

I think I understand things better for everyone. I get that, not everyone can bring in the same amount of passion and the same amount of work on an everyday basis. And you have to be mindful of everyone's unique situation. So earlier, I think I used to get frustrated when I used to not find people coming in with the same enthusiasm on something, but now I understand because I'm also stepping back myself, a lot of times now. So again, this also is about balancing performance with your own wellness. That you can give your best, yet not burn out in the process as well. For me now, I think I don't work as much on the weekend as I used to.

I want to give time to my children, which I don't give during the weekday.

Sudha: Okay, so your leadership style has definitely been influenced by your personal circumstances and learning and that it doesn't make you a lesser leader if you are not at it 24 seven. So, you know we've already spoken a bit about, self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

But I have a question. How does it affect you? And are there occasions when you doubt yourself or your decision-making capabilities? How do you address it? And what would you say to younger colleagues, who may face this issue.

Ashima: Yeah. I mean, imposter syndrome, I think creeps in every now and then, there are days when you feel on top of the world, and you feel like there's no one better than you.

And then there are days when you feel absolutely no good. Then, obviously you have to remind yourself of your journey and how far you've come in the first place. And my husband also really encourages me a lot of times when I'm really questioning my ability. Recently I was speaking to a mentor, and I was actually telling him that my communication skills are not very good.

And he was like, why are you saying that? So, there are moments when I feel like nothing is working. But again, think of the small little things you should be grateful of, things that bring joy into your life and feel stable again, feel normal again. I've started to do things like journaling and affirmations and self-love.

Initially again, it was very awkward to just pat yourself on the back at the end of every day and be like, I'm proud of what I did, it was a very new concept, but I think gradually I'm seeing a change in myself where, I'm okay with deciding to do a limited amount of work at the start of the day.

And at the end of the day, finishing it well, and then patting myself on the back because as I said I was so much into work and trying to grow that I had a lot of doubts all the time.

So I connected with a therapist also a couple of years back. And she told me that, Ashima, you're not being kind to yourself, and I couldn't believe it because I used to think I love myself so much. I spend so much on my clothes and my makeup, and I do everything for myself. But only to realize later that being kind to yourself means that you don't beat yourself up every time you make a mistake. And I wouldn't say I'm completely on the other side now, but if earlier it took me five days to forgive myself for something, now it might take two, so I'm still working on it.

I think it also has something to do with Asian parenting or maybe Indian parenting where you know, parents are very comfortable sometimes criticizing you, but they are not very vocal in appreciating you.

In my case also, my father, I think he had this feeling that if he praises me too much, even when I'm doing well academically, that will somehow make me very complacent and I'll stop delivering, I'll derail myself on the progress.

I'll just become overconfident. That's not really the case. We understand now.

Sudha: Yeah. I think in Indian culture, we do have this thing where we tend not to praise children. It's, we love you, you're expected to know that we love you, but yeah, you're not getting any praise for anything.

And I think we are to be excessively humble. If you've done things, that's great for you, but please no need to like tom tom about it or talk about it or even discuss it even within the family. It's like no big deal that you did it.

Ashima: Yeah. And even proverbs like empty vessels make more sound, make you feel like it's very blasphemous to even appreciate yourself. I recently attended a Google workshop called I'm Remarkable where they asked you to speak out in a full room of people. Why do you think you are proud of yourself? And there were a lot of people who could say that very openly, but I struggled because I was like, how can I? Praise myself like that. I'm not used to that.

Sudha: Yeah. How can I praise myself for doing well at work and surviving and doing this and doing that?

Ashima: Yeah. I'm supposed to do it anyway.

Yeah.

Sudha: What would your advice be to younger colleagues on how to address it? Some of your learnings.

Ashima: I think it's a personal journey in some way. Look into your childhood or all the traumas that you've had I do feel that therapy really helps you delve into your past, see what was happening and make corrective steps. I think self-love needs to be prioritized for sure. Standing up for yourself and believing in yourself is something that you have to sometimes practice and then it starts to come naturally to you.

Sudha: You say it enough of times and you start believing it.

So Ashima, how important do you believe is organisational culture to ensuring that women can progress to leadership positions or tribal leadership positions?

Ashima: I think absolutely crucial. When I mentioned to you earlier that I wasn't growing while working in India for a long time, it had something to do with the steel industry which is primarily male dominated and you know, the patriarchal elements.

I remember visiting a steel plant in Chhattisgarh once, and I literally had to walk a considerable distance to find a female toilet. Of course things are changing now, there are women on the shop floor, but still, I think much more needs to be done. So as a confident young woman in the corporate office that time, I struggled to understand how I could really progress to the top, what could I really do? I was really feeling very stagnated and I knew Singapore will really offer me that opportunity because when I work here, I don't see any difference between how a man is treated versus how a woman is treated. There's absolutely no difference because everyone works here. You sometimes need dual incomes because it's the most expensive city in the world also. But what I feel is that essentially it cannot be a single person's problem, if you want to grow professionally as a woman you need that entire ecosystem, that can foster inclusivity that can really empower women, your diverse perspective is valued to some extent.

And by that ecosystem, it can't be just the company. It's the whole societal setup. I think we were talking earlier about women's participation in the labor force in India and we actually co-wrote a piece from my organisation recently,

128: Building a better world: Gagandeep Bhullar on measuring good with Superhuman Race

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Show notes

Throughout history, there have been genuine supporters and sceptics of equity and inclusion. We can all see how the current political climate in the US has deepened the divide fuelling anti-ESG/DEIB rhetoric, leading many organizations, including prominent ones like Target, Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, Harley Davidson etc. to reduce or cease their initiatives. However, there is room for cautious optimism considering that some of the world largest organisations continue to be committed including Patagonia, Costco, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Eli Lilly, Amazon, Pfizer, Salesforce, Google, P&G, Goldman Sachs.

But, for a lot of people, like Gagandeep Bhullar, Founder of Superhuman Race, a data platform that measures good, it is business as usual. She does not perceive a decline in commitment or interest from US companies. In the 128th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast Gagandeep Bhullar, joined me to discuss the pressing need for measuring and scaling "good" in today's society. She emphasised that traditional measures of success often overlook the value of good deeds, which do not typically yield tangible rewards in the corporate world.

In the episode Gagandeep shares her journey from a successful career in aerospace at Boeing to becoming an entrepreneur focused on sustainability. We also delved into the unique features of her technology platform, which stands out by driving actionable sustainability practices rather than just reporting. As we explored the dynamics of ESG reporting across the world, in India and the built environment, Gagandeep also highlighted the importance of authentic narratives in sustainability and how sectors like real estate are leading the way in adopting these practices.

We also discussed her belief that BRSR is on the path to becoming one of the best frameworks in the world, her exhilarating and challenging journey into entrepreneurship, and two exciting projects: a climate model to predict asset-level risk and a study on the built environment and real estate developers. Fun fact: Superman, Batman and mythology inspired the name she chose for her platform 😎😎😎

If you are interested in DEI, ESG Reporting, and Sustainability, tune in to the podcast to learn how SHR is leading the charge with technology for good. Link in comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good afternoon, Gagan. Wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Gagan: Thanks Sudha. It's lovely to be here.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Gagan: I am Gagan Bhullar, and I founded the Superhuman Race. So what I do now is that I run a data platform called Superhuman Race that measures good.

So that is essentially who I am and what I do at the moment. My background is entirely aerospace though, so I'm a math and science nerd basically.

Sudha: Wow. Okay. That's very interesting. We'll talk more about the transition later on, but tell us a bit more about Superhuman Race and how did you arrive at the name?

And secondly, what is your ambition when you set up this Superhuman Race?

Gagan: I'll start with the vision first, and the reason why I started Superhuman race. When I started Superhuman Race, I was at Boeing, and I had a dream job. So, I was having a lot of fun, but I was also a very young person. And I think I was struggling with the realities of the world that we live in. And I was hoping that, before I get to a stage where I cannot do anything anymore, can I contribute to building a better world? And that's how we started thinking about setting up Superhuman Race.

It's also very interesting that the problem statement that I identified was that good does not get measured. Because as a young person, I started thinking about what does good actually get you, and I realized that it really doesn't get you anything. It doesn't get you promotions, it doesn't get you jobs. It doesn't get you grades. It doesn't get you admissions. It doesn't even get you dates. Like for the most part, jokes are made about good people, right?

I started thinking about the fact that in our world, good is not measured. And so, it, doesn't get scaled. Because I'm a math and science nerd, I started thinking about how do we measure good. So that was where we started. The vision was to build a better world. When I started building Superhuman Race, I thought that we could do these amorphous data models that measure good, that are completely abstract.

And I believed that, maybe before I'm dead, we'll see billions of people around the world measure good on the platform. What I envisaged is that every individual, every organisation, every country is measuring good and working towards scaling good. So that's the vision that I started with.

We called it Superhuman Race because again, the space of good and many of the examples that I gave you, I think that, especially as young people, it's easy to get disillusioned. So it's easy to see that the narrative is around children dying and there'd be no water left and the planet sort of, not being able to accept any more human beings and natural disasters.

I started thinking about bringing joy to the space of good and that's where Superhuman Race as a name was born. Because I started thinking, what is the closest analogy to someone who does good to protect people or to protect the planet, but is fun, right? So I started thinking about Batman, Superman, Hanuman that comes from mythology in India and that was where we thought that we should be Superhuman Race so that we become the sidekick that makes the human race, the superhuman race.

Sudha: That's incredibly interesting. You mentioned good does not get you anything. You don't get rewarded for it interestingly, I heard this from the head of sustainability on what is the upside to doing sustainability, and he said, you know what, actually there's no upside, but if you look at the downside, there are too many of them, for us not to be conscious of.

And the second thing that you mentioned, which is very interesting, and contradictory you were thinking of something concretely abstract, which I think comes from your background. So how is your platform Superhuman Race different from other existing technology platforms for ESG due diligence?

Because there are a plethora of them that are continuously being launched and bandied about for different things.

Gagan: So that's actually a very good question, Sudha. What the Superhuman Race does differently at the onset is that it is truly an abstract platform. So, the platform has AI and machine learning models for nearly all the industries.

And because we align with SASB for the most part, I'm able to confidently say that 77 plus industries that are covered by SASB, they are also mapped to our platform. Why this is important is because I think a lot of people set out to solve the problem of sustainability. So, we set out to solve the problem of measuring good, but a lot of people set out to solve the sustainability problem from the point of view of reporting, which is not what our platform does. Our platform is essentially an action platform, so there is automated reporting and there's better automated reporting than most platforms in the world because it's fully automated, but that's not what we set out to do.

Right at the onset, the fact that it's an industry agnostic platform, and when I say industry agnostic, it's to the extent that we have deeply funded competitors that are, let's say, working in a single domain like Real estate. And they will have 25 million square feet of real estate on their platform, and we have 0. 5 billion square feet of real estate and real estate is one of the 77 industries on our platform. To that extent, we've built the abstraction to be powerful. And the second is that we don't focus on reporting, we focus on action.

So, the platform comes together to generate action from, actually, our advisor Ashok Pamidi says this, but I'm going to repeat and I'm going to steal what he says, "from the shop floor to the top floor". So, the person on the shop floor has different motivations, and you know almost a different style of working and expectations from the person in the boardroom or on the top floor. So how do we build a platform that drives action across the spectrum of people and organisations to scale sustainability?

Sudha: That is again, interesting more often than not, these platforms become a way for organisations to say that they're doing sustainability. So by, putting in data they are trying to show that they do sustainability rather than it being embedded in their business purpose or in the operation.

Moving on from Superhuman Race to India and the industry. What are the drivers for adoption of ESG reporting in India? Are the trends different from the rest of the world? Where are we sort of on the maturity curve?

Gagan: So this is actually again a very good question. I think that at least the driver that I have seen to be the most common driver for adopting technology for sustainability from our point of view is investors asking for data driven disclosures.

So I would say that 100%, not 99, not 95, not 90%, 100% of the clients that we work with today were either trying to access capital, reduce the cost of capital, or just continue to engage with their investors. So that was the single most important motivation that brought most of our clients to us. And I have never yet met a sustainability professional who's trying to acquire a platform that is motivated by either regulation or investors till date. Having said that, I think that in terms of the level of maturity in India in particular, there's a book that Amartya Sen wrote that I read when I was a younger person, ‘The argumentative Indian’, and I think that in order to be argumentative, you have to analyse and explore and debate.

And I see that, across India sustainability professionals and I think that has given them an edge in terms of being able to learn very fast. So, a lot of the Indian sustainability professionals that I have the good fortune of working with today, I've seen that they are able to actually spotlight business successes that are a result of sustainability investments, which is something that one doesn't see commonly, actually, like even you shared the example of the sustainability quote that you mentioned.

So that is exciting, I see that in India, once people are getting it, they are actually trying to not just invest in sustainability, but they are also able to spotlight how those investments are driving better business.

Sudha: At the macro level there are so many anecdotal stories about how companies are struggling to report or that the quality of reporting is not great. How has been your experience? From the conversations I've been having I see that sometimes there is a head of sustainability and suddenly that person is supposed to be in charge, but then the functional heads and the leaders don't necessarily report and that person doesn't have the authority. What are you seeing? Is it seamless for a lot of organisations or some of them, what is your experience?

Gagan: I think a couple of things on this. One is that sustainability requirements and reporting have become onerous over the years. And I don't want to comment on whether it's fair or unfair that they are as onerous as they are.

It's just the fact of the matter that if you have to submit a CSRD report, it's going to have more than a thousand KPIs on which you need to report data. If you're a complex diversified business, it could be data from different industries spread over different locations, right? I think that the requirements have definitely become onerous to the extent that the sustainability professionals and companies now need to report on the detailed KPIs that relate with their business, which could, like I said, be geographically or across industries, it could be diversified.

They also have to report on things that are outside of their business in several cases. So work that's happening with communities, materiality often captures physical risks and so on, I think that it is onerous, it's hard, and the data is distributed across organisations, sometimes across multiple organisations.

So I think it's impossible to do it without using technology. Having said that, the technology to do this has existed even half a century ago. So half a century ago, a magical tool called Microsoft Excel was born, which is able to capture data, and it's able to visualize, and it's, able to do all sorts of things.

So the question remains, why is it still a challenge And I think that's where the actual understanding of the sustainability space matters. So one is that a lot of the KPIs are very technical within their own domain, whether it is calculation of carbon emissions, whether it is calculation of pay parity, it could be LTIFR, which is like the safety parameter, you have so many different, extremely technical parameters that need to be calculated.

So that complexity doesn't give any single individual or team any confidence because you cannot be competent across so many different domains that are all technical at the same time. And I think the second part of the reason why it has been hard to do this is because in some cases, the data has never been captured by the company because, it has not mattered till date. So now suddenly that data becomes important because somebody is evaluating performance on the basis of these parameters. And so if the data does not even exist in the company till date, how do you educate stakeholders in terms of what is the data, how should it be collected? And then how do you educate the consumers, which could be board members or C suite executives, that this data matters? And how do you contextualize it against core business KPIs so that it starts informing, business decisions in meaningful ways. I think that there's a wide spectrum of difficulties, which is why any technology platforms that don't bring a core sustainability expertise with them are unable to scale no matter how good the tech is.

Sudha: So, you have certain mandatory things in the geography, like in India, if you're India based, if you're a multinational, you're already reporting on so many things. In India, there's a BRSR, I think it's at a very nascent stage of development, because from what I see and how people are reporting, the reporting is quite vague.

If you're the company, you can say you are going to be ambitious about your carbon capture or whatever journey without actually making a real commitment. What are your thoughts on that, on the BRSR?

Gagan: So I think actually the BRSR has evolved significantly in the last few years.

So I think the first few versions, which were known as the Business Responsibility Report, BRR. Very, like you said, but I think that it has come a long way now in terms of not just intensity calculations required by companies, but also intensity based on pay parity in the sense of PP, across different currencies and so on.

So I think that there's a steep rise in maturity that has happened in a very short period of time, which I think the credit goes to SEBI for this. Today the BRSR, the new format of BRSR is actually a very robust format, especially when you put BRSR core on top of it, which is probably one of the most comprehensive value chain reporting formats outside of the EU that exists in the world today I think.

In that sense, there has been an evolution. But I think that the challenge still remains that a lot of these formats are self-reporting based and there's really no peer benchmarking that is provided by the regulator themselves, right? So whether it is the EU or whether it is India or whether it is any part of the world.

What the frameworks like BGSI and such do is that they rank and stack people based on certain criteria. But what the regulations do is that they just take the disclosure. So nobody really knows because there are no benchmarks. I think that bad data does not get filtered out at all.

There are no penalties for bad data today. I do think that will also evolve, because obviously, these are just the first few years of that type of data coming into the organisation, so there's no benchmark that has existed so far. In terms of track, BRSR is probably on a fast track to become one of the best frameworks in the world today.

It has come a long way in the last few years, maybe industry segmentation is something that the government is already thinking about because one sees initiatives like CCTS being announced where they've already said that there'll be nine mother industries where there might be targets and then how does trading happen and so on.

And a lot of this is also based on math actually. So SEBI which is administering this has come up with very, very scientific ways of assigning those targets across industries and on. So I actually see this as a sunrise sector in India at the moment.

Sudha: Yeah, I mean, India definitely deserves a lot of praise. It's mandatory to report. How important is it, Gagan for businesses to have an authentic narrative on ESG reporting and sustainability? Considering, the EU green deal is coming and greenwashing is going to be penalized. We also have seen legislation in India around greenwashing, around consumer segments, et cetera. What are your thoughts on this?

Gagan: So, I think that historically companies that have even had a narrative, if they haven't had the data, it doesn't fly in the new world anymore. So, I think that the biggest opportunity that I see for any company today, regardless of whether it belongs to a hard to report sector or a consumer sector. I think the opportunity is good data. Across the spectrum, whether it is export of teas, which is like one of the oldest commodities which is being exported or it is hydrogen for power, which is one of the newest commodities, I'm seeing that especially as it relates with the EU importing...

127: Creating an impact unicorn with assistive tech: Prateek Madhav, Co-Founder, CEO AssiTech Foundation

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Show notes:

What role can technology play in breaking down barriers and building inclusion? Can AI be a force for good? There is sufficient research to show that assistive technology can be a game changer for people with disabilities enabling them to be more independent(self-care) and improving their participation in social interactions, education, employment etc. So, when I came across an article by Prateek Madhav on assistive technology, I jumped to the chance to invite him to be a guest on The 🐘 in the Room.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a staggering 16% of the world’s population or 1in 6 of us or about 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. Under international human rights law, sometimes domestic laws countries have an obligation to address the inequities faced by persons with disabilities. Disability inclusion is an imperative to achieving the SDGs. However, disabled people face huge barriers to accessing education, livelihood opportunities and of course there are stereotypes and stigma that continues to prevail.

It was inspiring to hear about technology for good, about innovations that are enablers to inclusion and help people live more fulfilling lives. AssisTech Foundation(ATF) the non-profit founded by Prateek Madhav aims to build an ecosystem that leverages innovations by technology startups in assistive technology. Today, the foundation is the world’s fastest and largest ecosystem of assistive technology, with a network 450 innovators and startups in India and access to 1200 globally. Through the Inclusive InnovationNetwork (+N) (IIN) that he co-founded, Prateek Madhav aims to create a global ecosystem for collaboration and peer learning by partnering with entrepreneurs and investors.

The vision is for ATF to become an impact unicorn – creating scalable impact on the

lives of at least a billion people. The big takeaway for me, is that social

impact companies can be a force for good and help address some of the biggest

problems facing our communities and the world. ATF shows that is possible.

To get your daily/weekly dose of inspiration and hear more about the ATF head to the podcast. Link in the comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Prateek. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Prateek: Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sudha: We always start with an introduction. So please share a brief introduction with our listeners.

Prateek: Thank you. So, my name is Prateek Madhav.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of AssisTech Foundation. I grew up in North part of India, in a town called Jaipur. Out of house for 25 years. So don't know my kids probably are more Bangalore kids than Jaipur kids. I went to NIT Jaipur and then IM Calcutta to do my MBA.

I've lived in multiple countries, chose to come back to India for good reasons. The way I think of my life is that probably I'm living the second one. The first one professionally was in corporate, so I worked for 18, 20 years for corporate organisations and I loved the roles. It gives you visibility, it gives you opportunity to travel, meet different people, but what's more interesting honestly is the second life, which is where the attempt is to create more awareness about disability inclusion, create an ecosystem, which will use the technology innovation to help people with disabilities.

I'm sure we'll talk more about it. But yeah, I mean, beyond all this which I shared with you i'm a runner. Recently done a 500-kilometer cycling tour. Finished a couple of weeks back, next year aspiration to enter triathlons. So yeah, `that’s on the sights, but I'm very thankful to get these opportunities, to do different things and definitely blessed with a lot of good people around me.

But thank you again for inviting for this podcast and having this conversation.

Sudha: The thing about second innings really resonates with me. I faced barriers to career progression in the UK. And at that time, I didn't realize that this was an opportunity and a new beginning and a new start. And there was a lot of angst, but I'm so grateful now that I'm here on this journey and that I'm able to speak with people like you who inspire me every single day.

Prateek, what inspired you to start the AssisTech Foundation, and what is your vision for it?

Prateek: Sure, and thank you for asking that question. See, like I said, I started volunteering in the second life for various different disability focused organisations. In fact, my early experiences was to be a part of the organizing committee of first ever T20 World Cup Blind Cricket which we organized way back in 2012 in India, Bangalore. And we were a small non-profit sitting with an aspiration of doing a World Cup. How uncool and foolish that could be. But we did it, and I have to tell you what fun it was to really see, 10 countries, including India, playing the first ever T20 World Cup cricket for the blind.

And I don't know if you or the listeners understand how blind cricket is being played. It's played with a white ball, which makes sound. So, we did that World Cup. And in fact, I'm very happy to share that, that year India won the final beating Pakistan in it. It was a great experience for me personally and I continued volunteering for different disability focused organisations.

I was a part of the advisory of Dr. Reddy's Foundation and many other organisations. Now when I think of your question of inspiration, there's no one day or one instance. As I was spending more and more time along with my corporate roles in disability, I realized that number one, we were looking at challenges of different sort. Now, all of us know that we are talking about 1. 4 billion people with disabilities in the world, which makes us one in six or one in seven of us have, some or other kind of disability.

In India, somewhere around 70 to 80 million people with disabilities. So, we're talking about enormous challenge. And while we think about this large number, I looked around to see who was trying to solve the problems of people with disabilities to help them learn better, to help them get into employment While there were very, amazing organisations around me. One observation was they were using very 14th centuryish solutions. While our life was getting transformed through tech, we were getting access to online digital content faster, better, easier ways to travel, order food all that cool stuff.

People with disabilities were not given that opportunity. So that's number one. Second unlike a lot of us believed in, they were happy people and I have to tell you I have so many friends with disabilities. They are full of joy, full of aspiration. They may or may not have resources like you and I, but unlike my corporate employees who had everything but complained. People with disabilities live with a lot of hope very confident YouTube. And third, because my day job was to build technology, infrastructure, technology platforms I started realizing the same phenomenal tech can also be used to help people with disabilities learn, get employed, or live a very independent life. So, my curiosity was to see how I can use my skills, connect. knowledge experiences to help this section of society, which has been ignored is where the seeds started.

In those years, I started working with a lot of technology entrepreneurs and they would come to me. I took a sabbatical from Accenture to be full time CEO of a large nonprofit in India.

And a lot of technology innovators will come to me with their innovations. And I saw an opportunity in helping them. And if we had created a platform to help them, they will in turn help so many people with disabilities where the thought and the journey started, but I'll take a pause, if you have any follow up questions, but I'm happy to talk more about ATF and the vision.

Sudha: No, I think it's amazing because, yeah, we always think that everyone has an aha moment where you suddenly in one moment decide. But I think there is always a series of things and experiences that inspire us. Rather than just one thing for most of us.

Please, I'd love to hear more about the vision.

Prateek: So the journey started where I started sitting in this nonprofit and beyond when my sabbatical also ended. Imagine, a couple of guys coming to you and saying Prateek, we have built this app which will help blind people move independently, in an indoor and outdoor environment. And I would look at them, like, who are you?

And as I explored more, in this case, they were two individuals who resigned from their very well paying job from the corporate organisation and built this tech for six months, sitting in their flat in Bangalore. And they built a very credible tech. They were passionate. I said, okay, wait, hold on. And I called my friend Chandru who was 100 percent blind. I said, Chandru, can you please test it? And, he doesn't know who's sitting with me and he goes around and comes back and said, sir, it doesn't work.

So now, if you look at this more closely today you will see that tech founders had great passion, when you double click and explore more why they did all that what they did is because they realized that a friend of theirs got blind and they wanted to do something about it, but they never involved a wider set of users. So they built phenomenal tech, which was of no use.

I was meeting some of these xxxxxx when I said, what can I do to help them? And we do what we can do in our, area sphere of influence where they don't connect them with this different organisation. But then the idea started growing to see what if we create a platform. What if we create an ecosystem? What if we create an organisation which will help hundreds of these innovators and entrepreneurs grow? Helping one person is great, I think we all, in our individual capacities do that job day in day out. But idea is to create this ecosystem, because if we are able to help hundreds of these innovators, who are building assistive technology solutions for people with disabilities and elders, then in turn, what if they help a hundred thousand people? Imagine the kind of ripple effect. Imagine the principle of non-linearity. Imagine force multiplication starts to kick in.

Hence, we will be able to create that kind of, impact.

Having that thought and belief, we founded ATF, AssisTech Foundation in 2018/19, but I'm really happy to also share with you now, what we started with 20/25 Innovators is an ecosystem which is world's fastest and the largest ecosystem of assistive technology. Now we have a network of 450 such innovators and startups in the country.

We are global alliance, you have access to 1, 200 such innovation, and you're very, very excited that what model, which we initially thought should start kicking in is not scaling very well as well.

Sudha: Wow. That's amazing, it's not always easy to create this ecosystem. People say that India doesn't have enough of people who innovate, there is not enough of talent, failure of the technology. In spite of all the good intention behind it, if you are not inclusive at the design stage, including those who need to use it and keeping in mind the diverse needs even of that group, ultimately the product is likely to fail. So, it sounds like an amazing and very interesting journey. I'm sure you have a lot of stories. Prateek, you also founded the ‘Inclusive Innovation Network.’ Is it aligned to the ATF and what is the purpose of this network?

Prateek: So fundamental beliefs Sudha is technology is beyond boundaries. We have seen that when we have worked in an industry.

Another brilliant thing about technology is that technology doesn't discriminate while people do. So when we started to think about putting together ATF, which is a section 9 non-profit organisation, we also said let's also see what's happening around the world. We spoke to a lot of people in Australia, New Zealand. Israel was doing amazing in terms of tech innovation and assistive technology, a lot of folks in the US Europe as well. And we started to realize that the task of creating an ecosystem in India was important, but we were looking at an opportunity of creating a global ecosystem because for various different reasons, a lot of organisations working in different countries, the whole ecosystem was also fragmented, but they were phenomenal organisation, nonprofits, innovators, whom we were speaking to beyond India. And we started realizing that if we do not expand and create this ecosystem and think of a design of this ecosystem as a global design, I think will undermine the whole opportunity here.

And hence we co-founded this network called ‘Inclusive Innovation Network’ with six other countries. So, ATF India from India, Remarkable, who's a part of the largest cerebral palsy alliance in Australia, New Zealand. Kenya has a very interesting geography we have a very good friend and probably one of the best disability leaders in the whole South Africa called Bernard and we have Canada, there's some people in Hong Kong, China. What we started was, a few years back is now taking an amazing global shape because we have at least seven to eight countries joining us next year. Now, through this network, like I said earlier, you already have access to at least 1, 200 innovators and startup.

And I'll go back to the point which I was making that technology is beyond boundary. So, imagine a startup who's building solution for helping with social skills and communication to autistic kids. Is also talking to a similar tech startup who are trying to solve same or similar challenge in Australia. Look at the collaboration, look at the peer learning. Look at the possibility of they joining forces, collaborating, sometimes synergizing in terms of resources. They're investing in building this tech and then launching a global product. Imagine investors that's in many ecosystem, although we have tried building in India, but awareness in Western countries about investment in assistive technology is far better.

And hence we are talking to several investment houses, family houses as well, who are interested in investing innovations in assistive technology. So, I think that really is the purpose of plus and to create a global innovation ecosystem by partnering with different entrepreneurs and investors, very excited because we have seen that model working very well.

But obviously more needs to be done as we go forward.

Sudha: I think it's amazing that from now six to you have another same number or greater number wanting to join. That's brilliant. Prateek, so we all know the challenges of disabled people in India and they are the invisibles. I call them the invisibles because, most parents, society, I think for whatever reason, they try to hide those children or try to hide the disability, if it is possible.

How does ATF help disabled people take charge of their lives, I think if parents knew or if even their, support network, were aware of the things that technology can enable them to do that would be brilliant.

Prateek: You're right when we think about disability as a section of society, we are not just talking about the visible disability. So, if somebody is on wheelchair using crutches or a person's vision impairment, there's a large section of society like you rightly said are invisible disabilities, learning disabilities, neurodiversity, neurodivergent kids. And you're also right that in our experience a lot of time people with disability themselves or their parents do not like to really come out in the society. And I think there are good reasons for that because construct of our society is that we are not giving, equal opportunity to people with disabilities.

In fact, some of the organisations I have seen, if they divulge that there is a disability, they could marginalize, they don't get that equal opportunity. And hence, a lot of time, it's a question of acknowledgement, because of emotional reasons, acceptance. And hence, if you do not accept and acknowledge, you would never seek out solutions, you will never seek out help in the wider society because of marginalisation and stuff like that. My point of view, and I want to share with you and the listeners that the world has changed. We have seen so many kids with disabilities, with smarter tech today, they are not just excelling in their education, but they are growing with so much of confidence that they are entering into employment. One of the things which you would know that parents will always worry about what will happen to my son or daughter with disability after me. What after me is always a thought.

And I'm here to give them strength, I'm here to give them a thought which is very optimistic that if we open up, if we invest in training them on various stuff, various skills, I have no doubt that they will be able to take care of themselves and be independent. We have seen so many people with disabilities now entering workforce. The world has changed, not just because the newer technology is there to help, the world it's changed because there's a greater awareness about people with disabilities and their capabilities.

I will give you an example of a friend of mine, her name is Al and she was a very senior leader in one of the corporate organisation and then she resigned and she started a non-profit. She's a person...

126: A conversation with Christina Brooks, Founder, CEO Ruebik. inclusion first talent attraction agency

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Show Notes:

There are some brilliant leaders doing amazing work to promote equity & inclusion in the UK. Would you agree? There are not enough superlatives to describe the hard work and commitment of these advocates.

Christina Brooks, Founder and CEO Ruebik is one such leader. Along with her day job she is a trustee for an alternative provision school in Tottenham, a Trustee for pioneering Social Communications Centre for Autism. She also mentors incarcerated young people and advises many black owned social startups.

So, I was thrilled to have @Christina Brooks as a guest on the 126th episode of The 🐘in the Room podcast to talk about all things equity and inclusion. In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about her journey from global talent lead at Rolls Royce to starting Ruebik an inclusion first talent attraction agency and DEI consultancy. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 Learnings from the corporate world that she brought to her entrepreneurial journey

👉🏾 Being purpose led, and B-Corp certified

👉🏾 Lived experiences, and her intersectional identities that led to her being othered

👉🏾 Her thoughts on Industry trends indicating a slowdown and step back in investment and commitment of DEIB/EDIB initiatives

👉🏾 How culture and measurement contribute to creating an impactful recruitment and hiring process

👉🏾 Conscious/Inclusive leadership

👉🏾 Future of work – the impact of AI

We also spoke about her podcast Elevated Conversations with Tacita Small and Monique Carayol, Zoom Fenty, even Beyonce, her beliefs, motivations and having a long view of change………..

To learn more head to the podcast (link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Christina. It's such a pleasure to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Christina: It's an absolute honour to be here Sudha. Thank you for the invitation.

Sudha: Brilliant. let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. Also, tell us why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

Christina: Yeah, a really good question. Why did I decide to become an entrepreneur because it was not by design, I actually fell into it. So, if I give you a little bit about my background, I've got almost 20 years executive search experience. So that's really my bread and butter. So really thinking about how organisations should attract and retain exec leaders.

And prior to setting up Ruebik, I worked for Rolls Royce as a global talent acquisition lead. So, my team were in Derby, and I was based down here in London, and it was a really wonderful experience. And my mandate at the time was to increase gender representation, and we started to look at other underrepresented strands as well. But I think the real light bulb moment for me, Sudha, was when I was often looking for suppliers and other executive recruitment firms to help us really think about diversity.

They often sounded and looked like the business that we were trying to change and innovate in. And so really for me, I built the kind of business that I wanted to work with. So Ruebik, as it stands, it's an extension of a talent acquisition function. And so, we really partner closely with organisations who are trying to move the dial beyond gender. We're looking at race, we're looking at social mobility, we're looking at, fringe communities that typically sit on the periphery. And so that's what we do day in and day out.

Sudha: Wow, that's amazing. I think nothing better than a purpose led business because that's what you are. What were the learnings you brought from your corporate experience that have helped you navigate this journey to building a B Corp certified talent agency?

You are B Corp certified, congratulations.

Christina: Yeah, I'm happy to display it in the back.

Sudha: How important was it to have focus and purpose when you were setting this up?

Christina: It was intrinsically linked. It was never an afterthought and so when people say when did you decide to go to B Corp? B Corp came to me in a strange way.

Because of how I had built and set up the business I was introduced to a fantastic organisation called Cyd Connects. And it's run by two incredibly powerful women, and they take organisations through the B Corp process. So, if you ever need help and support with this, CydConnects, and I'd be happy to connect.

When I met with the co-founders and I explained how Ruebik was built, that we look at the ecosystem. As much as I'm passionate about changing executive diverse leadership within organisations, so really those decision making roles, I also look at fringe communities as I've already referenced.

I'm a trustee at a pupil referral unit, we are the academy that one, young children have already been expelled from school and it's typically because they have emotional, behavioural, psychological challenges that don't fit into that neurotypical peg. They come to our academy, and beyond that, we then, as a business, go into prisons and work with young men who are currently incarcerated.

I've been to Thameside, I've been to Pentonville, I've been to Brixton Prison and we work with the young men there to help reframe some of the activities, that really made them successful in an illegal way. How can we transfer that into a legal sustainable work that would help empower them and their families.

Because of this ecosystem that I've built that looks not only at executive leaders but wider society and community, it just felt right to have that B Corp certification and status to share with our clients, share with our candidates that this is something that is part of our DNA as a business.

Sudha: You haven't taken the easy path, because there are lots of people who've jumped onto the bandwagon post-COVID or pre-COVID because they saw an opportunity, a business opportunity.

Clearly you are deeply embedded in trying to bring about change as you said in communities that are at the periphery and are not likely to find as much support.

Christina: That's right.

It's so important for me, Sudha, because I often describe myself as the product of the problem that we're trying to solve. I left school at 15. I didn't do A levels. I did not go on to university at that time. I was brought up in a single parent family. My mom had four kids and in an incredibly religious environment. What that means, I was actually raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, so what that means to me is that I have a deep understanding and respect for other people's faith.

And while it is no longer my faith, but if you think of all of the complexities of also growing up outside of London, it was in Gloucester, it just meant that I was different in so many different ways. I was othered because of the colour of my skin, othered because our dad didn't live at home with us in that traditional family setting, othered because I was a Jehovah's Witness, there were so many things that made me so different.

And then it was a bit of an awakening to move from Gloucester to Tottenham, which is a very deprived inner city borough of London that for anybody who doesn't know it, but it's where the riots took place in 2011 when Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police. That, that was literally the bottom of my high road.

And I just have a different perspective in terms of people growing up in lots of different social communities and what access allows and what the lack of access excludes you from. And I think that this is where this fight comes from is really understanding how very quickly and easily you can be excluded.

When I would go to job interviews, the minute I said I lived in Tottenham, no callbacks, I would never get a callback. So, I started creeping up the Victoria line. And I was like, I live in Finsbury Park, maybe we'll call you back. I live in Highbury and Islington. And then it was the callbacks because I had to be savvy. I didn't want to lie about where I lived and I wasn't ashamed. It just meant that people perceived me differently when I said, I come from Tottenham.

Sudha: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not what we're doing, it's how others are willing to engage with you because of the differences. Post COVID, you know, DEI gained a lot of traction and momentum, but research in the past couple of years has shown that the efforts are now stalling.

And I have two questions here, do you agree or disagree with the research findings? And if you agree, what are the reasons for this progress stalling?

Christina: I think that's a big question. In 2020, there was a groundswell that nobody could ignore. Up until that point in the UK, there were a handful of things that it was impolite to talk about.

You were actively dissuaded from having conversations about politics, religion, money, and race. They're your four things, you wouldn't talk about it around the dinner table or with friends because it's like come on, we're British, be conservative, polite. In America, the conversation was so much more advanced because slavery happened on their land, they could see it there.

Here in the UK, it's always been so removed, and we called it business.

Sudha: Yeah.

Christina: So for that reason, conversations about equal opportunities, diversity and inclusion, now it's called ED& I, now E D I and Belonging. It changes its name, we have new acronyms, but the conversation stays the same. We would have to really have a radical shift in our community and in society to see the change that is needed, because there is something inherent in all of our communities, that it feels like we give away something when we are bringing somebody in.

And that's just a tribal feel, and it's something inherently biological, that if you saw something that looked different to you, that sounded different to you, it was a threat to your tribe. That is how we are built for survival. And so that seeps into organisation, it seeps into culture, it seeps into us being able to other, communities and people that are different to us because it's our reptilian mind, we do it without thinking. Of course it slowed down after 2020 because at that groundswell, at that time, I think that it was the first time in history that the entire world had a common enemy outside of itself, so we were all scared of COVID. We all looked at each other, and it didn't matter how much money you made, it didn't matter if you're a celebrity, if you're homeless and on the street, we all had a single enemy.

And in that moment, we all saw the humanity in each other. When you see somebody's life taken away by an institution, the police, you are stopped in your tracks. And we were already traumatized by what was happening. It really catalysed the conversation and shifted people into action. And of course, that has slowed down because the world got back up on its feet. There is less empathy now than there was four years ago, it was four years ago now. And we've gone back to old ways of working. So, I do agree with the research, which does make me sad.

Sudha: And does politics also have something to contribute to it? Because we saw the last government, take some steps or, even say that there were no problems with diversity or bias is not something that they wanted to include in training. I think the political class does have some contribution to make to this entire stalling business.

Christina: Of course, I think that it's the cascade down and we see it. If I think about our counterparts in the U S as I say, this is a conversation that has been alive for them for hundreds of years because of what took place on their soil, for us, it's relatively newer.

I think post Windrush and how we saw a lot of communities treated thereafter, both Black, Asian, all the other communities that have happened 60s onwards we see real cultural weaponisation around this subject matter from governments. Both across the sea in the US and here in our own backyard.

And I feel like what the political climate is, is if people look like us and sound like us and say, actually immigration is not the way to go or there's not a problem here, nothing to see here, it's really dangerous. It's a dangerous rhetoric, and damaging because it's from our people.

Sudha: Absolutely agree with you. Moving on from there, your clients, for example, are they asking for your expertise in building inclusive recruitment and more inclusive hiring processes? Or are they just interested in getting past the hiring requirements, whatever is the most immediate need?

Christina: Yeah. Sudha, that's a really brilliant question because I do think that there are a lot of organisations out there who are very metric driven and just want to tick those boxes and say, look, we've done it, we've got the percentage of women, black, disability and great is this is our scorecard.

Luckily, as a founder of my own business, it means that I'm willing to back myself and leave money on the table. If I do not think that organisation is doing it for the greater good of community and customer, that's what this has to be about. It has to be inclusive for all, not because you've got metrics to hit.

A number of our organisations and clients that we work with, are really trying to do things in a different way, and if we even just take one facet of the whole employee life cycle, which is a recruitment piece, the attraction, we have not disrupted the way that interviews are conducted for the past 40 years.

It's the same. It's insane. And we're working in an environment where there are four different generations. One client that I have has employees at 16 years old all the way up to 82. Imagine! If you think about the intergenerational context of that, and what people are demanding now from organisations, then we were, say, two, four, five years ago, it's completely different. So inclusive recruitment has to be a central part of how to engage different communities in a way that you have never done before.

Sudha: That's so true. we hear so much statistics about, the different generations in the workplace for the first time, and a lot of organisations are ill-prepared to communicate and engage with them.

How important, Christina, is measurement for keeping track of an organisation's DEI Priorities, when your clients, do they talk about measuring, the impact? And are there, two or three steps to get started on the journey?

Christina: Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that, where I spoke to clients previously who were just looking at metrics, there is absolutely a need, because what isn't measured isn't done. We do need the data, of course we need the data, but it can't be the be all and end all of this conversation. And I think that's where some people get stuck with data paralysis.

It's like, well, we know, and this is the amount of people that we need to increase by it's like, but what's the thing feeling of your organisation? What is the culture saying? And the best definition I've heard of culture is the worst behaviours tolerated in an organisation. That is your culture.

So how is that being measured?

And to your point, what are the steps that you take to get a better understanding of that, it's deep listening. It has to be objective. Of course, there is some merit and benefit to bold surveys and internal, kind of, you know, let's take a sweep and let's ask. But there will always be that inherent bias or fear that actually your boss might see it or you might be identifiable because you've really spoken up and shared your honest thoughts, but somehow HR might map it back to you.

So my advice is, even if it's not through a Ruebik, but find a partner that you truly trust and get that external objective feedback loop. And that's the first point, is listening to the business, listening to your organisation, because quickly after that, you can then map a pathway to making things better to organisational tweaks. But deep listening is number one.

Sudha: Yeah, I guess unless you listen, you'll never know the behaviours that need to change. Like you said, what is the worst behaviour that an organisation is willing to tolerate? That's an amazing definition.

Moving on, across the world, a large percentage of leaders are technocrats, you know, higher education, MBAs, they do not teach about DEI, you know, so unless leaders have a personal interest, they are not going to make, culture a priority for them.

What can be done to help these leaders unlearn behaviours and be more conscious and inclusive? Because I don't think there is an option for them now to not understand this entire landscape.

Christina: I think that this is one of the most underrated and undervalued points that we are trying to ratify right now across industry.

That question that you've asked right there should be the question of every CEO running an organisation right now in the market, is how do I get my leaders to understand how important this is. Up until this point, if we think about historically, how you hire, how you promote, how you retain, it's all been based on exclusion.

And it's all been based on the network and the network that you foster, which doesn't exclude, that doesn't include others. And you've been rewarded for that kind of behaviour. The whole thing has flipped on its head. Unless we're asking these much bigger questions, like how can we be consciously...

125: How social entrepreneur Anusha Bharadwaj (Voice4Girls)is empowering adolescent girls in India to unlock their potential

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 02:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:

Reams have been written recently about SDGs, climate change, just transition…… what does it mean in practice? India's National Action Plan on Climate Change emphasises the need for inclusive and sustainable development to ensure it does not fail millions on the margins or without a voice.

It would not be presumptuous to say that most people in world are aware of India’s demographic dividend. At 21% or 253 million, India is also home to the largest adolescent population in the world of which 120 million are girls. For a just transition and for India to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend by unlocking the potential of its youth, it is crucial that they are empowered with knowledge and skills to combat social and economic exclusion.

A majority of India’s adolescent girls are on the margins and face numerous challenges including lack of access to education, domestic work, early marriage and pregnancy and financial dependency. There are a myriad of government initiatives and schemes aimed at keeping this group in education in urban and rural area, but long lasting change will be impossible without addressing the deep rooted cultural norms, expectations and stereotypes.

This is where organisations like VOICE4Girls, step in, they create safe spaces for girls to have critical conversations around their physical and mental health; recognising, preventing and reporting violence and a space where they can dream. This social enterprise led by Anusha Bharadwaj, has impacted over 3,00,000 girls and boys through their work across 12 different Indian states.

In the 125th episode of The 🐘in the Room podcast we spoke about Anusha’s childhood, how it influenced her to step into the social sector, her ambition for Voice4Girls, breaking the cycle of exclusion, deprivation for young girls and boys, the challenges of being a founder. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 SoCh for social change an initiative aimed at building leadership capabilities of young social changemakers,

👉🏾 Social entrepreneurship as a powerful force for transforming communities and nations, being hubs of innovation

👉🏾 Context, feminism and feminist leadership

👉🏾 Failures, highlights and role models girls and boys can identify with

And much more in this freewheeling and inspiring conversation.

Head to the podcast to know more about the incredible work being done by Ashoka Fellow, Anusha Bharadwaj and Voice4Girls 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Anusha. Wonderful to have you on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Anusha: Hi Sudha, lovely to be here.

Sudha: Let's get started with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about your childhood, your education, what sort of influences did you have? I'm curious to understand how and why you decided to work in the social sector.

Anusha: Every time somebody asks me this question, some new parts about my family emerges and today what really came up is that I grew up in a South Indian family where education was super important Sudha. In fact, both my great grandfathers were very well educated, one was a medical officer, the other was a maths professor. And I've heard that, even during those times, this is still very British ruled India both my grandmothers, my maternal and my paternal grandmother, both are high school graduates.

Again, something very unusual for girls during those times. Looking closely, I realized that education for girls was a desirable thing for women in my family, because they should get a good marital match, right? Because boys were all very well educated. So, the end goal was getting her married and for that education that will get her married.

And that's the background of my family and my childhood was peppered with the constant efforts to prove that I'm better than the boys at home. In fact, I remembered as I was preparing for this question, that my father used to say very fondly that me as a daughter was a boy trapped in a girl's body because I had all the spirit of the boy is what he said and at that time I didn't understand. I would just be so proud of that. But realizing that I'd set a poor benchmark, this is always like, I also don't want to cry, I as a girl, because I was the only girl amongst my cousins and my own brother. So, there was a lot of being like a boy and better like a boy, I studied engineering, played cricket.

I think it was only when I was pursuing my engineering that I realized that my mind heart was not in it. Though the immediate family was super patriarchal, my parents were very supportive of all my choices.

When I finished my degree, I said, this is the certificate and now I want to, change my career because I'd already started volunteering for social organisations. I was working with a foundation, a CSR that was working with children and teenagers and I was like, this is the path I want to go. So that was my first steps in the social impact sector in 2002 and I've not looked back since. I continued working in that organisation, I did a rural management degree from the Institute of Rural Management in Anand. Worked in, civil society organisations. I worked for the government and UNICEF for a while and then of course my own social entrepreneurship journey with Voice4Girls. I found my own voice and purpose through the work. But yeah, I've never looked back since then and how much of my childhood and all those stereotypes is what, my organisation and my life's work has been in ensuring that girls just realize that they have so much in themselves that there's no competition.

Sudha: Yeah, they don't really have to be like boys, but it's so good to understand how you found your purpose, your calling, so to speak, and how you went into the social sector. I've read so much about, Voice for Girls and the wonderful work that you do. Tell us about its genesis and how you came to this and probably the influences that you've spoken about in your childhood in your own experiences were the stepping stone to getting on this, social impact entrepreneurship.

Anusha: Though 2002 I started working in the sector, I worked mostly with children and young people. And even then I felt gender was too much for me to unpack I felt like a lot of my childhood and my upbringing would inhibit and I felt that I couldn't be professional enough. I think again, these are some of the stereotypes that I carried that doing work in gender would make me very emotional.

Only later I realized it made me more resilient and strong. But it took me about a decade in the social impact sector working with children that I realized I love working with girls Sudha. Just give them a small platform and they'll shatter it, and they'll take charge of their lives.

And that sort of inspired me and that's what I felt that through them, I started realizing how much potential it is to work with girls and how crucial it would be at a very formative age to give them that platform and that safe space. But I think the true calling came when I was doing some field work, I was in an Anganwadi where they were doing a baby shower.

So, they were telling young to be mothers and their mothers in law healthy nutrition for pregnant women and lactating women. When I saw a very young girl, I felt she was not more than 13 and 14, heavily pregnant, completely listless, not answering, it seemed like almost the whole life's burden is in her womb. And I felt very angry that this shouldn't be happening to girls, but I was also angry that nobody else was angry. Like I had department officials, there were other civil society organisation members and police was there and everybody, like even parents and family, they weren't angry at that situation, right?

And it left me very angry to say this shouldn't happen and what can I do to see as many girls not getting trapped in that. So that's really the genesis of ‘Voice for Girls’ because we believe that creating a gender transformative safe space is very crucial in the life of adolescent girls.

Because, today she's a girl, she gets a period, she's almost a woman and then the transition was so quick that the girls aren't, ready for this transition, aren't prepared for what's happening in their bodies, let alone what sociocultural expectations will fall on them. So helping girls navigate that phase in life through Voices’ work was the vision in which we set it up.

And by creating these gender transformative safe spaces for marginalized adolescents, and we do it mostly in government funded schools, residential schools, in colleges, what we're doing is help girls understand what's happening in their bodies, how to navigate this crucial phase and prepare for what life is ahead of them.

And since 2012, we've been doing this work and we worked in several geographies, not just in Telangana, but currently our work is in Telangana, Andhra and Karnataka. Our work has impacted the lives of close to 270000 girls, women and boys.

Sudha: That's so amazing.

And like what you say is something that we've seen in the past, I think there are multiple India's in India, and we tend to ignore the fact that this continues to happen and there needs to be a specific effort trying to change and give a platform to young girls.

So according to you, Anusha, what needs to be done to reap the benefits of this demographic dividend, considering that India has the largest adolescent population in the world? How can we break the cycle of exclusion, deprivation, violence for young girls, also boys, I'd say, and create a more equitable society?

Anusha: India is sitting at a very crucial point in our in its history. It's exciting. And I think we should be nervous at the same time. We are a demographically young country, one in every five people in India is between the ages of 10 to 19, which is adolescent age. And we're one of the fastest growing economies.

In the recently held G20, India also promised that out of six priority areas, Sudha, that women led development would be a crucial area. And my question to India would be, can we be women led in the future before being girl led today? And there is a huge need to be girl led today. India is having 120 million adolescent girls as we speak.

So strengthening that agency will be very critical to unlock the fast growing economic pace that we need to sustain to get to where we want to. However, in recent news, you've heard such horrific crimes that are happening against women and it once again highlights that mainstream education is not reaching millions of girls and even if it is reaching, it is not preparing them for life. We're still a society where there are very regressive socio cultural norms. There's very limited access to information, especially to adolescent girls. And we require urgently to have spaces where girls are able to understand what's happening, but also get skills to be able to unlock that agency and potential for themselves, right?

And I feel that spaces like Voice is really crucial for that because it is preparing girls for life. It's giving them a space to have critical conversations around their health. And when I say health, Physical and sexual reproductive health, mental health, helps them understand how to stay safe from violence because we want girls to be able to recognize violence, prevent violence and report violence where it's happening.

Understand they have rights. India has many great laws, but it's not getting implemented because girls don't know these laws exist. They have laws that can help them stay in school, prevent early marriage, keep them safe in workspaces. So, it's very critical that they realize their rights and how to access them.

And at the same time, a space where they are able to dream, right? Like I think the dream for girls are set by families and communities. And it's sort of is like what they believe girls should dream. And the dream is like two, three years, get married and then we'll see. Have a child and then we'll see, have another child, maybe if you're in laws do. So, all the decision making for her is happening by others. So how do we create a space where she realizes she can be a decision maker because she's not seeing that in the family. She's not having enough role models in the community to showcase that. So also showcasing there are role models from these communities that have been able to challenge these norms, right?

So I feel that India really needs to invest in adolescent girls and unlock that agency because we have a bright future if we do that. If we don't, we will continue to see abuse and violence. We continue to see that woman, though they're getting educated, are dropping off because they have to xxxxxxx for their families. And I think we're at a point where it's not okay.

Sudha: It's so true we have great ambitions on where we want to go as a country. But to have that growth, you need to be able to harness the potential of all of these young girls and at this point in time, we are not even harnessing the potential of women.

And so, unless there is a, dedicated focus and investment, and resources put towards this, nothing is going to change or move.

Anusha: But I want to add that India has been successful in, say, increasing the literacy amongst women, right? And girls. The female literacy is probably much better than it has been decades ago.

And there has been a huge mobilisation from governments and civil society to get here. How do we like learn from those and continue to bridge the gap. Because girls when getting to school, we build that bridge. But girls are getting educated but aren't showing up at workspaces. Something has to be done for those as well.

Like there are crucial bridges that we have to continue to build because just pushing them into education, you're still like, sitting on huge potential that you don't know how to harness. But there are examples of having mobilized this for a good purpose. So how do we also translate it to the other phases of her life?

Sudha: Yes, there exists best practice in the system somewhere. And we need to know about it and use it in other places.

So, Anusha, what would you say are the biggest challenges you face while doing this work? Because I don't know about society, I think middle class is very, blase about it. And sometimes they're very patronizing about it. But there are so many challenges on the ground in the sense that you are trying to get young women into, education, empower them. But how important is it to have that social structure around them to actually educate and get them also up to speed?

Anusha: I think there are a few that I can think of off the top of my mind. One is just keeping up the motivation of the work. Even as we are preparing thousands of girls to fight the battles, stay in school, stay in school, question patriarchy, there are millions that are dropping out and getting trapped in lives of unrealized potential, I would say.

So it's always like you're putting one piece but two things are getting undone and you have to constantly pick yourself up and keep going as a leader, as the team, as an organisation. And sometimes it's quite challenging to find that motivation because the recent crime that happened in Kolkata has upset so many of us at a personal level too. And it makes us question like, we've done decades of work, we've had girls dream and say they want to be doctors, they want to be engineers, and then when you see this. What is the example that is going to set for parents?

They're saying, what is the use of education? If this is what might as well get her married, she's safer at home, but also to recognize the homes aren't safe for many women, right? So how do we have those difficult conversations? Second is I think figuring out ways to bring boys and men into this conversation.

Voice has been working with adolescent boys and young men, and it has been one of the most challenging programs we've done because we want this conversation which is empathetic towards them, because gender is affecting them as well. They're getting boxed into these gender stereotypes of being a provider and protector for the family, even as girls are saying you're the nourisher and the nurturer of the family, right?

Like, how do we recognize they're getting boxed, but at the same time, help them understand that they have the privilege to unbox themselves and become allies for girls and women. That's a very difficult conversation. I think empowerment for girls and women is very exciting. When girls get this information, there's just so much energy in the room Sudha, that you'll just be blown away by how girls want to share this information. But in a boy's classroom though, it's very similar in terms of the format of, you know, activity based and helping them discover this. It is a lot of retrospection and reflection because boys are like, yeah, that's true, my mother works during her period, and I didn't know it was such a difficult time for her.

Or when a boy shared that, I get more money because I'm a boy from my grandmother for Diwali, when I used to feel very proud, but actually my sisters weren't getting because they're girls, it is a simple thing like this, that is a reflection on their everyday lives. But helping understand the criticality of this conversation with the boy and then other organisations also maybe to learn how to do this at scale.

It's not enough to just do it with 10 boys, 100 boys. How can we do this at a scale? Because obviously they are super important to this conversation and we're still figuring out. And the third aspect is that funding landscape is changing so rapidly, domestic funding, as well as FCRA, and if organisations like us, which have worked for, you know, TK plus, there's a lot of evidence, can become ecosystem players, can become resource hub for other organisations wanting to do this work, there isn't funding for such kind of work.

And it's very difficult to get along, to become ecosystem players and, invest in organisational development, right? People

124: : ESG/EHG: The future of sustainable investing and ESG in India: Arvind Chari and Chirag Mehta, Quantum Advisors

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 03:00:00 +0000

Show notes:

The ESG backlash is real, and it is polarising. The rhetoric around it exacerbated because of roll backs by corporates and governments on climate/energy commitments. According to a leading ESG publication, Trump’s victory in the world’s second largest democracy, is likely to result in roll backs on climate and ESG regulation in the country and retreat from the global stage. Despite all the noise against ESG - asset managers globally are expected to increase their ESG related AuM to US$33.9 trillion by 2026 (84% growth). The driver for growth for ESG activity is not altruism but value creation.

In India the world’s largest democracy there are reasons for cautious optimism, with the government introducing a slew of policy changes over the last decade, that makes it obligatory for organisations to adopt an ESG lens for sustainability reporting. Since 2022-23, the top 1000 listed companies are obliged to follow the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework. The driver of course is India’s ambition to be a 7 trillion economy by 2030. There is lots to be done but the country is on the path.

To discuss India’s journey on ESG and Sustainability reporting I spoke with Arvind Chari and Chirag Mehta, Quantum Advisors in the 124th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. The focus of the conversation was global and local trends and Quantum’s own approach to ESG investing. We spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The drivers for sustainable investing

👉🏾 Responsible (patient investing) and what it means. Adding a 5th P to the 4 Ps investment management - predictability or patient capital

👉🏾 The reason for developing Quantum’s own due diligence process or integrity screening mechanism

👉🏾 How weightage on governance can drive better E and S performance for an organisation

👉🏾 Sustainable investing in the Indian context (considering India needs approx. $200 billion a year), where the country is on the sustainable investing journey

👉🏾 Public equity markets as the low hanging fruit for sustainable investing in India

👉🏾 Whether Indian companies are prepared to meet the regulatory requirements in particular BRSR

We also spoke about the ESG backlash, social license to operate, whether ESG funds perform better than funds that don’t have an ESG lens, the EHG trilemma and The 🐘 in the Room. If sustainability, sustainable investing, transparency and accountability is your thing check out Quantum’s ‘The Little White Book of Governance’.

Disclaimer: Quantum Advisors are not my client and I remain sceptical of the investment management & PE industry and their relentless pursuit of profits. However, we know how critical they are to achieving global and local climate and SDG targets. I was drawn to Quantum's mantra ‘Be good and Do good’ and intrigued by the integrity screen.

Check it out for yourself – links in the comment 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

#esginvesting #esg #sustainability #impact investing #governance #Climatehange #SDGs

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Arvind and Good Afternoon, Chirag. Wonderful to have both of you on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Arvind: Sudha, it's good to have us. Your name of the podcast itself is so interesting, and there are always a lot of elephants in the room to be discussed about so great to be talking to you.

Chirag: Yeah. I echo Arvind and pleased to be here.

Sudha: So, let's get started with a quick introduction. Tell the listeners about probably who you are and what you do.

Arvind: Quantum Advisors the firm that we both work me and Chirag, it's an India based, India dedicated investment management firm. It's the oldest firm in India in that space.

Quantum was founded in 1990 by Ajit Dayal and so we've been championing the cause of investing in India, either through research and advisory or through managing on their own name for now close to 40 years, right?

Quantum specializes in thinking about long term India investing from a very sensible risk adjusted approach. And we also believe, and as you will know over the course of this talk, that we believe in be good and do good. And we've employed that not only in our investment philosophy, but the way we run the firm and the choices that we've made as a firm to be able to deal with putting the investor at the centre of everything that we do.

We have two pools of capital, one is the global investor, the global pension fund, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, family offices, investing into India. Quantum manages and has strategies and products for that pool of capital. And then there is the Indian investor that the Indian retail or Indian high net worth investor who is investing into India and we have the mutual fund, the Quantum Mutual Fund for that.

I'm Arvind Chari. I'm the chief investment officer of Quantum Advisors, now of Q India UK, I moved to London about two years back to be able to be closer to the global investors. So, I basically fly two flags, one is to tell global investors that they are missing out by not investing in India and, more and more investors need to think about India dedicated.

And to fly the Quantum flag in terms of how Quantum can help long term investors allocated to India in a sensible risk xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Chirag, who's here as well, Chirag Mehta is the chief investment officer of Quantum Mutual Fund, which is Quantum AMC.

Chirag, if you want to give a quick intro of yourself.

Chirag: Sure. So, I've been associated with Quantum for more than about 18 years now and, it gives us pride. Arvind joined in 2004, I joined in 2006, so we both have been here pretty tenured and have seen cycles, and we really know how the Quantum way of investing benefits investors across these cycles.

So, I am the chief investment officer at Quantum Mutual Fund as Arvind said. I do look at many funds at Quantum. including spearheading our integrity efforts. When you say integrity, the outside world knows it by various other names like sustainability, responsible investing, et cetera. So, I do spearhead that and manage a team that looks at these aspects That's a brief introduction and I managed funds across the board in terms of right from multi assets to gold to small caps to what is called in India as ESG funds. We would like to call it integrity, but it's called ESG funds in India. So that's been a snapshot of what I do.

Sudha: Awesome. So, the focus of our conversation today, as I'd mentioned earlier is responsible investing. What does it really mean for Quantum Advisors when you say responsible investing?

Arvind: Sudha, we actually do not like to use the words, sustainability, responsibility, ESG. Either they've been abused or misused or it is not exactly relevant. What we call ourselves as a measure is integrity investing. And integrity is of course a higher measure to hold onto, but also suggests that there are certain morals or certain ethical framework that you use for your investments or for running the firm, and you don't change it, you live by those standards. We think of ourselves as integrity investing as an idea and everything that we do comes about from that perspective.

I'll just give you a history of the firm, which explains how we got into this aspect of why sensible risk adjustment and integrity is essential to what we do. We started the firm in 1990 and there are two seminal partnerships that Quantum had one was between 92 to 95 with a group called Jardine Fleming which we call Quantum Jardine. That's where we learned two very important aspects of an investment management firm. One is to be independent, right? When you are an investment firm and you're independent, the only thing that matters to you is your unit holders or your investors.

If you're independent, then all you're doing is investing long term capital for your fiduciary investors, which your unit holders. The other thing that we learned from the association is what we built as a integrity screen. Subbu who joined Ajit in 1996, so Ajit and Subbu are the longest serving equity managers maybe around the world now that Charlie Munger passed away. They've had a long history and that's when they built this integrity screen, which is basically a screen to avoid bad management, no matter how large they are, no matter how big they're part of the sector, no matter how big they're part of the indices.

If they don't fit our integrity screen, we will stop, we will never invest in them, we will never put client capital into that. So that was the first learning about being independent and having this integrity screen way back in 1996. And then we learned the process of investing of long term process through an association that we had with Hansberger Global Investors.

Tom Hansberg was the originally founder of the Templeton Group, which we call Templeton Galbraith Hansberger. A lot of our investing style of proprietary long-term value came about from that association with Hansberger Global Investors. And Ajit used to work with Hansberger, and they had a mandate from Vanguard. The Vanguard International Value Fund was managed by Hansberger and Ajit was a lead manager for that product. And that's when we learned about, how do institutional investors allocate long term capital?

Why are those, you know, those four P's that you call about in investment firm people, the philosophy, the process, and the performance. And we added a P on the performance called predictability. How can you ensure that your returns or your managing of money is predictable for investors? We learned all that. From our association with Hansberger and Vanguard. And we added a fifth P to that, which is patient capital because India needs long-term capital and India needs, patient long-term capital to come and benefit from the long-term growth prospects that India has.

So the four Ps of how we have and the then we and the desire a fifth p from our investor. The way we think about allocating is when investors allocate to India, either you're global investors or you're an Indian investor allocating to equity markets or taking on risk, you're increasing your risk profile, right? You don't need to do that, but you're looking to choose a higher return or a higher opportunity and you're increasing the risk profile. And our job at Quantum is to manage that risk. And I spoke about risk not being only standard deviation and market volatility, which can be managed.

There are risks which come about through liquidity, that come about through valuations. And there are risks which are predominantly of our governance, so which companies you invest with? Who do you partner as your local partner? What kind of projects are you investing? And the various aspects of governance that goes into it can have a big impact on you as an investor.

That could be some reputation risk that you invest in a company and that company has a governance problem, it blows out and it comes on the press. Or it comes openly saying that, this big, large investor has invested in this company, and they failed all factors. So, our job as a manager is to manage those kinds of risks, market returns, xxxxxx division we can manage, but these are risks that everybody should be aware of. And we as the manager should be able to manage that risk. So that is essentially what we do across asset classes, be it public equities, in the mutual fund, we also have fixed income and through our associates, we have reinvested in private equity. In all these aspects this factor becomes a very important factor about, whom we are shaking our hands with.

And when we shake hands, do we get our five fingers back and we count that. And if we do not get our five fingers back, we avoid our investing in those firms. So that's the way we think about these entire aspects of responsibility and sustainability for us it all starts with integrity for us as a manager.

And for how we deploy client capital.

Sudha: Wow. Yeah, that's so deeply rooted, from the time that you were set up and you'll have come to this premise where you have the five P's for responsible or sustainable investing. And of course, there's an ethical framework. In the global context. Arvind, now you sit in London, what would you say are the drivers for sustainable investing?

Sudha: And are there trail blazers or peers that you look up to?

Arvind: We don't necessarily look up to any particular peer or maybe in India we don't even think that we have a peer in terms of who thinks about risk in the way we think about it.

But in terms of global, that entire aspect of sustainability depends on the asset class in the first place. In the sense that there could be a lot of public equity investors who look at governance as a factor and there are many who do that, right? We are not the only one who look at governance as a factor. There are many who think about that as a filter or a factor before committing money. The sustainability could also be depending on if you're a climate specific investor, but your goal is say - decarbonization, or your goal is say on the climate aspect so there are firms who bracket themselves as sustainable or responsible from that perspective.

There are a few impact, the impact could be again, climate, the impact could be social, the impact would be inclusion. There are various aspects of it. So the entire bucketing of it depends on what asset class and what is a problem that you're trying to solve. And those can define the different drivers in the global context.

We also know that many are gaming it as well. And it is not all right, we know instances where firms or investment management firms or companies are saying that they are responsible, sustainable, but their actions and their products or their services are not that right. So, people say all kinds of things, if you have a very particular focus and it makes it otherwise, you're all over the place.

In terms of global investing, there's the other aspect of passive investing. So much amount of global capital is now invested passively, which is basically following an index. And if you look at the traditional indices S& P 500, Dow Jones, MSCI, these are the large equity indices that global investors do. These indices do not sift for any aspect of sustainability or governance or responsibility, right? So, there are firms which are saying they're responsible and they're allocating passively through these traditional ETFs, which have no sifting for any of these aspects that you mentioned.

So, there is a lot of dichotomy in terms of what is being said and what is being tried to achieve and the actual outcomes. I'm not saying everybody is doing that. There are some great firms who are doing it and especially if they're asset class specific then they're very much focused.

And that's why as you said, there has been a push back to say, ESG as a factor of investing. Or, calling yourself response sustainable when you are having ETFs or passive indices, which clearly do not meet those requirements. I think there is still a lot of evolving to happen. Firms which put responsibility and sustainability or integrity at the core of everything that they do should be able to do better is what we believe.

Sudha: So clearly passive is very different from what patient investing is which you all are doing. I agree with what I see, my background is communications and reputation. I see that a lot of people have been very quick to jump on the bandwagon and be opportunistic, but it's not something that is embedded deeply into the organization and they're not, truly doing sustainable investing or responsible or even that impact investing. There are lots of words people use, it doesn't show through in how they behave or act.

You referred at the start to the integrity investing. And I read on your website about the integrity screen. What exactly does it mean and why do you have it considering that there are numerous auditing standards and frameworks could you not just work around those to develop the due diligence because this is like a due diligence that you have the integrity screen.

Arvind: Correct. I gave the history of the firm. So, Ajit met a South African gentleman, he doesn't remember his name in 1989. And that gentleman asked Ajit, my founder that, ‘young man, what do you want to do in your life?’

And Ajit said, I want to set up an investment management firm. And he said, I'll give you one piece of advice. When you shake your hands with someone and when you get it back, count your fingers. If there are not five fingers, then never shake their hands again. So that is what we took as a genesis of our integrity screen.

And we applied that to when we are investing in companies, we apply that as a filter in some sense, right? You said due diligence. It can be filter, it can be a positive filter or negative filter but that's where it started. And then I told you about the experience that we had with our joint venture with Jardine Fleming where we had an issue with a very large Indian corporate and they had done a measure which was completely anti minority.

And we had to take a call of not investing and that's when we build this integrity screen as a non-negotiable. That's why we call it integrity it is a moral that we will never give up. We'll learn, we'll understand, we'll change. But there's an aspect of, if we don't get our five fingers back based on whatever standards we apply, we will not invest in that fund.

So that's when it started in about 1996. It was initially about 12 odd parameters, some from the balance sheets, some from related party transactions, but it was still intuitive. So, there are certain questions that we still ask and we used to ask back then to the management, to the CEOs or to the family...

123: Are stigma and social ostricization the biggest barriers to eradicating Hansen's disease: In conversation with Daisy Mansfield, Leprosy Mission

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

Not many people in the western world have heard of Hansen’s disease or Leprosy – for most who are familiar with it arouses fear and aversion. It is a tropical disease that occurs in more than 120 countries, has been referenced in the bible and Victoria Hislop wrote The Island inspired by a visit to Spinalonga, the abandoned Greek leprosy colony, which sold over a million copies.

My earliest interaction with the disease was on the Main Street of the city I grew up in. Along the street, one aften came across a small group of people begging for alms, those badly affected being pulled on makeshift carts by the more able bodied. The easiest thing to do was to ignore them or pretend one could not see them or their plight. That was my first experience of shame. Shame at the lack of knowledge, confidence or ability to engage with respect with people disfigured and ostracised by disease. However, this is not about me but about people who are disenfranchised, excluded from accessing healthcare, education, economic opportunities and social support because of fear and misinformation.

A couples of months back, I happened to be seated on the same take table at India Week as Sian Arulanantham, head of programmes and research of Leprosy Mission UK. We got chatting about the incredible work they are doing across the world and in India and I invited them to be a guest on my podcast to speak about the important work being done to eradicate an ancient disease that stigmatises and makes outcasts of over two hundred thousand people every year.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, Daisy Mansfield Policy and Advocacy Adviser at Leprosy Mission talks about the work being done in India and across the world. We spoke about a) how they deliver on their goals in this highly complex geography b) behaviour change campaigns for education and removing social stigma c) Strategies to empower individuals and families d) Roles models with lived experience of disability and stigma e) WHO 2035 goal for eradication of the disease and challenges to getting to the target

The most important thing to remember is that if detected early, the disease is curable with multi drug therapy (MDT) and the good news is that the WHO has made MDT available free to all leprosy patients around the world (with the help of big pharma).

Head to the podcast to listen and see how you can support the cause 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Daisy. Lovely to have you here today. I'm so glad that I met with Sian and Louise at India Week recently in London. And that's how I came to know about the work of Leprosy Mission UK. So, let's start with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Daisy: Hello. Yes. It's so nice to be with you on the podcast today. Thank you very much for having me. I'm Daisy and I work for the Leprosy Mission and have done for about three years now in a number of different roles. So, my current role is called a Programs and Advocacy Officer. Which means I am a point person, look after some of the projects that we fund in India and work in partnership with our team over in India. And previously I had roles in fundraising and also advocacy and policy working with UK stakeholders in parliament and also in international spaces such as the UN and WHO to advocate for people affected by leprosy.

Sudha: That's very interesting. So, we are here today to talk about leprosy or Hansen's disease. How prevalent is it globally? What is it and what are the symptoms? There seems to be a lot of ignorance, especially I'd say in Western countries. And it doesn't exist in lot of Western countries. So tell us a bit about it.

Daisy: Yeah, certainly. Actually, when I first joined the Leprosy Mission, I thought, Oh, I know what leprosy is. And I quickly realised that there was a lot of misunderstandings or misconceptions about the disease that I had thought were true.

And leprosy is one of the oldest diseases known. We see it back in biblical times, but there's so much of the disease that is so misunderstood in today's world and as you said, part of that is because it no longer exists here in the UK. It did many years ago and affected many thousands of people.

But today we see it across the world, particularly in places where poverty exists and slightly poorer communities, rural communities. So, you might be surprised to know there's 200, 000 new cases every year. And so. if you do the rough maths on that's about one person every two minutes.

And that's new cases of leprosy, but also there's thousands of people or millions of people that are living with the causes of leprosy which could be disability. It could also be the stigma that is surrounded by a leprosy diagnosis, which I'll talk a little bit more in detail about later. So, leprosy is a bacterial disease that is spread through prolonged and close contact and many of us think that leprosy is actually caught by touch, but that is a myth. It is not caught by touch it's transmitted through water droplets in the air, so between coughing and sneezing. But you need to have that prolonged contact with someone to catch leprosy.

Some people may remember many years ago. Princess Diana was heavily involved in work with people affected by leprosy. And she was over in India and there was a very iconic picture that hit the news of her with her hand, her arm around somebody affected by leprosy and everybody had told her, You can't touch them, don't touch them, you're going to get leprosy, and actually she'd been told by medical experts in these hospitals that it was okay, it wasn't caught by touch. And so, there's another example of a miscommunication that many of us have.

And let me just talk a little bit about the symptoms of leprosy as you've asked. So, leprosy affects the nerves and particularly in people's hands and their feet and they lose feeling in their hands and their feet. And you can perhaps imagine that you're cooking, and you've got a saucepan on the hob or something, and yes, it might be hot, but until you touch it, do you know how hot it is and actually. If you put yourself in a slightly more rural position where you perhaps you're cooking on an open fire, and you have a pan there if you have no feeling in your hand, there is nothing to tell you to remove your hand from this hot pan and you can so easily burn your hand and you can get really severe wounds and ulcers. And particularly many people experience ulcers on their feet. And these can get infected and if they're not looked after properly, sometimes there's no other choice other than amputation for people's legs particularly.

And so, we see one story is a young girl called Shakti who was in one of our hospitals in Nepal. She was only 16 years old and because her leprosy hadn't been diagnosed for many years. She'd hidden it away but also medical centres which she'd been to had not necessarily diagnosed it, she hadn't received the treatment particularly early and actually at 16 years old, she had to have an amputation of her leg. And the impact that had of her not being able to go to school and she had dreams that she wanted to become a doctor and the implications then of how her life changes at such a young age. One really key thing is to be able to find and treat people with leprosy as early as possible. The sooner people receive medical help, then the less likely they are to have implications.

Sudha: Daisy, is there a cure for leprosy? I know in India; all children are given the BCG vaccine just a couple of weeks after they're born. But I'm aware that again, in Western countries, it is not so prevalent and it's not something that is given. And also, there is the anti vax movement, which is pretty strong.

Daisy: Yeah, so actually the good news is there's a cure for leprosy and it's relatively straightforward. It's antibiotics as we know. These antibiotics are called multi drug therapy, MDT. And they're taken for between 6 and 12 months, depending on the load of bacteria in somebody's body.

And for patients affected by leprosy, these antibiotics are free. But actually, they only cost 24 pound so, they're not expensive to provide for people affected by leprosy. And the link that you mentioned to the BCG vaccine obviously children get this vaccination when they're first born.

And this actually, offers a small bit of protection against leprosy. The primary job of that vaccine is tuberculosis, but the reason that there's a link is because the bacteria of leprosy and the bacteria of TB are almost like cousins. They share some similarities and so that vaccination doesn't necessarily fully prevent people from getting leprosy, but it does provide an extra level of protection.

And so, there's lots of research across many of the countries around the world research centres are studying how leprosy is transmitted, the actual bacteria and particularly a lot of research into the tools to diagnose leprosy. We want to be able to diagnose leprosy within communities and easily be able to identify, diagnose, and treat people as soon as possible.

We have some world leading research centres within the leprosy mission that are researching these things, and we continue to do this and this is really a key part of what we do to fully understand leprosy. It's a very complex disease and so we need more research and more funding to understand this to be able to provide the right treatment for people.

Sudha: Yeah. We discussed that leprosy is not necessarily prevalent in Western countries. And about two thirds of the incidences are found in India, followed by Brazil and Indonesia. Is there a reason why there are more incidences of the disease in these countries. Is the climate is the weather or is it poverty?

What contributes? I'm sure there's some data and research around that.

Daisy: Yes. Leprosy has historically been endemic in lots of these countries. And leprosy has existed in India for decades. This year we actually have the hundred and fifty years of the leprosy mission, India. And back before the 1980s, there was no cure for leprosy.

So, for many of these 150 years, we could only provide love and care to these patients. But for the last 40 we've been able to provide the cure and that medical intervention to help and support people affected by leprosy.

But also, you can't ignore the fact that India is a huge country and has a population of almost 1. 4 billion people so it's not a surprise that the cases are quite high there due to the volume of people. But leprosy actually is a disease that's associated with poverty. So, it's associated with people who live in poor conditions, with people who for a long period of time have had poor sanitation, poor hygiene, unclean water, poor nutrition.

And therefore, they have a weak immune system, their immune system is lower, and so they're more susceptible to having leprosy. And then again, in some really rural areas there's limited access to healthcare, so people aren't able to or just don't know where to go to seek treatment when it's needed and the longer leprosy goes untreated, the more likely people are to have disabilities and severe implications of leprosy.

And another huge thing is the stigma the lack of awareness that contributes to the high level of cases. We see so much stigma and discrimination about leprosy across many of the countries that we work in. And a lot of that is based on those misconceptions that we were speaking about earlier.

Sudha: So, what is the focus of the leprosy mission in India, which is some of the work you lead on?

Daisy: Yeah. The leprosy mission, India we have several hospitals, leprosy mission hospitals across many of the different states and there we provide the medical care for people affected by leprosy.

So that could range from the cure to care for their ulcers. There's something called leprosy reaction. Which some people will experience, and they need to spend an extended period of time in hospital receiving medical treatment for that. And physiotherapy for people who lose feeling in their hands and feet and something else called reconstructive surgery.

Which helps with the mobility of people's hands and restoring movement and combined with the physiotherapy as well. So, the hospitals provide medical care but we have a, holistic view in that we don't just want to provide the medical care. We want to support people affected by leprosy in a range of different ways.

We have, vocational training centres in India, which is where people affected by leprosy students, young people. They come and they study a course. And the reason they may go to one of these centres is because of leprosy and stigma either they have leprosy themself or one of their family members, they might have been kicked out of school, for many years so they may have missed education and need extra support, or perhaps they've been in education, but because of leprosy struggle to find opportunities, job opportunities and so they come and they learn a skill. And then they're supported to go through the employment process.

These VTCs that we have, the centres, have a lot of partnerships with local businesses and organisations and spend time raising awareness within the organisations about leprosy and the needs of people affected by leprosy. And another huge part of what we do is advocacy and research. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of ongoing research to improve the treatment and understand the disease, but also a lot of advocacy to ensure people are accessing their entitlements, to ensure they're aware of their rights and their entitlements.

In India people all have access to disability certificates, which will allow them pensions. And other rights things like bus passes as well. So, it's supporting people within the community to advocate for their own rights. But then at a national level to ensure that leprosy is on the agenda.

India has one of the largest leprosy eradication programs the government run a national leprosy eradication program. So, the government are doing a lot of work to support people affected by leprosy to find, to diagnose and to treat. So, a lot of what we do at the Leprosy Mission India is we work alongside the government.

We work with them and align our projects ensure that we are providing the best possible care for people affected by leprosy.

Sudha: Yeah, that's a whole lot of stuff that you're doing a leprosy mission in India. And as you said that you align the work that you do with what the agenda for the national government is. India has a huge leprosy eradication program.

And I think they've been successful in how they've been treating TB, which is also highly prevalent in the country with the outreach at the grassroots level, but India, like we discussed earlier, it's a very complex country and delivering healthcare and also support to communities is not easy considering there are states and there are national government and then there are local governments and priorities.

So how do you deliver on your goals in this highly complex geography? How important are collaborations and partners on the ground?

Daisy: Yeah, I think it's a huge thing to be aware of in India you can cross one state boundary and that can be completely different ways of doing things. As I was talking about the entitlements and the disability pensions, you can go from one state where people might be entitled to 3,000 rupees and then you cross another state, and they're entitled to 6,000 rupees. And so, the changes between different states is huge and one of the key things is working alongside government health workers within these states. And yes, we have the leprosy mission Great Britain here in the UK, but actually we partner with the leprosy mission India and we work with the Leprosy Mission India, who are on the ground, who understand the community, who are locals and they team up with other organisations, other grassroots organisations working within the community, who understand the context and we can then really take that community based approach where we're working within the local networks.

One thing that we try and do in a lot of our work is to ensure that people affected by leprosy are central to the projects that we have, to the work that we're doing. And actually, they are the change makers themselves. Sometimes they're called leprosy champions, and they get involved in leprosy case detection, they get involved in awareness within their communities, advocacy, we have also self-help groups where people affected by leprosy will come together, support one another, train each other and how to care for their ulcers and how to really look after themselves.

And that is so key to what we do, they are central and actually, we almost follow their lead, it's led by people affected by leprosy and what they want and what they need. So that partnership is really key. And then we try as well to use as many innovative solutions.

We use things like technology or mobile clinics or things like this to overcome some of the geographical challenges.

Sudha: Like you said, it's hugely complex. It's not easy. It is like creating a whole support system in order to deliver on the program to support the communities that are affected or impacted by leprosy.

So, you know, I grew up in India and there's a huge amount of stigma attached to the disease. People affected by leprosy live on the margins of society because they get ostracized, and this is likely to push them further into poverty. What can be done to empower individuals with the disease and their families?

You've referred to some of the programs that you're doing with young people. Can you elaborate on that, please?

Daisy: Yes, of course. So, stigma is a huge thing across all of our countries but it's prevalent in India as well and that discrimination that people face, it's a huge challenge and continues to be. Back in...

122: Spotlighting the 'S' in ESG: A conversation with Sakshi Bansal, Unesco Kindness Leader, Diana Award Recipient

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the podcast are Sakshi Bansal’s personal views and do not represent or reflect the views of Arup Ltd.

Excited to share the latest episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast featuring Sakshi Bansal FRSA ChMC! 🎙️ Sakshi, a recipient of The Diana Award, the world’s first UNESCO Kindness leader and Founder of Project LEAP, dives deep into the 'S' in ESG.

In our conversation, we explore:

👉🏾 Psychology's link to sustainability

👉🏾 Social equity, triple bottom line, and social license to operate

👉🏾 Challenges in reporting the 'S' factor and current industry trends

👉🏾 Global sustainability dialogue dynamics and diversity concerns

👉🏾 Millennials' & Gen Z's perceptions of Purpose-driven organizations

👉🏾 The importance of continuous learning in navigating evolving standards

Tune in for insightful discussions on sustainability and ESG with @SakshiBansal

Link to the podcast in the comments below. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

hashtag#ESG hashtag#Sustainability hashtag#PodcastDiscussion

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Sakshi. Wonderful to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Sakshi: Hi, thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.

Sudha: To start with, give us a quick introduction and tell us a bit about yourself, maybe your childhood, education.

Sakshi: Gosh a bit about myself. So, I am a psychologist by education, both a bachelor's and master's degree, but I'm also a management and strategy consultant now. And if I look back on my career, because it's so well integrated into who am I it's what I call a roller-coaster career or a squiggly career. It started in a tech startup. I was studying in Delhi I wanted to be a professional salsa dancer, And I came across these guys and they were doing something really cool at university, building an AI platform for billing and telling software and digital menus of the hospitality industry.

And I said, ah, I'll join you. And started working in a startup as one of those co-founders specifically focused on bringing in clients. So we were a bunch of 16, 17, 18 year olds with a team of 20 people bringing in clients and selling our hardware and software products all over Delhi on a tech platform that I knew nothing about. So that was my first real education, I think, into the world of entrepreneurship is learning how to not run a business, how to be a leader, how to talk to investors. And I think very early on, I got an insight into that world. And I think that sparked the sort of entrepreneurial interest in myself, and then I later went on to start a charity. So later means two years later, when we sold the startup to Amazon, went on to start a charity which is called Project Leap, and we were providing free education to underprivileged families in New Delhi. And that really came out of a very personal experience I had visiting some of these areas in New Delhi.

And I saw that while people want to help, they just don't know how to help And so we started Project Leap for the last 10, 12 years of my life, I've been running Project Leap. We've expanded to different parts of the world, to Nepal, Sri Lanka, pan Africa. Then I came to the UK, did leadership development here, capacity building, team building for three years and then started doing sustainability and ESG and investments.

It's just been a roller coaster of various different things, but I've had a real privilege of working in various different organisations such as the UN as a youth activist, talking about, youth employment even in New York, all the way to Australia doing change management. And now, in India in aviation so it's really just a mixed background.

But I grew up with a very simple idea. I want to be a dancer, and I want to travel the world.

Sudha: And now today, of course, you are dialling in from the UK, you are in the UK, like me not based in India at this point in time.

Sakshi: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's really important to be mindful of the personal, experiences you've had and how they shape you as a person. And not a lot of people have time for that kind of reflection, but I've always. And maybe that's where the psychology background comes into play, right? You make time for reflection, and you think about how things have shaped you and it helps you take the next step as well.

Sudha: So, you wouldn't assume that after degree and master’s in psychology, you'd end up doing sustainability and ESG. what's connect? How did you find that route?

Sakshi: I think it's a very good question, because honestly, I was in my first company after my master's degree doing a very psychology focused role. So doing leadership development, team building and all that. And when COVID hit and I was in parallel running my charity as well, we started taking the charity work international and remote.

I was so well versed with the grassroots challenges in India that this time I had to re-educate myself on what's happening in Africa and what's happening in New Zealand. And I had a reintroduction to SDGs as well, which is sustainable development goals. And so, this understanding about sustainability and what that means and how do we redefine it for education, which was my charity's goal, became really important.

And I think at the same time, I was growing discontent with what I was doing in my job. Not because it wasn't good, but just because it wasn't good enough. There was so much else I could do, and I think that's when the entrepreneurial spirit sort of came back to hit me. And I said, I'm working for a big company, it was Willis Towers Watson. It's a massive US based conglomerate. So, they don't just do what I'm doing, they do 20 other things. So just started ringing people up from the organisation and started asking the question. What is your role? What do you do?

What do you care about? And these are really senior people. And around that time, ESG was a word that was quite thrown around quite a lot. So some of the senior directors in my company were trying to understand what ESG means for them and for the business. And what do we take to market? And what do we say to clients?

And I offered help, I was so young, and I said, when you go and speak to clients, can I come, I can help facilitate some of these conversations. I'm good at that. And we went to Spain, we went to France, we went to, various different clients with my company.

And we just asked the question, what does ESG mean? What does it mean for your business? What can we do for you? And then we came back and synthesized all of that data to try and make a go to market offering for Willis Towers Watson. And that was my role; to go and listen and suddenly I was working with a whole different team in the company with very senior leaders. And it was my first experience of making a global strategy for a very targeted thing that I knew nothing about. But actually, I probably had done it before with the tech startup as well. So that was really interesting. And I realized that coming from a psychology background is such an advantage because I really understand some of the things around social, so ESG is Environment, Social and Governance, right?

And the social pillar and the governance pillar were really intrinsic to me.

I knew how to measure them. I knew what the impact was. I had tools and a toolkit with me that other people didn't or shied away from. And just after leaving Willis Towers Watson I published a paper on what does ESG mean for psychologists, how do we interact with ESG, how do we bring sustainability and ESG into our clients and our day to day, and why it is so important for us to be part of that momentum of ESG and the global dialogue.

I published the paper; I was presenting that as a keynote speaker at a conference. And my current employers, Arup, were in the audience and asked me to come in and consider Arup as a potential future employer. And so, I did. And I did that because Arup was much further ahead in their ESG sustainability journey. They were almost market leaders in this space. And I thought this is a real opportunity for me to walk the talk and understand how I can add value.

And so, when I first joined, I started doing private equity investor due diligence, what is the people lens of assets and how do we create a due diligence around it? What do we assess? What are the risks? How does that impact your triple bottom line, your CapEx and your OpEx? And now I look after that, ESG due diligence, what is social due diligence particularly and what does that mean for emerging markets? That's my role now.

Sudha: That's a very interesting journey and very interesting transition also. So moving on Sakshi, I was reading up your profile that you have various roles and you're doing various things in your job and outside your job, so you are the United Nations Global compact Coordinator for Arup. And you're also the president for SDGs for WICCI. What does this mean and what does this entail and why are you involved?

Sakshi: These are really interesting roles. So, at Arup, I am, as you said, the UN Global Compact Coordinator.

Arup is signed up to UNGC. We are one of the business partners and signatories to the UNGC. So UNGC has a set of regulations and guidelines and commitments which is around making sure that human rights violations are not in our supply chain and making sure that we're adhering to global standards of sustainability, which we do as a company.

My role is to make sure that we are signed up to it. We are reaping the benefits of being a UNGC signatory, which means we have these competitions for our junior members of the team that they can sign up to and take part in sustainability, innovation challenges et cetera.

It's really like a learning platform for our members of the company, but also for us to continue to adhere to some of those guidelines and be signatories and also inspiration to other organisations in our network. And then similarly with WICCI, I think that role is a lot about understanding what SDG means specifically for India and for New Delhi.

What does it mean for the city? How do we bring people together from different walks of life that are interested or doing something about the SDGs? Whether that's activism or research or civil society, and how do we bring that together to shape a dialogue about Delhi and SDGs? So I've had the privilege of presenting some of that dialogue at UN General Assembly last year in New York in September.

All of these roles are really about keeping an ear on the ground and really listening to what people are doing, what challenges they're facing and helping them become part of a global dialogue, because that's what we really need.

Sudha: Yeah, that's true. We all need to be connected. We all need to know what the other is doing to learn probably from successes and failures.

How important is social equity and social risk assessment /in the grand scheme of things for organisations. I call it the business equity and inclusion risk resilience.

Sakshi: I really like the way you have said it's a social equity inclusion, risk resilience, because these are very important metrics for an organisation.. Talking about social equity for any organisation for any asset, whether you're diversifying the asset or expanding the asset or decommissioning the asset, or even, it's a greenfield asset.

I think for all of them, it's very important to continue to have or to create a social license to operate. Because really, whenever you're talking about asset and built environment, it exists in a place where community, any kind of community is impacted by it. Whether that's people living there that are going to be displaced, or whether it's people living there that have to deal with the noise and the pollution that's emitted from the industry or the asset.

Whether that's the biodiversity, whether that's the flora and the fauna, that's all community and somebody or the other cares about it. And I think that if you have an asset that you're investing in, and there's a likely possibility or a risk that you will lose the social license to operate because people are not reaping the benefits or worse, are getting some kind of negative influence from that asset.

It's a high risk. We have seen that with organisations such as Amazon with their data centers, when they're proposing different parts of the world and the communities have protested because it's just not beneficial for the community, doesn't uplift them. It takes away sometimes the jobs or doesn't create local economic opportunities.

I think that's really important for an organisation or for an asset to have that license to operate. I think that there are specific things that you assess under social equity, right? You've got your human rights violations. These are the factors that have a direct impact on your triple bottom line, and this is not the fluffy stuff, but this is genuinely the stuff that helps you understand. Absolutely.

So, I think ESG is really connected. Environment, social, and governance they're interlinked, and a lot of people tend to focus on the environment side of it. But actually, the environmental policy, for example, energy efficiency of an asset, It won't be optimized unless people in the building or in that asset are ready to bring the demand down.

And that is not just in your policy, but also in day to day how are you running the company? What's the governance like? What's the culture like? Are people really interconnected? And that again, in turn impacts your environmental performance that impacts your OPEX and financial performance.

I think these are really interconnected challenges. Things like demographic changes, right? We have got energy, renewable assets that are trying to diversify their portfolio, buy new assets, create new assets, but where they sort of lack judgment or don't see this risk properly, foresee this risk, is what are the demographic changes in that local area, right? Are we going to have a population that's educated enough to take up local jobs educated in the right sectors that is going to take up the local jobs so that we can fulfill the employment demand and the headcount demand we are going to create in this area.

So if you're, creating a new asset in Cumbria which is western part of England, you probably need employment there. You want to create employment there and you need young people there to take up those jobs, but young people aren't ready to go to Cumbria and take up those jobs. And then plus the universities in Cumbria aren't educating the young people or don't have university courses about renewable energy. So how are we going to actually fulfil that demand? That's a very big risk that people are, or assets or investors are not able to foresee because they are not assessing the social equity.

Sudha: Yeah.

And I totally agree with you that, all E, S and G parts are interlinked when you talk about equity and inclusion piece, which is the S piece, if you don't think of one or the other, I think that is a problem. And generally, people tend to have a very narrow view.

We've spoken about, as I said, equity and inclusion, business risk and resilience. What are some of the trends of reporting on S and ESG, and what are some of the biggest challenges that companies face in reporting?

One is, of course, their narrow outlook or lack of awareness and education that these are all interlinked issues. And so what has been your experience of having worked in multiple geographies?

Sakshi: Absolutely. I think they're still struggling to understand what it exactly means.

You've got these all-external reporting standards, TCFD and ILO and GRI, and they have come up with a few factors of risk that you can assess under the S, but they're not comprehensive enough. There's so much more that goes underneath the social and governance. And, I always like to say Social, unfortunately, suffers from the middle child syndrome and governance is just really hard to understand.

So people can't pin it on procedural governance, is it operational governance? Is it systemic governance? All that. And I think that it's exactly that, if people haven't given social, the time that it deserves to be understood and they haven't gone...

121: Why the social model of disability is key to equitable and inclusive change: Caroline Collier, CEO Inclusion Barnet

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

Being an advocate for equity and inclusion requires a certain level of self-awareness, humility and an appetite to be a lifelong learner. Especially considering that the vocabulary around DEIB/DEIBA or whatever you choose to call it is constantly evolving, there is more we don’t know than we know.

My chance encounter with Caroline Collier, CEO Inclusion Barnet happened over a LinkedIn recruitment post and my subsequent message to her regarding the language. She was gracious in her response educating me about why they were using ‘disabled person’ (instead of person first language). I was slightly mortified but glad that I had the opportunity to engage with Caroline to better understand why they subscribe to the social model of disability.

I am grateful to Caroline for making time for this important conversation (a learning opportunity for me). In the episode we spoke about Inclusion Barnet and why it describes itself as a Deaf and Disabled People’s organisation, deaf being separate from disabled in deference to the cultural model of deafness. We also spoke at length about the ‘social model of disability; harnessing lived experiences for social change; acceptable language; role of the private sector in opening up opportunities; what allies can do to support; and the just launched ‘Campaign for Disability Justice’ calling for a) Opportunity b) Security c) Respect.

Did you know that care in the UK is based on a ‘medical model’ that frames the body or mind of disabled person as something that needs to be fixed?

“We see disability through the ‘social model’, where being Disabled is a political term that describes our experience of marginalisation, not individual impairments. The social model allows us to come together to fight back against a world that we can’t navigate safely without care and support. This model helps us understand that a flourishing social care system should give us access to choices and the freedom to live independently.

We want a system that enables us to live independently, rather than generating a list of ‘care tasks’ our local authority can charge us for. The struggle for a better, more equal system should unify us all to talk about intersectionality and disability justice alongside the crucial demands for fair conditions for both paid and unpaid carers, wholesale changes to the gendered imbalance of care responsibilities, and the need to tackle the looming climate crisis, which will affect our capacity to care for one another.” Caroline Collier, CEO Inclusion Barnet

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Caroline. It's wonderful to have you today as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast. Thank you for being here

Caroline: Thank you. Really pleased to be asked, so thank you so much.

Sudha: Let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Caroline: I'm Caroline Collier. I'm CEO of a deaf and disabled persons' organization called Inclusion Barnet. My background is varied. I started after college working in libraries. Then I ended up in my thirties writing about the construction industry, unusually enough. That changed in 2009 when I became really ill with what turned out to be bipolar. I had a bit of a rethink just because I wanted to find something with a little bit more purpose, and I was incredibly lucky to end up working in the organization that is now Inclusion Barnet. I've been here for nearly 14 years, and I consider myself incredibly privileged to be able to have a job where I can sometimes make a bit of a difference and also just be learning every day.

Sudha: Yes, it's good to hear because we tend to put people in boxes but there's always a journey.

Caroline: I've been pretty adaptable over the years, I would say, yes.

Sudha: From what I understand, Inclusion Barnet it is a deaf and disabled people's organisation. Tell us a bit more. I'm curious and interested to understand why deaf is separate.

Caroline: Okay. You're not the first person to ask, and it does confuse a lot of people. But the deaf being separate from disabled is in deference to the cultural model of deafness, which rejects the idea that hearing loss is an impairment and instead emphasizes the shared sort of culture and history of British Sign Language users. So, because the deaf community is more comfortable with that approach, in London at least, we tend to use "deaf and disabled people's organisations" to recognise that distinction. Sometimes, in other parts of the UK, just "disabled people's organisation" is also used, but that's regional variance.

Sudha: That's very interesting to know and also good to be aware about this.

So Caroline, our first interaction took place because I reached out to correct you by suggesting person-first language on a LinkedIn post and very kindly and generously, you educated me on the social model of disability, which I know of. I have been looking at diversity and inclusion and try to keep myself updated. But I'm hesitant to use that model. Is one or the other more acceptable and why?

Caroline: That's really interesting, and I might explore with you later, if you're okay with that, why you're hesitant, because I think that's really interesting.

The first thing to say is, obviously, we can all self-describe however we want to. But I think one of the reasons that the kind of person-first convention has taken hold is because the social model of disability is not nearly as widely known as it should be. Very simply, the social model of disability says, okay, some of us have conditions, impairments, illness, whatever, but what actually disables us is not our individual condition, but it's the disabling attitudes and barriers created by society. So if I were a wheelchair user, my problem in a multi-storey building is the fact that there isn't a lift; it's not a problem with me, it's a problem with the building.

If I was rejected for a job because someone was worried about whether a bipolar person could do the role and whether they could handle the stress and all the other bad attitudes people have, that's not a problem with my competency. That's a problem with their attitudes. So, there's a lot that society can do. And it's really important because society needs to accept responsibility for changing and being inclusive. I'm not saying the social model is perfect; no theoretical model is perfect, but it's a really important construct to make us think about, okay, what can government do? What can institutions do?

Because there's always a temptation with disability to just go, oh, it's sad, but it can't be helped. A lot of things can be helped, and it's really lazy thinking, especially today when we have so much technological knowledge, so much ability to change things. Why wouldn't we just make things as accessible as possible? So, it's important to keep pushing the social model, reminding people, and just challenging people to think about difference. And how that comes back to language is, I always say disabled people or disabled person because we are disabled by society. If you say person with disabilities, you're attaching the disability to the person. That's social thinking. So that's why we make that distinction. And can I ask you why you're hesitant? That's really interesting.

Sudha: While you've been speaking, I've been thinking about that, why I've been hesitant. And it could also be to do with the fact that people are not as conversant, including me, with the social model of disability. While we hear advocates occasionally speaking about it, the other model is more prevalent in most places, even in training, unfortunately. And that could be the reason for the hesitancy because you're unsure, am I doing the right thing?

Caroline: Yeah, no, it's difficult, isn't it? And I think we all sometimes worry about saying the wrong thing.

I think it's a challenge for the disability movement to actually get more airtime to explain why this is important because the theory behind it is important; it's the impetus for change. And while we campaign for that change, we think it's important to use the language that reflects that. That's not to say that there aren't all kinds of challenges trying to always find the right words for the right things, because I think that's something that we all grapple with in this world now. But the core theory of trying to get systemic barriers changed is the overriding thing.

Sudha: That's true. I've gone to your website and seen this, that you speak a lot about harnessing lived experiences for social change. How do you do that, and why does it matter?

Caroline: I think it’s really important to bring lived experience to bear on a variety of issues.

And we use our lived experience in a variety of ways. A good example might be, we have a service called Touchpoint, which is all staffed by disabled people and provides peer support and welfare benefits advice in Barnet. So, we think, because we work in a social model way, we’re not just working with each individual as an individual to help them overcome barriers and achieve goals and access entitlements. We’re looking at this as a team and going, what patterns are we seeing here? What’s emerging? What resonates in terms of things that we could tackle locally to make a difference? So, I might have a meeting with the team and find myself writing to the DWP about something that doesn’t work, calling the local council to say we’ve got an issue with this, or finding out there’s an issue with accessibility in GP surgeries.

And you might say, could something go in the GP newsletter to just remind them about reasonable adjustments? It’s just trying to think, what differences can we make here? It’s using that social model approach: how can we dismantle some barriers here? Even if it’s incremental things sometimes, what can we do to make life a little bit more accessible?

From another perspective, also, there is a saying that you can’t be what you can’t see, and being open about being a person with lived experience and mental health issues, working in a leadership role, I think that’s also me using my lived experience to say, despite people’s expectations of me, it turned out I could do this and maybe you can do it too.

And that’s really empowering for people who might be really internalising stigma about what people are going to think they’re capable of. It’s really sad when that changes people’s own views of what they’re capable of and trying to provide that positive role model I think is really important.

We believe that we can use the lived experience to take a leadership role in creating a thriving and socially just society. Hugely ambitious aspiration, but we’re trying to show as an organisation that we’re not just providing services by and for disabled people. We can provide services that benefit the whole community because we’re thinking in terms of inclusion and dismantling barriers.

Now, I might give you an example of that if that’s helpful.

Sudha: Yeah absolutely.

Caroline: Yeah, so we run an equalities network that's not just concerned with disability issues. And, for instance, we held a meeting last year where we were looking at barriers to health access from multiple angles. We found that, with three groups particularly, so people with learning disabilities, people who experienced homelessness and rough sleeping, and people who experienced English as a second language, so three very different groups, they were all experiencing barriers and being excluded.

And there were overlapping issues that we could look at holistically. So we went to our local hospital, the Royal Free, and we started a project group with them to say, "Okay, how can we change some systems here, so people don’t get unintentionally excluded before they’ve finished their treatment?" So that was a really useful piece of work, still continuing actually. We’re doing a pilot in pre-operative care to make sure people don’t get excluded from operations that they might need, and we’re hoping to take that wider.

I think that’s quite a good example of how thinking in that kind of barriers way and how do we dismantle barriers is helpful for everybody

Sudha: Yeah, like you said, it's a really good example of it working for the entire community and it's not just for some people, it will benefit everyone in general.

Caroline: Exactly.

Sudha: Caroline, another thing that I learned during my conversations with you, you mentioned that disability is unique in the sense that it would be inconceivable for any rights-based groups to be led by people without lived experience. And, of course, we’ve seen this in the past couple of years, that there would be a huge outcry if something like that were to happen. But the reality is that most disabled people’s organizations are run by non-disabled people. Why is this acceptable?

Caroline: I think we have to start by differentiating the disability charities. The big traditional disability charities are indeed largely run by non-disabled people. Disabled people’s organisations or deaf and disabled people’s organisations are run by deaf and disabled people. That’s a bit of a differentiator. And the reason it’s happened like that, because the disability charities have been around for far longer, is for a start. Forty or fifty years ago, a lot of disabled people were institutionalised; we culturally had even lower expectations of what disabled people were able to do. And I think that there is still something, even if it’s unspoken or unconscious, where there’s still doubt around disabled people’s competency. Now, that might sound surprising, but we did several focus groups last year as part of a project to try and understand how different messaging lands with the general public.

It was really interesting because, firstly, some messages landed okay. There was a certain amount of openness around equality and rights for disabled people, but the message that landed least was when we said something like, “Disabled people are best placed to lead their own organisations.” There was actually a lot of push back. That might surprise you, but there really was. People were really uncomfortable about that. There’s a belief that it shouldn’t go to a disabled person; it should be the best person for the job. And we’re like, “Hey, so we’re saying that a non-disabled person might know better than a disabled person?” Okay, so that’s what you think. And people were even more explicit like that. But it’s just not a good idea. One lady specifically said it: “You couldn’t have somebody with mental health issues leading an organisation.” And as a bipolar CEO, that’s quite hard to hear and quite amusing also, because in her worldview, I probably couldn’t exist. But there is still a lot of expectation that disabled people will be passive, and that’s still something that we’re on a journey as a society to change.

Sudha: I think it's a lot of it like you said Caroline, is linked to the idea and that's like really embedded in most of us is that it's a competency issue. You can be one or the other.

Caroline: Absolutely. And the flip side of that is Oh if you appear to be quite competent you were never that ill or you're, you're not. People really can't hold the two thoughts together.

Sudha: Yeah, again, very enlightening and interesting. Disabled people, like any disadvantaged group, are not a monolith. What would your advice be on how best to communicate with them? I would always start with being open, respectful, and non-patronising, because unconsciously we tend to patronise people, and this is how we start. But what are the things actually I’d like to hear? What would your advice be?

Caroline: Okay, no, interesting question. I think the first thing to say is that a lot of the time you won’t even know if you’re talking to a disabled person because things are not always visible, and many disabled people won’t have any specific communication needs anyway. Beyond that, it’s really not one size fits all. I mean, start with thinking about things like, in the workplace, remembering that you won’t always know if you’ve got a disabled colleague.

Ask before meetings if people have any access issues. Do that in recruitment as well; give people time to prepare. I had to really work hard on that because I tend to do everything a bit lastminute.com, and I’ve had to really try and retrain myself that for some people an agenda a couple of days in advance makes a huge difference to their ability to contribute.

Think about just practical things like, if someone is trying to lip-read, don’t cover your mouth while you’re talking. If you’re talking to somebody with a learning disability, try and be simple and clear. But please try not to talk to people like they’re children; be age appropriate. Obviously, it’s different if you are talking to a child, but don’t talk down to adults.

Don’t ask intrusive questions and don’t make assumptions about other people’s quality of life or their abilities. Because I think some people get so tired of hearing, “Oh, you must be very brave,” or “What happened to you?” And I mean, it’s just like, you think that the first person that said that—just don’t be that person. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Sudha: Yeah, that is true. And I guess the other thing to do is one of our speakers said this at a conference is that sometimes, it's, good not to try and fill silences be comfortable when you are with people generally.

Caroline: Yeah, I think that's good.

Sudha: What can the private sector do to attract and retain deaf and disabled candidates? We know that representation or their participation in jobs is hampered because of how we are currently structured. How crucial is the private sector to opening up more opportunities, so that people can, fulfil their potential or work to their potential.

Caroline: Absolutely, I think the private sector does have a huge role to play and there is support out there. There are specialist job sites where you can advertise for disabled candidates, and there are organisations like our own that can give you advice...

120: In conversation with Sabiana Anandaraj: Lessons for a successful second innings

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Show notes:

We all need our cheerleaders, the people, who stand by us through thick and thin, who inspire and bring us joy. The friends who are like family or better. I am lucky to have a few friends like that. One amongst them is @SabianaAnandaraj, whom I have known since my first job in PR over 30 years ago when I was a young mom to two toddlers in Mumbai, and she was the young, independent, go getter who introduced me to the workings of the agency and our mutual clients. We worked together for a short while before life got in the way and we drifted apart - she moved jobs, got married, had kids and I moved to the UK.

It was serendipity that we bumped into each other in early 2007 in Mumbai. The circumstances were wildly different her father was in very ill in hospital and mine was in and out of hospital (the same hospital) as he battled a rare form of Parkinson’s. Sadly, both our fathers passed away in 2007 much before their time. And @SabianaAnandaraj facilitated my unexpected move back to India for a stint to look after my mother. This move would have been impossible without @SabianaAnandaraj offering me a role in the agency she worked for at that time. And the ‘rest as they say is history.’ Today, we have a deeply, fulfilling friendship and our lives are deeply enmeshed (along with the rest of the gang) enmeshed together (in the best possible way).

Getting her on the podcast has been on the cards for a while, to share her amazing work trajectory and her foray into entrepreneurship. But, also to spotlight the reality, that women in their 50s are not done as yet, they don’t suddenly lose their ambition. The dominant narrative is about them being overlooked and written off but some of us are pushing back against the lazy ageist trope. Sabiana and I are both in our mid-50s (soon to be late), have no plans to retire and firmly believe the next decade may be our best as yet Also, I don’t think we are the kind of people who will take kindly to being overlooked! In this free flowing conversation we spoke about our mothers, being old, work, women in leadership, ageism, freedom in the 50s, entrepreneurship, learnings, cheerleaders, staying motivated and much more…..

We still need to talk about female friendships, menopause, empty nest, ambition, aspiration, work-life, second innings, third innings, fulfilment, and definitions of success……

Meanwhile, head to the podcast to hear more……

Episode transcript

Sudha: Hi Sabiana. I'm so, so happy to have you as a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast. We've been discussing this for the longest time, and finally, it has happened. It's good to see you here.

Sabiana: Thanks so much, Sudha. It has been a pleasure. I was really excited when you asked me to be a guest on your podcast. We know each other for decades, have had, n number of informal conversations. I think this is one of our first formal conversations on a platform like this. So, I'm really looking forward to it.

Sudha: Let's get started with the questions. I always ask all my guests. And even though I know you so well, and we've known each other for decades, please introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us a bit about yourself.

Sabiana: In the grand scheme of things, I am the third musketeer in the family lineup.

All the way from Bombay, I am today a 57 year old grown up. My one and only, what do I say? partner in crime is Trivikram. I've spawned two mini me's through him. One is Aria, who's my son, and Kaira, who's my daughter. My entrepreneurial journey started in the year 2020, I must say where I started my rollercoaster journey which I tell you that twist and turns could probably be something that you could compare with a Indian, Bollywood, blockbuster. But after two years now, finally I've settled down and I'm really enjoying the entrepreneurial journey.

Sudha: So, you're enjoying the ride, so to speak.

Sabiana: Yes, that's right.

Sudha: We've discussed this informally a lot of times, and we speak about it. You know, when our parents were in their 40s and 50s, we thought they were really old, but like you just admitted on the podcast that you're 57, and I'm 57, I don't feel very old. Do you feel old?

Sabiana: I don't actually you know, but we must understand that the times are very different Sudha. They came from a time where there was so many limitations, right? I mean, look at the job scene then, look at the job scene now, look at the exposure we have as compared to the exposure they had.

They always looked for government jobs where there was work life balance. Here we are looking at, you know, raring to go even at 57. So, I think it is the times that really defined how you felt. Given the day and age that we are in today. I don't think we feel old because there is so much opportunity that I don't feel I've come to the end of that opportunity, which probably they would have, you know, at 58, they are retired, they worked at government organizations, lived in joint families. I think in their heads, life, had to come to a grinding halt from a professional point at 58.

At 57, I mean, you know, two years ago I just started, being an entrepreneur, a new twist in my career. So, no, I don't feel old at all to answer your question.

Sudha: Yeah, I mean, my mum was 42 when I had my oldest daughter, that is Asmita. And of course, my children show no signs of getting married or settling. And as you said, times are different. And the weight that they felt, I think it was those times where they got married early, had children early, did everything sort of at an accelerated pace and then waited. And I think even the lifespan used to be smaller. We now live longer and healthier than I think they did.

Coming to something that I believe is very true. Do you think people view women differently after a certain age? Personally, , of course, and professionally.

Sabiana: Sudha, I've had different experiences. I think generally speaking, yes, they do. Again, it depends on the times that we are talking about. Professionals our age at that time would be looked at very differently, treated very differently, perceived very differently, judged very differently. Over the years, I think that gap has been bridged to a large extent only for the reason that women have started playing different roles.

In the past, women were playing more housewives and not really sitting in boardrooms. Today you see women are in boardrooms as well. They've broken all glass ceilings. So they are viewed differently, but that gap has been bridged over time. There's nothing that a man can do that a woman can't do.

And I think over time, they've realised that we play a role at home. We look after their parents, our parents, our children, the home, and a successful career as well. So I look at it really differently because my experience has been very, very different. I've worked for organisations, Sudha, where the senior leadership team were all men and I probably was the only woman. But nobody really made me feel that I was the only woman. They gave me equal rights to speak up and so on and so forth.

But I think generally speaking, it has been a struggle. When I speak to the other womenfolk, it has been a struggle for them to get their foot in the door, for them to really get things moving because men, I can't generalise, but there are men who are also very insecure about a woman taking over their seat, which they probably had for years, right? So then all those nuances one does have to face being a woman, but I think slowly things are changing.

Sudha: Yeah. So this is the impact in the workplace. And I think this conversation that we are having, some of it is we are reviewing the journey that we have come on and that journey has not always been privileged, right? We've all struggled through different sorts of, what do you say, exclusions to come where we are today, and we are in a position of privilege.

And I see from the kind of person that you are, Sabiana, I think a lot of women lack that confidence and that clarity and the courage to be able to work to their potential. And I think you have been singularly very focused on that part and you've been, no, I wouldn't say nobody is blessed with that courage, I think you've given yourself that courage, right?

And you've spoken about the impact in the workplace. Are there any specific incidences, you don't have to name your employers, but are there some specific incidences that you can of think of where clearly, you know, the current people in power do not want you to step up or take your rightful position? Have you experienced that?

Sabiana: Yeah. Because the organisations that I've worked with in the past were more male, less female. So I feel it was more male, but it's not that you don't find it with women as well. But coming to your question about whether I felt like that, yes. Particularly in one organisation, which was a very male-dominated industry.

I came in, in a leadership role and, like I normally approach my career or my new job, I tend to understand the organisation, understand the colleagues that I need to work with. I need to get a buy-in, very important for me to get a buy-in from the people I work with, junior, senior, whoever.

So, when I was approaching them one-on-one because it was a male industry in particular—it was the telecom industry, probably you'll guess the organisation—they looked at me with zillions of question marks, so what are you going to come and do? What are you going to really tell us? But shift to another industry which had an equal number of men and women, and it was the same question marks on their faces, you know, I mean, how can you come and tell us what to do in an industry that you are not even remotely connected with? When you shift jobs, you shift industries, and you learn on the job. But I think what helped me overcome all that is one, of course, the belief in yourself to understand what you're there for, you have the conviction in the value that you bring to the organisation. And when you engage with these people, it is extremely important to get that surfaced in conversations.

For example, you understand your business, but I understand your business and how to run it, you understand my point. I think how you engage with people and the personality that you sometimes need to take on has to outshine your position at that point in time; it plays a very important role.

The second thing I did was, when I met them one-on-one, of course, I got this pushback. So then I changed strategy and said, okay, fine, get them all into one room. I realised people are far more fierce and wear their bully caps when you are engaging with them one-on-one. They mellow down when you put them all in one room. So that was my strategy, and I said, okay, and I acknowledged all the input that I got. So again, my learnings were, focus on the positives, ignore the negatives, don't give it too much importance. When they were all in one room, acknowledged all the help and all the support, and ignore the hard time they gave me.

The point I'm trying to make Sudha, is it's never a straight-jacketed approach. You've got to learn on the job, you need to work around, and it's never a customised approach, right? Some industries work very, very differently. But I think it is how quick you are in identifying those loopholes and how quickly you work around them. It's not easy, but it's not impossible.

Sudha: There are two things that come to my mind because I know you. One is that we are also from that generation where we believe that we almost work in our workplaces as if we are owners and not as workers. The second thing is what you said very clearly is that when you move into an industry at a certain level, you are taking your learnings, and you can re-engineer your skills to any industry because you have leadership skills. And the third thing is that you have to be able to adapt very quickly, think on your feet, adapt, and understand the environment rather than just being like straight-jacketed, like you said.

I spent a large part of my forties in India, coming back to India to work. And I thought when I was in my forties, I thought, okay, I'm really old now, but I began to enjoy it a lot, the forties, and it is definitely a function of having all of you around me that helped me to really enjoy that. But I believe that the forties are really a brilliant decade for women to be in. You suddenly discover, you can speak actually, you can say no, you can do this, you can do that. And the fifties, of course, were dramatically different for me; they've been dramatically different.

So how have the fifties treated you and has it been very different from your forties? Are you thinking about things differently? And how are you as an individual, you know, so your personal, professional...

Sabiana: Of course, it is radically different, Sudha. When I was 40, I was 10 years less in experience, 10 years younger. Now I'm 10 years more intelligent. I have 10 years more exposure, more experience.

So, of course, it is very, very different. But the way I look at it is that 40 is when I would say my journey as a senior professional began. Before that, I was just a junior, learning, grasping, trying to support a team and all of that. But at 40, I suddenly felt this responsibility of teaching, of helping my team grow, sharing all my experiences and all my learnings with them. And that satisfaction that you get is immense.

So for me, my journey at 40 was fantastic because here now, you know, is this excitement of, okay, now I have so many more people I'm responsible for. I need to look at numbers, I need to look at growth, I need to make sure I'm contributing to the growth of the organisation and also take the brickbats, right?

At 50, you feel you've achieved because it's been 10 years, it's been a whole decade and that you've achieved a lot, and then you've been there, done that, and now suddenly you want to start a new chapter altogether. And I think that's where I am currently. At 50, actually, Sudha, I moved from a profession which was the only thing I knew, which is communications. And at 50, I joined a law firm. The only time I worked with lawyers was, you know, working with the GC at a crisis or when there was some key message that one needed to give out.

And here at 50, I joined a firm where they were expecting me to run the operations of the firm. For me, it was exciting; it was scary. I had to use all the experience that I had, the learnings, and at the same time, I had to also tell myself to unlearn and relearn. And I do that all the time, even till today. I'm 57, but I do that all the time because things are never static; things keep changing, they keep evolving. I mean, my ideas would have been so great once upon a time, could be totally obsolete today. So, my thing is unlearn, relearn, unlearn, relearn.

So, my journey keeps going on, and the reason I enjoy my journey is because I keep innovating and innovating myself in a new environment because the environment is never the same. I'm 40, then 50, now I'll be 60—the environment changes. If I do not evolve, if I do not bring in new ways of working and adapting, it's not going to work for me. So I hope I've answered your question, Sudha.

Sudha: Yes, you definitely have. I think it was a big challenge that you undertook when you decided to become the COO at Trilegal, which is the third-largest law firm in India. And that's been an amazing journey you have the experience, the knowledge, the intent, and the energyI’d say you’re one of the most energetic people that I know in this world, one of the most hardworking and energetic people that I know.

I totally agree that you have to not just bring all of that learning and experience. You have to learn constantly and evolve.

So, let's talk about your entrepreneurial journey. I think a lot of us jumped on that wagon during COVID and post-COVID. Tell us a bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. What prompted you to embark on this journey? Because you were doing very well. I don’t know whether it was something that you’d been thinking about for long and then took the jump, or it was one fine day you decided, “Oh, enough, now I need to do this for myself.”

Sabiana: It was not thoughtful at all. So, it happened—like I told you, the mystical year of 2021—I got an opportunity to work for a firm in Noida. I live in Gurgaon, so I had to travel from Gurgaon to Delhi to Noida. As long as it was locked down, it was fine. I am a person who likes working in an office. I'm a very people-oriented person. I like interacting; I like the chaos of the office, and I can't work from home. So I used to go to the office. There were hardly anybody in the office during that time because, you know, we had the flexibility of working from home. But given that I had just joined this organisation, I wanted to learn and understand the culture of the organisation, which is extremely important for my success, so I did. But unfortunately, what happened was when the lockdown was lifted, I realised I was spending way too much time in travel. And you know me better than anybody, Sudha; I'm a very impatient person. Very, very impatient. If I don't see the time that I have put to good use, I start getting the heebie-jeebies. And I just felt, you know, that time in the car from here to there, two hours, sometimes two and a half hours one way, therefore five hours a day, it was a waste of time.

And that gave me the reason to say, no, I can't do this anymore. But I didn't take too much time because I knew by then I'd been there, done that. I was 56 and something, and I said, let me start something on my own. And what I did was, of course, spoke to a lot of people. People who had only good wishes for me from a professional point of view. I started speaking to them and said, you know, this is where I am currently, and I don't know what to do. Spoke to a lot of people, got a lot of ideas, and then I sat on my own and I said, this is what I want to do. And I went on to creating Curate.

So, Curate is a...

119: Misinformation, Disposable Diversity, Ethics in PR with Prof. Lee Edwards, Department of Media and Communications London School of Economics and Political Science

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

In the past couple of years, there have been a lot of discussions, debates, articles around how PR practitioners can combat misinformation. It is often cited as one of the bigger challenges along with AI (advanced technology) facing the PR industry.

The Elephant in the Room is the role of PR professionals in the dissemination and amplification of misinformation and fake news. How complicit are we as an industry when propagating the agenda of businesses, individuals, and governments?

Beyond the industry a lot of people ascribe ‘spin’ a pejorative term to the work being done by professionals. So, what’s the truth? To discuss this and more I spoke with Prof Lee Edwards, from the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. Considering that the title of her 2020 research paper was, ‘Organised lying and professional legitimacy: public relations’ accountability in the disinformation debate’, she has an in-depth understanding of the subject.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room, we spoke about role of PR in society; the misinformation debate; disposable diversity; ethics of climate communications, AI, ethics in general, and more……..

Thank you Stephen Waddington for the introductions, this fine conversation would not have been possible without your initiative.

Interested in learning more, head to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Hey, Lee Good morning. Wonderful to have you as a guest today on the podcast.

Lee: It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Sudha. I hope you're well.

Sudha: So, let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do. I'm really grateful to Stephen for the introductions that he made over email, but I'm keen to know more because I haven't really met with you.

Lee: Yeah, so my name is Lee. I'm a professor of strategic communications and public engagement at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I've been there about seven years. Prior to that, I was at the University of Leeds, Manchester, and Leeds Beckett originally. My research area is focused on strategic communications, particularly public relations. That's the area I look at most. More recently, it has expanded into the area of public engagement and also media literacy, which ended up being quite nicely related to the type of work that I do.

I originally started in practice. I did about eight years working for the technology industries as a PR consultant. Like most PR practitioners I know, I kind of fell into it with no particular ambition to do PR, but just ended up there. I originally started in New Zealand, then I came back to London. I was mystified by the apparent power that Tony Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, had and how much he was hated because he was the proverbial spin doctor. I was working in the profession and didn't really feel like I was powerful at all.

So that led me to do a PhD focused on understanding how power works through public relations and in public relations as a profession. The rest is history, really. I've been working in academia now for just over 20 years and really love it.

Sudha: Wow, that's interesting. And I think that we should have another podcast episode, probably on your PhD, because like you, I'd agree that, yeah, we don't always feel very powerful as communications professionals. In fact, rather disempowered and often isolated, including with clients and within organisations.

Let's move on to the next question. We live in such divisive and polarised times. What do you think is the role of PR in society? We are so set in our views; we all think the choices or the sides that we take are the correct sides to be supported and advocated for.

We've seen, day before yesterday, the attempt on the presidential candidate in the US. All this is a result of the churn happening in society, the conflicts and the unease there. And, of course, communications professionals have a huge role, I believe, to play. We don't often get that opportunity. But between strategic advisors to the C-suite and spin doctors, which most people like to think of PR practitioners as, is there a happy medium between the two? A space that we can occupy with authenticity?

Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. There are perhaps two answers to it in the sense that I think currently there's the role that public relations as a profession and practitioners occupy, and there's the potential role that they could play. Currently, I think we oscillate between those two roles of strategic advice and spin doctor.

The strategic advice role is the one that has the most promise, in the sense that it's a role that is more reflective and considered as a contribution to the organisation. It doesn’t just take the organisation for granted and follow what the organisation says. It’s much more of a kind of critical friend type role. And I think that's got to be positive because organisations can become very self-oriented and absorbed with their own purposes. That’s just the nature of the beast. But public relations practitioners have this bridging role that is very valuable. The strategic advisory capacity is important for helping organisations understand the nature of the society they exist in.

The spin doctor role, I think, is what happens when practitioners don’t or aren’t able to take on that more strategic approach. To some degree, that's a question of organisational culture, the degree to which organisational leaders are able or willing to listen, and perhaps also the degree to which comms practitioners are able to make themselves relevant. There’s a challenge there, because if you end up being the spin doctor, you end up simply parroting what the organisation thinks is important, and that’s not necessarily what society needs. So I think that’s what currently happens.

There’s a lot of debate within the profession about the pros and cons of both roles and the desire to be seen as more strategic. I think there is also a much bigger role for communications professionals, particularly public relations professionals, because they are different from advertisers, branders, and marketers. They are more focused on dialogue, discussion, and engaging with audiences. There’s a lot of talk, for example, about relationship building and engaging in conversations. That gives the profession a platform to influence society and the way social dynamics unfold.

For instance, with the shooting of the presidential candidate at the weekend, the ways in which the communications profession responds should also reflect on how they might make interventions as a profession, not on behalf of their clients but as a profession. They should discuss how and why such events might happen, what rhetoric underpins them, and how one might change it and make concrete moves in that direction. They have a lot of influence; these are people who work with some of the biggest companies in the world and with some of the largest media conglomerates. I would like to see a more socially oriented professional identity than we have at the moment. I think that could have a really significant impact on the way people talk about division and debate.

Sudha: I think that's a very interesting perspective, Lee. And I also think, how we contribute to the discourse, whether we contribute just on when you know, strictly has a problem or there's some reality TV show or we are participating in issues that really make a difference to people and to society. I think, we need to definitely consider that.

Moving on from this, we're talking about the U. S. and of course the U. S. has been so prominent in the past couple of decades, not just because of its power, but, what has been happening in politics. So the 2016 U. S. elections, were a time when we saw a lot of fake news or biased news and it brought misinformation to the spotlight.

And there was a spotlight on the role of lobbyists, PR practitioners, foreign actors to build a particular narrative. It’s been eight years since that spotlight. Has there been any change in behaviour or is it more of the same? Because I noticed that, as practitioners, as an industry, we love to talk about things, but I don't think, we really address some of the issues root and branch and try to make a systemic change. What are your thoughts on this?

Lee:I think the reality is that the volume of misinformation that became very visible in 2016 is now normalised. I think that’s probably the case. It was interesting how little it was discussed in the UK election, for example. I’m not sure about the election in India—there have been so many elections—but I was struck by the fact that occasionally it was covered as an issue but not really picked up, and there was no significant monitoring of it as far as I could tell. Although I was away for some of the election time, so it may have happened in my absence.

I think the reality is that we now assume misinformation will circulate, so the focus has shifted from trying to stop the origin to helping people understand what is true and what isn’t, particularly online. I wrote a piece a few years ago that argued that misinformation has also been part of the communications profession for many years. People in organisations or organisations themselves have always framed certain issues in ways that favour their own positions—climate change, tobacco, the chemical industries, for example. This is not new. And so, I don’t think the profession is innocent in this mix.

There was a really good study done by Jason companions and Jonathan on disinformation in the Philippines, where the people producing the disinformation in the context of an election campaign were people from the advertising industry who were working a second job at night producing this material. The skills and techniques our professions use in a legitimate way can also be used illegitimately and are used illegitimately. There’s a responsibility to acknowledge that and work towards changing it.

In terms of whether misinformation will ever stop, I don’t think so. Bad actors, as you say, will always be around. To some degree, the question of how to tackle it involves individual education, media literacy, for example, making sure people can spot disinformation. But I think this goes back to the previous points about the social norm. We now expect misinformation to some extent. We don’t have to accept that as our social norm. So, I think we need to ask ourselves what we are willing to accept in society and what we would like to see minimised. Communications professionals can certainly be part of that debate.

Sudha: I agree with parts of what you say. We’re now in a world where the more important aspect is not just that misinformation exists but how to spot what is true and how to filter out truth from lies or bias from unbiased information. For example, during the Indian election, India is a hugely polarised country, and the media has been polarised for the longest time. People generally know who speaks for whom and then make their decisions based on that.

Similarly, in the US or UK, people believe that media has certain leanings. If you are a left-leaning person, you might read The Guardian, while if you're a right-leaning person, you'll read something else. And that’s similar in India. But in terms of professionals and how we contribute to the news circulating, there perhaps needs to be more open conversations about what is acceptable, what level is acceptable, and how far we are going to allow our practitioners to operate in those areas.

Lee: I mean, these are ultimately questions of the ethics of the profession. And it’s not that people don’t talk about them, but I think, you know, professional associations and practitioners do talk about them. And there are areas where some really fantastic work has been done around inequalities, for example, gendered inequalities, racialised inequalities, where campaigns have pushed the forefront claims for recognition that might not otherwise have been taken up because brands are very powerful, because, you know, large conglomerates are very powerful.

They have some clout, not just for their customers but also for political actors, I think. So there’s power within that kind of market-based context or the overlap between markets and politics for practitioners to do something. But there is also, I think, as you say, this kind of reflexivity or, you know, self-questioning to ask exactly that question of how we limit our negative impact in this kind of space.

And to do that, you have to accept that there is a negative impact. Yeah, and I think that’s difficult for professions to accept because professions of all kinds, you know, their reputation and their legitimacy are built on doing good in society. That’s a big part of the profession. And so, being really overt about the fact that that’s not always the case is a difficult thing, I think.

Sudha: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. The industry, of course, is a microcosm of society. How does that impact our ability to fulfil our roles in a responsible manner? Because, you know, the makeup of the industry does not reflect our society, essentially.

And we don’t need to speak about statistics in general. So, are diversity and inclusion conversations in the industry today an imperative or a distraction? And I am asking you this question from having been on the PRCA Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council for three years. I think there are startups and newer agencies that are very interested in engaging, and the bigger agencies who don’t give a— I don’t want to use the word, but don’t give a damn.

So, what would you say? Do these people look at it as an imperative or a distraction? Because change is not going to happen unless the big players in the industry decide to put their weight behind any change that is required.

Lee: Yeah, well, I think you put your finger on the pulse there when you say, nominally, we should be a microcosm of society, but there’s no way the profession can ever describe itself as such for a range of reasons, in particular racialised and class inequality. I think this is a huge issue, and, you know, multiple surveys have identified that.

So, PRCA in the UK, CIPR in the UK, and a bit to a slightly lesser extent in the U.S., I think. There is a business case for diversity. The business case for diversity tends to revolve around the narrative of the more diverse you are, the more innovative you can be, the more ideas there are around the table, the more productive you can be, you’ll get the extra leadership, people will be more inclusive, etc.

And I was looking at the recent survey that’s been issued across 12 different professions, I think, that the CIPR contributed to. And that survey, which has just been issued in the UK in 2024, talks about this business case and cites various statistics. So, there is a business case for diversity, but diversity is complicated.

And it’s not without risk. If you want to be really honest about the need to be more diverse, and practitioners from marginalised groups say this every time they are asked, and they are asked a lot about their experiences. It can’t be just a tick box, it can’t be just the word, because really to understand the impact of a lack of diversity, you have to engage with some difficult questions about the really frustrating and miserable experiences that people sometimes have in their professional lives.

And you have to acknowledge that that is because of the nature of the organisations that have been built. And so that opens up difficult conversations that require mutual respect between the people who are marginalised and the people who are in charge, and that also require organisations to put aside their own self-interest in the sense that they can’t only ever manage the value of diversity by assessing whether or not it’s going to be profitable, or whether or not it’s going to get them more votes, or whether or not it’s going to get them more supporters for their charity.

It can’t only be about that. There has to also be a moral question of whether we want people in our organisation who are marginalised from the day they walk in, to the day they walk out, or feel that way, you know, enough on a regular basis for it to be a characteristic of their professional life with us.

And whether we want an organisation that also creates barriers for people who are marginalised to even get in, in the first place. Is that a moral position that we want to take? Because it is a moral position that one takes if one doesn’t do anything about it. It’s an ethical and moral position that is actively taken by doing nothing.

So, I think, from my perspective, with all the claims that organisations make about being responsible actors in society, I think it is a must-have. Because you can’t make those claims when you are, you know, then conducting your day-to-day engagement with your employees very differently.

And then the business case also is important. I think my challenge with the business case has always been that you can achieve the same outcomes without having to engage with diversity. And when diversity requires you to do difficult things, if you’re doing it properly, then it’s much easier not to engage with diversity and to achieve those profits and those changes in other ways, and I think that’s the problem with the business case for diversity. It doesn’t make diversity compulsory. It just makes it kind of attractive as one of the set of options that you might have. So, I think that means it’s always weaker, really, as an imperative.

I think the moral imperative is stronger.

Sudha: Yeah. I mean, I'm really glad to hear that because I think it’s quite frustrating to hear about the business imperative and the business case because. I mean, DEI has been around for a long time, especially if you look at the U.S they’ve been doing this for decades, and they’re still making a business case, and the business case has not really propelled too much action.

I mean, we’re like 30 years or 40 years into it, and things should have...

118: SDG 2 and the role of the private sector in sustainable development: Chris Argent, Head of Sustainability & Corporate Affairs, AMEA, Syngenta

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:

Most people would agree that sustainability is a much-abused word. It has become a catch call phrase for individuals and businesses keen on asserting their ‘good for society/good for planet credentials’. As we hurtle towards 2030, the reality is that the private sector has a pivotal role to play in helping to meet the SDGs. Cynicism aside, behind the rhetoric and noise, there is serious effort by some businesses to integrate it into their business strategy.

A couple of weeks back, I spoke with Chris Argent, Head of Sustainability for AMEA at Syngenta (A leader in agricultural innovation) to understand the role of the private sector in global food security (SDG 2), on innovations that can catalyse change and help improve the lives and livelihoods of farmers (especially marginal farmers).

According to the World Economic Forum, ‘the global food security challenge is straightforward: by 2050 the world must feed two billion people more and the demand for food will be 56% greater than 2010.’ The sector also accounts for a whopping 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of freshwater withdrawals, so there is also the need for adoption of innovative practices to be more sustainable.

What is the private sector doing to address SDG 2? How are businesses transforming and innovating for sustainable development? Chris covered some of the issues during our conversation👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The link between purpose, profit and sustainability

👉🏾 How organisations can be authentic when speaking about purpose or sustainability

👉🏾 What it means to be a leader in agricultural innovation for Syngenta?

👉🏾 The impact of climate change on small and marginal farmers who make up majority of the world’s farmers and produce over 70-80% of the world’s food (UN FAO 2021)

👉🏾 The ‘Good Growth Plan’ (Indian context) a time bound target to reduce its carbon intensity by 50% by 2030 from a 2016 baseline

👉🏾 The Portfolio Sustainability Framework aimed at increasing transparency to external stakeholders

👉🏾 Changing food preferences and growing trend for sustainably grown food

We also spoke about sustainability narratives, reporting, communications and much more.

Global non-profit EAT, “Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth”

To hear more, head to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Chris. It's wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room Podcast today. Thank you for being here.

Chris: Thanks very much Sudha for inviting me to join. Looking forward to the discussion.

Sudha: Brilliant. Let's start with a quick introduction. So, you've moved from politics to external affairs and then sustainability. How has the journey been?

Chris: That's a great question. Things have certainly evolved in terms of sustainability over that period. As you mentioned, I started my career in Australian politics working in various roles for about seven years before moving to the private sector. And certainly, in that early days of sustainability, it certainly wasn't high on corporate's agenda. But over that time it has very much come to the fore, which I think is great for the community, for business and also for the environment.

It really started with the development of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and it's certainly progressed from there.

Sudha: Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like a very interesting journey, and I'm sure there have been lots of learnings that you can now use in your current role.

So, I listened to a podcast where you spoke about purpose, profit and sustainability. This is something I'm very passionate about. my consultancy is called The Purpose Room. Both purpose and sustainability have become sort of buzzwords for organisations keen to show their commitment to a bigger, cause to a bigger purpose. So how can organisations show up, authentically when they speak about purpose or sustainability without somebody groaning on the sidelines?

Chris: Yeah, thanks for the question. I think authenticity is the key word that you just mentioned there Sudha. I think sustainability and sustainable operations throughout the business world and beyond are critically important to some of the key issues that we face as a community at the moment. And certainly, two that very important to Syngenta, which as I'm sure your listeners would know, is one of the biggest agribusiness companies in the world, where we sell seeds and crop protection products to farmers. And so, food security and climate change are two incredibly important big issues that the world faces, and that certainly not only impacts our industry, we believe that we can be part of a very complex solution to these issues and so authenticity is critical.

And I think we've all heard of many companies falling foul of accusations of greenwashing and certainly I think many companies perhaps were keen to demonstrate that they were doing something in the purpose space.

But I think critically, and this is fundamental to sustainability at Syngenta, it can't be separate from your business strategy. Sustainability needs to be part of the business strategy. If it's business and sustainability, I think it can be seen as an add on or an afterthought or even a cost rather than an investment.

And the private sector has a critical role to play in these big issues. And so that's where, I guess, where purpose meets profit, is to me the foundation of where the answer may lie. Private businesses are in service to their consumers and shareholders, but also increasingly consumers and shareholders expect the private sector to be in service of something bigger, and that's where the purpose comes in.

But if it's not profitable, if we can't find that sweet spot between purpose and profit, it becomes outside that that private sector space. And I think if we can find those areas where profit meets purpose in a meaningful way, that's how we can really drive the agenda forward and drive change. And I think it starts with being part of the business strategy, which is the approach that we take at Syngenta.

Sudha: Very well-articulated there and what is interesting that you're saying is it should not be an add on because so far it has been an add on for businesses. I think for decades it's been like yeah, you do some philanthropy and CSR and that's something that you're doing just a bit on the side. I think companies are definitely finding it difficult to, like you said, to make it an essential part of the business.

So, your boiler plate reads Syngenta Crop Protection is a leader in agricultural innovation. What does leader mean? Leadership has been redefined so many times in the past couple of years, I'd say. What are your aspirations as a leader for Syngenta? Is it size, scale, innovation or purpose?

Chris: Yeah, sitting on the fence, Sudha, I think it's part of all of those things and certainly going back to the point I made before about the importance of profitability in the broader scheme of the pursuit of purpose. So certainly, we seek to be a leader in the industry and I think that leaves us best placed to help farmers with the challenges of growing more food, with less impact on the environment.

I mean, that's a critical important challenge that I mentioned before. So, there's all that leadership in terms of how we listen to farmers. I mean, farmers being at the centre of everything we do, how do we understand the challenges that they're facing? And agriculture is tremendously diverse and if I think about the region that I'm responsible for Asia, Middle East and Africa, we have large scale industrial farming, and then we have a lot of smallholder farmers who trying to make a living and support themselves and their community with one hectare or less of, land to farm on.

There's lots of different challenges across that region. But I think finding a common way to understand what farmers are looking for in terms of solutions to their problem is one approach we take. So, there's that leadership. There's leadership in terms of innovation, which in terms of buzzword Sudha is another one that I would contend is thrown around a lot at the moment.

And innovation can mean a lot, it can mean technological innovation and certainly from our product development approach, that's a big part of what we mean by innovation. But it's also about innovative ways to deal with what is very complex in terms of food security and climate change, and the role that agriculture plays in that.

And so how can we be innovative in the solutions that we provide, not just from a product perspective, but also through partnerships with broader solutions for some of these issues. If you look at the emissions contribution of agriculture, products themselves play some part in helping to minimize that, but it's more about on farm practices, innovative ways to drive change at the farm level.

And that can be, complicated purely and simply because going back to the profit and purpose thing we talked about before, we need to find ways to make sustainable agriculture, not just sustainable, but also the best and most profitable form of agriculture, again, to drive that change at scale.

I think we are making some progress there, but we can't do that alone, so long way to answer your question, but in terms of a leader I think trying to take the initiative across all these various things that can drive the change that's required in this industry, but also keeping farmers at the centre of how we approach this. And last thing I would say too, is being a leading workplace in terms of how we encourage diversity inclusion, how we encourage people to speak up and have their say about issues that they are passionate about to drive that ongoing improvement.

And I know that a number of the country teams in my part of the world have been recognized as leading employers in that space, which I think is a part of the entire puzzle for Syngenta.

Sudha: Yeah, leadership is not just about one thing, it is about various pieces that all come together to make a company a leader. We've covered some of the stuff around, drivers for sustainability when we were talking about purpose and profit. So, we move to the next question on the ‘good growth plan’ that is linked to your sustainability efforts.

I understand it is particularly relevant to India. Could you share a bit more about it?

Chris: Yeah, the good growth plans been in place for more than 10 years now, and I think it was certainly back to that leadership point. It was taking a step forward for the industry in terms of really defining and quantifying the steps that we thought Syngenta could take as a company to pursue sustainability as part of the business.

And it certainly evolved and was updated about three years ago with some new targets to, acknowledge that things have progressed. And so that was really the aspiration for all of our country operations. And it covered things that are still important to us in terms of the importance of soil health, the importance of safe use training for all farmers that we can get in contact with about how to use products in the best and most sustainable way to protect themselves, of course, but also to get the most out of those products. And certainly, India is a really important market for Syngenta and certainly a country where agriculture is such a huge part of the economy and social fabric of that country.

Finding ways to use that foundation to drive sustainable agricultural outcomes was certainly a big ambition of the India team. And I think they've done and continue to do a great job. Just focusing on a couple of examples of that, as I mentioned before, soil health. I mean, if you think about sustainability and agriculture, it really all starts with how we take care of the soil to ensure that it can continue to be fertile and provide that foundation for crops for as long as we possibly can. And there's a big awareness part in relation to this, I think everyone intuitively understands that the health of the soil is critical, but what exactly about the soil?

How can we understand what the baseline is and what approaches can be taken to improve that. And some simple things, but very effective that we did in India is in relation to soil health testing and providing those tests to farmers, particularly in relation to rice growing. And then providing recommendations in partnership with the university about how to apply the right amount of fertilizer at the right time to ensure that the soil health was being protected and that yields would also benefit.

And this had fairly swift, but also impressive results in terms of yield, and of course, yield is linked to livelihood. If a farmer can apply less in terms of inputs, get more in terms of yield, and also the quality improvements, then that leads to higher prices for farmers. And so, these are some of the examples of the Good Growth Plan in India.

One last thing I'd say about the Good Growth Plan is we've now recently launched for the first time Syngenta Group's Global Sustainability Priorities and that builds on the foundation of the Good Growth Plan and really focuses on the key issues of higher yields with lower impact, and that means environmental as well as protecting the safety of the farmers, regenerate soil and nature improving rural prosperity, which is very important when you consider agriculture because agriculture is often really a foundational part of prosperity in rural communities throughout the world.

And lastly, about our own sustainable operations, really ensuring that we have a focus on reducing our own footprint in terms of emissions, as well as how we can move that forward. So good growth plan was the foundation, the sustainability priorities that were released in April this year build upon that.

And I think really sets us up to hopefully in partnership, drive further change for farmers, for food security and for the environment.

Sudha: All very essential pieces if you are to consider that the farming community, rural farmers make a huge chunk of the Indian population and they contribute to the GDP, but their own prosperity is also linked to all of this. And it is essential for them if we as a country are to grow at a certain rate that the small farmers are able to be prosperous and all of it is so interlinked.

So interesting to hear all of this. Moving on all conversations around sustainability start with climate change and global warming. Should the starting point not just be people and the challenges they face. Because we're speaking about ‘just transition’, but just transition starts with thinking about where the planet is going and where we are going to be 10 years later in 2030 or 2050.

Why don't we start with people and the challenges that they are facing. What are your thoughts on this?

Chris: Yeah, it's a really interesting point and I think we need to do both. But I would certainly agree that focusing on the challenges for people, because it's people at the end of the day that drive action and drive change.

But if I think about the urgency of the change in terms of food security and climate change, as I mentioned, having that broader topic set at that global agenda can really help to encourage that action. Because I think also if we focus too much on the bigger picture, maybe it gets a little paralyzing too, because, it is enormous, it is critical and it is urgent. And so it's important that, that is setting the scene for action. But then we focus on how people can drive change. And as I mentioned before, that's why it's certainly at Syngenta having the farmer at the centre of everything, because without the input of farmers, without the enrolment of farmers, it's almost impossible to drive change.

And so that's why that's such a big focus for the company because without that action at the farm level then those broader topics and concerns are going to be even harder to have an impact on, so that's also where it becomes, again, complicated. I know I'm highlighting some complications, but we are talking about very complex things here and trying to simplify it can be beneficial.

Why should, let's be very frank, why should an individual farmer who's done things a certain way for a certain period of time and had pretty good results change unless there is a personal motive for change beyond that bigger picture. Because again, particularly in Asia and Africa, we are talking about smallholders and so change is risky. And the impacts of that going wrong can be very detrimental in terms of their own food security and their own livelihoods. So, we need to find a way of finding value and I mean, value in the broadest sense of that word, not just financial value, but sure, that's important. But what can we do to demonstrate the value for change to happen?

And it comes down at the heart of your question, Sudha, it comes down to people and how we can together build a change that can have the impact we need.

Sudha: Yeah, so the farmers have to be motivated to actually come on board. And I don't think there's too much that is required other than engagement and a little bit of awareness.

And definitely because of food security and their own personal security livelihoods, they are more likely to be on board.

Chris: Yeah, but also when you're talking about 450 million smallholders in Asia and Africa that's a lot of people. And it takes a huge amount of resources to be able to interact with all of them and a company, even a small company of our size is unable to have that direct contact with such a large number of farmers. It's also finding progressive farmers who want to try something new and can drive change and then they can become the role model to really drive that change further beyond

117: Harnessing the power of GEDI(Gender, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) to build a more inclusive organisation: Kavneet Sahni, Dasra

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Kavneet Dasra Shownotes:

In my second innings I have been intentional about working with the third sector. Through The Elephant in the Room, I am able to engage vicariously with the sector without being a part of it. To some extent I have been able deepen my understanding and engagement with the sector through PRADAN where I truly believe there is an alignment between my passion and their purpose. However, truth be told the sector is cliquey and closed like most sectors/industries the world over. A bit jarring considering they exist to make society more equitable and inclusive, to provide support to the most excluded.

In the Indian sub-continent where I have spent a lot of my time it is no different. A cursory look at leadership, boards and composition of teams can be revelatory. That they mirror society, and all its inequalities is a bit alarming? Is it possible for them to continue to work with the excluded and marginalised, and be effective in their current avatar? What does it mean for the sustainability of the social sector short term and long term?

To learn about what the sector is doing to change, I reached out to Dasra one of India’s most respected and leading third sector organisation. Dasra evolved from being a philanthropy fund to a bridge between NGOs and funders. On their website they state that, ‘Equity is at the centre of everything we do’. To kickstart my conversations with the sector I spoke with Kavneet Sahni, who anchors internal DEI efforts, spear heads the GEDI (Gender, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) initiative at Dasra and leads on their Social Impact Program. GEDI is a lens that not only guides Dasra’s internal inclusion strategy but also informs their funding and grant making strategy. For the uninitiated GEDI is commonly used amongst multilateral organisations including ILO, IRC, UN to frame conversations on diversity and inclusion.

In this freewheeling episode Kavneet and I spoke about her background, move to the third sector, faith, privilege, GEDI, the drivers for change in the social sector, representation, war for talent, barriers to change, best practice, inclusive campaigns and initiatives, successes and failures………

My one key takeaway, the road to inclusion is paved with failure and learning……..

To hear more, head to the podcast….

Episode Transcript

Sudha: Good morning, Kavneet. It's wonderful to have you as a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Thank you for being here and making time.

Kavneet: Thank you, Sudha. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm so delighted that you actually are interested in learning a bit more about my journey and the work that we do at Dasra around diversity and inclusion. So, thank you for having me.

Sudha: Let’s start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Kavneet: So, I work as an Associate Director at Dasra and my role primarily is to design and implement capacity building programs for non-profits and other stakeholders in the sector. You may know this, but Dasra was formed on the basis that there is a lot of funding, a lot of focus that goes into supporting programs, on ground and very little focus on building stronger institutions like we often do in the corporate world. So, my role, my journey at Dasara has been, very old. I've spent close to 11 years at Dasara now and most of my time goes in building, designing programs, which will help nonprofit leaders, look through their own leadership journeys, become better leaders, but also strengthen their teams, their organisation.

In the last few years, with a lot of chatter happening on diversity and inclusion. I also have had the opportunity to dive a little bit deeper and understand. Beginning from who I am, what is my identity, how does that bring the privilege that I carry. And even at Dasara, I've had the opportunity to anchor some of the diversity and inclusion efforts.

So that's a little bit about me professionally. I'm a mother, I like to call that out, of a seven-year-old. He keeps me on my toes and kind of teaches me, new lessons every day, if I can put it out there.

Sudha: Amazing. So, like you said, you didn't start off in the social sector.

If you were not at Dasra, what would you be doing? Have you thought of it? Do you think about it sometime?

Kavneet: Yeah. I was at the crossroads and there was this dilemma back in 2013/14 when I joined Dasra. But on one side I had to pick this job at Dasra and the other side I had an offer from Johnson & Johnson. So, it was either the corporate world or the development sector. And I'll be honest, I did give it a thorough thought at that point of time because of course, if you enter the corporate world, you get a better salary, as a starting point, you have a lot of other incentives. There is a clear career path that you're moving ahead on. At the same time, I think my passion lies in the development space, and I really wanted to contribute my skills, my experience to the society and that's where I picked Dasra. But wherever I would have been, if not Dasra, Johnson & Johnson, any corporate job, I think I would still be doing the very same thing, engaging with stakeholders, working on diversity and inclusion, because my background was in human resources.

Sudha: That's so interesting. So, you are passion led and you knew very clearly where you want to go and how you want to use your skills. How important, Kavneet, is your identity to you? And what are the experiences that have shaped you and influenced the work that you do today? Because, we are also confused about our identities, like, who am I at the end of the day? Most of us tend to be identified by our designation and the place where we work.

Kavneet: That's such an interesting question, Sudha. And I see it in a way that there is a perception or there is a way in which the world identifies you. And then, there are certain things that you identify very closely with your own personality, with your work, with your personal family life.

And to the world, of course, I would say I have the privilege to be an able bodied woman, married women born in a upper class, upper middle class family, had the privilege of finishing a double masters and supported by my parents. So, I think I do acknowledge the privileges that I've had while growing up.

But at the same time, I also I always try to not negate the challenges that I have had, whether it is around, socioeconomic challenges of being in a family where I was the first girl to not get married at the age of 22. Where I was the girl who was like, I want to do a master's, but I don't want to do a BEd, which is apparently the best way for me to settle down in life and, in my career. Where I was the one who said, okay, if you don't want to, sponsor my MBA, I will take an education loan and I will go ahead and I'm ready to take the risk and the responsibility of the repercussions that come along.

So, I also had my own set of challenges, whether it was around seeing the financial difficulties, parents and me not getting on the same page around when to settle and what's best for me in my life. But I think what's always stayed with me are some values, that I identify myself with.

I am very into preachings of Guru Nanak Devji, and I follow Sikhism as a religion. But I think more than any of the gurus, any of the teachings, I'm very influenced by the teachings of Guru Nanak and he has spoken a lot about being kind to others, not discriminating, just believing in the oneness of God, but also the oneness of human beings. So, I think those are some of the values I really identify with and hold very closely to my heart.

Sudha: That's so good to hear gives a holistic view into who you are, your spirituality and faith that often, sort of grounds us and is our North Star and guides us in making decisions in life.

Tell us about your journey at Dasra internal, to DEI as strategic imperative, because I don't think for the social sector, it has been a big priority. What are the drivers? Why is it that the social sector really needs to sort of get started and get going very quickly on this journey?

Kavneet: Yeah. So, Dasra was formed in 1999, we've been in existence for 25 years. And I think some principles that have stayed at the very core of whatever programs we build, whatever path, new strategies that might have come along. We always want, and we always try to keep the communities, the vulnerable communities that we serve at the centre of everything we do.

So that has been like the core right from the beginning as to how can we think and how any program, any activity, anything that we do, any action taken at Dasara, how is it influencing these communities positively? I think that has been one of the very, I would say strategic drivers, for us to do what we do today in the field of D&I. And if you have to go back, D&I was not a buzzword either in the corporate or in the social sector. Back in 2008, Dasara was one of the leaders in the sector who said that we will pick on audiences or target groups or communities that nobody else is serving or focusing or highlighting.

So adolescent girls, for example, we started, with a few research reports that we did on adolescent girls, the condition of young women. Till date, we have like 25 plus research reports that we've published, focusing on girls, women in the sectors of education, nutrition, water and sanitation.

And it was in 2013 that we actually built the first collaborative that was focused on adolescence, specifically girls. So, in my mind, when I look at our journey around D& I, it's not new, it's something which is very inbuilt in our own strategy, in our own vision that we have for the organisation.

But I think it was back in 2019/20 where we were reflecting on where we are in terms of the organisation demographics. Is there enough representation of the different strata that India, kind of has? And that's when we realised that we are an organisation with 70 percent of women and an equal percentage around 67 percent of women also in the leadership positions in the organisation.

We decided that, let's move beyond just gender. Let's also look at, other aspects of diversity, whether it's caste, whether it's disability, gender and sexual orientation. We've, then kind of moved ourselves, not just looking at women, as one of the demographics, but also looking at other aspects that are so inbuilt in the society that we have.

And since then, we've done two demographic surveys, and we continue to do that once in two years so that it gives us a sense and a pulse check of, which are the underrepresented groups in the organisation. And so that our hiring and a recruitment strategy is focused on that.

But also, we try to dive deeper into understanding how are they voicing their feeling, are they able to bring their authentic selves to work or not? And these, pulse checks or employee surveys it kind of informs the vision for us on what next do we do on GEDI.

So, I think one thing which I just would like to highlight is that for us, it is a little bit around how can D&I be a lever for us to do what we do well. And there has been a lot of conversations with the leadership here where we've sat down for two days straight and just spoken about, do you think that as an organisation we need more diverse talent? How would it help us meeting our vision? How does that contribute to the goals that we have set for ourselves? Are we ready as an organisation to take this up? Are we ready to perhaps slow down our pace of work, perhaps open more ways of doing things, not just sticking to the ways that we might have been following for years at Dasra.

Sudha: So clearly externally you have looked at marginalized communities and internally when you have started doing that sense check on what the makeup of Dasra is like, you're looking again at excluded groups or communities and seeing how you can increase representation and of course belonging. But why is this a necessity today, is it just because Dasra believes that this is the way we should operate or are there bigger drivers or imperatives?

Kavneet: So, after the first demographic survey that we did, we were left with a few questions. And these were very, honest questions that we put out to the leadership and to the D&I committee, which said that what does D&I mean to us at Dasra? Why do we need to go on this path? We really have to move on this path or is it fine because Dasra as an organisation is doing fine and, will it be of a value add. Do you see it as a strategic lever?

And two things Sudha that came up very clearly for us, which has been pushing us to move ahead on this journey.

One, we ourselves, not just by the research that exists today and the data points that we have, but by our own experiences we realised, by having diverse perspectives, by having people who have different ways of solving things, we are able to innovate and are actually able to build programs that we would have not had built otherwise.

So, that was a learned lesson for us, and it was something that we weren't just saying because we read a research report say this, but we had five examples at Dasra where we saw this happen. And the second piece, I mean, India's social fabric is moving with a lot of layers of caste, class, gender, religion, and for us equity is the core belief, right?

It's like again, the centre of our work. And for us to bring any change, we have to solve for the structural inequities that exist in the society. And for that reason, if we have to make a change in the lives of the marginalised group, we need to start internally. We need to have them become part of the work that we're trying to do for them. So, it's a bit of like, it would be ironical if, we're saying, Oh, we want to break those inequities, but we don't start at home.

Sudha: So, I started the last question also speaking about the sector and the poor track record that it has on, DEI or equity inclusion representation.

One would assume that this would not be the case. Please, could you share your insights on what the barriers are for the social sector to be more inclusive? I mean, if you look at the statistics and if you look at just a couple of the big social sector organisations and you look at their leadership or their boards, they're clearly not representative, right?

And just having lots of women in an organisation doesn't mean anything. It doesn't show that you're inclusive or equitable unless everyone has a path to forge ahead in the organisation. What would you say are the barriers for this sector to moving in that direction. I think from my perspective, it is, they feel that they do a lot of stuff already because they are working externally with marginalized communities.

Kavneet: Yeah. I think a few things, right. One, I think first and foremost, we need to understand that the development sector is also part of what India's social fabric has right? So, it will definitely be a reflection of what is happening in India, the complexities, the challenges, the same social fabric who have these unconscious biases. Who have these you know ingrained understanding of the context or the society. So, we are all eventually part of the same social fabric and the challenges remain the same. But I think first and foremost, we also need to acknowledge and understand that the development sector is way behind in terms of the resources we have, the availability of resources we have as compared to any other sector.

The intent here of every organisation, every not-for-profit organisation is to not focus on profit, but it's to focus on bringing that change. Unfortunately, India continues to be way behind as compared to its, other countries like US and, UK, where philanthropy is way ahead on the journey and people are still giving a lot more as compared to India.

I think the resource crunch is a big factor, I feel, because if you have limited resources, it's logical that you will end up prioritizing, the programs on ground, you will look more external versus looking internal. And that comes to you only once you have reached a stage in the organisation journey where it's not a hand to mouth situation or you have, set the organisation on a path that you feel comfortable for the next five years on where the organisation is going.

I think the second thing is that, and funds is one, but also talent, right? There is not enough talent that's coming to the sector, and I have personally seen this change in the last five to seven years. Now, we get to see people who are picking social sector as a choice. And there are also a lot of myths and assumptions that, oh, you didn't get a job elsewhere, so you're joining, or you're a woman, that's why you just are picking this as a hobby.

So, there are still these stereotypes and assumptions that exist in our society which also act as a barrier for talent to come in. I think those two to me are, two of the very important things that we need to keep in mind. But apart from that, I think there is a lot of scope, and I will not, pull back on saying this, that we need to, in the sector, work more on the leadership commitment, that it has to be very clear role models. That women have to be seen and there has to be tracking and accountability, there has to be certain mechanisms, governance mechanisms in place that will hold the organisation accountable on, internal D&I aspects as well.

And thinking a little bit more of platforms, right now we do not have enough platforms where the underrepresented groups can connect with each other, can actually gain perspectives from each other and build the confidence in their own abilities. I think women, for example, I remember when I go back, when I started my career, every, every, every review I used to be told, you need be assertive, you need believe in yourself. And I agreed because, as women we're taught to not contribute to a decision that is being made at home. We're not, we're just told this is the...

116: Diversity and Inclusion in English Rugby: Conversation with Jatin Patel, Inclusion and Diversity Director RFU England

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes

Nelson Mandela famously said, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does”. There are examples the world over whether it is Cricket, Football, Athletics, Tennis ……. It brings together fans and inspires current and future generations. However, like the rest of our society and business racism and exclusion is rife in sports. The good news is that there has been a concerted effort by sportspersons, sports bodies, regulators address systemic issues in the past couple of years.

Recently, I had a wonderful opportunity to engage with Jatin Patel, to learn more about what is being done by Rugby England to bring about change. We spoke at length about the four areas of focus including i) embedding inclusion in the life cycle of employees in the org; ii) gameplay; iii) game leadership and iv) fan, followers and partners. A huge and challenging remit by any standards.

We spoke about the importance of data for building a business case in organisations; his thoughts on whether DEIB/A is really slowing down/stalling; Social mobility as one of the biggest challenges facing English Rugby; Racism at the institutional level and steps being taken to tackle the behaviour of fans and influencers; Role models; accountability and much more…….

Key takeaway, much needs to be done and nothing is going to change overnight but the collaborative approach by England Rugby, the two premierships (men's and women's premiership), as well as the rugby players association, to develop an elite game, inclusion diversity plan seems like a step in the right direction (to address root and branch).

Like to learn more, head to the links in the comments 👇🏾👇🏾

“Ultimately being in this job is about influencing. And I think a lot of leaders have realised that EDI leaders are influencers, they use knowledge and expertise and data to drive suggested ways of change, but they understand they can't do it themselves.

And I think it's that layer below where people do need more help because perhaps they've been more stretched that we need to close that gap of understanding that EDI practitioners are not there to do the job, they're there to help you and enable you to do the job, to be more inclusive, and therefore see diversity foster and succeed as a result of it.” Jatin Patel

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good afternoon, Jatin. Thank you for being a guest on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.

Jatin: My pleasure. And good morning to you Sudha good to see you.

Sudha: Good evening, actually.

Jatin: Oh, good evening. Of course, it's evening. I knew that. Good evening Sudha. Good to see you.

Sudha: Okay, so let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Jatin: Sure. So I'm Jatin Patel and I'm the Inclusion and Diversity Director at the RFU, which is the England Rugby Football Union. Been in post now just over two years and in terms of what I do, I think the simplest way of describing the way I do my role is across kind of four critical pillars.

We look at how we can build a more inclusive and diverse approach to employees on board. So the organisation, I describe that typically as your very quintessential I&D role. So everything in relation to the employee life cycle from attraction, approaches to recruitment to progression and retention of staff. And ensuring the journey for everyone is equitable, but also that we are constantly looking to diversify our staff body.

The second pillar is gameplay. So for rugby and for me, that means everything from grassroots community rugby, all the way through to the top of our senior squads, both men and women and the pathways that sit in between them. So trying to get more people playing the game understanding the experiences they're having from an inclusivity perspective and making sure that we can make them as welcoming and positive as possible. But it's not just players, it's also match officials we need more referees and there is a lot of talk about the impact on referees in rugby in particular at the moment. And also coaches. We need coaches from all different backgrounds to not only role model inclusive behaviours, but also inspire the next generation of talent from different backgrounds, becoming coaches. So that's gameplay.

The third pillar is game leadership. So we are a governing body. We have constituency bodies based around the country, pretty much reflecting different geographies. We also have a council, which is our chief decision making body, and ultimately is trying to build more inclusivity into the way they make decisions, the way they approach their respective leadership roles. But also diversify the talent pipelines behind them, so more people from different groups and backgrounds are able to become leaders themselves within the game.

And then the fourth one is fans, followers and partners. So I try to describe that as who are our fans, how do we get more of them, what is the content we're using to sell the game. So a reflective and honest picture of what the game is, but also one that entices people to want to be involved in rugby. But then also working with a lot of corporate partners. So Umbro are one of the biggest ones, they're on the front of our shirts. And we have a host of others like Honda and British Airways, etc. And working with them to align and collaborate and achieve mutually beneficial I&D objectives. They're obviously large organisations. They have a number of areas of focus for them, which similar to ours to try to scale up our objectives and ambitions, but working together to make it meaningful and cohesive. So it's quite a long explanation of what I do. But that keeps me busy most of the time.

Sudha: My God, I bet it would keep you busy. That's a huge remit. It sounds hugely challenging too. So as a second-generation British Asian, we spoke earlier at the conference when we met last year and you were speaking about, your parents, et cetera. How important is your identity to you? And what does it mean?

Jatin: Yeah, it's a really good question.

I sometimes struggle to answer it, if I'm honest, because my heritage is incredibly important me. My parents came over from India when they were very young but not very much. And so they were kind of learning the ways of being British whilst also being strongly Indian. And I was very fortunate, I was born in South London, which is a very diverse part of the country, I then spent most of my upbringing in Brighton.

And up until recently, I've always kind of struggled to kind of connect the two because Brighton's not the most ethnically diverse part of the country, but it's an incredibly liberal, wonderful place.

I was listening to a podcast the other day with Munya Chawawa, and he talks a bit about his own upbringing in Zimbabwe and then moving to Norfolk and rural Norfolk. And he kind of nailed it in a way because I kind of spent my formative years like when I was in university suddenly meeting more Asians that weren't my family and understanding a bit more of what your typical second generation experience and upbringing in Britain was like.

And so I had to kind of find that identity. But what it means to me is that I can't pretend I'm the most religious, but faith plays a big part of my culture and my family culture. It constantly drives me. I support England in every sport except cricket, because if I didn't support India cricket, I think my family would disown me.

But I think that's okay. You can straddle multiple cultural identities and still be proud of each and strongly patriotic to each. And so it means an awful lot and it's definitely defined me. But sometimes I kind of struggle to properly identify myself, if that makes sense.

Sudha: I can imagine, I struggle with it so much, so I can't imagine what that struggle is like for, the second generation. Because at some point we start looking at our roots it's not always important, but at some point it helps to us a lot of answers. And I think to make peace with who we are and what we do.

Jatin: Yeah, it's a real dichotomy if I may say that. Cause it's like, you grew up here, you're British Indian. Because of the colour of my skin, it's obvious that you're from an Asian background, and then every time I've gone back to India, not necessarily when I was younger, but when I was kind of in adulthood, you're seen as British, you're not Indian, you're British. And you kind of like, hang on, where am I meant to belong here? . And it's not a massive problems I have in life but at the same time, it does cause a little bit of a separation.

Sudha: Absolutely. Absolutely. Moving on I hear this all the time that let's make a business case. For DEIB, or DEIA, or whatever you'd like to call it. That's the first thing everybody wants to talk about. Have you not moved? Should we have not move beyond that?

Jatin: Look, I think data is important. I think building cases for change is always important.

Any person working in sort of change management needs to build cases for it. I think from a EDI perspective, I think the continued call for business cases for this agenda I think are like you say, I think are dated. I think ultimately, if you're searching for a business case to become a more inclusive organisation I think you're missing the point about what the entire agenda is about.

And for me, it's about people, it's about human beings and ensuring you can capture and engage as much talent as possible. And that requires you to look beyond your traditional lenses. And so if you need financial business cases to do that, then I think you're kind of missing the point of the fact that actually the drivers of your commercial and financial success are the people who work for you and the work that they do and then doing it to high standard.

And therefore if you're already casting a wide net in terms of talent and engaging as many diverse populations as possible and you're reaping the rewards of that, there's no need for a business case. So yeah, I think the continued ask for a business case is I think we're definitely past that.

That said, I don't think any organisation is doing this perfectly and I think sometimes the constant need to reflect on the business case sometimes creates a bit of a barrier and a blocker to actually seeing impacts and success over time. So I think we need to move, move, not move entirely away from the business case, it's important to reflect on the data and the impact that your programs are having, but move more towards what's next, how do we make sure we continue this in a sustainable way and it doesn't become just a short term project.

And unfortunately, there are organisations that do look at it as a sort of, if we do this mentoring scheme, we introduce these apprenticeships, if we do this, then we'll see some change in a short amount of time. Actually, how do you make it meaningful and strategic over time and align it to everything that your organisation is trying to achieve, rather than as a separate sort of approach or agenda or action plan or strategy that sits alongside your broader objectives.

Sudha: Yeah, because this way when you need to make a business case every year to justify your existence every year, sometimes it's the easiest thing to ask and do away with and so we segue into the next question. Do you believe that we have lost some momentum from 2020 and that progress has stalled? Because last year, we were speaking about the Kantar report and that showed that globally it was stalling.

Jatin: Yeah. And I think, so over the last couple of years, a lot of organisations, as we saw post, the horrific killing of George Floyd, the growth of the Me Too movement, we were in a very unique place globally as a result of the pandemic.

And a lot of organisations recruited ED&I practitioners new, so, and they used those instances as a large part of the narrative behind why they were doing it. And some of it was ultimately bandwagon to some extent. So if my competitors doing it or if that organisation is doing that, we need to do the same.

And in a way, it's almost built on a false premise and it kind of speaks to the cycle of the D&I issues, which have gone around for years and years and years. And it's like, you know, not to diminish what happened in 2020, nor to diminish the efforts that a lot of people in this space make. But it's almost like organisations look at it, what is the important social issue of the month or the year, and we'll focus on that in the here and now, I don't think we are necessarily across the piece losing momentum. But I think we are in another one of those challenges where we're having to justify why this work is important.

And If I go back to the point I've made previously, it's important because it's about people, it's about human beings, it's about organisational culture, it's about people driving the success of organisations, regardless of what sector you work in. And that has to be strategic and sustained over time. And so, yes, I can see organisations cutting resource or even cutting departments in this space, but they're doing so, I would say, unfairly, because the change that we as practitioners in this world are trying to drive takes time.

It doesn't happen immediately. Yeah, there are quick wins, but if all your focus is on the short term stuff, then you're just ignoring the longer systemic institutional issues that are not three years old, they are hundreds of years old in most institutions and organisations. Particularly in a country like Britain and also in the United States.

And then if you look at it from a global perspective, I think one of the challenges has always been, and you're starting to see differences here, because the growth of D& I as an agenda, and also the quality of practitioners in other parts of the world, It's very much focused on what is culturally nuanced in those respective countries, so be it in Asia, be it in Africa, be it in the Middle East, which is right.

And again, that speaks to the broader issue here, which is there is no one size fits all. There is no one approach that works for a country, let alone the organisations that are operating in those respective nations. So, yes, I can feel the pain of practitioners and I can feel that sense of momentum being lost and resources being cut. But given a secular nature of diversity and inclusion issues, there'll be no doubt, unfortunately, that something bad will happen again, and organisations will go, well, yeah, we do need to put effort and focus on this. And almost you have to, you know, to the outside world, it'll feel like you're starting again, but actually all it's doing is allowing practitioners who are doing this and been doing it for a long time to gain that buy in from their respective leaders to carry on with the work they probably set out to do much, much, much further in advance than when the issue happened itself.

Sudha: Yeah, you know, from what I've heard you speak and I've read some of the stuff you seem like a glass half full rather than glass half empty.

So you do like to see the positives also. So from that point of view, do you see that some progress has been made and that leaders can still get this back on top of the agenda.

Jatin: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are organisations, you know, large high profile organisations in multitude of sectors who are doing some incredible work.

And I think one of the really interesting things is that if you ask most, let's take corporate leaders, for example, whether ED&I is important. And actually, take sport for great example. If you speak to the leaders within our organisations, they absolutely will talk about the importance of ED&I, the importance of inclusivity, they understand the nuance of and the difference between inclusivity and diversity and the need as well. I think where some of the challenge probably remains is that, once we have more leaders openly talking about the importance of this stuff, perhaps it hasn't seeped through to those middle layers of management who actually do the day-to-day recruiting, who oversee the day to day cultures of organisations who are ultimately the gatekeepers to seeing equitable progression within organisations, et cetera.

I talked about earlier, so not to be hypocritical, but the importance of having a strategic approach is absolutely there, but then sitting behind that needs to be clear delivery plans and buy in at all levels of an organisation, it shouldn't just be the underrepresented groups through employee networks, whatever it might be, pushing from the bottom.

It can't just be the leaders at the very top because I genuinely believe that the vast majority are bought in. It's that large chunk of people in senior management positions inside organisations who, yes, they've got really busy jobs, they've got huge remits, they've got KPIs they need to hit. I get all of those things, but if they aren't enacting the behavioural changes that most ED& I practitioners are championing, if they're not doing it in a meaningful way, which is reflective and focused on their respective organisations, if they don't know the tactics they need to apply themselves and the role and responsibilities they have, that's where this stuff falls down and I'm not saying I'm doing it perfectly.

I don't think anyone has the secret sauce, but that's certainly the way I try to look at it. And it's the way, ultimately being in this job is about influencing. And I think a...

115: A conversation with Taisha Nurse, Global Senior Director, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, McDermott

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
On The Elephant in the Room podcast it has been my endeavour to spotlight leaders from the global majority. I recently had the privilege to speak with Taisha Nurse, Global Senior Director, Diversity Equity and Inclusion at McDermott. As a senior HR practitioner she has been responsible for building Centre’s of Excellence across multiple geographies before moving to her current role in 2020. A role she loves the most and believes that her various experiences have prepared her to navigate the web of challenges and opportunities she faces in the course of her work.
The focus of the conversation was on an industry well known for its lack of diversity, and to her her views a female leader on all things DEIB/A. We covered many interesting topics including
👉🏾 The challenges to finding success in her DEIB/A role in an industry that isn’t traditionally recognised for gender diversity
👉🏾 Cultural intelligence and steps to building an inclusive culture (one culture) in a global organisation
👉🏾 The role of managers and leaders in building safe work spaces
👉🏾 Her definition of leadership
👉🏾 Measurement and evaluation of DEIB/A efforts in an organisation
I name checked @Pamay Bassey when Taisha spoke about being a learner for life❤️❤️
“It's probably my most favourite job in my 20 plus years is it definitely keeps me on my toes, but it allows me to stay in the sphere of being a learner for life. Every day, I'll have a conversation, I'll read something. I'll have an experience. And I think, wow, I didn't see it from that perspective. And so it's really putting me in a very open mindset. Even though I sometimes resist it, I want to be kind of in my comfort zone, but it puts me in this open mindset to see the world through someone else's eyes, when I'm thinking of a strategy, a campaign, the training that's required, being able to sit and think, okay, this is the audience, how are they going to receive it?”
To listen to the episode, head to comments for Links 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Thank you, Taisha, for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Wonderful to have you here.
Taisha: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to today's dialogue with you.
Sudha: Brilliant. So to start with give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Taisha: So my name is Taisha Nurse.
I am currently the global senior director of diversity and inclusion at McDermott. McDermott is a global engineering procurement construction and installation organisation. So we're in energy, let's say. But my background is I have over 25 years of HR experience. I am an American born, so I started my work experience in the US. However, only worked in the US for two years, I then transferred to London, still in investment banking. I've worked in the Caribbean in telecommunications and now at McDermott in energy for the last 10 years. I've worked across most of the centres of excellences in HR. So mobility, HRAS, compensation and benefits, recruitment, and also worked as an HR generalist.
So the scope of my HR experience is quite broad, but I would probably say I'm now in my favourite, most favourite position being diversity and inclusion. And it truly takes a bit of all of my experience and combines it quite nicely to help me navigate through what I kind of see some days as a web of challenges and opportunities et cetera. So that's me in a nutshell.
Sudha: And I think you're a multi, country experience must come in really handy with a global organisation that you work in.
Taisha: Definitely. I say time and time again, diversity inclusion is not a one size fits all. And at McDermott, we have over 25 countries, we're averaging 30, 000 employees. And so it's being able to be very open to others experiences, listening very intentionally to come up with strategies that will work for that particular market.
Sudha: So how easy or difficult has it been to succeed as a DEI leader in an industry that isn't traditionally recognised for diversity or gender diversity. The industry isn't really known for being a very inclusive industry.
Taisha: So I will say my organisation, we would say we're very diverse. Again, working across over 25 different countries and diversity is measured across many, many dimensions, as we know. I would say from a gender perspective their scope to improve. But when you look at the nature of the business being engineering, being construction, you don't find many women even leaving their undergraduate studies or even in their secondary education going into STEM studies. So as an organisation, we really need to look at establishing partnerships all the way down to perhaps secondary schooling to get more women into this type of industry.
We're never going to achieve 50/50. It just doesn't exist in the market. But like I said there's opportunities to improve. I think as a DE & I leader. I have been successful because we know that the world is changing and the market is changing and the industry is changing. And there is a focus on diversity and inclusion.
We have a function of DE&I and I work very closely with top leadership to say, what does our strategy need to be to continue to celebrate our diversity and bring more diversity into the organisation, but also to be inclusive. And all organisations want to be inclusive. That's effectively where everyone feels valued, respected and recognised.
And so even though I sit as a DE& I lead, it's my challenge perhaps, what's perhaps difficult is trying to make that everyone's responsibility, not just mine. I can't be accountable to being an inclusive and diverse leader for such a big organisation. And so It's being able to create a message that resonates with every single employee that they realise that I can contribute to creating more diversity and also inclusion within the organisation.
So those are, the big pieces, but I think as a DE&I leader in the industry, it's not as challenging perhaps in the past because the focus is growing and the understanding is also more clear to all leaders and throughout the world. So it's one step at a time. I always say it's a journey. It's going to take time, but we're getting there.
Sudha: Yeah, I think the important thing is that you get started and you recognise that this is critical for the business. So if you're on that journey, it's brilliant. We spoke about this in the first question that you worked across multiple geographies and that sort of is definitely a superpower. It gives you an understanding of cultures, etc.
As a global organisation, you said you're present in 25 countries, 30, 000 employees on an average. How do you go about creating an inclusive culture or one culture that everybody strives for?
Taisha: It's challenging because I think, also the dynamics of our workforce is very different.
So not only do we have our office-based staff, who I probably spent a lot of time trying to educate, raise self-awareness, run campaigns, and really engage that population. We also have probably over 15, 000 employees working in fabrication yards. And so these are our blue-collar workers. I can't get them all in a room and do training.
We also have employees on vessels, we work offshore. And so they're doing rotations where they live and work on a vessel. And so how do you tap into that culture? And then we have project sites in some of the most remote locations. And so an inclusive culture and creating one is a challenge because it's again, not a one-size-fits-all in terms of how do we do that in some of these different locations.
However, what we're trying to drive is a McDermott culture. And so we tap into what are our values? What is the culture that we want everyone to experience irrespective of where you're sitting on this planet. And so it's looking at what are our values, it's educating our leadership on inclusive leadership behaviours.
So they're adopting it into their language into their day to day behaviours, into their decision making. So that takes time because effectively what we're doing is saying when you walk through McDermott's doors, this is how we want you to show up as an employee, as a leader. This is the experience we want you to have.
And so, by definition of inclusion, we want you to feel that you can bring your whole self to work, that you feel that we value and respect you, that we celebrate your uniqueness, which is your diversity. And ultimately we want you to be successful in the work that you do.
And so is it a big challenge? I think yeah, just organisational culture on the whole is going to be a challenge. But the inclusion part of course has its own challenges. But it's every day, one of our values is 'One Team’. And so it's breaking down what does that ‘One Team’ then mean when we think about inclusion, and how do we make sure that we're getting the best from our people.
So creating it is setting it at the top, they must live it, breathe it, exemplify it. And then pushing it down and teaching others, what does that look like in your day to day interactions?
Sudha: Yeah, sounds like a huge, huge task I can't imagine it being easy and it must require a lot of engagement and coordination with leadership and of course different teams and functional heads and countries.
Taisha: I mean, a part of the role, especially this year, that we've looked at doing a lot of cross-functional collaborations. So we're working with our ethics and compliance. We're working with our quality, health, and safety. We're working with communications. We're working with sustainability and social governance.
We work with our leadership and so it's looking at how do we drive this message? We work across all of the HR areas to make sure that the message is embedded in everything that we do.
Sudha: Yeah. It's a huge task nonetheless.
And how important is cultural intelligence for your employees and leaders in today's world?
Taisha: Well, cultural intelligence pretty much sits as our business strategy. So just to take a step back at McDermott, we operate as a ‘MOPEX’, which is a multi office project execution organisation. So that means we can have a project where the project director may sit in the US, the engineering is going to be done out of India. The fabrication may take place in the Middle East, or let's say Indonesia, and you have individuals supporting from anywhere in the world. And so sometimes we work off this basis that we've brought the best resources together across the world. We threw them onto one team, and so they're gonna have the same working styles, speak the same way, communicate effectively and as that is so far from the truth.
So as a part of our strategy, probably for the last two or so years, is looking at how do we build cultural intelligence, cultural agility in our managers, so that they can flex their style of communication, so that they can flex their working styles to accommodate different cultures.
And. It's working well. Of course, it's not intuitive, if you have someone that is very different from your style, even if they're from the same culture, that has its own challenges. Now imagine you're working with different time zones, even language could be different. It's going to be challenging. But we need to have cultural intelligence in order to have successful project execution.
That's how we function. That's a part of our success.
Sudha: Yeah. and the model that you said that you have as an organisation, that means that this is just an imperative. So the definition of leadership, since I was a young person has changed dramatically, even in the last 10 years or in the last three years or post-COVID, Black Lives Matter, the definition of leadership has changed dramatically with all that has happened in the world.
And it's, moved on, I think, from where it was about command and control. What does leadership mean to you?
Taisha: I think leadership it has transformed. And I believe it's starting at a much earlier stage. So we have a younger generation coming out of university and they feel they are leaders. So it's not being linked to perhaps work experience. It's not linked to age. It can be thought leadership. It can be individual contributors that are leaders.
And I think if I go back to how you and perhaps myself, how we experienced leadership, it was authoritative. It was driven by age. It was hierarchical. It was based on being very technical in your experience. And what we're seeing is this huge shift to being collaborative, very much people oriented.
The softer skills are taking precedence. So we have a lot of conversations around being an empathetic leader. How do you coach as a leader, being inclusive, being flexible and adaptable. And I think for some of the leaders that I know, this is huge that if I say, be empathetic, they're looking at me with cross eyes, be compassionate, they're like, what are you talking about?
But that's the expectation from a new generation coming out that my leader, is not going to be hierarchical, that I can voice my thoughts and that we can collaborate, even though I may not have as much experience. I have knowledge and I have ideas and the thought is that should be embraced. And so I think you're seeing yeah, this definite shift in leadership to the softer side. And I think that goes sometimes a little further than the technical leadership that we know because if you're very agile and you can learn things and you can lead people not necessarily processes, that takes you a lot further than just being very technical in your in your leadership style.
So, yes, it's changing, but I think, there's some gaps in us being able to move a previous generation into this leadership style that I think is going to take time.
Sudha: Yeah, I think there is some resistance and reluctance.
Taisha: Yes still, even though we can say leadership has shifted, it's more softer still, compassionate, empathetic leadership, being able to actively listen and relate to employees. We know that is the way forward, but yeah, there's definitely resistance from previous perhaps generations. And saying, well, we're just here to get the work done, just do it.
Sudha: You can't win them all, yeah. So, leadership and people in supervisory roles have a very critical role to play in creating inclusive and safe workspaces. Why is psychological safety critical to workplace inclusion? So we spoke about how we experienced leadership or how we experienced workplaces. And what was yesterday doesn't have to be today. So I guess the changes for were good, but what are your thoughts on this?
Taisha: Yeah, so when I think about individuals in these roles, they have a duty of care to create an inclusive and a safe workspace and the nature of McDermott's work where we're working in fabrication yards, safety is paramount. But I think in previous years, we spoke about physical safety.
And what we realise is that psychological safety is actually linked to physical safety. So when we talk about creating these safe workspaces, it's beyond physical. It's psychological where employees feel they can speak up. They can share their thoughts and opinions if it differs from status quo, that if they see something going wrong, not being done properly that they can raise the flag immediately and in our case be able to stop work.
But that comes with a level of, there'll be no retribution, I will not be penalised, that this is an environment where my thoughts, my ideas, my voice is actually welcomed. And if you don't have an inclusive and safe workspace, things can go very awry. And so what we're pushing is that we need to really start focusing on how do we build psychological safety, and that's down to your people in leadership, they have to start with demonstrating behaviours and that mindset that we want you to speak up, that we value your opinion.
It's not this hierarchical, do as I say, we need to expand that. And the younger generation will not tolerate.
Sudha: No, they won't. They just won't.
Taisha: No. They're not gonna come to a work environment that's not inclusive and that's not a safe workspace. So, it's really important and it's quite interesting to see the research and the conversations really starting to shift around psychological safety and how do you create that and how it impacts the overall work environment.
Sudha: Yeah, I think it's a part of the older health and safety thing, which is just brought to include, this very, very, very critical for successful workplaces. Do you believe Taisha that, it's important to regularly measure and evaluate the work that's been done in the DEIB space and organisations? Because a lot of organisations speak about this. So there's a lot of talk that's happening but not everybody can stand that scrutiny and that's why probably measurement or accountability is essential. What are your thoughts on this?
Taisha: I mean, we definitely have to evaluate. Measuring tangible measurements are probably a little more challenging in the DEIB space. But definitely being able to tap in with engagement surveys spot polls to understand how are your initiatives landing. I think in kind of the DE&I space, it's absolutely imperative, because sometimes the dialogue, or if...

114: Steps to building an inclusive recruitment process, with Rohan Shah, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Ruben Sinclair

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 03:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
People recruit people from the industry, but also people who look like them, behave like them, are from a similar background, use a similar language... Would you agree?
If this is the reality, the question is how important is inclusive recruitment for the PR industry or businesses in general? And what does 'inclusive' recruitment actually mean? What can organisations do to break the cycle of systemic exclusion and homophiliy? Move from being performative to truley transformative??
Rohan Shah, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Ruben Sinclair, and I had an interesting conversation about all things inclusive recruitment and more. We also spoke about 👇🏾
👉🏾 The role of technology/Data in creating fairer and more inclusive recruitment processes
👉🏾 Inclusive job adverts, structured job interviews, pre-determined questions and clear evaluation critera
👉🏾 Ensuring candidates are evaluated on the basis of skill sets and competencies rather than personal information
👉🏾 Back to work, future of work
👉🏾 The Elephant in the room for the recruitment industry - that leaders don't really get involved with the recruitment process
👉🏾 His belief that to have a truly inclusive recruitment process, a company's employee value proposition (EVP) should allow for radical flexibility. What does radical flexibility mean?
"I think it's easy enough to have people acknowledge the importance of, strategic and inclusive approach to recruitment, but it can seem very difficult to actually get people to actually, genuinely adopt it. I think that's more so because when they realise the work, the time, but also the cost associated with it. You can slowly see this barrier going up between sort of saying it's important and actually doing something about it. Do people understand the importance? Yes, Are they always adopting it on the whole, I don't think they are, and if they do adopt it, do they generally get a specialist in to help them? I don't think that's always the case."
Rohan Shah
Head to the podcast to listen 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Good morning, Rohan. Wonderful to meet you again after a couple of weeks
Rohan: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, Sudha.
Sudha: So let's start with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Rohan: Sure. Okay. So I'm Rohan, I'm responsible along with my business partner for the overall growth and direction of Reuben Sinclair, which is your traditional recruitment consultancy. But also RS Engage, which is very much a HR and talent management consultancy on the recruitment agency side. We have a vision to introduce exceptional PR, marketing sales and digital professionals to businesses around the world, whilst also changing that sort of traditional recruitment practice.
And on the RS engage side we have specialist HR consultants go out and advise small to medium enterprises on their HR practices, but also put in place specific practical work for them, but also help a number of global clients transform their talent acquisition and sort of retention strategies with a particular focus on inclusive and accessible recruitment.
Sudha: That's interesting. So how did you get into recruitment? How does one get into recruitment?
Rohan: It's the same as many in recruitment. I simply fell into it to be totally frank. Well at university I studied accounting and finance. That was more to please my parents than myself. And you know, I think, I was in year two of my degree and after quite an honest and probably upsetting discussion with my parents, I took the decision to drop out, I just simply wasn't enjoying accounting and finance.
Despite the fact, actually I do quite a bit of it now for my own business, I actually quite enjoy it. But, you know, my dream at the time was to pursue a passion in performing arts. I loved sort of the theatrical elements, I love sort of dancing, singing not so much, I wasn't very good at that.
But yeah, at the time, that's what I wanted to do, I looked at various drama schools and, you know, I needed some money to pay for that. And I was speaking to a friend down at my tennis club at the time, and he was in recruitment and he said to me, look, why don't you come and do recruitment for six months, earn a bit of money and then go to drama school.
So I thought, yeah, why not? But once I get into something, you know, I want to give everything that I've got, you know, there's no point in doing it half heartedly. So I went to recruitment, I gave it everything I had. Maybe I found that sometimes I was acting on the phone and I just thought, you know what, I'm actually quite enjoying this. I think the money was an attraction as well, at that point in time, I was quite young and I didn't have a lot of it at the time. And when I started earning, I just thought, well, this is great. And that's it, here I am, nearly 20 years later.
Sudha: You know, well laid plans of mice and men. Yeah, but I'm disappointed to hear that you didn't pursue the performing arts.
It's something probably you should give a thought to. So I'd say like as an Indian parent, I think, I feel that I've been very liberal, but I didn't actively encourage my kids to pursue the arts and especially my oldest kid. But she's in marketing, she passed out of Cambridge and is doing extremely well. But she took up improv a couple of years back and she's enjoying it so much. And I'm just saying it because you spoke about performing arts. I think it's something you should give it a try.
Rohan: It's interesting actually, I did a comedy course not too long ago, probably about a couple of years ago, which was so interesting. I was at a speaking event and I spoke to the keynote speaker after, and I said what was the one thing you did to sort of enhance your public speaking? And he said, look, the best advice I'd give you is go on a comedy course.
I thought, oh, you know what, this might be quite fun. It was the hardest thing I've done in a long time. I had to get up and do a five minute comedy set at the end of it which was great fun, but really tough. I think at the time, I also used to love doing magic, like magic was a real passion. And actually, when I got the job, I'd just got entry as an associate member of the Magic Circle, and I had to go to lectures every Monday, which were in Euston. And if I even dreamt about leaving my desk at 6:30 PM to try and get to Euston, the company would just look at me and think, where are you going? What time do you call this? And so it became really hard for me to go to lectures.
And in a way, what you say about, pursuing the passion, that was one of the things, I think my old recruitment company simply took away something I was really passionate about because I just couldn't keep up with it. And when we started Reuben Sinclair, one of the things that we did say was we'll never really steal anyone's passion. If someone has a passion, then commit to it, go to it, don't worry about finishing work at a certain time.
Go out and pursue it because, yeah, that's one thing I do regret that I never kept up with magic as much as, I would have wanted to.
Sudha: Oh, but that's amazing that you're enabling other people within the organisation to do that, because I think people are still worried when they come into workplaces or are working remotely, whether they can log off to do something else.
So that's really nice.
Rohan: Yeah, we actively push, you know, people's passion and how they keep up with it.
Sudha: Since the time it's been 20 years, especially in the last three years, how has the recruitment space changed or evolved?
Rohan: You know, that's a really good question.
I think in some ways it had actually in some ways, no. I think surprisingly the things that are still quite the same is generally the external process in the way people still recruit. So, you know, people still write a job advert, they review a CV, they'll arrange an interview, they'll do a first interview, maybe a second, maybe a third, and then they offer a role, and I think, if you think about that process, certainly well documented that Leonardo da Vinci was the first person, I think to write a resume in like 1480s. And not much has changed since then.
So of course there's different ways now, obviously there's the digital element. You might be doing some video CVs online and so forth, but you know, there's things that are going back 500 odd years and they're still exactly the same, which is really surprising to me, but in terms of recruitment and what we actually do internally, what has changed is the technology and the attraction and searching the candidate.
As well as the way in which we develop new clients and new business. Ultimately though, it's still very much based on the same principles. I think it's a lot more data driven now than it was, you know, 15 years ago. And obviously a lot more is more automated rather than having to go through Rolodex or faxing over certain information and so forth.
So, I think where there's been a real shift. in recruitment, specifically what we do is what is probably known as the embedded model. Which is very much what RS Engage actually does today. You know, this basically allows one of our specialist recruiters to sit on site and work for the client as their own in house talent manager, utilising the sort of expertise and technologies and all of the resources of a recruitment agency and within the agency that we have. So actually you're getting a recruitment agency sitting on site working on your behalf as your own. I think that's really evolved in the way companies have recruited. I think this method actually works really well for businesses that, you know, they're looking to scale and you don't have to be hiring a ridiculous amount of people every year.
I think if you're hiring say five or six people per year and that maybe includes churn then actually utilising this method, you'll see sort of a real considerable time and cost saving. But also I think it goes beyond just finding people for a specific vacancy.
You know, we then start to look at, like I mentioned, obviously data is really important. We start to look at data behind the talent attraction, the numbers of how many people, your business are attracting, the demographics of those people. What does your hiring process look like? Is it fair and is it inclusive? That actually starts from the attraction stage, but then also the retention of people joining your organisation but leaving there's, fundamentally something else that needs to be addressed. And I think all of this encompasses that sort of core principle of a fair and inclusive recruitment and I'd say that recruitment has really tried to develop itself and evolve itself in making sure that recruitment practices are fair. But I do think actually on this, generally in recruitment, it's a low barrier to entry, I think everyone knows that. And I think businesses today, there's a real responsibility for businesses to vet their recruiters properly, ask them the right questions, ask them the hard questions, challenge them on what they're using to find candidates and so forth. And I think you'll very quickly come to realise the ones who have capabilities and the ones that don't.
Sudha: So Rohan, would you say you're able to influence how they think or to broaden their thought process on the journey of recruitment, because it's not just one thing. How difficult or easy it is to get clients to adopt some of the new things that you are suggesting, whether it is technology or whatever, in order to be more strategic, but also to be more inclusive in how they're recruiting their talent?
Rohan: Yeah. Okay. That's a great question, Sudha. I think it's easy enough to have people acknowledge the importance of, strategic and inclusive approach to recruitment, but it can seem very difficult to actually get people to actually, genuinely adopt it. I think that's more so because when they realise the work, the time, but also the cost associated with it, you know, you can slowly see this barrier going up between sort of saying it's important and actually doing something about it.
I think we do influence how people think, some more so than others, but do they always get a specialist to help them implement an inclusive approach? I would say majority of the time, no, and actually that's because I think recruitment or recruitment strategies or recruitment principles, however you might want to look at it, is viewed as something that is It's quite straightforward.
Now, I'm not saying that recruitment strategy or recruitment is rocket science by any stretch. It's certainly not. But I do think it's how people view you know, maybe painting and decorating. I know i'm comparing decorating to recruitment, but most of the time people will say they can do it themselves.
And if they don't, it's generally because it's time associated. So it's easy to just get someone else to do it. But when you get a specialist to do it, the difference is always so visible. and, you know, it's so noticeable because it's a genuine skill set that's been adopted and practiced and perfected over time.
My job, is always to ask the right questions and to challenge in the right places. But I can't force people, but I will always try to have them think about strategic and inclusive recruitment process and the importance of doing it properly because, just like the painting and decorating, cracks will begin to appear very quickly and imperfections will stand out when the lights are on.
So I think, do people understand the importance? Yes. Are they always adopting it on the whole, I don't think they are, and if they do adopt it, do they generally get a specialist in to help them? I don't think that's always the case.
Sudha: Yeah, like you said, it's not rocket science, but it is one of the most important steps to building a great organisation. And I don't think people are thinking that they need to spend money on it, because essentially, when you talk about time, it also means money and resources, right?
Rohan: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, time is definitely money. I think generally, when you've actually got someone's time, they probably are more likely to go on and spend the money.
But like I say, I think generally when you've got the time, I think people are very eager to learn. And to take a lot of information and then when they've got some, but not all the information, because, if you went into it into real detail, you'd be there, for a whole week. When they've got enough information, I think it's that point of which they then start to go, well, actually, we could do some of this ourselves. And you know what, they probably can. And they do, and some do it really well. But I think actually asking the right questions and challenging themselves in the right way isn't necessarily what they might be doing.
Sudha: Yeah, that's true. So for organisations that want to do the right thing, what are the steps that they can take to reduce biases in shortlist selection, interview processes, especially, how can they use new technology.
Rohan: But I think in terms of reducing biases, there are so many, I mean, you know, there are over sort of 13 different hiring biases that will happen in the recruitment process. And the way to go about this is to eliminate as many hiring biases as possible.
You know, we are human beings, things happen unconsciously, we need to put steps and technology in place to help us reduce layers of bias. First off, I think it's important to state that addressing bias in the hiring process is a consistently ongoing effort. It's got to be continuously looked at, but look, I think for me there are so many ways of addressing hiring biases and eliminating layers, I think, you know. We've got a list as part of RS Engage and I think there's around sort of 18, 19 different things that organisations can do on an ongoing basis. But I won't go through all of those, but to name a few, first and foremost, if you haven't started with training and educating your staff that's really important.
Provide sort of unconscious bias training, diversity and inclusion training to everyone involved in the hiring process, including the recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, make sure they understand the importance of a fair, inclusive practice. I think the second way is using structured interviews, implementing something that's very structured to the process with predefined questions and a clear evaluation criteria.
This helps standardise sort of the process and reduces the influence of the personal biases that go on. I think it's important to make people feel welcome in an interview. But reducing and not necessarily having a lot of small chat, you know, as I say, it is important because that then starts to lead on to certain biases kicking in.
But it's still important to keep a friendly process. You talked about technology. I think it's really important to leverage technology particularly things like xxxxxxxx contracting systems and AI powered screening tools. Like, you know, I think these things can help in various different ways, you can anonymise resumes and applications. You can ensure that candidates are evaluated based on skill sets and competencies rather than sort of personal information, for example, which companies they've worked for or which universities they studied at, you know, so technology can really help you leverage doing that element of anonymising CVs. The other thing I think is best important is diverse interview panels. So creating interview panels that include individuals from a variety of background, you know, having different perspectives can really help in making more...

113: The transformational power of 'Cultural Intelligence' in driving behaviour change and actions: Ritika Wadhwa, Founder Prabhaav Global

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
The Elephant in the Room podcast was in hibernation in December and January. We are back this week with our first episode of the year with the indomitable Ritika Wadhwa. Ritika Wadhwa is a strategic advisory board member for British Transport Police, is a Fellow at the Society of Leadership Fellows, Windsor Castle, a Board Director and Trustee of the 5% club. But, above all of that she is an accomplished, kind and hugely generous person - opening up her networks to all who need it (including me). There is a beautiful story behind the name of her consultancy Prabhaav Global and also her brand colours (listen to the podcast to know more).
She is one of the many people I follow on LinkedIn and early last year I invited her to be a guest on my podcast. By the time we actually recorded the podcast episode it was October (I think) - the timing was perfect though. She had taken a proverbial leap of faith and launched her consultancy Prabhaav Global - on a mission to cultivate cultural intelligence amongst individuals and organisations. When we finally caught up we spoke about cultural intelligence, her journey to entrepreneurship, working with a global brand like ASOS, intent and impact, culture and identity, leadership and much much more……
“When I decided to call it Prabhaav Global, a lot of people were giving me their feedback to say, why make it difficult? And I said, difficult for who? Because Prabhaav speaks to me. Prabhav means impact in Hindi. And that’s what I want to do. That’s me, that’s my identity. That’s my language. And I’m done with fitting in. I’m done with trying to be someone I’m not yet again. So I said, that’s it. I’m going to call it Prabhaav Global. The colours of the company are going to be turmeric because I love yellow. It’s my favourite spice and turmeric is the spice that transforms everything that it touches, thats I want to achieve through Prabhaav Global, transformational leadership, transformational behaviours” Ritika Wadhwa
Like to know more, head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Episode transcript
Sudha: Good afternoon, Ritika. Wonderful to have you as a guest today on The Elephant in the Room podcast. Thank you for being here.
Ritika: You’re most welcome. Thank you for having me, Sudha. This has been something that I have been excited to be on for a while.
Sudha: Yeah, we’ve been planning this for some time. So to start with can you give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do?
Ritika: Sure. So I am Ritika Wadhwa. I am the CEO and founder of Prabhaav Global. Prabhaav means impact in Hindi and that’s what I’m here for, impact, impactful work and using the transformative power of cultural intelligence for impactful leadership.
Besides that, I also sit on the strategic advisory board of British Transport Police. I’m a leadership fellow at Windsor Castle and also a trustee at the 5 percent Club. All of this to say that really grateful to be here on this conversation with you talking about everything that we’re going to talk about and I’m excited about that.
Sudha: Brilliant. So how and when did you decide to focus on cultural intelligence? Was it, a natural pathway to the work that you were doing because I’ve seen you’ve had varied experience or did you just wander into it, you know, and you were good at it.
Ritika: Oh, I don’t know about good. It’s definitely been a journey.
So I was born and brought up in India, let’s start from there. Born and brought up in India in a very sort of strict patriarchal society and community structure. I then moved to the UK to do my MBA and along the way, you know, until we’ve got to this point, I have worked and studied and lived in three continents.
So when COVID hit and I was sort of going from one job to the next until that point. When COVID hit, it almost felt like I know what I don’t want to do, but I don’t know what I want to do, if that makes sense. So I was very clear about the job that I was in at that point was not something that was serving me and I didn’t see it serving me for the rest of my career.
So I went on a coaching journey to really unpack who I was, what I wanted to do from life, because as an Indian woman, it’s almost as if you never ask that question, you get on with life. You get on with doing the duties as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister, as a wife, as you know, all of that.
And your career is there somewhere in the way for various reasons, but it’s not something that you think about too much or give it the importance that you should probably. So I gave it the importance that it deserves at that point in my life. And I went on that coaching journey, unraveled what was important to me, what my transferable skills were and what I wanted to do for the remaining part of my career, because all said and done, we are doing a job, whether that’s eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, a core part of our life is working.
So for me, the question was, how can I sit back for a second and really do what I want to do because I’m going to give this the time anyway. So in that coaching journey DEI came out, diversity, equity, inclusion came out as a passion, rightly so, because as an immigrant, as a woman of colour living in the UK, who’s been born and brought up in India, this is something that I was very passionate about.
And then I saw the job ad for Cultural Intelligence Center and I applied and got the job. The thing that called me towards cultural intelligence was the fact that here’s a framework that actually makes people accountable for behaviour change. And that’s what I was interested in. I’m interested in actions and behaviour change rather than training courses that people go into and are not accountable for that behaviour change.
And so cultural intelligence almost called me and it was meant to be and I started working for them as director of operations more than a couple of years ago, got promoted to chief operating officer while I was with them and cultural intelligence has been since then a core of what I do and how I intend to change the world.
Sudha: Wow, that sounds absolutely incredible. You’ve said that we don’t normally spend anytime thinking about where we want to go and where we are on the journey and where we’d like to go and what the next 10 years, what would I like to be doing for that period of time.
You launched your company Prabhav Global. I saw, your posts on LinkedIn and I heard from our conversations. You are very passionate about the name, about what you’re setting out to do. So you’re new to the entrepreneurial journey, but how has the journey been? And I recently also saw on LinkedIn that you won xxxxxx xxxxxxx as a client. So massive congratulations. And tell us a bit about this journey.
Ritika: Yeah, thank you. Fascinating, right? If someone would have told me, even in March this year, that you would be setting up your own organisation, I wouldn’t have believed them.
No way. Because I’ve been on a salary for 30 years. And as much as the rest of my family is filled with entrepreneurs I never thought that I would be one of them because the job security, especially if you have a young family, it’s really important. And I thought, you know what you do your job, you get your salary, you give your best to the job you have.
And then, you know, the times that you fall sick, et cetera, et cetera, you just think the entrepreneur way sounds really risky. But this time round, it almost felt like something in the higher powers was pushing me towards that, the way things unraveled it almost felt like this is what’s meant to be at this point in time. So literally I just decided to set up the company, give it my all for as long as I can afford to and see where it goes. The underlying factor that pushed me towards being an entrepreneur was, hey, bet on yourself. It’s fine. Just believe in yourself and bet on yourself fully and wholly and see where it goes.
So I set up Prabhav and you’re right, even when I decided to call it Prabhaav Global, a lot of people were giving me their feedback to say, why make it difficult? And I said, difficult for who? Because Prabhaav speaks to me. Prabhaav means impact in Hindi. And that’s what I want to do. That’s me, that’s my identity. That’s my language. And I’m done with fitting in. I’m done with trying to be someone I’m not yet again. So I said, that’s it. I’m going to call it Prabhaav Global. The colours of the company are going to be turmeric because I love yellow. It’s my favourite spice and turmeric is the spice that transforms everything that it touches, thats I want to achieve through Prabhaav Global, transformational leadership, transformational behaviours.
And so it’s been a very fascinating journey. It’s only three and a half months. So far, and I have learned more than I’ve learned any time in my life before. Thanks to amazing people like yourself, who I have come across along the way, who have been just God sent, right. Right from some of the introductions you’ve made, Sudha to just being around for conversations. I’ve been really lucky to have people like yourself in this journey so far that doesn’t make it feel lonely, that when I’m feeling down, I know I can pick up the phone and talk to people to go, okay, oh my God, right. What do I do with this next? And people that have been on the journey a lot longer than I have, they are willing to share.
And that’s beautiful. Those people that I’ve met along in the last 3, 4 months, that have taught me some, shared with absolute generosity, with not a competitive spirit, but just a generous spirit of wanting to see each other do well because we’re on the same journey, we’re on the same path, really wanting to get the same outcomes.
And so that generosity of spirit has been absolutely beautiful. I still, worry about a lot of things in life, but I somehow do not worry that much about business. Because again, I have been put on this path by higher powers. So I, believe that the higher powers will look after me. And at the end of the day, it’s work, you know, it’s work, it’ll all work out.
Sudha: And I think you’ve been amazingly generous. I have seen the kind of generosity that you yourself extend to others. And the wonderful network of people around you and how generous you are to open up that network to anyone, including to me.
So I’m sure, there are people who know that and good things definitely have an impact and make an impact on people. And there is definitely a snowballing effect on that.
What would your advice be Ritika to organisations who are getting on this journey? Why is cultural intelligence important for them, what are the three or four things that they can start with?
Ritika: So I just think that it’s a no brainer. And I say it’s a no brainer because look at the way the world is rapidly changing around us, look at even right now what’s going on with the division around the world that is causing havoc everywhere.
It’s heartbreaking, really, that humanity is going after each other in such a sorry and a sad way. So I feel from that context, it’s almost a no brainer that we have to find ways to find more that is common between us than there isn’t and cultural intelligence is one way that does that. There’s also the fact that the world is globalised because of digitalisation, because of social media.
We’ve all come closer together in a way. Those boundaries have become less and less pronounced. I also want to say, you know, what does AI mean for us as humans? And as we grow what does that mean for our roles in the future? 5 Years, 10 years from now, what is this all going to unveil?
So, with so much ifs, in the world around us right now, I think cultural intelligence is an absolutely needed skill that individuals and organisations need to develop, must develop, have to develop, in order to even sustain themselves, in order to survive, in order to have a competitive edge. You just have to learn how to work with people.
And so I just want to step back a little bit, cultural intelligence then is the ability to work with people that are different from us. It’s an ability that we can all develop, a skill that we can all develop, and a skill that, as I’ve said, is extremely much needed in the current context of the world that we operate in.
So my advice to organisations that are starting on the journey is, first of all, congratulations to consider starting on the journey, that’s the first step, and then the cultural intelligence framework itself unveils what are the three or four things. So the CQ drive, for example, the reason why we need to work with people that are different from us.
CQ knowledge, how do we gather information about people that are different from us? CQ strategy, how do we plan to work with people that are different from us? And CQ action, how do we actually work? How do we use that knowledge? How do we use that planning and the purpose to work with people that are different from us?
And so really, in a nutshell, the advice is to absolutely get on that journey and stay the path because it’s like anything else, you’re not going to be able to develop a sense of intelligence or anything else over one workshop. It’s a commitment to stay on that journey.
It’s that persistence to stay on the journey. And this is why the first, the most important thing that organisations and individuals have to unveil is why should they go on that journey. Because if your why and your purpose is clear for any journey in life, but specifically as you go towards something that might be uncomfortable, then it’s really important in order to stay persistent and confident on that journey, you have to be clear about your why.
Sudha: Yeah, that’s so true, Ritika. You spoke about digitalisation, you spoke about, the world coming closer together. And also, we live in a divided world, organisations are working with diverse teams across geographies. And people want to be treated fairly, they don’t want people in or Europe, or, UK dictating to employee groups in Asia or Africa about, and not actually treating them equal to themselves. So I think, yeah, definitely as a way forward, it’s something that people need to do. You’ve written an article about intent and impact. Tell us something about it. So impact is critical, definitely from your perspective.
Ritika: So before I go to intent and impact, you mentioned something really interesting there, that employee groups and people around the world work differently and it’s important to understand that.
So there’s that aspect of global diversity, right? How does the nationality affect who we are and our cultural values and how we like to be spoken to or treated or respected, et cetera, but then within the context of cultural intelligence, there’s also domestic diversity, which can very much show up in generational differences.
What you just mentioned around, the generational culture of…. I was speaking to someone recently who’s a millennial and she said to me, we are trying to work with a system that wasn’t built for us to succeed.
Sudha: Yeah, true.
Ritika: How do I work with this system without being called lazy or impatient, et cetera, because I just can’t be bothered to stay and try and work through a system that wasn’t built for us in the first place.
And those systems and policies and procedures that have been around decades. Some organisations are doing it better than others, where you sit back and you go, well, this isn’t serving us anymore, how do we change it? And so that’s all part of the cultural intelligence work.
So I just wanted to mention that before……
Sudha: That’s very critical thanks for sharing. Yeah.
Ritika: Intent and impact. So where this has all come from is when I moved to the UK 20 something years ago, my accent was mocked terribly. I had a very, very Indian accent. I still do, but then it was even more pronounced. And my first workplace. I was surrounded by people that would say my name wrong, say the words that I couldn’t say in the British way. And what that did over a period of time is that it really brought my confidence down. Although, in India, I had been taught the Queen’s English, history, geography, maths, whatever it was, all the topics were taught in English.
We had an elective Hindi, but it was English and the language that I thought in, was questioned. My ability to speak that language correctly was questioned in the first few years that I was here in the UK. Now, if I go back to those same people and said, did you intend for me to feel like that?
They will probably absolutely say no. That was not, we were just having fun and you know, it was just part of xxxxxxxxx together, et cetera, et cetera. But the impact of that on me was awful. And so I’ve reached a place in my life as an immigrant, ethnic minority, woman of colour, etc, to go, I genuinely don’t care what your intent is, because it’s invisible to me.
a) I can’t see it, until it turns into an action that has an impact on me. So when people get people’s names wrong or say things because it’s banter or, you know, sorry, I didn’t know, that’s fine. But what is the impact of that on the marginalised communities? And that’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the impact first.
I’m interested in making people accountable for that impact. Really, there is no excuse anymore to ask the type of questions people ask because there’s enough resources out there. There’s enough knowledge out there for people to really get their head. That doesn’t mean people can’t be curious.
Not everybody knows about everything. So, of course, there is a place for curiosity. But again, what is the impact? How is it that you’re positioning your curiosity? So, this is why I’m interested, of course, there’s a place for the fact that I intended to cause you harm and I’ve caused you harm, versus I didn’t intend to you harm and I have and I apologise for...

112: The trailblazers fostering an inclusive culture: In conversation with Nicky Regazzoni and George Blizzard, Co-Founders, The PR Network

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 06:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:
I talk a lot about women, mothers/carers, mid-career professionals, and leadership. Of course, these are intersecting identities that coalesce at different points in life to create additional barriers for working women. We are not even talking about race, disability, ethnicity, ageism etc. And I talk about these issues because I was squeezed out of what I thought should have been a fulfilling career. What happened to me, does not have to happen to others, and so the aspiration is to get women to understand where the barriers may lie and be more intentional about their journey. For my part, would it have helped if there were more women in leadership at the time, women for whom their careers were as important as their personal lives? I definitely think so.
I wish I had known a lot of the women, I know now - at that time. Amongst those who have been an inspiration for me in my second innings as the founder of a purpose led consultancy are Nicky Regazzoni and Georgina Blizzard 👩‍💻 of The PR Network. So, I was delighted when they agreed to be guests on The Elephant in the Room podcast.
Both, Nicky and George are trail blazers championing flexible, remote working and job shares when they set up The PR Network 18 years ago. That The PR Network is a B-Corp and thriving says something about the model (family first) - that it works. At a time when women are still struggling to find support and balance or make it to leadership positions - The PR Network is a testament to their belief in the model. In the world we inhabit today (back to controlling location and time), we definitely need more role models and allies who have the bravery and imagination to do things differently - if we want women to thrive.
Massive congratulations to both Georgina Blizzard 👩‍💻 and Nicky Regazzoni, for winning the inaugural Global Women in Public Relations and International Communications Consultancy Organisation Angela Oakes Award. For those who don’t know, the award recognises those who have smashed glass ceilings and changed the game for empowering female leadership, making a significant contribution to improving the landscape for women working in PR.
Their 18 year journey has been a journey of learning but also inspiring to say the least. Head to the podcast to hear Georgina Blizzard 👩‍💻 and Nicky Regazzoni talk about values, purpose, creating cohesive cultures, challenges facing the industry, skills for the future, strategies for promoting women in leadership, and what’s next for the PR Network.
#womenfounders #womeninleadership #inclusiveculture #familyfirst #trailblazers
Link in the comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Podcast transcript:
Sudha: Good afternoon, Nicky. Good afternoon, George. Wonderful to have you as guests on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.
George: Hi there, Sudha. Good afternoon. Thanks for having us.
Sudha: Great. So let's get started with the questions. We normally start with an introduction. Do you have an elevator pitch, Nicky?
Nicky: We do. The very short version is that we are a global communications agency powered by experts.
And what I mean by that is that we have a footprint all over the world, we are in all four continents. But our difference is that we're based on a network of experienced people such as yourself, who have experience between them across all sectors and disciplines, and we can cover most geographic markets.
And we have a team of nine people in the UK including George and myself, and that core team manages the base of experts all over the world, precisely according to our clients' needs. We work in the technology and consumer sectors, and on the tech side we've got brands such as Western Digital, Workday, Dropbox, what three words.
And on our consumer team, we work with Beyond Meat and Zipcar and Lexus and Toyota. So real kind of breadth of clients that are using our services.
Sudha: Wow. Sounds incredible. And it also sounds like a different model from what you hear of the traditional agencies. So very interesting to hear that.
So we're all shaped by our experiences, by culture, people, education, reading. What would you say were your biggest influences? And of course this is building towards some of the questions I'll ask you later. George, would you like to start on this?
George: Yeah, I think about this quite a lot actually and I think it changes.
So I'm often inspired, I actually can walk away out of a meeting and think, gosh, that was so inspirational and take something from that. However, probably the one person who inspired me the most over my life would have been my father. So he had an incredible work ethic. He traveled all over the world.
He kind of opened my eyes this kind of global workforce and encouraged us all to work. I mean, it's no surprise that, I'm one of three sisters, we all work in business. Two of us have our own company and actually Harriet works with Nicky and I and has done since the beginning, pretty much.
I'd also say my children, that's you know, big family theme here. I've got three daughters as well, but two of them are neurodivergent and one actually, in particular, is very dyslexic. But I've watched her, which actually, even myself, I probably could have written her off when she was about 12, because she always had this big goal of wanting to be a doctor.
And actually, she completely powered through and has achieved that now. So she's off to medical school. So I think, for me, it's that work ethic, that sense of never giving up and that kind of the world's your oyster. It's that kind of thing that has inspired me.
Sudha: Wow. Nicky?
Nicky: Yeah, I mean, on the family side, I think my grandfather, he left school at 14 and kind of put himself through school and university ended up becoming a head teacher.
He again inspired me to have that really strong work ethic. But in terms of kind of business people and leaders, I've always admired the late Anita Roddick for her kind of commitment to sustainability and the belief that you could build a good business with purpose at its heart and balanced profit and people and planet at the same time and still have a really successful enterprise.
And I think, I know we'll come on to talk a little bit about our business and what's important to us in that sense. But I would say that she's certainly been a really inspirational figure for me.
Sudha: Yeah, this is like so interesting because when I ask people about, who are the people who most inspire them?
Often there are a lot of people close to home who have been the people who have inspired us the most. And of course there are people outside also, Anita Roddick is a great example. So congratulations to both of you. The PR network is 18 this year and you all have been partying nonstop for some time.
What were the drivers for setting up your own consultancy and also having that operating model, 18 years ago when it was sort of unheard of, right? Nicky?
Nicky: Yeah, I can take that. George and I both worked in leadership positions in traditional agencies for sort of seven or eight years each.
And we'd both noticed that it seemed to be really difficult as women kind of progressed up the workforce particularly positions on boards to balance that with their family life. So George actually had a baby was on maternity leave and I'd been freelancing and I'd noticed that there were lots of people who'd have taken the decision like me to jump out of that traditional trajectory and look at working in a different way for themselves.
So George and I had this idea of building an agency with a different kind of model different way of working really, which would be based not on people in the room or in an office, but people who have complementary skills and experience that we could bring together in virtual teams for the benefit of clients.
And there was nothing out there like this at all at the time. And it wasn't necessarily going to be a lifestyle business. We thought, actually, this does have a really strong commercial basis. And certainly the people that we were taking advice from, run agencies and were client side, we thought, actually, this definitely has legs.
And we also tested the idea on some of the people in our network who had some great experience and skills and we thought might like to join forces with us, but still remain independent. So we thought, let's go for it and set up a company, kind of see where we go. At that time, we didn't plan or intend to have staff, but actually the business model did prove to be very strong quite quickly. So now, as I mentioned before, we do have nine staff, but the operating model today really remains the same. So we have now a very large network of people who I mentioned earlier. So we've got 1,318, I think, in our database at the moment. So those aren't people working on our accounts at any one point in time, but they're people who, have the right level of skill and experience.
They've worked for at least 15 years or so. And they sort of fit our criteria in terms of work ethic and caliber and share our values and so on. So now we bring these people together in teams, they work exactly according how they want. So they choose their clients, they choose when and where they work.
And then we match it to the clients. So we look at the brief, we look at what experience they need, what sector experience where those clients are when they need in market experience, and then we build a team based around that. So there isn't any fat, it's all about smarter working, because we don't have an office, we still don't have an office, but the client fees are not sort of subsidizing expensive overhead.
So it really is. about matching and using our connections on the client side and the team side to make sure that the brief is fulfilled as it needs to be. And kind of everybody's happy and it works and we keep clients for a really long time and we keep our people happy for a long time. As you mentioned earlier, very successful party is the proof of that.
Sudha: Yeah, yeah, that sounds like an incredible sort of model where you're, creating teams based around their need, rather than just having people around who may not meet the needs of the clients. But this model, as we discussed, is not something that would work.
And definitely not for such a long time, if you didn't have certain key things to hold it together. And that's my next question to you, George, probably how important are values and purpose to you remaining authentic to what the PR Network is all about. And then what does purpose mean for you at the PR Network?
George: Yeah, I think to answer your question, incredibly important. I think those drivers that Nicky just kind of talked you through are still our values to today. They've become our values. So this commitment to absolute excellence, everything we do and that commitment to our clients, but also being matched with that total flexibility that Nicky described. Like we don't prescribe how people work or in terms of what they do, but we just look for the best possible outcome for our client and the very fact that we've worked virtually and flexibly for so long as well, means that we really understand what that means. So it's not just kind of lip service to that approach, actually truly is that approach, the fact that our children, I mean, my eldest is 18, Nicky's is 17 now, we still live by those values, although our children have moved on, that flexibility, that family first approach is something that we're very, very committed to.
And I think, obviously there's members of our team and people all over the world who have very different circumstances, meaning they want to work perhaps more flexibly, whether that's because of the other pulls on their time. That's exactly how, we see it. But those values have to be matched obviously with the quality and the level of work we give our clients. In terms of purpose, and actually sometimes purpose is a very overused word, rolls our eyes when it's mentioned. But it is important to us, but it has to feel very natural, it has to feel something that we are incredibly committed to. And I think anyone that meets us or comes into our business or works with us understands our purpose immediately. And that is to do great work for great people. but in a very flexible way, in a very agile way. And that's what we've always done, now that has changed as our circumstances change, but that remains the same. And it's a very simple approach, but it's one that I think, because it's very authentic people believe in it. And I think if you're just saying things for buzzwords, people won't come along with you. Well, it's obviously those 1300 people Nicky talks about, I think are all attracted to us because there is a sense of belonging that they feel that purpose, they share that purpose.
And therefore we can bring them together and deliver great work for our clients.
Nicky: And perhaps we should talk about our B Corp accreditation as well. It's something that George and I actually wanted to go for way before COVID. We got really excited about it, thought a great framework not just to tell people what a great business we are and to rubber stamp it, but also to give us kind of a path to go along and to ensure that we keep becoming better.
And unfortunately COVID did get in the way for us and we started probably pursuing that B Corp dream about 18 months ago, and it did take a good year to get us in the position to be certified. But we got 90 percent for workers, in the workers category.
Sudha I'm sure you know how it kind of breaks down. And we were so happy with that, because George has been talking about our approach to people on both sides and I think that obviously is a great endorsement of the fact that we don't just talk the talk, we don't just say we treat people well, but obviously we do, because you can't become a B Corp without really being a business.
Sudha: Yeah, without walking the talk, so to speak. And I think this is such a wonderful way to also showcase something that we've lost probably in the past couple of decades where we've all become so work centric that we've forgotten that our individual lives are not just about work, there are other things beyond work.
There may be children caring responsibilities, but there could be passion projects, there could be anything. It could be just sitting idle and not doing anything.
George: But actually it's even better there is 'cause I think that the motivation people have because they're able to work more flexibly. The experience they have outside of work brings a lot to work. So I think having those external factors built into your life, and very much part of your working life, is brilliant. It just makes a better experience for everyone.
Sudha: Yeah, I'm sure people have less dread because I remember during the agency life, you work so intensively and such long hours that you dread some of the days because you have other commitments too. Maybe they're just administrative tasks, but you don't have enough of time in the day.
So if this frees up some time for you to do other things without feeling stressed, you'll actually bring your best self to work.
George: Absolutely. I think so, xxxxxxxxxxxx is definitely there to do that.
Sudha: Yeah. George, this is a question for you. As a virtual agency, how do you create a cohesive culture?
I mean, this is a question for everybody post COVID actually. With a remote, hybrid, intergenerational, culturally diverse workforce. It is a huge challenges and it is also a...

111: The role of HR in curating organisational purpose and culture: Marcia La-Rose, Group People & Diversity Director, Four Communications

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

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Shownotes:
A couple of months back I spoke with Marcia La Rose, Group People and Diversity Director, Four Agency Worldwide. Her story is uplifting - she has been at the agency for over 2 decades with over a decade in leadership roles and has been heavily involved in the agency’s acquisition of B-Corp status.
In our freewheeling conversation we spoke about her journey as a woman leader from the global majority, her learnings from the journey. We also spoke about👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 How the role of HR has transformed in the past couple of years, and the biggest challenges and opportunities
👉🏾 Post COVID workplace, the future of work for our industry - if remote/hybrid working is done for or here to stay
👉🏾 Her views on whether HR should drive purpose and culture in an organisation
👉🏾 Inclusive/equitable culture and steps to creating it
👉🏾 The importance of goal setting and measurement for culture change programme
👉🏾 What the industry can do to increase representation of the global majority in the C-Suite/Leadership teams
We also spoke about what the Elephant in the room is for her and much, more. I cannot thank Marcia enough for her generosity in making time from her busy schedule for this conversation.
To listen more, head to the podcast in the link below:
Episode Transcript:
Sudha: Good morning, Marcia. Wonderful to have you on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. I am tuning in from Gurgaon, India. So it's afternoon here.
Marcia: Great stuff. Brilliant. I'm in London, so it's morning here.
Sudha: So to get started, give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Marcia: Okay, so I'm Marcia LaRose. I am the head of HR at Four Agency Worldwide. I've been at Four for 20 years now. I am actually an accountant, so when I joined Four I was their accountant. Oh, well I was the whole finance team. And the company was very small then maybe 15 employees. So at that point, it was quite manageable to look after suppliers and clients and paying staff and the like, so that was all absolutely fine, but as the business grew, it was found that I had particularly good people skills by others, I must add.
Marcia: And so I moved into HR, and I've been in HR probably now for about... 12 or 15 years, and I still look after a lot of things to do with money. So I work really closely with the group finance director, and I still look after the salaries and tax issues, student loan issues, those sorts of things. Aside from that I was heavily involved in Four acquiring its B Corp status and I actively work to ensure we are continually improving on that. And separately again, I am a fellow at the PRCA and I am an immigration advisor at the Home Office. So that's what I do.
Sudha: Oh my God. Wow. You definitely have your plate full.
Marcia: Yeah. I like to be busy. Keeps me out of trouble, I think. Yeah.
Sudha: So as a woman leader from the global majority, how easy or difficult has career progression been for you? From the sound of it, it looks like you, managed to find some good people along the way, or?
Marcia: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't necessarily easy but I know I've been lucky, which isn't how it's actually supposed to be. It should be fact, not luck. Many, many years ago when my daughter first started school, she's now 28. So many years ago I was able to work from home due to child care issues that I had and I was only actually able to do that because my employer at the time was a progressive thinker and I just don't think there's many of those people, I just don't think they were around at that point and that was the luck part.
Marcia: And that person, Nan Williams, is the chief executive of the company I currently work at and have been working at for 20 years. And she knew the value of working mums, which I think is missed by many businesses. I think that's a big group, that lots of businesses ignore.
Sudha: Yeah. My kids were probably of a similar age and younger age. And I remember really struggling and having to step back a couple of times in order to be able to juggle home and work. Often I had to sacrifice, to stop working to be able to look after. And also you mentioned that you move from being an accountant to being a people person.
Marcia: Yes. So, I mean, the central service functions are always quite interlinked. I haven't got any really strong IT skills, so I won't claim anything there. But I think, the group finance director and myself, Patrick Kwok, we work very closely. I've literally just come off of a call with him and we have maybe three or four calls a day when we're not in the office together. We work very closely to make sure everything's going well across the business. And because I've already got the financial background. It's easy for Patrick to speak to me in ways that maybe it wouldn't be for others. So it's just the way it's gone really. So yeah, again, luck.
Sudha: And that be shouldn't be the case. But thank God for that. What would you say are your biggest learnings from that journey? Something that you can share with aspiring women leaders, especially from the global majority, black and ethnic minority.
Marcia: Yeah, I think one of the biggest learnings for me, and because I experienced it, was not to judge others for their lifestyle choices. So I know in the past that I was judged because I was a black single mother and people had their own preconception of what that looks like and what that would be. And I think, although I have been able to carve a pathway, it has hindered me in other ways, other opportunities at other organisations.
Sudha: Yeah. That's very unfortunate. And I can imagine at that time, especially, nobody even thought about how it was impacting.
Marcia: No, if I tell you a really bizarre story. I remember working somewhere and I had to drop my daughter to school before I came to the office and then there was something happened on the tubes and everything went wrong. And I was hurtling up the escalators at a tube station and broke my toe on the escalator groove. And that was a turning point for me where I'd sort of mentally said to myself, I'm going to just take it easy when I get there is when I get there, rather than break my neck, literally, to try and get to work. And I think a lot of working parents go through, similar type of epiphany, I suppose, where they get to a point where they say, look, X is more important than Y.
Sudha: Yeah, it can be so traumatising, this whole thing. Absolutely. So you've been around for some time. Has the role of HR transformed in the past couple of years? And what according to you are the biggest challenges and opportunities. Not trend, I wouldn't say trend because everyone is doing it, I'll do it.
Marcia: Yeah. I think a lot of businesses would have found that one of the largest opportunities has been the ability to hire talent from all over the country/world. The ability to do that has given a lot of businesses a step forward where the hurdles arrive, now the challenge, would be to get those individuals to come to an office space for mandated days. So yeah, the opportunity has also created the challenge, if that makes sense, in the past couple of years of how the workplace looks like.
Sudha: And do you think that , workplaces of the future are going to be hybrid?
Marcia: Well, I think because our industry, the communications industry as a whole in the UK have now got staff going in the office for two or three days mandated. I think the shuffle of staff between agencies might not be as extreme. So there's that. So hopefully it will stop the churn of people going and coming. But as a whole, I do think hybrid might be here for a while longer, but I don't know because now we're going into winter here and COVID might show its face again and we might go backwards before we go forwards.
Marcia: So it's all a bit up in the air because obviously the home working or remote working and hybrid working were sort of forced on businesses because of COVID. And so we may have to come to a conclusion as a country at some point that it's sort of like a seasonal thing rather than something set in stone. I don't know.
Sudha: So, you're, talking about that the flu may come back and we may need to take similar sort of measures, you know, and you're talking about seasonality. COVID did a lot of bad, but it also helped us to reimagine how we could live work and play, as I say often.
Sudha: So what do you think is now the future of work for our industry? Where you are looking at increasingly intergenerational workforces. You're looking at, different cultures, you're looking at a lot of diversity and you're looking at people, who want different things from the workplace. And especially when you look at millennials, or you look at over 50s, where they are not willing to compromise, unless they have a great pension, of course, , don't have a pension, let me say, they're not willing to compromise on certain aspects of what they hold dear.
Sudha: So what according to you would future work look like? I mean, nobody can predict it actually things evolving so fast. It's always changing, but maybe two or three things that you think?
Marcia: I think there's a lot of prongs to this because some businesses may feel that they could, not renew their lease on their premises and have some other form of office space, a rework type situation. But then I know the government have been actively encouraging people to come back to London, to keep London Limited functioning. But so all the shops and the other businesses that are around there, but there's been an increase in footfall for the high street since people have been working from home.
Marcia: So it's sort of swings and roundabouts and businesses, although they're independent and can do what they wish, there are some limitations. So for example it took a long while for train companies to offer other seasonal train tickets. Because historically it's cheaper to buy a weekly ticket than a daily ticket on public transport. But if people are only going to the office two or three days a week, what does that mean? And so there's lots of different... tangents to this. It's not simply just a business deciding they want to do X and it'll be fine.
Marcia: Because we've also got to think about employees, the cost of living. There's so many different elements, but I, do feel there will be some businesses who will decide against having permanent premises.
Sudha: Yeah. And Marcia, do you believe that , again, if we talk about in a post COVID world, purpose suddenly became something that everyone wanted to talk about, right? Do you believe that HR should drive purpose and culture in an organisation? Or HR is well placed to drive purpose and culture in an organisation?
Marcia: Well, they need to be working with the C suite of businesses, but HR, yes, should definitely drive the purpose and culture of the organisation. There should be policies in place to ensure that the culture is diverse and the business has a purpose definitely.
Sudha: Yeah. And what does that mean when, organisations say they have an inclusive equitable culture? What does that mean? And how does one go about creating it? Because it's not like you mix a couple of ingredients and it is done.
Marcia: I think businesses need to be committed to an equitable culture.
Marcia: Because, there's no point the C suite or HR implementing an inclusive environment if those working with the diverse staff on a day to day basis are not aligned. So it's a really important thing to educate the current staff to make sure that they understand the direction the company is heading in and that , they're bought into it and so they see the benefit as well or understand what the benefit would be. So yeah, how do we go about creating it? We at Four, we have a redacted CV process, as one of our main strands. So somebody would apply for a role and that CV is only seen by people within the HR team and the CV is then redacted before it is shared with the hiring manager and only when the hiring manager says they want to see person X will they get the full CV. So there's no preconceptions or unconscious bias, a place if people see someone's name or where they were educated or what additional languages they may speak or what additional countries they may have lived in.
Marcia: So the HR team actively read the CVs and don't just carte blanche, blank out information, they read it. If it's something that is needed and wanted, obviously that is kept open, but some information is actually redacted. So we hope that that.... well it is helping us improve our diversity stats.
Sudha: And you can see the improvement?
Marcia: We can actively see the improvement. Before we started doing that we found that a certain group were very, very diverse, and that group were the central services team, which incorporate the finance, the IT, the HR, the office teams, reception, because I generally interviewed those people. The client facing teams, however, we were at a different percentage of diversity. So to improve that we implemented the redacted CVs and we went from 14, one, four percent of diverse client facing staff to 24 percent within a two year period.
Sudha: Wow, that's good. Well done on that.
So how important, Marcia, are fair pay and representation for building an inclusive culture in order of priority?
Marcia: I think they're all think they're all of equal priority, to be honest, because they're all interlinked. You cannot have an inclusive culture without fair pay and representation. It just wouldn't happen. So they are all of equal priority and importance. I think that's quite clear to me, anyway.
Sudha: And pay transparency?
Marcia: So we're not yet at a point where we need to publicly publish our ethnicity or gender pay gap, but we have those figures. We're very strict on the pay brackets for job titles, and so if somebody is ex job title, their pay will be between A and B range, and that's quite clear. So yes.
Sudha: That's a good way to ensure that, you're not, just making decisions because you feel like it.
Marcia: Absolutely, we don't want to restrict the management, but we do want to give them particular boundaries to work within. Because, it's human nature, they'll have favourites, they'll have this, they'll that.... but this helps us look at it, with clear eyes and make sure that nothing silly is going on in the background.
Sudha: Yeah, that's true. Goal setting and measurement, how critical are they for the success again for culture change program? And would you have any examples of what success would look like, what goal are you setting at, when you're talking about an inclusive culture, or when you're talking about transparency, or who you are as an organisation, all of this is not like a one time thing.
Sudha: It's something that you need to do continuously. So how do you measure and what is that goal that you're moving towards?
Marcia: Yeah, so because we are a business that has offices not just in London, but in the north of England and Wales and across the Middle East, we set each of the teams, a different target for diversity.
Marcia: So that's a hard target that we've set them. We've also got soft target on gender because, we're 60 percent female fundamentally, so where teams are lacking, they've got different targets to others. So we are quite strong on that, and we also implement the Rooney rule which is an American thing where we would make sure that somebody diverse is in the top three or five candidates that people want to look at for roles, even if they haven't pre selected them, we would ensure that they are in there. So we do things in the background to make this happen for us, but the teams themselves, all the directors of the teams know their targets and we have a company target on top of that.
Sudha: Marcia it seems like a fairly simple thing that, when you're doing something on DEI or DEIB as you call it, it should be embedded within your business purpose and where you're going as a business. And if it is done separately because, people are looking at you and sort of asking you what you're doing you're likely to fail.
Sudha: Do you believe that you as an organisation have done that, it's embedded within your business purpose and that it is aligned to your objective to be a profitable business, but an inclusive business?
Marcia: Yeah, I mean, the fact that we've been awarded a B Corp status actually also proves this, but as a business, it definitely is embedded. We've got a very varied workforce in age and gender and disability and ethnicity. We've got a very, very varied workforce because in our industry, we believe we couldn't serve our clients, rightly and correctly if we didn't have diverse staff. And so it is very important to us to have that and to act on that.
Marcia: And an additional thing that we do at Four is that rather than rely on recruitment agencies, we have a recruitment bonus, for...

110: Building a purpose led, B-Corp business: A conversation with Kirsty Leighton, CEO and Founder Milk & Honey PR

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
I recently spoke with Kirsty Leighton Founder and Managing Partner of award winning consultancy Milk & Honey PR, the highest scoring B Corp global communications agency in the world. As someone who speaks so much about purpose, it is always a great learning opportunity for me to engage with people/founders who believe in the power of purpose.
In this freewheeling chat with Kirsty Leighton we spoke about the meaning of purpose and how it manifests itself in business conduct, engagement with stakeholders and sustainable practices. We also spoke about bravery, setting up a business in her mid-40s, building an agency that behaved differently 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The Elephant in the Room for the industry - poor diversity and social mobility
👉🏾 Addressing challenges facing the industry including the disruptions around new technology, upskilling the talent pool and also changing the traditional agency model
👉🏾 What comms professionals can do to maintain their seat at the table
👉🏾 The drivers for transitioning from LLP to an employee ownership trust
👉🏾 B-Corp certification, as a path to betterment, external validation and respect
👉🏾 What leaders are doing to prepare for the future of work - including dealing with hybrid, new technology, mental health, work life balance etc….
And much more.
Link to the podcast episode in comments 👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Good afternoon, Kirsty. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.
Kirsty: Lovely to be invited. Thank you so much.
Sudha: Okay, so let's jump right in. Give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Kirsty: So my name is Kirsty Leighton. I am the founder and I've given myself the very exalted title of Group CEO of Milk and Honey PR. An organisation that I set up six and a half years ago. So six and a half years ago, with just me, with my almost 30 years experience now we've been able to grow that from just me in six years to now 50 people in three continents and four offices.
Sudha: Wow. That's amazing. So when and why did you decide to launch your own consultancy? Did you have an aha moment? I know that women are fairly risk averse and often when they take that first step, it's because they're not satisfied with what is happening in the workplace, or there's some sense of dissatisfaction.
Kirsty: Well, that was absolutely the case. I was incredibly fortunate that in the last 25 years prior to starting Milk and Honey, I had worked for some amazing, always PR agencies. So I'd always been on the agency side. And I'd learned an awful lot during that time. I got the opportunity to work in lots of different types of PR, but what I found is that sometimes the intention of what an organisation's policy was looking to achieve was perhaps slightly missed in practice.
Kirsty: And there was just these little niggly bits where I could see what the intention was, but the practical delivery wasn't quite delivering it. So my last role, which was at Hudson Sandler before I'd set up Milk and Honey, they were actually coming out, they were doing a management buyout from Huntsworth, and I just thought actually, do you know what? Do I really want to wed my future to this organisation as brilliant as it was? I was there as MD for five years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought, actually, do you know what now is the time, if I'm going to do something on my own, to do it.
Kirsty: But, talking about bravery and women wanting to do something in perhaps later life, for me I was in my mid forties when I set up Milk and Honey. And both my parents used to actually run their own businesses and both of them were incredibly intelligent and incredibly hardworking, but they, bless them, did not have an ounce of commerciality between the pair of them. So every couple of years we moved to a slightly smaller house. So I was always terrified of running my own deal and being responsible for paying other people's rent and mortgages.
Kirsty: So I put it off and put it off. But during my career, I was given plenty of opportunity by my leads, very often female leads actually, that allowed me to open new divisions, open new entities, open new countries. And so I then had the practical experience and probably more importantly, the confidence to be able to do it myself.
Sudha: Yeah, think that's so important. And that's very interesting actually, that you speak about your parents and them running their own businesses. And I think sometimes that would make you very risk averse. I've seen some people who've been, I think, put off because they've not seen their parents have success or it defined in the parameters of success that we have today but very interesting to hear that. So, Kirsty, we live in a world where purpose has become such a buzzword, especially in the last two or three years post pandemic. How integral are values and purpose to how you run your business?
Kirsty: So it's been the story, been the platform from which I've built the business. So when I started Milk and Honey, I wanted to create an agency that behaved a little bit differently. I wanted to create an agency that didn't sell hours, but instead was able to sell ideas, work on strategy and be a real partner. I wanted to only work with organisations that, had a positive impact on people and planet.
Kirsty: And so therefore be quite picky from that perspective. I wanted to work with organisations that were ambitious. Now I would imagine most organisations like to call themselves ambitious, but I wanted to work with organisations that were going somewhere, because that way around it allowed both myself, selfishly, and the team that I was building around me to be able to continue to learn and to progress.
Kirsty: And I wanted to create an organisation that could demonstrate its values and bring them to life. So for us, there were five founding values. The first was around bravery, let's not ever be afraid to try something and just because it doesn't work, you never lose, right? You either win or you learn. And so I think from that perspective, that was important to us. Energy, I am one of these types of people, my husband always says that I have no dial, I'm a switch, I'm either on and I'm full on or I'm off. And so for me being able to have lots of energy giving individuals around me was important.
Kirsty: Respect is hugely important, I think as a mother and as a wife and as somebody who plays a role in our community. I think, being respectful of all different types of backgrounds, ages, cultural sensitivities, neurodiverse sensitivities. Both my husband and both my sons are, neurodiverse.
Kirsty: And so I wanted to be able to create somewhere where people could be celebrated, not where they're tolerated, where different ideas and ways of thinking could come together and we could all respect one another. I then wanted to create somewhere where collaboration was really important, I think, especially in the type of organisation that I'm part of in terms of being a professional services consultancy, very often, some divisions come in when there are separate P& Ls. And so I've constructed an international business where actually everyone is paid from the top company. So therefore it's encouraging, everybody to work together, irrespective of which division or which country they sit in.
Kirsty: And then the last one was passion, let's make sure that nobody has to do anything that they're not excited about. Very often again in consultative roles you're not necessarily always given the choice as to what you're working on.
Kirsty: And I wanted to make sure that, nobody worked on more than five clients, that nobody worked on anything that they weren't passionate about. And so anyone can ask off any client at any time for any reason, in fact, they don't need a reason. And I think that was really important. So then as we started, I say we, it was only me at the time, as again, I came out with those founding values, then I started to think about some of the behaviours that would bring that to life. And then beyond that, as we've evolved, I've looked for external ways to prove that because clearly you cannot say about yourself that you are successful or that you are truly worthy or that you're respectful, you need other ways and means to, demonstrate and find that out. And during the last six years, we've been able to really evidence all of those pieces.
Sudha: Yeah, Absolutely. What, according to you Kirsty, is the elephant in the room in our industry?
Kirsty: Gosh, well, I think for me it's still just a lack of diversity. It's really interesting that when you look at the percentages of men that are running organisations versus the percentage of men that are in communications it's still wildly skewed. And I know that some of that is women have historically taken on primary carer roles and so have maybe left the workforce, but then let's get them back in again. These are amazing individuals that have got so much to share. Also, I think that historically, it's been a very white dominated industry, and that is more and more telling when you look at the availability of talent at different levels, and the more senior you're looking at, the less available talent in market there is.
Kirsty: So again, I think it's really interesting and appropriate that we look a little wider, that we don't just look in our own backyard in terms of of attracting new talent. So we look into journalism, we look into other forms of marketing, we look into other forms of management and strategy roles and try and invite people from that perspective. And then another area for me is more from a socio economic perspective. Very often people from a less advantaged background, don't necessarily know about communications as a career. And when they find out about it, they don't necessarily know how to get into it, what the access point is, and what their earning potential is.
Kirsty: And then when they get into it, studies from the likes of socially mobile, show that actually they don't progress as quickly. And so I think that's a confidence piece as well. So it's great to see these new programs coming in. That are directly tackling some of these barriers that still sadly exist in our industry.
Sudha: Absolutely. Diversity and social mobility, all these are big challenges in our industry. And considering that we are living in a world that is in a constant state of flux. I mean, the world has always been in a state of flux, but with social media and how connected we are, everything seems more immediate and everything is evolving around us. There are so many crises that we can see that touch each one of us and are touching our industry. So what do you think would be the three biggest challenges facing our industry today.
Kirsty: I think you make a very good point around social media and I think the macro element there perhaps is around this idea of immediacy and response. And I think there's an opportunity for us to just be a little bit more considered. So if you break that down for me, that's two things there, the first of which is using technology, using AI to help make sure that we can separate the important from the critical and make sure that we know where we're putting our, human endeavours and our attention.
Kirsty: But then also, I think it's also about just helping people to build their own personal resilience. And so they don't feel this constant bombardment of information so that they can filter a little bit more. And I think actually as communicators that's rather our job as well to do some of that filtering and reframing. So I think that is definitely one side of things that like time management, information management. Then I think also there's, obviously in the last couple of years since we've moved more typically as employers and employees into a hybrid workplace, then that requires a different type of leadership style and it requires a different type of internal motivation for all of us.
Kirsty: So those of us that are more, extrovert get our energy from outside of ourselves and so not having other people around actually can be quite difficult, but those that are more introverted that get their energies internally. Obviously, that's quite a nice mix, but we still need to come together to balance one another out. The point of having diverse teams with people with different educational backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, different academic backgrounds, is so that we can all learn from one another and if we're not, therefore, still working in a very intertwined manner, then we're not getting the full advantage of those diverse teams. But they don't have to always be in the same room, but I think that making the hybrid model work is another challenge that we're dealing with right now.
Sudha: Yeah. And do you think that this is just a supplementary thing that I'm thinking of is, do you think that you earlier spoke about the P& L model which puts a stress on this thing. Do you think that the agency model that has existed so far really needs to change in some way?
Kirsty: Oh, completely. I mean, it's already quite a lot of discussion in our own trade media at the moment where it's like, okay, those organisations that have been billing on hours, now the AI is coming into play and generative AI specifically, then how's that going to work , clients aren't going to pay in the same way.
Kirsty: So there needs to be a rethink there. I do also think that as agencies have evolved, especially more international agencies, then they may have numerous P&Ls. So not only would they have their own country P&Ls, they may well have sectoral or divisional P&Ls. And again, as we're moving towards more and more integrated comms and integrated marketing, that doesn't necessarily encourage those behaviours.
Kirsty: So again, back to the earlier point that I made around you can see what people are trying to do with some of the way that businesses have been set up, but actually the processes that they've put in place sometimes, cause them to trip up a little. And I think having multiple P& Ls is part of that problem.
Kirsty: So the way that we've got around that in Milk and Honey is we're actually an employee ownership trust. So I'm surrounded by my bosses every day, which is wonderful. keeps me grounded, keeps it real. But what's nice about that is that everybody after they've been with Milk and Honey for a year becomes a co owner in the business and their shares are held centrally in a trust.
Kirsty: And so they've been all benefit from profit share at the end of the financial year. So what happens there is that everybody owns everything. So the Singapore team doesn't just own Singapore, they own Singapore and Germany and UK and the US. So therefore we're always looking out for one another, we're always looking to put the most appropriate, best skilled and most motivated teams in place to deliver. But it also allows us to do truly joined up global work. So for us that's been something we've been quite purposeful in terms of putting that infrastructure in place.
Sudha: Yeah, that's very interesting, you've answered one of the questions I was going to ask you after on the drivers for Milk and Money moving from being an LLP to an employee ownership trust. And so clearly you are looking at the future and you've made this decision.
Kirsty: Yes. So, when I set it up, obviously there was only me on my own I but knew that I wanted it to be a shared ownership organisation. And naively at the time, I thought, Ooh, the best way to do that as an LLP is a limited liability partnership. Quite a number of them exist within our industry. And they tend to work quite well. However, what we found there was that that's fine if you want to have a limited number of co owners in the business.
Kirsty: But if you're actually looking for much wider co ownership, that model isn't excellent. So it took us a couple of years to find the right model actually that for us being the EOT, so that's an employee ownership trust. It's something that only really truly exists in the UK. And it was only put in place in 2014.
Kirsty: So It's still relatively new. I think there's less than 750 companies in the UK that are EOTs. Although interesting to see that there's more and more PR agencies that are going that way. But what's nice about that is it's pretty much admin free. It's not free to set up though. I mean, for us, it was a true consideration.
Kirsty: It cost us about 80, 000 to change the legal structure. So it is something that you really need to think about.
Sudha: But it was something that was aligned with your core values and purpose right from the start, you were on the journey and you came there. Moving from there during the pandemic, our industry , we got a seat at the table, so to speak and we were able to advise more CEOs and boards and they look towards us to show them the direction and show them the path and what could happen. So we took on roles as consultants and advisors, as trusted advisors.
Sudha: How do we ensure that we continue to have a seat at the table? Because that seems to be disappearing again.
Kirsty: Well it's really interesting. So I started in a consumer environment, then went into tech, then into brand, then into digital, then into corporate then into financial and M&A. And what was really interesting about that is that throughout that journey, one of the pieces that I found out is that if you find yourself working into the CEO or through the CFO, then they see you as strategic advisors, they truly see you as strategic advisor. And as such, any change in strategic advice is sometimes seen externally as a bit of a wobble. Whereas if you go up through more the CMO, then they see it...

109: The relevance of context, leadership and doing DEIB right: Akin Thomas CEO and Founder AKD Solutions Ltd

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

SHOWNOTES:
How does context help up define and be comfortable with who we are?
In a recent conversation with Akin Thomas we spoke the role of context and how it helps us define our identity. We also spoke about his entrepreneurial streak, how the Johnson and Johnson credo inspired him to define it for his business. In this very thought provoking and sometimes difficult conversation we also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Organisational consciousness - the sweet spot, where an organisation’s intention and impact goes beyond their need
👉🏾 Leadership - as an energy and force for change and the need for leaders to have long term vision as opposed to a tactical approach
👉🏾 His optimism about progress on DEI in the UK, and belief that senior leaders are more authentic and genuine than ever before about the desire for change. The recognition of the existing fear (resistance to change) within active resistors
👉🏾 #Tell your story project that was commissioned by UK Sport, Sport England, Sport Wales, Sport Northern and Sport Scotland to research Race and Racism in Sport
👉🏾 The terrible reality that there are more alternative structures in sports now than in the 1950s when our forefathers came to the country.
👉🏾 That nobody, absolutely nobody feels that it is worth investing in the cost of discrimination, the cost of belittling people, the cost of crushing people’s lives.
👉🏾 His advice to organisations seeking to be more authentic ‘stop looking at what others are doing, look within and get a real sense of what it means to you as an organisation.

If you would like to listen more, head to the podcast….👇🏾👇🏾
“And if you don't have context, it's very easy to be pulled in so many different directions. So as a child, I grew up in a place called xxxxxxxx, which was the largest council estate in Europe. I was one of very few black kids. I was the only black kid that went to school from 5 to 16. I didn't see anybody else other than myself. And I was void of context because I was fostered from six weeks old. And therefore I am this black child in the middle of this extremely white space. I knew I was different. I felt different. I didn't get a sense of belonging, but I didn't know what the context was because I just knew I was not within the right context.”
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Sudha: Good afternoon, Akin. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.
Akin: Yeah. Hi, how you doing?
Sudha: I'm fine. Thank you. Okay. Let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Akin: Okay. So my name is Akin Thomas. I am the founder and CEO of AKD Solutions. We are an organisation of change consultancy.
Akin: So we focus on three areas of business, which is research, learning and development, which is our core and consultancy services. We have evolved over the years and I've gone from a local brand to an international brand and the planet's become our global brand.
Sudha: That's amazing. So have you always been entrepreneurial? And what made you get on that journey?
Akin: Okay. I think the answer is, it was there. I used to work for local government. So I started off working in Children's Homes and I kind of progressed through the organisation, became a senior manager, but I just had this burn, I had this urge. And I just knew that being within the organisation couldn't satisfy it. I felt quite restricted and also I was doing things on the side whilst I was working as a senior manager. I always had different projects on the side and one day I just jumped. One day I just had an epiphany. And I just said, I said, I'm done.
Akin: I'm not doing this anymore. Went to my director and I said, I'm done, I'm leaving. And he said, you can't. And I said, watch me. 30 days later, I was sitting in my house with no job, no nothing. But it was probably the best decision I've ever made. Well, one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Sudha: Wow. That's amazing. And I guess when you have to take the leap, you really have to believe in what you're doing. There's no hedging or no thinking, Oh, can I do this? And can I do that?
Akin: Absolutely.
Sudha: I went on your website and did some research and I saw that at AKD you have a credo. What is the inspiration or the belief behind that credo?
Sudha: And how does it translate, in every day, because it's standard to see mission, vision purpose, et cetera.
Akin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, what was really important is that I was doing a lot of work with organisations around leadership, and we were doing lots of work in regards to mission, vision, statements, et cetera, values.
Akin: And for me, there was a lot of work that we were doing with organisations and it just didn't feel as genuine as it should do. It didn't translate into the day to day. And for me, one of the things I was thinking about, there's got to be a compelling vision. There's got to be a vision that excites everybody in the organisation. And so, I was searching and searching, doing lots of work, studying different companies. And I discovered the credo written by Johnson & Johnson. And written by the founder in 1943. And to be honest, they have amended it by taking out a few words. It has stood the test of time. So this credo, I mean, Johnson Johnson is well over 100 years old.
Akin: I think they wrote it in 1943 when it became a public listed company. And what I saw was this amazing statement of intent. What I loved about it, firstly, it talked about its customers, it talked about its staff, it talked about stakeholders and then it talked about its shareholders last, because it said if we do all these things well, our shareholders will get a good return and it just inspired me.
Akin: And what I wanted was a statement of intent that really captured who we were and was authentic, and it was timeless. That was what's really important to me. Too many organisations were changing and chopping and changing. And for me, if you think about leadership, leadership should be a long term thing. There should be a long term vision. And often what we're finding ourselves In now is leadership is being really condensed into very short bursts. And so therefore you'll never really get in the best. And that's the same with some of our visions and missions, because you talk to organisations that values have changed after three, four years.
Akin: It's like, why aren't they rooted in terms of who you are? And so for me, that's what it was about. So it's about really kind of capturing the essence of who we are. So when we talk about, we believe in the brilliance of, every individual and every person it means that, what does that then translate to when we talk about, we believe in the power of conversation.
Akin: I say to people, we will never become an e learning company because I just don't, I don't disrespect it, but it's just not who we are. What we see, is that we see transformation in classrooms when people are having conversations. So our job is to stimulate brilliant conversations. And in fact one of the things I've said is that it's got to be fun. We work too hard not to enjoy life. I've said to the team the day it becomes boring and we stop laughing, I'll shut the company down. And so I really want these things to translate on a day to day basis, not only internally, but it infects our clients as well. So that's why we created it.
Sudha: That's so amazing. Especially, talking about the day it stops being fun because we don't realise that we spend most of our lives in our workplaces. And yeah, it shouldn't be that hard or that difficult. And the other thing that you mentioned that really resonates is now we're talking about stakeholder capitalism, and we are talking about stakeholders being the primary people who we need to take into consideration.
Sudha: So, this existed a long time back and we're just coming back to it, but it's also about having a long term vision rather than being tactical because that's, it doesn't sit right changing who you are every other day.
Akin: Yeah. Cause there, I think there's a couple of things.The issue about being authentic. But secondly, I think it's about if you truly want, you know, good things take time. It's like food. Yeah? Okay? You can have a microwave meal or you can have a well prepared meal. Which has taken time, it's been done with love, with care and with passion, yeah? They are markedly different.
Akin: And I think the trouble, what we're expecting from a lot of our leaderships and organisations is kind of popcorn, quick meal, yummy fast meal, fast food type mindset as opposed to actually, if we take time and do this really, really well, the longevity that we will experience will be phenomenal. But people are too scared to make those decisions.
Sudha: Yes, they don't want to stick to one thing or don't want to commit to sticking to one thing.
Akin: Absolutely.
Sudha: Now, so moving on, in a LinkedIn post from last year, you've spoken about the importance of context. I read all your posts and that was so interesting. Is this to do with your identity and how important is your identity to you?
Akin: It is hugely important, and I think it's one of the things, the more that I have grown in age, the more I recognise the importance of context and really embracing yourself. I think one of the challenges we have in society is that most people are not comfortable with themselves. They're busy trying to emulate, copy other people.
Akin: And if you don't have context, it's very easy to be pulled in so many different directions. So as a child, I grew up in a place called Leapath, which was the largest council estate in Europe. I was one of very few black kids. I was the only black kid that went to school from 5 to 16. I didn't see anybody else other than myself. And I was void of context because I was fostered from six weeks old. And therefore I am this black child in the middle of this extremely white space. I knew I was different. I felt different. I didn't get a sense of belonging, but I didn't know what the context was because I just knew I was not within the right context.
Akin: And that leaves massive voids, and when you have no context, the void that that gives people is incredible. So the fact that you can't speak your mother tongue or that you don't know language or you don't know who you are. You don't know friends, family, it just leaves voids and what then people do in my opinion is that they have to fill those voids often with stuff which is superficial, not true et cetera. And therefore what you have is a lot of people walking around who are shadows of who they should be. So for me, when I went to Nigeria the thing about being Nigerian is like, it's in your blood, but you don't understand until you kind of find yourself in a context like, Oh, I get it.
Akin: You understand? So my drive, my thought process, the entrepreneurism, et cetera, yeah? It was when you've put it in context, it's like, Oh, I get it now. And what it does, it gives you a sense of peace, greater understanding. And I think the minute you can become comfortable with yourself because you've got context changes because suddenly you can't be the victim of others.
Sudha: Yeah. And that's not the best way to lead a happy or productive life.
Akin: Absolutely. Absolutely. How many people really have context, especially in the UK right now know, we're very diverse, I see so many people I talked to them and they say, yeah, my mom and dad didn't speak their mother tongue to them. Why? Yeah. Okay. Why? All of these things are so, so important. I mean, we change our name so it's more palatable to other people. It's not right.
Sudha: We change our name, we change the way we dress, the way we behave, the way we talk or laugh, I think in public, you don't want to be too loud, don't want to get the focus of attention on yourself.
Sudha: Yeah. That's so interesting. Akin, what does leadership mean to you? Because you said you have done a lot of work around leadership.
Akin: What does leadership mean to me? I think for me leadership is the energy and the force for change. And I think that's really, really important. It is the energy and the force for change.
Akin: It is incredible the impact that one individual can have over 10, 20, 100, 2 million. It is incredible that one person and their leadership can literally change history. Change the focus of a nation, change a community. And if you think about that level of power and influence. You have to recognise that, I think there's a couple of things. Firstly, it is a huge privilege to have leadership ascribed to you, but it's also a massive area of responsibility when you're leading an organisation. Like for me, okay, my organisation, we have about 40 individuals, both kind of full time and associates, but that bears a weight in terms of I'm responsible for these people.
Akin: But also I think the excitement in terms of, for me, great leadership is like, do you know when you take people on a journey where we've never been here before, we've never navigated these waters before, we're creating something new, we're creating something innovative, we're creating something that creates change. It is an incredible force for, good, but also if handled badly for evil as well. And so for me, the more I look at society, the more I look at kind of individuals, governments, sporting organisations, families, the importance of leadership, it is right through society. And I think when we understand and respect leadership and utilise it properly, profound change is possible.
Sudha: There seems to be a vacuum in leadership across actually business and politics. I don't think we should even discuss politics.
Akin: I think one of the things I would say to you is this year is that I think one of the things I believe is that we have a lot of good managers in leadership positions. And we do recognise leadership and we're not saying one is better than the other or more important, but what we are saying is that actually the quality of leadership, that we are experiencing is actually really quite concerning.
Sudha: I agree with you. In the course of like doing the background research, I read another article where you spoke about organisational consciousness. What is organisational consciousness and why is it important? So the organisation is like a living being.
Akin: I wrote that article in regards to, how do we learn as organisations? And the premise was this. The initial premise was this is if we have no idea what society is going to look like in the next 5, 10, 15 years, how do we create learning platforms which are fit for purpose that will help us to create the right type of future?
Akin: And one of the things I've seen in terms of the evolution of organisations is one thing is where we go from what we call ego to eco. So we go from the selfless, the selfish to the kind of more selfless. And one of the things you look at in organisations is this. So if you think about an organisational need being that prime reason for existence.
Akin: So if we look at an organisation, let's take, for example, Ikea. Ikea's prime business is to sell furniture in a particular mode. Yeah. But that's the prime drive so it's a profit making organisation. Yeah. Now, if you were to roll back, say 20, 30 years, all the learning would be geared towards that function only.
Akin: So if it didn't impact upon the bottom line in terms of upskilling people to be better at their jobs, organisations wouldn't have done it. There has been a shift now in terms of how society functions and businesses function. So organisational consciousness is basically where an organisation's intention and impact goes beyond their organisational needs.
Akin: Okay, so there are three elements that are required. So I've already spoken about organisational need. So therefore, what is our core purpose? But then you've got two other elements. You then start to bring in individual needs. So suddenly in an organisation will start to be more conscious of where and to address individual needs.
So let's look at well being. Again, 20, 30 years. it wasn't on the table. You were expendable, you didn't have the luxury of mental health challenges, it was just not on the table. Now we're much more conscious about well being. You can see there was a mutual benefit, but we're now starting to think about individual needs when you're looking at development now, we're not developing you for where you are today, we're developing you for where you want to be in two, three years time. So there's an organisational need. But the third element, which is the really important element, is what we call the societal needs. Now, societal needs are quite complex, it's because a societal need is basically where there is a fundamental disconnect between what is right and what is going on in the world. And an organisation says, we need to engage with this societal need. Let's look at domestic violence. It is a fundamental curse on our society.
Akin: Again, 20, 30 years ago would never be part of the narrative of any organisation. But now there are organisations...

108: Power and influence of top 2000 companies in achieving the SDGs: Samantha Ndiwalana, World Benchmarking Alliance

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 05:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
A while ago I invited Samantha Ndiwalana, a Senior Researcher at World Benchmarking Alliance to talk about the pivotal role of the private sector in meeting the SDGs. The WBA maps 2000 of the worlds most influential companies. The influence is staggering, the companies have over $36.5 trillion in revenue and employ more than 97 million people across 85 countries.
How are these companies identified? It starts with looking at the seven transformations needed to meet UN SDGs: Social, Food and Agriculture, Decarbonisation and Energy, Nature, Digital, Urban and Financial. The WBA then go on to identify the 2000 keystone companies within these industries based on 5 principles that goes beyond just size and also looks at impact and influence
It is a tall order to challenging the prevailing bias that leading companies are based only in Western countries or the global north to ensure that the right companies are included in that list. Samantha and I discussed this and more in our conversation
👉🏾 Why is there less representation from the global south? Is it because we equate size with influence
👉🏾 Engaging with the power and influence of state owned entities
👉🏾 We discussed a recent report that spoke about ‘emerging markets have longer runaway and steeper slope for SDG improvement’ (according to an American PE firm)?
👉🏾 The big emerging challenge: the sustainability information gap
👉🏾 The reality that companies from developing markets generally receive limited funding to support SDG focused investments
👉🏾 Are companies from developing countries less sustainable or is it a measurement issue?
We also discussed why achieving SDGs in emerging markets is set to become more important going forward - it is fairly straightforward actually………..
To listen to the episode head to the link in the comments 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript:
Sudha: Good morning Samantha. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the room Podcast today.
Samantha: Good morning, Sudha. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Sudha: Let's just get started with the questions. Give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do at the WBA.
Samantha: Yes, gladly.
Samantha: So I work as a senior researcher and company engagement lead at the WBA. My focuses are digital inclusion and that's looking at some of the world's most influential tech companies, how well, or maybe not so well they're doing in terms of making sure technology is ethical, fair, safe, sustainable for everyone.
My other focus is the SDG 2000, and we'll speak a bit about that today. And that is the universe of companies that we look at, at the WBA. So, managing that list, putting it together, and just making sure it's representative of an ever changing world.
Sudha: How critical is the private sector to meeting the SDGs? We are now in the decade of reporting so to speak and there are not too many years before we get to 2030. How critical is the private sector to meeting the SDGs?
Samantha: Oh, I would say they're quite pivotal. So if the central promise of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, around which the Sustainable Development Goals are planned, if the central promise of that is to leave no one behind, then one of the ways we get there is by leaving no company behind.
Samantha: So companies are quite pivotal, and not just the companies that we might be used to everyday companies or products, but also companies that are quite big, quite influential whose name you might not know, or might not have heard of. Just because a company is always in the news or is popular doesn't mean that these are the only companies that are pivotal to meeting the SDGs.
Sudha: And how does the WBA define the list of 2000 most influential companies that are to be assessed? You've mentioned that it is important to make a choice, not to leave any of the big companies or any of the influential companies behind. Is there a bias towards companies based in the global north because we are more familiar with their reputation, their size, their products and what they do.
Samantha: That is a really great point. So to answer the first part, how we go about finding these influential companies, what we call the world's most influential companies, is first we take a transformational approach. So we look at the world and we break it down into seven system transformations, such as social, nature, digital, financial and these transformations look at what we need to do to transform the world, to drive the world towards achieving the 2030 agenda and meeting the sustainable development goals.
Samantha: So once we have those transformations and we've looked at the industries that were pivotal to influencing those transformations, either in a positive or in a negative way. And then once we had that list of industries, we then dove deeper into the companies. And to do this, we had an approach which looks at whether companies dominate global production. We tried to have a look at their supply chain, their influence on global governance and institutions, these are just a few of the things we would look at. But something we found when we were looking at available information, because one of the big things about us is we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're quite happy to lean on existing knowledge and existing expertise. But one of the things we found was just by taking an approach where you look at the biggest companies if you would equate influence with revenue or number of employees, as pure markers of how big these companies are, then you would start to look at a majority of companies from the global north and from China.
Samantha: And so we saw this happening and it became clear to us how important it is to make sure that the list is as broad, diverse and balanced as we can make it. Because while these companies and these regions the United States, China, Europe, while these regions, these countries are quite important, they aren't the only ones in the world.
Samantha: And if we want the list to look at the global influence of companies, so that we're leaving no one behind, we needed to take active steps to make sure that we're including companies, not just from the global North, also the global South and when we say global South, not just the big players like China.
Sudha: So you've answered a part of the question that I was going to ask next, which is, do we equate size with influence, and is that why there is less representation from the global south?
Samantha: Yes. So often size is equated with influence, as I had just mentioned. But we find that influence can be thought of in other ways, not just the pure markers of size, like revenue or employees.
Samantha: And one of the ways you can start to see the influence of companies is the number of people they impact. If you start to look at their supply chains and see where those connections lead to. So a company could be based in one country, say South Africa or India. But their roots, if we could call them that, spread around the world.
Samantha: And that's one way of thinking of the influence of companies.
Sudha: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know from having lived and worked in India that state owned entities, as well as family businesses are some of the most influential businesses in that particular geography, but also I believe across other geographies also.
Sudha: So clearly from the SDG perspective, they are critical and they need to be engaged with. How do you ensure that you include them in the conversation?
Samantha: That's a really important point. And as you say, it's not just in India, from my experience in South Africa, Uganda, and in other countries as well.
Samantha: We see the importance of family owned businesses, we see the importance of small to medium sized businesses, not just the big companies on influencing change within that country or within that region. Making sure that we're reaching out to these companies is quite important and is something we prioritise at the WBA.
Samantha: We do this via company engagement. So if companies are being assessed in the benchmarks, we have different events such as webinars, trainings to reach out to the companies to discuss the SDGs, the World Benchmarking Alliance, our approach with them. We also partner with governments, so any governments that are having events where these companies might be involved, that's one of the ways we're able to make connections with the companies to bring them along this journey.
Samantha: But one of the most important ways we do this is through our alliance. So at the World Benchmarking Alliance, we believe in a collaborative approach and the allies play a very important part in this. They're global, they are big organisations and institutions, such as GRI, that's quite big in the reporting space.
Samantha: But we also have a lot of more local focused organisations and NGOs, and we rely on them to make sure that we're taking into account different local perspectives and that we're connecting with these family owned businesses or more regional or country focused businesses that might not be at these big international events.
Sudha: Okay, that's very interesting to know. So you know I was doing some background reading before putting together the questions and I read this American PE firm report and other reports also and data that indicate that emerging markets have a longer runway and steeper slope for SDG improvement.
Sudha: Would you agree with that statement?
Samantha: Yes, I would to a certain extent. So if we look at the findings from some of our benchmarks, we see that on average, companies from developed countries have stronger performance than those from developing countries and so that's one way of looking at it.
Samantha: But we also understand that there are a lot of things happening in the background. For example developing countries might have other focuses or priorities than developed countries just in the very nature of the issues that they are facing and the stage of development that they're at. So levels of poverty, poor health care outcomes, low levels of unemployment, those might be things that companies are focused on. And so they might have programs around these issues to try and help address these problems within their countries. And even though some of those might fall within social, the S of ESG, they might not necessarily think of them as ESG related projects.
Sudha: That's very true. Would you say that the sustainability information gap in emerging markets is a big challenge? There has been a lot of progress in the past decade but there is still much to be done. What are your thoughts?
Samantha: Yes, definitely, it's a big challenge and it's starting to take off a bit if we keep thinking about the longer runway and the steeper slope.
Samantha: But as I said before, one of the things creating this longer runway and steeper slope is that the focus might be elsewhere. And in some cases, the laws, the policies, the regulations aren't in place. And we find that having these laws, policies, regulations in place goes a long way to influence company behaviour because the parameters, the guidelines are already there about what information you should share and the incentives are also there about what information you should share. If you don't have that guidance, it is still very possible to share information to counter that in sustainability information gap, but it does make it a bit more difficult.
Sudha: Okay. So you know linked to what we've been talking about not just the private sector, but large state owned entities and family owned multinationals still require access to international capital markets to fuel the growth or innovation. However, companies from developing markets generally receive limited funding to support SDG focused investments, even though they have in depth knowledge of the situation in the countries in which they operate, you know, what is going to work on the ground. With the rising demand for ESG compliance, is this an opportunity where the investors and funding organisations start taking that into consideration? That they can be a good way to go about meeting our goals.
Samantha: Yes, definitely. So I think that when new legislation comes into play, there are two ways of thinking about it or seeing it. So some companies might see that and understand that there are more requirements on how they might disclose or different levels that they need to meet and they might be a bit scared, intimidated, they might think that this is an extra burden or perhaps a waste of their time.
Samantha: So instead of thinking of it as a burden, if you think of it as an opportunity, this is an opportunity to align with international standards, international disclosure, such that they can make their efforts, all the work that they might already be doing around ESG more visible to investors, and that will help them generate investment and also make it more visible to other stakeholders who might want to support in other ways.
Sudha: Yeah, that is so true. So it's a bit about the journey, it is a bit about the information gap. It is about then being proactive and adopting some of the reporting requirements so that investors are more confident about investing or putting in their money in those markets.
Samantha: Yes, Exactly
Sudha: So I just want to clarify this that our companies from developing countries less sustainable or is it a measurement issue or is it where they are on their journey?
Samantha: I would think it's more a measurement issue and where they are on their journey. So I guess it's quite common to see these images of factories in a developing country that are producing whatever sort of product or chemical and you see them shooting smog into the air, rivers are polluted, and it just goes on and on and on. And while that might take place, that's not necessarily the standard. That's not how all of it cities or all areas in developing countries look. I can speak from the South African perspective and say that there are companies that are green, that are sustainable, that are looking at things like solar energy.
Samantha: For example, and I'm sure from the Indian perspective you can name a lot of examples as well. So it's not that these companies or these areas are inherently less sustainable. I would say that part of it is a measurement issue because they are focused on different issues than some companies in developed countries, their programs or efforts towards sustainability might not be exactly the same.
Samantha: But if you are focused on health issues such as tuberculosis or the HIV AIDS pandemic, that is also social work that's also sustainable development work. It just might not fit into the standard ESG reporting disclosure approach. So these are the types of things we need to take into account.
Sudha: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. It's also perhaps what we measure them on and because, their parameters may be different from what the parameters for developed countries or companies in developed countries are slightly different. and you're still moving on the path, but what your priorities are different.
Sudha: And I think that understanding possibly, also needs to be made across the world, not just for developing country, but across the world on how we frame not just our measurement questions, but the narrative, like you said when you talk about developing countries and you have these images - smoke spewing out of a factory or a river that is like really dirty. And that becomes the narrative that is stuck. So we probably need to progress from there. We are on our last question. Why is achieving SDGs very, very critical for emerging markets as we progress towards 2030 and beyond.
Samantha: Well, I guess first off, it's the idea that we don't want to leave anyone behind.
Samantha: So when we say we want a sustainable world, we want a safe world, we should also be thinking in terms of inclusivity an equal world. And that means that progress happening in developed countries exclusively isn't what we should be aiming for. We should also be considering that developing countries have progress to make, they have a role to play in driving the world towards a more sustainable future. And another reason why achieving the SDGs is quite important in emerging markets is the vulnerability, the unique vulnerability that these markets, these countries face in terms of the climate crisis, for example. We see that developing countries are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, such as natural disasters, excessive heat, like we've seen over the past few months, the news coverage is focused on America, the U. S. and Europe, but high levels of heat were seen in Africa, were seen in Asia as well. And these might be areas where people can't just go to the shops and buy an air con and install it in their homes or buy extra water.
Samantha: There are unique challenges and vulnerabilities there that we need to understand, respect and take into account.
Sudha: So I just want to ask an additional question. What is it that motivates you about this work that you do? It's not very easy, right? But what is it that motivates you and drives your interest?

107: Championing accessible tourism: Neha Arora, Founder, Planet Abled

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
As a podcast host I meet so many inspiring people - I recently met with Neha Arora, who quit her job after working for nearly a decade in the private sector to set up Planet Abled (2016) with a vision to make travel/tourism accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. Today, Planet Abled has grown to become a destination developer and ecosystem enabler.
Her business is rooted in authenticity, a gap in the market identified because of her lived experience. As a child she and parents (her mother is a wheel chair user and her father is blind) did not go on holidays or travel, she naively attributed it to not having enough money. Travelling with her parents when she started working opened her eyes to the reality - they chose not to travel due to the societal stigmas around disability and also inaccessibility at every stage of the travel journey.
In this eye opening episode we spoke about the series of side hustles Neha had before Planet Abled, the Indian travel and tourism landscape (from an accessibility lens), societal prejudice, assumptions that people with disabilities do not work or have money, that it is ok for make decisions on their behalf, lack of vision by investors…….👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Quitting her job and becoming an entrepreneur
👉🏾 The need to mainstream accessible and inclusive travel, and not create a parallel industry
👉🏾 Census data and the reality that people with disabilities are hidden in Indian society
👉🏾 The demand and actual numbers of people with disabilities travelling
👉🏾 Awareness, attitudes and affordability - the three A’s that influence travel decision
👉🏾 The biggest challenges facing the industry
👉🏾 Policy and legislation
👉🏾 What accessible and inclusive travel/tourism would look like in an ideal world.
We also spoke about travel and tourism industry workforce training and sensitisation, the challenges she facing running her business, role models and what drives her.
To listen to the episode head to Apple podcasts or any other podcasting platform.
Episode Transcript:
Sudha: Good afternoon, Neha. Thank you for making time to be a guest on The Elephant in The Room podcast today.
Neha: Thank you so much Sudha for inviting me and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Sudha: Brilliant, To get started, let's start with a quick introduction. Tell us a bit about yourself.
Neha: Well, I'm Neha Arora and I'm the founder of Planet Abled, which makes tourism accessible and inclusive for persons with disabilities and the elderly. And I started because of my own personal experiences, because I never travelled as a child. And my parents who are now in their seventies and eighties, they never travelled until a few years ago. So after I started earning, the first thing I did was to save some money and travel, only to be disappointed by the inaccessibility and the societal stigmas related to it.
Neha: So we started off as a travel service provider and gradually grew up into a destination developer and an ecosystem enabler where we help businesses as well to become accessible and inclusive.
Sudha: Okay, that's very interesting. So you've said a bit about what PlanetAbled is. So it's very difficult, I understand when you start on your professional journey to actually quit a good job and to become an entrepreneur. And to become an entrepreneur at any stage is a difficult thing, it's not in our psyche, it's not in our mindset. So what were the drivers for you.
Neha: Yeah. So Planet Abled is not my first venture. So along with my corporate job, which lasted about nine years with various IT and telecom companies, I was having side hustles all the time. And just for the fun sake, because I found a corporate job to be too boring. So I was like, let's do something, this is an opportunity. Let's make some money here, and this is a gap. So every year of my corporate, I was trying and launching something new and sometimes I gave up because I lost interest, sometimes I shut things down because I thought, oh, I'm not the right person to do it. Or sometimes I ran out of money or sometimes there were different reasons for abandoning different projects, but Planet Abled actually kind of simmered over the years. So when I started working and we went for our first holiday, and it didn't go as planned, and what happened was wherever we were going I was getting into arguments about accessibility that why it's not accessible.
Neha: And one fight at a temple turned into a mob fight because the priest made it about religion, like asking for access . And that was kind of the tipping point when my parents said, we are not going anywhere because you fight anywhere. Because they are like most individuals with disabilities are conditioned to accept this is not for you and that's okay. Yeah. I mean, I was that person, why it's not okay. And so this was, I think 2009 and I thought they'll get over it and they'll get back, but they did not. And then gradually I started looking for solutions not to find it. And then I was like, okay, perhaps I should do something about it. But because of my starting and closing business trend, I cannot abandon this, if I'd have to do it, there will never be a plan B. If I do it, I'll go all in, because this is not about money, this is not about fun and this is not about just doing something exciting, because you'll be creating hope in so many people and then you cannot abandon them, because they've kept their trust in you.
Neha: So I think for two to three years I did my homework, to convince myself that it would be a financially sustainable model and that I can pull it off. So I sat at airports counting the number of disabled people coming out because India has no data about disabled travellers. Still doesn't.
Neha: And talked to concierge of hotels who are there at the airport to receive travellers. Like how often do they travel? Do they travel for work or leisure or stuff? And to my surprise, there were not enough people travelling. And then I went into the community, like what sort of experiences they were having, whether they were travelling or not travelling at all, what are the challenges and what is their ideal solution? And does that make business sense? Like, would I be able to pull it off as something financially sustainable? So then once I was convinced, then I was at a point like, yeah, this makes sense, I'm convinced like if not now then when. Like, you know every day sitting in Adobe office, I was like, nothing's gonna change, my parents are retired, I have a lifestyle to support I have no savings because I burnt all of them in previous businesses. But it was still like, I'll take it one day at a time and it paid off. I mean it's been the most amazing journey of my life till date.
Sudha: I can imagine. And I think, you should not forget about the kind of experience that you got running those businesses, even though they may not have succeeded, it prepared you for where you came, where you started your journey.
Sudha: And probably , this business idea was the most authentic, most aligned to your purpose. And it was like you say, whenever you have a plan B, things don't work. I think entrepreneurs just need to go all in. Otherwise it just doesn't work.
Sudha: Yeah, it's like tragic to hear the statistics and of course we're all aware about how how unusual it is for people to travel with disabilities. Globally there is an estimated, 1.3 billion people with significant disabilities and that is one in six of us, right? And as per the Indian census, it is just 2.2% or 2.68 crore. It sounds like a ridiculous figure really. And so my question to you is, would you agree that the numbers are perhaps not right, but also that people with disabilities are hidden in our society?
Neha: So both the things actually, so answering to the first part of the question, when the last census was done that time, only seven disabilities were recognised in there. Autism was not a disability at that time. We recognised as a disability only when the new RPWD law was passed in December, 2016, and which came into force in 2017. Now we have 21 disability. So there is a huge leap in the number of disabilities that are recognised.
Neha: It still does not cover all the aspects of disabled people, but still it covers a lot of them. Even some invisible disabilities. And also the world average is like 15%, how can India have 2.2%, it does not make sense. And India has the maximum number of blind people in the world, and because blindness. Most of it is preventable in India, it's lack of basic healthcare, basically cataract has been the biggest, reason for people going blind in India, and so the number is definitely not correct. And we should go by the world average and perhaps more because going by the kind of lifestyle or living conditions we have in India, we are supposed to have more disabled people, and of course it is stigmatised because even families hide that.
Neha: Even people themselves hide that they have an invisible disability. In India, how many times are we talking about children having a ADHD or a learning disability? We still consider, okay, it's only wheel chair accessibility and then also it stigmatised like, okay, why do you have to go to a shopping mall to shop? I'll get it for you. Like l've had such horrendous experiences with some people, that they have never sent them to school. They're just born into wealthy families and the person with disability has never stepped out of the house in years. The neighbours don't know that there is a person with disability that lives in their house.
Sudha: Yeah. I have seen that within my family. (I asked to edit the part about the person with visual impairment - please delete) People didn't want to talk about it. People didn't wanna tell other people about it, with the stigma associated. With my aunt and my mother, they had polio, Aunt more visibly, and my Mother less visibly, but it is such a stigma, my God.
I totally agree with you. And it's a very sad thing and I think the more we talk about all of these things and the more we sort of spotlight issues.
Neha: Yeah, and just to add, I mean, in India, even the elderly, if you acquire a disability because of age, it's not even considered a disability. I mean, people don't even accept themselves. "I wear hearing aid, but I'm not disabled". They'll lose their vision or their mobility, but they're not disabled.
Neha: I was asked when my parents of my schoolmates got to know about me. My parents, they were like, who pays your school fees? I was asked this question because there is an assumption that people with disabilities don't work.
Sudha: Yeah. I had a really good colleague when I was at Uni. Raman who was such a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person. And there were quite a few people with visual impairment at college. But you don't know what happened to those people because they're not visible in the workplaces or not visible when you go into a mall or when you are outside somewhere, you don't see people with disabilities in India.
Neha: Yeah. That's sad, but employment wise, I think it has been, improving like much, much faster because India does not have a disability benefit like the UK or US or countries in Europe where you have a disability benefit on which if you are not able to work, you can live on most benefits. India doesn't have that. I mean, yeah, we have that's like 200 rupees to 2,400 rupees, depending upon which state you are in per month.
Sudha: Yeah, that's like really not going to do anything.
Neha: So people had to struggle to find jobs. So now even the MNCs, like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco in India are hiring person with disabilities in white collar jobs. I have a friend who is a blind person and he is a cybersecurity expert. I have a certified CFA, who is a business analyst with Deloitte. So they are growing in numbers, and this is very, very refreshing to see, but when you, talk about social life.
Sudha: Yeah, I'll speak about this to you after the podcast because a lot of what I have noticed is that companies want to be seen as doing DEI and being inclusive, but for most people it is like really challenging just to get past the first screening, because most of the time they want you to not have any visible disabilities or visible problem. Maybe you're a wheelchair user and don't have anything that's going to impact how you work, which, they don't want to make any reasonable adjustments as one calls it.
Neha: True.
Sudha: And let's move on to the next question. Is there data on the number of people with disabilities travelling and how big is the demand? Because you said that you were sitting at airports counting the number of people who were coming out from the airport.
Neha: So, as per my knowledge and experience, four countries in the world monitor travellers with disabilities data. Four countries in the whole world, And these are independent organisations that track most of the time - US, Australia, UK and Germany. But their focus also is majorly on persons who are wheelchair users or mobility impaired. So in 2018 or 19, I'm not sure of the year, Americans with disabilities, only wheelchair users, so this was done by an independent organisation in the US, this research and they spent 58 billion US dollars on accessible travel in one year.
Neha: And we are just talking wheelchair users at the moment, which are like only 10% to 12% of the disabled population. So we are not even counting the 88% to 90% of disabled people, still the yearly spend is 58 billion. So that disposable income of disabled people and their families and friends is $13.1 trillion. That's the amount of money that we are talking about, and we are not creating products or services that can cater to them because we have our own prejudice that these people don't travel or they don't have the money.
Sudha: Or we are just used to doing things in a way and we don't want to move, it'a a huge opportunity, it's a huge opportunity. According to you Neha, what are the biggest accessibility challenges facing the Indian travel and tourism industry? Yeah. I mean, I'm not an expert, but I can see a lot of obvious ones.
Neha: I'm just thinking where do I start? So I think the biggest challenges first, recognising that this is a market. Recognising the fact that this is a market that you need to create products and services for that is important in the first place. That is still missing. So when I started like almost eight years ago now, and it has changed like earlier hotels used to say they don't travel, why are you even coming? ? Now they're at least talking about it, let us know how do we make it accessible? They're still not investing major money into it, but yes, there's a major shift.
Neha: Last year the Ministry of Tourism released draft to guidelines for accessible tourism in India, and it was a lot academic, so I gave them a whole new document of practical applications like pro bono. And now both the documents are nowhere to be seen, but it's changing in a way because of the RPWD Act that we have. Like the America has ADA, which recently completed, 33 years. Ours is like only six years in the making, so that's why you see at least some ramp somewhere, at least for the compliance sake being put. Just to meet the compliance at least the government organisations are doing it, but then it is so much more than just a ramp that you put in, when it comes to accessibility.
Neha: The websites are not accessible, the travel content that you see on social media or on website, the fancy videos and the promotional brand videos, they, none of them have audio description or captions. Or they're not made keeping in mind people with sensory disabilities that some kind of trigger must be there or should be a warning that people should watch or not watch. Museums, everything is still behind a glass wall, so there is no access we are talking about for people who are blind. We are not talking about the lights and the sounds in the museum, we are not talking about easy language guides for people who are deaf or have learning disabilities. That whole idea, that accessibility in tourism is so much more, we are not there. Airlines have nothing. It has to start from the point, "Okay, I as a traveller with disability, want to travel", the thought. Now I go to Google and find a website, but I find no accessible content in travel, about the destination. Okay. I still figure it out, but then I have to find the transport, whether I travel by train or air or by bus. None of the intercity buses are accessible for wheelchair users. I mean, you give them a free discount, like, okay, have a free ticket. But what does a free ticket do, if they cannot get into the bus.
Sudha: Yeah, that's true.
Neha: We have the largest rail network in the world and it's not accessible for wheelchairs. Zero. Like what are we talking? And then when you go to accommodations, only four-star and above have one room which is wheelchair accessible. For other disabilities, we are not even talking or thinking. And they're also, for compliance sake, once I have got the shower panel removed while the guest checked in the hotel, because she could not go inside the shower area to take a shower, and this was a five-star property certified accessible.
Sudha: This is like so terrible, and I know that a lot of the global chains do that because of global compliance needs. And if they can cut corners in the Indian context, they will and they do. But I think so much needs to be done. This is like so shocking that we are keeping people away because they cannot access. Yeah, just at every point of the journey there are...

106: State of Black and Ethnic Minority leaders in Board rooms and the C-Suite: Barbara Philips, Chair REEB, PRCA a

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
After the initial high of 2020/21 DEIB/A or whatever you would like to call it, is facing rough going - budgets are being cut, dedicated DEI staff are being sacked or are leaving in droves. Organisations are using the cost of living crisis and economic slowdown as an excuse which doesn’t really make sense - are they easily expendable? What has not helped is that people have mistaken the high volume of talk(chatter) for action, all that virtue signalling and diversity washing has resulted in conversation overload and fatigue.
I recently interviewed Barbara Philips Chair of the Race and Ethnicity Equity Board (REEB) PRCA about the state of representation of the the ‘global majority’ (Black and ethnic minorities in common parlance) in the C-suite and in Boardrooms in our industry The first question I asked Barbara was if like the ‘State of the Nation’ report (social mobility), we should have a state of Board Representation in the UK and the rest of the world? And if it is time to hold companies accountable through transparency on data for progress or lack of - because data doesn’t lie (Actually it does occasionally when it is used selectively for greenwashing).
Fortunately, in 2023 no one is contesting the reality. The more important question now is how do we increase representation especially considering the industry’s reputation for homophily (birds of a feather etc.) on one side and the broken rung, or the glass ceiling that talent groups from global majority constantly have to face. And the absolute reality that we are not promoting nor nurturing enough leaders through the ranks.
At REEB we are determined to spotlight the vacuum, the lack of opportunities for talented leaders and the absence of creativity and imagination by the industry on how it can engage and nurture talent who can rightly take their seat at the high table or in the boardroom.
We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Why Board representation is a focus area for REEB
👉🏾 Barriers for board representation/C-suite for Black and global majority
👉🏾 Why senior opportunities continue to elude talented global majority talent. Why are talent leaders and recruiters unable to engage with this untapped potential?
👉🏾 Shadow Boards: It was a resounding ‘No’ from Barbara
👉🏾 Steps organisations can take to get on the journey
We also spoke about role models and there is a call to action for the PR Industry.
For an industry that aspires to have a seat in the Board Room and the ear of senior leadership - it is perhaps time to change the narrative, move away from ‘spin’ and take action for change…….
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Good afternoon, Barbara. Wonderful to have you here today, and we're going to be discussing something that is very, very close to both your heart and my heart. And this is about senior representation, representation at the leadership level, board level representation for black and ethnic minority talent within our industry, and of course beyond, but let's limit our ambit to the PR industry at this point in time. To get started with the first question, like the state of the nation report, which talks about social mobility and looks at tracking social mobility in different ways now, rather than just looking at the number of people who've gotten into jobs, do you believe we should have a state of board representation in the UK and probably the rest of the world?
Barbara: Absolutely. I mean I've got a couple of theories on that. I think that the CBI as it was before, I mean we can't talk about it now 'cause that's another place. But the CBI as it was before, they really should have taken up the mantel and the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and there's all of those regional boards, they should have taken up the mantle but clearly, , they didn't. And then we had the McGregor report in 2017 which actually says exactly this, there should be looking at ethnicity pay gaps and looking at board representation. So it's all been there so people just don't want to take up the mantle. So I'm absolutely for this kind of state of the...... whether it's in another report or one on its own, it absolutely should be there 'cause people need to know the stark reality, of what our boards look like, which are kind of male, stale and pale, which they have been forever.
Barbara: And then this whole piece about representation, I'm interested to know what it is we want represented, 'cause let's not pretend we just want some brown faces. Because we have to look at our government, don't we? We have to look at our government over the last few years. We have lots of lovely brown faces, but their politics are really not helping the majority, they're not helping society, they're helping a small elite. So when we say board representation, we don't just mean brown faces, meaning people who have the proper ethos to help change things, move things forward, not take on some people with brown faces who are keeping the status quo, who are gatekeepers, which is what's happened with the government, essentially.
Barbara: So, it's two areas. One, it could have been taken up by any number of organisations and two, let's make sure it's not just some shiny faces on the front of your recruitment catalog. It really is people who are gonna push things forward and make changes, and if you're going to recruit people from the global majority, those are the ones that you really should be looking for, not ones to keep the status quo.
Sudha: So you've also answered a part of my second question, which is, why is board representation an area of focus for REEB? Clearly, what we've seen in our society, in government, they've left a lot to be desired, it is about people who believe in their politics. So it's not necessarily people who believe in equity and inclusion for all.
Barbara: Because
Sudha: people who believe in continuing the privileges of the classes that are continuing to govern and rule over the country.
Barbara: Exactly.
Sudha: Yeah, but do you think board representation or senior leadership is critical also from a point of view for people, for our next generation, for the cohorts that are coming in to see more role models?
Barbara: Absolutely I do. Because ultimately, not only REEB but I think every decent human being wants to go and work in an inclusive culture that's acceptable, that's accepting rather, it's psychologically safe. And we know all white boards who have had the reins forever, they've had the power, but they can't seem to make boards and environments and cultures safe for everybody. So, absolutely, I think it's really important. I looked at some figures on the National Census from 2021, and that put the 46.2% of the population in London, this is for London particularly, are black, Asian, mixed, and others - their term. And also it said that the urban areas, around the country, but specifically London has the sort of median age of 25 to 29. Now, what that's saying to me is that's a talent pool,. And I'm just using London as an example because I didn't go through all of the major cities, but if that is your talent pool okay? If that's where you are going to get your future talent from, if you're blocking those people.
Barbara: One, when they come into your organisation, they're not seeing themselves, so it isn't psychologically safe and it isn't inclusive. But two, that is the future. I think people will just need to get used to the idea that the future C-Suite isn't going to look like them and I know a lot of people struggle with that, even today they're struggling with it, it's not going to look like me, it's going to come from another quarter. And I think this is how our industry, having that board representation, having that pathway clear is how our industry stays relevant. I mean, the world changes, societies' changes, so does the talent pool and unless the leaders now give opportunities to people who don't look like them, who are different, , they're gonna be dinosaurs. It's going to be a huge risk, and they're going to literally wither and die because people won't do business with them. I mean, it's kind of a sustainability piece, but it's a risk as well. Absolutely, that's why it's so important.
Sudha: Yeah, absolutely. I think organisations have to look at it from a business risk and resilience point of view. I mean, your consumers want it, your employees want it, and your employees are going to be different, your consumers are different already. And they are seeking more inclusive workplaces. So that's very, very critical.
I'll combine two questions into one and ask you this one. According to you, what are the key barriers for board representation - a C-suite for black and the global majority. You and I are well aware that there's no dearth of leadership talent amongst these groups, However, senior opportunities continue to elude them. And if I give the example of me or of you, I stepped away very reluctantly a couple of years back because I just couldn't open any doors for myself and people did not see me as a senior leader, and I'm assuming it's the same for you? We step away because we don't have an option and because people are not giving us the choices. What are the barriers? So it's the recruiters, it's the leaders? Why are they not able to engage with people like us?
Barbara: Yeah. Well you're very kind and you're very benevolent to say, you're giving them the benefit of the doubt. Me, not so much. So I think, well let's start from the beginning; PR and comms in the UK, we know from the last PRCA census was about 16.8 billion pounds, it's a billion pound industry.
Barbara: And the people with the power who are mainly white to mainly male, they don't feel they have to change. Why should they change? We've made all this money for ourselves, and we've made it this way, and the industry's been this successful with this kind of format and this system, so why do we have to change? And if you think about it, if you go back a little bit further, you think about British society and the British idea of capitalism, how was that wealth built? How was the empire built? It wasn't on having tea and crumpets with people around the world.
Barbara: So the fact that I think that people have subconsciously got used to. People are used to an elite group having masses of wealth and not having very many opportunities. So I think people are thinking, "well that's the lay of the land, why should we do anything different?" And that's the status quo, it's working for us. That also leads into opportunities, the top jobs for opportunities are just given to this small elite and that little elite likes it that way because they've got their little group and they've got their little clique and they like it that way. And that elite, this kind of, the components of the elite can be classism. So class, social mobility, which is part of it, which I really do think needs to be a protected characteristic now it's ridiculous. Because it's just so blatant, especially our economic systems right now, and then obviously the more obvious one of racism. If you're not ticking that box, you're just not getting in that club. They're just not letting you. So I think, in terms of barriers, it's desire. I've been saying desire since 2020. Remember, much of the things we experience in life is because somebody wants you to experience in that way.
Barbara: That is why you're experiencing it, so let's not forget that. And then, there's this magical mystical pathway to the C-suite, which only white men seem to be able to find. Isn't it funny? No one else seems to be able to find it and that's because we have gatekeepers. As I described earlier, there's some pretty strong areas where people would just stop you dead, you've experienced it, I've experienced it. And it can be, not only your background, social mobility and race, it's universities, it's maybe the way you speak. And then for you to get to the C-suite, certainly in our industries, on this magical path, they expect you to have had worked on high profile clients and worked for big brands and led a huge team, maybe internationally, but of course we're not on that path. How do we get to do that? If you won't let me lead a big client or a big brand, how am I gonna have the experience so you can open the C-Suite to me?
Barbara: It's so much gatekeeping and I don't think it's unconscious. I think it's absolutely consciously done because they like the little look of their club, who's in there and they don't want to let other people in. And those are the real blockages 'cause there's no other reason. If you look at who's going to university, it's completely mixed. In fact, the global majority are the majority of young people who graduate, it's just a nonsense, that means it's stopped, it's blocked somewhere, and I think the gatekeepers just need to open the gate and share their love. That's what they need to do because one day there won't be a gate.
Barbara: There won't be a gate for them to keep and they will just be on the outside rather than on the inside. And as you spoke about earlier, it's a huge risk that they really need to think about, really do.
Sudha: Absolutely. And yeah, I think our industry is also such that it's very cliquey, people know people and they know someone or the other in positions of power, and those people keep recommending each other?
Barbara: Big circle, isn't it?
Sudha: Circle of people within that and people who are outside are always going to remain outside. And how complicit are recruiters in this entire business? How much understanding do they have of the challenges?
Barbara: Yeah. I've had some great recruiters but I've had more poor recruiters and I think that recruiters just need to grow a backbone. I think they need to try and draw themselves away from the commission 'cause it's all about the money and commission.
Barbara: And I think they need to seize an opportunity to make a real impact on societal change, they really are in a position to do that and if they could just draw themselves away from just being the carrot is the commission then they could make so much good. I think the whole idea that they have to present a candidate in their own image, or the last candidate who fulfilled a role, let's just send another one of those along.
Barbara: I find it gutless and weak, and I tell you what, I think if you and I, Sudha, I know people who look like us can go into a job, an all white space every day, where we are ridiculed, where we face micro aggressions, where people are ghosting us, where people are just rude and ignoring us, and yet we go in, we do our best work, we go home, we come back again.
Barbara: That's courage. And I think recruiters need to just grow a spine and think. I think I should be helping my client to convince him and advise him that the talent pool is open now, it's wide, it doesn't have to be in your image or my image. Take a look at some different types of people, I don't believe in blind CVs, I think you should know my name is whatever my name is.
Barbara: So that I'm not exactly like you and that's the reason why you should take me because I'm not exactly like you, that's why I don't like blind CVs but that's another conversation. So I think that they really are missing an opportunity and I think they need to be courageous. And I need to think, even if, for one minute, just not think about just the commission and I have a quote.
Barbara: Which seems applicable for recruiters and the quote is from Thomas Sowell, and he is, he's about nineties now, he's black, he's African-American and he's an economist, and he said something that just seemed to sum up where we are with recruiters and the whole atmosphere that we have and the whole situation we find our industry in, and it says, "when you want to help people", this is for you, recruiters especially, "you'll tell them the truth."
Sudha: Yeah.
Barbara: "But when you want to help yourself" by your commission, "you'll tell them what they want to hear." And that's exactly where we are, sadly. So I think there's a role to play for recruiters. And I know a few of them say, and a few of them are on the scene saying, "yep, we're harping inclusiveness and et cetera, et cetera" and they participate and what have you, but to be honest, I don't believe that they're pushing people, especially senior roles. I don't believe headhunters and those elite recruiters that , ring you up out of the blue and say, you've got this great board job for you, I think it's just performative because the boards are still male, pale and stale. So either they're failing on a massive scale or it's performative.
Sudha: Yeah. Also, I think they need a huge amount of awareness and understanding about the untapped talent pool that exists.
Barbara: Indeed.
Sudha: Actually in today's world, should have already read about it or should know about it. But if they don't, then they need to know about it.
Barbara: Well, it's 2023, there's enough information to fill the British library on what you need to know about inclusive cultures, all of the various buzzwords; DNI, inclusivity, equity, et cetera, et cetera, it's all there. So if you don't know about it, it's 'cause you don't want to know, let's be honest, you don't want to know.
Sudha: Absolutely agreed on that. So moving on, Barbara, do you think shadow boards could be the way forward as a way to build skills and visibility for talent? You're smiling.
Barbara: It's a hard ‘No’ for...

105: Sustainability in practice: In conversation with Serbjeet Kohli, Sustainability Practice Lead, Steer

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
What does it mean for a business to be Carbon Neutral? Did you know that the buildings businesses inhabit can sometimes have the highest impact on their carbon footprint?
When businesses set ambitions to be Net Zero, what are the steps they take to get there? Does taking positive climate action mean sacrificing growth?
According to @Serbjeet Kohli Sustainability Practice Lead at Steer a global infrastructure consulting firm - it means decoupling growth with a businesses carbon impact. It is about reducing the impact of carbon generated per dollar, per pound, per INR that a company earns. As is obvious sustainability was the focus of our conversation in this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast.
We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 ESG backlash - Serbjeet Kohli’s view that ESG or however you frame it is here to stay, that our communities and key stakeholders have set the direction of travel. The backlash is to be expected considering the huge ask, a fundamental shift in how we think, and evaluate the choices we make
👉🏾 The importance of embedding equity right at the concept state on how we design our cities, urban spaces or transportation and not start thinking about it post facto. Donor and investor imperatives
👉🏾 Moving from supply side world to demand side world - taking into consideration consumer based thinking to generate more value from assets
👉🏾 Addressing the Elephant in the room - the deep lack of diversity in the industry
👉🏾 The ability to swiftly adapt and thriving in change has be to the motto of sustainability transition
👉🏾 Future opportunities from a fast evolving sustainability landscape. And it never profitability vs sustainability, it is about doing both
If you would like to listen to the podcast - head to the links in the comments
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Good morning, Serbjeet. Wonderful to have you on The Elephant in the Room Podcast today.
Serbjeet: Good morning Sudha. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Sudha: Okay, let's start with a quick introduction. So who are you and what do you do?
Serbjeet: I'm Serbjeet Kohli. I'm the sustainability practice lead at Steer Group. I've been in the business for 15 years, been in the industry for 20 years, but the sustainability role is a new role.
Serbjeet: So I'm looking to expand and establish our offer in all the markets that Steer Group operates. We are an infrastructure consulting firm who's been in this practice for over 40 years. And we supported clients, both public and private sector around the globe, essentially helping them invest in infrastructure, transport infrastructure specifically. But as we move forward in the world, the challenges that are being faced by our clients, by our economies, by our communities are getting even more complex and what we are realising is that it isn't just an infrastructure solution that can answer the questions and the challenges that are being posed on its own.
Serbjeet: We need to think more widely, more sustainably and linking up different aspects of not just transport, but transport and energy, transport and energy and finance and all these solutions require fresh thinking. So that's what really our offer is, it's to bring our existing expertise, and I'm trying to link up our capabilities with our clients requirements to solve some of the most complex challenges that our clients and communities face.
Sudha: So I understand from reading on your website and some research that 2022 was a milestone here for Steer. You became a carbon neutral organisation. What does that mean?
Serbjeet: Now it's really interesting and I think again transition is part of essentially all organisations ethos to evolve and grow and kind of, almost keep up with what the society demands of us. So I think carbon neutrality and achieving net zero by 2025 was an objective that our organisation decided that it wants to meet and achieve.
Serbjeet: And we went through quite a rigorous process of first of all, understanding what is our carbon footprint. And this was quite an extensive exercise around the globe. We went to each of our offices to understand what's our travel patterns, what's our supply chain patterns, what is our scope one, scope two, scope three emissions, as you call it. Getting it quantified to the level and converted to emission standards, using global standards. And getting it independently audited, reviewed. Almost to check that what we had done in terms of the efforts we are making, in terms of improving our supply chain carbon footprint, improving our own footprint and one of the biggest impacts we realised was our office space. The buildings that we inhabit as a business, are one of the largest impacts that we have on emissions, and our largest office in London where we moved into a new space is one of the most green building at Rushford Street, which had a huge impact.
So, as part of the calculation, we found that moving into a green sustainable building meant that our footprint reduced significantly, and that helped us achieve, essentially carbon neutrality in 2022. And it's a process we are continuing to monitor our travel, continuing to monitor our supply chains, continuing to monitor and estimate our greenhouse gas emissions. And then we're required even kind of take actions to source responsibility to travel almost more responsibly and carry out employee surveys and supplier surveys to understand that what we are estimating as our carbon footprint is independently verified. And more interestingly, I think even things like very simple, having a vegetarian day or a vegan day in the office where all colleagues come together and eat, it's also to make it the social thing, not just an obligation on the organisation, but also something fun to do. So it's not all pain as it is being painted that, achieving net zero or becoming carbon neutral is all pain, it's also a lot of fun as well.
Sudha: Yeah, it's very interesting to hear about the journey from you because the scope one, scope two, a lot of organisations are doing, but scope three they don't want to get into that because that is going to be the biggest footprint for most organisations.
Sudha: And of course it's interesting to hear that the building where your biggest office was, was the biggest culprit in this. And you've moved to a greener, more sustainable building and this has had an impact on reducing your carbon footprint. So it's very interesting to hear that, and I love this thought about the narrative around how we move forward, the narrative is about, oh, we have to make sacrifices. Oh, we have to do these things which are like very painful. So it's not all about pain, it is also about ensuring that it moves beyond, tick box to where we start embracing it as something as a part of our lives so that's a great process.
You mentioned just now that Steer has set a target to be net zero by 2025 and near zero carbon by 2030, through less than 50% offsetting. Now offsetting , it used to happen a lot I think in the nineties and two thousands and, even in the last decade.
Sudha: But slowly we are realising that offsetting probably isn't the best way to go about on this journey. But what does this entail when you say that you want to be net zero carbon by 2025, what steps does Steer have to take to get there?
Serbjeet: Really good question. And again, I think what I mentioned earlier, some of this is in our nature itself. We are heavily an organisation that has promoted sustainable choices in form of almost ensuring that majority of our travel, and I think technology and pandemic has helped us, has been on sustainable modes as much as possible. Wherever we have opportunities available, our internal policies are aligned, so it isn't just sort of a strap line on the top, which says, we will be carbon neutral. Our behaviours need to respond to that requirement. And behaviours, what we find is often the messaging that comes from the top flows all the way down to each and every employee and it kind of gets embedded in the organisation's DNA. And that's where we've always found the processes and policies that we put into place should be there to support our businesses to grow because we are not about reducing our business's impact just because we want to lose our growth trajectory.
We also want to grow in this market. So it's fundamentally about decoupling our growth with our carbon impact growth. So it's really reducing the impact of carbon generated per dollar per pound, per INR that we earn. That's fundamentally the ethos with which we work with. And within that, then there are quite simple things that you can do around, providing bike share schemes or providing incentives for people to make more sustainable choices by giving access to loans for monthly or annual passes. And I know that's kind of a trend that used to exist where people used to go in the office every week and every month, and therefore having a bulk discount on their subscription was quite a heavy ask on their paycheck, so we had schemes. We still have schemes available for providing loans for such facilities, but obviously we are now in a new world of hybrid impact. So that's where then the choices to travel even for business purposes, as business travel comes back, we are starting to kind of promote more sustainable choices in our policies, each office now has a local environmental plan in place where they are, first of all, creating a baseline of understanding what the energy consumption is, what the supply chain is, how are we making choices in terms of any shared travel that we are doing? Do we have choices available in form of let's say using zero emission vehicles for our travel if possible.
Serbjeet: So it's down to that kind of making sure at a bottom up level that this thinking of being aware of your footprint and as the business grows and as our organisation grows and starts offering more solutions to more clients. We are not falling through any of those attributes, which would result in us going backwards. We want to move forwards in terms of our growth, but backwards in terms of our carbon footprint. And that's the solution that we keep finding in all the choices, all the decisions we make. So, fundamentally, what we want to do is to keep going along that path, which has led us to carbon neutrality last year.
Serbjeet: We want to move forward with those initiatives to get to net zero and then you know go to almost sub-zero by 2030. We want to be ambitious in this space and we think we can achieve it.
Sudha: So very different from what the UK government has in mind at this point. Not ambitious at all, and probably have taken steps that are going to probably impact how countries are making their own decisions on Fossil fuel and oil and gas licenses, et cetera.
Serbjeet: I kind of take a step back almost from some of the noises you hear on a weekly basis. And if you want to kind of separate the signal from the noise, the signal is very clear and the decisions that have been taken by the voters, by the people who put governments in place are very, very clear. That messaging, I don't think is changing. As a society, as individuals, we have made that decision. I don't think that direction of travel is changing. How we get there will be different for each economy. I was in California three weeks ago and the direction of travel there is just phenomenal in terms of the amount of money that is being put in place, where the government's mouth is, and exactly the same challenges that there are elections happening in all the three biggest markets we operate in, in the US, in the UK and India next year.
Serbjeet: So the direction of travel of central government, federal government policy could evolve and change in all these geography But the messaging on the ground, at least in that part of the world in California, was very clear that this is happening irrespective of the political direction of travel because this is now embedded in their laws. And I think in some sense, California stands out in North America particularly given the amount of disruption it has faced in its own, wildfires and you know adverse weather events, extreme droughts, they've had a good rain this year, so it's very lush and green so would definitely recommend anybody to go and travel there at this point of the time. But I think the consequences of not taking action is significant and people have realised that, and I don't think that choice is changing even in an economy as India, which is committing to being net zero in 2070. I think the action on the ground is phenomenal, is what we are seeing. So I think that direction of travel is not changing, we believe that and that's a decision that people, individuals have taken.
Sudha: Agree with you on the broader line of thinking.
Sudha: So you are the sustainability practice lead at Steer. What services are you offering to clients? And are there examples of how you are thinking of integrating, the sustainability offering with whatever work, you are doing on transportation or any other area?
Serbjeet: Sure. Absolutely. And I think it's a real culmination, and we are learning as we go as well in this experience because nobody has solved this problem fully. So the key services that Steer offers is zero emission rate vehicles, and this covers electric buses, electric two-wheelers, hydrogen buses.
So anything that reduces emissions while providing mobility is where kind of our core offer is. And this goes into even looking at charging infrastructure that supports or refuelling infrastructure that supports deployment of the zero emission vehicles. Because that's the other thing we are finding these days, that it's not just the vehicles that need to be produced and procured and deployed, it's the supporting, charging infra, supporting refuelling infra that needs to come in and that's where often the crux of the problem lies, not so much in the kit that comes out of a manufacturing unit from an OEM, but it's what happens once it is out there.
Serbjeet: How does it get serviced? How does it get replaced? How does it get charged? How does it get refuelled? All of those aspects we look into, and in all of this, in all of this money matters. Who's funding it? Who's financing it? The current upfront costs of these vehicles is still significantly higher than the counterparts that are available and corresponding refuelling, recharging infrastructure doesn't quite exist even in quite advanced part of the worlds, where perhaps, let's say again, I take example of California, where Tesla is like almost what used to be the most sold car, whatever that was, Ford T 110 number is as visible as that and has a widespread charging network.
Serbjeet: Even there, the challenges are being faced in terms of when they're trying to migrate their buses and their trucks, which also have a significant GHG impact. But then when we turn this around into a world where the electric vehicle revolution in India and South Asia is moving in a very different direction where we are seeing two wheelers and three wheelers being electrified and that being electrified in masses. And that's where TCO, the total cost of ownership advantage already exists and will exist in case of buses and cars fairly soon as a manufacturing base expands and the volumes increase. So it's looking at all of this ecosystem where, our clients face challenges or we see challenges at governments or funding institutions and what is very interesting is that almost every fund, every investor who we speak to, now has a climate transition fund in place and has millions committed in participating in this transition, and we are there to help them as we have helped them in case of investments in airports and toll roads and metro projects and all other modes.
Serbjeet: We are there to help them in this climate transition activity. So that's kind of one strand of our work. We also have very interesting and economic development unit both in the form of fourth economy in North America and form of Steer economic development team. Here in the UK and they have a very clear net zero strategy offer which looks at the economic impact of these things 'cause this isn't just about technology and investment taking place, this is about communities being impacted, this is about individual livelihoods, individual skills being impacted, and then wider ecosystem, how does this net zero strategy impact on the supply chain?
Serbjeet: Because as what we touched on earlier, It's not just what you do, it's what you do in the supply chain that you exist, of the service that you're providing or the products that you're supplying that matters and it has a different impact depending on what level of carbon intensity you are offering. So both fourth economy in the US and Steer economic development in the UK have the strategic offer of net zero evaluation, both coming up with a strategy for net zero transition for local economies. But also then to look at the community impact, the skill impact and what support those communities need to enable that transition to take place.
Serbjeet: And we also then go in and look at the evaluation of how they're transitioning, what the challenges are, what can public sector agencies do to support that transition? And then the third very interesting offer that we've recently added in form of our acquisition of Amber Side Advisors is our capability in decentralised energy.
Serbjeet: So, like I said, our buildings contribute to a lot of our emissions, and what we are finding is that district energy, district cooling, district heating, decentralised energy is a big agenda on most investors and most public agencies as a way to decarbonise our carbon impact - whereby essentially replacing that whole individual old boilers or old heating equipments or old air conditioners that exist in individual homes and are quite inefficient with a centralised heating and cooling unit, which can be managed at a district level and heating and cooling and...

104: Tips for women to be successful in the workplace with Mohana Talapatra

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
I don’t have to be a crystal gazer to say that we have a long way to go before we achieve gender equality and even longer before we get to gender equity. This is not something unique to one part of the world, this is a reality across geographies in developed and developing countries. After decades of advocacy the only thing we can say with certainty is that there is too much talk, and very little action. And that too much talk has resulted in gender washing and fatigue amongst those in positions in power.
The consensus from speaking to women leaders across the world is that the road to equity is steep and arduous. This struggle for representation and equity is stymied by a belief by people in positions of power and some women that all is well and that women can be who they aspire too and succeed.
To throw light on some of challenges faced by women in the workplace I recently spoke with Mohana Talapatra, an ex practice leader for sustainability and ESG (at one of the big 4). As Mohana describes it - she has worked in typically type A - predominately male centric work environments in global investment banking and consulting. So it was interesting to hear her perspective on what it takes to succeed in male dominated spaces
In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about a lot of things including
👉🏾 Learning how to claim the space which we occupy and where we want to belong
👉🏾 Challenges women face in the life cycle of their careers - imposter syndrome, being excluded, negative quietness bias…….
👉🏾 Evolving leadership styles and strategies to navigating power structures within organisations. We also speak about the Queen Bee syndrome
👉🏾 Treating your career like a marathon - and being prepared for the ups and downs. Mohana uses an interesting analogy of the stock market (short term/long term)
👉🏾 Thinking like a man (🤔🤔) - especially when it comes to taking credit, applying for roles or prestige projects
👉🏾 Choosing your battles and taking calculated career risks, developing a portfolio of skills
👉🏾 The importance of work life balance
👉🏾 What organisations can do to help women to succeed
We also spoke about the people who inspire her and much more…..
If you would like to listen to the podcast, head to the links in the comments
Episode Transcript:
Sudha: Hey Mohana, thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast.
Mohana: Hi Sudha, lovely to be on this podcast and to be speaking with you today. I think about all the issues that are important to us in business and especially as being women in business, so very excited. Thank you.
Sudha: Me too. Looking forward to this conversation.
Sudha: So let's get started with a quick introduction. Do you have an elevator pitch? Do you have this quick thing that you tell people whenever you meet them? Because I get very flummoxed sometimes when I start giving a detailed introduction.
Mohana: No, absolutely. And that has been me also. I'm like, can we just talk about not me for a bit?
Mohana: And I just tend to gloss over it very quickly. But I think, as part of my recent training to be a coach, I'm learning that if we don't claim the space where we stand and where we want to belong, nobody's going to give us that space. So off late, I'm learning to craft an elevator pitch, but I've not gotten there yet. But yes, very briefly, I've had a 25 plus year career across investment banking, consulting, studying, working and living across the UK, America's, Asia, greater China, and now in India.
Mohana: So all in all, I've had a very multicultural studying, working, living experience, and typically all in nearly type A, predominantly male centric work environments. And most recently, I have been a sustainability and ESG practice leader at a Big Four. So that's me.
Sudha: That's so interesting. I love the experience that comes from having worked across geographies.
Sudha: I think it opens up your mind really. As someone who has worked across multiple geographies and leadership roles, do you believe that women leaders face challenges that are different to their counterparts?
Mohana: Absolutely. And I think this is a great question. Especially because now when I think back in all my roles across different regions, organisations, parts of the world, I think some things stand out as being common threads.
Mohana: And I think let me start by looking at it, right from when a woman leader comes into an organisation. And then the entire journey whilst they're there. So if I were to look at it that way, I think it starts right at the time of hiring. You know, how many a time women with equal qualifications and experiences will get hired at a level or a compensation band below that of their male peers.
Mohana: For the equivalent leadership role or position, and there is no way to contest that from the outside in, right, because you have no idea of what the internal band of the structures look like. But once you're in the organisation, you recognise and realise the disparity of it. And then it takes a long time to reach peerage, because then you're already in the system and you're going through the hoops.
Mohana: Now once hired, women are, of course, as is the experience for all of us, routinely expected to outperform on all our KPIs, just to sometimes even qualify for peerage, with a large organisation and our male counterparts. And then comes the big whopper of it all, the performance review and promotion discussions.
Mohana: And it's been my experience that I think women aren't given their due recognition most of the time. And I would say this also has to do with us a little bit, because we don't ask for it. We don't speak up about our accomplishments, about our achievements. This can go back to how the age old gender conversation and stereotyping is done at a very early age.
Mohana: It can go back to cultural nuances. I really have no idea why this happens, but this is something that is very typically seen in mostly all women leaders. We hesitate to speak up, even about our own accomplishments and achievements, right? And as the old adage goes, you don't get if you don't ask. So there is that, and I think if I had to think about a couple more other things. And then, of course, we can talk about this, is that, leadership styles? I find that it's a challenge in a way, where if you do too much either side, then you can be very easily branded as being one way or another.
Mohana: For example, you cannot be too strong or assertive a leader because then you are overcompensating for your gender. And if you have a balanced, inclusive, empathic leadership style, which is not very type A, then you could get branded as being soft and consensus seeking, in other words, indecisive.
Mohana: So where is the fine line? It's not very obvious, not very clear. And I think the other thing is also that I've seen when I have been in a senior leadership position, looking at my managers, how they've been hiring employees into the organisation. I’ve seen that one of the things is that while women often have to juggle multiple responsibilities at home and the workplace, this gives them an edge in multitasking, but it sets them back on the career track.
Mohana: And organisations typically will, of their own accord either give a woman employee less responsibility in the role or may not even hire women into roles, which demand a lot out there. And many a time, this is done leaving the woman's choice and preference out of her own decision matrix.
Mohana: And I've seen that as a woman leader when my managers have been making those unconscious biases at the time of hiring, or at the time of progressions or promotions. And I've questioned it. And I've been told, but... XYZ is at this stage in her life, and will she really be able to devote time and energy to this role?
Mohana: And I'm like, why don't you leave that conversation with her? Why don't you have an open dialogue? Why are we to assume, presume, right? So there's so many biases and they run through the entire course right from hiring to the entire tenure of a woman leader's existence.
Sudha: Agree. And none of these are small things that you can overlook. They have an impact, a snowball impact on women's careers and their aspirations, the opportunities that they have.
How would you Mohana, describe your own leadership style? And do you think it has evolved in the course of your career? And of course, as human beings, we are constantly evolving, but leadership and as we know it, what was defined as a good leader, that definition stayed stagnant for a very, very long time.
Sudha: And I think that has impacted all of us and how we behave with ourselves or with others, But I think it's changing. It's dramatically changing.
Mohana: That's again, a very thought provoking question. I think leadership that I saw about 25 years ago was a very different leadership style where it was very top down, very autocratic in a way where do as you're told, type of thing.
Mohana: And that's been evolving and changing over the years for the better, of course. As for my personal leadership style, I think it's always been involved, inclusive while collegial. And I'll be honest with you, Sudha I think I've been sometimes called out for it and not in a good way. Right, because I've been told, I'm not hard enough, or I'm not laying down the rules as much as I ought to.
Mohana: And that's been the other side of the coin in terms of being too inclusive, collegial, involved. But my personal belief system, is that I'd like to give voice to the particularly shy and underrepresented team members, by giving them platforms and opportunities to be more visible. And this is critical because I think that way one doesn't end up subconsciously discriminating against team members who might be and are equally smart and equally hardworking, but they keep a low profile.
Mohana: And this happens quite a lot, gender notwithstanding also, and this is something that I call as the negative quietness bias, but particularly women tend to have this more than men. Generally, there's a quietness amongst women that sometimes does not work for them.
Mohana: So yeah, so I try to kill that negative quietness bias right at the beginning. And another thing I do is share credit with the team always, but I take the fall on my shoulders when something goes wrong. And this is important because this is important from, building trust, it's also important from a perspective of the fact that I have your back, you're just here to do your best work possible. Go do your, play your A game. If something goes wrong, I'm the coach. I have your back. So that's the kind of messaging and the actions that need to go out to our teams always.
Sudha: Yeah, that sounds like some great advice Mohana.
Sudha: And moving from that, power structures within organisations. What would your advice be to younger female and underrepresented colleagues? How do you navigate power structures in organisations? I mean, this is like something I don't think they teach you in management degrees.
Mohana: And I think it's something that you kind of learn intuitively as you kind of go through your own journey. I can only talk about what has possibly worked for me and just from my kind of life experience is I would say just network network network, because all organisations these days are inherently matrix organisations.
Mohana: So the best way to navigate power structures is possibly to align with a few different formal as well as informal sponsors within an organisation. eople who have the opportunity to see you outside of the immediate role construct, who have the ability to observe how you deal with people, your peers, your managers, your teams, across lines of business, across geographies, across multiple clients and across different cultural dimensions.
Mohana: And that is important because that builds a lens into you, which is not a very role driven lens, rather it's a skill driven lens to you, so that I think is important. The other thing, a tactical thing that I would do is in the reporting chain, I would find out who is my manager's manager.
Mohana: So skip level and a practice leader and set up a rhythm of connecting with each such, level or layer of people proactively. So that kind of keeps everybody informed on where you stand, where they stand. And I think the other thing that I'm learning now especially now, as I am learning to be a business coach is that we talk about, or we make reference to a systemic order in organisations, in society, in life, which takes precedence over all else.
Mohana: And sometimes in order to maintain that systemic order and to navigate power structures, I think one has to be a little flexible to accommodate the big personalities which come with some of, the larger positions, which are executive level positions. And what that means is generally that somewhere one has to keep people in powerful positions involved. So even if you are fully capable of solving a problematic situation at work related to a work project on your own. It's important and I think it's advisable and a good practice in that sense to involve and inform those who matter about the situation and what you did to resolve it also, more importantly.
Mohana: So I think in a nutshell, that would be it.
Sudha: Coming to this next question, whenever I speak to women, a lot of women, professional women in India, and especially senior women, I hear that women have the same opportunities and chances as their male colleagues.
Sudha: So my question to you is, it's a true or false question, women in india do not face challenges in the workplace
Mohana: No, I think it's false and it's in big bold false.
Sudha: And what have been your experiences of being excluded, people taking credit for your work, not being promoted or being given your due, or not being allowed to be vocal or visible?
Mohana: I think let me start by taking the easier question first. The easier question would be people taking credit for your work. And I think why I say that's a easier question is because I think it's bit of a gender agnostic global phenomenon and it falls more to a power hierarchy or a power structure hierarchy, if you will - because it's been happening for decades now. The most famous one is Rosalind Franklin's groundbreaking work on discovering the double helix strand structure of the DNA, but which got credited to Watson and Crick, who ended up with the Nobel Prize for it.
Mohana: So there are many such examples throughout history in the modern world, except that that will continue to happen for a while, one can't wish that away, and it just is a reflection of the power structure. So how higher are you in the organisation, how much influence you wield and all of that. We can hope for a more equitable world in the time to come, but that's the way it is and yes, it's not something that is easy to digest. But when I put it into perspective with the fact that if the woman who discovered what the DNA strand looks like wasn't given credit for it until much, much later, then my little contributions or big contributions even if they are taken away from me, I can learn to live with that a little bit.
Mohana: As far as being excluded is concerned, I think sometimes it happens very obviously or overtly and sometimes it happens not so overtly. There are times when I have been excluded from projects, especially when I've taken holidays.
Mohana: And this is, I think something that needs speaking about because people in today's corporate world are just afraid to take holidays. Just because they are so insecure that there's another line of people waiting to jump on the prize project if they go away or disappear for a week. And it has happened to me, I won't deny it, it has happened to me more than once and I've been eased out of projects either for that project or using that as an excuse or pretext for easing me out of an important market or an important region or an important account for that matter. And then been told that you're best at hunting or incubating, so this is now critical mass and you don't need to spend your energy and time to this because we could use you somewhere else.
Mohana: And so then the question arises that am I always going to continue to incubate and build and build when do I get the chance to be handed something which is ready made on a platter and be recognised for that. So there is that, it does happen.
Sudha: It's really telling that example because we see so often excuses, they are masked in a manner as if they're thinking about you, but it's not about you, they're just masking the language in order to keep you excluded and in order to keep you down.
Self-doubt, imposter? How do you tackle it? Was there a career move that you missed because of it?
Mohana: This is a question that I think I sometimes ask myself. Big career moves, strangely, I've not really had that imposter syndrome or self doubt. I think because if I step back a little bit from myself and look at all of us in general, the...

103: Project Mumbai: Harnessing kindness to build India's kindness capital - In conversation with Shishir Joshi Founder and CEO Project Mumbai

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
In the midst of all the doom and gloom, here is a heart warming story and wonderful initiative that taps into the ‘kindness bone’ of people. My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Shishir Joshi, a veteran journalist and the Founder and Chief Executive of the award-winning not-for-profit Project Mumbai (www.projectmumbai.org) a public trust striving for social transformation through initiatives of scale.
Mumbai, is the city of dreams for millions of Indians. Its a city I spent over a decade in the city and fell in love with it, its spirit, its generosity, its ability to let people be, for everyone to dream, for everyone to be who they were, for being a safe city for women working crazy hours. I loved it for its indomitable spirit and humanity but also its street food (nothing to beat Mumbai street food). It is also the city where I met with Shishir (a journalist at that time) as a PR pro.

Coming back to the podcast, according to Shishir, the idea of “Project Mumbai” is founded on the belief that every human being has a kindness bone - especially Mumbaikars (people who live in Mumbai). And he wants to harness that to make Mumbai the ‘Kindness capital of India’. Project Mumbai represents what a successful model for what public, private, people partnerships should look like, showcases how we can achieve social transformations through collaborations and make our cities more accessible and safer for those who are the most vulnerable.

The tagline for this brilliant initiative is equally brilliant and colloquial “Mumbai ke liye kuch bhi karega” which losely translates to ‘I will do any thing for Mumbai’. The tagline beautifully captures the essence, the spirit of the city. And that not just why this volunteer-led non-profit, was selected by the UN SDG Action Campaign as one of the global recipients for the Solidarity Award, a special call from the annual UN SDG Action Awards 2020 (It is was 1 among 3 selected from India among 50 in the world)

Listen to Shishir Joshi speak about building cohesive teams, volunteers and their role during COVID, his favourite projects, proudest moments, biggest learnings, the future, and how cities could tackle some of their biggest challenges through similar initiatives and what it means to be a catalyst for positive change. To know more about how this incredible organisation is harnessing the kindness of people and collaboration to deliver on over 100+ successful partnerships towards building and creating a more inclusive city head to the podcast.

Episode Transcript
Sudha: Hey Shishir, Good afternoon. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. Wonderful to have you here and see you after a very long time.
Shishir: Thank you so much, Sudha. And yes, I really love the title of this podcast that you have. It's very interesting
Sudha: Brilliant. So let's get started with a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.
Shishir: Oh, it's going to take a long time.
Sudha: I can believe that.
Shishir: I'm Shishir Joshi and I head a not-for-profit called Project Mumbai, which may have been founded, co-founded by me, but it's a citizen-led initiative and it's an idea of - can we create social transformation through initiatives of scale. And that's where our entire passion is to also involve citizens doing their bit and there are two elements to it. One is, our tagline which says, ‘Mumbai ke liye kuch bhi karega.’ And second is, because there's a lot of kindness that people in Mumbai have I'm not saying other cities don't, but the city which is kind of a country in itself, then can we work towards making Mumbai the kindness capital of the country?
Shishir: So I love what I do. And I'm glad that there are people who love what we do as well, which is why we've become a go to organisation for a lot of things.
Sudha: Absolutely. So you've also clearly mastered how you do that because people wouldn't be coming if you were not doing it well. Moving on to the next question.
Sudha: There have been rare occasions when I've seen a journalist move from being a hardcore journalist to working with communities. How did that happen? You were like doing hardcore business reporting.
Shishir: Well, I think as a part of journalism, there's so much of people interface, which happens. We did journalism at a time when cell phones did not exist. So there was actually live real interactions. So when you meet people you have conversations, you understand people's stories, and vice versa. So when that happens, your understanding of situations, change. But yes, that's seeing life from one perspective.
Shishir: There have been lots of opportunities I've had over the years, even as a working journalist to interact with communities. My earliest I think was when I was in school and college then I was reading books for those who are visually impaired. I'm not saying that that contributed to where I am today.
Shishir: But I think just things fell in to place, dots got joined and I think there were opportunities which just came my way and I kind of let my passions pace move in the right direction or maybe the direction just started getting created. I've always enjoyed doing what I'm doing. So a question which I'm sometimes get asked is, don't you miss journalism?
Shishir: There's been print and there's been television. So do I miss it? Of course I do. But because I love that as well. And do I love what I do? Yes, I do. So if I leave this and go elsewhere, will I miss this? Of course I will. So I think it's about enjoying what you do. So living for the moment and for the present.
Sudha: Yeah. And also following your passion, because when you moved out, you started an initiative, which was also linked to supporting young students. I think it was all leading towards where you are today.
Shishir: You're right. Absolutely. So the teaching journalism or the citizen journalism was also about as one would put it the kindness bone that I see in most other people as well. So I think maybe that's an extension which led from one to the other from hardcore journalism teaching to maybe civic journalism, which is about civic sense and responsibilities and duties apart from rights, which led to people sharing what are their concerns and from concerns led to maybe solutions from there led to finding a pathway.
Shishir: And it's not about me finding a pathway, it's about guiding people and working with them to find the pathway. Because it's not about me doing Project Mumbai, it's about people who are part of it, which is leading to Project Mumbai what it is. It's a people movement.
Sudha: Yeah, finding the right communities to do that.
Sudha: So what is Project Mumbai, this passion project of yours. I love the tagline Mumbai ke liye kuch translates into, I'll do anything for Mumbai. How did you arrive at that?
Shishir: I think a lot of things at Project Mumbai well, there is a planning that happens, but being a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, because it's about a feeling. Living that feeling. Now, the name Project Mumbai also is not about getting a lot of brand experts coming together to say, what should we call it? It's about the city Mumbai and treating it like a good project. So it became Project Mumbai. So we never really thought about, it was a very simple thing that would it become popular or not popular if you have a different name, we do good work. It has to be popular or not popular. So project Mumbai name also became that way. And similarly, people in Mumbai talk like that and that's how, when we started talking to a lot of people to say will you be able to help us out? And that's when came in, of course, we'll do anything ‘kuch bhi karega’. So that became Mumbai ke liye kuch bhi karega.
Shishir: And from there realised that there are so many people who have that element of kindness to say. And we've seen the city going through crisis so often over the years, decades, that every time there's a crisis, people have come together. So there is that very deep, inherent kindness bone that people have, that of giving.
Shishir: So when it's in crisis that people come together, why not in peace times? So can we make the city the kindness capital? It is a kind capital, it is a kind city, there are kind people everywhere. It's just that sometimes they don't have that opportunity to express that kindness. It's just that some of these stories don't come out.
Shishir: One story which has come out, there are so many other bigger Project Mumbais' happening around us. Maybe we don't know about it.
Sudha: True. But, the tagline Mumbai ke liye kuch bhi karega it so well captures the spirit of that city and also the language. Right. Mumbai language is different, Mumbai Hindi or Marathi is a bit different to what is elsewhere in the country. So it captures that spirit definitely.
I read on the Project Mumbai website that you've had like a hundred-plus successful partnerships. And the partnerships work on the principle of collaboration with local administration and the private sector.So one a bit slower and the other a bit faster or both very slow. I don't know. So what does it look like in practice?
Shishir: Which one would, according to you, be the slower one, if one would ask?
Sudha: I'd say the public sector would be the slower one, but from recent examples, I also know that organisations sometimes they take their time to move on important things.
Shishir: So, it comes back to that element of kindness, that there are good people everywhere. There are good people within the government, there are good people in the private sector, there are good people all around us. And it's just tapping that resource helps the door open faster. And its also then creating that interest, it's about storytelling, maybe that this is what we are doing. And if I am trying to sell you an idea about an initiative, if that does not interest you, then either I have not conveyed it to you in the manner it ought to be conveyed, or maybe your priorities are different.
Shishir: So it's about getting the right story to the right people and then getting them on board. So people could come on board as volunteers. People can come on board as permission givers, people can come on board as funders or just co creators. But they have to buy in.
Shishir: I might say, okay, Sudha, why don't you join me in x activity of mine? You would join in the first time because maybe I've asked you to, but you need to come on board again and again and again, you need to like it. So that is where the idea is to get people interested and get the right people interested.
Shishir: So to answer your question, the earlier one there have been challenges at either ends that governments or the public sector be it the municipal corporation or different authorities. It takes time to convince, but some of these ideas and so many of them, which is like, when you said the tagline, Mumbai ke like kuch bhi karega so many of our initiatives, just to give you an example, setting up libraries in the gardens of Mumbai.
The moment we share it with somebody in the government, they say, wow, so interesting. And all we do is ask very little of others because the ask is big, but we are breaking up the ask in different portions. So I'm not asking a lot from one person, I'm just breaking up the ask so that everybody feels doing something little where he feels or they feel a sense of giving partnering and a sense of ownership.
Shishir: I gave you an example or be it vaccinating the elderly or taking care of, maybe providing vanity vans for women cops, or you name it, or road mapping. Everything takes a little of everyone, so then the onus does not fall on one person. And then there's a willingness, there's happiness. And that brings in that collaboration.
Shishir: The most difficult is to bring money, so to answer your question, easiest sometimes is permissions because corporates have their own limitations in, audits, processes, paperwork, and then there are multiple people in in the chain who have to agree to, in alignment with the idea. So it's good on so many fronts, it's challenging on so many other fronts as well, but we have to keep at it.
Sudha: Absolutely. That is why it is successful and you had such great projects that you've done. So some of what you said helps me to segue into this next question. That project Mumbai has been able to engage with ordinary residents to get them to give their time towards issues that they are passionate about. Like you said you're not putting all the onus on one person they are contributing in the best way they can without feeling overwhelmed by it. So as I understand, most of the projects are managed by volunteers, how do you create a cohesive team of volunteers focused on an end goal? Because these are not people who've worked as teams. Sometimes you'll have new people, sometimes you'll have different people.
Shishir: Yeah, I'll just make a slight kind of structure that the projects are by and large run by the team, and I've got a fantastic team at Project Mumbai.
Shishir: So this is the in house Project Mumbai team, but co led in so many cases by the volunteers, because they're part and as much the arms and legs. I could lead a team, but if there's no team, then what am I in that sense? So there are, for instance, if you talk about beach cleanups, which have volunteers who come in at maybe carrying stuff from here to there, keeping records, ensuring certificates are done, that could be done by volunteers. There's a lot of responsibilities that volunteers take. But there is a team which just ensures that the systems are in place, the processes are done. Libraries in schools, there is, yes, some projects are driven by volunteers. Or in COVID a lot of the responsibility because we were doing 30 initiatives at the same time.
Shishir: And I don't have those many team members who could handle 30, but then yes, there are volunteers who took independent charge. My entire vaccination initiative was largely on ground driven by a volunteer lead, but you live and learn. Sometimes mistakes do happen and we learn from them, but sometimes you get lucky and we were lucky most time because there are good people everywhere.
Shishir: It was being done by a lot of people, and when you put the word out to say, I'd like to do something it's not a force, it's volunteering. So only those hands will go up, which are interested. Some hands will go up for something else. Some hands you go for even something else. So also answering one point that you mentioned, that it's not just ordinary people who came in, people across age groups, people across economic abilities joined in. The volunteering is not only about stepping out and doing an act, but volunteering was about volunteering money sometimes, volunteering is volunteering to connect me with somebody else. Volunteering is also just showing a support or dropping a mail about our work to a third person, that also led to a lot of traction of goodwill, which brought in so many people. Just to give an example, we've had some fantastic leaders in the corporate space who for nothing in return, put the word out, spoke about us to other people. And then that led to more and more people getting to know about us. Or using social media, let's say John Abraham offered his entire social media platform to us during COVID to say, whatever you're doing, my team is going to put it out in the public domain.
Shishir: So that's his big heart, his kindness, his volunteering to the cause. There was Katrina Kaif and Alia Bhatt, Vicky Kaushal, they chipped in support financially to buy things for the needy. Amitabh Bachchan and Amir Khan contributed, Ayushman Khurrana contributed. Now, we don't know them personally, but they hear about us, but they chip in that's also volunteering, volunteering your time, volunteering your money, volunteering your credibility. So it's just that one has to keep doing it. So we were touching what lives, what people were getting impacted, which is what led to other people saying, I'd like to help out also. So that's where more hands go up where we are not an exclusive activity, we are an inclusive kind of activity.
Sudha: Yeah. And then with the internal teams, probably guiding the volunteers, or facilitating an environment where they are all working towards a common goal.
Sudha: So interesting to hear this. And you've spoken about COVID and the number of projects that you were running during COVID. So Project Mumbai played a huge role in supporting citizens who did not have access, the elderly and collaborating with public health to deliver on the COVID vaccination drive. Tell us more about it, that was a terrible time across the world, but especially for those who are excluded or have no access.
Shishir: I was speaking to a Jesuit priest recently and I was talking about the work that we do, and he said you guys are actually like a Jesuit priest. You're doing things, which nobody else does. And I think that aptly kind of summarised what we do because there is a role that a state has to play. There is a role that a organisation, a building has to play. What we were looking for were the gaps, and we said, let's fill those gaps...

102: The Role of the Oil & Gas sector in a 'Just Transition' with Vicky Sins, World Benchmarking Alliance

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
I think it is safe to say that 2023 has brought climate consciousness to more people than ever before. Extreme climate events across the world - forest fires, extreme heat, intense droughts, flooding, melting polar ice, changes in the weather pattern, rising air pollution, declining biodiversity have made it difficult for us to ignore climate realities - climate change is for real. And climate anxiety amongst people especially the young is becoming a cause for concern.
What about some of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis and global warming? Who are they and how concerned are they? According to the IEA ‘The Energy sector is central to efforts to combat climate change. Energy (Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the largest contributor to global climate change) accounts for two-thirds of total greenhouse gas, so it is the central player in efforts to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.’
But, this sector that made obscene profits this year has not been doing much according to a recent report by the World Benchmarking Alliance. At the launch of the report two weeks back, I was staggered to hear one of the speakers mention that ‘pension funds have not set red lines on fossil fuel funding’. And that £88 billion has been invested in fossil fuel by UK pension funds and banks. It seems very careless, considering we are on the brink - so to speak.
The WBA Climate and Energy Benchmark in its second iteration assesses and ranks the world’s 100 most influential oil and gas companies including on their low carbon transition and social impact. In a recent conversation with Vicky Sins Climate and Energy Benchmark Lead at the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) we spoke about the benchmark, the significance of the insights and its impact on decarbonisation and transition to low carbon economy. Listing below some of the key findings 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 0, That’s right ZERO companies have committed to halting the expansion of fossil fuel activities before 2030. With no set date for phasing out fossil fuels most companies don’t have credible transition plans (Am I SHOUTING??)
👉🏾 Most companies have not set targets that cover their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions meaning that the majority of emissions from this sector are still not covered by reduction targets
👉🏾 Only a minority of the assessed companies are engaged with necessary preconditions for a ‘Just Transition’
👉🏾 Despite soaring profits companies are still not investing in a low carbon transition. Only 25% of companies report the amount of capital expenditure that they have invested in low carbon technologies
👉🏾 To halve the sector’s scope 1 and 2 emissions, companies need to invest $600 billion by 2030 into low-carbon solutions. This is not happening. Just 12 companies’s scope 1 and 2 emissions intensities have decreased in line with their 1.5C pathways.
👉🏾 Just 35% of companies are committed to social dialogue with workers and affected stakeholders and 46% percent disclose the share of their workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements
👉🏾 Over half of companies assessed still link executive remuneration or incentives to the growth of fossil fuels, and only 18% of assessed companies have scope 3 emission targets.
👉🏾 93% of companies score zero on just transition planning
If you would like to know more, head to the podcast. Link in the comments👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Hi, Vicky. Good afternoon. Thank you for being a guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast today.
Vicky: Thank you for having me. It's great to speak to you today.
Sudha: Okay. let's jump straight to the questions. Give us a quick introduction to the World Benchmarking Alliance and what it does.
Vicky: Yeah. The World Benchmarking Alliance, we're a global NGO and we were really founded by this idea that we needed to create a movement with a lot of different stakeholders like policymakers, civil society organisation, the financial community to really look at what does accountability on companies look like and really accountability in the face of the sustainable development goals.
Vicky: So looking at the heart of what do we need in order to have development done in a sustainable fashion. What is then the role of the private sector and how do we hold them accountable on that role? As you know we had the Paris agreements and the sustainable development goals. They were agreed over eight years ago, and we all realised that business has this significant role to play alongside governments, but really look at the biggest, most influential companies. We have identified 2000 of those and really look at these companies, they employ millions of people's directly throughout their supply chain. And they sometimes hold more influence that is larger than entire countries. So how do we then create this movement to collectively hold these companies to account and reaching these sustainable development goals?
Sudha: Yeah. That's so interesting. Just the 2000 and how powerful they are. So last week the World Benchmarking Alliance launched the second iteration of the Climate and Energy benchmark.
Sudha: What is the purpose of the benchmark? I missed being there at the event in person, but I was there for the online session. And it was an eyeopening session, let me tell you that.
Vicky: That's good to hear. And hopefully others have the opportunity to listen back to it. But indeed this was the second iteration of the oil and gas industry benchmark launch. We look at what are the traditional high emitting sectors and how are they transitioning to a low carbon economy, and how do they do that in a just, and equitable way?
The reason why we look at the oil and gas sector is, as you probably know, and maybe for the listeners as well, is the energy sector is responsible for three quarters of our global greenhouse gas emissions. And of course, the use of fossil fuels is an important one as the main contributor to that. So we all recognise there is this need for this major shift away from fossil fuels. And we looked then at who are then the biggest players in this supply chain?
Vicky: And how are they really looking into contributing to the goals of the Paris Agreement, which we said we want to limit global warming to one and a half degree scenario in order to have still a liveable planet for the next generations to come. So that's the reason why we look at the oil and gas sector specifically, and we look at a hundred companies within the oil and gas industry and what it is that they do or don't do in order to meet those goals.
Sudha: Yeah, it's so interesting isn't it that the oil and gas industry is responsible for three-four of the emissions but how they have managed to get people to focus on other areas rather than on their own is very, very interesting. So how do you assess the company's Vicky in this benchmark and what is the key focus of the assessment?
Vicky: So as I mentioned, we look at 100 companies from different shareholder structures. So we also say influential companies does not automatically mean that these are the largest listed companies. Of course, they are also included. But for the oil and gas sector, the national oil companies also are a very important player in this industry.
Vicky: So we look at different type of companies alongside the full value chain. From upstream to downstream to midstream to full integrated companies. And the real focus lies on how credible are the plans that these companies are presenting, because the last time we assessed this sample was 2021. We then look at collecting data and information. We do this in partnership with CDP, who a lot of these companies report to. So we are able to reuse the information. Then we use a methodology called ACT, assessing low carbon transition, really looking into, okay, has the company set the targets? Are these targets then aligned with the one and a half degree pathway that the IEA the International Energy Agency has presented for this sector, then identify and how are they then contributing to reaching their own targets.
Vicky: So for example, we look at - are these companies making the right investments? What type of horizon do they have for the targets? Is it only a short term horizon? Or do we see that a lot of these companies set targets to 2050, which we encourage. But then also this needs to translate them back into, what does that mean in terms of the short term, in the medium term. And how are they then aligning this really to these net zero pledges that they've made, because it is really important that they are transparent around how they are going and intending to get there. Because to my earlier points about accountability, that can only happen if companies are transparent in what they are actually doing to achieve that.
Sudha: So true, because there are lots of things that lots of people are going and saying at big conferences and big forums. But what is the road to those? And what is the authenticity of those claims or the statements that they're making?
Vicky: Yeah, exactly. And for a lot of these leaders, it's still along way to go at 2050. It's an easy commitment to make if you're might not be here, right? So, but if you have to actually contribute to that in the next five years, that goes on you. So we also look at where is then this decision making embedded in an organisation? At what level is it really felt and understood that, this transition is an integral part of their business model going forward.
Sudha: Yeah. have they really resourced for it and prepared financially for it? Considering that there are no set dates to phase out fossil fuels, how are companies preparing for the transition? I mean, this is the elephant in the room, I would say.
Vicky: Exactly. And that's, of course, also part of the reason why you're doing the podcasts. Right, is really looking to addressing that big item is it's been very clear that Antonio Gutierrez also said, right, the only credible future for this sector is that there is a phase out date for fossil fuels because the problem is not only the managing of the emission of the fossil fuels.
Vicky: The problem is the fossil fuels itself, right? And that is something that really needs to be understood. And then often, of course, we get this feedback like, but yeah, but we're still so dependent and access to energy is an important one. And that in itself makes the argument why these companies need to start planning for the transition. Because of the fact that we, everyone needs to understand that there is no long term future for fossil fuels going forward if we want to keep this temperature goal in sight.
Vicky: So where we do see that companies compared to 2021, there has been an increase in companies that have set targets. So at least we see that companies have started to maybe be a bit more public disclosing about the commitments that they want to make. But without this fossil fuel date insight and the end date insight, it means that there is a lot of incremental change to their business, model is like, how do I more efficiently use the resources available whilst actually the only way is that it's transitioning out.
Vicky: Of this business model and into another business model, being lot of focus on investing in renewables and technologies to get there. And these targets that these companies have set, like I said, it's like, it's an interesting evolution that more companies have set the targets, but most do not include scope three in their target setting.
Vicky: And for the ones that don't know, but burning fossil fuels is the highest emission source, right? So as long as that's not captured in those targets, then there is also no credibility to neither the target, nor the transition, and the acknowledgement of these companies that they need to tackle that part of the transition as well.
Sudha: Vicky, I speak a lot about the Global South because of, again, dependency and also not having a voice generally in the climate conversations as much as they should have. And we have China and India and the Global South who are really dependent on fossil fuels. US, is a big party, but we are talking about Global South.
Sudha: And is there enough investment, sufficient investment, and are there enough viable innovations that can support mass movement to low carbon solutions? Because at the end of the day, when you talk about people moving away or looking for solutions, there has to be some accelerant, something that will get people to adopt. There has to be some incentive and of course there has to be the existing technology.
Vicky: Yeah, no, and I think everything that we set and analysed is science based, right? It is not something that we come up with. And within the IEA, it has been very well investigated that all the technology that you need in order to achieve the 2030 targets, that technology is there.
Vicky: They need significant investments from these companies to back them up and to deploy them in a high rate fashion to support this. And then of course, we look at the 2030 to 2050 targets that needs a lot of R&D and it leads a lot of development. In principle, the development has already started, and we know that with the right amount of financial investment that that technology can mature in order to support that longer term objective.
Vicky: Of course, there's two sides to this, and especially also what you say in terms of developing countries. I think A, we look at the companies themselves. This sector has made a record profit last year, right? Four trillion US dollars in profit, that alone should tell these companies is like, the thing you need to do with that profit is significantly invest into these deployments of these technology. For your own operation, but also to help others to accelerate on reaching these goals. And we say that based upon the IEA paper and their scenarios, 77% of a company's total investments should be in low carbon technologies and then spread across the different timeframes. And the sector is far, far off of doing that, right?
Vicky: And the transparency on what it is that they're contributing to the low carbon technology is very low. So the call to action that we say is A) there needs to be more transparency in these companies and B) there are good examples of companies that are aligning their full investments to the low carbon scenario that is needed. And we also want them to highlight this leadership more so that we also see it is possible to do this, but it's to be the strategic conviction that they do and then the point around the developing countries, the finance has a massive role to play in that. Because they also need to unlock finance, equip development banks in different regions, because we've not talked about the just transition elements in this, but a lot of these countries are very dependent from a social perspective as well of this industry.
Vicky: If we foresee that there's going to be a demand side reduction in the future, we have the obligation to plan for not only the workers and communities, but for these whole countries that they are equipped and financially equipped to move to a new economy going forward.
Sudha: This is very interesting. I think one of the examples that we can look at actually, it's not even an adjacent industry. It's the pandemic and look at how people have collaborated because they believe that lives were going to be lost. The lives that are being lost because of climate change and climate extreme events, we don't look at it in totality. We are not looking at it as something that is so imminent that is impacting our day to day lives.
Sudha: And I think that is the urgency that is probably required. And collaboration and not hiding something, share it and let it grow and let it make positive change.
Vicky, moving on to the next question, what is the preparedness of the oil and gas industry towards taking positive action for climate change and is it possible for the industry to create a roadmap, you were talking about just transition for a just transition because it is traditionally an exploitative industry.
Vicky: I think these are two questions that have two different answers almost, because it's like, what is the preparedness of the oil and gas industry for positive action? We've seen some glimmers of hope in some countries, but it's very scattered around different topics. Some are doing well on investments, some are taking steps to include scope 3, but overall, we would say that this sector is not prepared to take a sufficient action to provide a positive contribution.
Vicky: Hence our focus as well and probably we will get towards the end as well as like what's next, but very much to accelerate accountability to this sector. And it has come to the point where of course, there's always been a discussion that this sector needs to be part of the solution because of their importance in the industry.
Vicky: But what if they're not prepared, what is then needed in order to create a solution, because going forward and continuing the way we do is not an option. And I think that should be clear. I do think that it is still possible for the industry to create a roadmap for a just transition because of the fact that they have been able to build this infrastructure, they're big infrastructure companies. They're big companies that have highly trained talents, right? They have been able to build communities. They have been able to build, bring industries to different countries. So if they will use that, to have a vision about what is the future workforce that this industry is in need of?
Vicky:...

101: How HR leaders are leading on purpose and inclusion: Seetha Rani KP, Head of Human Resources at Philips Innovation Campus

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

I can never say this enough - hosting my own podcast means I have had the privilege to meet so many wonderful people, some of whom have gone on to become friends and trusted advisors. My first meeting with Seetha Rani KP was last year when running a workshop for NASSCOM senior industry leaders in Bengaluru, we connected over our lived experiences (and we were both wearing green).

She shared a story about her name - her name Seetha has a religious and cultural resonance. So, people have expectations about what Seetha should look like, how she should dress, behave, speak🤔🤔🧐🧐🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️ Seetha of course does not conform to any of the stereotypes, in fact she is intentional about smashing them.

So, when we caught up a couple of weeks back it was a pleasure to speak to hear about her role at Philips Innovation Campus. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Traits of a good leader, her leadership style as it has evolved over the years
👉🏾 The role of HR in driving purpose and culture in an organisation and defining the employee value proposition
👉🏾 Skills for HR to be able to step up to its expanding role and managing change
👉🏾 Advise for future practitioners
👉🏾 Role models - the people around her who inspire and motivate her
👉🏾 Her immense belief and faith in people and their abilities
If you would like to know more, head to the podcast. Link in the comments👇🏾👇🏾
Episode Transcript
Sudha: Good afternoon, Seetha. It's wonderful to finally have you on the Elephant in the Room podcast today.
Seetha: Lovely to be here with you.
Sudha: Brilliant. Let's get started. Can you give a quick introduction to who you are and please share a couple of experiences that have defined who you are today.
Seetha: Thanks for that, Sudha. I am a people's person, and I believe in making a difference to people and being joyful and bring joy to people, that's the core of who I am. And what has shaped this is my foundational years. I was born and brought up in Bangalore, in a place where I had people from different parts of India. We had people from Andra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and even Maharashtra, Gujarat. I grew up with different sets of people, and it also had different, classes of people. And also, we had people with disability who were thriving in that environment, we had people with polio. So I got a lot of exposure being with different kinds of people and probably that has helped me have a very diverse mindset. That is number one. And number two, I think, from my family, I draw a lot of strength, particularly I want to draw attention to what my dad was like. My dad was someone who really brought a lot of joy. As a child when I was growing up along with my siblings, every single day he would come home from work no matter how his day was, whether he was going through his own hardships.
Seetha: But when he would come home, he always got something for us; it could be chocolates or it could be like poppins or biscuits, et cetera. But it used to bring a lot of joy to us, he would take time to tell us stories, make up some his own stories and entertain us, and all of them brought a lot of joy and kind of made me believe that it's the moment, we have to seize the moment and make it count. I still remember my Dads, one of the incidents that, where he was old and ailing and frail, still wrote on my birthday, he wrote a handwritten note about me, a couple of lines, and which I framed and kept it on the table.
Seetha: And it's really giving me immense joy forever. It's something that I will always cherish and even though he's not there with me, he's always there with me. So that's something that I can recollect. All of this has really made me and a lot of lovely people that I've met along the way, the human resource persons, their experiences has shaped me and I have been a part of some of their journeys, so that's who I am.
Sudha: There are some heartwarming stories in there. So at Phillips Innovation Center, what is your role? What do you do there?
Seetha: I have the honour of leading the human resource function for Phillips Innovation Campus Bangalore. We are a diverse team of engineers, clinicians, researchers, designers, software developers, other functions. It's my privilege to understand their diverse needs, help shape the policies, practices, so that they can bring their best, not only in their day-to-day work, but also build innovation that really improve lives and wellbeing of people, which is the purpose of our company.
Sudha: So you've been in leadership role for some time now Seetha, what according to you, are the traits of a good leader? In the past couple of years, especially post covid, the definition of leadership has evolved and it is evolving constantly. So what according to you, are the traits of a good leader? Who, according to you, is a good leader?

Seetha: I think part of the answer lies in the question that you asked, it's about evolving, right? I think I definitely attribute the leadership style to be totally evolving because a lot of different things are happening at this point, and today we need more responsible leaders to have, set up very sustainable platform for socioeconomic benefit. So that being the case, I think I'd start with basics. Maybe, the need of the hour is to exemplify some of the basic traits, and number one for me is always the emotional part, right? Tapping the commitment of people and creativity of the people can happen, if you can really be be caring, compassionate, empathetic, that helps to connect with people. Especially people who are dealing with a lot of things post covid, losses, and different other emotions.
Seetha: So, wellbeing is very important. So I believe an emotional aspect of leadership is very important today, number one. Number two is definitely inclusion. Inclusion is a place where everyone can feel safe, they can have their own voice and give their perspective. Because we need everyone's input today to resolve any kind of customer issues or customer needs, to meet customer needs. So, a workforce should reflect their customer base. So I believe that it's very important for us to be inclusive, that's the second part.
Seetha: The third part is business and technological aspect, right? Leaders with sharpened business and technological traits, because we should be able to talk business language at the same time, technology is so fast and so dynamic. It's important to keep the safety aspects in mind. To responsibly innovate with new technology is another important thing; it could be the safety and privacy of the customers, it could be safety of the patients, or it could be just protecting overall what is good globally as well. So that responsibility from that angle is important.
Seetha: Another point would be intellect and insights, and today there's so much of data that's available in the market in different forms, making sense of that and keeping a long-term view. And taking that calculated risk is very important. Getting some insights. And last but not the least, I think what I have realised as a leader over a period of time is to really nurture the intuitive ability, intuition, right? There's a lot of data that we rely on, but it's important for leaders today to believe back on their own intuition because intuition is also one kind of a data. It is a data, and it is telling you based on something that is inside of you. So I do believe that leaders should nurture the basic instincts and intuition as leaders.

Sudha: That's very interesting. That is true, we tend to disregard our instinctive abilities and that of course, the instinct is because of the experiences in our muscle memory, in our body, in our brain. That's so interesting. What is your own leadership style Seetha? And has it evolved? I think for all of us, of course, how we behave as leaders has evolved, I can definitely see that for myself. How has it evolved over the course of your career?
Seetha: Oh, that's a lovely question and I said that, I totally believe in evolving. Version 9.0, like I mentioned earlier. Definitely it has evolved, my natural style has been a very empathetic and compassion style of leadership and that can be confirmed because I just spoke to few of my people that have been a people leader for over 20 years back, 15 years back, 5 years back, and even today, some themes remain the same. And the caring part and the empathetic part still holds good.
Seetha: What has perhaps evolved is, like I just mentioned about intuition. I think I was not trusting my instincts a lot, but with lot of experiences, taking chance on people, et cetera. At the same time, I can tell you how is it evolved. It has evolved with people and my leadership style is like, I start with trust, I start with 200% trust till I have reasons not to. It's something that I believe that we should just start on that and then more than delegating, my intent is always to elevate, elevate the people around me you know, I'd like to give them a stretch, like to see how they can be elevated, how they can be showcased.
Seetha: And if I look back and speak to a lot of people, I still have people who I hired in my previous companies who really raised to, really senior positions and it makes me really proud how they have grown in their careers, how they call me for any career moves that they make. And even today in my team, I've had the opportunity to have put together a team from different, experiences and I thoroughly enjoy working with them.

Seetha: I really believe in letting them lead and just giving them opportunities, guide them or coaching style, that's what it is. And what has helped it, I can give a couple of examples, right? In the beginning when I was a people leader this is about 15 years ago, let's say. I was again friendly, approachable, kind of a leader and people would say, "oh, you're the best manager I've had."
Seetha: And gave me all good feedback. And then, when it came to an employee survey that really talks about manager, I really got a beating. I was taken aback by a kind of a score that was unbelievable, right? I fell off my chair, I couldn't believe, I thought, I'm reading the survey wrong. I reread it, looked at it and all of that, and then realised that that's the fact, that's what is in front of me. Then, that took me some time to kind of digest. So I went on a soul-searching trip for a couple of days myself, came back with a determined mind to get over this, to understand what is going on.
Seetha: Met each person personally and had a heart-to-heart talk, just to let them know that it's about me, not about them. And about, you know, letting me know where I can do better and about improving myself and not so much about them. And believe me, I got a lot of good inputs and there were some misunderstanding between different other people, which was brewing underneath, which I didn't probably pay attention to, which I thought was frivolous, et cetera, meant a lot for somebody else. And it led to so many other things in the team. So thereby it gave me a lot of blind spots about other people and what's happening with them.
Seetha: And then how my being in the centre of it, how it helps them perceive differently. So it helped me clarify a lot of things and then we went on to being one of the best teams after that. So thats just one small example, but I can tell you I learned a whole lot by that and that helped me to continuously keep the dialogue open with team members. And it's important for me to see that they do well in their roles, plus do well in their personal lives. Even today for all my team members, I ask them to put on a personal goal as well, while they put in their professional goals for the year. Just to see where I stand with them, I kind of nudge them a little bit and help them. So it is evolving and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Sudha: Yeah, that's so interesting and also important to acknowledge because I mean, when we talk about leaders or leadership, essentially it's a cultural thing. I think we don't want to be seen to have made mistakes or to have failed. So, you know, to recognise that, okay, there is something that's wrong, take a step back, to engage and to hear from people. To actually listen to them and ask them, that's like opening yourself and being vulnerable. And that's like, I think a great trait for all leaders because we are not perfect human beings and we definitely need support at different junctures, so it's good to hear you talking about that.

Sudha: Moving on, do you believe that HR can or should drive purpose and culture in an organisation? Again, in a post covid world, purpose is suddenly taken front and center stage, and HR as a function is hugely powerful in sort of how you influence a culture within the organisation. What would you say?
Seetha: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I think HR has a really, really critical role in this. First of all, HR would be a part, an active member in defining the employee value proposition itself. What's in it for employees today? Multi-generational talent is what most companies would have, right? And it's important for them to know, why they're working, what are they working on, and how will they work, and all of that. So articulating some of those and getting those narratives right, in such a way that people understand, you know, why they're there. All of it starts with that.
Seetha: Secondly, to strategise and look at what kind of talent we need to be able to unlock that kind of potential in them and bring forth the result that we are looking towards a shared purpose. So driving that is important.
Seetha: And thirdly, 'culture'. Culture in itself is like a fertile soil, on which you can build things and HR can build and enable that ecosystem by nurturing it and also calling out ‘what’ of that culture. Culture is the ‘how’ part, right?
Seetha: Like for example, if it's a customer, the core of everything, it's customer first. It's a behaviour, And how do we drive that behaviour? The 'how' part is the part where HR can hugely influence. They can help coach people, they can demonstrate and they can have role models that continuously invest in leaders who can carry on that message, walk the talk continuously, keep nurturing and facilitating some of those aspects. And especially in a ever-changing world, at current juncture post covid for sure. So HR is also a change agent. So they really play an active role in change and even dealing with change fatigue and wellbeing of people. There's so much change, you know, you can only cope with it by being with people and helping them to take take care of themselves.
Sudha: Okay, and why do you think it is important for workplaces to be representative, inclusive and equitable? And what is the wider impact, because I think there are learned behaviours that we all have and experiences that we all have being nurtured in a particular way. So how can organisations, I mean when you have people working in an organisation, they don't come from just one place. There are different different lived experiences, different socioeconomic strata, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you build that inclusion with all these different people coming together and how do you build that cohesion and why is it important?
Seetha: I think the opportunity cost for not doing so is very high, right? If you don't have diverse set of people, because it's the people who really define your strategy of how you're going to achieve your purpose, They are the ones who really shape the thoughts, they're the ones who bring in new ideas, they provide solutions for the customer's problems. So it's important to have different thoughts, which we may not be, if everyone's looking alike, then they will not be able to cope with the complex challenges that they're trying to crack.
Seetha: And so basically we should be able to mirror the customer base that we have. It's only then we can think, like if we have people with disability and you will know how to think on their behalf, or they can represent a particular set of society, you know, because every business is here for societal value. So the only imperative that they keep representation from all kinds as possible. So that's how I think inclusion is very important, and then people want to be themselves, right?
Seetha: Like if you look, we have a campaign called "Life is Better when You are You", right? And people want to be themselves when they come to work. They can be of any generation preferences today, but there's so much of awareness that is being created from LGBTQ-related awareness, persons with disability, they have strong special abilities if you're only able to match that and have a win-win, it's a great success for each company.
Sudha: Yeah, I think this is the sort of difficult one is that traditionally, HR is there and I think it has evolved in the past couple of years.
But what are the skills that practitioners need in today's world order to be conversant with their expanding role? And of course, what the expectation is from the employees. What would your advice be to like current and future practitioners? What are the skills that they need to have and what are the ones that they need to really sort of think about?
Seetha: Yeah, it's very tricky. Like I mentioned, there's change happening everywhere. So change management has taken over HR's role, you're always trying to manage change. And like I heard in one of the talks recently that change is something that is constant, but fear and resistance of change...

100: Climate disclosure imperatives for India: Prarthana Borah, India Director, CDP

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
Most of the narrative around climate change, net zero, SDGs is framed from a global north perspective. Most of the studies (90% or more) on climate change are by academics and institutions based in the global north - primarily North America, Europe and Australia. Ironically the countries that have contributed most to global warming. Not only is there a lack of diversity in the current discourse but crucially there is a missing perspective from some of the poorest regions of the world, that have the biggest impact of global warming.
At The Elephant in the Room, I am attempting to give platform to some of the voices that can help broaden the perspective. In this episode I spoke with Prarthana Borah, India Director for CDP and an expert on climate change, air pollution conservation, environmental education. When we were discussing the episode, my one line brief was to keep our conversation relatable - we were not going to use jargon, rather use language that most people can understand.
The aim of course was to learn, and enable others to understand the language around climate change. In the episode we spoke about Prarthana’s incredible career in environment, conservation, clean air, CDP and its work in India, the CDP Annual Disclosure Report 2021, climate change, climate disclosure imperatives (India context), challenges, BRSR, greenwashing, ‘beyond compliance’, best practice. We also spoke about…….
As we discussed in this episode climate disclosure is not an and/or question. It is about business risk and resilience, it is about having a long term view and business sustainability….The top 1000 in India have to mandatorily report but what about the 100s of thousands of companies who are not being nudged by legislation in India… what is going to be the impact of not being ready for climate disclosure on NDCs??
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 So firstly thank you to The Purpose Room for having me here and I'm really excited, this happens to be my first podcast. So my name is Prarthana Prarthana Borah. I am the India Director of CDP. For those of you who don't know, CDP is a global not-for-profit primarily working in disclosures. We are headquartered in the UK, but we work on a subsidiary model. So we work in almost 60 countries with offices in North America, South America, India, and a large presence in the Asia Pacific region.
👉🏾 Personally, I would like to call myself an environmental educator, and I've been in the space for almost 30 years now. Started with conservation, nature education, moved on to sectoral areas of work. Started with first climate and then air pollution, and then back to climate again. Now in the last couple of years working specially with the business community to what I would say drive climate action, understanding of environmental issues and promoting sustainable business models with the help of disclosure.
👉🏾 So I think every organisation working in the environmental space, or especially in climate, would have to have a large ambition for the global south. And if we talk about the global south that two countries which have the highest emissions and also are capable of making the largest positive environmental impact are India and China. So I think like every other organisation working in this space, CDP has I must say, It does have an ambition for India and the very fact that we have a growing country office, and a growing ambition from the point of view of looking at more and more industry to convince them to adopt our disclosure process, as well as start thinking about the transition to net zero.
👉🏾 I think that itself is an ambition. As far as India is concerned, if we look at our work, I think over the years, we began in India almost 11 years back. So we were established in around 2012. We started with very few companies but today that number is almost a 130 plus companies, which kind of disclose to CDP in India, work with us. About 60 odd companies are working with us to set their science-based targets and look at net zero transition. CDP works in climate, water, forest disclosures, and in our initial years, we would see there was a lot of interest in climate disclosures.
👉🏾 But today we see that more and more companies are becoming interested to talk about security issues. The Indian business ambition for India in terms of how much they want to contribute to environmental issues. And I'm saying environmental because I think it's more than just climate just now. It's going beyond, you see companies wanting to contribute to biodiversity. We are going to be including plastics as an area for disclosure from this year.
👉🏾 Although it's voluntary this year, we see there's a lot of interest in people wanting to contribute to that. So I think the ambition is not just in terms of volume, but also in terms of looking at an integrated view of environment. So it goes beyond just carbon disclosure. Today we are going into water, forest and overall environmental disclosures.
👉🏾 So Sudha I must say I was a bit worried when I saw that question because I think as you said, , from a layman's perspective, it needs to be interpreted right. And if it is mentioned in our report, then I must say when we talk about, something like, india is already on track to meet 2030 emissions target, we are actually referring to the sample, based on the sample, and it's an inference based on the sample.
👉🏾 So if you see what has happened in this last year, the Prime Minister announced in the COP 26 that India's net zero target would be 2070. And there was a lot of discussion around that, that it's too late for us. But if you see what has happened in the last couple of months is that India has revised its NDCs, that's the nationally determined contribution. If you just look at that, we are talking about, 50% of our energy coming from renewable sources. That is the kind of commitment that we're looking at. So if you're thinking about that kind of commitment, we are actually moving towards being on track because a country like India, I think makes such a commitment itself, is the commitment that is required.
👉🏾 But coming back to a question on whether we are aligned or not, this is based more in terms of what corporate India is. So if you look at the targets that are being set by a country are also reflected in the business community because where is the emissions coming from and a large amount of emissions is actually coming from business or from industry, and of course we also do city disclosures, so we are also measuring the city emissions. So if you look at some of that, there are some kinds of interpretations that actually lead us to think that we are on track. For instance, if you look at some of our, corporate disclosures, we see that most companies have emission reduction targets. that they are on track in terms of setting a target, getting a target validated. Almost 60 percent of the companies that are disclosing to us have emission reduction targets, and they have net zero transition plans. So from that perspective, it looks like we are on track because it means that companies and businesses started thinking about it.
👉🏾 But if you look at the overall country in a holistic manner, then I'm not sure if we can say that we are on track because there are a lot of other things that need to be addressed. And the complexity of addressing this is where the discussion needs to focus on, so we basically need to engage in a conversation which talks more about how to, rather than why not. So I think we are all aware, I mean, since you said right in the beginning that this is a layman's conversation. I wanted to also say that we are all aware that the whole climate discussion is very closely related to the energy discussion.
👉🏾 And I think the controversy as far as India's concerned, is basically the discussion around coal and our dependency to coal. And that I think is our biggest challenge, how do we transition away? So which is why as I said in my last response, that to actually commit that 50% of the energy that we would be using would come from renewable sources is a large commitment. But what is gonna happen with the rest of the 50% is what we should be concerned about. And I think one of the biggest challenges that is there and this is because as CDP also, we are now trying to really work in this whole area of financing for climate. I think finance is something that we must discuss and talk about in a manner that is not just proposing things, but also to look at how we could build internal capacities to generate this kind of finance.
👉🏾 And I'm going to talk about a very practical example when we discuss about this. For a country like India, we are still at a very nascent stage as far as climate financing is concerned. And I want to give an example. Let's look at, say, the investor market. I mean an organisation like CDP globally has about 700 investors who use our data to look at companies, how companies are assessing climate risks, are looking at climate opportunities, looking at energy transition. But within that sample we have very few Indian investors. So I think the Indian investor market is still not discussing. I mean, let's look at Indian banks for instance, are they really looking at risk assessments? Because unless you really push that side, which is very closely linked to the whole aspect of financing, because unless you understand the importance of energy transition and you link financing to it, we would not be able to kind of reach the goals.
👉🏾 So I think it's not just about a policy because we talk a lot about the policy part of it, but we don't talk so much about the operations part of it. And the operations part is where, the financing comes, and where is the fund going to come to ensure this transition. That's one. The second is of course, Energy transition means technology transition.
👉🏾 And there again, a country like India would need support because we're not really, a great place for research, we are not a great place for, developing new technology, innovative technology. So I think that's one area, and even if we are, we come back again to the whole financial models because the newer companies and newer startups, for instance, are trying to get into the space, but it's not happening again because it again needs investor interest. So that is the second, and the third is, I think for our country the social aspect plays a very important role. I mean transitioning from coal is also talking about the people who are actually employed on the ground and what is going to happen to them. So that's again, a different story. So I think it's good that this COP, there was a discussion on ‘just transition’ and they're talking about things like how do you include just transition in this whole process.
👉🏾 And we are talking about a loss and damage fund and all these kind of things which are more relevant to the Africas and some of our Asian countries. So I think if I had to put the hurdles in three boxes, it would be first the financing, which actually becomes cross-sectional and the larger kind of an umbrella. And then feeds into the technology as well as these areas which are looking at the social issues like employment generation, resilience and some of the terminologies that we use. But it's basically about the people who have been engaged in the not so clean areas of providing energy, how do we deal with their growth or their transition.
👉🏾 I just wanted to add that, I think one of the challenges when we are dealing with say, climate issue is the fact that we cannot see it in a box. It's correlated to so many other areas, so it's important to look at it holistically. And I think it's very challenging for India because on the one side we can do a lot when it comes to being a leader in innovation, looking at new ways of doing things, and instead of just adopting what is being done in many of the countries which are much ahead of us.
👉🏾 So I think of the areas where we need to really look at it is, I would say is not vehemently opposed the transition, but find your own way to kind of do the transition basically. Because I think the alternative method is what we should work in. And that is where probably we need a little bit of investment as a country on the research, the knowledge, the indigenous knowledge and carve out our own pathway rather than rely on or cry out loud for what we are not getting from the global north. If we spend a little bit of time in looking at how we could create our own models in the transition, that would work better.
👉🏾 And I think the corporate sectors is really doing that well. If we look at, say we have a climate leadership client and we analyse, the energy transition models they're working on. And unfortunately as an organisation, we are not analysing our data enough because we are responsible for generating the data. So by the time we finish generating one year, we are regenerating it for the next year. So we are so busy in upgrading our data that we don't analyse it enough. But I often say that, if you look at the 2022 report, 90% of the companies have senior level governance involved in climate transition, which is huge for a country like India. That means they have someone in the board who's actually thinking of climate related transition.
👉🏾 Similarly 90% of the companies have emission reduction projects. Now, it'll be very interesting to see what are these emission reduction projects, assess this emission reduction projects and see if some of these are replicable. I think those are India models that need to be delved deeper into. So I think while there are the hurdles, I think what is required is a little bit of an out of the box thinking. And our narrative is so much on.... I don't want to use the word complain, but it's basically so much on that, we cannot do it, that we are not thinking enough on how do we try and do it. But we use our own method of addressing these issues and discover our own way of addressing major issues.
👉🏾 I think, maybe globally disclosure has a lot of acceptance. So you don't probably think about it as much, but I think for a country like India, we need to understand that disclosures is a new concept. If you look at even CDP or a GRI, although we've been around for more than a decade our sample is very small in terms of addressing it. And most of these companies are companies who have a global presence. So usually when you talk about disclosure, the word itself scares you off saying that, oh, what are you supposed to disclose. And it's always has a negative implication because disclosing means, you're telling people something that is not good for the organisation or not good for you. But I wanted to really highlight that the best part about disclosure is that it allows you to review your internal strategy.
👉🏾 And I think if you ask the companies who disclose to us the reason that they continue to disclose to us is that, It gives them the time and the technical process, the indicators and the benchmarks to review their internal process. So if you look at a CDP climate disclosure, for instance we have five sections. So the first section looks at governance models that you have, which can review how much of your governance is involved in the climate disclosure process. The second section is on emissions. So it talks about how much emissions are you emitting and are you releasing?
👉🏾 So what happens is that if you do not have an emissions inventory, you start looking at how to do it, and then you start doing it and you start assessing your own emissions. We have a section on energy, so it talks about what kind of energy transitions, what is your energy consumption, what is your scope 2 emissions. So you start reviewing all these things and then the most important part, which I feel that even businesses look at it as an advantage from the business perspective, rather from the economics perspective, more than the environmental perspective, is the assessment of risks and looking at opportunities.
👉🏾 And when I say assessment of risks, companies start looking at their value chains which is also another section, in terms of raw material sourcing. Now, when you are doing a disclosure, you try to understand where your raw material is coming and what is the risk associated with these weather changes that are happening. So there are simple introspection issues that come in which actually are converted into numbers, and you are able to assess your company's risks from climate and then you have also the opportunity to convert it into an opportunity. So then it's a double opportunity. So basically, what are the opportunities?
👉🏾 Like for instance, we look at last year's data, the opportunities identified by the Indian companies, the 130 odd Indian companies that have disclosed to us, was 10 times more than 2021, and if you delve deeper into it, there are opportunities actually identified in energy transition. So people think it's an opportunity to move from traditional energy sources to newer energy sources, new and renewable energy sources.
👉🏾 And hydrogen, for instance, has been identified as a large opportunity. So the figures have shot up tremendously. So I actually would like to say that in disclosure, there's a business opportunity, and that is the biggest imperative, whether it's for the private or for the public sector, because I think you are able to assess and look at newer models in your business process, in your operations, as well as your value chain engagement.
👉🏾 So I think there is an organisational priority in why this number is less, because we also wanted to emphasise on the quality of disclosures so that we have the right kind of data and we avoid people just disclosing for the sake of disclosing. So actually, traditionally we've kept our samples small. So as far as India's concerned we had, over the last 10 years, the largest sample that we had was 200 listed companies in the Bombay Stock Exchange. So it was a conscious choice, but if you look at it as you've said, they implemented the BRSR this year and the sample was 1000.
👉🏾 So we've increased our sample to 1000 also because we wanted to align it, which means that we have now a larger sample to deal with. So I think the nudge would be the regulatory push because so far the companies disclose to CDP because investors use our data. And it's completely voluntary, but now with the regulatory push they would be automatically disclosing under BRSR. So I don't know, they would just be motivated to disclose to CDP because you know, okay, we are already disclosing here, so we have the data, why don't we put it there so investors can use it?

99: Rosie Wainwright social justice ambassador: On her lived experiences, career, mentors.......

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
According to the Social Mobility Commission Report from last year only 35% of adults in the UK believe that everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their hard work will take them and 46% said that where you end up in society is mainly determined by your background and who your parents were. It is hard to disagree with what the commission has to say. But, every once in a while you hear stories of people who make it despite the challenges, the hurdles that they may have faced in life. This could be because of a teacher who is interested, a mentor who is committed to adding real value to the life of a mentee….
My guest on the podcast this week Rosie Wainwright, an ambassador for social justice met her mentor Laura @Career Ready. Laura hugely influenced the direction Rosie took in her life, by unlocking her love for books (as a dyslexic) and focusing on education as a path to attainment and breaking the cycle (in her own words). In the episode we spoke about her difficult life experiences, being in foster care, becoming an ambassador for social justice, a panel member on TACT (Fostering and Adoption Charity) and a people and change specialist at PA Consulting. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Learning what ‘normal’ looks like. Being the first person in her family to go to university
👉🏾 How Career Ready changed her life
👉🏾 The dreaded imposter syndrome, work place culture and being a culture fit
👉🏾 Her mantra ‘Reminding myself that I deserve to be where I am. I am not in my position because someone made a mistake’
👉🏾 Supporting social impact and widening participation
👉🏾 Her biggest achievement which is her relationship with herself and others
👉🏾 Networking and her mentor at PA Consulting Sally Bibb
“Words have power. Do not be embarrassed, your situation at a young age is not your fault. Focus on your education. Education is often the key to social mobility. So develop, learn skill yourself where you can. And something that I do now, make a conscious decision to surround yourself with people who uplift you, who are going to offer support and encouragement. And if your come across someone that inspires you - reach out to them, ask them to be your mentor like I did.”
I am ever so grateful to Rosie for sharing her story, her difficulties and triumphs with me and the listeners even though we discussed in advance what she was comfortable speaking about.
Memorable Passages from the Podcast:
👉🏾 Sure. So I'm Rosie Wainwright. I live in Southeast London and I work at a company called PA Consulting as a people and change specialist. I'm also a mentor and a qualified coach, and I sit on a fostering and adoption panel for a company called TACT. And yeah, I guess I'm passionate about social mobility and having a positive impact where I can.
👉🏾 Sure. So I would say that every experience in my life has shaped who I am today. But I'll keep it simple and I'll talk about my top three that kind of stick out in my memory. So the first would have to be, I think like most people, my childhood. So I grew up predominantly with my mom as a single parent and was helped to be raised by my grandparents. When they passed away, things took quite a turn. My mom, she had me very young and she got mixed up with the wrong people and got into the wrong things. So unfortunately, I became the target for most of her anger. I then went into foster care. I was about 14 or 15 years old, and the woman that I was placed with, her name's Judy.
👉🏾 She is the most extraordinary woman that I have ever met. She showed me what normal, if there is normal, but what normal was and being able to see that a complete stranger was willing to take me in, look after me and trust me in her home was huge, right? It, it was really difficult, I suffered with a lot of mental health problems. I had trust issues as you could probably imagine. And the relationships that I got involved in weren't always the best for me, but being with her showed me that there are good people in the world. And ultimately it gave me a new outlook in life, even though I couldn't really see it at the time. But now I do.
👉🏾 I guess the second experience that sticks out in my mind is when I was at college. So this was my third college by the way, I had failed the other two. But my teacher recommended that I get involved in a charity called Career Ready. It was called Career Academy at the time, it was many years ago. And, I didn't want to do it at first, I was quite stubborn. I didn't really understand what it was about, but I knew then I didn't want to go to university because it wasn't for people like me. But I also had no idea what I wanted in to do in the future, so it couldn't do more harm. Right. On the program, I was given a mentor called Laura.
👉🏾 And I got the opportunity to go on various workplace visits, and I remember going to Canary Wharf for the first time, and even though I live really close entering these, like huge shiny buildings and I dunno, it was just like being a part of a whole different world and this experience really was the turning point in my life.
👉🏾 Towards the end of the program, I had an internship at Morgan Stanley and actually working in that environment showed me that I could be part of this world if I really put my mind to it. And just, yeah, it really changed my life. We also, during that time we had this guy come in, he used to be a student and he told, he spoke about his own experiences at university and this guy, he was kind of like me, he was from where I'm from and he'd studied the same subject, it was a B Tech in Business and that kind of, it just affirmed to me like, okay, maybe I can go to university if I really want to. So I went back, I retook my Maths GCSE, I think it was for the fourth time and I applied to study law at City University and got accepted. So yeah, those are the main two.
👉🏾 And If I think about, a third time in my life that's kind of shaped my identity. I always think about my early career, so, after graduating law school, I went to work as a compliance analyst in New York. And it became this dream of mine to work in the US to work at a high flying company, strut around Manhattan with some heels and a cool laptop bag that didn't actually have anything in it. But you know, it just makes you look really important. And I really thought to myself, that is the end goal. That's exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to make loads of money and seem really important, but actually it wasn't it. About three months in, I realised it wasn't for me, this is not who I am and this life wasn't going to make me happy.
👉🏾 It was soul destroying because everything I believed that makes someone successful up until that point. It, it just kind of, everything felt like it was just crumbling beneath me. So what I'd done is I left New York, I came back to London, I had no job, no idea what I was gonna do in the future. Ultimately hit a state of depression, and I felt like I had to start all over again. At the time, I was even, I was dating this guy who was cheating on me, so just everything that could go wrong did. And it wasn't an easy decision to make to leave. I felt like I was letting a lot of people down, myself down, but actually it was the best decision.
👉🏾 And I don't regret leaving. I came back to London, I was reflecting on what is it that I enjoy doing? What makes me happy? And ultimately it was all the volunteering work that I was doing with young people, helping others having an impact. So I started to work in higher education, within the widening participation team, I worked my way up and then I actually moved on to Career Ready to work there. And now I've come kind of full circle, now working at PA, which is an amazing firm because it allows me to kind of, continue to do all of the great impactful work with our clients, but also to mentor, do outreach work and, you know, we can make a difference in society through projects or doing like the extracurricular
👉🏾 Yeah, so for me personally, I saw education as being a way out, a way to break the cycle. I knew that I had to do something to get out of the situation that I was in. So learning, reading, gaining new skills, working multiple jobs was my way out. And, it got me into university, mixing with people and I wouldn't, usually come across the people that I mix with at uni. So it really did make a difference. And opportunities just, started to appear, but as you've alluded to, like I didn't always think like that, Career Ready really planted that seed. Having a mentor, Laura, she gave me my first ever book which just unlocked this love to read books inside of me and being dyslexic, I didn't actually think that would ever be possible, but it is.
👉🏾 Going on the workplace visits, I remember thinking, I wanna work in a place that has multiple food options for lunch and has a hairdresser on site. But yeah, it wasn't until I had my internship with Career Ready that I could actually see myself working at a place like that. And looking back, the program, it really is the full package. You have the guidance of the mentor, the exposure to different opportunities, the masterclasses that prepare you for actually working. And then it's just topped off with the real life experience of working in a job. So I am, I am biased, but it is one of my favourite charities, it really did make a difference.
👉🏾 Sure. So, yeah, I mean, whilst there are, programs and initiatives that are in place to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, there's definitely more work that can be done to ensure that these people get access to the support that they need. And this is why charities exist, right? Is to kind of fill that gap. I think one of the main challenges is actually identifying and reaching out to young people as firstly, the young person may not even know that they're at a disadvantage as the life that they live, that's just their life, right? It's just the norm for them.
👉🏾 Or they may be embarrassed to speak up, I know I was, and also some of the indicators or tick boxes as you like, like free school meals or the postcode that you live in, they're not, it doesn't capture everyone that needs the support. So I think in my situation, if I hadn't gone into foster care, I would've still been at a disadvantage. We were still poor and there was a lot of physical and emotional abuse involved. But then if you take free school meals, for example, I was eligible, but we never claimed it because my mom would've felt embarrassed, and I would've just fallen through the gaps. Like, some young people do.
👉🏾 And I, I suppose like there are a lot of issues as well, like once we identify and support these young people to get into work and education, there is this big question mark, like what's being done to support them once they've crossed over that line. Are these young people that come from disadvantaged backgrounds succeeding in their career at the same rate as someone who come from a middle class background? Probably not.
👉🏾 Sure. So I guess the first thing would be, education. When I say education, I don't mean that everyone has to go to university because there's loads of alternative programs out there that can get young people into the workplace. But having decent grades is always a good starting point. I didn't have the best grades, but I passed what I needed to pass to get to where I wanted to be. So some advice that I would give is to start researching and to look at, what do you actually need to get into the job that you want.
👉🏾 And when it comes to education, it's not just that you get that one qualification and that's it. You continuously learn on the job. And, the job market is forever changing and being able to adapt and learn new skills is really important. I think as well, networking. Networking is so important and most of the jobs that I've heard about was through networking.
👉🏾 I remember being, I think I was about 17 and I turned up to this networking event, and I was the youngest, most unqualified person in that room, but I made some pretty good connections and people were surprised that I was there. I did feel uncomfortable, but I had to try something. And, this could also lead to finding a mentor to get that extra support and guidance.
👉🏾 I think as well, work experience, it doesn't matter what it is. I, my first job was at a pharmacy when I was 15, and then I worked nights in cab firms. These are all skills that are transferrable to wherever it is that person wants to go. And I suppose like perseverance, working hard, it's not just one. You don't just start from here and then end up here. It's up, down, up, down, and nothing is, nothing is handed to you on a, on a silver platter, you need to go out and grab opportunities. And it's, it's not easy, but as long as you are doing something is, always better than doing nothing at all.
👉🏾 And I would've never guessed that I would be in the job that I'm in now because I didn't even know that this kind of work existed. I grew up with hairdressers and, and plumbers and there's nothing wrong with with those jobs, but there is a whole level world of careers out there and getting as much exposure to that as you can is, is really helpful in kind of figuring out your career.
👉🏾 Yeah. So I think for most of us, at some point in our careers, we've experienced this imposter syndrome whereby we have moments where we doubt our skills. I think that we're not good enough, and when you come from a place where you're the first person in your family to go to university, the first to have a corporate job, that feeling is at the more extreme end, but how I've kind of managed this is having, the right mentors in place and remind myself like, I do deserve to be where I am.
👉🏾 I'm not in my position because someone made a mistake somewhere. It's because I have the skills and the experiences that I have, which has led me to where I am today. I would suggest like find your people. Like I have a brilliant mentor named Sally Bib who I met in my first couple of weeks at PA and I was just taken aback by her and her values and I just sat there and I thought, I wanna be like this woman.
👉🏾 I wanna learn from her. So I just reached out to her by email and I remember sitting there like, oh my God, is she even gonna reply? Cause she's so senior and she's been mentoring me throughout my career at PA. But there are some instances that can trigger that imposter syndrome, even if you're doing really well.
👉🏾 And that could be when you are, you spoke a bit about the culture of a workplace. And there may be times where people will talk about their childhood experiences or the fact that they go on ski trips every year since they were like five years old and I can't relate. But there's going to be experiences that I have that I may talk about that they can't relate to either. Like I could say, I used to have to go and visit my friend in prison every other month and people would be like, oh my God, like, I don't even know anyone that's been to prison, that kinda thing. But I do believe if you're ever at a company where you just don't fit, and I did have that at one company that I worked in. I, I won't mention which one, where people aren't welcoming and the way that the organisation is set up, some people succeed, some people don’t. It's quite toxic environment then that's just not the company for you, and that's okay. The most important thing is being able to be your authentic self and bring your whole self to work every single day.
👉🏾 And I definitely get that from working at PA, I've had friends that have changed their accents to fit into a job because most people are from Cambridge or Oxford, and I don't think that's right.
👉🏾 It's really important for me. I, at the moment, I support four charities, Career Ready, Helena Kennedy Foundation, Comfort Cases and Generation Success. We also have the PA Foundation, which gives colleagues like myself the opportunity to, carry on doing meaningful work, like whilst we're employed. So, I guess the reason that it's important for me is because there was a time that I was going through some pretty horrendous stuff, but life still passes by and I felt quite lonely. So I make it my mission that no one else should ever have to feel that way and so where I can, I try and help those in needs because I know what it's like to feel that way.
👉🏾 Although one piece of advice that I was given actually, and it was from the CEO of Comfort Cases in the US, his name's Rob Sheer. And he said to me, we had like a, an amazing chat and he was like, "Rosie, you're so amazing. You're doing all of this good work, blah, blah, blah." But he said, "you need to make sure that your cup is full before you help anyone else, you can't give when your cup is empty." And this really stuck with me because there are times, not a lot, but it happens when my cup is empty. I'm overworked, I'm stressed, there's family stuff going on, or there's been times where I haven't been able to pay my bills and I can't help anyone else when I'm in that situation and, and, and that's okay. So I actually took Rob's advice and that's part of the reason that I moved back into the private sector. When you're at the right company, you can continue to fill your own cup and still pour into other people's at the same time. So yeah, to answer your question, it's really important for me. Definitely.
👉🏾 So I think for universities, financial support in the form of bursaries is a huge one. So when I was at the Helena Kennedy Foundation, they gave me a bursary which kind of bridged that gap, of really struggling to just survive. I was working five jobs through uni and even that didn't get me to the point where I was at the same level as my peers and that's what these bursaries are for, right? Is to make sure that if you're at a disadvantage, you are brought up to that same level where your peers are in, in terms of support.
👉🏾 When think about university, when I was there, online classes didn't exist and I lived independently in a council house at 18. So when my boiler broke, I had to stay home and wait for someone to come and fix that which, council properties, it would happen all the time, I missed loads of lessons and that was actually frowned upon.
👉🏾 So maybe looking into people's like individual experiences would be really helpful if, if

98: Benevolent leadership, purpose and fitting in with Sanjani Shah, the Global Head of PR, Body Shop

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
The angst associated with the imposter syndrome is something that a lot of us have felt or continue to feel at various points of our life.
This angst is different to the fear that comes with not being a ‘culture fit’. For decades organisations have weaponised ‘culture fit’ to exclude those who do not conform to the dominant cultural norms in a workplace. The global majority, the neurodiverse, people with disabilities or those on the margins tend to be punished for being different.
So much of the challenge across the world is because we like people to fit neatly into boxes. That we expect people to fit in with the our stereotypes, to conform to the dominant culture or workplace norms. Who is or can be Indian/American or British; or who is the ideal team member? Do they comply with our expectation of how they should look, dress, behave….? The good thing is that increasingly people resist being boxed. But, this is not an easy road to take….
I recently spoke with Sanjani Shah, the Global Head of PR at The Body Shop about identity, fitting in, her learnings from her career journey and personal purpose. In her own words, she spent her early career trying to fit in and was called a ‘coconut’ (brown on the outside and white on the inside) by friends and family. Accepting who she is and that she is good(great) has taken some unlearning.
In the episode we also spoke about what ‘Purpose’ means at the Body shop and how it translates and is embedded in how the organisation communicates. We also spoke about…
👉🏾 Speaking up, having a personal purpose, benevolent leadership, collaboration as the new paradigm
👉🏾 How The Body Shop continues to build on the legacy of Dame Anita Roddick
👉🏾 Authentic communications, greenwashing/sustainability washing?
👉🏾 The role of networks, mentors, sponsors for women and other disadvantaged groups?
👉🏾 Role models and reading lists
We ended talking about hindsight and doing things differently……
If you would like to listen more, head to the podcast….
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Yeah, good morning or good afternoon in India. Such a pleasure to be on the podcast.
👉🏾 So I'm Kenyan Indian, living in London. I'm one half of a dink, that's a "double income no kids" and one quarter of a pack of siblings. And I think, you know, if I just talk, if I say where I am now, I used to be FOMO and Covid has changed me to JOMO. So in my earlier years, always out very social.
And now I think since Covid, I've just become a lot more happy to be in my own company and don't feel like I have to be everywhere doing everything. So it's a little bit about me and because this podcast is about leadership, I wanted to talk a little bit about my career and some of the roles that I've done and some of my highlights.
👉🏾I would say that my first actual job was with the International Red Cross in Kenya and it was helping reunite families that were separated by the genocide in Rwanda. It was the most fulfilling role I've ever had. And it's the role that stays in my heart and, and that was a role I did before I even went to university, it was in my gap year and it was just amazing. I actually learned a lot about leadership then. Another highlight I would say in my career is working with MasterCard in France and I worked on their World Cup sponsorships. It was all-around events and sponsorships and I got to go to all the World Cup games in '98 in France, and I met Pelé so that was a really amazing point of my career. I've then worked with two of the largest PR agencies Edelman and Weber Shandwick based out of London and based out of Singapore. Now I'm working with one of the world's largest beauty brands and one of my favourite brands and I love my job. It has so many highlights, but it's really taken me far and wide. Perhaps the favourite part of my job is kind of visiting our farmers. So I've, you know, done media trips and taken journalists far and wide to, you know, meet our farmers in Rwanda who grow our Moringa or to the women's cooperatives in Morocco or to plastic ragpickers in India.
👉🏾 So I just wanted to share that just as a little bit of flavour about myself, but also kind of what my work history has been about.
👉🏾 I know, when I got the job, it was a real pinch me moment. Cause, when you admire a brand so much and then you get to work for it, it's pretty amazing, I have to say. You know, people have asked me this question and I've thought about it and exactly that, you know, when you've been here and there and lived in lots of different places, you kind of tend to take on the identity of different places as well.
👉🏾 I would actually say, and you know, don't mean to sound like a cliche, but I do feel like I'm a global citizen. And actually, now I'm actively trying to lose the idea of having a strong identity. I'm actually very happy with not having a strong identity because I think having a strong identity, you end up putting yourself in a box by trying to give yourself an identity and an identity gives you a set of definitions that I think end up limiting you, and actually you are so much more than an identity. So I'm actively trying to lose the idea of identity.
👉🏾 Or even constraints of upbringing or constraints of race or culture or religion, you know? Yeah.
👉🏾 Yeah, I would say that one of my earliest learnings is, to stop trying to fit in. I think it's in the, it's in the words of Oscar Wilde, "be yourself, everyone else is taken." And I think it is really kind of dawned on me now that I bring a really unique set of things to wherever I work, to the Body Shop, and that's why I'm hired. But I spent a lot of my earlier career trying to fit in, trying to wear it, like, actually become more white if I can say that. There’s a running joke in my family that, I'm a coconut, but it was because I was trying to fit in and now I'm trying to really unlearn all of that, trying to fit in.
👉🏾 I'm shaking off the uniform and I'm really trying to stay true to myself and stay confident in it. And what I would say is, there's a few, so that's one of the biggest things I've learned, you know, don't try and be someone else, be yourself and be grounded in that. I've always considered myself to be a confident person and ready to speak up. But when the George Floyd incident happened, I realised, actually I was not speaking up. I was seeing micro aggressions or I was seeing injustices happen and I was not speaking up even in the workplace because of that whole trying to fit in and not putting my head up above the parapet and it's all fear-based, isn't it? If I stand out for the wrong reasons, I might get fired, that kind of thing. But I feel, you know, in, at the Body Shop there were a lot of conversations, that opened up after the whole George Floyd incident. And I think that was quite a pivotal moment in history, in my history anyway, in that it suddenly opened the doors for a lot of people to speak openly about something without the worry about recrimination.
👉🏾 So as one of the people of colour, you know, I was consulted for, a lot of various kinda networks and things, and I would talk about some of the things I'd observed at the Body Shop and I remember this conversation and she was in senior leadership and she said to me, "Sanjani why have you never said this before?"
And I said, well, actually it's really difficult, especially if you're in a predominantly Caucasian environment to speak up and it didn't feel like a safe place. I think, it shocked her that I didn't speak up, but I was like, well, because you're coming from that space of privilege where you've always been able to say what you want and it's so different.
👉🏾 But that, that was really stark for me and I think now, I use my voice a lot more. And, I'll do it as nicely as possible, but I don't worry about the consequences and I think that's just, gained me a lot of respect. But I also feel a lot of responsibility being in my position, you know, in a large organisation, but also in a PR world, which in the UK is predominantly Caucasian. So I feel like there's a lot of responsibility on my shoulders, and if I don't use my voice, I'm kind of mistreating that responsibility. So yeah, those would be my kind of two biggest lessons.
👉🏾 I mean, a lot of it comes over time. When you're in your early career, there's a lot of fear. Although I see a new in like incoming people, younger people are quite fearless. I mean, if I compare myself to what, you know, when I was at that age, they're quite fearless and they kind of stand for what they want. But I would say that just, you are hired for your differences. You are hired for your uniqueness. Like be yourself. As I said, be yourself, everyone is taken. So I'm spending a lot of time unlearning, what I've learned and thankfully I'm much wiser now and, and I would say I fully embrace my Indianness and the different perspective it gives me. So I'm really a lot more comfortable in being relaxed now, not having that stiff British upper lip, being so proper, which is what I've, which I tried to do and actually quite frankly isn't me or wasn't me. And for example, I've been told by quite a few of my managers that I'm a good negotiator and that's a real strength and I actually fully attribute that to my Indianness and my inherent kind of haggling nature, and my boss now, she's like, "well, you've got an advantage over all of us in this, you know?" and I'm like, "yeah, I do." So it's kind of drawing on the strengths that you have been given through kinda various experiences or, you know, through your childhood.
👉🏾 It's definitely a fancy buzzword that's going around in the corporate world, I would say and the notion of everyone has an individual purpose actually used to really stress me out because I was like, I don't know what my purpose is. What is my purpose? and that kinda, oh, I'm not enough because I don't have a purpose and it seemed like everyone else had a purpose. But what I would say is having a purpose is important because without it, you kind of go through life, at the whims of what's happening outside. So, if you don't have a purpose, you can be at the whims of what's happening on social media or what's happening on news and I think purpose just really helps centre you. And I'm still figuring it out, but I would say that my purpose is to become a benevolent leader and I'm hoping that, if by leading by example, I hope to serve and make a difference in people's lives. Again, I don't want it to sound like a cliche, but I've always had a certain type of management style or a certain type of manager. It's only recently that I had a very different manager and she really kind of embodies benevolence, and what I realised in me, I mean, if I look at me two years ago versus now, I really flourished under that kind of leadership. It helped me grow and it's really helped me become, you know, find my true self and I'm so grateful for it and the way I work and my outlook to work has changed so much so. I feel like that's really what I now want to give to other people.
👉🏾 Yeah, and I've definitely been on both sides of the coin as a leader myself. But you know, if someone isn't a good leader, can really knock the confidence out of you and it can take you back quite a few years. So yeah, I feel like my purpose is to really help people flourish.
👉🏾 So I would say, that the Body Shop believes in change making beauty, the Body Shop is about change making beauty, and it's not about an idealised version of beauty. So you know, the Body Shop stands to fight for a fairer and more beautiful world, but it's also about natural beauty and the focus is really about what's inside. And I, two years ago, did a campaign with a Body Shop on self-love and it's really about helping people look at beauty through the lens of self-love. I mean, self-love is where it all begins. When you have that insight, that self-love insight, you can make changes on the outside.
👉🏾 And I would say as a comms function, you asked, you know, how, how do we embed it? I would say the, for me and for the team, the filter is that every piece of communication should uplift people rather than create fear which the beauty industry does quite a lot. So, for example, we recently, it was last year we launched a new range, we have a bestselling range called 'drops of youth' and we felt that it really didn't embody what a Body Shop stands for, what our values are. And as a business, we made the decision to change the name of that range and actually. It was quite a big decision because it's our number one skincare range around the world, so any kind of change like that in a business is usually you'd say, do not do it because you know,
👉🏾 Yeah, don't break what's broken. But chance is it was already broken because 'Drops of Youth' is already instilling fear and is idolising youth, and it's like completely against what we talk about. So we did a whole campaign and we've changed the name and for us, it was an anti, anti-ageing, you know, we're not here to try and get people to look younger, it's about helping people age gracefully. I'm working on a campaign now which is about kind of really not, or debunking the myth of perfect skin. So we're using models that absolutely don't have perfect skin, but are able to tell their stories.
👉🏾 So as a coms department or the personal filter I use is this piece of coms uplifting or not? And I feel like it's, it makes it very simple then. Yeah. And actually that thing of is, is what I'm saying, uplifting or not. It's a way I filter my comms at work. But also I've started using it outside of work. So you know, if I'm talking, if I'm saying something to someone, I always try and use that filter, if I'm saying this, is it uplifting? And if it's not, do I need to say it? Yeah, I mean, I would hundred percent say I haven't perfected it by any means, but it's something I'm trying to more mindful of.
👉🏾 We are, we are, and especially when it comes to things like our families or our friends, we slip into, cause I think at work, you have a level of, you know there are some rules at work and that there are, like brand guidelines, et cetera, which kinda keep you in check. But when you step outside of that world and into your personal world with family and friends, you often kind of drop into unconsciousness, so like a simple filter like this, it for me, I'm definitely not embodying it right now, but at least it's an intention.
👉🏾 Yes and I think what you're saying is so potent for us that a lot of companies are kind of jumping onto the bandwagon of sustainability or campaigning, et cetera, but the Body Shop had that in its very DNA from the very beginning. So actually, it makes my job and the whole comms team's job really easy because everything is authentic and even when we kind of, we work with influencers or if we work with celebrities, the feedback we get from the agents is that, I think nowadays, people are being really careful which brands they work for. But whenever the Body Shop is mentioned, there's like no questions. It's like, yes.
👉🏾 So I think that authenticity carries a lot and what I would say is that the Body Shop really does continue to be a force for good. So one of the things, one of Anita's biggest legacies was our stance against animal testing. I think that's, you know, when you ask someone what do you know about the Body Shop's is the number one thing that comes up. We were the first Cosmetics company to campaign against animal testing in cosmetics in 1989 and we're now taking that further and we're now set to become the first global beauty brand to have a hundred percent of its product formulations vegan by the end of this year. So we are working with the vegan society, they certify us, they have very stringent certifications. So by the end of this year, we're set to be a hundred percent vegan with all our formulations.
👉🏾 So we feel that, we're taking that legacy against animal testing and we're growing and building it. Another thing that Anita started and I think she was a little bit ahead of her time, was refills. So you could come in store and you could bring your bottle of shower gel and you could get it refilled. This scheme kind of stopped for a while because I think, like I said, it was a bit ahead of our time, consumers were just not ready for it. But also a lot of Health and Safety regulations kind of emerged and just made it very difficult. But it, something was very much still in our hearts and two years ago, we relaunched our refill skin scheme with the underlying thinking that why waste a container when you can refill it? So how it works is really simple, we have refill stations in a lot of our stores, we have 822 refill stations around the world, and we've got a range of 12 of our best selling shampoos, conditioners, shower gels, and hand washes. You have an aluminium bottle that can be reused over a hundred times and you can come in once you've finished it, you come in and it gets refilled so it's great. We've saved over 20 tons of plastic from going to waste from this and so far 350,000 people have used our refill scheme, so we're just looking to make that bigger. So again, we're just continuing the legacy of Anita.
👉🏾 And then I would say, in terms of force for good, Anita also kind of really pioneered a program called the Community Fair Trade Program, which is the Body Shops Bespoke Fair Trade Program. And back in the day when she launched it, it was called Trade Not Aid. And the philosophy was, rather than giving people donations and philanthropy, you teach them a skill. You trade with them, you buy them so that they have a long-term income, but also it helps their self-esteem and the benefits of trade versus aid are multiple. So that program is still going really strong, and we continue to invest in it: like from handcrafted shea butter in Ghana, to recycled paper bags from Nepal to our plastic packaging coming from India, the program goes from strength to strength. I would say in terms of, you know, Anita was known for doing things very differently and one of the things, and like my favourite thing to launch at the Body Shop was our community fair trade plastic.
👉🏾...

97: DATTALION: How Ukrainian women are collaborating to capture stories of war for posterity: Dina Nemyrovych

Fri, 19 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
TRIGGER WARNING:
I have mental fatigue because I live between two countries, I feel unsettled, cannot plan too far into the future and there is a constant sense of restlessness, a journey not completed……..But, all of this I do out of choice (difficult though it may be). This is not about me but about perspective.
Most of us cannot even being to fathom the personal cost, the emotional and mental stress, the economic, social, physical cost of a never ending war forced upon peaceful people. What does it mean to not have any control over your life, not have the ability to look after yourself, your children, your elderly parents, your friends or plan for the future?
It has been 1 year, 2 months and 3 weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine….During that period 8 million Ukrainians have registered as refugees in Europe; 5.3 million Ukrainians have displaced internally; Over 5 million children have been displaced by the war; And millions of men separated from their families………..
In the midst of this tragedy, uncertainty and strife, there are people who are trying to get on with their lives, wherever they are. One such person is Dina Nemyrovych. I met Dina Nemyrovych at the @ICCO Conference in Dubai last year where she spoke passionately about the war in Ukraine, its impact on Ukrainians (including her and her family) and the work being done by millions of Ukrainians to support the effort. Over the past couple of months Dina Nemyrovych and I have been in conversation on how I (as an individual) or the industry could support them in the difficult work they have been doing.
The podcast is a first step to embarking on a journey to creating awareness about the scale of the task at hand. In a frank and often emotional chat Dina Nemyrovych spoke about DATTALION - a project founded and run by Ukrainian women.
The project is supported by international volunteers and is focused on collating authentic, verifiable war footage. The idea is to collect and store evidence of war crimes, environmental crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. “DATTALION is home to the largest free and independent open source database of Ukraine war footage as well as the database of verified eyewitness to the horrors of Russia’s invasion.”
We also spoke about the impact of the war on her and the family; the vision for DATTALION the challenges to running a volunteer led organisation, working in difficult circumstances; #mentalhealth health, staying resolute, what we can do to support DATTALION and Ukraine.
For the future there are plans to help capture the stories of Ukrainian women, whose lives have been roiled by the war - to create for posterity records of the impact of conflict, war. If you would like to learn more and support the efforts: visit the DATTALION website, Donate and listen to the podcast (Link in comments) 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable Passages from the episode:
👉🏾 Good afternoon. I'm in Abu Dhabi and I can say Good afternoon.
👉🏾 First of all, I'm Dina Nemyrovych and I can say that currently, I'm in Abu Dhabi, but I'm from Ukraine because it's very important just to say I'm from Ukraine. I was born in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. I spent all my life in Kiev. I was graduated by Kiev Economic University. I gained my professional experience in various sphere, a lot of multinational companies, very famous like Ernst & Young, Deloitte. But in Ukraine, you can see a lot of big Ukrainian companies, leaders of Ukrainian market very famous for example, in NEU. I have three daughters and I would like to continue to live in Kiev in Ukraine. I would like to grow my children.
👉🏾 And so finally why I would like to show this xxxxxxx that I spent all my life in Ukraine, because during last year, starting from March, 2022, I'm living in Abu Dhabi. I'm living in United Arabic Emirates, and only one reason because of the Russian and Ukrainian war, or Russian invasion, my preference to say Russian invasion, which started 24th of February, 2022. I decided to leave Ukraine after five days in shelter, together with my daughter, 11 old daughter and I decided because of the safety reason together with my husband visit, we unfortunately we have to leave Kiev. And now by the way, my husband, he decided to join Ukrainian army. He's not military and he spent all his life as like a manager, facility manager, but he decided to go to Ukrainian army.
👉🏾 So as of now, I'm Dina Nemyrovych, I'm living together with my two daughters. My husband, he's a part of Ukrainian army and I say that we are still Ukrainian and we are still hope that Ukraine should win this war. Sorry for the introduction, but it's very important.
👉🏾 Oh, one remark from me. Yeah, because for example, if we come back to Dina, which before 24th of February I have a hobby. I'm open water swimmer. What does it mean? I have done a lot of, yes, I have done a lot of long distance swimming. It's more than 10 kilometers. I'm a part of big Ukrainian swimming team. I took part in a lot of challengeable swimming marathons. But if you open my swimming map, what you can see, you can see Odesa, Kherson, Slovyansk, you can see a lot of famous cities. Which a lot of people know, but before the war. This maybe yes. But it's very interesting that our Ukrainian cities started to be famous because of this awful situation. But when I decided to think what's happened with my lovely places, with my lovely swimming places, it's awful because Kherson you know, yes, it's a big damage.
👉🏾 So if I would like to talk about my hobby, unfortunately, I should think about this, like damage about the war again. So, yeah, so I decided to share this, like very remarkable. I'm continue to swim in Emirates because I hope that I will be back and it's like my dream real dream, to start to swim in Ukraine because it would be like a real situation, if you can swim, what does it mean that Ukraine will be very good, very quiet place for all of people and we think that maybe we can organise some international competition
👉🏾 Yes. It's totally changed and I would like to just to continue this phrase, totally changed and the second line, it's very difficult to plan next year, for example. It's very difficult because it's impossible and maybe the biggest challenge for me, because if you come back to my background, my financing background, I spent a lot of years in audit and planning because xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx I like planning for my personal life as well.
👉🏾 But what I can do now, I can plan on the next month maximum. For example I have recognised a new issue. Because I have three daughters, so I have big family, but additionally, I have a very big dog and what I have to do, yes, I have Labrador. He is very big dog, and what I have to do immediately, I have to find opportunity how I can transfer my dog from Kiev to Abu Dhabi.
👉🏾 So what does it mean, it's like a real example of our real life, every day we have a new issue, which could be related to your, let's say, Ukrainian life. I'm living like in two different places in one time. So actually I'm living in Abu Dhabi, I'm working in management consulting. But actually I'm Ukrainian woman. I have a lot of friends, a lot of relatives. I have my dog, I have my husband, and so I'm in Ukraine. My hope with Ukraine, my head in Ukraine, I have a lot of issues which should be resolved. I should help to a lot of people, because of the situation, because of this crisis, because of a lot of problems.
👉🏾 So my just like first conclusion that Dina, you cannot plan anything for a long term. Long term, it means that more than one, two months, you should be ready to change your life immediately. After receiving of any new information from Ukraine, and yes, you should be ready to be so flexible to change your life, your country tomorrow. It's absolutely one of the biggest challenge in our personal life because I have a lot of friends. But mainly I'm talking about Ukrainian women, and we are living in different countries, Canada, Sweden, a lot of few countries with our kids. But we are ready to change our lives today just after this interview. So I'm ready for any changes after this year.
👉🏾 Thank you for this question because really I would like to tell more about Datallion. If we come back to my story when unfortunately I decided to leave my home country. And the same time I decided that I have to find my way to struggle. It was very important for me after five days of starting the war, what I can do. Yes I should provide safety for my kids, but from another hand I would like to find my way. And I have found very interesting requests in Facebook.
👉🏾 For example, who would like to be part of volunteers project? If you have analytical skills, please join us. I decided to put like plus, you know, in like in the comments. Yes, and after three days, very interesting volunteers project xxxxxxxxxx ,they just gave me a message, said, please join us. What does it mean the xxxxxxxxxx?
👉🏾 We are talking about data plus battlion, so we are talking about like a real unit which can struggle using data. I can say the biggest database of photo, video, witnesses of Ukrainian war. The biggest we don't know because it's difficult to compare and, but we sure Dattalion team that we are the biggest open database. Mainly we are talking about photo and video, and you can see each day of Russian invasion in Ukraine, starting from 24th of February. You can find this content per each day. We are talking 406 day.
👉🏾 It means that you can find 406 days content. Which consists of information like a photo, video, interview, and why we decided to do this one year ago, let's say different reasons. First, we decided after one week of Russian invasion, we have recognised that it's very important to provide a lot of information like photo and video to different media because it's difficult for them just to have like immediate presence in Ukraine.
👉🏾 So at we decided to start from free of charge, like access to database. And first three months as it was very important for a lot of journalists, media to open to find pictures like videos, as I said, interviews and to use this material for their articles. And we decided that it would be very good way to say real true stories about what is going on in Ukraine. And the second issue that it would be very important to demonstrate how we can see the situation because it's a pictures from us.
👉🏾 It's a photo-video from us. In May, we decided to add witness database, because we received a lot of requests from media again, that guys, can you provide us some contacts of people who can tell their stories? And we decided that it would be very good idea just to compile this witness database to be ready to provide the stories to different medias. And it would be very important to understand who can speak English, who can speak German, who can speak any other languages. As of now, we have more than 150 witnesses, they are ready to speak, and we just documented each story. We have like a video, and from one side, any of nationalists can use the story, from another side we started to think about future after three, five years. I'm sure we will be winner in this world, but it would be very important to start to think about current situation again from history point of view, because. I think that when we started to be winner, the next step will be, we should tell to all of people, that guys, It's impossible to see this awful situation in any country. So what does it mean? Please use our archive, I'm talking about our archive now, starting from database to archive to history archive. Use our archive for the purposes to say we don't want to see the same situation in any country in the world.
👉🏾 We have started from, we would like to provide access to real stories. Currently we think that we would like to have enough documents for future archive or maybe for future Museum, Digital Museum. But anyway, so we have two different mission now because we are still very important for all people who would like to use our materials and to prepare stories and to use our materials, for example, video for films makers And so important because we can assist them, for example, if you have like the following request, xxxxxxx can you assist me in relation to May, 2022 materials in relation to Bucha materials in relation to Mykolaiv April, 2022 materials? So finally my personal view, we are ready to give a real trust stories. And true stories about the biggest current war.
👉🏾 Yes, really, it's difficult. But I would like to switch on to challenges. Yes. Yeah. Really? The biggest challenge I think that I'm talking about real volunteers organisation. So what does it mean? We can rely only on two assets, our time and our skills. For example, it's interesting statistic, which I can use to show what does it mean, volunteers, organisation and the biggest challenge. If you ask me how many volunteers do I have? My true answer will be like approximately 200.
👉🏾 But how many volunteers do you have in your team now? My true answer will be 60. What does it mean that a lot of people spend their time during this one year, but unfortunately, It was impossible to keep fixed team every day. Because we are talking about mainly women with kids who left Ukraine because of safety reason and in regard of the situation of us, we decided to invest any spare time. Sometimes, Nighttime to help Ukraine to win through using your time for the Datallion, for example, we have done a lot of, let's say, mini projects. And it was very popular as for example, you can be a part of our volunteers team for 1, 2, 3 months just to do this project and unfortunately leave us after like your investment.
👉🏾 So the biggest challenge are people, it's impossible to rely like on our team every day. We are relying Ukrainian people who continue to invest their time and every day we should think about new volunteers. Every day we should think how we can find them. After one year, really it's very difficult because of you know, financial situation. After one year, a lot of people, they lost their work. A lot of people, unfortunately, out of Ukraine, and it's difficult to find like real acceptable work. And so what does it mean? The biggest issue, be ready to promote your project every day for two purposes, just to find new users and to realise your mission to tell more about Ukraine. And the second one, just to ask people to join you.
👉🏾 Yes. Yeah I think of a question really starting from maybe October, November. By the way, we have like a few people like main co-founders when they're talking about fixed team, we're talking about a few people, like a main co-founders, and we are responsible for everyday activities and we are responsible for strategy, we can use this word for the Datallion. So we decided to think that women and work topic will be very important because we would like to demonstrate like Ukrainian women role, like profile and how we can continue to grow up our kids at the same time. How we can struggle against Russians. And what we started to do, really, we started to propose our materials and our team for different events. And it was done, let's say a lot of presentations and participation in different events out of Ukraine and to tell like a real story about Datallion. By the way, we have internal statistic and this is real project which driven by women. We have 85 percentage of our core team, we are talking about let's say like women team. But if we are talking about volunteers team, it's approximately 90 percentage.
👉🏾 We're talking about women's team. For example, in my case, I have received an invitation to be a main speaker in my company because diversity issue and women leadership. One of the biggest issue in this company and I'm working in big international company, it's very important for them to see leadership from women and they asked me to prepare this presentation and to tell this real story for a business woman. It was very important to hear the story and because it's like a real demonstration that you will be very powerful. You as a woman, you will be very powerful and you can do all things together, you can continue to grow your kids, you can find new job. But it's very important, you could be and you could invest your time and for example, in really very important things, which could change the world because after a lot of years it would be big recognition that current time and Ukrainians really we are changing the world because we would like to demonstrate that it's impossible to leave and such situation, and we should combine our efforts around Ukraine and we should be winner.
👉🏾 And it would be big changes the world as I believe after our real win. So finally we come back to this topic. Really we have very good coverage from different media. If you purchase Datallion women team, it would be a lot of references to articles about us. And very interesting because we have very young women and they participated in different events with their stories because approximately 40 percentage of our team currently, they living in Ukraine and really, It would be very important if you would like to know how women leadership can change situation and for example, we come back to my presentation for a lot of women from different countries, in my company. It was very like a real, not big surprise, but it was a very challengable story. You should use your leadership and you can do a lot of things, especially if you can combine your efforts. So it's like really women efforts, which you can combine and which you can use as one team can change all things.
👉🏾 Do you remember my statistics that if you ask me about how many volunteers do have I can say that more than 200, yes and currently we have 60. First of all, it's very difficult time for all of us. And the second one sometimes it's very difficult to see this contact every day. I remember my March, 2022, I started to work in the Datallion as...

96Discussing social mobility with two role models: Victoria Ayodeji and Marley Ahmed; Career Ready Youth Advisory Board Members

Thu, 04 May 2023 03:00:00 +0000

According to a Deloitte Report from last year, “The UK has one of the poorest rates of social mobility in the developed world. This means that people born into low-income families, regardless of their talent, or their hard work, do not have the same access to opportunities as those born into more privileged circumstances”.
Charities like The National Tutoring Programme, the National Access programme, the Sutton Trust, The Social Mobility Foundation, Career Ready, UpReach are working hard to support young people in difficult circumstances. However, we are unlikely to see any transformational change without political will, finances, a joined up approach between the government, private sector and charities. And of course a mindset change.
A couple of weeks back I had two members of the Career Ready Youth Advisory Board on my podcast. For those who don’t know Career Ready, it is the national social mobility charity founded in 2002 to boost social mobility by empowering young people and giving their talents a platform to flourish. Career Ready now has a network of 1000 employer supporters, 3500 volunteers and have have so far reached over 200000 young people including supporting 30000 young people on its high impact Career Ready post-16 programme.
Both my guests Victoria Ayodeji and Marley Ahmed are highly self motivated, are on the path to great career journeys and deeply committed to giving back. And they are involved with various initiatives which support them in this ambition. Essentially these Gen Z social mobility advocates and role models, believing in walking the talk.
In this free wheeling conversation, we spoke about their early years, educational attainment,
👉🏾 Role of support networks and intermediaries like Career Ready or the Social Mobility Foundation
👉🏾 The Role of mentors in learning and making career choices
👉🏾 Their experience as Chair and member of the Youth Advisory Board at Career Ready
👉🏾 Advocacy and what giving back means for them
👉🏾 Social mobility in the UK and challenges
👉🏾 Role models, the future, change and many other uplifting issues…..
Depressingly a Sutton Trust research from 2022 reiterated something most of us already know - that opportunities are still determined by background. The research shockingly predicted a fall in income mobility for poorer young people due to the impact of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
What do we ensure that young people from disadvantaged background do not fall through the cracks........Who is to be held accountable for lack of support and access to opportunities?
Shownotes:
Memorable passages from the podcast:
Victoria: Hi everyone. My name's Victoria.
Victoria: So I recently graduated from university, so I went to Cambridge and I studied geography. I am also the Chair of the Career Ready Youth Advisory Board. Beyond that as well, I'm very interested in pop culture. I'm also a DJ. I'm also very interested in storytelling. I've been public speaking for the last 10 years and I'm also very passionate about social impacts. That's probably me in a nutshell and I'm trying to be a content creator as well. So feel free to follow me on socials.
Marley: That is quite an introduction. I'm Marley I'm a graduate University of Essex. I'm also a member of the Career Ready Youth Board. I completed the program in 2017. By the time that this goes out, I'll be part of the first-ever cohort of Merky FC, working at Adidas in a community's role with the football space. And I'm also very heavily interested in social mobility, having done my dissertation on social mobility and achieved a first class.
Marley: Essentially I think growing up in council estate it has many pros and cons and I could go into detail all day, but I really do feel like growing up within my community you had to have thick skin. There was a lot of experiences that we went through and a lot of things we saw that made us build up a lot of resilience.
Victoria: For me, it probably all started from when I was pretty young. For some context, I'm an introvert and oftentimes when you grow up as an introvert or someone who is very shy, probably until age 14. Why is this is important? Being an introvert from a young age, I was always very, very self-aware. I always knew and understood the social issues that were happening in my community. I grew up in inner-city London, and that gave me a drive to succeed in life and look for opportunities where possible.
Victoria: So that's pretty much how I then thought more widely about the kind of access to support I can get. For example, when I was in school, I had access to charities like Career Ready, which is how we're on this podcast. But then also I applied for programs with organisations like the Sutton Trust and Target Oxbridge, and that's run by Rare recruitment. Also into university The Social mobility foundation. So these are all charities that operate in the UK and also UpReach as well. A lot of these opportunities I just found through Google. And I think for me, it kind of showed me that there was access to opportunities for young people from less advantaged backgrounds.
Victoria: That kind of got me interested in trying to better myself and get access to different things. That kind of encouraged me to kinda do the work I'm doing today. So whether that's mentoring, speaking in schools across the UK but I think also beyond this as well. When I was actually 17, I wrote an essay about social community in the UK. So this is back in 2016 when Teresa May was still prime Minister, and I wrote an essay about grammar schools in the UK and whether or not they should be reintroduced. I've been very interested in this topic for a long time. For me, like a lot of my childhood experiences have kind of been tied to social impact education.
Victoria: Even when I was 15 years old, I gave a school assembly talk about education because this is in wake of Nelson Mandelas passing away. So yeah, I've been very passionate about education and access to opportunities for those who are less advantaged in society.
Victoria: Yeah. I think for me, I thankfully went to a school that, yes they focused on education attainment. Same at home, there was the focus on trying to get really good grades, but there also was a focus, now that I look back on it, on holistic learning. So I went to a school that really pushed us to make sure we were doing extracurricular activities.
Victoria: For example, when I was 16, I co-founded a project called Youth Go Global, which was basically 15 young people in East London who were fundraising and volunteering to go on a cultural exchange program to Hungary and then also to Gambia. Again, this has nothing to do with educational attainment. But it probably had a big impact on my personal development from a young age. So I think for me, Educational attainment has always been quite important because the way I've seen it is about, if you get certain grades, it allows you to jump through certain hoops, but as you know, in society grades are a big thing that matter, that's other thing important for a young person's personal development.
Marley: I, I guess for me there was a push. I think I briefly stated earlier and if not, I'll state now, but I was a first generation student, so I come from a family of six, a big family. I'm one of the latter middle children and essentially the only one who probably would complete my entire education.
Marley: And my parents essentially, I remember studying sociology at A level and seeing this, and it's always stuck with me. There are three types of parents when it came to educational attainment. Parents that had the the support child, the parents that were disengaged, and a type of parent in the middle that didn't have the cultural or financial capital in a sense, but really wanted you to do well.
Marley: And I feel like I was grateful to have both my mother and father in my life who supported me, always pushed me and said phrases like, you can be wherever you wanna be. That really, really helped. So I never felt too much pressure. And then I guess at university I always had my own individual why, in terms of why I wanted to achieve my degree and I wanted to go on to do.
Marley: And so I guess there was a push in educational attainment by myself, but I think more so it was the experiences that come in higher education. So I specifically applied for Sussex because of opportunities, like in my first year, I was able to kinda study via sponsorship at Nan Yang University in Singapore for four to five weeks.
Marley: Or I was able to do internships in my second year because my university had a focus on increasing diversity. So factors like that were also very important to me and helped me stay driven, I guess.
Victoria: Yes. I think they're really important. Obviously there is the cliched saying that a child is raised in a village, but I think having family, teachers, community is really important. And also, again, that's a point worth remembering. So for me, a lot of my journey has been enhanced by having amazing mentors who I've met through the charities I mentioned, and also some mentors who I just met through social media as well.
Victoria: So I think it makes a difference in regard to exposure. I always say when, if I'm doing my public speaking events, that you don't know what you don't know. And when you do have a mentor who is a lot more accomplished than you, someone who has achieved what you are aspiring to achieve, the opportunities now become endless because you now know what is available to you.
Victoria: Also I think that's, there's a lot to be said about when it comes to access to education for young people. I think as a society as a whole, we all play a role in trying to ensure that young people irrespective of their background, are able to have access to opportunities. I think it makes a massive difference when it comes to supporting these students.
Victoria: And I also think that there is a lot to be said about the difference between emotional support and material support. Cuz sometimes, you might have someone who grew up in low an income family where their parents can't necessarily give them material support, but they can give them emotional support by supporting them in regards to what they might wanna do.
Victoria: But then someone might come from a wealthy family, where the parents might give them material support, but they might not have emotional support. But then also vice versa, you've got people who come from wealthy families who have their material and their emotional support. So I think there's a lot to be said about trying to think more holistically about a young person's personal development and also an adult's personal development.
Victoria: We need both the material access, but then also the emotional access to our own personal and professional development.
Marley: Victoria hit the nail on the head in terms of it takes a village to raise a child and I think that's evident in walks of life.
Marley: I think teachers have a key role and they're put under a lot of pressure in various ways, but I think back to science in about year 11. So a couple of years ago, about six or seven. But there was one teacher that would essentially if it wasn't up to the mark and pulling our weight, we'd stay behind and do extra science lessons.
Marley: And I look back now and it was just being in that space, still after school, we all focused and kind of gave us all a growth mindset. In the sense that a bit before everyone else started revising for GCSEs or A Levels, we would just come together and do some flashcards or do some practice questions. And it was really key to have that space and have a few jokes here and there as well, but then also be able to focus.
Marley: And I believed that all of my friendship group some predicted Cs and so on, we all got Bs or higher. So I think teachers have a key role and in terms of teachers, they have workload and then they unconsciously take on that emotional support element as well.
Marley: And that's where I'm coming to what Victoria said about mentoring and where I thought it could be so effective. And I guess something that I'm gonna try and do over the next couple of years. And hopefully I have a good enough network and people around me is a bit more focused on sponsorship. In the sense if there's any opportunities arise that any of my mentees I feel like are suitable for, if I know someone in that field or I know of a job or role, I'm able to talk highly of my mentee when they're not in the room. And I feel like mentorship is amazing and I'm a big advocate. I have mentor, mentees, but over the next couple of years in my life, I'd like to focus a bit more on sponsorship.
Victoria: Yes. So basically the Youth Advisory Board was set up in 2021, so both Marley and I were on the very first cohort, trailblazers.
Victoria: The purpose of the youth Advisory Board is to ensure that with the activities of Career Ready because it, because it's a youth centred charity, we kind of wanna make sure that young people's voices are fundamentally heard when it comes to different changes. But then also trying to kind of foster a really strong community of alumni on the program.
Victoria: So whether that's ex-students who did the program, also ex-mentors, and to kind of ensure that you can learn so much from the Career ready program. Doing Career Ready when I was in school changed my life. But it's also about trying to encourage and spur on those life-changing moments post the program.
Victoria: So different experiences that I've had so far was be given the opportunity to speak alongside the CEO Tokunbo at events. So encouraging employer partners to sign up as mentors, that have been very successful, so just sharing my journey of Career Ready.
Victoria: I think for me as well, running live events. So I did an event with a personal branding agency I interned at called WOW. So it was a co-led event why I worked with my manager, Phoebe, and we were basically running a session on personal branding and how young people can use social media for good. And we've also run events on entrepreneurship and also done a variety of collaboration events with different organisations like for example, Apprentice Nation, which kind of encourage more young people to have access to knowledge on apprenticeships in the UK.
Victoria: And so I think for me, the reason why I wanted be on the board, but also be Chair of the board was, I knew how transformational career was for my own life. For example, I had a mentor who is probably one of the most amazing women I've met in my life. Like, she really just changed the game for me because through her network, she allowed me to get free tuition for A-level economics in school. And I will tell this story whenever I speak and everyone's just like, whoa, that's crazy. And I think that's kinda why I'm so passionate about mentoring. That's why I'm very passionate about giving. And yeah, I think when it's early ages, but I think it's about trying to encourage that momentum post the two-year program for students to kind of ensure that they're still developing personally, but also professionally.
Marley: Yeah. What Victoria said, amazing summary. And I think similar to me, so from Willard Common where I live, where I did my Career Ready Internship. Until I was 17, I'd never been to Canary Wharf. It never comes to anyone from my community's mind. Let's go Canary Wharf for a day, it's not really something you do, but you can see the huge buildings, right up in the sky and you're like, wow, like that's amazing.
Like, I wonder what they do there, or I'd love to just go and see what London's like from their view. And it was really ironic, one day myself and a couple people I'd met on the program were just all there and we managed to get coffee on about the fortieth floor in Citibank.
Marley: And we were looking and we were just in awe. We're all from different parts of London, all the outskirts of London, and we're just like, wow. It's, it's just such a beautiful and amazing view. And I think in terms of the youth board, the reason I wanted to get involved is because of that engagement we get to have with young people. And I see us in a sense as like a sounding board for any initiatives or ideas they wanna come up with as a charity. And it's mutually beneficial in the sense that they want us to develop governance skills, develop any skills that are transferrable that we wanna work on, i.e. public speaking.
Marley: I'm very fortunate to have worked on their ACE events service, the event toward the start of the year with various schools from up and down the country come together in London. And I was able to do a sofa Q and A there, and then also at the awards event, I was also able to further do some public speaking in terms of giving out awards. And experience with like in the sense of working with the alumni relationships manager and thinking about how we could further connect and work with our cohorts and other cohorts. It gives us a range of skills to develop and the organisation gets a sounding board and some different perspectives on ways they can engage with young people. So it's really nice that it's mutually beneficial too, in my opinion.
Sudha: Brilliant. Marley, I noticed that you volunteered with Global Enterprise experience as a team leader. What do you do there in that role?
Marley: See that was an amazing opportunity that again my university offered. And...

95: A conversation with Farzana Baduel, Co-Founder, Curzon PR on PR, Purpose and Leadership

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 03:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
Not all Asians have the same stories and experiences. My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week Farzana Baduel, a successful entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Curzon PR was inspired by her mother and her aunts who ran their own successful businesses in Pakistan. She also considers her identity as a British Asian to be her strength, something that has helped her straddle two worlds.
In the episode we spoke about her entrepreneurial journey, setting up multiple businesses,
👉🏾 The impact of a world in flux on the PR/Comms Industry
👉🏾 Comms on Board, has the time come?
👉🏾 Diversity washing
👉🏾 Purpose vs/and Profit
👉🏾 Her definition of leadership and leadership style
We also spoke about her role models, beliefs, immigrant work ethics she inherited from her parents, work like balance, kindness, believing in the potential for what we can achieve……
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you so much for having me.
👉🏾 I guess I am a mom and a wife. And I also run a PR firm called Curzon and British Asian, married to an Italian, love diversity, live diversity. And I love being a communications bridge between different cultures.
👉🏾 I think my identity it shapes what I do. So sort of being brought up in two cultures, the South Asian culture and the British culture, it just innately made it quite intuitive to work not only within the British and the South Asian culture but to work with lots of other cultures.
👉🏾 Because I think when you sort of straddle two cultures growing up, you have the ability to have that sort of level of empathy of being an outsider and that really helps to build bridges, build trust. And I find my sort of identity as a British Asian has massively helped me not just straddling these two worlds, but straddling multiple worlds and most importantly connecting worlds.
👉🏾 I think I was quite lucky because my maternal grandfather was a huge sort of feminist and he used to always say to his daughters, my mother and my aunt, education is really important and career, so do not stop at just the education. So in Pakistan, he had five daughters and he was a huge sort of proponent of women working, women in the workplace back then in Pakistan.
👉🏾 So I think that sort of really percolated throughout our family. So, growing up my mother was well educated, my aunts had businesses in Pakistan, my mother had businesses. And so I grew up there were women in leadership positions, be it a small business, a large business, freelance, it was the norm for me.
👉🏾 So for me, I kind of almost aped the women who are in my family and but what I really admire is actually those women out there who set up businesses who didn't have those role models in their family. I think those women should be celebrated, cuz women like me, actually, I had role models growing up.
👉🏾 So it was something that growing up, it just nurtured me into believing that is also a path that I can easily take. Sure. Well I left university after my second year, so at the age of 20, I set up my first business, which was a tax business, and I ran it for around 10 years. And then the PR business, I've been running for about 13 years.
👉🏾 And I would say that actually the tax business was fairly straightforward and easy. I think also because it just came naturally to me. I was good at mathematics, I was good at processes. And so the tax business was relatively easy for me to run and do well in. I'd say the PR firm was a massive struggle, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
👉🏾 I think it took me about 10 years to really understand and feel confident about being a PR person because I set up the firm, foolishly without ever working in PR before. And I thought I was just being brave, I think in hindsight I was just a bit foolhardy.
👉🏾 So it was incredibly difficult. It was like the blind leading the blind. I think if I could turn back the clock, I would've worked in other agencies, but I was always scared about would I be able to get a job at an agency back then, because I had an accounting background. So And also I had a one-year-old daughter.
👉🏾 I sort of thought to myself, well, actually, let me just, set up a business in this world and learn it as I go. Because I didn't feel I had opportunities to get into agencies back then. So that was sort of the rationale behind it, but incredibly hard massive sort of imposter syndrome. I'd almost talk myself outta contracts sometimes. And that's not really helpful in sort of revenue growth.
👉🏾 And I think that it took me about a solid 10 years. of which I'd spend weekends, holidays, reading up about PR. I'd read lots of PR books and blogs and podcasts and I would just consume everything. I think I stopped feeling like an imposter when Oxford asked me to be their resident PR expert at the university. And I thought, okay, maybe. I do know something about the craft. I think when you have imposter syndrome the pursuit of external validation is really important. But I think I'm now at that stage where I don't need that external validation anymore. There's an innate confidence that I have, but it's taken me so long to get there.
👉🏾 I think the good has been that there has been a lot more agencies that have cropped up. People have felt a lot more confident to start up PR firms because the barriers of entry is much lower. Because before you'd have to have money to buy an office space. And now because there's a remote model that's become acceptable culturally in the world of business. There's been a lot more people who are able to set up, their own business in the PR industry.
👉🏾 And I think that's been really positive. Cause it's just lowering the barriers of entry which I think is a good thing. I think the second is again, because remote work is increasingly acceptable, what's happened is that there's a lot more people with caring responsibilities. So looking after the elderly or children, or sick relatives, they are able to sort of manage their caring responsibilities as well as work. And before it used to be very binary. It was like, you're either gonna be a carer or you are going to have a career. And now actually you can have that third path, where you can still have a career.
👉🏾 And also I think PR can be very London-centric. So what's wonderful again about remote work is the PR industry doesn't have to be so London-centric. PR firms can hire people from other parts of the UK, and that levelling up agenda that was part of the sort of government's narrative can really take place through remote work.
👉🏾 So I think that's the good side. I think the bad side is that there's been a lot of uncertainty. It's led to a lot of anxiety, I've seen a lot of spike in mental health issues, and how to sort of, balance this new way of working with ensuring that people are also feeling supported, but at the same time, the productivity is also there.
👉🏾 So trying to find a balance between ensuring that the culture is supportive in the workplace as well as the productivity, cuz it's often, sometimes a balance between one or the other
👉🏾 Very much so. I think also because as we're sort of moved from the emphasis of the state of being the customer to sort of stakeholder capitalism. The stakeholders are not just the customer in terms of priority, but also the internal stakeholder, the employee as well as government, journalists, communities, suppliers and because of stakeholder capital. It's sort of really brought PR professionals to the fore because before it was often if you saw somebody on the board they have a marketing background, because of course customers king, but now actually multiple stakeholders are king and queens. And consequently, the PR people are the ones who navigate stakeholders.
👉🏾 And so they are the ones that actually increasingly are needed at board level in order to spearhead the strategy as well as identify these sort of strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats, which PR people are naturally horizon scanners. We're always looking at context and increasingly because of risk and geopolitical strife.
👉🏾 And us moving towards a multipolar world, horizon scanning is increasingly important. And I think CEOs and chairs of boards, they beginning to realise that actually PR people hold the skillset of horizon scanning, identifying risks, managing risks, crisis communications, building reputation and resilience around the organisation.
👉🏾 And the fact that reputation is an asset on the balance sheet that needs to be protected. And that's where I think PR people are becoming increasingly sort of more in demand. And we are moving away from the old way of thinking on boards where they used to just have a marketing person on. But understanding that other stakeholders also, communications with them need to be managed.
👉🏾 I think that's why it's important to have people of colour in the decision-making room because when they come up with the ideas for the diversity inclusion campaigns. It’s more likely that somebody, an ethnic minority can say, hold on, you can't just basically do diversity washing. What is actually the experience of an ethnic minority within your organisation as an employee?
👉🏾 And really try and remind them that there shouldn't be that wide gap between perception and reality. Whatever you communicate about your organisation on the outside really has to authentically connect with what it's really like on the inside. And I think there's obviously been a lot of greenwashing, a lot of diversity washing.
👉🏾 I think the fact is that millennials and Gen Z, they care passionately about these subjects, but also they are not stupid. They are incredibly savvy and I think what they hate more than anything is actually hypocrisy. And there are a lot of organisations that lack self-awareness, that don't understand how to approach diversity and inclusion that feel that just by putting a disproportionate amount of ethnic minorities in their advertising campaign, that means that they are sufficiently woke in order to be able to, speak to their target audience. And they don't understand that this generation, they will go on the website, they will look at the leadership team, they will have a look and see, what diversity do you have in the senior leadership team. They will take into consideration the sort of lived experience of the ethnic minorities working within that organisation. And I think they've got to be extremely careful, they've gotta make sure that they are aligned internally and it's almost better to sort of, really underpromise and over deliver when it comes to diversity.
👉🏾 So really, I think also to be vulnerable and say, what, we recognise that we need to do better. We're not there yet, this is the path that we are gonna follow, this is how we're gonna measure ourselves and we're gonna be transparent in our reporting. And if we fall short, we will let you know and we will have a contingency plan on how to bring us back in line with where we want to get.
👉🏾 And I think sharing that journey, cause nobody expects organisations to change overnight. But really having that sort of transparency, that sense of humility. And that sort of, underpromising and over-delivering, I think would really builds that trust in organisation.
👉🏾 I think what's happened now is, I think down to stakeholders. Before it used to be very much focused on the shareholder, and now actually it isn't, that's the harsh reality. And the reality is that actually employees is as important, if not more than the shareholder. Because ultimately a business cannot really survive without employees.
👉🏾 And so, what's happened is I think that the public feel more empowered because they are able to communicate, through social media, they're able to really create sort of coalitions and campaigns together, on Twitter, for instance. So I think people are more empowered, which means people are sort of forcing organisations. I think because they perhaps feel let down by governments that they're thinking, well, actually the governments really haven't delivered. We don't really trust them to deliver. And the only mechanism as a public to make ….
👉🏾 But we need to just direct them into the areas that we care about, which is not profits but obviously they understand that businesses need to be sustainable, but they care about planet and people. And that's where I think, we're getting much better frameworks like the ESG framework in order to ensure that we hold companies to account.
👉🏾 So I think we're very different than the sort of greed is good mantra of the eighties. And that's perhaps a philosophy I think that makes a lot of hardcore capitalists feel quite nervous. But I think at the same time, we are dealing with some existential threats around climate change, the sense of inequality between the haves and the have nots are widening. I’m a capitalist, but I think fundamentally it's a good thing to look at profits as well as people, as well as planets because a lot of costs and the P&L accounts of businesses are environmental costs that haven't been captured.
👉🏾 And the harm that they're doing to the planet as well as the communities are not there in the P&L account. So I think the reporting around companies, it's good that the ESG element is brought in because a company polluting rivers you don't see that harm and expense it does to the environment on the P&L. I think we're moving towards, a sort of purposeful business, which is what we need, at this stage of our humanity, our journey. It's an evolution, I'd say.
👉🏾 I would say that I define leadership as the ability to articulate a mission. And to help others along in their journey towards that mission. I would say that my sort of leadership style has massively changed. I think that in the early years of my businesses, I think, I was quite blinkered, a bit of a hamster and a hamster wheel just kept on working, very much immigrant work ethic that I inherited from my mom and dad. Working seven days a week, extremely long hours, I would work throughout my holidays, and I thought I was doing the right thing. And I thought the more hours I put in, the more successful that I would be and the better the business would be.
👉🏾 I've been running businesses for about 25 years now, so I think only I had an epiphany five years ago. So 20 years of sort of running my business I think was wrong because I just worked to death and as a result I was grumpy. Yeah, I wasn't nice to work with, I was short-fused, I was highly critical, I wasn't empathetic, and it was to do with my well-being, because my well-being was low priority. I was always grumpy. And looking back, I thought I just wouldn't wanna work with myself. And just about five years ago I thought, you know what?
👉🏾 I want to actually stop working weekends, I wanna stop working holidays. I want to be present for my family. I want to do walks in the park every morning with my dog. And I want to take holidays and weekends. And since I've done that, I've ironically started working normal hours and consequently, I'm much nicer to work with, I like myself more, my the staff retention has increased. I often get sort of, you know, positive compliments from my colleagues who are like, I really enjoy working with you, never had that before. So I think actually, the game changer for leadership for me has been if you take care of your own mental health and well-being and you don't work yourself to the ground, then you have much more capacity and energy for kindness.
👉🏾 And I think kindness is that magic ingredient in teams that really build the foundations for high-performance teams. And it took me 20 years to get the kindness memo and not just kindness to others, but kindness to self.
👉🏾 Gosh. I mean, I think I have different role models for different things, so, Obama, I think he is such a wonderful role model in terms of his elegance, his ability to orate and his ability to really give people a sense of optimism just through his oratory skills. I think he is absolutely incredible. I really admired Margaret Thatcher for being the first woman for her political longevity, for her ability to really care about the country. Of course, she didn't get everything right and she got a lot of things wrong. She's human, she isn't a saint.
👉🏾 But just to withstand that level of criticism and constant undermining as the woman, as a mother of twins I just thought what a woman. And so I admire these, women politicians with a thirst, because I think that the amount of criticism that was levelled at them would've been a lot higher because of their gender and they just, ploughed through. On the same vein, Angela Merkel, as well these women in politics who have really been able to maintain their position I think is extraordinary.
👉🏾 And I would also say actually the people who are, you know, sort of role models are, people who are in public service. So people who just devote their life to public service. I recently had a lunch with an old school friend of mine from secondary school and she's a social worker and she looks after kids between the age of sort of 16 to 18 who issues with crime and the law and drugs and vulnerability. And she's literally just devoted her entire life. And that's all she does is look after them. And she takes the work home with her in the sense that mentally she cares, she worries about them.
👉🏾 When I had lunch with her, I thought, God, what an amazing, amazing woman. And there are millions of them in public service or in caring responsibilities, be it nurses, be it people work in care homes who have very hard jobs physically and emotionally. And they get on with it. And what motivates them is not recognition or intellectual stimulation or money but is actually, walking the talk of genuinely caring for people. I find they're really inspiring and I'm not that person. I know that, but I admire them for it.
👉🏾 I believe in the potential for humanity. And that's in the positive sense, we've got huge amounts of challenges ahead of us. But I believe that we have it in ourselves to create the utopia that we are trying to create...

94: Advancing the equity & inclusion agenda in 2023: In conversation with Leela Stake, Global Lead FH4Inclusion, Co-Lead True MOSAIC DE&I Practice

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
One of the best things about hosting my podcast is that I get to spotlight some incredible people from across the world, especially people from previously underrepresented groups and communities. A couple of weeks back I spoke with @Leela Stake, Global Lead FH4Inclusion, Co-Lead True MOSAIC DE&I Practice. Out side of work she is Vice Chair of the Board of Stanford’s Haas Centre for Public Service.
In the course of our conversation we spoke about her influences, childhood, her identity as a multiracial woman, role models, her current role, the intersectionality between sustainability & equity & inclusion, her journey to leadership, leadership in general, what orgs can do to create equity inspired designs to building inclusive organisations, being an eternal optimist and many other things…….
Hearing people’s stories of lived experiences and resilience (it is a word I don’t like anymore) is humbling, and revealing. The stories we hear teach us, that it may be tough but we all have the power to define who we want to be, rise, reach for the stars and pave the way for those who follow in our wake.
Want to hear more, head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾
“So to me this is a key year as we are in 2023, and we think about some of the headwinds or economic uncertainties that we may be facing. This is a time to really hold leaders accountable for what they said that they would do and make sure that we're not either stalling progress or moving backwards.
We have to make sure we stay really united and lock arms with the people that we're working with. It's just tremendously important that women leaders support other women leaders, that people from under-resourced communities support each other and lift each other up. So that continues to be, I think, just so important to me personally and so important to moving this work forward.” Leela Stake
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 It's so nice to be with you, Sudha. Thank so much for having me..
👉🏾 Oh, there's so many. Well, I am currently a global lead for FH for Inclusion at Fleishman Hillard and Co-lead of True Mosaic, which is our global diversity, equity and inclusion practice. I'm also a multiracial woman, I am a parent of two amazing teenagers who are 13 and 15 years old. And happily married to the love of my life.
👉🏾 So those are a few of the influences in my life. As I think about influences, I really have to look into my past. Both of my parents, I'm a minister's daughter, a Unitarian minister's daughter, so my dad grew up in a small town in Kansas. My mother was an immigrant to the United States from India. And I had an amazing older brother growing up. So in our family of four, all three of those people influenced me very profoundly.
👉🏾 Yeah, it's incredibly important to me. I think that sometimes you can't know where you're going in the world, until you know very deeply where you've come from. So it's something that I think about a lot in terms of my identity. I think, it was maybe more common now to be multiracial, but growing up maybe it was less common.
👉🏾 And I think that there are both superpowers that come from it and also challenges. In one way, I feel like I could go to almost anywhere in the world and feel like I fit in. I have kind of olive-tanned skin and so there's many places I would go and people would wonder if I was from that place.
👉🏾 And there's something really beautiful and amazing about that. On the other hand, I think that it can be really challenging because in some ways you feel like you don't completely fit in anywhere. People will sort of say, oh, you're exotic, or, oh, isn't that unusual. And I would love the time that I spent in India, but I also didn't speak the language.
👉🏾 I studied Indian classical dance and felt very connected to my family there, but it was a little bit different for me in terms of the way that I grew up. And similarly at those times in the United States, there weren't a lot of people who looked like me. And in some ways that can be good. I think maybe because you're seen as unique and in other ways, I think you have to kind of even more than some other people, pave your own path.
👉🏾 Yes. I mean, I get to have the amazing privilege and opportunity to really help achieve our ambition to become the most inclusive global communications agency in the world. That was an ambition that our CEO John Saunders set out. Probably about five years ago. So before people were talking as much as they are now about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
👉🏾 And I get to wear a couple of different hats. So my role in FH for Inclusion is really leading a lot of our pro bono and volunteer efforts around the world. For our 70th anniversary, we launched a desire to unite all of our global offices in celebration of the 70th anniversary by joining together in volunteer and pro bono service to help nonprofit organisations around the world.
👉🏾 And to date, we've worked with more than 130 organisations, more than 35,000 hours of volunteer and pro bono service. So that's been really an incredible track record and it keeps on going which has been great. And as co-lead of True Mosaic, our global diversity, equity and inclusion practice, we're really working on how do we bring diversity, equity, and inclusion to the center of our client work.
👉🏾 That's the work that drives us each and every day. And so really, I mean, our ambition is quite great. We hope to bring DE and I as a core service to all of the clients that we work with ultimately, and we're making really great in in roads to doing that. We've worked with more than a hundred clients to date and we've built a team of more than 160 counsellors around the world.
👉🏾 And I would say the one thing that's also kind of interesting about True Mosaic, cuz we're really talking about how do we bring people together who have not only, different kinds of professional expertise, but that we're really a true reflection of society that we live in. And we think about all of the different facets of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
👉🏾 So that might be culture, race, and ethnicity, but it might also be gender identity, sexual orientation, people with disabilities of different kinds. People who have had different backgrounds and different experiences, and we really feel like that enriches the work that we do.
👉🏾Thank you so much for asking that question Sudha, I couldn't agree more. And I think that it is really important to bring these pieces of experience together and I think unfortunately, I've even heard some trends in the opposite direction. I think now in times of economic uncertainty, like there's been more talk about these worlds maybe being pitted against each other or competition for resources.
👉🏾 And I think you're absolutely right if we're doing this right, we're working together and really these things are inextricably linked. As we move forward, we can't think about climate solutions without thinking about the communities that are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis that we're in.
👉🏾 And we have to think about solutions that truly work for everybody. And I think that there's so many ways in which diversity, equity, and inclusion, and environmental sustainability go hand in hand and I have really found it to be a great asset in my work that I have worked in both of these spaces and will continue to do so.
👉🏾 I think maybe the one way I'd like to answer this question is with just a concrete example. Because I think it's really easy to get stuck in sort of generalities about what are these different types of terms and how do we define them, and that's really important. But then I think we have to get down to what does that actually mean when the rubber hits the road. So I'll give an example at our own organisation or in our own industry So the communications industry and the agency world as like many industries historically not been very diverse. So if we're talking about advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, there are few things we need to do from a talent perspective.
👉🏾 We need to start building the talent pipeline, starting with people who are beginning their careers, and that's really important. So we have an amazing fellowship program that helps to do just that for people who are early in career. If we just wait for people who are early in their career to rise up the ranks, we could be waiting even if people progress fairly fast. It's still a number of years down the road before those people become senior leaders. So we need to be thinking really proactively about how do we also bring people into our industry who are from other fields, and how does that enrich the work that we do? And whether those people are former journalists, whether they worked in-house or in government or with NGOs of different kinds.
👉🏾 And then, if we're bringing those people in, we have to recognise they are coming in with a wealth of experience. They have many gifts, but they haven't been working for the past two decades in the agency world like I have. And so equity is really about how do we recognise that some people may need additional support and deserve additional support to have a level playing field and to kind of create the world that we want to live in, the kind of profession that we want to live in. And so that's something we've been thinking a lot about is how do we make sure we create really successful on ramps, equitable on-ramps for people who didn't maybe have the same opportunities to thrive and become leaders in our industry.
👉🏾 And so I just think when we're talking about these different terms, it's helpful to really get into the programs and what are we actually trying to accomplish, and that's just one example.
👉🏾 Yes, and I think the journey continues, right? I mean, I hope that I'm at a point that I'm not even halfway through my career at this point. And so it's something that I have thought about most days of my career and will continue to think about as well. Yes. I do think that in some ways it has been more difficult.
👉🏾 And I think that there are probably a few examples of that. I think really early in my career I started working abroad in a number of different countries. And I remember I would sometimes go to meetings where I was the only woman in the room or one of just a few women in the room and that can be really challenging. And I think that you have to be kind of brave in a way and not be scared off by that and sometimes maybe work harder than others to kind of maybe get to the same place. I think that there's still a tremendous amount of sort of mommy tracking that can happen.
👉🏾 And sometimes I think people feel like they're doing that as a courtesy to you. Like, oh, I didn't even think about you for that job because I just assumed that you wouldn't want it. I remember that from some of the early years of having children and I think people didn't mean to do it maliciously, but I remember in one case I really wanted to put myself forward for a position cuz someone above me was leaving the organisation.
👉🏾 And I thought to myself, so it's really inopportune timing. I have two young kids at the time, and so it wasn't really ideal to be taking on a much more significant role, but I also thought to myself, it's either now or I might have to wait several years for another opportunity like this. And I remember very vividly making that call and sort of getting the response. Oh, like, I really think you could do this job, I just hadn't thought about you for it. And I ended up taking that position and ended up being a huge leap forward for me in my career. And it wasn't ideal timing, but it worked out great and it wasn't that others were closed off to the idea. It was just that I needed to advocate for myself to put my name in the running.
👉🏾 Absolutely. Yes. I mean, I think that there's probably a few things to this. One is just to make sure that we are holding leaders accountable. I think the interesting thing about where we've been over the past few years, you're right, diversity, equity and inclusion is nothing new.
👉🏾 However, it has reached a fever pitch and gained a lot more momentum in the past few years. And there's been a lot of talk as we kind of were in the depths of 2020 and coming out of it. This is a movement, not a moment, but now it's sort of like where we really get to take people to task if they're not leaning into that.
👉🏾 So to me this is a key year as we are in 2023, and we think about some of the headwinds or economic uncertainties that we may be facing. This is a time to really hold leaders accountable for what they said that they would do and make sure that we're not either stalling progress or moving backwards.
👉🏾 So I do think that this is a really, really critical period. And I think the other thing I would just say practically is, we have to make sure we stay really united and lock arms with the people that we're working with. And so it's just tremendously important that women leaders support other women leaders, that people from under-resourced communities support each other and lift each other up. So that continues to be, I think, just so important to me personally and so important to moving this work forward.
👉🏾 I think it's hard to generalise, I do think that there's a lot of studies that show that women tend to be more empathetic leaders. So I don't think that's true of every individual, but I think on the whole, that probably is true. I think being an active learner is really important. And also being able to admit sometimes when you're wrong is a really important trait.
👉🏾 I think that it's important to lead with confidence, but it's also important to be a really active learner. Every day I feel like I make mistakes and need to learn and improve from them. So I find that to be an incredibly important trait. And I also think being a really active listener, really being able to hear people and the conversations that I have. I get to manage many wonderful people and really making sure before I jump to a conclusion or a solution, reminding myself to take a moment to really be a good listener is so important.
👉🏾 Yes. I think that's really well sad. And there's a reason why we generalise as well because we have to follow the data points and really see where the trend lines are moving. I remember that was one of the things that was really striking to me, when I was at college at Stanford, I took a women's leadership course when I was doing my graduate work. And it was mostly with women from the business school and the statistics were really staggering. If you looked at all of the graduates of the business school there and just compared it by sort of gender identity, you really found that most women dropped out of the workforce. Even like extremely well educated women once they became parents and you don't wanna generalise because each person is different and people's leadership styles are different. But there is something to be said for, we have to see what the research shows too, because it may reveal some trend lines that we need to take a really hard look at.
👉🏾 Yeah, I think about this all the time. I mean, I had two amazing Indian women influences in my life, more than two. But two come to mind, I guess for this interview. My mother was, as I mentioned, an immigrant to the US from India. She was an economist, extremely smart, amazing woman. She passed away eight years ago. I miss her every day. But she decided that she didn't feel like she could continue her career and raise her children once we were born. And so she stayed at home and was an incredibly engaged, amazing mother. I always think about it, I wish she was still here to call and ask her for advice, especially now as I'm parenting two teenagers.
👉🏾 And then I had my Nani, my maternal grandmother was an amazing woman in so many ways. She was on the Mumbai City Council. She lost her husband tragically in a car accident when my mom was six years old. So she had three children and really paved her own path, which was really ahead of her time and quite extraordinary. I think about both of them a lot because I don't really want to make a trade off between being the kind of mother that I want to be and being the kind of professional that I want to be. And I have these two amazing influences of women from my past, but I don't think we talk about this enough. It is not easy.
👉🏾 It's really not easy to try to do it all, and I'm most of the way through having my children at home, and so I've been able to figure it out. But I think the adage, the days are long but the years are short, is really true. There are days that feel really challenging and so when some people say it goes by so quickly, I remember thinking, wait, this doesn't feel fast, what about when you're sleep deprived, and what about when you're just like, oh, is it worth it? Can I do it? But on the other hand, here I am, and now the kids are so much older and so the years have felt short and fast in that way.
👉🏾 So I think it's just a way of saying to your question I don't think the structures have been kind of built for people raising children and I think it continues to be a struggle. And I think we're starting to do a better job but I think that we have keep working on it. I had the real pleasure of working with Sheryl Sandberg on the launch of lean In and, it's interesting because it's in our common vernacular now to talk about kind of leaning into opportunities. But that's something that , has been talked about more over the course of my career.
👉🏾 And I think that's a good thing, and I think we have to continue to think about how we put the right structures in place to support people to get through the years of the parenting, years of their lives. Women and men for sure women. And because it's just true, like I know five years from now my kids will likely be out of the house and in college and I will have more time on my hands than I do now, and right now it's a matter of packing a lot of it in. So we need to continue to support each other to get through these years with gusto.
👉🏾 Yes. I mean...

93: Mapping India's journey to Net Zero: A conversation with Shailesh Haribhakti

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In November 2021 Indian announced its updated NDC - to achieve net zero carbon emission by 2070. And to meet 50% of its electricity requirements from renewable energy sources by 2030. This was a bold and significant moment not just for India, but for the fight against climate change.

India is the third largest emitter of CO2 in the world, though CO2 emissions per person put it near the bottom of the world’s emitters. The numbers are lower still if historical emissions (per person) are taken into consideration. Ditto for energy consumption - average households in India consume a tenth of what is consumed in the US (according to an IEA blog). The good news is that India has overachieved it’s commitments made at COP21 Paris Summit by meeting 40% of its power capacity from non-fossil fuels.

As the most populous country in the world, India has a long road to growth and energy demand as it speeds up its development agenda. India’s climate adaptation and mitigation efforts if successful, will be transformational for the world. The country’s private sector has a pivotal role to play towards Net Zero, by embedding sustainable strategies in their operations, identifying, deploying and adopting innovative technologies that accelerate the that journey.

India Inc. is being nudged in the right direction by SEBI's mandatory ‘Business Responsibility & Sustainability Reporting’(BRSR) rules, that will see the top 1000 companies disclose their ESG journey publicly for the first time at the end of FY23. The BRSR is framed around three aspirations: Adapting to and mitigating climate change impact; inclusive growth and transitioning to a sustainable economy.

My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Net Zero evangelist Shailesh Haribhakti. We spoke about the drivers for ESG reporting in India, BRSR, India’s energy sector, changes in how renewable assets are owned in India, ’just transition’, EPA laws, Integrated reporting, challenges for the India Inc. and many other issues around climate change, net zero, and sustainability….
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 I'm absolutely delighted to be in this podcast with you and conversing with you such a delight. And I'm looking forward to our conversation.
👉🏾 Well, I'm seeking to be a co-traveler on many journeys with individuals or organisations who want to achieve net positive. All my work and all my energies and my thinking and everything that I do is revolving around how can we get people to believe that if they become net positive they will also be much better scaled, very much more profitable and will certainly be green.
👉🏾 Tremendous question and I think our Prime Minister gave the world what he called "Panchamrit" which was largely focused on decarbonisation in every which way, through energy transition, through making sure that everybody gets onto the path of reducing the usage of fossil fuels and all of that. And he has followed it up by carrying that conviction into his leadership role at the G20. This is a fantastic move by the Prime Minister and by the country. It just reestablishes India's credentials that we want to be part of the solution, we do not wish to add to the problem.
👉🏾 And as proof of that, the extent to which we have built up renewable capacity is way ahead of our commitments, at least by five years. We are five years ahead in the race to establish the capacity for renewables. Now it's a matter of bringing all that capacity into the energy, make sure that the grid becomes active. Make sure that we can have continuous power through a mix of renewables based on solar, wind, bioenergy, nuclear, that is also very much now in the news and which is likely to get reactivated. And very importantly, we have a whole lot of hydro which we need to harness. So we will have this entire bunch or bouquet of renewables, which can ultimately make us confident that we can run the grid at some point in time in the future, purely on renewables.
👉🏾 Let's first talk about tractability and timelines. So we are hearing that the next budget statement itself will plug in India's commitments on climate. So we will see that not only the national budget but also the state-level budgets will start reflecting the commitment on the 17 SDGs. So that's the first point that is important to hold in our minds about India's commitment.
👉🏾 The next point, which is important, is that the people who are producing this energy are completely connected. There is a comprehensive change in the ownership patterns of these very large projects. I'm seeing that each one of them is now being held by extremely long-term patient capital, which has no exit line.
👉🏾That is a crucial thing to note about India and the way that India is changing the way its renewable assets are owned. This also gives us a tremendous scaffolding to make sure that we are in it for the long run. Capacities are being enhanced through use of the latest technologies. So that is also happening. The productivity of solar is improving quite well, the productivity of wind is improving. Bioenergy is taking off, it's a nascent state, but it's taking off very well. Hydro, we had a wrong kind of ownership pattern on the hydro projects, and that is being corrected. And nuclear is purely in government hands and it's likely to stay that way. So we have all of these constructs in place to make sure that we can meet and exceed our targets.
👉🏾And there is no going back because these are long-term investments, which will continue to produce the desired returns because we are still working on a cost-plus basis so far as our energy industry is concerned. So that is a comprehensive way to look at how India is dealing with making this sustainable, making it look long term and actually making it happen.
👉🏾 The first thing that to note is that we came in with our environmental protection laws way back. They're on the statute book for decades and so that has been a very good trial run, if you like, for Indian industry to be sure that they get aware of what are the obligations they must meet to keep the rivers clean, to not have discharges which are toxic, to not contaminate soil, all of those regulations have been fed into the psyche of Indian industry over years and years, over decades of EPA laws. The enforcement of those laws has also improved significantly.
👉🏾 There's a whole lot of public process surrounding permissions, environmental permissions, so there is a whole gamut of regulations which you need to be in compliance with if you want to start a project which has the danger of either contaminating a river body or affecting a forest or doing anything that would violate environmental norms. So that is the first big stake that we put in the ground. Then we started tightening the incentive structure around renewables. So renewables, India is one of the few countries which has a separate ministry for renewable energy. It's a completely independent ministry, which is supporting all of these projects by financing, by good regulation, by making sure that costs get correctly calculated by making sure that the tariff is fair, by making sure that the grid will accept the power.
👉🏾 And while we are not fully there, there is a whole lot of regulatory support to make all of this happen. That is the way, and now we have the regulators of the listed environment, namely the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and the Reserve Bank of India and the IRDA, the insurance regulator, all getting into the act.
👉🏾: Okay. Lovely. So first of all, let me say that Indian industry was prepared, like in everything else, we had the trial run. So we had Business Responsibility Reporting, which is BR, which has been in place for the last seven years. So BR actually transitioned and moved into BRSR. Which is 151 different parameter-driven frameworks, which enables corporate India to actually measure what is happening in their environment. So everything has a measure, whether it is DEI, or it is your human rights practices. I’m taking the tougher things first, whether it is the way you can show that you are well governed, whether it is your environmental footprint, your carbon, your GHG gases.
👉🏾All of that will now be positively measured because what you don't measure can never be improved, and therefore this realisation is very much there. As soon as this framework became visible, and perhaps even before that, there were many people who actually converted this framework into a set of parameters and a set of algorithms, which will, in a digital manner, support the implementation by corporate India. So what has happened is that there are at least 10 different digital platforms available. One which we support strongly is what is called GovEVA, which is governance leading to economic value add, and that is a framework that now covers the entire spectrum of sustainability issues.
👉🏾 So that is the other enabling and useful thing that has been put into place in to support corporate India. Of course, initially, people saw it as an additional regulatory burden, but a lot of people had already issued what are called integrated reports. And there was this whole transition and this whole ambassadory happened over many years.
👉🏾 Personally, I was an ambassador for integrated reporting for the last many years. So wherever I could have an influence, I pursued companies to actually go out and put out their report on six capitals as opposed to just the financial capital. And that got people ready. And then when these regulations came about, people sought out digital platforms help from organisations, which were geared to make sure that this can happen. Today we can automate completely digitally, the production of the BRSR report. And very interestingly, what we have also done is made whole framework capable of being expressed in any global framework that a company needs to report on. So let's say an Indian company has a large European footprint, then we can convert the same data, which will produce the BRSR report into GRI-compliant reporting, and we can tweak it to meet any regulatory standard.
👉🏾 Good news for the world is that the ISSB is working very hard, to actually bring about harmony, and India is a very strong supporter of ISSB. There is a committee formed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India on which I serve, which is actually actively supporting the creation of the global standard.
👉🏾 So from every pathway, the attempt is to make sure that we make it as easy and as empowering to Indian industry as we possibly can. That's the approach and attitude that people have taken in India.
👉🏾 You know, the first thousand listed companies by market cap, are the ones who are obligated to do this reporting. So they have all started dusting out their frameworks and formats and are making whatever attempts. Everybody's on a different path in the curve. Some people are already there. Many, about 65 companies have already done before the due date compliance with BRSR.
👉🏾 So you can imagine the enthusiasm BRSR has because it's pulled out of GRI. If you were to compare GRI and BRSR, you'll find tremendous overlap. And so people have taken this BRSR very positively. That is this voluntary compliance, which is getting engendered. What SEBI is also doing is it is working on what is called BRSR Lite. So there will be a lesser rigorous framework, not this 151 variables that I talked about, there will be far less variables for the small and medium enterprises. So that we can build in the scope three as well. So BRSR will address the needs of Scope three and of the MSME population in India.
👉🏾 So you can see that we are trying to cater to different sizes, different complexities, make sure that the framework will enable computation and bring out meaningful data that analysts and others can actually accept. And all of this is a like that India will be amongst the first countries to require mandatory reassurance of the BRSR.
👉🏾 Yeah. No let me share with you what's happening in one of the largest groups in the country. So they have taken exactly what you are talking about, the S part of the ESG and they're building a framework for the whole group, which will be rolled out for individual entities in the group to make sure that they will achieve best practice in the world.
👉🏾 They're not aiming to be best in India. They're aiming to be globally benchmarked against the best. So what are they wanting to benchmark against? They want to benchmark against the company which received the highest ranking in their particular industry, to which one of the group companies belongs, on the DJSI index.
👉🏾 So that's where the efforts are being made, through benchmarking, through double materiality, concept deployment, through rigorous frameworks of measurement, the DEI, the human rights, the workplace neutrality, the entire set of S issues, health, safety, all of that are being benchmarked to the best in the world. And this is being linked with the HR function so that the HR function supports all of this because the data resides largely in HRMIS systems. And therefore this integration is being attempted. So you can see that the attempt is to get to benchmark level as opposed to let's just make sure that this is compliant and you tick the box. That is a very interesting insight that I am seeing from the largest groups in the country.
👉🏾 Brilliant question. So let's take S, let's stay with S. How will I demonstrate that I've implemented S well? If I can be in the top five companies in every industry that I have a foothold in the five best places to work in India, or if I aspire to be the best place to work in the world, that is the price worth going after because that's going to attract the best in class employees to my table.
👉🏾 And that is the attempt that this particular group that I have in mind is wanting to achieve and many people are along the same path. Everybody wants to make sure that they have the best human resources that they can find and deploy and keep and harness to make sure that they feel comfortable, feel that they can be part of this whole missionary approach to making sure that you are doing things which are world class in every which way.
👉🏾 Way down. Absolutely. A brilliant question again. Let me put it this way. From the highest levels, I have heard conversations on what quantum of GDP can be enhanced simply by getting women into the workforce. Let's park that for a minute, let's look at the greatest, fastest-growing segment of the finance market. It is the MFs, which is the funding which happens to self-help groups, micro-finance it's called. And which is taken in by groups of women who cross-guarantee the repayment of this money. Now the company that I sit on the board of is the number one disperser of micro-finance, and you'll be very happy to know that our collection record on the day on which the collection is due is about 99.78%, and this is in rural India. So this is where we are beginning to reach out. See, India should not be viewed only in terms of statistics. A large part of the women in India are instinctively entrepreneurs, and they instinctively need flexibility in working hours and working time and working habits and all of that.
👉🏾 This is very important because even today, the woman is seen to be the protector and the curator of the home. Which is a role that has shifted from that part of the population in other parts of the world, it has not shifted out from India. And therefore the attempt that India is trying to make is to make this workplace neutrality a reality.
👉🏾 So the S part of ESG in India will depend for its success to bring in the diversity and to bring in all the other factors to show that women power will be actually harnessed, which it must be. We need to be sensitive to these issues and our computation must change. We must look at all these women entrepreneurs.
👉🏾 I went to a village and I was interacting with the self-help group and it's leader, and what was the work that they were doing? They were creating brooms with which we sweep homes, the part of India where they were operating in has a lot of dust flying around cause there's factories and there's cement, dust and whatever.
👉🏾 So they were making brooms, and this woman proudly tells me that she has become a lakhpathi, that means a person who owns more than 100,000 rupees. So proudly they said it. From entrepreneurship, that was their next surplus in that period that we were discussing. So this part of India is not well documented, is not in anybody's imagination, but this is a very important part of India.
👉🏾 I think it's the biggest myth that we need to blow on this podcast right now, right here, . It's amazing. You know If you put on the lens of sustainability, you can actually envision a far more profitable, far more scaled-up future. And I have seen it time and again. For example, the cost of renewable power, marginal cost is about a eighth of the cost of fossil fuel power. Nobody in their right minds would not want to see a future where all power is renewable if your cost is going to drop so dramatically, so how is it in anybody's conception a cost? It's actually a phenomenal reduction in cost.
👉🏾 Energy transition in India when it is fully complete, as I had described earlier, the cost of power will come crashing down. We will have amongst the lowest cost of power, competing with the places where everybody's moving because they want power at cheap price. That is the future we can look forward to. How can that be a costly future? Costs have to be democratised and they will be. That's only in this area. Look at EV, the cost of patrol versus the cost of maintaining a EV car, It's just on two different planets. Therefore for anybody to have this conception that being green or practising ESG is costly, is simply not knowing what they're saying and therefore we need to blow the myth.
👉🏾 So one be sincere, very important. No greenwashing should be permitted from the beginning,...

92: Building an inclusive fintech organisation: Karoline Raets, and Laurent Jacquemin

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 05:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:
Everybody wants to talk about fintech - apparently it is the new normal. I recently learnt that a staggering 95% of the founders of the FinTech 50 list are male. Not difficult to do the math here - it means women founders make an abysmal 5%.
An International Monetary Fund Report from Dec 2022 - Digital Gender Gap, says that women represent less than 13 percent of leadership - both as founders and members of executive boards of fintech firms. Women’s representation in fintech is worse than traditional banking and technology companies.
And then there is the issue of gender inequality in fintech’s user base……… reports suggest that the needs of women customers is hugely underserved, the lost opportunity means 100s of billions of dollars in foregone revenue each year.
To discuss the above and a myriad of issues (related to gender equity) facing the fintech sector I spoke with the leadership team from Adenza, a global fintech company with presence in over 20 countries. My guests for this episode of the podcast were Karoline Raets, and Laurent Jacquemin. The timing was just right with IWD 2023 around the corner…….We spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Internal and external imperatives that are driving the industry to be more inclusive and representative
👉🏾 Adenza’s vision on gender diversity and equity. How is the vision aligned with Adenza’s purpose; launch of Adenza’s women’s resource group
👉🏾 Poor gender diversity in the fintech industry, challenges in being able to attract and retain female talent. Addressing the ‘war for talent’
👉🏾 Systemic gender biases in the workplace; representation statistics and ambition
👉🏾 Absence of role models, and the cascading impact on pipeline for managerial and leadership positions
👉🏾 The role of internal sponsors in supporting women to achieve their potential; Laurent’s experience as an executive sponsor
We also spoke about inclusive leadership, monitoring progress and both Karoline Raets and Laurent Jacquemin shared some great advise for women wishing to pursue a career in fintech.
My takeaway from the conversation - there is lots to be done but the industry can change the status quo with the right intent, and taking specific actions (linked to strategic long terms goals).
To learn more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
#fintech #womeninleadership #genderequity #representationmatters #equityandinclusion #inclusivefintech

Shownotes
Memorable Passages from the Podcast
Karoline: Thank you, Sudha, it is great to be here.
Laurent: Hello Sudha yeah, I'm very excited about what we're going to do.
Karoline: I will start. So I am Karoline, I'm from Belgium origin, and I lived and worked in Belgium, France, and I'm now based in the UK. I've been working since I was 21, I won't say what age I am today. You can go and figure that out.
Karoline: But I've worked in various roles in sales, marketing, communications and then I ended up in the HR world in 2007. I must say that most of the time I have worked in international organisations, so I've been very exposed to different cultures, different ways of working. And it's been almost 25 years now that I've been working in the FinTech industry.
Karoline: I'm married to a jazz musician, so a totally different world, which is actually great. And I have two daughters, one is 16 and the other one is 13 and I'm the Chief People Officer at Adenza since 2020. .
Laurent: Sure. So my name is Laurent. I am French, as I think you would tell from the accent. I'm not going to tell you my age either, but I'll tell you the age of my children, and you will see that I'm a bit older than Karo, they're more in between 20 and 30 my children.
So I'm French, as I said, I'm sharing the life of a French ceramic artist, which is a bit different to what I do, which is a great too. We are the father and mother of three plus two, if you see what I mean, and we try and see them often to compensate for a bit of an empty nest these days.
Laurent: I'm in the FinTech space since the nineties, actually, did all the way up from a 30 ish staff french software company to about 50,000 people, a US giant FinTech before landing at Calypso, that was about 4.5 years ago. And loving it, to be honest with you. I look after the customer facing practices of Adenza, customer support, customer delivery, customer success, and cloud services. And like Karoline, I've been exposed to a great number of different cultures and nationalities throughout my career and I have to say I love it. .
Karoline: I can go first. Women first, right. Yeah. So I believe that Adenza's vision on gender diversity and equity is pretty simple.
Karoline: It's really about respecting each and every individual in the organisation for who they are and make sure that we allow each and everyone to just be themselves. I think that if you achieve that diversity and equity balance, generally people feel that they belong in the organisation. So this is something that we strive towards, is to make sure that people have this sense of belonging.
Karoline: So that's what I would say, is how I see the diversity and equity at Adenza.
Laurent: Yeah, I think we're very close on that Karoline actually, because I think that our vision is to be simply diverse and equitable, as simple as that. It is to make sure that there is no impediment to anybody's career due to gender, ethnicity, religion, whatever.
Laurent: We are a truly global business with presence in, I think more than 25 countries these days, on the five continents. We've got local employees in each and every of our offices, and given we are a software and services business, there is no genuine reason whatsoever for all of the roles to not be open to everybody, actually, irrespective of gender, ethnicity and everything, so I guess it's our vision.
Laurent: And to your question, Sudha as to whether it's a tick box exercise or not? We're not the kind of people who just tick boxes, I mean we don't know each other very well, but everybody in Adenza will tell you we're not looking to just tick boxes, we're really looking for action.
Laurent: Sure. Maybe I'll start on this one then. I think that the imperative is both internal and external, actually pretty simple. Internal as I said, because again, there is no reason why any kind of role in a business like Adenza should be restricted in access based on gender, on age, on ethnicity, on religion. To be honest with you, the only criteria that we tend to recognise in terms of selection criteria are skills and experience and ability to excel in the role, that's about it. So that's kind of the internal imperative, people are looking for that you said it Sudha, that's absolutely true. And externally, the point is that we see a real shift towards ESG, including for our customers who are being regulated on that topic or start to be regulated on that topic.
Laurent: And they start to raise expectation with company like us on those topics, which is why, together with the kind of internal push, we're looking at that more seriously these days.
Karoline: Well yeah, I totally aligned with what Laurent just said, and I think it's all about creating that environment where there's no judgment, where ideas are welcomed and listened to. It's being open-minded and having in mind that people have different perspectives.
Karoline: And so I think to be really inclusive, everyone in the organisation should keep that in mind on a daily basis as they work with others in the organisation. Because ultimately, if we all do that, it will drive into a higher engagement which usually, it drives that sense of belonging, which again ties it back to, being an inclusive environment.
Karoline: So it's a mindset. And I think that at Adenza we're in a place right now where people understand that and we continue to build on that to make sure that we continue to reinforce that awareness with our staff at all levels in your organisation.
Karoline: All right. I think I would like to start here, Laurent. So if we look at the gender split today, cuz I mean diversity and equity goes way beyond just men and women. But if we just take that gender split, male-female in the organisation at Adenza, today we've got 31%. Female, 69% male and if you look at the FinTech industry in general, as you mentioned, Sudha, it's highly underrepresented by women. It's a real male environment, if I may say. So in general, less than 30% are females in the FinTech industry.
Karoline: Now this can be due to various reasons, one is that there are less applicants in the FinTech industry as a starting point on the hiring side. But it is also due to a historic sort of more senior leadership teams that are male and if you look at the FinTech industry and the senior roles, they're 17% are filled by women.
So actually, if you look at Adenza, we're at 31% overall, and we have 27% of our women that are in senior leadership or management positions. So we're actually better than what the industry is doing. And if you take it a step further in the FinTech industry, and I looked at this survey a couple of days ago.
Karoline: The founders of the FinTech 50 listing are 95% male and 5% female. And another information that I found in one of the surveys was that most of the FinTech apps that you would find are used by men. So there really is a lower interest or maybe eagerness to work in this industry because it has been for a very, very long time managed by men.
So if I look now at Adenza and our leadership, so like I said, we've got two executives on our leadership team, so that represents 20%. So we're, again, slightly above the benchmark if you look at the FinTech and 27% female. So, my view is that going forward, I would really like to see that shift increase so that we could get to, let's say a 35%, 65%.
Karoline: And if we could achieve that by the end of the year, that would be great. But I also don't want to force that, because we want people, like Laurent said earlier, the people who join us and who work at Adenza, we want them to have the right skills, the right experience, the passion and drive. And if that is men or women, it doesn't really matter. But if we could get more women with those attributes, then we'd be very happy to take 'em on board.
Laurent: Yeah. So I mean, it's interesting to see that we've got those percentages added and that are a bit better than the industry and that's good, that's good to know. I don't think that we are going to be happy with that Karoline, are we? We want do better job then for sure.
Karoline: We always wanna do better.
Laurent: Exactly. And the reason why we decided to launch that and allocate kind of sponsors and really start to look at it very, very seriously is precisely because we want to beat the benchmark.
Laurent: We're not the kind of people who love to just be at the benchmark, so that being said, I do remember if we want to share some sort of an anecdote at Adenza. I did consider, I think it was like 24 months ago already, I did consider to make it mandatory to create short list of candidates that would've at least one female candidate in it.
Laurent: Started to work on that with the talent acquisition team and the net kind of result we got at the time was that we faced a difficulty, cause at best following that rule would make the time to create the short list longer, because of a lack of female applicants and sometimes actually we were not able in a reasonable period of time to find women applicants in those short lists.
Laurent: And we had to break our own rule a few times just for the sake of the business, cause we can't wait like years before we find someone. So, I think it tells a lot about the fact that indeed, that industry today does not have as many women who are applicants potentially to all the jobs that we've got to offer, and that tells a large part of the story, I guess.
Karoline: Okay. So I can start here. I wouldn't say apart from what Laurent just mentioned, us wanting to try to get like a short list of female candidate for each of our jobs, we haven't necessarily done like specific work or efforts to attract more women to the organisation.
Karoline: So our genuine approach is that we're open to all applicants. But what I can say is that, and what I've heard also from women at Adenza is that we're not afraid to hire a young mom who just had twins. We're not afraid to hire a single mom. We're totally open to hire people from various backgrounds religions, as long as, again, it ties back to them having the experience and the skills and the passion and the drive.
Karoline: But recently we have now constituted an internal employee group, ‘Women at Adenza’. And so one of the things that we will put on the table with that group, which constitutes over a hundred women willing to help us with moving this project forward, is to also get their input on, what should we be doing to attract more women to the organisation? What do they feel is important, what would make a difference or an impact? And I think it is more about, rather than a couple of heads at the top of the organisation trying to figure this out, is to get the bottom up. And also to rely on that internal network, to spread the word externally because all these women are also connected to other women. So this just opens up the network much, much broader.
Laurent: Yeah, I guess that when I think about that, it seems to me like we're trying to bridge the inflection point between not actively resisting in any shape or form to having women at Adenza to dealing with the passive biases. So since I joined the organisation, I don't recall having any difficulty to attract women to Adenza, i.e anytime my guys would've interviewed with candidates, with female candidates there is nothing in Adenza that would prevent those women to join Adenza. I've never heard about any kind of active bias of people going like, no, I'm not interested by that kind of person, that kind of gender, that kind of age and all that, I've never seen. Now it's great news, I guess, that we have no kind of active bias from that perspective.
Laurent: But the reality is that we've got passive biases. And the only example I would give going back to the anecdote I shared with you a bit earlier today, is that you could look at people accepting to have a shortlist, which is made of exclusively male candidates as a passive bias. And I guess that we're at that inflection point today where we go like, well, maybe we should not accept that and we should do something about that. And that's, I think, where we are at today.
Karoline: Yeah, I mean, they're definitely going to give their inputs. So we've had two or three meetings so far and there's plenty of ideas and anecdotes. But I think that at Adenza, we of course have like any organisation, our code of ethics, our internal policies. So what we want to do is make sure that we create that environment that fosters, a safe environment for people, where mental health is taken into account as well.
We ensure that we create that awareness and what we did in 2022 is we started to roll out webinars around emotional intelligence for managers, but also for employees. We were rolling out on March 14th which is going to be Women's Month at Adenza, we're doing a dedicated webinar towards unconscious bias. and we'll kick it off on the 14th of March. But again, this is something that we will be rolling out on a regular basis because we do have 2000 people in the organisation. So, for the word to spread you got to repeat and repeat. So I think it is about reiterating with our people and augmenting that sense of awareness.
Karoline: And then just being vigilant as well, that when we hear something or see something is, not to pretend it didn't happen or to think, oh, you know, it's okay, was this once it'll go away. Because it may be a pattern and you don't want to sit on that and do nothing. But the big piece in my view comes with creating that awareness so that people have it on their minds.
Laurent: Well, not much to add because that was a pretty comprehensive answer. No, I think again, that I've never since I joined the company seen any kind of active bias in any direction. So I don't know whether it happened or not, but I've never seen that. And I've met with a number of people that have been in a number of meetings, so that kind of has some value from that perspective.
Laurent: But really where we're today is to go one step further and start educating people and ourselves. Right? In terms of how do you reckon, how do you identify any kind of passive biases and how you deal with that? And while I'm pretty sure that I never saw any kind of active biases again, I couldn't be that certain that I never saw passive biases. So...

91: A conversation on enabling culture change with Ricky Forde, Senior Director, EMEA Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, FTI Consulting

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 04:30:00 +0000

It has not been long since the PR/Comms Industry started to be conscious about the impact of inherent racism, prejudice and discrimination on employees from black, and ethnic minority groups. Moving from talk to taking action for change has been painfully slow. It is important to acknowledge that organisations in the industry are at different stages of the journey. Some have been quicker to authentically address issues to reflect their values and also recognise it as a business resilience and sustainability challenge.
To get a sense of the work being done by agencies, I recently spoke with Ricky Forde, Senior Director, EMEA Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB). Interestingly Ricky is also FTI’s first DEIB lead and has a track record as a culture change expert. Key topics covered in this podcast include:
👉🏾 His career graph and his role as DEIB lead at FTI Consulting
👉🏾 We discussed the apparent fatigue around diversity, equity & inclusion issues; the burning platform metaphor
👉🏾 What orgs can do and are doing to address the disproportionate impact of global events on disadvantaged and underrepresented groups
👉🏾 BAME, BME, PoC, Global Majority, DEI, DEIB, DIB - are acronyms critical building block or is it taking attention away from the bigger task at hand
👉🏾 Groupism, fair pay, and equitable hiring practices
👉🏾 Representation as a tick box; equity and belonging for culture change
👉🏾 Importance of cultural intelligence for designing relevant solutions
We also spoke about the challenges and opportunities for the industry in the short term and long term, biases, micro aggressions, the Elephant in the room, his reading list: ‘Allies’ (Darling Kindersley), ‘How not to be strong amongst; (Alex Scott) other things
To listen, head to the podcast

90: Aspiring women in tech: A conversation with Aarushi Nair, Ambassador & Community Volunteer AnitaB.org | #GHC22 #NextIsNow | #GirlsWhoCode

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 09:30:00 +0000

Shownotes

36 %: No of women employees In the Indian tech sector (the biggest employer by far)

51%: Women entry level recruits 🤩🤩🤩

25%: Women in managerial positions 😕☹️ (how bad or unsupportive does the culture need to be to get educated women to leave)

1% : Women in the C-Suite 🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏾‍♀️ (This cannot happen without entrenched and systemic biases)

The statistics are so predictable it is almost boring. We have seen similar statistics in other markets, markets that are supposed to have been advancing the cause of women for decades. The numbers are depressing and disappointing.

Considering that 50% of India’s population is below the age of 25, I invited @Aarushi Nair, an engineer and aspiring academic to hear her perspective. The perspective from a generation who have faced and are facing great uncertainty and isolation due to the pandemic. A generation who lost years of socialising, classroom learning, and opportunities. The inheritors of a world that is literally going up in flames or down the drain or seems bleaker - take your pick.

In the course of the freewheeling chat we spoke about her role as an Ambassador/Community Volunteer at AnitaB.org, her thoughts on the challenges facing women in tech; her aspirations; changing priorities; equity & inclusion; what climate change means to her, friends, peer groups etc.

We also spoke about optimism, about changing your mind, mental health and the one super power she would like to have to change the world (Twilight 🤔🤔)
Want to hear more, head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Shownotes

👉🏾 Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be on and yeah, let's have an amazing conversation.
👉🏾 So hello, my name is Aarushi Nair. I am 21 years old, I'm gonna turn 22 soon. I've only recently completed my bachelor's in technology and I majored in computer science engineering. I completed it in June, 2022. I feel like most of my character development has only happened in the last four years, honestly, only since college. My personal journey as such, I moved a lot as a child, we moved a lot. We moved from a city called Mumbai to Gurgaon. And we moved back and then moved back again.
👉🏾 So I think that helped me become more adaptable to different situations and people and cultures. But it wasn't anything crazy or something that I would say was significant to my journey. I think in the last four years, and I'm talking about when my college started and when the pandemic hit, I think these are the situations that really helped me grow.
👉🏾 One of them being that when I joined college. Before that I was in a very protected golden bubble sort of environment. I like to think that I come from a very privileged background where I've never had to struggle for anything as such. I mean, financially or emotionally. I've been blessed with a great family and only in college did I meet people from different backgrounds in different situations where they grew up and listening to their stories made me realise that what I had was truly a privilege. And I realised that I was a lot more grateful and a lot more aware about the things that I was seeing and making sure that I was a lot sensitive to people around me. So that's what college taught me.
👉🏾 And during the second wave of Covid, September, 2020 my father and my sister got dengue in the middle of the second wave of Covid, and that really hit me. It was a very scary time for our family. And I really grew, I think, as a sister and a daughter at the time. I realised the importance of my family, and I realised that it was harder to be strong for someone else than to just be strong for yourself and how much effort that takes. And again I was just a lot more grateful. Career-wise I feel like I've had a change last year when I did my first internship, Feb 2022.
👉🏾 All my life I've thought that in computer science I could always follow the path of coding and I was doing very well in class in coding, Java made sense to me. But it was only after I did an internship in web development where I realised that I can't be coding my entire life. And it was not something that gave me purpose. And so it was after my internship that I realised that I wanted to do something else in computer science and not a programming desk job anymore. So I'd say these three things are what kind of defined my journey.
👉🏾 So like I said, since I was brought up in a very privileged household, things like equality and opportunity for everyone and people being treated the same were always something that was a given. It wasn't something that was new or unconventional. But it was only when I met people in my field and in my university, I realised that it was not the same for everyone and that people had to really work for where they were and really had to fight for basic rights and basic opportunities.
👉🏾 So that was when I realised that I want to advocate for this because to me it makes sense. It is what the norm should be and that's when I found anitab.org. It's the largest community for women in STEM, and their message is that they want to build a space where the people who work in technology mirror the society for which they work for. And that makes sense that if you're going to be providing solutions and technology, devices, this and that for a society where you have women, or you have people from different backgrounds, even the people that work in those fields should also have the same kind of numbers, that's what they're trying to say.
👉🏾 And so when I found the community anitab.org, I decided to, sort of become really active in that community. I met a lot of students there, I started to hear their story.
👉🏾 And then people at anitab.org reached out to me and they said, we'd love for you to be an ambassador, and I also wanted to be a volunteer because I wanted to help organise events, be it online or virtual. And just last year, in October, I organised my very first event in college where we had a female speaker, come from anitab.org and speak to a few students and she shared her journey and what she does in the field, she works as a data scientist in the field. And I think it was one of the first times that I saw a female speaker at one of my technical events on the panel in my college. So it was a definitely quite memorable and very different from my juniors.

👉🏾 So yeah that's what we do at anitab.org. We help people, we connect them to different people in the technology field. And where it comes to advocating for people, for women in tech, it honestly seems like it should be the norm, you know it shouldn't be something that's unconventional. And as long as we encourage women to choose STEM careers at a young age, opportunity will always be made once we have more people there.
👉🏾 So I think maybe because I'm looking at it a very basic level, at a very introductory level, I think going ahead it depends person to person. Of course, some people don't see a career for them in this field. And some people I'd say that they might not want to grow sometimes because of their social constructs and they're not as ambitious as they need to be, as I'd like them to be at least. Because sometimes I don't know, I think maybe they hold themselves back because this is such a male-dominated field. So maybe because of certain biases, they don't want to go ahead or they're not given the opportunity to do so.
👉🏾 So maybe because it's so hard to go and rise up that some people don't pursue it. Again, it depends person to person, but maybe that could be one of the many reasons why we don't have a lot of women at least rising above in these fields in terms of position. And when it comes to people staying long in this field I wouldn't know.
👉🏾 I don't know how to actually answer that or why they don't stay as long because the people I've met from this field have been there for like years and they're doing well. But why they wouldn't stay long, I think the same reason, I think because they think that this is not a place for them, they won't really grow because you know the numbers are against them, there's such a big gender gap that's already existing. It's too much work, it's too much commitment. So, maybe they wouldn't want to continue working in a space like that. That could really, discourage them.
👉🏾 About myths. Yeah, it was definitely not an easy decision, because till last year before I finished my last semester, I wanted to continue programming and maybe create a new software and work at different companies. But it was after that I started programming and coding at a health tech startup called My Healthcare, they were wonderful people and lovely projects. But it was after I actually coded for about four to five months that I realised that was not something that I wanted to do in terms of a career. I didn't want to sit and just code for a career. And so I realised maybe I want to do something else with my degree. And growing up I've always realised that I have, I don't want to say this myself, but I'd say people have told me I have a knack for teaching and that if I understand the concept I can teach it well. And so I thought I should go ahead and pursue that.
👉🏾 So I wanted to go ahead and get a master's, hopefully from the the US or Canada or something like that, but I'm not sure yet because we have a lot of complications in my application process so far, but I'd like to get a master's and then hopefully a PhD.
👉🏾 So I want to be a professor in a college because I know how important my teachers were for me in choosing this career and choosing this field. And I know if we have good teachers, we'll have fantastic students then. Because the teachers do truly decide the student's future and how successful they will be and I know that my teacher taught the subject of programming to me so well that now it's my career. And so, I hope to also make a difference to anyone's life, any student's life. So that's what I'd like to be doing, I'd like to teach for now. That's the plan.
👉🏾 Again, I think maybe I can change since I'm going to go to be doing academics in this industry, maybe it'll go from, computer science to philosophy about why tech should be used. There's something called techno ethics, I could be doing something like that where it's ethics and technology. But I think I'll still always be doing something within the digital space because it's so popular and it's something that's fundamental to our lives now. And luckily it's something that I understand and that makes sense to me and I'm good at it. So I don't see a future where I would not somewhere be related to this field. But maybe my role would change, maybe I wouldn't just be a professor, maybe I would be an activist or something like that, but I'm not sure yet. For now I think I will still continue pursuing this field.
👉🏾And honestly, these myths and gender gaps, I don't think they scare me or they take me away from these opportunities. I think they just make me more excited to bring in change and I do want to see the numbers change and things change. More determined than before. Yes.
👉🏾 I think for, again, I'm speaking from the experiences that I've had and the peers that I've seen, I don't think postgrad is mandatory today, at least nowadays it's definitely an upper hand to have, but I know people that are getting fantastic offers post their bachelor's and postgrad is almost an optional thing that you can do if the company sends them or something like that.
👉🏾 It's not a mandatory thing to get nowadays, some people can go from a B Tech directly to a PhD, but that's a whole other conversation. Post-grad is now just a plus one, it's a plus one to have, it's not compulsory. And when it comes to marriage, I feel like women, at least in my circle nowadays, are not taking marriage so seriously, it's not something that they need to be looking forward to. Marriage is, if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. I think women are more inclined to being more independent and working towards their own careers, at least right now. And I think it's really sad and fortunate that maybe women in your days do not have the opportunity or the construct to do so, but I'm glad that's changing. And marriage is honestly again, optional, it's not compulsory anymore that's how I'll say this.
👉🏾 I think maybe back then there weren't many opportunities for women to be earning and supporting themselves and their families. Since now things have changed and there are so many other opportunities for women to stand on their own two feet. Then marriage is not always the first thing that they look at. Marriage is something you do if you want to do. It's not that you have to go ahead and get married, so I'd say that's changed.
👉🏾 I think climate change and net zero and diversity and inclusion, they're obviously very important and fundamental to our lives. And when it comes to climate change, I think something that's inevitable, something that we definitely need to be addressing. Diversity and inclusion, I think given my field and given the role that I do play, professionally, is always part of conversation amongst my peers. And as we're constantly talking about what needs to be done, not just in my field, but in different fields in terms of access to education. I think we're also still working on how more women can be more aware about are the different opportunities presented to them.
👉🏾 But when it comes to climate change and net zero I'm a little embarrassed to say, but I don't think I've had too many conversations about it at least. I do things on more of a personal level, like I'll use more green methods and things like that. Whatever we were taught in school at a very young age, like, recycling and, green waste handling this and that.
👉🏾 But I don't think I've been having any conversations, but I know a lot of young people who are very passionate about it. And it is definitely a very important conversation and is a matter of urgency. So I think that's what I'll change this year, maybe I'll be having a lot more conversations about climate change, net zero that's what I'll be doing.

👉🏾 It's definitely impacted me a lot. I think during the pandemic there was definitely a period of uncertainty and I was very loud. I think I've definitely grown a sense of apathy, which I did not have before, but I definitely, I felt like I grew a bit of apathy towards my future and my plans during Covid, it's because everything just seems so unsure and that I wasn't even sure if I wanted to pursue the things that I wanted to pursue. And I think my enthusiasm was cut down a little bit for sure. The pandemic was not a good phase for my life and a lot of people's lives, even career wise speaking, I was supposed to be pursuing a lot of different things that could not happen due to the pandemic, so that definitely affected me mentally.
👉🏾 What the pandemic also did for me is that I became a lot more aware of my mental health and the mental health of people around me. So I think that was one good thing that I think the pandemic did for me. I understood the importance of my family, my friends and how I realised that it was really just your health that matters the most in these lives, you know because you get so caught up that you don't realise that I should probably be more aware of the people around me, just be thankful for them. So the pandemic definitely, it was a period of uncertainty and I definitely think that I am a little less optimistic about the future than I was before, but it's inculcated a sense of gratefulness in my mind for sure. So bit of both, I'd say. I'm not too optimistic about the future, but I think I'll get there soon.
👉🏾 Yeah, definitely. I think it gave us a new perspective altogether. Like you're constantly caught up in what my dad likes to call a rat race, and so that gave us a pause and gave us the time for reflection. I mean, I'd say ironically I'm also like thankful for the pandemic as well, that, it gave me that, it gave me that chance to just pause and look around.
👉🏾 But at the same time, again, there were lot of uncertainties and I was very unsure and constantly anxious about different things, be it my college, be it my career, this and that. So a bit of both. I'd say.
👉🏾 Hmm. Recently? So, I think growing up I valued the number of friends I had, a lot. I wanted to always have a big circle of friends because I was of the opinion that the number of people that liked me and that I could talk to that would kind of give a sense of validation. And that would mean that I'm a good person and that's a good thing to do. And so growing up I always had a big circle. Every time I shifted to a different city, I used to have a huge number of friends. Even when I started college, I started with a group of like 10, 12 people. And I always thought that that meant that I was validated, that I was liked.
👉🏾 But it was only, I think after college ended, and I think after the pandemic, was when I realised that my validation shouldn't be based on the number of friends I have. And that quality does matter over the quantity. And so now I have two good friends and I'm a lot more happier. I feel like at peace with certain things, I don't have to constantly be pleasing other people.
👉🏾 So that's what I've changed, that's what I've learned about this year, is that as long as you have people that care for you and that you care for, it doesn't matter if there are five, six people, as long as you have one or two friends, that's more than enough. And so even though this might not sound like such a great realisation, it was actually a very big moment for me. I learned a lot about myself and gave up a lot of my insecurities during this time.

89: Driving stakeholder well being through sustainable development: Anirban Ghosh, Head for Center for Sustainability, Mahindra University

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
India was ranked 121 out of 163 countries in the 2022 Global Index of SDGs. It has also been identified as a global hotspot by the IPCC in terms of geographical and socio-economic vulnerabilities. In 2023 India is expected to become the most populous country in the world. As a rapidly growing economy with decades of infrastructure growth ahead of it, India’s energy demand and emissions are projected to double if not triple by 2050. Then there is the all important commitment the country has made to reaching Net Zero by 2070 (It is not as bad as it looks). Achievable, not achievable - whatever the verdict, India’s impact on the world’s ability to meet the SDGs or NetZero is undeniable.
To discuss the role of the private sector in helping countries achieve the SDGs I recently spoke with Anirban Ghosh, Head for Centre of Sustainability at Mahindra University and previous Chief Sustainability Officer at the Mahindra group. In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about organisational purpose, stakeholder priorities 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The key drivers for the private sector to start planning for, embedding sustainability and adopting ESG reporting?
👉🏾 The priorities for the Mahindra group on Sustainability and ESG reporting
👉🏾 The World Bank’s Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and its ambition
👉🏾 The challenges to India achieving Net Zero by 2070 considering it is one of the largest emitters, its dependance on coal and lack of funding
👉🏾 The role of the private sector in achieving the 👆🏾👆🏾and Mahindra group’s strategy on Net Zero
👉🏾 Green and sustainable growth - can this be a reality for a developing country like India
👉🏾 Just Transition - can this be a reality? How can we ensure people on the margins are not left behind
👉🏾 Corporate Greenwashing - and how big a concern it should be. According to Anirban the private sector has just about started on it - there is worse to come
We also spoke about what he likes about his job and what keeps him awake at night.
If you want to know more, head to the episode 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Good afternoon to you.
👉🏾 Currently I'm the Head for Center for Sustainability at the Mahindra University. Till recently I was the Chief Sustainability Officer of the group. Did that job since about 2014. And now we are looking at leveraging the centre to make a greater impact on the sustainability ecosystem. Three things that influenced my career. I think there's only one, which is chance. There are these lovely lines from a song by John Lennon which says "life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans". And it just seems to happen every once in a while.
👉🏾 The sustainability job is very interesting. You can kind of create your day for yourself. There are two or three broad things that one needs to do. Of course, I must also look at it from the lens of what it was a few years ago, to what it is now.
👉🏾 A few years ago, a lot of the time was to take your colleagues along on the journey. Help them understand how they could leverage sustainability to do their own work better. And as a result, get all the benefits that a organisation could get by practicing sustainability. That was probably the biggest thing that one had to do, and figure out ways of doing it, so that it seamlessly became part of the organisation.
👉🏾 To be able to do that, one had to figure out or keep track of what was expected of organisations in the sustainability space. Because in regular business the expectations are very simple and clear. In sustainability, I think every organisation has spent a lot of time trying to figure out, so what is it that I'm supposed to do, and what makes sense for me and what doesn't make sense for me. So that's another important part of the role.
👉🏾 A third thing that the chief sustainability officer must do is continuously build competence within the organisation. Because if you have to, let's say, do energy efficiency or transition to renewable energy or crack circular economy, there are new tricks that you have to teach your colleagues. Which means that there has to be a very strong capacity building program to expose colleagues to new concepts, new learning and new technologies, which they can then adopt in the work that they do.
👉🏾 And while doing all this, it's important to build culture within the organisation, so that sustainability becomes a regular part of everyone's life. Awareness increases. So we have a program called ‘Make sustainability personal’, through which we do lots of interventions across the year, and typically engage upwards of 10,000 people. 10,000 colleagues within the group in some activity or the other.
👉🏾 In this function, the extent of external engagement is very high. The primary purpose of external engagement for me was to learn, to get a sense of what needs to be done, what are the new things that are happening, who's doing it well, who can be a partner and so on.
👉🏾 Over time as the work has evolved, there is an element of sharing your story and building your brand. But that's evolving now and it's probably going to be a big thing going forward.
👉🏾 Businesses have always had to have purpose. The purpose may have evolved. Milton Friedman said this a long time ago, when financial security, economic well-being were things that the majority of the population was searching for. And business was a way of creating value. In most parts of the world we've come along way. And in the course of our journey as economic wellbeing has improved or increased, we have created society in a way in which there are many who are underprivileged and many who are super privileged. This is probably why we are talking about stakeholder wellbeing more than shareholder wellbeing.
👉🏾 And asking about the role of an organisation in ensuring stakeholder wellbeing. We're also asking the question because in the pursuit of economic wellbeing, we have actually led to the degradation of environmental wellbeing, shall we say, or the degradation of natural resources. In a sense we were maximising the P & L and making a mess of the balance sheet. The assets that we use, I mean, clean air, water, soil, minerals. I don't think they're in any better shape today than they were 200 years ago.
👉🏾 And there are second order, third order impacts of let's say polluted air. Things which we are only recognising today cause it has gone out of hand. Another reason why it's important to understand societal wellbeing in a holistic way. We've captured all of it in the sustainable development books.
👉🏾 And for an organisation to be seen as a responsible organisation, I think the things that it has to do and the scale that it has to do it in, has evolved a lot. And hence the conversation on purpose, with the implicit understanding that purpose goes beyond financial wellbeing and goes towards addressing the health of society and the health of the planet in a much broader way.
👉🏾 For a business, the key reason is business resilience. Whatever we've done, let's say our organisation is 75 years old, whatever has helped us, in this journey of 75 years, we will need to do a few other things or a few things differently if we want to be around for the next 75.
👉🏾 So what are these other things really? And the conversation is very clear, you cannot do business by polluting the environment, you cannot do business by having a negative effect on the natural sources, mineral resources and so on. Also, I mean there will be pressures on minerals not being available in their virgin form. Things that we didn't have to deal with so far.
👉🏾 We know that there is this big problem of carbon dioxide in the air leading to global warming and that leading to these weather events and many other dystopian situations that we are facing. And that we cannot allow this to get out of hand. I don't know if you've heard the number, I read it in an article, which is quite old now, but the numbers stayed with me. That 71% of all the emissions in the world are caused by a hundred corporations, which essentially means that if we have to solve the emission problem, we've got to get the corporations to do something.
👉🏾 And most of these corporations are in the power sector because 74% of all emissions happen because of the generation of, consumption of energy. So suppose we don't solve this problem, when suddenly there will be all sorts of regulations from the government, there will be mandates to do, things which are not happening as of now. Because there is still hope that we will all take action and we will all do the right thing and cut emissions. We're miserably failing because every year emissions are increasing. So when things get out of hand, there will suddenly be all sorts of regulations and mandates. If you take action today and you make remarkable progress in your business, when the mandates and regulations come, you will be far better prepared than the ones who have not take action.
👉🏾 It doesn't necessarily mean that you will be an island of calm when the world is going crazy from a weather perspective. That is not possible, but at least you'll not be buffeted by regulations and merits as much as those who would've not made the effort. So, whichever way you look at, whether it is about reducing cost, identifying new business opportunities, being ready for future regulations and mandates. Being able to cater to the new needs of consumers, which are evolving category by category today. Whichever way you look at it, sustainability is about business resilience and about making sure that the business continues to do well. And in the process making a very positive contribution to the environment, the planet, the society and so on.
👉🏾 You know, mother of all frameworks is a GRI framework. It has gradually evolved, it went from guidelines to standards and so on. But it continues to be the mother of all frameworks. All other frameworks, including the new ones that are getting made, are variants of GRI in some form or the other.
👉🏾 In the Mahindra group, there are a number of platforms, we disclose sustainability information, I think at last count we were addressing upwards of 1500 questions. And the funny thing is the same question gets asked in a slightly different way. So I can't even say that, okay, there are 300 common questions or something. But the way we looked at reporting, we've always looked at reporting like that is, it's a expression of stakeholders on what they want the organisation to do.
👉🏾 Now some businesses will have a few things which are more important, a few which are less important for their business, for their business resilience and for their impact on society and climate. And like you were saying, the prioritisation comes from - the end goal is I will do business in a way in which my business continues to be resilient and does have a negative, hopefully have a positive impact on environment and society. Our definition for sustainability has been to build enduring business while rejuvenating the environment and enabling stakeholders to rise. So we look at all disclosure and reporting questions as things to do, to operationalise this definition. Yes, there are too many questions to answer, but today the sectoral questions are evolving. As long as you have the goal in mind, you don't have to be buffeted by millions of frameworks.
👉🏾 Okay. So all of us have to reduce emission. Not everybody is going to do it voluntarily. And beyond the point, it'll take a bit of a push to get the sort of reductions that we need to get. Carbon price is a tool that can be used to shape behaviour, to shape adoption of technologies towards things which are cleaner, greener, and good for the planet.
👉🏾 So actually, it can come in multiple different forms. So every time there's a new technology, a good technology, like say electric vehicles. We tell the government, oh, you must give us some benefits for this and you must cut some taxes. So that the technology, which as of now is economically not as viable as existing technology, becomes attractive to the people who buy it. It is a form of a carbon price.
👉🏾 What are you doing? You are reducing the barrier for adoption of a clean technology. You could have also said, okay, I will put a greater tax on fossil fuels, serves the same purpose. So it comes in very many different forms and the primary purpose of carbon price is to increase the adoption of clean technologies and give us, give businesses and people a chance to switch faster than we would ordinarily do. New technologies have been evolving all the time, nobody puts incentives to accelerate the adoption of new technology. But in this case carbon price is a tool and it is being discussed because we have a time limit. We've got to keep temperature rise below 1.5, we have to do it by a certain date, and if you let new technologies get adopted in the regular pace, that will not happen.
👉🏾 Actually the challenges don't lie in the use of coal and things like that.
👉🏾 The challenges lie in the availability of alternatives. Let's look at it from an energy security lens. If we reach a stage where we can use renewable energy, nuclear power hydro power, and all of this to meet our energy needs, why would we even want to use coal?
👉🏾 So if you are to shift the conversation from why are we using coal or when are we gonna stop using coal, to how do we increase the availability of alternatives? That can take us away from coal and fossil fuel, it'll be a constructive conversation, we'd all enjoy being part of the journey. And similarly, how do we ensure that we move from fossil fuel powered devices, vehicles, and other things too clean energy powered devices. So that actually is the real journey that we're on. Along the way we'll get rid of coal, we'll get rid of fossil fuel and so on.
👉🏾 Today, you don't have a choice. I mean, this is how we've evolved as a society, when fossil fuels got discovered we were delighted, when thermal power happened we were delighted. When plastics happened it solved many of our problems. But now we are seeking alternative solutions to all of this. So we'll get rid of it only when we have an alternative solution.
Massive. So this will happen only through business, because one of the primary driver is new technologies. So where are the new technologies going to come from? Somebody has to make it marketable, commercialise it.
👉🏾 Even if the development were to happen in some government lab or research institution, it has to end up getting commercialised. Therefore, businesses play a critical. And every single solution that we talk of, is it LED lamps or BLDC fans or inverter air conditioners, electric vehicles, just name it, any one of them. You will need a business that'll have to commercialise the product, of the service.
👉🏾 In the group, we've committed to being net zero on Scope one and Scope two by 2040. We will get there. When we made the commitment, we knew we will get there and we are making good progress to get there. The challenge is scope three, which is the emissions from say, a vehicle in use or the emitted carbon from the material that we buy, because those are not things we can immediately solve ourselves.
👉🏾 Even if we go a hundred percent electric, we're dependent on the grid becoming a hundred percent renewable. So that's where all of us will have to come together. I think the conversation on Scope 3 has started. People have understood that it is really a very big problem and we are able to get there because we've almost tackled Scope 1 and Scope 2. People are actually comfortable that this can be addressed, but Scope 3 is another animal all together.
👉🏾 It is not as bleak. There will be issues in just transition. If nothing else, say, let's assume for a while that use of thermal power keeps reducing, which means we need less coal. There are people who are mining the coal, what will happen to their livelihood. It is easy to say that, okay, there will be an alternative, something else will come by, but there will be some effort required to make sure that we take people along from different areas of society.
👉🏾 Actually, the taxis you saw are, after one round of culling. There was a rule that said 15 year old taxis have to go. So you probably never saw a old premier taxi anymore. Because they're all gone. Now you've got a second round of culling that has become possible. Part of the reason why the taxis are the way they are is because of how their industry's shaped up with app based cabs and for radio based cabs and regular cabs and how they've chosen to price each other, each product and so on.
👉🏾 So that is not in the ambit of our conversation, so we won't get there. But I share your angst in terms of terrible cabs that we get to sit in. Couple of days ago I sat in a clean cab and it was clean enough for me to tell the driver, to ask him, have you just done up your taxi? It just looks remarkably clean.
👉🏾 So, back in the day when taxis and taxi drivers were often the hero of Hindi films, or at least a very important part of Hindi films, taxis actually used to be done up very nicely.
👉🏾 Yeah. Even the autos. I mean, you could step into an auto, there'd be music playing. The fellow would have decorated the vehicle in some very nice way.

88: Doing Social Mobility Better: Tokunbo Ajasa Oluwa, CEO of Career Ready

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
According to a report from last year by a leading consulting firm - compared with the other developed countries, the most disadvantaged in the UK are less likely to climb the income ladder and economically advantaged tend to stay at the top. No surprise there…
It is no secret that, the on going impact of the pandemic, cost of living crisis, economic recession and global uncertainty has pushed more households and therefore young people into poverty. For young people from underprivileged backgrounds this is going to deeply impact their ability to bridge the attainment gap between them and their better off peers. Young people without access to resources, mentoring and networks required to progress will struggle to reach their full potential. In 2023, instead of disappearing, the barriers to achieving upward social mobility are getting more and more entrenched in our society…..No surprise there either……
To understand more about social mobility, imperatives and impact I spoke with Tokunbo Ajasa Oluwa, CEO of Career Ready, a passionate advocate for young people and social mobility. We spoke about the findings of the last State of National Report by the Social Mobility Commission and discussed why as a developed country we have been unable to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty?
👉🏾 We spoke about the role of education and access to higher education in enabling transformation
👉🏾 The need for a collaborative approach between governments and the private sector
👉🏾 The Sutton Trust research on the impact of accents on social mobility finds pervasive accent bias. The research highlights the clear link between accents, socioeconomic background and social mobility
👉🏾 We also discussed the fact that social mobility has not been on any recent party election manifesto, the effectiveness of the APPG on social mobility. And the possibility of change without political will
👉🏾 Measuring progress - via long term impact
👉🏾 The people who inspired him - his mother and Dame Anita Roddick
And if you would like to know about the super power he would choose, head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
👉🏾 So my name's Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa. I'm Chief Executive of Career Ready, a social mobility charity that works across the UK. My background, I suppose I've worked in the third sector and the private sector, kind of jumped from one to the other over the years. Well, what's been the golden thread throughout my career is working with young people, particularly in the focus of youth empowerment and helping young people to realise their potential.
👉🏾 But before doing any of that type of work, I trained as a journalist and I worked in the media industry for about a decade or so, before making that shift into leadership working in the third sector and young people.
👉🏾 So Career ready, essentially, we're a charity that believes talent doesn't have a particular postcode. So for us, we consciously focus on working in areas of the UK that have a higher level of deprivation. And what we do is we work in partnerships with schools and colleges in that region, to identify young people that are in need of our support to help them realise their potential when it comes to career choices.
👉🏾 So how we do that practically is through three things. We provide each young person with a mentor. We provide them access to masterclass workshops that are delivered by volunteers from our employer partners, and we offer them a paid internship at one of our employer partners during the summer holidays. And those three things together help the young people make informed choices about their futures, it exposes them to new possibilities that they didn't believe were available to young people with their background. It helps them to increase their self-esteem and importantly it helps them to grow their social captial.
👉🏾 Okay. I think the part that I love is when I get the opportunity to go out on the road and see our program in action. So whether that's visiting a young person when they're on their internship, at the end of their internship, when they're doing their presentation and their level of growth in confidence and self-esteem that you see in that young person. Or when I get a text or a message, an email that one of our young people have now secured employment with one of our partners, those bits are the best.
👉🏾 Being able to see, go out on the road, whether it's in Belfast. Edinburgh, Manchester, wherever it is across the UK, being able to see the impact of our program, that for me is definitely one of the highlights.
👉🏾 One of the more challenging sides is as a leader having to make tough decisions. And the reality is we are a medium-sized charity. And as much as we'd love to support all the young people that need our help, we have to make choices and one of the tough parts about my job that I don't like, is where we have to kind of identify what the size of our lifeboat is. And there are people that need our program, but due to our circumstances, we don't have the capacity to facilitate their need alongside those that would prioritise. So that's probably the bit of my job that I don't enjoy the most.
👉🏾 Very different indeed. I literally just came back from visiting my team in the North of England. And you'll be aware about the narrative around the levelling up agenda. Which very much feels like a narrative rather than a reality. And I think that the reality is that there are multiple components that relate to that intergenerational poverty reality that we're facing in the UK. And I think one of the key points is, we need a more unified approach to those social challenges. We can't continue this vein of working in silo where you're talking about housing, you're talking about mental health, you're talking about, parenting challenges, all of those kind of social factors, intertwined, relate to where we are as a country. And I think a prime example of that, is for us as a organisation, we can only deliver our program in viable circumstances. And the reason why I stress that is because a region like Cornwall in the southwest of the country, is in desperate need of an offering like ours.
👉🏾 However, we're not able to provide a viable model because we don't have the business community in that region to enable the volume of internships that we'll need to offer. So you've got a clear need, but you don't have the united agencies working together to respond to that. So I think we need to definitely think about joined up approach to solutions rather than a budget sitting over there and a budget sitting over there and not realising the connectivity.
👉🏾 I think another prime example of what I'm talking about is we recently had the initiative tackling youth unemployment called Kickstarter scheme. Significant amount of resource went into Kickstarter scheme. However, it was a standalone entity, so it was about identifying young adults who are unemployed at the moment and getting them into employment for a period of six months. But once that concluded It just dropped off. So you're potentially dropping those young people back into the position where you found them. For me, a logical notion would've been connecting Kickstarter to our apprenticeship objectives and seeing that as almost like an introduction to an apprenticeship scheme. And that way you don't have that volatile narrative around a key social issue, which is unemployment.
👉🏾 We've been here before though. This is the challenge, and there was a totally different government, I think 2008, 2009, last recession, we had something called the Future Jobs Fund. Literally replica kind of model. But again, it stood in isolation. So the frustration I suppose is, when are we gonna learn from our own history and enhance those propositions, which as an entity, the objective is brilliant. It's about the sustainability and how do you then make it long term viable to see the return on that investment.
👉🏾 Well, I think we're in a different time to say when we had that kind of boom in migration. So for those of us that have our first generation, British African or British Asian, it's a really different time to when our parents were first arriving on these shores.
👉🏾 So first and foremost, education is key. It's critical that as a principle doesn't go out of date and doesn't shift. But the circumstances, of what is required to your point around the cost. I think it's about ensuring that young people are making informed decisions. It's very rare for young people coming from the backgrounds that we work with, that have the luxury to go to university just for the experience.
👉🏾 Those days have come and gone, right? It really does have to service what you're trying to do with your life moving forward. So the informed decision is there are certain traditional industries and sectors where, the university education is still critical, right? But that's not necessarily the narrative for all industries.
👉🏾 So this is why, for us, it's really important that young people get that exposure to what is available and then making informed choices about how that can support them. So if I had my time now all over again, rather than going to university and studying journalism, I probably would've gone onto an apprenticeship degree or a degree apprenticeship, right?
👉🏾 Where you are getting the best of both worlds. You get that qualification whilst learning on the job, whilst being paid, rather than how long it took me to pay off my student loan. And that was nowhere near the cost of what the student loan is now. So I think, it's that point and I think the fact is we cannot underestimate the position of poverty within society and how that impacts people's decisions.
👉🏾 Yeah. I think in that point private sector definitely have a role to play. But I think like a cocktail or a salad, it requires a number of agents coming together and seeing the kind of sum of its parts and seeing the benefits to all entities.
👉🏾 So if you're thinking about it from a business perspective, when it comes to diversifying workforces, there's a plethora of research out there that reinforces the profitability and the business sense of diversifying your workforce. So from a socioeconomic kind of point of view, I don't need to kind of beat that drum. But at the same time, how that supports businesses alongside society is that you are removing a cost from society. That is a young person on unemployment benefits, and empowering them to become a positive asset where they're feeding into the economy through their disposable income and the businesses accessing talent that they wouldn't normally get access to.
👉🏾 So I don't necessarily think there is a hierarchy of who should be more responsible. I think again, it's about that collaborative approach of understanding that each entity has a benefit of us finding a long term viable solution to this. So I've seen some great examples of employers evolving the way they work and making sure that they can tackle social mobility. Some are further along that journey than others, and they are like the trailblazers and providing those examples of best practice.
👉🏾 And that's across industry, but you are right. I definitely agree that it's a requirement that business needs to look at. And I think a great example of that collaborative approach, I'm not sure if you're aware of something in Scotland called The Young Person's Guarantee, which literally has that, each of those stakeholders coming together, unified approach to a long term solution.
👉🏾 I mean there was a few recommendations within the report, which I think are kind of sensible and practical steps. I do think it is about ensuring that diversity from a leadership lens. So the fact of the matter is we need more diversity of experience, lived experience, and that will be reflected in people's accents as well.
👉🏾 So I think if you were to kind of focus on any particular aspect where we need to really drive that development, it's in leadership. It's in senior management roles and setting ourselves some specific targets around what that looks like in regards to diversity of lived experience. Because I think in certain industries it's very challenging, if you're thinking about the kind of banking and law for example or insurance - these are some of the more traditional industries which have got further to go compared to say, the creative industries or digital industry. So for me, I think it is about utilising the recommendations within the report, but if there was anywhere that I would hone in on that and really hold employers to task, it's around that senior leadership piece.
👉🏾 Yeah, I think pre-pandemic, the profile of young people we work with. I think some of the most impressive qualities about them, is they are some of the most tenacious and resilient individuals of their generation. Just based on their lived experience and that was pre-pandemic or pre-living crisis, living costs of where we are.
👉🏾 So, I think how we have to support this generation is really adapting to the fact that we are in a different climate and really understanding what support looks like now compared to 2019. Just even the idea of a number of young people not having access to digital resource, that enable them to enhance their potential, that's a key factor.
👉🏾 We've recently did some research in partnership with Total Jobs and it said about 50% of 16 to 18 year olds are no longer confident about securing the job that they desire. So there is a real level of anxiety, a real level of disappointment within this generation z. Whether they're school leavers or whether they have aspirations of going into the higher education. So many of them are adapting and changing to the circumstance.
And I think it's just about us providing them with as much wraparound support as we can. I think a prime example of, what I'm referring to when I say wraparound support is there are the practical components around their careers, et cetera, but also mental health, one of the organisations that we have a relationship with is a charity called Young Minds. And during the pandemic, their hotline for parents that needed support went up by 400%
👉🏾 So that was in the height of the pandemic. So now we're in the cost of living crisis, which compounds that, I expect that to be even more so we have to be creative in what a fit-for-purpose support looks like for generations Z.
👉🏾 I would say yes, but I think having a stronger, wider employment market is definitely where we need to go. But for me, I think an example of what we can replicate right across the UK is what they're pioneering in Scotland with the Young Person's Guarantee, because that is, about long-term sustainability.
👉🏾 It's not a short-term solution, which, gives you a spike for a quarter when it comes to new fund employment. It's woven into the fabric of doing things differently in more of an alliance approach. So yes, definitely is about macro policy, but it's also about understanding what role each component plays in that long-term positive outcome.
👉🏾 Yeah. I think the APPG is brilliant for what it is. And that's for the fact that it brings together interested parties in this space, and it kind of provides a driver and a think tank space for change.
👉🏾 But you're absolutely right, we're not gonna see that change until central government is bought into it and prioritising that. Now this is where, in theory, the levelling up agenda could and should come into play. Because it's intertwined into the reality of the social mobility profile.
👉🏾 So for me, and the recent autumn statement in regards to the cuts to the levelling up agenda, it just feels like we're going in a bit of a vicious cycle. So I can't see foreseeable significant government change, unless we can see some meat behind the words that have been banded around the, levelling up agenda. That needs a lot more structure, a lot more focus and targets that we can hold the powers that be accountable to. So yeah, the APPG is great as an entity, but it doesn't have the power to create the change that we need to see.
👉🏾 Yeah, so what we do at the moment is first of all we focus on the profile of the young person, and I think a key component of success and progress that we're making is measuring apples with apples.
👉🏾 So in the past is very tempting to kind of measure the cohort against an average across the nation. That's not accurate or appropriate. So what you need to actually do is measure the profile of that young person, get a controlled group of young people that don't have access to the program and see like for like, what kind of outputs you've got. So that's what we've started to do as an organisation and we've been really invested in our data and impact resource to enable us to do that in a proficient manner. But in addition to that, it's the longitudinal research. So that's about engaging our alumni because the kind of work that we're doing is not short term. So yes, we can have immediate results within, have they gone into a positive destination after 12 or 18 months engagement, that's fine. But I'm more interested in where are they three years, five years from there, what impact has our program had on their long term futures and the decisions that they've made. And what's even more profound is then measuring what impact that their journey has had. In their family, in their local community.
👉🏾 Because then it's about inspiring that change. Literally, just a couple of weeks ago I was in Belfast visiting some of our students and there was a young man who did an internship at Citibank. He used to walk past the building every day, didn't know what went on in there, secured an internship, impressed them so much, was invited to one of their assessment centres for an apprenticeship, and he started that apprenticeship this month in Citibank.
👉🏾 So this was an organisation that he knew nothing about 12 months ago. He walked

87: Kwame Senou: Reclaiming and redefining the Africa narrative

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
👉🏾 How many of you know that Africa is home to approximately one third of the world’s languages?
👉🏾 That there are at least 75 languages in Africa which have more than one million speakers
👉🏾 That it has a combined landmass of China, US, India, Japan and much of Europe (11.7 million sq mi)?
👉🏾 Considering its size, demographic dividend, economic potential, achievements , we know that it does not have the voice or representation that it deserves on all matters, including climate change, SDGs or within global media etc.
👉🏾 Through sheer ignorance and stereotyping most of us continue to use Africa synonymously with a country in Africa? It is 54 distinct countries, that are diverse culturally and geographically
👉🏾 The reality is that Africa is not a monolith. That even Francophone Africa is not one homogenous group
👉🏾 Covid has impacted countries on the continent in different ways. And countries and communities are still trying to figure out what back to normal, or life/work in a post pandemic world would look like
👉🏾 One thing is clear - work from home is not necessarily a thing
The unpalatable truth is that perhaps it works for outsiders to continue to perpetuate the narrative on Africa, to undervalue the expertise/skills of professionals from the continent. The expectation remains that outsiders define strategy and locals just implement and experts/consultants, businesses from the continent charge less for work similar to other markets
Last month, I spoke with Kwame Senou, about the need for education and cultural awareness if businesses are to succeed in the African continent. We spoke about his journey, future trends, what brands could do to take advantage of the opportunities in Africa and much more…..
Listen here….
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾Thank you Sudha for inviting me. It's a real pleasure.
👉🏾 I was born in West Africa in Benin Republic right beside Nigeria. And I grew up in a multicultural family where my dad shared some Ghanaian origin with Benin and my mom being from Benin. And I have two brothers and two sisters, so it was quite a big family. I went to public school, I'm always proud to say that because public education is now kind of synonymous of not being a very good quality. But I went to public school and then after doing science in high school I moved to university where I took law degree.
👉🏾 And after a while doing world law, that's where I got hooked into the communication through journalism, initially the university, and then in a private publication. Being always adventurous and curious. I was always interested in discovering, so I started travelling with my parents. We lived in different part of the country.
👉🏾 And what people always realise about Africa is that South, for instance, is coastal, and the north is almost xxxxxx or desertic a bit arid. People speak different languages, so it's a whole difference. And I remember my first trip to the north of the country, it was in a train, and it was a good experience as the train was moving forward, I was learning more about the country I belong to and the people. In most parts of the world, train stations are like shopping malls and you can see different things being sold in each city and how different they were. And how agriculture is a very important part of the daily lives in Africa.
👉🏾 Having this diverse background, I think I quickly started opening up to the Anglophone words while I was educated in French. And I was reading things from Ghana, things from Nigeria and it quickly shaped me into how I describe myself today.
👉🏾 Born in Africa and World Citizen. And beside my job as a journalist, I started working in a bank and my boss who was a Nigerian lady, gave me a book. And I know today it is dangerous to say you have been inspired by Donald Trump, but back then it was a book by Donald Trump called Think Big and Kickass.
👉🏾 But I mean, he changed the title to Think Big and Make It Happen. But this book really reshaped my focus around thinking big and thinking beyond what I know what I take for granted
👉🏾 And she gave me a second book. The second book was Dream from my Father of Barack Obama. So it was a really through the lady, got influenced by the English speaking world while having a French education, having learned French history, french philosophy and French way of thinking. And I think the nuances from both side helped me really better myself.
👉🏾 I would define myself as a communication strategist. In Africa it's very difficult to be a specialist, like someone from the UK will tell me, "oh, I do health comms, work in financial comms cetera. But I will define myself as a comms strategist having worked across different type of clients; whether it's government, non-profit, private organisation, association, special interest group, individuals.
👉🏾 And I will just give you an example to tell you how I love my work. You know, During Covid a good friend of mine, and a client became the mayor of the third city in our country. And in my home country, because I live in Cote D'Ivoire and I'm from Benin Republic. And remember then Covid happened, nobody knew how to react and everything was very centralised, government were ever powerful. And we had a conversation, you are a mayor. How can you make a positive change quickly? And out of that brainstorming came the idea of trying to influence government and financial partners of the country into supporting directly the community.
👉🏾 Because remember the response was everywhere, it was national. So he drafted an op-ed, read and reread, it so as a political space. He was just becoming a mayor, he didn't want to create any wrong perception.
👉🏾 And we published it and I can tell you that within one month the phones were made available. I think his community got something like a hundred thousand US dollar. But all the communities in the country got over 1.5 million dollars, and they could effect change directly in the communities where it was needed the most because government were more busy buying mask, buying ventilators and all that, when people were deprived of their livelihood.
👉🏾 And it appeared to me that it's what I love about this job, the ability to impact, to impact positively. And it can translate quite effectively in such case. Sometime it takes longer, but at the end of the day PR and communication have been responsible of some of the most positive change we can see in the world and I expect PR to still drive this change, especially for my continent, Africa.
👉🏾 Yes. I think the first challenge, and I'm sure everybody who's worked on the global stage faced it, is the challenge for most people to adapt to different environments. I am fortunate not to have this challenge. If you see me walking in the street of New York or in the hotel of Lagos, I'll quickly adapt. Sometime I even adopt the local slang, I'm just coming back from Morocco and I was greeting people in Arabic and they were all amazed like how this guy is able to do that.
👉🏾 But yes the challenge is there is a kind of refusal of adaptation. People are not interested in that, they would claim they want to work in a multicultural world, they want to learn, but they are not really interested, those are just empty words. They don't want to understand the differences. Like, PR is not the same. I mean, the media landscape is not the same. So there are so many changes that I believe before starting anybody should first educate him or herself on what is going on locally, rather than trying to import directly.
👉🏾 The second challenge is obviously language. In Africa, I mean, I'm based in Abidjan where we speak French. And a lot of my requests are in English, or sometime even other languages, like people from Vietnam that I worked with it once. And they don't understand French. They don't seem to understand that there are nuances that English cannot carry into French. So it's always a challenge.
👉🏾 And the third and the most painful is this perception of Africa. I think decades of media brainwashing, and I don't blame the media, they kind of serve global geopolitical interest and all that, but they've brainwashed people into thinking that, there's so little good out of Africa, and that little good is only music, you know? I joke usually saying that when you are an African, a black guy, and you're not are not having dreadlocks on your head and you're not singing, you don't have tattoo on your body, you kind look alien when you travel outside the continent, people don't know what to exactly do of you because they're so used to framing you in that category.
👉🏾 But again, and to your point, education is the key. And I don't think blaming people, fighting them complaining is the solution, it's education. And a lot of us are now realising that patience is also part of that education process. So what we do is that the first time we engage with a client, if they accept of course, some don't have time for that, but we take them through an understanding of the continent, how it is different, we call it Africa briefing. An understanding of the continent, it's geography, it's history, the languages, how people are different.
👉🏾 And let me just give you another example, yesterday I was talking to a client and I was telling him the president is going to be at this event and I think it would make sense that you send someone senior to attend this event because, this president we call it in French, xxxxxxx like kind an influential figure in the region.
👉🏾 And he wouldn't be happy to be dealing only with a local MD or this sort of thing. And this is the kinda small details that make the difference in government relation. And I believe it's the same in the US, you won't expect the ministry of transportation of one country to travel to Washington be received by Joe Biden. It apply everywhere, but people tend to believe that because it's Africa, it's substandard, we should accept that. So we have to educate, and that is really about bringing more African voices out, bringing more information, bringing more publication. And I encourage my team, I challenge myself to write books from 2023, because we need more publication and more voices from Africa talking about African things.
👉🏾 And I am among those people, we are tired of the African experts who desperately don't look African. And despite 10, 20, 30 years of academic studies, there are things that you can only understand when you were born in and you really understand the language.
👉🏾 Thank you for raising this point, and it's given me an opportunity to talk about it and I hope we can have more discussion in organisation like PRCA or CIPR around it. You are very right. This is all part of the global perception of Africa. Africa is substandard, Africa is cheap. People don't need much in Africa which is wrong. Africa, cost of operation for any B2B services provider is higher in Africa than it is in the UK. Travelling between, I mean, Abidjan, if I have to go and deal with a matter in Guinea, it'll cost me $500 or $600, like an economy ticket. That is just one hour and a half from here.
But I think it's also part of keeping the money outside Africa. They have report from measures about cost of living in Africa and all that, and they know the numbers, but they just want to keep the money where they think it's belong. It also have to do with capital, whoever owns the company wants to keep the maximum for him.
👉🏾 But how can we start educating clients? I think the work start at home. Let our partner agencies, the networks we are part of, start treating us with respect and making sure that when they're talking to the client, they do not expect the client to see Africa as substandard. And again, to this point you can look at when foreign experts travel to Africa, they are paid even more than they can expect in the US. We've seen so many situations where after working in Africa for five years, experts are no longer happy to go back because they're going to get the big house with the garden, the Jeep from Toyota and so many packages. The children, school fees, the insurers, the life insurance and all that.
👉🏾 It's actually cheaper to employ an African who is here based here than to bring a foreign expert but they still do that, they pay them decently. So they realise that working in Africa is not cheaper. But working in Africa by Africans should be cheaper, it shouldn't be the case, it's wrong and I think it starts within US agencies when we are making quotes, when we are sending financial proposal, we should really be specific about, we treat everybody equally. If we are billing hours, let the rate be the same for everyone. If we are billing overhead, let's make sure that we listen to the African agencies. Because clients are going to anyway pay. Second and I want to take some ownership on that, we also on the continent should work engage, lobby to show people numbers, data. Not only complain, because sometime I feel we also complained too much without providing data.
👉🏾 And this is a job to be done. We should show clients how an operation look like on the continent. Like, I was talking to a friend in the US and she was like, why do you have to do all this for an event? And I'm like, the hotel doesn't offer that service. I have to bring everything, the sound system, the video guy, everything I have to do. So you can understand that I will bill more hours than someone in the US who can just sign a contract with the hotel and the hotel take care of everything in the background.
👉🏾 And again, it comes to what you mentioned before, education. We need to start providing data to people outside the continent. And I'm very happy of the work PRCA Africa is doing in showing the state of the industry. We should also start thinking of how to show clients what is cost of operation, how business is conducted, how much it cost to run a successful campaign and all that. So that they understand and they grow in that direction.
👉🏾 I mean, I would say nine and nine and a half. Because we tend to live in this single village now. You can wake up in Africa and know exactly what's happening at the G20 summit in Indonesia. I think I'm part of that last generation who was not too connected. When I was a young kid, we only got news from the radio and the TV news was very short. It was 1:00 PM at midday and 8:00 PM in the evening, and that's all. And it was 30 minutes. But today through internet, we can know what is happening everywhere.
👉🏾 Like yesterday I receive a storm alert in Chicago because my cousin is living there. And this makes you deal, contact, engage with people from all over the world. So the first skill I believe is cultural intelligence. How do I engage with the Japanese? How different is an Indian who is living in the UK, because it's not the same with an Indian who is based in India. How people in Latin America see things like respect, how do you address them? How do I switch from a country like Benin where you can't be too friendly, you can't be too forward with people to a country like Côte d'Ivoire. You know, in French, we have a difference between using the second person of singular or using the second person of plural as a sign of respect.
👉🏾 So how do you switch between those nuances? How do I engage with someone who thinks in Swahili but then speaks English, and different background, different people, so different expectation. And when you are not culturally intelligent, it's become challenging to work. Because even here in West Africa, we see Indian in company, Americans in company, Italian Japanese, Chinese, everywhere.
👉🏾 And I think what we leaders need to do generally is to be more humble. I always say that the danger of leadership is that you reach leadership positions usually after some accomplishment, and it can give you a sense of self-worth that can be dangerous in accepting others and their differences. And this culture of humility, this culture of willingness to learn would really help into making cultural intelligence a common skill.
👉🏾 How do I discuss climate change from London to São Tomé, an island of the coast of Africa. It's really important, because we are going to advise clients who usually rely on us for this cultural intelligence, they actually need us to provide the information. So I feel it is really one of the area we should dedicate education.
👉🏾 And I want to talk about the work done by Robyn de Villiers, who is the chair of BCW Africa. She started educating people on the culture map. And I was really impressed listening to her mentioning how people are not really aware and it creates conflict and cultural intelligence as a tool to prevent conflict. Yes. I always smile about this particular question of future of work and hybrid and all that, because in Africa, while a lot of people who just push this narrative, but the situation is quite simple.
👉🏾 If you look at social survey in Africa, what you realise this job is still the number one problem in Africa. And we have a population on average below the age of 35, which is 75%. These people need a job, they need a job and they don't even have a demand. They just want to get work. What we saw with Covid is that of course there was this time between March and July 2020, where everybody had to kind of use a dual hybrid mode. But what I am seeing increasingly is that everybody's going back to work fully for those who are working. But let talk to you about something different that happened.
👉🏾 What happened with Covid is actually that it opened job possibilities to people in Africa on the global market. In Nigeria, there are graphic designer, web designers, developers, IT engineer that are now operating remote for company in the UK, in the US. So because remote work was now possible in so many organisation, in Europe or in the US.
👉🏾 So many African talent could apply for job and even get them and live off it. What is less told also is that even us on the continent, I have five people on full remote. COVID helped me being attractive to them as a company. So they...

86: Spotlight: Mental Health, the hidden crisis amongst Indian students: A conversation with Dr Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership SPJIMR

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 03:30:00 +0000

WARNING: THE INFORMATION BELOW MAY BE TRIGGERING
1.64 lakhs, a daily average of 450 or 18 per hour…..
That is the number of deaths due to suicides in India in 2021
The statistics for death by suicide amongst young people is worse. Not surprising then that this is the third leading cause of death amongst young adults and a significant problem amongst college students in India.
Mental health can bye impacted due to a myriad of factor amongst young people. The two big issues that stand out are a) Stigma around mental health, it is a taboo subject that individuals and families are reluctant to engage with. 2) An education system that is not knowledge oriented but exam focused - testing students on their ability to ace the system.
In a post independence India there has been a rise in social capital attached to educational attainment (because it leads to acceptable jobs, financial and material gains). Indian students face some of the toughest competitive examinations in the world. And just to share an example - with less than 1% acceptance rate the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) exam is said to be tougher than getting in Harvard. A million students, yes that is right 1 MILLION students apply for the 13000 seats.
The pandemic of course has exacerbated the issue. Peer pressure, all consuming access to media, parental pressure, fear of failure, lack of access to opportunities all compound the issue. With prominent Bollywood celebrities and more young people speaking about the issue - there has been some progress. But, by and large the issue remains a taboo and largely undiagnosed.

In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Dr Lata Dhir Prof of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership and Group Head of Design Thinking at SPJIMR about the deep challenges we face in addressing this hidden crisis. Lata is deeply passionate about helping create the structures and safe spaces to support young people and proactively address mental health issues. She believes this is her life’s mission - her why?
If you would like to learn more, listen here
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Good morning. I'm excited to be a part of this whole journey. How are you doing?
👉🏾 Who am I? Okay, I am a professor of Organisational behaviour and Leadership, at SPJIMR, one of the top schools in India. That’s my formal introduction. And I'm a psychologist. But my major, major passion lies in mental health. And that's something that I'm really passionate about and that's maybe the ‘why’ for most of the work that I do.
👉🏾 It's a plethora of things, right? Generally, when you think of saying that you're a professor, in a traditional institute or a college, you are mainly teaching, right? Teaching, of course, is a core, but there's a lot of research that we need to work on, on the work that we present in classrooms, case studies that we write, articles that we need to publish. That's one part of the whole process. We do a lot of management development programs for organisations. The academia industry kind of connections and meet up, become extremely important if you need to really solve real-life problems in the world. So that's where we collaborated a lot with industries, sectors across India. We do consulting work with them. Sometimes we write a book also .
👉🏾Thank you. A very, very interesting person and a very interesting organisation as you know. It’s a completely Indian-based genesis in the HDFC group of organisations. And on Mr. H T Parekh and Deepak Parekh, who are the pioneers of this financial sector. I've added some more things in my plethora of work which is Vishwas, creating psychologically safe spaces and counselling sessions.
👉🏾 I do a lot of personal growth labs and leadership labs, I think that would be my forte if you had to say. Maybe I'll take a minute to kind of tell you the difference, we do workshops, we do classes, we do labs. So when we do sessions on say leadership for example, we are just giving you the knowing piece of knowledge, of theories et cetera.
👉🏾 The moment we get your workshop, we talk about some kind skills, communication, negotiation, team building, et cetera. But the moment we talk about a lab, we are actually impacting the being, maybe give them a place and a space where they can experiment with their thoughts and feelings. And that's the space that I really like to work on.
👉🏾 Like all children who will do well in their studies in India, we either become a doctor or an engineer. So I was going to be a doctor. Very soon realised that doctor was not something that I wanted to be. I was not really interested. So I had you know, forward-looking parents who kind of said, Ok, then drop out and I dropped out from medicine and finally got into psychology, right? And psychology was not something that was happening decades back. Right. It was a lot of stigma, but I did get into psychology. So that maybe was the genesis, the connecting of the dots of my why today. I went onto psychology without knowing why I was doing psychology. And I completed my graduation, my masters. Did an MBA in HR just to make my parents feel a better about themselves, okay, their daughter has an MBA and then of course I did my MPhil and PhD in psychology.
👉🏾 But when I came into a B school mental health psychology was not something that people really talked about, like a decade and a half back. People were generally talking about quantitative toolkits like finance, marketing, et cetera. And I wanted to bring in psychology, but the moment I would go to the corporate world and say I'm a psychologist, people say, Wow, No!
👉🏾 And that's when I said I'm a behavioural scientist, right? It sounds more fancy.
👉🏾 More acceptable, yeah. But I kind of felt psychology was important because at the heart of everything that we do, is understanding human behaviour. And that is when I started focusing on labs, I started focusing on understanding the psychological mechanisms of what the aspirations, the goals, thoughts and feelings of human beings are.
👉🏾 As we say, we have no idea about our emotions at all. We do not know. We know the world, we know the moon, but we do not know, our own emotions, right? And we do not understand our own thoughts. So that's where I started kind of focusing a lot on that. And I started conducting these labs, and that is when students would keep coming back to me. After the lab and say, like we'll not just talk for ourselves because suddenly the pandoras box is opened and they started thinking about themselves, reflecting about their behaviour and their thoughts and feelings and they would just keep coming back to me. I had this one student who came to me, so came back Sudha and that's kind of left me an impact is when he walked into my cabin and says, "You know, ma'am, I go into other professors' room to understand marketing and finance and getting a job, but when I walk into your room, I feel that I'm going to get answers to my life".
👉🏾 And he said it in Hindi, which is Vishwas hai mujhe (I trust) And Vishwas in English means trust. I trust that I'll get my answers. I have that Vishwas that something, you know, good will happen, that we know. That kind of hit me and I started realising that there were a lot of people coming, a lot of students coming to me, looking for that agenda less conversations, which then led to more crucial conversations in my cabin, and they're talking about themselves. But those crucial conversations needed that safe space where they could happen, right?
👉🏾 So I started thinking a little more deeper and I said, here is this space maybe I have created not knowingly, but it is happening. Okay, there must be something that I'm doing, so there's an art to it, but there's a science to it. So I started kind of delving deep into the science of creating those psychologically safe spaces. And I also realised that there are, these people who are coming to me. What if there are others out there who do not have an access and don't even know that they can go to somebody, right? Cause the moment Sudha, we talk about mental health, we talk about mental illness, we talk about anxiety and depression. And we know that there are places we can go to, but we may not go because of stigma. And that is when I kind of thought that we could create this space and I started reaching out to students and then formalised an entire process and we launched Vishwas in September 2015. And that is a time when UN, in the sustainable development goals, added mental health. I got to know later, but it was like some god's connection building up, but that's what we did. So I think we are latching onto a higher goal on the sustainable development goal, number three, which is mental health.
And I think that's when I started getting more and more involved, more and more deeper and the ‘why’ of what I'm doing in my life
👉🏾 Yeah, you're right Sudha. It's a huge responsibility because when somebody opens out their heart to you, you know, you need to honour their being. And building the trust is like a verb, right? Like I always say my students like, love is a verb, it's not a noun. In the same way, trust is a verb, you need to build it up. You need to show your own vulnerabilities and if you need to share something about yourself, for them to be able to kind of get into that space where they can then form their trusting relationship.
👉🏾 Yeah, so being a psychologist, let me go back to talking about a psychologist, Carl Rogers, He talks about unconditional positive regard. His therapy starts with saying that I give you the unconditional positive regard. And it's a humanistic psychology movement, which says that I accept you for who you are, I lay no conditions.
👉🏾 And that is what is not happening. We have so many conditions that we put on our people whether it's parents or teachers or society, so many, many conditions. I will respect you, I will love you only if you meet those conditions. We starting on the wrong track, number one. In our society, we have expectations, we have conditions, we want to change every individual because we believe sitting in some high society as parents or teachers or as whoever we want, in authority figures, telling ourselves that we know how the world should run, and we have made certain rules and you need to follow those rules.
Who says?
👉🏾 I think we start with the wrong kind of an assumption saying that we know what's best. And Sudha you know for sure that covid turned the world upside down and it told you that whatever assumptions you were thinking is not actually going to happen. The way you thought the work would happen is not happening
👉🏾 And two years down the line, have we learnt our lesson?
👉🏾 Not at all.
👉🏾 Because you want the world to go back to where it started and everybody say, "Oh, let's go back to the normal". What is normal? And I'm sorry if I'm digressing, but the question that, you know, really comes to my mind is, the world will not be able to go back, because history demands that you go forward. We can learn our lessons from what's happened, but we need to move forward.
👉🏾 But we are not.
👉🏾 Again, we are stuck in the same rat race, that herd mentality, the expectations, judging people based on their success on how much do you earn. And so we create that kind of pressure on our kids as parents. And we want them to live up to those particular expectations. I've already put some conditions and I'm already wanting to change you from who you are. Interestingly, let's look at nature, lot to learn from nature. We don't tell a rose plant to grow like a Daffodil.
👉🏾 We don't do that. Then why are we doing it to human beings? And so we are doing it to satisfy our own, call it ego. There is so much of mental health issues that we see around ourselves. If don't look at only anxiety, depression, suicide. We look at loneliness, we look at FOMO, we look at cognitive dissonance, we look at fear of failure, we look at how to manage our disappointments. These are across the spectrum of human race. And how many of us, if we had to question ourselves, how many of us our actually thriving in our lives?
👉🏾 Yeah. It'll not happen without a mindset change.
👉🏾 So I kind of heard somebody saying failure or success is just a feedback. It is no reflection about who you are as a person. That's extremely important, because failure is something that's happening outside me. And it's happening and I need to respond to it. And then I go back to another very famous psychiatrist I'm very, very fond of there's a book ‘Man's search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankel. It's a very interesting book to read.
👉🏾 And he talks about when he was in the concentration camp and he was fighting so many issues, wasn't sure whether he'd be alive, but he kind of told himself that between the stimulus and the response lies the space. And in that space lies my freedom to choose. So failures are inevitable, they will happen.
👉🏾 But how do I respond to that failure is a choice that I have to make and that's something that we have to do. So while we can say that the society is not accepting our failures, and I'm trying to kind of bring in another concept here, which is Steven Covy's concept about circle of concern and circle influence.
👉🏾 So I'm concerned about what the world is doing, I'm concerned about, the society and expectations and parents and teachers. We wanna enable our youth to be able to get the power to decide what they can influence and that is what they can control.
👉🏾 And the control lies in that space where I decide what I will do with my failure. If I look at failure as a reflection of who I am, a reflection of my own, my self-esteem is gonna go down. And I'm gonna keep on ruminating about that whole stuff. But on the other hand, if in that space I decided that's a failure, it's just a feedback. I am going to reflect and find out cognitively what went wrong, why did I fail? What could I have done wrong? Have those conversations with myself and with other people who understand me. I will be able to accept failure because failures, like, you know, there's a very old saying which says, failures are stepping stones to success.
👉🏾 I have to fail right? There is no way that I'm not fail. But in India or this side of the world where there are so many people, right? Opportunities are less. And getting into that prime college, prime job you have to fight, like somebody said, very interestingly, getting into a top B school in India is tougher than getting into, say, a Harvard or Stanford, because of the ratio.
So I think it's something that as a culture, we need to, first of all understand failure is fine. Talk about the fact we should have conversations around failure.
👉🏾 I wrote this book on HDFC and Deepak Parekh and H T Parekh. There were struggles, there were failures, there's conflicts that happened. And that is a journey that we need to kind of celebrate too. When we talk we about our role models, we only talk about somebody who's reached the top, but what about the struggles?
👉🏾 So I'll, go forward and come backward to your answer. You're saying they should not be left behind. So those who are not left behind and they've reached the top, whether it's top B schools or it's a corporate world, many of them are burnt out even before they reach 40.
👉🏾 Many of them fight mental health issues even before they reach certain level. There is no happiness. There is no joy in what they're doing. They find no meaning in the work that they're doing. After some time they don't know what they're doing with their jobs. They don't have the courage to leave it because they're now in golden handcuffs. Okay, you will reach there and then what? I will end up into a mental wreck. And there's another book by Clayton Christensen on ‘How to Measure Your Life’. A very well-established professor at Harvard. And he says, how will you have fulfilling relationships, how will you have fulfilling careers and how will you stay on change? When you get great power come with great responsibility.
👉🏾 Are we teaching them that? We're not. We just saying, just succeed. By all means, reach the top. By all means, get the money, get the big car and a big house. And you know, you can show off to the world and I as parents and teacher and say, Oh, that child is mine. Wow! And look at the pressure that person is going through, it's crazy. So is the education system to be blamed? A hundred percent. Because, look at the marks that we give student, it's out in the open, everybody knows I've got an 80-90% and the other person's got a 50%. What a super way of putting on somebody's self-esteem. And the guy with a 90% believes that, Oh wow, I'm God's gift to mankind now.
👉🏾 And that person comes into a B school or a top institute in the world, and now sudden realises that there are others who are as good with the 90% as he or she is. And now I don't know how to manage that failure, that disappointment.
👉🏾 So right from the beginning, right when we are in school and college, we are teaching our kids to be competitive. And telling our kids that there's this one best way of answering a question. And sorry, Sudha, but I'm gonna take you to three lessons that we learned in school, which we need to throw in the dustbin.
Number one; teacher is always right. Teachers not always right, the manager, the boss authority figure is always not right. They're too many perspectives to one thing.
Second, the reason I hated maths when I was growing up, was, there is only one best method of answering the question. If I don't follow the steps, I `will get less marks even if I get the right answer.
And the third is that it is only through my own efforts will I reach success. And life teaches you, it's not about independence, it's for interdependence.
Where is that coming from? I haven't taught them any of those skills.

85: Tehseen Zaidi: Advocating for gender diversity in the workplace

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
What is it like to be brought up in a conservative, small town where girls are groomed from their childhood to just be good daughters, wives and mothers?
For the 85th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Tehseen Zaidi, Head Communications, Syngenta India. Growing up in a small town in UP, Tehseen was unlike her peers, she was opinionated and spoke her mind. She was influenced and supported in large measure by her father (her role model) who believed in empowering his girls, enabling them to fly and define their own journey.
It was refreshing speaking to Tehseen, she was disarmingly candid - opening up about her personal life, her mantra’s to beating the imposter syndrome, her advocacy for gender diversity/women in leadership. We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Challenges women face in progressing to managerial and leadership positions including the barriers she faced in her professional life
👉🏾 Self doubt/imposter syndrome (she has no time for it); negotiating pay rise and promotions
👉🏾 The role of mentors and sponsors in supporting women to grow and lead
👉🏾 What differentiates women leaders and the role of empathy in leadership
👉🏾 Her advise for aspiring women leaders
👉🏾 Balancing act: juggling a career, family and personal ambitions
Thank you Tehseen for making time for this wonderful conversation and supporting women on their journey.
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
My Guest on The Elephant in the Room Tehseen Zaidi Head - Communications, Syngenta India
👉🏾 Good afternoon Sudha. Thanks for the wonderful opportunity. It's always good to connect with like-minded people and speak your heart out on the subjects you really like. So thank you once again for the opportunity.
👉🏾 Well, the first introduction of mine will be someone who passionately works for women, and who always believes that women can empower each other.
👉🏾 Professionally I've been a media professional for past 20 years. I've spent, more than a decade with NDTV, taking care of the crisis communications, proactive communications, PR, relationships and networking. Currently I'm working with a Swiss-based multinational called, Syngenta India private limited, where I'm heading their corporate communications department. Apart from this introduction of mine, I am a mommy to two boys, one who's going to be a teenager soon, and the other one who's six year old and a very, very naughty brat . I'm also a pet lover with a cat and two birds who coexist and love each other.
👉🏾 No, they roam around freely and coexist beautifully.
👉🏾 Well, that's a very interesting question Sudha. Yes, I grew up in conservative environment where the only future for a girl child was to get their basic education, which is still 10th or maybe till 12th. And then look beautiful, cook tasty food, sing well, be presentable and be a good wife. So that's how women in my town were treated.
👉🏾 For me, it was different. I was a very stubborn child from my beginning. So when I was like towards my teens, my mother started teaching me how to cook good food because according to her, this was the primary responsibility of a girl and I will be judged if I don't know cooking.
👉🏾 So that is where my rebel started and I said, No, whoever I'll be marrying will cook for me and I'll not cook for the person. Coming back to your question, who influences me the most? Yes, my father, my mentor, who's no more physically with me, but he inspires me, he guides me in each and every step of my life I take. He's my biggest critique, mentor, my guide and my well-wisher.
👉🏾 So when my mom used to push me for cooking, and I will purposely run away saying, it's not my job. My father will say, she will be empowered and educated to that level that, she will have 10 khansamas - means the cooks, and the guy should be brave enough to marry this kind of a woman.
👉🏾 So my girl is not meant for doing household chores, she is meant to be a leader, I want to see her empowered. I don't want to spend money for dowry, rather, I'll spend that money on her education so that she can take care of her family and she can own for her lifetime. And that is where I'm coming from.
👉🏾 Yes, of course, and I feel every woman does face. Some speak out, some are vocal about it and some are silent. So I am the vocal one. Yes, there are are barriers, in India, fortunately, or unfortunately,
👉🏾 Unfortunately, there are not males supporting, they feel that job goes only in the females kitty. So barriers are like, you know, okay, my father supported me, I got educated, I was empowered enough and I was free to choose my life partner, which I chose, who's equally supportive. But the problem arises that when you have family or you have a ailing parent, societal pressure.
👉🏾 So, yes, while they do that, they have to compromise a little bit on their career. Like for me, I denied promotions twice in my high-flying career. When I was on my peak, I had to say no because I wanted to be a good mom, I wanted to justify my role and I refused many offers from the industry. So I'm happy about it, I have no. But I feel yes, if responsibilities are equally divided and if we have a very good support system, again coming back to my point, if strong women support each other, I think we'll be able to fill up this void very, very soon.
👉🏾 No, I never dealt with it and I never had a self-doubt, honestly. And I am very clear in my heart and in my head on what I want to do, what I want to achieve, where I want to take a backseat and where I want to be the driver.
👉🏾 So I drive my own life. And the mantra to drive my own life is being myself. I firmly believe that when you are yourself and you pamper yourself and you nurture yourself without being judged and without always trying to be the best in every aspect and always trying to do the best for every relationship.
👉🏾 Sometimes there are some things which you just need to leave. So that is where the secret of my, always never being in a self-doubt lies. That I will think this is the, and I will be convinced there will be no second doubt and I'll be able to convince people that I am right and this is what I want.
👉🏾 I'd like to add that success comes automatically. When you know your work well, you are confident of your work. Success can wait, maybe what I was supposed to achieve five years back, I will achieve now. Because I have the talent, I have the ability and I'm sincere in my work. So when I do it, there is no looking back.
👉🏾 Yes, of course. I was very clear in my head from the time I got married, that before turning 30, I'll have two kids. At 40, I want to look as young as I can, so now I'm 38 and I'm living my life on my own terms and conditions while my kids are grown up and they're living their own life. So that's what my target was and I achieved it.
👉🏾 Yes, of course we do live in India. And why do I blame India? It's all over the world.
👉🏾 So while I was pregnant the second time, I was working in a high stress news environment, the newsroom, I was working with one of the leading news channels of India, which is NDTV, and it was considered a woman-dominated organisation. Considering that, one fine day my male colleague who was senior to me, I told him that, okay, I am pregnant, I'll not be able to work on this show further because I have to give a handover anyways. He looked at me with surprise eyes and a very strange look, and he was like, "Oh, your career is gone” in a newsroom. "How dare you plan to have a second child?" So I was like, "It's my wish".
👉🏾 He said, "Oh, so now you have to take a backseat in your career, and now I don't think you will be able to excel the way you want to”. So the kind of vibes I received from him was like, very negative. And the second thing, the same colleague when I returned to work and if I speak his language, he said, "Babu, now you have kids, two kids to take care of, I don't think so, you'll be able to cater prime time requirements, you'll be able to stay late night for the 9:00 PM prime time program. I said, "Why not?". He said "No. Who will take care of your child?". I was like "I am senior enough to do a primetime show. Leave it on me where my kids are and how I manage. It's not your headache, it's mine. Give me what I want to do". We had a back-and-forth argument, and he was trying to convince me that since I'm a mother of two, I should take a show at a junior level, which I refused to. And I said, "Okay you want me to stay in office till 11:00 PM?". He said yes, and he made sure that I leave office by 11 even if there is no work.. That is the kind of challenges we face.
👉🏾 I'll say it's very unfortunate, and the biggest barrier I see is that women are not supported well. I am lucky enough that while I was have my family way I had the full support system from NDTV, my employers NDTV, they had a crèche facility. So the moment you deliver your child, you will get six months maternity leave with a one month of leave clubbed to it. So seven months you are free to do your mommy role.
👉🏾 The second good part was that there was a full-fledged crèche, with five nannies, two nursery trainers, one office doctor, one homeopathic doctor every week and they will not take more than six kids in one shift. Mother will have full access to the camera and it was within the premises. I like to stress on that within the premises crèche facilities is very important, because when a mother returns to work after giving birth to a life, she's so attached to that life that she will not like to stay long hours without that little one. So the liberty was that while working, I can go any time to see my child, however many times I feel like no one is going to ask me.
👉🏾 My work should not suffer, rest it was my choice. So I nurtured my kids while working professionally, which is a privilege many women are not able to avail. In fact, in a very recent conversation with Ms. Smriti Irani I said you have made maternity leave mandatory. You should also make crèche facility mandatory within the premises of the office or in the same building. Three, four corporates can pool and have one crèche. So that the mother is not anxious, she can see her child, she doesn't have separation anxiety, and she can do a work life balance. And that ways we'll be able to get more women in leadership role. Secondly, if you have an ailing parent, in-laws or your family, you should be offered work from home facility.
👉🏾 So you give a job to a woman, she will do magic. Don't ask her what time she's doing. You assign her, she might sit at midnight and finish that work with all her dedication. So I say how we can welcome women to leadership positions to the boardroom, is by supporting them, nurturing them, giving them what they want and unconditionally without telling them, "Oh, this is a favour we are doing" the moment you do a favour it will not be liked by many women like me.
👉🏾 Indeed very important and let me tell you what I am, I am because I had a woman mentor who was a mother of three, who was in a leadership role, and totally understood how to support a woman. She knew, if I tell her, my child is unwell, I will take leave tomorrow. She said, Yes, that's your right. Do it. And we will take care of the work the next day. So we should have women who support each other. Women who are in leadership role should know what a woman needs to give her best. So mentors are really important and women mentors do magic if they really support women.
👉🏾 And sponsorships are required, specially in the case of women where they take a break in their career. Let me tell you, I have so many of my friends who were on the peak of their career and they had to take a break just to take care of parents, family, child nurturing, and when I met them after three, four years, they were totally under confident. They were not the same ones. They had hesitation going out, they had hesitation speaking. So that gap is there and they were the most talented pool from the industry. If they would have been nurtured, well sponsored, they would've been valuable assets for the industry, for the corporate, for any organisation. Unfortunately, they were not mentored well, they were not sponsored. It's the industry's loss apart from what they lost.
👉🏾 I'd like to take the liberty of saying four things
👉🏾 What comes to my mind often, the foremost is empathy. Without empathy, no one will flourish or excel. That's a must . Second is, trust and appreciating the uniqueness of each individual because each individual, each professional is unique in his or her own way.
👉🏾 So we should respect that, empathise with them, appreciate them, trust them. And the last thing which I'll say is freedom of thoughts and freedom of speech, which is most important. See, the biggest concern for organisation is when the most passionate people become quiet. And you know why they become quiet? They become quiet because they are not trusted and they don't have that freedom of expressing their thoughts and speech.
👉🏾 So all these things, combined together will be a huge change and the organisation will gain a lot if they follow these for everyone, irrespective of gender, irrespective of caste, or irrespective of special ability which the individual posses.
👉🏾 Certainly women leaders are different from men and I feel that women are better managers, they are better organisers because the one thing which they really follow is empathy, and whoever follows empathy will be a successful leader.
👉🏾 So you should understand the concern of your employee. You should identify their skill and be human, and I feel women are exceptional in giving that human touch to everything. So while my leadership style has always been a transformational and affiliative mix of leadership style, I largely believe connecting with people and giving that human touch that's for the growth of the organisation. And the second thing which I follow is that, there are two goals; one is the organisational growth and one is the personal growth. So being a leader, one should see the team members are growing personally, they are climbing the ladder positively or not. If they're not climbing, then it's the fault of the line manager, it's the fault of the leader. So a leader should always be ready to up skill the employees and their teammates.
👉🏾 First thing which comes to top of my mind is be yourself. Be yourself. Don't be afraid of anything, don't be afraid of getting judged, follow your heart and mind and speak up for the right thing. And be a support to a woman, I always keep repeating myself. Empowered women, empower women. Be that empowered woman who's always their selflessly smiling and empowering another woman without her knowing about it and without just saying that you are doing it. Don't say, just do it and try to pull as many woman as you can. And the second mantra is never, ever try to be perfect. Be happy with your imperfections, don't try to do things perfectly instead of try to do things positively. And have your own space, I firmly believe when you are happy from inside, you pamper yourself while you upgrade your skills, then only you'll be able to take care of your family. If you are not happy, you are not satisfied with yourself, you will not be able to give the best to your family, to your organisation or to anyone around.
👉🏾 Well, that's a difficult task, but I feel that, I've been practicing it for last 15 years and now I'm pro at it. The first month after to it; Define your objectives. Once you are clear in your head what your objectives are, then you divide your time. I know this is my time, this is my children's time, this is my time to up skill myself. And I have basically trained my kids that way, that if it's a Sunday, two hours, I'm sleeping, they are not going to knock my door because they know that's my me time. Similarly, whatsoever comes on a Saturday between that particular time, I will say no to it because that's my time for my children, my family.
👉🏾 So I feel, a work-life balance is very important and a very disciplined routine is important. Second thing, which I really follow in my life is yoga and meditation. That keeps you fit and your mind fit. You meditate and you will feel the energy and the positivity and you'll be able to focus on what you want rather than thinking thousand things at a time.
👉🏾 So what I do is I divide my time and I focus on what is important to do that time, and I try to maintain the timetable. So that's my mantra. Tough question, but yes, I'll say don't be rebel, listen to your parents because they're more experienced and they have seen life closely than what you have seen. Don't always feel that, you know, Okay, the parents are the barriers or they will not give you the right advice. Just follow your dreams, follow your passion and be yourself. Once again I'll say that, that once you are yourself, everything follows.
👉🏾 Thank you. Thank you for having me over. I hope we gather some insight and we'll be able to support more women through this and we'll keep doing these kind of sessions more often.
Follow Tehseen Zaidi:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAACQkX2cBcGCvKELC9sDTg_AGFlpyuSHw7nU&keywords=tehseen%20zaidi&origin=RICH_QUERY_SUGGESTION&position=0&searchId=4c4c3be2-fbd3-4065-9d8f-88e61057a5ff&sid=42d
Important Links:
👉🏾 https://www.exchange4media.com/pr-and-corporate-communication-news/diversity-is-only-about-numbers-its-inclusivity-that-we-need-to-think-about-123322.html

84: Building sustainable livelihoods in rural India: A conversation with Dhruvi Shah, CEO Axis Bank Foundation

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
In the 84th Episode of The Elephant in the Room Podcast, I spoke with Dhruvi Shah, Executive Trustee and CEO of Axis Bank Foundation about her journey as a banker and transitioning to working for the foundation.
In the episode we talked about the work being done by Axis Bank Foundation in the ‘sustainable livelihoods’ in rural India, priorities for the Foundation, the state of the social sector in India. We also chatted about 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The importance of taking into account the cultural context of local communities to solve problems
👉🏾 Grant funds as a catalyst to enable local communities to access credit from government programmes, build capacity, form SHGs etc
👉🏾 Measuring return on investment - for every rupee the Foundation spends, the Foundation is able to leverage between five to seven rupees
👉🏾 Changing operating model of foundations in the social sector today, where they are no longer just grant making bodies but also implementers of projects.
👉🏾 Changing priorities in a post Covid world - supporting community health initiatives and rural youth
👉🏾 Sustainability not being the destination - but focusing on the lifecycle of the journey
👉🏾 Allowing communities to experience the learning curve and acknowledging failure
👉🏾 Build the capacity of NGOs to enable them to grow as an organisation. The need for competitive pay to attract the best talent
👉🏾 Existential challenges facing the social sector in India
“So like I said, we've been doing rural livelihoods since 2010, giving us like 12 years. At an operating level, there are two or three opportunities where we need to kind of invest further. One, is on the communities participation in the markets, they're now able to produce more than subsistence. They are going to engage and interact with the market. So how do you build that capacity to have informed engagement with the market? And on the other side concerns around ecological sustainability, degradation. That's kind of two spectrums of the value chain. Now, this is more on the operating side. We are at this nice cusp of market and the society and how do we get the communities or the society to demand more from the market and how do we influence the market to be profitable at the bottom of the pyramid?” Dhruvi Shah
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 So, I lead Axis Bank Foundation. I'm based in Bombay and I'm a migrant here. So I've been in Bombay for many years now. I came here for work. I was with a ABN AMRO for a 18 years and after that I joined Axis for about six years. I'm a commerce graduate and during the banking I got the opportunity to move to the not-for-profit side. I think it's a nice thing that happened, because it's not only helped me grow professionally, I think even as a person it's been a wonderful journey for me. And I, feel lucky that I have found something that I enjoy doing and something that I also believe in very strongly.
👉🏾 It was definitely not by design or even by accident. I honestly didn't plan as much. And you know, in those days, like 20, 25 years ago, you studied something and you did something it kind of very well aligned and I was lucky to have transversed into something very different than whatever I ever intended to do.
👉🏾 So when I look back, it feels like a very natural progression for me. I was part of the banking system, we've kind of made these silos. But to be very honest, they’re just in the design of operating else, you are still trying to solve a problem, right? And again, being part of a bank you get to see many facets of the economy.
👉🏾 And through banking I got the chance to work on micro finance and that kind of brought me closer to the grassroots so as to speak. I was travelling, I went to the hinterlands of the country. There were many different kinds of challenges that you saw. And all of us were trying to solve this problem from the bank side, from the NGOs trying to solve the problem. And we were at a very good intersection where we could see how the businesses was trying to operate in this space and what is the role that NGOs were playing as frontline organisations, who knew the community so well. And I think it's these explorations and the curiosity that kind of helped me take a decision to move away from what could have been like a mainstream banking career.
👉🏾 And work more closely with the social sector, we used to call it the development sector, to be very honest. So that's how the journey has been, it's neither accident nor design. It's been honestly, a very natural progression, I never felt, Oh, I let go of something and I keep hearing this you know, we let go, sort of sacrifice. No, it was a very natural progression, just kind of aligned to probably how I was as a person and I feel quite proud about it.
👉🏾 So the foundation was set up in 2006 and as any new foundation, we also dabbled in few things, we did education, we did few other things, and probably as a bank, also our travels, conversation with people in the sector, as a bank we felt we understood livelihoods better. Also we wanted to do something wherein you can have some form of transfer to the community. And not exit, exit per se, but there is a clear demarcation between what you transfer to the community and then you fit into the next kind of role.
👉🏾 So that's how we started getting into livelihoods and rural livelihoods because the challenges were much more than in urban livelihood, even today working in an urban landscape is very, very different. So that's how we started the programs on livelihood. We call it sustainable livelihood so that there is a bit of a focus on what we really believed in at that point of time. So livelihood is what we do, we've been doing that since now 2010.
👉🏾 So I mean, what does livelihood mean in a rural community or let's say for a rural household large part of our communities have small parcels of land, what we call a small and marginal farmers, and there are people who are landless. They typically depend on what they grow in one season, which means right after the rains and the rest of the year, they do farm labor, they migrate to cities for work. Our attempt is to try and find income from the assets that they have, by enhancing the scope of what they can do in the village. So the asset that they have is land, so try and see how much of income they can earn from the farm and farm allied activities.
👉🏾 So typically what you need is water, water for irrigation. So work on the water resource development, wherein farmers have enough irrigation to take the second crop and maybe the third crop. Create alternates, which means, let's say livestock, could be micro enterprises, so that they have a second or a third source of income. I mean this is what we call creating a basket of livelihood. What happens gradually is that two or three sources of income get developed, the farmer has cash income which allows him to migrate for lesser months than before, allows them to migrate out of choice than distress migration. Farmers or families who do not have land find it a little more difficult. So the focus there becomes creating livestock as a major source of income. They always have some small parcel of land, so try and see if they can do vegetable cultivation, they can set up micro-enterprises around the rural value chains. Credit is a very important part of enhancing any kind of livelihoods. And there are many programs available, so try and link them to some sort of credit form collectives, like self help groups, farmer producer groups, so on so forth. It takes about three to four years to be able to confidently say that the incomes have now stabilised and will continue for a long period of time. So that's what we call as sustainable livelihoods.
👉🏾 So we work with the NGOs. We very early on realised there is a set of organisations who know the local grass root issues very, very well. They also know the cultural context in which communities live. And I think that's a very, very important part of knowing how to solve a problem with them because it's not a mechanical process. It's a process which a lot of trust building is required and until you know the community and in the context in which they live you cannot really help them solve the problem. It's very easy to go and solve the problems for somebody, but sustainability comes in when people take more ownership. So we found that the NGOs are skilled to do that, so we work with NGOs.
👉🏾 Do we work simply on grant making? No, we don't just cut a cheque to an NGO to say, Okay, do what you do. When we started the livelihood program, we did a lot of research , conversations moved around in the communities, in the villages. And we've co-created this program, it's the same program that we implement across the geography that we do. It evolves over a period of time. Every few years we get together with our partners, we look at the newer challenges that are emerging, and then kind of design the next step. Our money is used more like a catalytic fund. There are many funds which are available for the community, there are several government programs, like I said, there is credit, which is available. We don't want to replace any of it, we actually can't, right? Grant money is very tiny in the whole scheme of things. So let's use our money as a catalytic fund to bring all of these things that are designed for the community, available for the community. So a lot of access, capacity building, joining the dots, collectives, all of that kind of work is facilitated through our grant. Back of the envelope calculations, for every rupee that we spend, we are able to leverage anywhere between five to seven rupees, for the community. And that is what kind of triggers largest change than what just our grant money could have done. So that's how the operating model is.
👉🏾 So no, our priority remain livelihood and will remain livelihood and became very evident in Covid that creating sustaining incomes, especially in the rural area is even more important than before. It gives families certain sort of stability, right?
👉🏾 Yet there were changes, there were some things which became very apparent which may not have kind of been so important. So a couple of things one, we really found health as I mean, something that one should now focus on, right? It was there always, but it just gave us an opportunity as larger number of stakeholders to acknowledge that yes, health needs support. Youth in the village, that's a segment that we don't typically focus on, right? And these are the youth who are educated or they're youth who are not interested in everyday kind of farming. They want to do something different and they are people who typically migrate short term, long term, and they also want to try and see if something in the rural India is possible. So that's a segment we kind of want to focus on. So I think the focus on livelihood remains, what kind of emerged as newer priorities will seamlessly fit into the design at some point of time, and we've started kind of focusing on these things. Any design takes time, it takes time to gather resources, it takes time to design a program. But it did open our eyes to newer challenges which are to be kind of looked at post covid. It also gave us time to think through things.
👉🏾 So you know, sustainability is not a destination. It's a very ideal space to be. It's not a destination, it's the journey. So success is not about what you will achieve in four years, five years, because it takes time to change, make any kind of change. You're working with people, you're working with human beings, you're working with families. So one of the critical thing we like to focus on is the process part of it. If your processes are working today, you will get certain sort of desired outcomes, but if you just wait for something to happen with assumptions in three, four years, there is going to be a lot of unpredictability. And rural lives are very, the conditions in which you operate are very unpredictable.
👉🏾 So focus on the processes and what are these processes that I'm talking about? So it's getting the right ingredients in place. It's getting the community involved at every stage, this slows things down, right? If I take a very simple and a basic example, if I go to a farmer and tell him, I'm gonna dig a well for you, he's not one saying no, right? He'll say, Okay, come dig a well, I mean, what have I to lose? But if you want to get the whole community together, for them to decide who needs that well, where should the well be, how will you do the water sharing, who will own the decision making?
👉🏾 This process is a longer process, but it's a more sustainable process because you have the chance of having that well in the right place, by right place, I mean where the water will be. You have scope of helping more farmers and families because there is water sharing. Now, these are processes which will give you a certain outcome, but these are processes that take time. So for us, measuring what will work, what'll sustain, comes through assessing the processes which the organisations follow, and that's where we partner with a certain kind of organisation, it's a continuous exercise. It's not something you measure, at three years or four years. You do assessments and all of that. But it's something that you do on an ongoing basis through engagement with our partners, with the communities, sometimes by simply listening to the communities and most importantly be agile. I think that's very, very important to be. We also have to understand that the area in which we operate is a very high risk area, so as much as there are successes, there are failures.
👉🏾 Sometimes it's important to let the community go through their learning curves. Like anybody who's trying to learn, gain confidence and trust, it's important that they're allowed to make certain mistakes. You may know it'll not work, they have traditional knowledges, it's okay to sometimes let it run its course and be there with the community as they are learning in a new journey which is very unknown to them. So we have to be mindful of these aspects as well.
👉🏾 Let them have their conflicts. Let them find a solution. They know how to deal with conflicts when they will happen later. So it's important to allow a learning journey for the communities you're working with.
👉🏾 Oh there are many areas. I think post covid also and post changes in how the funding is going to happen. See the sector has always evolved, if we kind of look at last 50 years or 70 years of it. But these are too many changes happening at the same time, it is sort of unprecedented and transformation is not easy. With this change of nature of funding and that's going to remain like that for a long period of time, organisations are required to change at an operating level, and this is not without heartaches, right? So all of us are going through that and any sector goes through that, and I'm hoping something more stable or better may merge out of it. Again, it'll all depend on how we as practitioners kind of shape it up in the future, right? So the onus equally lies on all of us. The other challenges, and these are going to become bigger is that any organisation, you're working with organisation and institutions, there is a need to build them as organisations. So there are very limited opportunities for NGOs to build onto their corpus which allows them to grow as an organisation.
👉🏾 And it becomes very difficult for NGOs to operate without any kind of equity. So, that's a challenge. There are opportunities because there's a lot of philanthropic funding now coming in, other than corporate CSR and that's an opportunity which wasn't there so much at past. But now it depends on are you able to capitalise on this new source of funding to build organisations? Are you willing to kind of walk halfway to do what is required? But the opportunity does kind of exist. HR continues to honestly be challenge in the sector. And like all the organisations post Covid, there was a lot of attrition in the sector as well. Again, a lot is linked to how local you are.
👉🏾 The sector also lacks pay parity. The salaries in the sector don't match up to any other sector, so I think that's something which should change, allowing an equal opportunity for people to make a choice of working in the social sector.
👉🏾 I sleep very well.
👉🏾 We see challenges every day, but it should also bother you. Right? So I'm not saying there are things that bother me immensely. But I have reached a level where I can sleep with those challenges with me. I feel there is a disproportionate focus on scale. NGOs are not designed for scale, they are not supposed to solve the problem, the entire problem. Right?
👉🏾 They're designed to find a solution in many challenges that are there and help other people, the government, the businesses, community themselves to solve this problem. So this disproportionate focus on scale, sustainability just with the NGO is not the solution. So I think this bothers me a lot because a lot of our conversation you are not able to scale up. I am not designed to scale up, right? You know there is this inherent conflict that I see, it also takes away from the responsibility from people who are supposed to solve the problem at scale. Also the grant, like I said, the sector works in challenges that have not been solved, the challenges that happen every day. So there's a very high risk of success and failure there. And I think with the ask of positive outcomes alone. And many other sort of funding that is trying to come, we are trying to change this inherent nature of risk funding, right?
👉🏾 CSR grants are the highest risk-taking fund, and that is what is allowing NGOs to walk that path of finding difficult challenges to solve. I think that shouldn't change, it'll again, kind of push things behind if you don't take up those challenges. And we are very, very silent on the role of failures in finding successes. A lot of what we see as success also comes after a lot of experimenting, piloting, and there are a lot of failures. Only out of failures you know, this will work, this will not work. So two things happens, one, you're creating a perception of everything that happens has to succeed. Second, you're not sharing failures for others to learn and make the same mistake, and if you keep making the same mistake, you're also kind of...

83: The building blocks of an inclusive organisation with Sushma Uthappa-Schwerdt

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
Racism/casteism comes in various forms across the world, sometimes it is overt and sometimes it is coded. In either form it negatively impacts the life and life chances of millions of people who move to a different country to seek a better or more stable future. Sometimes it can break people and other times it makes them more resilient and more determined.
Did you know that Sweden is a country where every fourth resident(24.9) has a foreign background and every third (32.3) has at least one parent born abroad. But, does this diversity translate into a more inclusive country or workforce? Sweden’s recent election results are telling.
For Sushma, the experience of looking for employment at the start of her stay in Sweden was deeply disheartening. In her own words, “Recruitment bias (unconscious) has worked against me in 99 out of 100 job applications. That gives me 1 interview opportunity in 100+ submitted applications; where I check 100% (more or less) of the job requirements on the ad.”
Unfortunately, this is not unique to Sweden, or any one country. My own experiences in the UK, a couple of years back were similar if not worse. I survived but I am still smarting from the experience.
In addition to being the Head of Talent Acquisition, Northern Europe at Transcom, Sushma has also been involved in the local parliament in Lund since five years. She is determined to move the needle and contribute to building a fairer society.
In this episode we spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Her experiences growing up in different parts of India and the world. The absence of a sense of belonging or affinity to any one culture
👉🏾 Her move to Sweden, and challenges she faced seeking work in the country
👉🏾 Diversity washing
👉🏾 The building blocks of an inclusive organisation
👉🏾 The need to dismantle decades old work practices
👉🏾 Bias free recruitment and the myth of average human being around which workplaces are designed
“But then when I was trying to look for a job again, just recently maybe about a year ago it was the same challenges. This time it was a hundred-odd positions that I'd applied to I only had three companies that reached out. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, is it better to be rejected, interviewed and rejected? Or is it better to not be seen at all? What is the lesser of the two evils, right? And I feel like I'd rather that companies met me and then if they didn't like me, did not continue with me in the process. But I don't get the opportunity to present myself, I wish we could do more. And I usually apply for roles where I know I could at least fit 80 to a 100 percent of what's written on the job ad” Sushma Uthappa-Schwerdt
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha, I'm really glad to be a part of this and thanks for reaching out. I'm calling in from Sweden today, this is where I'm based, currently. A little background about myself, I was born in India, lived a little bit all over India. Everything from Chennai to Kashmir, Assam, Delhi, Mumbai. So we've travelled around a lot and also lived abroad quite a lot in my childhood in countries like Kenya and Sri Lanka, I've also lived in the US. The last 10 years I've been in Sweden.
👉🏾 So when it comes to my background and culture, that's a hard question, I would say, because, I am a mixture of all these people and all these places that I've been and lived in. So I don't have an association with a single culture or even belonging in that sense. The good and the bad. So yeah, that's a little bit about my background. Very short.
👉🏾 It's been about five months since I joined Transcom. I head up the talent acquisition space here, basically taking care of all things talent attraction and recruitment for the Northern European cluster. I've spent a good portion of my career, it's been about 18 years within talent acquisition. It's an area that I've stuck to for a long, long time because of my passion with recruiting and attracting people, changing people's careers and lives and also changing the shapes of organisations with diversity and diverse recruitment.
👉🏾 That's a good question. Diverse workforce, yes, we do have a diverse workforce. What I have found lacking is diverse workforce at all levels of the organisation, in all sectors of the society. I see that there's a huge work that needs to be done. So we're lacking the diversity at senior levels of management, mid-levels to senior levels of management, for example.
👉🏾 Yeah. I can imagine, it's not unique to Sweden. It's probably in most places, in most companies. But there's a lot of talk about it, so I hope we can start.
👉🏾 I think a lot of times companies they think that they can hire, a head of diversity, you know, ED&I head and then there's a lot of BIPOC marketing campaigns. This is not enough to secure diverse workforce and inclusive workforce I would say. I think organisations really need to sit and work, hands-on, on making sure that there is diversity in all levels of the organisation.
👉🏾 And the focus has been, I would say, a lot on gender. If I look at Sweden, it has been gender equality and gender diversity in that sense, but we need to go beyond that. Look at people of colour, ethnicity, race, we need to look at diverse abilities, LGBTQ+ communities, that we don't have in all levels, and when we don't have diverse workforce in all levels, we don't have diverse solutions. So a lot of the organisations don't have systems and infrastructure in place to cater to diverse workforce, because solutions have not been built by diverse workforce. So there's a gap that needs to be filled.
👉🏾 Yeah, for sure. I moved to Sweden about 10 years ago and I started my journey in applications, job applications. And I think I was a little naive to think that an MBA in India and a background with companies like Yahoo and Citibank would land me a job easily in Sweden. So there was a lot of naiveness in that, but very soon I learned that it does not matter what your background is. There's so many systematic biases in the recruitment process, which hindered me in getting a job. So 200 odd applications and zero interviews and this was about, 10 years ago.
👉🏾 It really broke me, the experience and it broke my confidence and I decided that I needed to move out of the country and move somewhere else. But as a last resort, I got an opportunity to intern with a bank, in Sweden and I had a three month internship opportunity. It was this foot in, that actually led me in getting a job at the bank and continuing my journey there and moving within the bank and the whole Ingka group family that's where I worked with. So that was great, so I was able to get that foot in.
👉🏾 But then when I was trying to look for a job again, just recently maybe about a year ago it was the same challenges. This time it was a hundred-odd positions that I'd applied to I only had three companies that reached out. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, is it better to be rejected, interviewed and rejected? Or is it better to not be seen at all? What is the lesser of the two evils, right? And I feel like I'd rather that companies met me and then if they didn't like me, did not continue with me in the process. But I don't get the opportunity to present myself, I wish we could do more. And I usually apply for roles where I know I could at least fit 80 to a 100 percent of what's written on the job ad
👉🏾 I think this is happening to me because of couple of reasons, so first of all, I'm in a non-niche segment, which means that you get hundreds of applications in these roles. Secondly, I'm trying to look of course for leadership-level positions, so I can head up the space or at least leadership level, manage teams.
👉🏾 Thirdly, I think most recruitment systems are biased and when I apply, my name is not a common name, people have a hard time associating, where does Sushma come from? You know, you don't click on it. So recruitment systems are designed in such a way that on the backend, when a recruiter receives an application, so that you apply for ahead of talent acquisition, the recruiter receives the application, the recruiter has to click on your name to open your application. So here you have the first unconscious bias sitting in, right? So when you have well-known names or easily recognised names versus Sushma, which you don't recognise, you have a tendency to be filtered away unconsciously, I don't think it's a very conscious bias.
👉🏾 So I don't think anybody's looking at my application at the first stage itself. So, I think this is where we need to start with change. Our recruitment systems need to be more inclusive. People in organisations, heads of recruitments, need to see how can we change recruitment systems to not have this as the first, click for the recruiters to look into
👉🏾 There is a lot on that. But I would think that the majority of the recruitment systems today do not have that option. So a lot of times, due to certain reasons and regulations recruitment systems the name is always a mandatory field or a required field. If you apply directly to a hiring manager, maybe at that point of time you could hide, but not from a recruitment system perspective, a lot of recruitment systems that I've used and, and seen in the market, the name is the primary factor there, that you click into.
👉🏾: Quite a few, I would say, but I would start with structural changes in the systems and infrastructure within the organisation. Everything from how we have our recruitment systems built, for example or how we work with diverse workforce you know, inclusion starts first. You need to try to think about what are the different people out there? What are their needs? I don't think today workforces are built for that. I think workforces look at what is the average human being and systems are designed based on that infrastructure, work is designed based on the average human being, but the average human being does not exist.
👉🏾 And then I think it's very crucial with continuous learning. So people in the organisation are aware of this. And aware that we need diverse workforce at all levels to create diverse solutions. We need recruiters and recruitment leaders and recruitment teams, partnering with hiring managers, influencing hiring managers in the decision to recruit diverse workforce. Recruiters are the gatekeepers of the organisation, right? They also need the education and unconscious bias, and they need the education on recruitment bias. We cannot eliminate bias, we cannot eliminate recruitment bias, but we need more education and learning in this space. Constant learning and real-life experiences. And a lot of times you don't get this, If you don't have a diverse workforce and you don't see the diverse challenges in a diverse workforce, you don't see it then you're doing as is. And then you have a few diverse, elements in your organisation, which you tend to portray up in your marketing campaigns, but we need to go beyond that.
👉🏾 Exactly. And that's because inclusion plays such a huge role here, right? That you really truly understand the diverse needs of different people. Just as an example, if you take a person of colour or a person with Indian origin, right? We have a tendency to take care of our elderly parents very differently from how the Swedish society would probably take care of the elderly parents. Here you have the government, the society that takes care of it. Whereas if you come from India for example, it's usually down to the children to take care of your ageing parents as an example. If organisations understood this that if you have an Indian and you have a Swede, an Indian would probably have a more higher need to probably be back home in India now and then when you have ageing parents to take care of them versus a Swede who lives here doesn't have that.
👉🏾 It's the same thing with systems, right? If you have deaf candidates that you employ or if you have, blind candidates, do we have systems and infrastructure to support them to do the work, that is coming from, you know, a central fund and not something that is, you know, okay, this hiring manager has made this recruitment, so it's this hiring manager's responsibility to fulfil that need.
👉🏾 No, we should talk more about it, whether it's cultures, or if you take the LGBT community. Like I was talking to a friend the other day, and she was talking about how the challenges when she's moving as an expat, the challenges of moving her pets with her, she and her wife have a tough time getting approval to move the pets. But whereas if you are a heterosexual couple and you are moving with your children, nobody's questioning you if you're having two children or ten children and you will get the support, you will get help with their schools. We need to hear these stories, so we are empathetic and we understand different needs and we accommodate all that and with that you build an inclusive culture with diverse workforce. So it's both of them, it can clash sometimes we want to try to create diverse workforce by recruiting diverse, but if you don't have an inclusive culture, and if you don't see these needs, we're not going to be able to tackle it. Another last example I want to give is like, for example, you know, there are people who are nocturnal, you know, we know that creative people work better in the evenings and in the nights. We are genetically built like that, right.
👉🏾 But we don't have organisations that have catered to that, right? We are still going by the industrial revolution, you know, eight to five has come from those times. And we're still sticking to that, right? And, you know, creative workforces, you will get the better of them if they're working in the nights. We need to give that space, we need to understand these different ideas and that people are different and accommodate it. And this is what I mean by infrastructure and systems in place within organisations that accommodate not the average human being but everyone.
👉🏾 I think its stemming from frustration after you go through hundreds of job applications and not getting an opportunity to get a foot in. To do what you have done for 18 years, I have experience within this field and I cannot get an opportunity. And I would say when I apply a majority of the companies I look at. I look at, you know, what if they work in sustainability, what if they work on the ED&I spectrum? And they're fantastic you know, on the websites, but in reality, you don't even look at an application with a name like Sushma.
👉🏾 It boils down for me to think that it's a lot about marketing, you know, we cannot have ED&I leaders that are marketers, fantastic marketers. No, we need to make true change and we need real empathy in this area and we need to collectively move this forward. So I really want to, push that out there. Organisations reflect, look at each level of your organisation and see are you truly making change? Are you adopting to all the different needs that are there in the human workforce. So that is why I talk about, we need to be mindful about how much we talk about diversity.
👉🏾 First of all, I think that bias free recruitment does not exist. I mean, we are human beings and we are biased, it's been a source of survival for us. So it does not exist. But what we can do is we can be aware of our biases and we can start talking about it. We can openly talk about it. I know it becomes sometimes a taboo to say that, Oh, I thought like this when I talked to this person, you know? But we need to talk about our biases openly, and recruitment in that sense, can act as a catalyst for building inclusive cultures.
👉🏾 But the thing is, we need to work with them in both ways right. You know, just to check some diversity KPIs. We cannot bring people of, colour or people of diverse abilities of people from the LGBT community just to tick this, because when you bring them in and then you don't have an organisation that is built to take care of these different needs, then they will leave. So we need to work with them simultaneously, so inclusive cultures have to be worked simultaneously and a lot of this has to be done with continuous learning, being open, honest, looking into the internal biases, have forums to talk about this, to talk about experiences of different people.
👉🏾 Forums, where people of colour, people of disabilities, LGBT communities can come and share their experiences because that way we can try to create more awareness and learning on this topic and together work with changing this.
👉🏾 Yeah, I mean that's a very interesting question. I mean, this is a really tricky question for me to answer because I have been struggling with belonging, of course. And I've been trying to go down to the roots of it. And I have as a person lived in different parts of the world at different times, and I don't have a sense of belonging to any place or any culture in that sense inherently. And also, I see that in organisations as well. And I'm not sure if this is for me because of my background and maybe other people have different experiences. But I've had a hard to have a sense of belonging, I've been questioning that quite a lot, you know, I don't feel a sense of belonging in India, for example, right? Even though I have Indian heritage and I've lived there. I have so many, differences there. I don't have a sense of belonging in Sweden, and that's the same thing in the workforce, right? It's different, it's extremely important, I feel for, for getting the most of the individual out that everybody's seen, everybody's heard and everybody's included, even if your needs are maybe weird.
👉🏾 And then you approach it in an empathetic manner. A little bit, like I said, like sleep patterns, if we can meet a person who says, I can't manage this eight to five, because I'm not, I can't wake up in the mornings and be creative. I'm most creative at 11 in the night. How can we as managers and leaders accept that, Okay, there are certain meetings maybe you need to take during the daytime because there are stakeholders that you need to meet, but your creative work can happen after work hours. We're not gonna question when you do work and where you do it from. So we meet even things that you think are weird that need to be included, like, you know what I mean?
👉🏾 Yeah and to be your best self, you need to be yourself and then I think we can unleash so much potential out there that is kind of, boxed into these frameworks that we have set, which are not really inclusive for the many people.
👉🏾 You mean more from

82: Are DEI efforts stalling globally? Nadach Musungu, Inclusion Lead at Kantar and Abhijeet Roy, Senior Growth Leader at Kantar

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000

At the first PRCA EIAC Conference in September this year, Kantar launched its 2022 Inclusion Index. The Inclusion Index covers 24 industries across 14 countries and 18000 respondents. For Kantar a key purpose of the report, is to enable organisations to understand, measure and track and their own progress in developing an inclusive workplaces. Interestingly, there is data from key markets and geographies - so it is easier to figure out progress or lack of in markets.

A shocking but not surprising finding is that DEI progress has stalled. Does this mean that the rhetoric by organisations on equity & inclusion does not match action? From my conversations in the UK, Middle-East and India, I hear the word fatigue a lot during conversations on DEI. What is clear from the report, however, is that employees, customers and clients are noticing the push on DEI but that is not enough with shifting employee expectations and businesses have to work harder to reach the new bar.

According to the report,” Employees want businesses to go beyond DEI campaigns and cultural days. They want to see a stronger focus on driving systemic change.”

To understand the data and insights better, I spoke with Nadach Musungu, Inclusion Lead at Kantar and Abhijeet Roy, Senior Growth Leader at Kantar in this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast.

We started with a conversation on Nadach’s career and journey so far
👉🏾 Her learnings from leading on D&I at big organisations
👉🏾 The Kantar Inclusion Index and the purpose of it
👉🏾 Key insights from the report
👉🏾 The Global engagement gap
👉🏾 Industries performing well
👉🏾 The differences based on geographies?
👉🏾 The need for Cultural intelligence
👉🏾 Why organisations struggle with inclusion
👉🏾 The drivers for inclusion and belonging in an organisation
And the three things she would prioritise on. Thank you Nadach and Abhijeet for this conversation
“The fact remains that for minority groups, experience in the workplace is measurably poorer, driven by a lack of sense of belonging, experience of discrimination and presence of negative behaviours” Kantar Inclusion Index 2022
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾Thank you for having me.
👉🏾 Thank you for having me as well.
👉🏾 So I started my career in market research, and this was purely accidental. I was doing my masters and I was looking to make some money to support me because I was cut off from the bank of mum and dad. And yeah, I fell into market research and I enjoyed it and things kind of evolved and picked up from there.
👉🏾 It was a very interesting space, I worked in various consult consultancies and I worked for various companies in-house. And I was typically the only a black woman, which was to be expected in a way. Not saying that I was kind of not thinking about it, it did have an impact on me, but I numbed myself to the experience. So I just knew that when I go into an organisation it'll only be me within the team or within the entire organisation. And it kind of reminded me of my just general experience in schools, of being the only person but kind of thinking it to be normal. And thinking that that would be the typical experience as well for any ethnic minority.
👉🏾 And when I was thinking about my journey and thinking about how that had an impact on me developing, I kind of had to mimic and shadow other people try to fit in. I didn't want to stick out too much. Even though I loved so much about me and my personality, my uniqueness, and my culture, because I felt like I didn't fit in. I found myself a lot trying to kind of null myself out, or blend in the background and that kind of dulled a lot of my magic. And a lot of my interests or the things that I thought like would've been a valuable asset to an organisation or within a school
👉🏾 And it was only until after I graduated from my masters is when I decided to make the conscious effort to liberate myself from those shackles. And I don't actually know how I did that or what I did, but I just thought, you know what? I am me and I'm gonna be confident in it. And I took big risk in doing that.
👉🏾 And I just felt that my confidence grew, I was more vocal in meetings. I was a little bit more aggressive with my career in terms of the direction that I wanted it to go and the kind of progress that I wanted to see, and it all came from me kind of owning who I was and accepting my difference instead of fitting into the background.
👉🏾 I think the biggest learning for me is how challenging it is for an organisation to step out of fear or their status quo and step into action. On the outside employees, consumers, the audience may think, you know, why can't this organisation just go about and be diverse or just do an inspiring DEI initiative. And my experience has shown me that there are so many complex blocks working behind the scenes. And it involves senior stakeholders, allies, DEI change agents, data, budget it involves all these very complex factors to come together and to align. And then that's where you get to point of action. And at Kantar, having understood that this is actually a very complex process in the back end to get to the action point. And at Kantar, I've been really inspired in making that process easier for clients by harnessing the power of data, by using data to their advantage. Because I know from my experience when I was the client, how difficult it is to get that budget, to get all these different components to come together. And sometimes data, having that as your best friend can help you push things forward. So I feel like that is probably the biggest challenge. And for people who kind of watch on the outside, they think that this happens at the drop of a hat, but in practice it's far more complicated than that.
👉🏾 So the inclusion index was designed to help organisations understand, measure and track their inclusion performance. And by being able to track it and understand how inclusive you are, they were able to see how they are moving on their D&I journey. So see exactly where they are and then kind of create an action plan or a strategy that helps them to move along. And by benchmarking their inclusion performance, it gives them a real sense of what good looks like. So sometimes when you are so focused on your own business, you might feel like, yes, we're really inclusive, but when you are benchmarking against your industry and also against your market, you might start learning and seeing that we're not that inclusive and we've got ways to go.
👉🏾 So that was the whole purpose of it, and it was to really bring about a system of measuring inclusion, because diversity, it's easy to measure and a lot of organisations have come up with a system that allows them to track and measure how diverse they are, although it can still be difficult to kind of collect that data.
👉🏾 But inclusion is slightly more complex and it's something that organisations are not measuring in a standardised way. And we wanted to come in and come up with a formula that allows organisations to measure their inclusion performance and really understand the inclusion experience for employees. And for us if you start with inclusion, then that will impact your diversity numbers because if you are inclusive, truly inclusive, and your company is great for its sense of belonging and there isn't that much discrimination or negative behaviour, it will have a positive impact on your diversity numbers.
👉🏾 Yeah, you mentioned a valid point. D&I is a massive topic and includes so many different components and it's forever evolving. So sometimes when you've got it or you understand it in one area, then that quickly changes. And what we wanted to is kind of drill into this inclusion piece because again we felt like there is not enough attention in understanding the inclusion experience of employees, and we wanted to do that in a standardised way that can be made easy to track and measure and do on a yearly basis.
👉🏾 So we kind of came up with a formula where we looked at the company sense of belonging, the absence of discrimination and the presence of negative behaviour, and we broke the index in these three key areas focusing on looking at how employees feel when it comes to their sense of belonging, and then looking at where there is that discrimination and then the presence of negative behaviour. And all of this focuses on the employee experiences, which was really important to us. The fact that we can actually have such a survey that opens up and focuses on employee experience means that we can look at across many of the protected characteristics, so it's not just tailored to disability or tailored to ethnicity, it's got the range to kind of embody all these other protected characteristics. So that was really the main thinking behind what we would include in the survey.
👉🏾 So I mentioned this at the event and it was quite shocking, it's that really DEI progress has stalled. So we ran the inclusion index in 2018. And measured, what was going on in 2022 to kind of see whether we're growing, whether we're moving forward and we heard all the pledges and we heard business make promises. And after George Floyd's tragedy that kind of ramped up a lot of the DEI conversation. So we wanted to measure and see what is the state of DE & I. And unfortunately, our data shows that the progress has stalled. And that in fact some of the big markets that we have within our benchmark have actually dropped in inclusion score. And there's also other markets that have grown as well and that have really ramped up their inclusion efforts and they're more inclusive. But yes, we kind of see these big discrepancies within market and within industries. But when we speak about that, it can be kind of disheartening and shocking as well. But what we learn is that the fact is the expectations have actually increased.
👉🏾 So in 2018, where it may have been okay or good enough to just talk about, DEI initiatives or training sessions or cultural days or awareness, on the topic. In 2022 employees want to see more, they actually want to see organisations step into systemic change, step into action. So it's not that nobody cares about DE & I, and that's why the stalling is actually that the bar has been risen and now organisations need to focus more on being actioned and to drive their DEI agenda forward.
👉🏾 Yeah, the conversation is still going and the reality is when we look at our data, we're still dealing with those hard truths. So for instance, with disability one and two, who identify as disabled feel that opportunities to progress have been restricted by senior colleagues. And even for gender, almost half of the women in our study report people taking sole credit for shared effort. So we are still seeing that minority groups experience, poorer lived experiences in the workplace, but it's now this focus on that systemic change, how do we still tackle these issues and decrease these numbers by focusing on systemic change?
👉🏾 Yeah, so the global engagement gap kind of teases on the systemic change that I spoke about. And what we're seeing, is this gap between diversity and then the inclusion. So yes there may be diversity within an organisation and organisations are attracting more talent, but then there is this gap in terms of making sure that they are inclusive and that also helps them to retain talent actually and to develop them.
👉🏾 So that is something that we will seeing and employees actually flagged that they recognise that their organisation is being diverse and inclusive. I think 71% of employees said that they believe that their organisation, actively taking steps to be more diverse and inclusive and about 46% said that they personally benefited from DEI in their organisation. But then the engagement gap is that they still believe that their company could do more to be diverse and inclusive. And some employees actually flagged and said that they would like to see more diversity in C-suite positions, they would like to see closer monitoring of inclusion and diversity linked to their performance. So this is where the engagement gap is coming in, so we know employees can see that their organisation is doing stuff around year DE & I, but actually how is it being executed and is it engaging with all the protected characteristics?
👉🏾 Yes. So just to kind of back up what Nadach is saying, this is very akin to what we seen consumer behaviour.
👉🏾 You know, the difference between what people think and how people act or what people do. So it's a very similar situation where companies are thinking of certain actions or certain programs, but when it actually comes to doing it it's quite different because it's all about behaviour thereafter. So Nadach was pointing out, once you recruit the kind of diverse talent coming in, into the organisation, how do you treat them, how do people behave with them? How do they feel as part of the organisational culture? So is there any work being done there and from what we are seeing here is that might be a gap at that place in terms of people feel that they belong to that organisation, which is why the actual aspect of belonging is not really playing out that well, despite them being attracted to that company upfront.
👉🏾 Yeah. In our inclusion index, our benchmark study reveals that the professional services are leading the score when it comes to inclusive industries.
👉🏾 Our global average for the inclusion index is at 55% and the professional services is about at 64%, so they are over indexing. And then you also have the charity non-for-profit following right behind and professional services. Some of the industries where there is lots of growth that is needed is the entertainment industry, security and defence industry as well, where we can see that there needs to be a little bit more growth. And in the PR and marketing industry, we rank about 15 out of the 25. So again indicating that there is this inclusion gap for us to really address and, and focus.
👉🏾 Yes, there are, we can actually see that 8 of the 10 markets we examined in 2018 have dropped in their inclusion score. So when we are looking at their score from 2018, for instance, in Canada they were at 66% with the inclusion score and then in 2022 they dropped to 57% and some other big markets as well, like the US see similar patterns. They were at 66% and they dropped to 56% as well. And then you also have markets such as Mexico, which you know has some challenges around certain areas of DEI, there are some challenges there culturally. And in 2018 they were at 43%, and in 2022 they've risen to 58%. So you've got some markets that have shown some real growth as well and then others where there is a bit of a lag. In the UK there's been no shift. So we were at 56% in 2018 and we're at 56% in 2022.
👉🏾 No, I think all the markets they have their nuances and they have different tensions. So the events or the issues that are affecting, for instance, Mexico or the US, are going to be very different to what's going on in the us even with DE & I. And in the UK it's not that DE & I is not an important topic anymore, or everybody's decided to rest their laurels. It's again this prospects that we are anticipating that this systemic change. DEI is a topic in the UK that is more developed in other markets, so a lot of people have heard about it enough they understand it a lot of organisations are talking about it and being bold in the conversation. But now the gap is, okay, how do we get to that systemic change? How do we implement changes that actually drive impact when it comes to representation?
👉🏾 Representation at C-suite and senior level, also pay gap, how do we address that ethnicity pay gap as well. So these are all these kind of systemic and structural change that people are going to be more interested in, and keen to see in the developed markets where DEI has really evolved and where markets where they're at, I guess, the earliest stage of the conversation.
They'll see growth relating to their kind of area, so maybe growth on gender and or growth around LGBTQ plus the conversation in that area picking up. So I wouldn't look at the markets like for like, just because they are all nuanced and they are very, very different.
👉🏾 Yeah, I think it's so important understanding these market sensitivities because again, when you are trying to collect data and you're trying to understand your workforce, you don't want to put them in danger.
👉🏾 So questions around sexuality in certain markets that it's a crime. You don't want to explore that or even kind of endanger or put your employees at risk by looking into that. And then there also those cultural influences that will impact where it can be accepted, it can be a legal question to ask, but culturally it's frowned upon so nobody will share.
👉🏾 And I think it's something that when you are looking at different markets, you have to consider and you have to make sure that you've got your eye or your finger on the pulse on that. When you are looking at DE & I, and you're looking at it in different markets, I think it's so important to allow those local markets to have their voices and to make sure that you are talking about their nuances. Because what happens sometimes is when we're focused on the bigger markets or maybe the western markets, that sometimes washes out all the different nuances and all the uniqueness in other markets when we're looking at DEI. And it's so important that those are highlighted to make sure that strategies or action plans are relevant to the market. So anywhere possible. I always think that it's important to look at that and to consider those nuances and those sensitivities.
👉🏾 I think the big struggle with inclusion is the fact that it is difficult to measure or organisations DE & I, leads haven't got into a system of measuring it in a very systematic way. So we are all comfortable with diversity numbers and it's easy to build representation targets around that. But actually when it comes to...

81: Conversations with DEI leaders: Richa Singh (she/her)  VP HR - D&I and CSR at Max Life Insurance

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 09:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:
We all know that countries and cultures are not monolithic and homogeneous. That when we speak about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), we are at different points in our journey; sensitivity and awareness levels may wildly differ from country to country within a region or a continent. So, the drivers for DEI will differ from one geography to another. For practitioners to not force fit HQ policies in local markets, a level of cultural intelligence is critical to understanding this.
Over the coming weeks I will share insights from my conversations with DEI leaders and C-Suite from the Indian subcontinent in an attempt to better understand the priorities, socio-cultural barriers, legislation, and best practice.
My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, this week, is Richa Singh (she/her)  VP HR - D&I and CSR at Max Life Insurance. In 2020 Richa was featured in the Top 50 Global Ally Executives Outstanding list by Yahoo Finance. In this episode I spoke with Richa about her DEI journey, acknowledging her privilege and becoming an advocate and ally.
We also spoke about how organisations could leverage the current buzz around all issues of inclusion and diversity
👉🏾 The biggest challenges to building an inclusive business
👉🏾 The relevance/importance of ERGs to building an inclusive organisation
👉🏾 DEI talk vs action. The slow pace of change and movement on pay, representation and culture
👉🏾 What she finds rewarding and frustrating in her line of work
👉🏾 Her advise to those starting on the journey
👉🏾 Businesses with great stories to tell
And what inspires her and keep her motivated.
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾Thank you for having me Sudha, it's a pleasure.
👉🏾 I'm you know, usually not very good at doing this, talking about oneself, but as a means of introduction I'm Richa, I'm based out of Delhi, India.
👉🏾 I'm a cisgender woman, my pronouns are she and her. I'm also a single mother who is a mother to a teenage son. And in work front I lead DEI and CSR at Max life insurance. I'm also a certified coach and a mentor to young women. I've had almost 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry.
Richa: I used to head learning and development and diversity and inclusion, for a group of five-star hotels. And I also helped set up the Keshav Suri Foundation, which is a not-for-profit organisation, working for the inclusion of the LGBTQ youth in India.
👉🏾 Actually, I love telling that story Sudha I completely acknowledge my privilege. Raised in the capital city of India, I had the best of education, I had very supportive parents. Not once I think growing up, did I ever feel that there was any difference between the way me or my brother were treated, which is actually the case in many Indian families. So that difference was never apparent to me.
👉🏾 I went to a co-ed school and boys and girls were treated as equals and healthy competition. So I think this was a blind spot and I kind of grew up with the understanding that I was a very inclusive person.
👉🏾 And when I started in my previous organisation, this talk about diversity and equity and inclusion was a very fresh topic in India. Somewhere in the year, 2017, end 18, that was also the time when section 377 got scraped. So almost every organisation, I like to say came out of their own closets. and we're talking about DEI, Indian and multinational companies. I was fortunate enough to be working in a company that took this agenda very, very seriously.
👉🏾 And we were more concerned, I would say, and more focused towards the LGBTQ inclusion front. And I would often ask myself this question that, why do we need to speak about this at all? I mean, people are people and everybody is only being assessed on their merit and what they bring to the table and if that is what we are focusing on then how does it matter what their gender is? What their sexuality is? What their ability or disability is? What their age is? And so many different kinds of diversity that we all bring when we come to work.
👉🏾 So when I started working and interacting more with communities, with organisations, NGOs, and CEOs, working with acid attack survivors, working with people who had a visual disability or speech and hearing disability, is when I realised that there is so much disparity and inequality and inequity in our modern world.
👉🏾 We still have many cobwebs to clear in our heads, and we might come from this place of, you know, merit is king or queen for that matter and we are absolutely impartial and there is fairness and justice. But we don't realise that the skills are actually not tilted in the favour of the marginalised communities, of the minority community, everybody does not have the same starting line.
👉🏾And that's when I understood that there is so much work, absolutely, that needs to be done. And I honestly believe that companies and organisations have this responsibility to the society. We are not just enterprises designed to make profit, we are also enterprises that touch many, many lives. All of our people who come to work also go back home, and if we can influence these people and make a little dent in their very conditioned thought process, and then they go back and talk to their families and their friends and their own little communities that they're part of, I think that's how you really create a ripple effect.
👉🏾 So that's how I got involved and, being a woke person is what I thought I was, I realised that, oh my God, there's so much that needs to be done. And hence, I like to talk about it because we actually have so much work to do.
👉🏾 That's a great question Sudha. So I always say that DEI has a business case, it has a talent case and it has a culture case. So whichever way you look at it, it makes absolute sense and I honestly wonder as to why we had not begun conversation about this earlier.
👉🏾 We are talking about it more and more in the year 2020, especially because we were suffering from the pandemic. One of the things that we've all understood, especially after the pandemic is that nobody can move forward by leaving anyone behind, we have to take everybody along with us.
👉🏾 So when developed countries were not able to share vaccines for examples for developing countries, we know that the virus was mutating itself, was making itself even stronger and hence the second wave and the third wave and the fourth wave, which is now again happening around the world. So it is only when the entire world would get vaccinated, would we actually be able to get rid of coronavirus from our lives.
👉🏾 Why are companies talking about it? Is it fashionable to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion? I would say some of them, yes. And that's the nature of organisations, you know. organisations are competitive in nature and when people are talking about the latest buzzword, I'd say whatever gets people on board.
👉🏾 Initially yes, people will be curious, organisations would be curious to understand what is DEI? Why is everybody talking about? And I would say that's a little part of your battle already won, because when you have people's attention, when you have got their curiosity piqued is when you can actually get their mind share. You can actually get their attention in the boardroom and talk about this.
👉🏾 Any change for it to be effective has to flow from top down. So I think it's very important that right from the CEO, the CXOs and the leadership of the organisation are absolutely convinced of the DEI imperative. It is not something that can be postponed any further, it is not something that you can do at leisure. It is not something that you can say, oh yeah, let's do this another year or let's do it next year. I think it's urgent and it's important because we've all seen trends like the great resignation.
👉🏾 People understood, especially after the pandemic, that what is most important to them is their health and wellbeing. To summarise it I would say that this is something that cannot be postponed any further because it affects you as a company, it affects you as a brand, it affects your mere relevance and existence. And if you were to continue being a great organisation or even continue to exist and be relevant to your customers, you have to understand that this is what is required and needed today, and it cannot be postponed any further.
👉🏾 So that I would say, it's like I said, companies are very competitive in nature, right? So one thing that gets the attention of the CEO and the CXO is how is it that the other company or the competition in your environment is doing better, and one of the reasons why they're doing better is because of their focus in diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, if you were to elaborate the business case of diversity, I would say that I think the most important thing, and that's why most companies go wrong, is because they think diversity is getting more women into the workforce.
👉🏾 Well, that's not it. Diversity is diversity of thought. Because when you have different minds, different experiences, different people coming under one roof and solving a common problem, you will have better solutions. There will be creativity and innovation will be something that will happen very naturally because we all see the world through our own lens. I see the world as a woman, and even within the women folk, there is so much diversity.
👉🏾 Similarly, a person who let's say has a disability, would think completely different from you and me who are able-bodied, Because their life experiences are so different. So something which is completely a blind spot to us and something that we haven't experienced firsthand, we cannot think about that problem. And hence, we cannot think about the solution because for us, the problem doesn't exist.
👉🏾 So I often take this example of the speech to text or, you know voice to text. It was actually developed for people with disability, it was developed for people who could not see and they could just simply speak into their device and it would get typed out and that message would go to the person. But today you know, when I interact with my son, he just doesn't type. He goes onto Google and there's a mic button and he says what he wants to search. So it's benefiting not only people with disability but people at large.
👉🏾 Similarly ramps, for example, we think that ramps are only meant for people who use a wheelchair. All of us, at some point in our life experience some form of disability. Let's say you have a knee issue, and you have arthritis and you cannot climb steps, that's when you understand the importance of a ramp, or let's say you pregnant and you understand the importance of a ramp or a lift or an accessible place. So all of these are structural barriers and hence I think innovation is something that keeps a company going, that makes a company ready for the future.
👉🏾 Let's talk about communication, you and I are sitting in different countries and talking in real-time, and where we can look at each other and hear each other absolutely without any lag. This is innovation, what if nobody had thought of it and people were just content on their phones where somebody had to kind of place a call and some operator would connect you and you know, you remember those times.
👉🏾 And we've seen communication advancement and innovation go about leaps and bounds and everybody benefits. So we all benefit when we innovate, and innovation only happens when we have different thoughts and different people working for a problem or discovering a problem that many of us don't see. So diversity of thought is really the business case of DEI in an organisation. It keeps you relevant, it keeps you current, it drives innovation and makes you a future-ready organisation.
👉🏾 The other thing that I talk about, the great resignation. Many people are leaving, and people usually leave, and I say this often that people don't leave organisations, but people leave people. So no longer can people, managers and supervisors think that it is not their responsibility to engage with their team. It is everybody's responsibility, and one of the key things that happens during engagement and driving that feeling of belonging is to make those human connections.
👉🏾 If I feel valued and heard and respected, I will feel engaged, I will have a longer stint in the organisation and when I will come to work, I will bring my authentic self to work. I will bring my hundred percent to work, which means that no time would be wasted in covering a part of my personality, which I hide because I don't think that I will be accepted at my workplace if I bring my whole self to work. Oftentimes people don't understand what does it mean, you know, bringing your authentic self to work. So I'm kind of taking the liberty to explain that.
👉🏾 What it really means is when I am accepted for who I am and I don't have to hide a certain part of my personality or my life or my status or my orientation. And I just be without worrying who's thinking what about me. Then imagine that kind of freedom and that kind of mental load taken away from that person. Then that person is there on the job, doing their work completely a hundred percent productive and they feel engaged and they feel this is an organisation that cares for me, that values me. They know me as a person and not just as a resource. So, making that human connection is very, very important. And that is what will help us organisations retain people.
👉🏾 So that is really one part of the talent case, I think the other part in which I have seen firsthand Sudha, is that there is great talent in the market, and that kind of talent every organisation wants that they should come and work with you. How will you attract talent, and I go out and do campus interviews and I speak to the youth, the youth is bubbling with energy optimism and they're full of bright ideas and ideas for the future. How do you attract the youth, how do you attract great talent into the organisation, what are the things that talent is asking you, right at the time of interview, is that what is your company doing for diversity and inclusion.
👉🏾 So one of the very often repeated questions when I ask is, do you have any questions for us? That's a very common question. What is it that your company's doing for diversity, equity and inclusion? So I think it's no longer just an internal exercise organisations have to take a stand and act in the public sphere, I think that's very important.
👉🏾 Also, I think lastly, when we are talking about the business, the brand, you will see many organisations and brands, actually, their marketing is focused in such a manner that they are redefining what a family looks like. You're reimagining what a family looks like. It need not be a heterosexual couple, it can be a same sex couple. Who are you projecting as the breadwinner of the family? It need not always be the man. It can be a woman. Who are you projecting as showing the primary caregiver in the family or the person who is taking care of all the domestic chores?
👉🏾 So we are seeing that shift in the way brands are positioning themselves and telling their stories. And the reason they're doing that is because the customers expect it, they demand it, they're looking for it because when you do that, you become an attractive brand. That is a brand I wanna be associated with.
👉🏾 Because you are forward looking, you're progressive, you're talking about something that's sustainable and that's a brand that I, as a customer wanna be associated with. So I think that's really the brand story and I think that's the business case.
👉🏾 I think Sudha, once you have the C-suite on your side and convinced that it is really an imperative and something that we have to do. Oftentimes that's the layer where it rests, but really the job of a DEI practitioner or anybody who's kind of shouldering that responsibility in an organisation is to reach the employee till the last mile, which means that each and every person in the organisation should have a basic understanding of what diversity, equity, inclusion is. And understand the importance of it and how it affects our work and who we are as people. So where we kind of struggle is really the middle management, I would say, that's one. And second barrier is really that section of people who are called the hiring managers.
👉🏾 So one is talking about the environment within the organisation, and one is really guarding the gates of the organisation. Who do you let in? Let me talk about the culture of the organisation and who are these keepers of culture. In an organisation, because what we are really saying is DEI is about changing mindset, it is not a project, it is not a one-time activity. You are changing mindsets of people. For example, the two of us I'm sure is a product of years of conditioning and it's the way we've been brought up. It is shaped when we go to school, when we interact with our friends, where we live, our parents, our culture, our religion, what kind of books we read, who do we mingle with.
👉🏾 That's really something that shapes our opinion and our thought process. So whatever ideas we have about the world at large is pretty much fixed by the time you are in your late thirties, early forties. and you know, of course growing up it's pretty much fixed. Are we talking about changing those mindsets? It's obviously not as simple as it sounds. Like I said, once you have the C-suite on your side of the table, I think few things that are low-hanging fruits are changes you can do in terms of policies and in terms of facilities. So practices and policies is something that can get driven from there. And facilities is also something that you need to build in order to include more and more people. Now, the toughest bit, like I said, is about the mindsets and mindsets can only change with lots and lots of conversation. And I'm so happy to see this topic of diversity and inclusion is actually quite popular, even when it comes to media.

80: A conversation with Sheeraz Gulsher, Co-Founder People Like Us on building a fairer industry

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
For the 80th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, I met with the amazing Sheeraz Gulsher, one of the co-Founders of People Like Us. People Like Us is an award winning not-for-profit that celebrates and supports media, marketing and communications professionals from Black, Asian, Mixed Race and minorities ethnic backgrounds.
According to the website they are also working towards building a fairer workplace through equitable pay. A couple of weeks ago I met with Sheeraz to learn more about the ambition and vision for People Like US.
We also spoke about:
👉🏾 The need for the industry to prioritise in order to progress
👉🏾 The role of fair pay in attracting diverse talent
👉🏾 We discussed how much progress the industry had made on equity, inclusion and belonging in the industry
👉🏾 How communications practitioners can contribute whether in their workplaces or in advising clients
We also spoke about best practice and what keeps him going.
Listen on any of your favourite podcast platforms 👇🏾👇🏾

Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you very much Sudha. What an honour to be here.
👉🏾 Absolutely. So I've been in the comms industry for about eight, nine years now. I suppose showing my age. So I'm a guy that's born and bred in Luton to wonderful British Pakistani family. I've got three older brothers who are all my best mates. And yeah, I suppose in my time in comms, I've had a real rollercoaster in a fun way in the industry. And yeah, I'm really fortunate now to work at SNAP, looking after EMEA consumer coms. And I suppose in my spare time, I'm running an organisation called People Like Us, which I'm very proud of.
👉🏾 Oh, wow. You're like the grand master of comms.
👉🏾 Yeah, I'm very fortunate actually and they all are very different, I think, to each other. So my oldest brother, he is a bit like Del boy actually, it's the best way to describe him. Bit of a Wheeler dealer, but a wonderful man with a huge heart. My brother Darian is in comms and actually inspired me to join the folds. and my other brother, he is the most patient and kind person I know. And I like to think I have qualities from each of them. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes.
👉🏾 So ‘People like Us’ is essentially a movement that celebrates and supports, journalists and comms professionals from minority ethnic backgrounds. So my brother and I started this about two and a half years ago. It was just before COVID actually, and then at the time on paper, everything was great. We both had great jobs, both flying through our careers and everything was kind of great, but there was this quiet dissatisfaction, just growing. Just looking at representation in the industries, which was very low, people were being underpaid, unrepresented and blah, blah, blah, like I'm sure all your listeners have heard this all before. And we thought, why don't we try and address this? But my brother and I are, I suppose we're particularly in some ways we thought, okay, if we're gonna do this we have to follow two principles.
👉🏾 The first is whatever we do, needs to bring some kind of meaningful change, otherwise it just wasn't really worth it. We're not really here to virtue signal or whatever, and second, it just had to be fun. Like if it isn't fun, then what's point. So we kind of get close to these principles as best as we can. And we came up with a concept, People like Us, which essentially, I suppose we do a few things. The first is we host events every quarter to profile brilliant journalists marketing or comms professionals from Black, Asian, Mixed race, Minority ethnic backgrounds, and each have a fun, but slightly tricky task of essentially talking about a piece of work they're really proud of, so it could be. I don't know, a breaking a news story, they were at first, or investigative journalism piece, a PR stunt or whatever really, but they had to talk about it in three minutes. And we found it keeps things moving along, keeps things engaging. And a really nice opportunity to show the rest of the industry, what we can do.
👉🏾And since then, it's kind of grown from strength to strength, off the back of our events. People have hired from the likes of Apple or really top agencies like The Romans have hired folks, people have won new business.. importantly, I suppose it's a place where people can feel at home and not be worried and kind of be their true selves.
👉🏾 Yeah, completely. I think the murder of George Floyd and subsequent movement, I mean it was a generation-defining movement that really shook up the workplace and even just life all over the world, like particularly in UK and US. And then suddenly you saw lots of brands, companies reacting and particularly our comms industry was quick to jump in and, which on one hand was really good to see. In fact, we did some research actually a year on from the murder of George Floyd, what had actually changed. And it did find that the momentum of diversity and inclusion conversations pretty much rely on big tragedies happening, like that big event or such as the racism faced by Marcus Rashford, Bakayo Saka and Jaden Sancho after the euros penalty shootout.
👉🏾 So I think absolutely, I think the industry needs to make sure conversations around inclusion are regular, otherwise it doesn't come off as very genuine. And I think this is a conversation we've been having in comms for a long time, there's so many brilliant organisations out there that do some amazing work quietly behind the scenes, like the Taylor Bennett foundation or the PRCA.
👉🏾 I think the time is now really, we're are now snowballing into a real crisis where people are no longer going to be able to afford their bills or are borrowing money, from people they know just to get by. And I think cost of energy is just really having a major impact. And already people from minority ethnic backgrounds are disadvantaged and sort of playing catch up. So I think the industry absolutely needs to prioritise these conversations and act quickly rather than just talking about.
👉🏾 For me it's paramount. I think we were fortunate to do a study with PR Week, last year we approached them to investigate pay disparities in comms. And I think as a very first step, it's knowing the scale of a problem. So we invited agencies all around the UK, to submit their pay gap data and not only for ethnicity, but also for gender. And where we're at right now, it's really difficult to improve from there and. You absolutely need to be held accountable and you can see growth year on year. And I think it's only fair, I suppose, from an ethics point of view, there's that argument. And I think it's only fair for people applying for different roles.
👉🏾 So actually is there a pay gap in this organisation? I think they deserve to know. And yeah, I mean diverse talent deserve to be paid as good as anybody else. And I suppose the challenge we have time, time again, is leadership roles. That seems to be a big blocker, and why many people in fact leave the industry altogether, it seems to be a progressional glass ceiling. People aren't being paid where they should be or progressing as quickly as they should be. So it's their pay for me is the most important thing to addressing inequity in the industry.
👉🏾 I think I've touched on a couple of them. I think the transparency around pay is a big one. And I think it's one where we're proud to have addressed, somewhat, with PR Week last year and this year. So I think that is a big one, particularly from a minority point and comms point of view. Leadership again, it can be quite painful, actually, I think a lot of people when they're not progressing to director board or managing director levels agencies or in-house, it's becoming quite problem, I feel like it's quite hard to become what you can't see. I think I was very fortunate and I have my brother Darian who is somebody I look up to, he's my hero.
👉🏾 I see him flying through the ranks at LinkedIn and he does a wonderful job, he's so well respected. And I think unless more people start seeing that it's quite hard to keep motivated if you think actually, like, I don't look like the leadership team here, I don't look like my senior directors or VPs, could that be me one day?
👉🏾 And I think based on lived experience and a lot of people I've spoken to it is. It's quite hard and you think, oh actually like, what am I doing this for? Like, is there only so far I can go? So I think those two are some major challenges, the comms industry is facing. There are so many challenges, we can talk all day about the energy crisis or climate change or whatever, I think from an inclusivity point of view, that is a real sticking point. And I'm really hoping. And you know what, and I do believe comms as moving along and we are seeing and hearing about lots of improvements, which is great. Yeah, but those are big challenges we are facing right now.
👉🏾 I absolutely agree, I think that's the major challenge in comms. All the best brands and agencies are based in Soho or east London, which are the most diverse parts of London and the representation is like, nonexistent.
👉🏾 And if we are communicating to the wider public, it's our roles as comms professionals, to make sure we are representative of our wonderful and diverse country. At the moment, like perhaps that doesn't always come through because of representation, as you say, like in the leadership levels or agencies or whatever.
👉🏾 You know what I often think, people always say like a good test of a good PR campaign is talking to your friend at the pub who's not in comms, about an idea and will they find it funny or will they get it? And often when I see campaigns the answer is probably not . And that's a test I'm trying to build and certainly I don't always go right, if I took this to my friends in Luton who are not remotely in comms or media industry or whatever, do they know what the hell I'm talking about? And I think it's like making sure that like yeah, the boardroom and the agencies and the voices are being heard from diverse backgrounds, otherwise we absolutely risk falling increasingly out of touch.
👉🏾 Yeah. I mean I do feel like anecdotally obviously without seeing the census, but there has been improvement. I think looking around people are more conscious about creating more inclusive environment and supporting staff from, from diverse backgrounds.
👉🏾 And I think a lot has changed in two years. I think it's great. People are having these conversations. And I think in time it will become the norm, to just take action, really, to actually have a real hard look at the boardroom or the leadership team or pay gaps in an organisation and actually make choices there rather than just talking about that as a primary thing.
👉🏾 That time is now really, I think the only way we are really gonna make comms inclusive and representative of our incredible country is to make sure that communicators are, are like from a breadth of backgrounds and people know, like there's so many good reasons to do it, obviously outside of the, the ethical reason of like everyone having fair opportunities. It's actually great for business. Great for innovation, and it's great for like team morale, and everything else. I would say to anyone listening to this actually. Why is inclusivity, useful? Essentially it's like having brand new people in the room who have lived experience that you don't have and have insights that are incredible, and lived.
👉🏾 And it's like using those and I think that's what makes a wonderful team really, is our differences that, make us stronger. So I do think like, it's probably quite easy to say "actually not much has changed", but I do feel like things are happening in the background.
👉🏾 PRCA did some really cool stuff. I think PR Week have been really, really strong and really forward thinking. So, yeah, I've got faith.
👉🏾 It's a really good question. And it's something that I get asked as well quite often. Cause I suppose my day job, I take a lot of pride in being a comms professional that really enjoys media relations or working with influencers, or setting up events, or like all facets of comms, really.
👉🏾 And is it our role, to be able to like bring D&I in. I mean, for me, I suppose it's a personal thing. I think it's hugely important, to have that lens on. I feel like that should be considered in all facets of, of your role. And I think that starting to really shine through, particularly in the way lots of agencies are handling campaigns now. They're thinking about these things from the very beginning, from the very start. It's actually who's in the room for a brainstorm? Is it people from like, if we're doing a brainstorm about, I dunno, Ramadan or Eid, like, do we have some Muslim folks in room to have people from different backgrounds to get their opinion, get their take. And right through the entire journey, people are really starting to think about.. actually from suppliers. Which photographers are we working with?
👉🏾 Which models are we using? Who's on the selling-in team? Who is it on the brand side that we can consult? And I think it's great. And I think that's how all campaigns should be. I think PR has evolved now into like being more thoughtful and mindful. And as we say, that's what makes it beautiful and that's what makes it more representative.
👉🏾 And it's gonna resonate more with different audiences. If we're doing an Eid campaign and that was worked on by a staff of Muslim backgrounds or whatever, have that experience, they'll be able to know actually these are the nuances for Eid, or whatever we're working on. And I think that's great.
👉🏾 And I think people are, starting to include that more, which is really, really positive to see.
👉🏾 I think a good recent example is LinkedIn supporting the Women's Euros. So they've been, long-term supporters. They were big sponsors across the ground, the teams and they've kind of quietly just kind of got on with it and, and obviously. It's the Lionesses got to the final and they won it and it was, it was just stunning.
👉🏾 I remember afterwards there were a couple of interviews where in a nutshell, the likes of like Ian Wright and a couple other commentators said, well, if you're a corporate or brand or a company, that's here now, like after they've won their first major championship since 1966, you're too late to the party.
👉🏾 Which I thought was really, really fascinating. Cause I thought obviously LinkedIn, isn't the only brand to have worked with the England football team, but, I thought, wow, like, you know in having that, they really firmly believe that actually women's soccer is amazing.
👉🏾 And there's so many amazing role models there. It's a great career, and really championed them. And I thought it was just a really beautiful thing and it is not like they've flaunted it. All the other brands actually, that have been on there for the journey haven't flaunted it. The way it all unravelled was just really, really touching. And it shows that actually like being inclusive and being open, it is a wonderful thing.
👉🏾 Exactly. Exactly. And I think consistency is also important rather than reacting, or something amazing or something really awful to happen. I think standing by your values and your beliefs it truly truly goes a long way.
👉🏾 Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of work. I think working with an incredible company like Snap, it's a busy day job. And working across EMEA, it's always lots of fun, weird and wonderful challenges. And it's really enjoyable and often I think for, most people, a full-on in-house role when you're working across so many regions. I think with People like Us, it is something really important to me. I think it means everything to me that people should feel like they should belong. People feel like, they're being paid fairly and respected. It means a lot, I think the past two and a half years doing this like reviewing CVs pretty much every day or two and hearing people's stories, it is special.
👉🏾 Cause people let you in on what's happening with them and what's happening on their lives. That's something always like very special. And to me, it drives me. It's just connecting with people in a, in a meaningful way. And, and yeah, like having a really small part in helping them feel like they can succeed, they can work at incredible companies and, and they can belong. Cause everyone deserves to feel hope and everyone deserves to belong.
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha that I really, really enjoyed speaking with you.
Follow Sheeraz Gulsher:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheerazgulsher/?originalSubdomain=uk
Twitter: @WanderSheeraz
Website: https://www.plu.org.uk/about
Important Links:
https://ethicalmarketingnews.com/people-like-us-a-celebration-of-diversity-in-the-media-and-communications-industry
https://www.prweek.com/article/1795142/people-us-calls-mandatory-ethnicity-pay-gap-reporting
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/15729445/people-like-us-diverse-workforce/

79: End of Bossism: Servant Leadership Comes of Age with David Thomas Guerra , Transformist

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
In several episodes of The Elephant in the Room podcast I have spoken with CEOs, academics, influencers on what leadership means. This is a part of my own quest to understand leaders and leadership by listening to others and to redefine it through the lens of my own experience.
In this episode of the podcast I speak with @Dave Guerra the author of best seller ‘Super Performance’, a transformist and a proponent of servant leadership.
In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about
👉🏾 Exploring what leadership actually means - is it a position? A set of skills or behaviour?
👉🏾 The relevance of words like powerful, commanding, fearless, bossman in today’s context
👉🏾 Resetting the expectation of/from leaders and leadership
👉🏾 Servant leadership - challenges/risks associated with the idea
👉🏾 Building cohesive cultures in a world in a constant flux
👉🏾 Authentic leadership, Conscious leadership, Ethical/Moral Leadership and Servant Leadership
“And if you look at the planet and the state that the planet is in, I would say, like we discussed in our original conversation, we have too much yang energy, not enough yin energy, too much control, not enough liberation, too much management, not enough leadership. And so the real problem is a paradigm that we are still tethered to, especially in a western society, this paradigm of organisation as machine, a mechanistic paradigm that presupposes that you can engineer an organisation or anything into perfect efficiency, but that's not true.”
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 My pleasure Sudha.
👉🏾 Yeah, I thought about this in preparing for this conversation and every time I have to answer that question, I have to think about it again, because I think that's been an inquiry my whole life around who actually am I and what am I really about?
👉🏾 And I think what I've kind of come to is, I'm really a seeker of truth. I am just deeply curious to understand how things work, and in particular I developed a deep curiosity for how is it that business works and what is it that makes business successful very early in my life.
👉🏾 And then I went to college to kind of learn about business and get a business education and then came out of college and I still didn't feel comfortable that I understood business. I guess I would say I had a mechanical appreciation, but I didn't have a practical appreciation of business. And then I went to work for companies and especially very large businesses and that provoked me even more around understanding how business operates.
👉🏾 And I have to confess, I was really confused for many years around how things worked in business, because a lot of what I saw didn't make sense to me Sudha. It kind of left me with this frustration that a lot of what I had set my life up for, my career for, was not really proving out to be very fulfilling or meaningful, or kind of makes sense to me. And so then I stumbled into this territory of quality and it was like I'd been to the promised land and I finally found something I could kind of grab onto that kind of hung together for me, that made sense.
👉🏾 And then I learned a lot from W. Edwards Deming, and then Peter Drucker and many others. I would say in that I formed my company, Corpus Optima, some 27, 28 years ago I kind of generally would fall into the category of a management consultant. But that's kind of a misnomer because it presupposes that if you manage something well, you'll produce a great outcome, but that's not correct.
👉🏾 If you manage something well and you don't lead it, well, then you'll sub-optimise the outcome. So that kind of led me to finally this revelation that I'm not a management consultant, I'm a management and leadership consultant. And so now I see that I'm a transformist, my job, my work is to help people in organisations transform, to become all that they can be, to optimise their performance.
👉🏾 Yeah Sudha, that's a really great question because, as I was sharing, became very consumed with that inquiry around what does managing mean and what does leading mean? And back, let's say 20, 25 years ago, when we talked about management and leadership in business, we used the terms interchangeably like it was the same thing. And then in organisations, we have this kind of generic way of thinking like the leaders are the people at the top and the managers are the people in the middle and everybody are the people that kind of do the work, in colloquial terms, the worker bees. And so the idea is that leadership and management is a location, but that's not true at all.
👉🏾 The truth is that leadership and management are both two sides of one coin, the same way that mind, body, are two sides of one coin, or yin yang are two sides of one coin, or particle-wave duality is two sides of one coin. The work of management is about control, and it is about control of process and the work about leadership is about liberation and the liberation is, liberation of spirit. When you reframe organisations that way, then you see management and leadership as to complementary properties that, exist ideally all the way up and down organisations, in that, everybody's a manager and everybody's a leader.
👉🏾 I remember a reporter asking Colleen Barrett, the sort of the famous Chief Operating Officer of Southwest Airlines once the, kind of the loved airline, "can you tell me a little bit about your leaders, tell me about the leaders at Southwest airlines" and she looked back at the reporter and says "I'm not sure what you mean, everybody's a leader at Southwest airlines. We don't have any job that's not a leader job at Southwest Airlines". And I think when you reframe leadership that way you see it as a way of being as the opposite side of the management work in organisations.
👉🏾 I think it was Peter Drucker that said famously in his very last book, Leadership Challenges for the 21st century, there's no such thing as managing people, the task with people is to lead. And I thought, well that's a big wake up call because all of every manager I've ever met had this paradigm that part of their job is to manage their people. And the idea of management implies control, which is correct to manage something is to control it. Anybody who ever has to make a recipe or to drive a car or to accomplish anything, knows that there's steps in the process, there's procedures, there's a way of doing this sort of a one best way. But that's different than the joy of doing it, the intrinsic motivation for doing it, the fun of doing it.
👉🏾 And so when you think about things from that view, it's mind-boggling how simple that principle is that the way to think about leadership is around helping people, liberating people, liberating the spirit of people, creating the environment so that people are doing it because they want to and not because they have to.
👉🏾 And so all of that sort of right brain kind of activity, behaviour, way of being, is the antithesis of the left brain kind of control process, structure, order part of things. And it applies to organisations the same way it applies to people, the same way it applies to economies, the same way it applies to governments, the same way it applies to marriages, the same way it applies to everything.
👉🏾 That's really a very good question, Sudha I think it was Warren Bennis that said, most companies are over-managed and under-led. And if you look at the planet and the state that the planet is in, I would say, like we discussed in our original conversation, we have too much yang energy, not enough yin energy, too much control, not enough liberation, too much management, not enough leadership. And so the real problem is a paradigm that we are still tethered to, especially in a western society, this paradigm of organisation as machine, a mechanistic paradigm that presupposes that you can engineer an organisation or anything into perfect efficiency, but that's not true.
👉🏾 Machines don't feel, machines don't have a self-organising nature, machines don't breathe, machines don't evolve and only organisms do. And so the idea of a paradigm for optimisation, that works is a paradigm of organism, not machine. And if you reframe organisations and really everything into this view of left and right brain, or this view of mind, body, this view of the two sides of everything, the tangible and intangible side of everything, then it's so much simpler to operate it in a way that's sort of working smarter and not harder.
👉🏾 And so the words that I would use to describe leadership, it's really easy when I speak with a group of managers or a group of executives around the topic of servant leadership or sort of what is the best leadership. I tell them, you already know what the best leadership is, you already know, and I'm gonna prove it to you. And I ask them to just think about someone in their lives that had been a profound influence on them and their careers or their development or their growth that had maybe a particular that they would call out as the best leader I've ever known, could be a parent, it could be a teacher, it could be a boss, and then give me an adjective from that person that kind of encapsulates who that person was.
👉🏾 And they use words like, listened to me, believed in me, coached me, had compassion for me, was fair, was encouraging, was available, kind of modelled, would always be willing to roll off their shirt sleeves and do the work. They were inspiring and sacrificial, those are words that they came up with.
👉🏾 And then when I show 'em sort of the portrait that they paint, it's like, that's the model of servant leadership, that's what it is. Sudha in my research I'll confess to you that I set out to learn about business because I wanted to be successful. And I had in my mind the idea that to be successful, you have to go learn how business worked, what business success is. And so I set out to sort of investigate what is super performance, who has the best performance. If you look at organisations that outperform over the long term, what kind of animal is that? What are they doing? Is there some simple pattern that they all contain that you can call out that is kind of self-evident. And I tell them I didn't come looking for servant leadership, I came looking for super performance, but everywhere I found super performance, I found that way of being that is contained in all of those words over and over and over again, kind of like groundhog day, that pattern kept repeating itself.
👉🏾 Yeah, I don't think there's ever been a more important time for servant leadership than the time that we live in Sudha. You see it in especially here in this country, in the US, this polarisation that we've experienced in politics, there's just extremism too much left and too much right, and not enough cooperation, and you see the outcome that that's produced is huge disorder and dissension and nobody winning.
And to me the next generation is going to be about the female leadership the integration of a lot more yin into the yang. I think the condition that we're in has come about because of way too much, kind of bossism I call it, or selfish leadership, which I would generalise around the opposite of servant leadership. And the short term thinking that has produced this sort of okay, well now we're really in a pickle.
👉🏾 And so we have that situation with short term thinking is, how can I produce instant pudding and it's really easy to produce instant pudding in an organisation, all you have to do is let a lot of people go. But I call that flash performance, the chickens in ,the flash performance always come home to roost because then you end up with processes that don't work anymore, people that are overworked and over stressed. And then people that will leave. We have this condition of the great resignation where hundreds and thousands of people have left their organisations, because they're not finding meaning well-being or fulfilment from their organisation, and then there's a lot of research that shows that the largest reason that people leave is because of their boss. People don't leave organisations, they leave their boss, they leave their bad boss.
👉🏾 And how did the boss get bad? Well, the boss kind of learned what the boss before him did and then that boss learned from the boss before him or her. And so that paradigm of this is how you're supposed to do it, is a paradigm that is over a hundred years old and it's sort of way past it's expiration date.
👉🏾 Now we're in the state, I believe, where the millennial generation, I'm gonna call it the heroic generation, that's sort of the first generation that's digitally native, that is making up almost 50% of the workforce today, doesn't want to be led that way, doesn't want to be managed that way. And so it's I think because of the existential backdrop of the world, we live in, people need a work experience that's meaningful that they can give themselves to, that they can believe in and that has some substance that has a more meaningful return than just the economic benefit that it provides for me and my family.
👉🏾 My well-being matters too, and it matters more than being in an environment where I'm come out at the end of the day, just completely, psychologically diminished or worn out, I need something that will energise me. And I think that's a big driver of this shift, but the other hidden driver is, I really believe that enterprise is finally coming to this revelation that, servant leadership is good for business. Deming used to say, does anybody here care about profit? Well then it pays to cooperate, then it pays to work together, it pays to help your people.
👉🏾 Yeah, that's another very, very good question, Sudha, you know, servant leadership has been in all the world's major faiths for thousands of years. We, have it in the Christian tradition in the model of Jesus Christ, we have it and Buddhist tradition in the model of Buddha.
👉🏾I really love the example of Gandhi and the Indian culture and I learned a lot from Swami Vivekananda, I've learned so much studying him, but one of the things he said that I thought was so profound, he said "before you can be fit to be a master, you must learn to be a servant".
👉🏾 So servant leadership has been in all the world's cultures from probably the beginning of time. Maybe we haven't called it that, or maybe we haven't recognised it as sort of one pattern, one distinguishable pattern. But it was Robert Greenleaf who was an operations consultant in AT & T that brought the term to business and he wrote a book called ‘The servant as leader ‘. In the monograph ‘The servant as leader’ he describes the servant leader as someone who's called to serve first, then lead. And he distinguishes servant leadership from the other form of leadership that he said is usually driven by a need for power or ego, or to be the number one guy to be at the top, some sort of personal need to outperform everyone else, versus lead. And where he got his inspiration for that was a book that he read called ‘Journey to the East’ by Herman Hess, and it's a short book, but it's really profound.
👉🏾 And so then he wrote his famous monograph and then it turned into a book and then the Greenleaf society was created and now many, many, many organisations have adopted servant leadership as sort of their way of being. I have interviewed so many CEOs and work with so many amazing organisations that operate from this paradigm.
👉🏾 And yeah, I would say that the best way to approach servant leadership, is to think of yourself as an apprentice. I remember W Edwards Demings sort of the grand old man equality, on his business card said, W Edwards Demings, Apprentice Statistician, and that's just astonishing because and he's well regarded, maybe the most famous statistician in all of industry and all of enterprise.
👉🏾 I met so many people I would put in the category of servant leadership and as great servant leaders and when I point that out to them, they kind of blink and look at me. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you're amazing, everybody loves you, everybody comes to you for advice and everybody trusts you and your performance and your department or your function or your group or your organisation is off the chart. And they're very humble Sudha, they're very much well, I'm just doing, I don't know any other way to do it in this way. It's sort of in their bones, it's in their way of being a practice that's sort of acquired over time. In all of our development work with executives, all of our executive coaching and leadership development work. When we teach these principles, we teach the concept of servant leadership and we examine famous servant leaders throughout history and sort of point to their experiences and kind of how they did it.
👉🏾 I would say for anyone who wants to be a high performer, for anyone who wants to be successful, for anyone who wants to be happy joyful in life, then seek out servant leadership, investigate it and look closely at the companies that you interview for that you become a part of around their philosophy around their values.
👉🏾 I remember again, back to values that who a company is, is not a set of values that you post on the wall. In some groups I would share a company's set of values from a particular company and it said always be good to people, always operate with integrity, always tell the truth, always do all of these wonderful things.
👉🏾 Then I'd ask them guess which company this is they think about and all these great company’s. I said, this is Enron's values, and we see what happens to Enron with the force ranking, this sort of a greedy every man for himself mentality. The whole thing collapsed like a house of cards, and you know, Ken Lay the CEO who was venerated here in Houston, where Ken Lay, you've got a meeting with Ken Lay that's a big deal.
👉🏾 Or if the Enron people came into your meeting, everybody kind of moved and there was almost hushed tones around it. And then he had to hide in the parking lot because he couldn't come out because he was vilified. He went from the very top of the kingdom to the least regarded and I think that we see that pattern repeated over and over and over and...

78: Rich world view, poor Adivasi: Status of Adivasi Livelihoods Report: Dibyendu Chaudhuri and Parijat Ghosh, PRADAN

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
“I would say that this report presents a contradictory picture, which is probably a feature of this report. And this contradiction is about rich Adivasi and poor Adivasi. Rich Adivasi in terms of their world view and cultural practices, but poor Adivasi in terms of the deprivation”
The 78th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast, is a follow up episode, on the first ‘Status of Adivasi Livelihoods’ (SAL) Report by PRADAN. The report based on a survey of around 5000 households from across 16 Adivasi dominated districts of Jharkhand and Odisha, paints a grim picture of Adivasis as one of the most deprived sections of Indian society.
India has several laws and constitutional provisions that recognise the rights of indigenous peoples to land and self-government. The Indian Constitution also provides for positive discrimination in employment, higher education and political representation in the Indian parliament and state assemblies. However, these positive discrimination efforts do not seem to have worked.
The big question is WHY? Who is measuring the impact of development programmes and interventions? Adivasi leaders, activists and academics believe this is because policy makers do not recognise them as different, which in turn does not allow them to define and design their own development agenda.
The main purpose of the Status of Adivasi Livelihoods report is to develop a more nuanced understanding of Adivasi livelihoods and the socio-cultural setting that shape these livelihoods, in order to evolve a better response to improve their plight.
As we navigate a deeply divided world on the cusp of climate crisis, it would make sense to learn from the deep knowledge and wisdom of the Adivasis who are not a part of caste society. Adivasis possess a worldview which is different from the non-Adivasis. They do not consider themselves superior to other creatures of nature and do not believe in the accumulation of wealth and exploitation of nature for human purposes. This worldview shapes their relationship with nature and society and influences their practices including livelihoods.
“Programmes and schemes for tribal communities need to align with their values of togetherness, living in harmony with nature and non-exploitative livelihood practices. That is the only way to ensure the challenges being faced by the Adivasis are addressed without compromising the Adivasi way of living.”
Listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Okay, thank you Sudha. So see, PRADAN has been working in this Central Indian belt for last almost four decades, 40 years. And our intervention to impact the livelihoods of Adivasis has been helpful to some extent I would say. And this has been largely due to the development of many livelihood prototypes, such as Tussar prototypes, smallholder agriculture, small enterprises, like broiler poultry farming, mushroom, all these things.
👉🏾 Now all these models were developed by taking into account the distinctive features of the region and the Adivasi households. But despite efforts of PRADAN and other similar well-meaning agencies and government, by and large Adivasis in this region, the central Indian belt have remained deprived. So this is the reason why PRADAN thought to come up with a periodic status report of Adivasi livelihood. So that organisations including government, remain periodically informed about the status of Adivasi livelihoods. That's the purpose that I would say.
👉🏾 Let me try it. If we consider the whole of India, the population of ST is 8.6%, as you mentioned. However, if we look at the states where they live, such as Jharkhand, Odissa, MP, Chhattisgarh states of Northeast, the share of the population is quite large.
👉🏾 And they're mostly living in the areas, which are rich in natural resources such as forest, coal and minerals and now this is a unique situation. Historically Adivasis were displaced from time to time for various reasons. On one hand government needs these natural resource-rich areas for big development projects, such as dams, mines, et cetera. On the other hand, government also worked out various acts and provisions to protect their rights. They are considered to be the most marginalised section of the society as Dibyendu also mentioned.
👉🏾 Therefore it becomes important to understand the real status of their life and livelihood. And as of now there is no systematic data kept on this. There are various interventions from government, many CSOs are working in these areas, but there is no systematic data to track the impact.
👉🏾 So we as fellow citizens also, we do not know much about them. So having a clear idea about the status and the reasons probably will help in coming up with better solutions. That's why it is extremely important that we come up with such status reports.
👉🏾 I can add two, three lines here. See so there are many kind of ideas about Adivasis. One set of people talk about their rich worldview and some other talk about their deprivation. And at the same time, there is a larger section of Indian citizens that Parijat was talking about, who do not have any idea about Adivasis. So that's why a public report was needed to let the citizen of this country know about situation of Adivasis, which constitutes a significant portion of our population, 8.6% in Indian population is huge. So this is apart from the fact, that the policymaker, CSOs, and academia, they will also be benefited from this data.
👉🏾 Yeah, I can talk about the climate change. See the climate change is undoubtedly the result of human activities. Unlike you know, about the paleocene eocene thermal maximum, which took place around 56 million years ago when global temperature rose up to 5 degrees centigrade. But CO2 emission at that time was comprising of carbon 13 isotope, which come from the volcanic activities, whereas burning fossil fuel releases carbon dioxide with carbon 12 isotope, which is the main component of the current CO2 causing global warming. So that's how there is no doubt that global warming today is due to human activities, there is absolutely no doubt.
👉🏾 Now there are two main ways to fight this crisis. The first is changing our lifestyle so that we need less exploitation of nature and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The Adivasi worldview of non-accumulation of wealth becomes important here. The second way I would say is the carbon sequestration which is much talked about nowadays, here also the indigenous people's practice becomes very important. One of the main mechanism of carbon sequestration is increasing the forest cover. Now worldwide, if you look at data, it indicates that deforestation rates, are two to three times lower in lands held by indigenous peoples, this is world. Even in India, this can be observed, you can see that forest are intact in tribal region and all. So when it comes to conserving nature and biodiversity Adivasi communities can teach the world, teach us how to do that.
👉🏾 Let me also talk about their basic values, which we can learn in today's world. The Adivasis believe in a harmonic non-extractive symbiotic relationship with nature, which Dibyendu mentioned. And these are actually reflected through their language, dance, song, painting and all other art forms. And their religious rituals are also connected to nature and they celebrate together, human values like mutual support, collaboration and cooperation are the integral part of the tribal society. So in today's society where it is all about individual prosperity and we compete with each other, these sets of values can actually make the world a far better place to live in.
👉🏾 They use local seeds, locally available material for crop production, which helps in rejuvenation of the local soil. Their agriculture is also community based, it used to be, it is changing, but it used to be like that. So Dibyendu also mentioned that their relationship is not extractive. In mainstream, idea of development we extract things from nature for our own good. But their relationship is more mutual and they actually try to take things which actually they need, not more than that. And they're also help in rejuvenating the nature, the way they use it. So these sets of values and way of life probably needed to keep this planet suitable for human species for a longer time.
👉🏾 Yeah, so you are right, the term tribe, Scheduled tribe, Adivasi, have been used interchangeably to refer to these social groups that were not part of the caste system, at least originally.
👉🏾 And also it is a fact that the British coloniser's experience of Africa and America made them think about these groups as kinship based groups, which have primitive traits and which are in a stage of evolution, so that's the history. Now, most of these so-called tribes were dependent on both agriculture and forest, historically. There are other groups also, which have been mostly hunting and gathering, but by and large they were dependent on agriculture and forest. Now post-independence, they have been displaced, dispossessed for the sake of building large dams, exploitation of mineral reserves and establishment of wildlife sanctuaries. In response to this, this displacement and dispossessions, tribes started claiming that they were the original inhabitants, which is Adivasi of the region.
👉🏾 Now, this Adivasi identity contains two different political ideas. The first one is that the Adivasis are original inhabitants of the place where they are living now, and they have a historical right to their homeland. The second form of Adivasi political identity is based on the idea that tribal culture is superior because it is more, egalitarian and ecologically sustainable as compared to modernity or capitalism or industrial model, all those things. So during this study of Sal, we came across both these ideas, a set of people said that this is our original homeland and we cannot be dispossessed from the area and there are a set of people who were proud of their culture, their worldview, which talks about equality, which talks about togetherness being with nature, and they were proud of that. So both of these identity-based ideas we came across.
👉🏾 Yeah where we conducted this study of Sal, I think most of them would like to call them as Adivasis because this is the identity under which they were all mobilised and they relate to this identity. Tribes from other regions, for example, Northeast and other areas, they may not relate to this term of Adivasi, they may be more related to the term tribe. But the people who are residing in the central Indian plateau, the way we understood during this study that they mostly would like to associated with the term Adivasi more than ST. ST they use for the official purpose, of course, cause that's the government term.
👉🏾 Okay, let me start and Dibyendu maybe add. What I understand that the overall report shows that the status of Adivasis in livelihood, income and other areas, whatever data we collected and analysed, the situation is worse than the national average. The national per capita income is around 14,780 in Jharkhand and we have 13,034 in Orissa. Although farming is reported by more than 90% of the families in both the states as the major source of livelihood, but in case of Jharkhand this is the highest contributed to the total household income, which is almost 42% and followed agriculture. In Orissa agriculture is the first, but second highest is the wage.
👉🏾 So you can see this contrast, that whether more than 90% of the families do agriculture but the contribution or income is not that high from the agriculture, rather wage is more in that case. And though Adivasis in these two states lead in foresting the areas, the income from the forest does not contribute very significantly to the total income. They're dependent in forest in many ways, but if you calculate in monetary term as income from forest, that is not significant, which is a significant the way we thought it could be. So that became a little counterintuitive for us also.
👉🏾 The situation of functional literacy is really very poor, only 45% male household heads and 63% female household head could not read and write in Jharkhand and then the number is even higher in case of Orissa, 55% male and 75% female household heads not at all read and write. The status of infrastructure, including road connectivity and other connectivity is poorer in the Adivasi areas, that's what the report is saying. So these are some of the major findings, and I would like Dibyendu to add.
👉🏾 See this is one-time report, so it's basically very difficult to say trends only from this report. But if you can compare this report with earlier reports where similar data is there, it shows that Adivasis land holding is decreasing. So this is one thing I can tell you definitely. Other things we have to see.
👉🏾 I would say that this report presents a contradictory picture, which is probably a feature of this report. And this contradiction is about rich Adivasi and poor Adivasi. Rich Adivasi in terms of their world view and cultural practices, but poor Adivasi in terms of the deprivation that's talked about. This report does not say any reasons for deprivation, hints at points, which are mostly external to Adivasis. So the report talks about displacement and dispossession that we discussed already, since independence and probably prior to that also. But it also talks about reach of development services and facilities in terms of the existence of all weather roads, telecoms, educational institutions, health infrastructure, all these things, and which are poorer in Adivasi villages compared to non Adivasi villages in the same geography. I can't remember exactly now, but for instance, mobile connectivity was found available around 70% Adivasi villages as compared to approximately 90% of the non Adivasi villages in both the states, something like that.
👉🏾 See there was a group who actually helped us during the design of the study. So this group also comprised of academician, the activists, the social workers, many kind of people. So the most important input that we received from them was that the Adivasi livelihoods are not only about livelihood outcomes, such as income or food security or dietary diversity.
👉🏾 If you want to understand Adivasi livelihoods, it is important to understand the cultural ethos that shapes their livelihoods, their relationship with nature and their relationship among themselves. So that is the main contribution I think, otherwise we were only going with probably the outcome-related things and it would have been just another report with some poverty indicators. So their input made it very different, the Adivasi context and issues were captured because of that.
👉🏾 Yes. I mean, in the larger society and development forums, those who talk about Adivasis and their issues are mostly non Adivasis. Those who formulate policy in the government also they're mostly non-Adivasi. Therefore we miss out to understand things that Dibyendu explained. I mean, this livelihood is not only about outcome it's also about this cultural ethos. Collaborating with Adivasi activists, academicians, and politicians, that also helped us to understand that there are diversities among the Adivasi also we call them Adivasi and put them in one bracket that probably is not the right representation of the diversity they have within themselves. So this collaboration helped to develop this understanding. There are common things and binding factors as the Adivasi community, as well as there are huge diversities also among Adivasis. And I hope this does not become one-time collaboration and we continue to work together to come up with ways for the Adivasis to self-determine their development agenda rather than others speaking on behalf of them.
👉🏾 So far it has been received well, most of them said, those who went to the report or attended session they said that this kind of status report came up with very important insights and that it will be helpful in deciding their own future course of action. They also came up with suggestions for next reports for how that can be more helpful, what more we can include. And overall I sense that there is an increasing interest and acceptance among the stakeholders.
👉🏾 This is the first status report, so therefore we probably need to continue to work with the stakeholders to disseminate the findings for the report and findings for the report to be more relevant for advocating the desired change that we are talking about. So I would say overall, there is an increasing interest. It is received well so far, but more work needs to be done so that all the stakeholders actually referring to this report, when they're talking about or thinking about their communities
👉🏾 Yeah, actually we received many messages from CSOs and donor agencies, they were thanking us for making this report available in the public domain specifically. Some agencies said that they would leverage it with their clients to drive the focus towards Adivasi population. Some of them have also appreciated that the Adivasi community voices have been kept at the centre of this report.
👉🏾 So yeah, we conducted webinars where Adivasi scholars were present so they appreciated the presence of this kind of a report and they said that this kind of reports were needed. And not only like one-time report, this has to be a periodic report so that one can see if there is any change in the situation. So that was appreciated quite a lot.
👉🏾 So I think that data will be mostly used to track the overall impact of all the efforts made by various agencies, to improve the situation of Adivasis, that we already talked about. Additionally, I would say we will identify areas where deeper studies needed to understand the reason of marginalisation. See this report doesn't talk much about the reasons, it hints at some of the, possible reasons, but it does not directly talk about those.
👉🏾 We decided that probably some deeper study would be required to understand the deeper reasons, correlate findings, statistically, and also establish causality. And we are hoping that many academic institutions can do this because this is a public report, anyone can use the data of this report. So the academic institutions may do this on their own, or we can collaborate with them. Deeper studies on areas to understand the

77: A conversation with Rachita Vora, Co-Founder, India Development Review - The contribution of social sector to India's growth agenda

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week took the path less trodden. After a BA in History from Yale and an MBA from Judge Business School - she didn’t follow the path of her peers to investment banking but decided to pursue a career in the social sector in spite of the disapproval of family and friends.
Rachita Vora is co-founder of India Development Review. India Development Review (IDR) is India’s first and largest independent media platform for the development community. Before IDR, Rachita led the Dasra Girl Alliance, an INR 250 crore multi-stakeholder platform that sought to improve maternal, adolescent and child health outcomes in India.
During our freewheeling conversation Rachita spoke about her background, privilege and education that enabled her to take a decision to work in the social sector…….
👉🏾 The ambition behind setting up IDR
👉🏾 The challenges of running a magazine for the non-profit sector in an age of 24x7 media, dwindling ad budgets
👉🏾 The big issues facing the social sector in India including dwindling pool of donor, the regulatory environment, negative perception, small talent pool, the impact of COVID 19
👉🏾 The pivotal role of the social sector in helping India meet the SDGs and its ambition to for a high growth economy
👉🏾 Collaborations between state and the sector
👉🏾 Calling out the social sector for its shortcomings and Failure Files
We also spoke about future plans, existential questions, and what inspires her…..
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thanks Sudha. Thanks so much for having me.
👉🏾 Yeah, sure. So I've been working in the social impact space for around 16 years and if you had asked me when I was a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don't think I'd ever have imagined that this is a career choice I would've made. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, so I grew up with a lot of privilege and a lot of opportunities. And I think because of those, I was able to attend Yale, which is really where I think the seed for wanting to work in the service of others really took root. I didn't realise it when I was there, maybe it was the kind of friends that I kept. But it was really when I moved back to India in 2007 that I began to feel very strongly that I wanted to use my education for something that was bigger than me.
👉🏾 And this was also alongside sort of at a time when there was just growing inequality and the wide income disparities, gender disparities, class disparities that I was noticing coming back to India after a while, really hit me hard. And so, I did sort of speak to a bunch of people and try to figure out where within the social impact space I could work, but then once I made the decision, there was really no looking back. And so I started working at an organisation called Swadhaar Finserve which was one of the first urban micro finance institutions in India at the time and then of course went on to work in CSR and at different kinds of organisations over the course of my career. And it's been an incredible education and reflecting on it, I don't think I'd change a thing at all because it ultimately brought me to IDR, which is a job that I absolutely love.
👉🏾 Yeah. I mean, I don't think my parents were too thrilled, honestly. A lot of my peers that graduated my class ended up working at investment banks and some of the top consulting firms in the world and then I also had friends who actually spent a year abroad teaching English in some country somewhere.
👉🏾 So I think it was definitely something that I had to convince my parents of. And it didn't help that back then in 2007, actually, I didn't really have any friends or any people that were senior to me that I knew that had chosen this as a career path. And so even sort of figuring it out took a little bit of time. But honestly, I think once I knew it felt like a call, and once I knew that this is what I wanted to do, it was actually very easy. The difficult part was trying to figure out where within the social impact space I might fit. What was I interested in because it's such a vast field, there are so many areas you can work in, so many kinds of organisations you can be a part of. So for me it was really about, well, where do I begin? And I was really fortunate to meet Veena Mankar who set up Swadhaar FinServe and she's been a mentor and like my full sort of hashtag life goals kind of person and I had the opportunity to sort of learn under her and the rest is history.
👉🏾 So IDR is the brainchild of one of my co-founders Smarinita Shetty, there are three of us in total, so there's Smarinita, Devanshi and myself. And honestly, I think IDR was just born out of frustration.
👉🏾 So what we had actually seen over the years of working in this space is that, we have the solutions to a lot of the problems that India was facing, right? Whether it's malnutrition, whether it's issues with sort of learning outcomes, maternal mortality, we had many of the solutions. And really the problem was that they weren't reaching the right people at the right time, in the right format for them to act.
And we began IDR really just asking the question, what if we made this information available and we made it contextual and we made it relevant to people who were taking decisions, whether it was nonprofit leaders running programs, whether it was policymakers, whether it was CSR. What if we gave them the information they needed? Would it result in more effective funding decisions or policies that reflected ground realities? And so that was really the initial idea. We spoke to about a hundred people before we started trying to understand where they go to learn, what do they do if they find themselves stuck on a particular problem, how do they find solutions? And interestingly everyone told us that they don't read, it was 110 out of a hundred people saying we don't read.
👉🏾 But fast forward, we sort of tweaked our model a little bit and we built a product, we built an audience, we built an organisation. And it was only through this that actually, we realised how big our dreams were. Because the three of us would sit around this small table and I remember Smarinita would always, I think the first month we had maybe 5,000 visitors to our site and we were making projections for the year and she would say by the end of the year, we're gonna get to a hundred thousand. And it just seemed so unlikely, such a moonshot, because we were at 5,000, there were three of us we had no idea, we probably had funding just for six months anyway. But I think that has continued to be how we do things. There is this kind of understated ambition that I think characterises how we've always done things at IDR. And yeah, it's just been a hell of a ride.
👉🏾 I was just gonna say, I'm sure there are many naysayers, it's just they've been kind enough to not tell us to our face.
👉🏾 But maybe we'll find them on Twitter or some social media platform. Honestly, it's been incredibly validating. I think what was proven quite quickly was that the sector really was aching for a product to come in, that made information and insights and the latest thinking available to a vast number of people. And I think that actually really helped with our initial traction, because when you fill a vacuum it's very easy to get validated and to do really well and so that was in the initial years. But since then, what's been interesting is that we've had a lot of mainstream media pick up our articles, which is never something that we expected. So more than half of IDR articles are actually republished in Scroll, Times of India online, The print, et cetera, a number of different publications. And that has really shown us that even people outside the sector are interested in these topics. IDR Is a little bit different from a mainstream journalistic outfit, in that we see our role not just in informing, but we very carefully track what happens as a result of an article being published on IDR.
👉🏾 So we want people to either think or act differently after reading something on IDR. And that doesn't always happen, but when it does, I think it shows us the ways in which what we publish is being used by people. So I'll just give you a couple of examples, early on when we started IDR, we had somebody write a piece on critiquing the social sector as not being caste diverse. And the piece was published both in IDR, as well as a much more established online news media publication. And then after the piece was published, the author got a lot of feedback, saying I read your article on IDR and you pointed to this problem, what about the solution, how are we gonna solve for this? And the author actually came back to us and said I want to do a follow on piece. But I wanna publish it on IDR because I know that decision makers who can actually do something about this are your readers. And then it kind of cuts through the noise a little bit, and for us, that was incredible because this person was actually choosing a much smaller, lesser, known publication to write what they wanted to write, because of what might come out of it. And our articles have been used for sort of internal strategy changes, they're used in academic curriculum, we've had it used extensively for policy advocacy, especially during COVID 19 and a lot of the policies that were being pushed out, we had a lot of people from the social sector, kind of writing in and saying, look we wanna publish because we wanna take it and say, this is why this is not working, or that is not working. So I'm sure we're making a lot of mistakes as well, but so far the response has been really positive.
👉🏾 Sudha I think you laid out all the big issues, I mean you're absolutely right, there are definitely issues with funding, with talent, with the reputation of the social sector within sort of the larger narrative. But I think right now the issue that's gonna have the most long term implications is really the regulatory climate. And just to tell you a little bit and to tell listeners a little bit what it's doing to the sector, right? So the FCRA is an act that actually covers international donations to nonprofits. And over the last decade, or so there have been various changes to the act that are making it increasingly restrictive and onerous for nonprofits to comply with. Nonprofits have to apply for a license every year essentially. So even if they have the license to accept international donations, they have to keep getting it renewed, and there's no guarantee that it'll be renewed.
👉🏾 And if I were to just make an analogy, if you think of what sort of water is to human beings, right? And you compare that to for instance, the FCRA and accessing international funding. Now, imagine if somebody came and told you that in order to get water, you need to apply for a license and you may or may not get it, and then even after you get the license, there's an authority that's gonna tell you how much water you can use for what purposes in your home. So how much can you drink? How much can you use to wash your vegetables? How much can you use to have a bath? If you run out of water, you can't get water from a neighbour or somebody else. And there's only gonna be one location in India, no matter where you're based, through which you're able to access the water. How long do you think this fictitious human being is gonna survive for?
👉🏾 So if you were to think of this from the context of nonprofit organisations and the historic reliance on international donations, it has created a huge vacuum. A lot of domestic giving still tends to be towards direct service delivery, which means working in schools or, health delivery system.
👉🏾 And so when organisations that are doing different things, for instance, research or academia, these organisations have historically relied on international funds. And now when that source has been entirely cut off it's making it incredibly, incredibly difficult. And then you layer on top of that, the pandemic and so many organisations struggled and many of them didn't survive. And so you have a domestic giving situation that isn't perhaps where it could be, you have international funding increasingly under threat, and then you have people reeling from a pandemic in a sector that is anyway already underfunded and under-resourced.
👉🏾 So , there have always been ebbs and flows when it comes to policy and the society space but I think especially now it's extremely difficult. And I actually know organisations, very established large organisations that when they get their FCRA renewal, it is such a relief, they're almost throwing a party because it's literally just out of "oh great we're gonna survive".
👉🏾 Absolutely. So the SDGs have 17 goals, 169 indicators, and these are not going to be achieved without collective effort and without collaboration. I mean, that's what SDG 17 is all about, right? So whether it's ending poverty or it's ensuring access to clean drinking water, organisations in the social sector are gonna be crucial to this effort, because like you said, they're the ones that have been embedded in communities, they're the ones that have been delivering services and fighting for basic fundamental rights of people at the last mile, for decades.
👉🏾 So I think that's a given, but now let's come to the Indian economy right? More than half of our population is under the age of 35, and we've known this for a while, but still, we're nowhere near leveraging our demographic dividend. I think with the pandemic, we really saw how poor our public health system is to serve the kind of population that we have in India. How inadequate our social security system is, our governance is, every year the ASER survey publishes how abysmally our students perform and all the evidence is pointing to how the pandemic has set us so far back, not just in terms of education, but in terms of health and so many other indicators.
👉🏾 And so we might have in schools, for instance, a hundred percent attendance, but if kids aren't really learning then how are they going to grow up and go on to study in higher education. Or how are they going to be sort of active, positive contributors to the economy. And the social sector works across these areas, right? Whether it's education, whether it's healthcare, whether it's livelihoods, and it plays a very crucial role in filling the gap wherever government services and the markets don't reach. And they're the ones that really fight for people at the margins. So I think there are a hundred reasons why the social sector and the work of civil society is so crucial to India's growth as an economy. But really even if you just look at human capital, the civil society space is crucial in ensuring that the basic fundamental rights of people that today are not perhaps where they should be, are upheld and that basic services that allow you to function in society are delivered at a quality that they should be. That is really I think what's gonna be crucial if we want to get there. I mean, of course, there's a major role for industry, and government and there are systemic changes that need to happen, but I don't think any of it is gonna happen at the pace that it's gonna happen without civil society.
👉🏾 And then of course there's the role that the social sector plays in sort of ensuring a healthy democracy, holding government to account and to ensure that policies are inclusive and democratic. So it is as important a sector as the business sector, as a private sector and as the public sector and I think perhaps it doesn't get as much importance by the media or generally in sort of dinnertime conversations.
👉🏾 There are a ton of collaborations at a subnational level, whether it's at a state level at a district level, the nonprofit sector and local government actually works very closely together. So a lot of times nonprofits will pilot a program and then get an evaluation done and have the evidence to prove that the program achieves the outcomes that it's stated. And then we'll sort of go to the government because ultimately if you wanna work at scale, the government is the only partner. And there are examples of this across the country where the government will say, okay, your education program is working, I want you to scale it to all schools in 10 districts of this state.
👉🏾 And this happens at all levels, not just nonprofits. It happens with foundations that co-fund or will partner with the government to execute these massive programs. So there's definitely collaboration on the execution side, but then there's also a lot of working together on technical support groups and advising on policy, and essentially supporting the government, wherever support is invited. And some of the biggest successes in India have actually come out of such collaboration, so the whole polio eradication campaign, right? It was a combination of the Indian government, but Rotary international, which is a foundation, UNICEF and other civil society institutions. And there are many examples of programs like this.
👉🏾 I think idealism and cynicism are actually two sides of the same coin. I am very idealistic and I have so much hope alive in me that I think it makes me that much more frustrated when I see , the state of things today. So I think it's very easy actually to not wear rose-tinted glasses and I think the people that have a romanticised view of what it means to work in this space are probably new to it or are sitting outside of it. But once you're in, it kind of exposes itself to you when you see it for everything it is warts and all.
👉🏾 We've been very passionate about this at IDR and we actually have a feature series called Failure Files, and the purpose of it is really to normalise conversations about what's not working. And so it's actually both a text-based series as well as a podcast. And the idea is to get leaders from across the sector, social entrepreneurs, heads of foundations, non-profit leaders to talk about professional failures as well as ways in which we as a sector might be failing at certain things. I think it's crucial to be able to have these conversations because ultimately the work that so many organisations are doing it changes lives. So we need to be honest about what's not working.
👉🏾 I wanna share this story. So it wasn't easy to get to Failure Files. Right? We launched Failure Files in year four of IDR being around we're five years old...

76: Building a clean label brand - the highs and lows of being a female entrepreneur: Anusha Bhushan, CEO and Co-Founder, Smoodies

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

“And it is really hard, I think, especially when imposter syndrome sort of plays on your mind saying, do I deserve to be so audacious with my dreams. And actually, for some time, I think I used to say the right thing, so I used to say that I'm playing a go big strategy, but when it came to actually making decisions, I would take a slightly safer route. And in fact an investor actually called me out on it and he said, you know, you're saying you want to go big, but your dreams do seem to be limited by some sense of restraint in your own mind.”
Across the world women’s participation in labour fell dramatically during the pandemic and India was no different. Except that numbers of women in the workforce had been steadily declining since 2010.
Women entrepreneurs fair no better in the country - just 14% of women own or run businesses(IMF2019). So, it is no great surprise that women account for just 17% of GDP in India, less than half the global average.
The barriers to entry for women are numerous - socio-cultural expectations, risk aversion, unequal access to finance and collateral, absence of support networks …. The list is endless. So, it is always good to meet with women who step out of their comfort zone to make their dreams come alive. In this case, it is my guest Anusha Bhushan, a young entrepreneur who left her career in investment banking to set up a wellness beverage brand Smoodies.
In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast we talk about her journey to becoming an entrepreneur,
👉🏾 Overthinking and overcoming the Imposter syndrome
👉🏾 Her commitment to building a clean labeled, sustainable business
👉🏾 The unique challenges faced by female entrepreneurs
👉🏾 The highs and lows of running a business
👉🏾 Support networks and mentors
👉🏾 Learnings from running a sustainable wellness brand
👉🏾 Her advice to aspiring female entrepreneurs
To know more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Morning, Sudha. Thank you so much, a pleasure to be here.
👉🏾Sure. I actually find this question very hard to answer, still discovering it. But no to answer it accurately by trade I'm a food and beverages entrepreneur based out of India. I run a fruit-based beverages brand called Smoodies, so I've been running this for the last six years. Before, which I spent some time in management consulting and in investment banking across both Mumbai and London.
👉🏾 I did my MBA from, IIM Calcutta, and I have an economics degree from the London School of Economics. Both degrees were quite some time ago. And personally, I'm a pet parent, have been for around two years now and it's a fairly big part of my life. I'm very passionate about sort of clean label nutrition and that feeds into what I do at work. I'm beginning to learn a lot more about climate change as well, and I like to spend time, educating myself around sort of what we can do as a business as well, and of course how that feeds into my personal life as well.
👉🏾 So my first job coming out of LSE was in investment banking that was in London. So, you know, I did the mandatory, the analyst years in an investment bank and a couple of years down the line, I think I just realised that there were two things that were missing for me. One, I didn't really want to do banking long term, and I wanted a career in India, that was important to me for a number of different reasons. I think family, of course, was something that I always knew I wanted to make it back to India for eventually. But you know the murmurings of entrepreneurship in India had started around then this is, maybe around 2011 or so. And the idea of sort of eventually starting a business in India at some point was sort of seeded in my mind.
👉🏾 So, I moved back, I said, let me move back and there are a lot of different things that I could do. I was figuring out business school and so I took a break, and I moved back with a couple of food intolerances and so I found myself during my break, actually walking up and down a lot of supermarket shelves in Bangalore, you know, just looking for things to sort of manage lactose intolerance and stuff like that.

👉🏾 And you know, this is, again, this is back in the day when there was no variety available on shelves. And that's what kind of got me thinking that, you know, I've been thinking about doing something on my own anyway. Maybe there's an opportunity here to build something in the packaged food space. I'm not a techie and so the startup stuff for me was very much like I wanna do a product that I understand that I can make and sell and build a business, build a physical business, right?
👉🏾 But you know, somewhere in that process, I got into business school, so I went. Somewhere in those two years of business school, I got a consulting role. So I said, why don't I do that for a bit? So I did, but I think the second time round, I think the parallels between investment banking and management consulting they're both very glamorous roles to take. But I think because I had already done the banking thing, when I did it in consulting, it didn't give me any sense of fulfilment. And that's when I realised, I think I was ready to maybe sort of take that plunge and just figure out atleast the early part of starting my own business. I was a bit early actually, I was maybe 27 when I made that decision. But I was very, very particular that I wanted to start the grind of entrepreneurship while I was relatively young. Because I just wanted to be able to devote all my energy and all my time to it, which typically I think as you get older, you just have priorities as well. And I said, let me do it while I'm free and unhindered. So that's how it started. And yeah, so I just quit my job one day much to everybody’s dismay and yeah, and then just started.
👉🏾 I suffer from imposter syndrome all the time. To the extent that I think, sometimes if somebody gives me a compliment or pays me a kind word about our business, in the back of my mind, I am literally finding all the reasons for why they are wrong and I don't deserve that compliment. There have been times when people have actually told me to stop, just accept the compliment, it's okay.
👉🏾 I'm actually working actively at combating risk aversion though. I think entrepreneurship is a gamble and sometimes I think the journey only sort of pays off if you play the kind of go big or go home strategy. And it is really hard, I think, especially when imposter syndrome sort of plays on your mind saying, do I deserve to be so audacious with my dreams. And actually, for some time, I think I used to say the right thing, so I used to say that I'm playing a go big strategy, but when it came to actually making decisions, I would take a slightly safer route. And in fact an investor actually called me out on it and he said, you know, you're saying you want to go big, but your dreams do seem to be limited by some sense of restraint in your own mind.
👉🏾 So that is something that I'm very conscious of and I'm working on that now. I think comes down from, I think, situations of absolute uncertainty, they used to make me feel very, very anxious. So actively trying to manage or learning how to manage ambiguity and just become comfortable with it because unfortunately with entrepreneurship, you find yourself in these situations all the time.
👉🏾 So yeah, I mean, we positioned Smoodies as a wellness beverage brand because effectively what we are trying to do is we are trying to unjunk the juices sector, right?
👉🏾 So we're trying to deliver a ‘better for you’ version of products in the packaged food space. And the first space that we actually decided to work in was the juices of the space. So for us what that means is you know, if you study the back label of any other large juice brand today, you'll find sugar, and preservatives, and emulsifiers, and additives and colours, flavours, you name it.
👉🏾 And so the actual fruit content that you're getting is very very low. And that's why we call it a wellness beverage brand, you know, we don't like to call ourselves a health brand because what we're trying to do is effectively say, can we give you juice in its most natural form, and that itself is a wellness play. So we call ourselves a wellness brand, we also like to talk about how we are clean label.
👉🏾 So clean label effectively means that, right? It means that every single ingredient on your back label should be something that a consumer understands and recognises. And ideally should not have been manufactured in a lab. That one is a extremely cool principle for our business. I mean, we wouldn't exist if we didn't want to solve that one problem.
👉🏾 The other bit that we are very, very sort of conscious of, and this is a very difficult one, it's very difficult goal to meet is, can we be a sustainable business as well? And by sustainable for us, again, being in the packaged foods industry, the first thing that we're trying to attack is the packaging. So most of our competitors today are in plastic. You know, they're using plastic in their bottles, in their labels, in their secondary packaging. So the first thing we said is like, can we do glass instead? And we've had to make a lot of other compromises around the business to make the glass bottles work. But it's something again, it's just incredibly important for us because if small businesses today, while building the foundations of their business, don't try to make it sustainable, there's no way you can do it at large scale. Is it possible to take a 500 crore brand and say, okay, why don't you now try to become sustainable? Your processes are set in place, your supply chains are set in place and it is what it is. So I think that's the beauty of the startup ecosystem as well, you see a lot of entrepreneurs these days trying to do the right thing. So that's, fairly important for us.
👉🏾 Unfortunately I think women entrepreneurs not only face the usual entrepreneurial challenges but they face the additional set of challenges that come from society, come from people close to them.
👉🏾 And I think when I talk about women entrepreneurs, I am talking about myself as well. I think that the largest sort of issue is that society is still not used to seeing women in positions of authority in the workplace. Especially somebody saying, I run this business, It's almost like it's a contrarian thing to say and to hear and to understand and to digest.
👉🏾 So for me like this comes across and has come across in multiple ways. I have a male co-founder, he's a very good friend of mine and is very supportive of this fact right? That I have a female co-founder who is the CEO of this business and I must ensure that she is given that position in every meeting that we walk into, right?
👉🏾 But not everybody gets that privilege of having somebody who understands that. So, you know, when we raise capital from investors or when we are trying to attract high-quality talent, or even just sitting in a meeting with key customers or vendors, there's an extra layer of mental load that every female entrepreneur actually has to take on, just to ensure that they are establishing their position of authority in the room.
👉🏾 Because by default eyeballs will move to the man in the room.
👉🏾 It is what it is and the only way to do it is to actually, in the meeting hold your own, right? Or establish it right up front that I'm the person that you should be directing most of the conversation to, for example.
👉🏾 So I think it's a very frustrating place to be and you know in the beginning it used to bother me. It no longer bothers me, I've just picked up a set of skills to be able to manage that. And also as I said a very strong understanding with my co-founder that this is how we do things, but if you don't have that support, then it's really hard to do.
👉🏾 The other thing is there's also a lot of mental load and guilt, sometimes of making sure you show up as, in your society dictated role, right? Like, I know my personal life is really simple. I don't have kids and I have a super supportive husband. But you know, I know a lot of female entrepreneurs, otherwise who have guilt of, am I spending enough time as a mother or a wife or a daughter, and expectations, preset expectations that people have of you. So, yeah, I think men are always encouraged to shoot for the stars and chase their dreams, but women are always cautioned, right.
👉🏾 Saying will you be able to do it all. And if they're not cautioned there, that's always subtle guilt that you're made to feel. That because you spend so much time at work, you're spending less time on something else.
👉🏾 So I think for me being a consumer business the highs are almost always related to just great consumer feedback. Whether it is somebody just telling me that, you know. I love your product or seeing the brand that we've build, like actually being entrenched into the lives of our consumers. I love seeing that especially when it is actually unprompted feedback, right? I went for a jog the other day in the middle of Cubbon Park , it's just like very large park in the middle of Bangalore and I saw somebody doing yoga and they had a bottle of ours.
👉🏾 And it's a very nice feeling to see that, you know people are using what you've built in their everyday life. I think that for me has always given me some of my greatest highs and that's what we build for. And that's what makes me wake up every morning. The other thing is, I love doing what I do. I love working with my team. The other sort of the dual objective of entrepreneurship was can we generate employment? And there was the other reason to run a product business. We run our own manufacturing, means we hire labour. You know, the first person in our factory who was making the product, and the only person making the product at that time is now the production supervisor for 20 people.
👉🏾 So I like being able to see that we've also been able to give career progression and financial progression to people. So I think the people aspect of it also keeps me fulfilled.

👉🏾 There is a network of women entrepreneurs that has been set up by the Pan IIM member network. We started picking up momentum around 2020, so when the pandemic struck. I find that network to be very useful to sort of bounce ideas off, and so I do like networks because of the ability to access resources and to find the right set of people who can maybe help you.
👉🏾 But I was slightly contrarian due to how useful networks are after a certain point, right? Because in our culture, like we're always curating self-image and we're always showcasing only the positive aspects of your journey. And I've seen that, that extends to networks as well, especially like the larger the network the more people have to lose by talking about their difficulties, right? Because you don't know who else is in their network. So I use the networks to some extent to meet people or to meet the relevant people. But I much prefer one-to-one interactions, I think they feel a lot more authentic, and I feel a lot safer communicating in smaller settings. But there is still even outside of just this one IIM network, there's still work to be done to build an ecosystem, to support women.
👉🏾 A lot of people are doing a bit, right? So you have people who are funding women entrepreneurs, or who are trying to ensure that there is diversity in their founder networks. But I think in general, I still feel like the onus is on, and it should be actually, the onus is still on women entrepreneurs too, to seek out help. But if you do, and if you go out and you look for help and you do it systematically, you build your networks, there is a lot of goodwill and there is a lot of help out there as long as you're willing to put in the time and the energy. And this is actually independent of whether you are a man or a woman.
👉🏾 If you build the right networks that are relevant to your industry and your goals, there are a lot of people willing to help. Like I have different people I talk to for advice on sort of various steers of life right? So if I'm worried about capital raising, I know that there are three or four people who've done it and done it very successfully, and I would go to them and will talk to them about what they did how they did it, what am I not doing right, for example. If I'm struggling with something very specifically to do with our industry. I go with problem statements about the challenges in our business to, let's say, an industry professional. These are people who you don't get time with very often. But very often, like they come back with perspectives and solutions that you may not have gotten if you had sat with a problem yourself. And then there's just the people who you talk to just to complain about life, right?
👉🏾 You know, you don't want anything back, but you just need somebody to be like 100% vulnerable with. And I've actually found that the best people for that are not your friends, not your family, somebody who is going through what you're going through and has just recognised that I'm safe with this person. I have people in the F&B industry who I will call up and talk about anything and everything that's going on, knowing that it's a confidential conversation. And I think that one is what I've learned in the pandemic in fact, to find a few people who you can talk to, so more than network, it's just about feeling safe.
👉🏾 Definitely
👉🏾 So outside of obviously business decisions there are obviously some business decisions I would've done differently with the benefit of hindsight. But on a larger scale, the one thing I...

75: Prison reforms: Decongesting Indian Prisons: Justice Madan B Lokur and Sugandha Mathur

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
For the 6th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast in partnership with India Justice Report - we focused on the overburdened Indian prisons. For a very long time India’s prison system has been known for overcrowding, unhygienic conditions and the disproportionate number of under trials in the prison population.
The covid-19 pandemic led the Indian Supreme Court to issue directions to the High Court for decongestion of prisons in order to prevent the outbreak of the epidemic in closed spaces. The court directed the constitution of High-Powered Committees (HPCs) at state-levels to oversee the decongestion efforts, while also directing the Under trial Review Committees (UTRC), a district-level body mandated to review cases of prisoners, to meet every week.
However, despite several measures to decongest prisons overcrowding has remained a serious issue, along with a shortage of staff and medical officers. The level of vacancies at the National level means 1 in every three posts has not been filled
When we were thinking of the focus for this episode - it was about culling out lessons from the pandemic. Lessons that could help support the drive to sustainably decongest Indian prisons.
Is it training for the police to prevent indiscriminate arrests, or is it giving more power to the prison authorities to refuse to intake a prison when maximum sustainable number have been reached?
It was also about understanding whether magistrates who know the conditions of local prisons shape their remand powers to ensure that there is no overcrowding.
What is the role of legal aid in solving this problem?
Most importantly, central to the conversations is the role of multiple stakeholders - whose actions and frequent inactions contribute to the overcrowding. How can they be corrected and made accountable, what processes and systems need to be put into place to enable positive action.
I was privileged to speak with Justice Madan B Lokur, a former judge of Supreme Court of India and Sugandha Mathur from the Human Rights Initiative to get their insights on progressing the agenda of prison reform. Thank you Maja and Valay for your support and insights.
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Yes. You see, in my view, the process of decongestion has not been very successful either before COVID or during COVID. It's okay to say that, you know, 8,000 people were released, but out of those 8,000 how many of them actually came back, that is one. Number two, on what basis did you decide to reject the application for release of some of those people? So theoretically it's possible that 15,000 people could have been released and even this 15,000 is not a particularly large number considering the inmates that we have.
👉🏾 But I think the administration should have been far more proactive and should have taken steps to release as many of them as possible. The idea was that COVID should not strike other prisoners. Now, what is the point of just releasing a handful people and say, well, it's not going to strike the others.
👉🏾 Frankly I don't think that makes too much of sense. So if you ask me on a scale of one to 10, I would just say about maybe 4 out of 10.
👉🏾 On a scale of 1 to 10 I mean, I would agree with Justice Lokur and I would probably say 5. So there was clearly an effort that we could see in different states if not in all states and union territories. But at least in some states, there was this coordinated effort where the judiciary, the prison department, the legal services institutions, everyone came together.
👉🏾 I think for the first time the coordinated effort that we keep talking about, this actually happened in few states. However, the effort was neither constant and not uniform and because of that, as Justice Lokur was saying that the impact could have been more, could have been better and, you know, it could have benefited more prisoners, but unfortunately, that did not happen. So yes, I would say on a scale of 1 to 10? Five.
👉🏾 Yes, definitely there was a scope of releasing more categories of prisoners. The functioning of the high-powered committees was not uniform throughout the country. And the Supreme court had left it to the discretion of the high-powered committees to determine the categories of cases for different class of prisoners. And it had merely suggested one category that may be considered for release and that category was those who've been convicted or are under trial for offences, for which the maximum prescribed imprisonment is 7 years or less. So about 26 states, identified this category for release of under trials and 17 states undertook this category for release of convicts.
👉🏾 However, there were seven states who did not determine any other category at all. Right? So there we clearly see where that effort could have been made. So overall, when we see the categories of business identified for release by the HPCs range from 1 to 20. So in some states, they did make that effort. So for example, in Punjab, Delhi, to some extent Jammu and Kashmir and even West Bengal. So they undertook the decongestion exercise in a very systematic manner and where you could actually see while going through the minutes of these HPC meetings is that there was a correlation between these categories being identified and whether that is actually helping in reducing the prison population or not.
👉🏾 And you could see their thought process, you know, and how gradually they devised more categories of prisoners for release and slowly, moved towards, decongesting their prisons. And other HPCs, like I was saying, they took a very, very restrictive approach and they worked very mechanically, with the bare minimum efforts required. And as regards women and elderly this was very, very disappointing to note. You know when CHRI conducted the rapid study, we found that only five HPCs actually undertook the cases of elderly prisoners. And similarly there was only one HPC that is Punjab which categorised pregnant women for release, you know, they said that pregnant women should be released, that was the only HPC which talked about that. Very few again, only three HPCs considered categories of prisoners who had co-morbidities or who had some preexisting condition and primarily because this was a health crisis that was something that the HPC should have looked at. But unfortunately that did not happen.
👉🏾 Yeah, you know we already have these under trial review committees, right? The idea should have been in my view to strengthen these under trial review committees, rather than set up another high-powered committee. These under trial review committees are at the level of the district, so you have the district judge, you have the superintendent of police, you have the district collector. So they know exactly what is happening on the ground. The high powered committee may or may not know, okay? So they're just going to lay down some kind of a policy, but what is actually happening, it's only the Under Trial Review Committees, which are aware of this.
👉🏾: So I think the Under Trial Review Committee should have been strengthened and then they should have gone ahead. And if there's some kind of a doubt, all right, then refer the case to a high-powered committee. Otherwise, hopefully, if nothing happens, what are they going to do? Are they going have a higher high-powered committee? I mean, this will never end, you already have an established mechanism, use that, strengthen it.
👉🏾 In my view the arrest and detention of under-trial prisoners, of persons, did not stop and that is why the number increased. The point is that you are dealing with a health situation, a pandemic, the focus has to be on the health aspect, not on the crime. The crime is something that the courts will take care of and the courts have taken care of, at least in the case of convicts. And to an extent they have taken care of the under-trial prisoners by declining to give them bail. So the focus should have been on the fact that there is a health crisis and that should be addressed. Not that oh, you know, you've committed this kind of a crime, so therefore I'm not gonna permit you to leave.
What about pregnant women? As Sugandga was saying only one state did that. Did it prevent other states from doing it? I don't think so, whatever the crime. So I think that focus was just not there.
👉🏾 I mean, what Justice Lokur was mentioning. In most of the states, that was the issue, that there was lack of sensitisation on the part of these stakeholders and why this decondition excise. Though it did sort of help in reducing the prison population for some time, but then again, it increased. So that clearly shows that there was that lack of focus and lack of sensitisation among the stakeholders and regarding the point on whether arrests is one of the reasons, yes, definitely increasing arrests by police is one of the reasons for increase in prison population and the share of under trials.
👉🏾 And actually data can help us to understand this point better because when we look at the data that's there in the Crime India statistics.
👉🏾 So a closer look at these total number of arrests under IPC, SLL, CRPC and preventive detention laws revealed that the number of arrests under IPC crimes increased by 42% and the number of arrests under state local laws offences increased by 14%. So this clearly shows that the arrests were increasing, despite the Supreme court directions to the police authorities and time and again
👉🏾 And another reason for increase in prison population, I believe, is because of these sporadic functioning of courts, you know, the courts were also shut down for some time, so reduced court operations have negatively impacted the provision of timely and fair hearings. So it has contributed to increased case backlogs now and has led to increased length of judicial and administrative proceedings. So unless that is addressed, this will result in prolonged detention of prisoners and thus increasing the prison population in the coming years.
👉🏾 As you are aware, there are a large number of vacancies. The number of jail officials, I think 33% of the posts are lying vacant. The number of doctors is this just not adequate I mean one doctor for 300 and you had the pandemic and you had to divert doctors to hospitals, nursing homes and so on. So really, I think the whole thing has to be looked at in a global fashion, so to speak where you can't say that where crime is important or you can't say that health is less important or, you know, "oh, we don't have people" so that these guys remain. Judges can't say that because the courts are not functioning therefore the Liberty of an individual should be taken away. That doesn't make sense if you're not working, that doesn't mean that somebody has to remain in jail. If you're not working, you should say, all right, I'm not working. So I don't see the reason for keeping him in jail. So I think at the relevant time, there should have been a far greater debate on many of these issues, which unfortunately did not happen.
👉🏾 Well, in our experience the, the problem largely lies at the small district prisons and the sub jails, where there is no full-time medical officer available and even if a visiting doctor from a local district hospital is visiting, he or she's only visiting, say once a week, you know?

👉🏾 And in this situation, during the pandemic that's highly inadequate. And the reason that is often quoted to us is that there are a dearth of doctors, even in the government hospitals, and therefore it is difficult to depute doctors in prisons by the health department.
👉🏾 And on a practical level, we do see that some prisons engage doctors on contractual basis also. So for example, they would engage a retired government or army doctor on that. So when we look at the prison statistics and when we say that 30% to 40% are the vacancies in medical staff, it is not clear if the number of these contractual doctors are also included in the data or not. And if that is not included, then that means the ground situation is really very, very bad and challenging.
👉🏾 I was wanting to follow up on Justice Lokur's two or three points actually. One is about the arrest and one is about the courts. See the courts were not functioning and as you say, there was no great effort to say that, oh my God, these people are all going to be inside and so one must do something about it, it was sort of left to the high-level review committees. And they, according to some of the work that has been done in Maharashtra, they released convicts on parole, but hardly ever released under trials. And when they released under trials in some states where bail had been granted, it took as much as three months to get all of the conditionalities there. And there was still the reluctance to give bail by the magistracy.
👉🏾 You also have spoken about this many times when we have been in conversation. Now this is a comorbidity that has existed for a long time. So how are we going to repair it, even in the future? You've got already nine lakh people more and the under-trial numbers have gone up from 65% 70% to nearly 80%. 80% of the population is now under trials. And there doesn't seem to be any study, on this, I wanted to also ask Sugandha that what is the reason for the arrests, is the reason for the arrests in the two years, something to do with not obeying the epidemic protocols being out on curfew time or what, unless we know these things, there's just no question of repair and no consequences flowing for keeping somebody in jail, just because you don't want to give bail.

👉🏾 So Madan, really my question to you is how do we hold trial court judges? And magistracy for not doing the duty that they should at remand and during bail?
👉🏾 Yeah there are two solutions. One as Sugandha said is to sensitise the magistrates and the judges. Why are you keeping people inside? I mean, is it absolutely necessary? Is there any evidence to show that this person is going to abscond, is a flight risk? Is there any evidence to say that he's going to influence the witnesses. Now what the prosecution does is they say, oh, you know, keep this fellow inside because he's going to influence the witnesses.
👉🏾 So the magistrates don't look into this, one of the reasons could be pressure or work, but I'm not sure whether that's the correct answer to give on the part of the magistrates. So that is one aspect. The second aspect is, you know the legal aid system, I think has not functioned properly. What happens is that a person is produced and the judge says, all right, do you have a lawyer? He says, no, I don't have a lawyer. Alright, you know, somebody from legal aid, okay, you represent him. He will represent him, but does he know what has happened? Does he know what the case is? Does he have a copy of the FIR?
👉🏾 Now you can imagine what will happen to a person who belongs to one of the disadvantaged sections of society or who is otherwise very poor. If he asks or she asks that, listen, please gimme a copy of the FIR, or the lawyer should ask, that person should ask, they'll say, "no, we won't give it". What do you do? So that's where the legal aid system has to be strengthened and I'm afraid it's just the legal aid system is just going on. Okay. You produce somebody, you have a lawyer attached and say, okay, you argue for whatever it is worth. And frankly, it is worth nothing because the lawyer does not know what are the facts of the case.
👉🏾 The lawyer is not given an opportunity to discuss the case with his client, maybe half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. That doesn't happen. So that's why you have this problem.
👉🏾 So I'm not aware whether, most of these arrests were because of not following the lockdown protocol and guidelines. But I mean, we clearly know that the crime in India data clearly says that arrests under the IPC offences have increased by 42%. And during the lockdown, there have been nearly 150 reported instances of police employing physical force through beating, kicking, or xxxxxx charge, you know, as well as inflicting verbal abuse insults to people. So and including essential service providers, on the ground for enforcing these locked down conditions. So that goes on the functioning of the police and their accountability. But yeah, I'm sorry I'm not aware if there were increased arrest for following the lockdown guidelines.
👉🏾 That's absolutely fine Sugandha we're just trying to understand from Justice Lokur also that yeah what is to be done, but where can we get some consequences for the judge who doesn't do his job, the lawyer who doesn't understand his client's case and the policeman who arrests willy nilly.
👉🏾 Because if at those levels of those first responders, there is no accountability and no consequences flow, no disadvantage to them.
👉🏾 It's like this. So far as the judges are concerned the high court prepares their annual confidential report. So if a particular judge is just not fearing the law or just randomly putting people inside, declining to give bail over a period of time questions can be asked and the high court can be told that, listen, this guy is not following then law. And the high court can then take action you see this is a different kind of accountability. I mean, there has to be accountability, but this is a different kind of accountability. It's not that you fire the judge and say that why didn't you do this or why did you do that?
👉🏾 So you could have these accountability mechanisms, not to punish a judge that might be going a little too far, but at the same time telling the judge that listen, we know what's happening and you better, shape up otherwise it may have an impact on your career.
👉🏾 So accountability in some form, will have to be brought in not only with regard to the judges, but certainly with regard to the police. Now in one of these gang rape cases where the girl died, what did the state do? They just transferred the police officer from one district to another district,...

74: How leaders lead? A conversation with Liz Sweigart, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Safe Kids AI

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Liz Sweigart, PhD Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Safe Kids AI. Liz serves on several boards, is a frequent author and speaker on mental wellness and mental health.
In the episode we explore leaders, leadership, conscious, moral, ethical, moral leadership. We also spoke about her journey to discovering who she is and separating that from what she does.
👉🏾 The imperatives for leaders to lead differently
👉🏾 What it means to be an authentic leader - eliminating the gap between who they are and how they present themselves to the world
👉🏾 Conscious leadership
👉🏾 The concept of the leader as a moral integrator
👉🏾 The inherent contradiction between moral leadership and capitalism as we know it.
👉🏾 The double bind for leaders in today’s world to deliver returns for shareholders and their obligation (as perceived by society) to act ethically and in the wider interests of society
👉🏾 Female leaders and trust
We also spoke about the people who inspire her.
“And where I think that leads into this whole question of leadership, is how is the view in the world changing, around who it is, again when the music stops, who it is that deserves these returns. And so I think leaders are being pressed to negotiate between this evolving view of shareholder capitalism, this evolving view of stakeholder capitalism.” Liz Sweigart

Memorable Passages from the episode:
👉🏾 Good morning and good afternoon, good evening and I guess good night, depending on where you are and when you're listening to this.
👉🏾 Well, I appreciate the opportunity and I am thrilled to get a chance to visit with you.
👉🏾 Oh, okay. Wait, how long did you say we had?
👉🏾 That's actually a really beautiful question for me because I've spent a lot of time in therapy actually exploring that. As some people listening may know, if you did any sort of light internet stalking on me, I'm very public about my journey with mental health, specifically with depression and with O C D, obsessive compulsive disorder.
👉🏾 And one of the things that I had to do in therapy in the last several years is to really engage with the question of, who am I? I got to a point in November of 2019 where I was suicidal and it was in large measure because I really had no idea who I was. And I didn't have really any anchor points as a result, I was completely unmoored. And so I have spent quite a bit of time in therapy and on my own trying to understand who am I.
👉🏾 And here's what I've come to. I am a person who loves connection, I am someone who loves meeting new people, I am someone who loves bringing people together around a purpose, which is one of the reasons why I was excited to talk with you and to join The Elephant in The Room today. Because for me, I have found that I am a wanderer, I love to journey and explore and adventure. I am a thinker, I like to sit and think, and I like to engage with others, I like to connect with other people.
👉🏾 So that is who I am and then there are things that I do. And the biggest lesson for me, I think in all of this was separating who I am from what I do. My answer to who are you used to be, essentially my name, rank and serial number, it was my title, it was my job. And then when I realised maybe that was the wrong answer, then it was my other jobs, it wasn't my professional career. It was, oh well, I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister.
👉🏾 And that actually still isn't who I am, those are roles that I play and those are things that I do. So I am all of those things and more. But figuring out who I am, began with what is it that motivates me, and then what do I feel is my purpose? And my purpose is to foster environments where human beings can flourish and bring people together in those environments where we can solve problems and we can be generative toward one another in the earth.
👉🏾 Thank you. I appreciate that.
👉🏾 So that's such a kind way of you're saying, why can't you keep a job? (laughter) So you are absolutely right, I am a polymath and a Renaissance woman. The challenge I found is that there are so many things that interest me, and there are a lot of things that I am very fortunate that I can do well. And so the challenge has been over the course of my life to allocate my time in line with the things that I believe are most valuable to myself and to others.
👉🏾 I don't want to just do things because I can and I enjoy them. It's important to me that what I do provides meaning and value and support and care and kindness to others.
👉🏾 So why did I go get a PhD? Well, it started based on the whole, why did I go get an MBA? So I grew up in New York city, I grew up in the upper west side of Manhattan. The bubble that I was in, I went to an excellent private all-girls school and there were 30 women in my graduating class when we got to the 12th grade. And the only other people that I found who've had similar experiences to having such small high school graduating classes have been from incredibly rural parts in the US. So I realised that I needed to do something pretty drastic if I was gonna get out of the bubble that I was in. And so I picked Rice University and I moved to Houston, Texas.
👉🏾 So while I was at Rice, I studied a whole variety of different things. And I somehow talked my way into my first job which was in international tax and over the course of my career, I ended up needing to go and get an advanced degree, they said, you gotta go get yourself a credential. And one of the options was going to get an MBA, so I went and got an MBA. And I promise this is going to answer your question. I started that in 2005, while I was working on my MBA part-time while I was working at the same time. And one of the professors I had, a brilliant man, he's a psychologist, an exceptional executive coach and he'd just published a second book on executive coaching.
👉🏾 He taught my organisational behaviour course, and I'd never taken a psychology class before. I didn't know anything about organisational behaviour and in this class, it started to answer all these questions I had about even the work that I had been doing. And I just loved it and at that point. So that was 2006, fast forward to 2018, so this has been sticking with me this entire time, I keep dancing around this whole area, this whole piece of psychology that touches on leadership organisations and groups of human beings. And I finally just got to a point where I went, you know, I want to do and be something different professionally than what I'm doing right now.
👉🏾 And so I went and pursued the PhD and it was marvellous, I loved it. And it was a great experience because I think I was also at the point in my life where the pieces came together.
👉🏾 There's a proverb when the student is ready the teacher appears. And that seems to be a theme in my life.
👉🏾 Yes, and I think that's another question of, oh my goodness how much time do we have? So I think one of the things that's important when we frame these conversations is to first kind of define our terms. Leaders are people who lead and how they lead is the practice of leadership.
👉🏾 And what I have seen frequently is a sort of conflation of the two. I've heard people describe especially in corporate settings, well that's what leadership wants to do, and what they really mean is that's what the leaders want to do. That's what the people in charge want to do. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're actively practising leadership. So when I think about the question of what's changing in the world? What do leaders have to do to lead differently? How is the practice of leadership evolved?
👉🏾 I am a firm believer in nothing new under the sun. So I think the world has always been in a state of flux. I think leaders have always been challenged with ongoing change. I don't think any of that is new or different, I do think that, what we have now is essentially the fourth industrial revolution, right? We have... and I'm just gonna use 5G as a proxy, but essentially what we have is the ability to transmit incredible volumes of data at incredible speed. And so I think that what has happened is that the perception of the pace of change has, changed, because we have more information than we did before, and that information is delivered without filters.
👉🏾 And then that information is also delivered with different lenses. So when I say it's not delivered with filters. I'm not talking about how you receive information from say a news agency and it's through their particular lens, what I mean is that volumes of data are simply available. And then it is up to leaders to parse this data and to make meaning from it.
👉🏾 And so the ongoing human struggle of meaning making, I think has become much more challenging, particularly for those in positions where they are practicing leadership. So I think leaders are one, grappling with all of the information that's available. Instantaneous feedback, which again is a relatively new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things because we haven't had telecommunications capabilities as we do now, we did not have social media the way that we do now. There has always been a form of media, and there's always been a form of human beings being social, but the way that it's come together now with technology is particularly challenging. So I think that leaders are at a place where the expectations have ratcheted up. They're more aware of the expectations than they may have been before. The ability of stakeholders to communicate those expectations and to do so loudly and broadly is all new and different.
👉🏾 So to me the great challenge of leadership right now is actually one of information and communication. Because the tenets of leadership when I think about, what leadership means when we get to kind of more of the theoretical level, it's actually, it's almost static. What to me is different is the environment in which it's being practised.
👉🏾 Yes. So let me start with the last one first. I think that there are certain words that sound inspiring and important and so we use them excessively without necessarily ever defining what we're talking about, kind of going back to the whole question of leaders versus leadership. When I think about authentic leadership as a subject area. And we think about that sort of in the firmament of leadership theory. Now leaders in leadership have been around from millennia, but we've only really dug into this idea of, are there different flavours or different types or different practices of leadership. You know, what are the different types of leaders, how does their personalities....all of that stuff, is really only something that's come about since the mid 1800s. So kind of the first theory of leadership that was put forward in sort of an academic or theoretical context, was actually Carlisle in 1841 and was the idea of the great man theory.
👉🏾 And that was the idea that throughout history were sort of ordained, appointed, divinely inspired to be leaders and to lead the people and basically tell other people what to do.
👉🏾 And then this view over the next couple hundred years, has evolved and it really started with this view, which is a fancy way of saying that it started with this idea that leadership is about individuals. It's about individual leaders.
👉🏾 And really it's been in the last 50 years. The view has evolved to understand and appreciate what's known as relational leadership or a view of leadership as being less about the individual leader and more about the relationship between leaders and followers and with followers among each other.
👉🏾 And within this relational view, that's where you start to get concepts like authentic or charismatic leadership. Because for authentic leadership to be practised, you really are depending upon followers to perceive the authenticity of the leader. And one of the challenges I think is that we continuously present the idea of leadership as being all about the leader.
👉🏾 So we talk about leadership development, but we're not actually developing the practice of leadership. We're talking about helping individuals to be different or potentially better versions of themselves. So what happens I think, is that we get into this idea that, oh well, this person is really unliked, this person is authentic and we tell leaders, you have to be authentic.
👉🏾 But the thing about authenticity is you don't get to decide it for yourself. So I can go and be me and I can just present me to the world. But it is the determination of another person as to whether they perceive me to be authentic, genuine and a true reflection of who they understand me to be and who they believe I understand me to be.
👉🏾 So I think one of the challenges is that you can't go to a group of people and say, I'm an authentic leader, you can't. Like that's a determination that you don't get to make and so I think we have this sort of challenge in how we present leaders and leadership, that we sort of tell people, you have to be this thing, and the thing is you don't actually get to decide if that's what you are. I think that what we want to inspire leaders to do is to eliminate as much of the gap between who they know themselves to be and how they present themselves to the world, to narrow that gap.
👉🏾 And it's also what speaks to, you know, the basis of social power. I mean, and that was first and partially best articulated by French and Raven, who talked about this idea of referent power, which is where an individual has power because other people see, revere and want to essentially refer to them as the standard.
👉🏾 So referent power is, I see you and you are someone who I want to emulate and be like and that becomes the base of your social power. And I think in leadership, that's the secret sauce is when it's not that you have power, you are able to practice leadership, because you can give people rewards, or you can coerce them, or even that you were elected or appointed, or even that you have knowledge denied to others. It's that people see you and go, I want that. And that's what compels the followership. But I, think that's where the authenticity piece comes in.
👉🏾 Oh another really good one. Okay, so here's the fun thing about anything in the leadership realm? There are so many different definitions because essentially there's not a lot of standardisation in all of the terms, even leadership itself, when I was writing my dissertation I think that was one of the first things that really caught me was that there's actually no universally agreed definition of leadership. You could go to the dictionary, but that definition itself is hotly disputed and essentially self-referential as well.
👉🏾 So what I would say about how do we define terms when we talk about leadership? I think the most important thing is to be clear about what you are speaking about in that moment. So I want to acknowledge that there is quite a bit of valuable scholarship around the idea of conscious leadership, as in raising consciousness, and it's tied to things like mindfulness and awareness and that is valuable.
👉🏾 When I talk about conscious leadership in the course that I've had an opportunity to lead with David Reid, what we are talking about is leaders who are conscious of the world around them and they're conscious of the often conflicting and frequently complex landscape in which they are trying to lead others. And so our definition of conscious leadership is leaders who are conscious of self, so they're self-aware, they're conscious of others in environment, so they are situationally aware, and then they have developed a degree of emotional intelligence and self-regulation that allows them to bring together their self and situational awareness to strengthen their community.
👉🏾 And our focus on this is to help leaders to be able to act in ways that help those in their communities who are often the most vulnerable.
👉🏾 So it's really a question of how do we help business leaders to gain in their own self and situational awareness, such that not only are they able to lead in business, but they're also able to strengthen their communities.
👉🏾 Yeah, with all of us, I would say even followers. And we all lead and we all follow. Yes. self-awareness is a challenge.
👉🏾 All right. So we both agree that's a stacked question right there. Okay. So let me start with this. So the goal of the three-part course that David and I have been leading on conscious leadership. It has been built largely around my doctoral work actually, which is where you kind of bring up the point of the moral integrator and ethical leadership.
👉🏾 So when we think about what is ethical leadership there has been kind of an established definition, at least in the academic literature since, oh gosh, like the middle 2000s. I think that the definitive article that was written was Brown, Harrison and Treviño in 2005. And they described ethical leadership as leadership practised by leaders who were both moral persons, meaning that they themselves acted ethically and responsibly, and moral managers, meaning that they role modelled for others, how to behave in an ethical and moral fashion, and that then they used their power to inspire or compel others to do the same.
👉🏾 And they were able to bring about change in their organisations as a result of their actions. And so over time, this idea of ethical leadership has evolved Muel Kaptein in 2019 wrote a paper that added this idea of the moral entrepreneur, meaning that leaders, particularly leaders in business, are in a position to innovate new ethical norms in society, and so you can sort of think about it outbound. So the idea of the moral person and the moral manager, those are really taking place within

73: Reclaiming my identity and life a conversation with Ruchika Singh

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
What do people think of as they are coming to the end of their college/University degree? The future, a new life, new job, new friends, travel, and new adventures. And most people step into this beautiful but messy world full of hopes and dreams.
My guest this week on The Elephant in the Room podcast Ruchika Singh, had to press pause on the life she was looking forward to when she fell ill suddenly during exams in the last year of her engineering degree. Life ground to a halt as she was diagnosed with CNS Tuberculosis Meningitis. It meant fighting to survive and catastrophically losing vision as a side effect. The road to recovery has been a nearly decade long uphill battle and the social stigma and pressure has delayed her entry back into the life she dreamt for herself.
In spite of having one the highest percentage of people with visual impairment in the world - India is woefully ill prepared with the requisite training, support, job opportunities, networks, infrastructure, accessibility to enable people to live a normal life - a life that most of us take for granted. There are systemic barriers to inclusion for people with disability, including lack of knowledge about visual impairment and outdated attitudes/perceptions amongst most people and potential employers.
Stigma around any form of disability means millions of Indians are hidden, have no voice, no power and no decision making authority. Other people decide for them, choose for them, what they can or cannot do, about their passions and abilities - they are robbed of their identity. The struggle is everyday, to compromise on what you believe you can do and the reality of what you are able to do. Ruchika has not given up her ambition to have a fulfilling career. Like she says, ‘In another life. I may have joined some tech firm after completing my engineering. I deserve an opportunity to have a career and a fulfilling life.’
Ever the optimist - she is dismayed by the lack of support from corporate India. Her attempt at employment in the behemoth that is the Indian tech Industry has been deeply demotivating and demoralising. - lack of response, zero engagement and an attempt to obfuscate on what disability actually means for the companies. She has a question for global and Indian tech companies - why talk about inclusion when you are not inclusive. And what use is technology innovation when it cannot enable her to live a better quality of life.
Every person deserves to be able to live life to their fullest potential - what can we do to make the world more inclusive for people who do not conform to what is considered the norm. I know Ruchika is brilliant, smart, intelligent, well read, ambitious - her visual impairment should not become a barrier to living the life she wants. And I am here ask - @Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Infosys, HCL, IBM, Dell, CISCO, TCS, Accenture, Wipro - what does inclusion mean to you?? It is time to show up and be counted - move beyond the tick-box.
“I am going to keep trying on every day to live the life which I wanted to and which I deserve to. And you know, I'm not my disability, I'm smart, intelligent, and capable”
Full disclosure - I know Ruchika since she was a child (she is a part of my extended family
Memorable passages from the episode:
👉🏾 Thank you. Thanks a lot for inviting me
👉🏾 Let me tell you about Ruchika. I was a very normal girl, who loved dancing, singing, styling, reading. And hailed from a tier 2 city of India. I also followed a very normal and very standard career path, as many youngster in India, choosing science as a mainstream and then opting for engineering. Everything was very normal until in final year of my engineering, my life took a sudden turn and I got diagnosed with, you know, CNS TB, Central Nervous System, Tuberculosis Meningitis in December 2012. I had to drop out of college and I was in treatment for several years and in the process I lost my eyesight. It was a difficult moment for me, but the setback had made me more stronger and even more determined. I always work harder each and every day, to reshape and reclaim my life again, with whatever capabilities I have. I can say that I am going to keep trying on every day to live the life which I wanted to and which I deserve to.
👉🏾 Absolutely yes. In fact, I feel privileged because you know, it's not just me, I'm talking on behalf of the millions of people out there, not only in India, you know, still facing the same situation probably. Not everyone get a platform to speak and voice their story. So I really want to take this conversation ahead.
👉🏾 I'll say, the impact was very heavy initially. For the initial few years, it was really very difficult for me to digest the fact that I'm having optic atrophy, in which optic nerves got damage, which results in loss of eyesight. But for four to five years, me and my family, we kept traveling to different places, contacted different doctors you know for the treatments. But there is nothing, no medications, no cure. Even though we tried outside the India, through our relatives and friends, but the situation was similar everywhere. Then we came to know that it's still an area of research.
👉🏾 It's very difficult moment for my family also. But all these hardship, it doesn't go all in vain. Instead the situation had made me more stronger. Instead of thinking of what I lost, I try to feel grateful that what I have. That I'm alive. That's a big thing and I fought against a very rare and a chronic disease. And I'm still with my family, my loved ones, and I still can do many things. You know, all the hardship of my mother, my loved one, they always gave me, enough courage to always have a positive outlook and to be the source of happiness to others.
👉🏾 There is a long list, but yeah, I'll mention some of them. So I first start with my area of interest, choosing clothes is really a very huge challenge for me, because previously it was very easy, you just see and pick up whichever you want. But now the situation is not the same, not only purchasing but even buying different items, these are really a big challenge for me. And because it's what you have to do on each and every day on your day to day life, and there you are going to face this situation. Second, if I say like stepping out on my own, it's really an absolutely no, because now if I want to go outside, I really need a help from other to be with me to hold my hands when I have to go outside. So it's also not at all possible.
👉🏾 Next I'll mention about the mobile phones, the use of mobile phones. You know, mobile phones, nowaday is a part of our life, a very important part, I must say. But for me, I can't use all the features in the mobile phones, even though there is a virtual assistant available but with that also, you are not going to use each and every features of your phone. If you'll start once you are going to get stuck at one place and there you again need help from others. So it's not very smooth. As I previously mentioned about reading, that I like reading. So now I tried reading, but that's also not possible because the situation and the condition has been changed. And even though I tried using screen reader, but I didn't find them very smooth because they can't move ahead. And you know, with all these things I mentioned one very important thing, is that getting job. It's a very, very, very big challenge for me till now because I'm still trying for that and it's not possible.
👉🏾 And after that, you know, keeping myself updated with whatever is going around me, because for me now, source of information is limited. With that solely I have to get all the informations. It's not very easy form me. Previously, you know, I just pick up the newspaper, go through the headlines and then you came to know whatever is going there, but now it's not the same thing.
👉🏾 And I must say that if you are not careful, there is a bit of challenge. And like all these things, there is a long list ahead and I can't mention each and everything because from morning to night, there is challenge.
👉🏾 For this answer. You know, in physics we learn that energy is a conserved quantity, it cannot be created or destroyed. If you see world around, you know, everybody has their own suffering, but trust me, no one is comparable. Likewise, when I look at my mother, she face a lot in her life at different stages. Still she keeps smiling. So, you know, for me, she is the source of positivity.
👉🏾 And after that, when I see my husband, he has been waiting to marry me since from her eight years, so for me, he is a source of patience. After that, when I look after my brother he doesn't think before helping anyone, So for me he is a source of kindness and forgiveness. So likewise you know, I don't have to look far around for having any sources rather I had it around. People around me, my loved one, always believed in me, that's why I decided first I should believe in myself. So I think you should first love yourself then really life will become a very beautiful place to live.
👉🏾 It's nothing very different to youngster of my age. I'm a very simple girl, you know, I'll find happiness in very small things, like getting gifts, hanging out with friends, just all these things really make me very happy. And I must make a point over here that, in my final year of engineering, I was preparing for India airforce. But all of this just stuck at the mid st because I fell ill. Now, you know I always hope for getting a good job, a good life, but these things all have been halted. But I must say that I'm not sure that any aspiration is big or small. I think it depends upon us, how we think of it.
👉🏾 See things changed a lot. I've not used any fancy words over here. It's a true thing. Like everything around me has changed. I lost my friends, I lost networks, contacts, everything. Maybe because few of them, they thought there is nothing to gain here. Or maybe some of them they lose hope very earlier. But, you know getting gifts and hanging out, everything has been changed, nothing is the same now. I am the same or the similar Ruchika, but yeah, it's another thing that now I can't fly a plane, but still, I am hoping for getting a good job and leading a good life. It's not impossible, but I'm sure that I'm having a struggle ahead.
👉🏾 I must think about a word which will express my feelings. I think unfortunate/ disappointing are correct words. If you'll check the sent items of my email, there is lots of application sent to different organisations for different roles, but there is nothing in my inbox. Even though some of the MNC had scheduled interview, but when I went through the interviewer, I always have to face rejection or sometime vacancies are not open.
👉🏾 So I'm very surprised that, you know, in this fast moving technology world, still we are not able, to hire and to have people like me in the workforces. Do we still not have appropriate system, appropriate process to hire the people? I'm always thinking like where is the technology to support me. We're always discussing that we are a developed nation and all, but if it is true, then I should not be here. And you know, I'm speaking about myself, So I must say, I'm not sure that it's the condition because I'm in India or is it the condition all over the world.
👉🏾 Yeah, I have.
👉🏾 No in the interview process. You know whenever I used to offer the interviews, there I'm always talking in the category of you know disabled candidates. But when the final round used to come along, at that time, I have to face that we are looking for some better candidates or sometime I'm not going to get any replies.
👉🏾 I think I've already overcome the biggest challenge that was to survive, to live the precious life, which God has gifted to us is not a small thing. But sometime we forget to appreciate it. And you know, there is a saying that we don't know the value of our position until we have the fear to lose it. And I must say that I know the value now.
👉🏾 Similarly, you know, is a condition with my eyesight there are lots of things which is very obvious for other people, and it's very easy for them to do. But it's not the same thing for me, but not everyone understand it. And I'm not blaming them as well because they haven't been in my shoes, nor I want anyone to face the situation, which I had faced at a young age. But you know acceptance is the biggest challenge because I've seen people being uncomfortable talking about me just because they don't want to accept me how I am. And sometime people want to ignore it or hide it. I'm just not talking this thing at a professional level only, or at a personal level only.
👉🏾 While I know that companies have to make their profits, they have to expand their thinking on how can they be inclusive. Don't you think that there is immense potential in, you know, each and every person. But I believe that each and every person is unique in their own way, we have to always, you know, be ready to accept those people.
👉🏾 At start, you know, we are having male dominating workforce, but then we paved the way for the female contribution, and I must say, it's still work in progress. And it's very normal and very common to many places now and has became norms to many organisations. The same thing, you know, have to do with the people like me, I think organisation need to make a space for people like us. And you know, they have to prepare to engage all talents.
👉🏾 And you know, I'm not my disability, I'm smart, intelligent, and capable. In another life. I must have joined some tech firm after completing my engineering. I deserve an opportunity to have a career and have a fulfilling life. And I must say that to just give a tag to the person who are facing some issue as special person, it will not make them feel happy. You should always make them feel a common and a normal people. This feeling will make them very happy as compared to just giving them their tag of, yeah, special candidates. Because I am facing the situation, that's why I'm telling these things.
👉🏾 And I also wanna say that making diversity inclusion, just a rule is not a good thing. It should not always something to talk, but it should be implemented. And might be it's just a word for you, but it's hope for others, for their future. You must think in this direction, it's very necessary because people who are facing some sort of issues are, a huge section of our society. You can't ignore them and move forward in your life.
👉🏾 Thank you. Thanks a lot Sudha.
Get in touch with Richa:
sudhasingh@thepurposeroom.org

72: Building a humane prisons in India: A case for reform: Prof Murali Karnam and Mr Somesh Goyal,

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
The core purpose of the partnership between The Purpose Room and The India Justice Report is about helping raise awareness and understanding of the Indian justice system and also getting ordinary citizens to understand, be aware and curious about the justice system. The aim of course is to discuss how the delivery of quality justice must be seen as a priority and become real in the lives of everyone.
In the first episode Maja Daruwala, Chief Editor of the India Justice Report, and a barrister from Lincolns Inn and Valay Singh, Project Lead of the @India Justice Report spoke about the purpose behind India's first ever ranking of states on their capacity to deliver justice and what that means
Episode two with Surya Prakash B S DAKSH a civil society organisation working on judicial reforms and Radhika Jha, a lead researcher for the Status of Policing in India Report series from Common Cause focused on on budgeting in the justice system, the availability of funds, underutilisation, prioritisation or lack of it, access to justice, the quality of justice and more…
The third episode focuses on the status of women in policing in India. My guests Meeran Chadha Borwankar and Devika Prasad spoke about the systemic issues that hold women back, and what actions can be taken to reach the target numbers.
In episode four Jacob Punnose ex-DGP and State Police Chief of Kerala and Jayanto Choudhury ex-DG NSG and ex-DGP Assam Police talk about the systemic issues that ail India policing - conditions of work; budgets; internal culture; accountability; public perception etc.
This week my guests Prof Murali karnam, a research scholar on Prison Reforms and Penology and Mr Somesh Goyal, Former dg Himachal Police and former Director General of (Prisons) speak about what can be done a) to make the administration of prisons stronger so that prisons are not places of violence and violation of rights b) what needs to be done to - to turn prison administration away from the warder-lockup-control-punishment mode to that of genuine reform and rehabilitation of prisoners.
Whether it is the UK or India it is important that all of us understand the contours of the system that governs us and not just for the sake of accountability!
Listen to this episode and catch up with previous episodes here👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you. Mr. Goyal, Professor Karnam, Maya and Vallay for making time to be here today for the third in our series on prisons where today we are talking about strengthening prison administration. So thank you very much for making time today. And we'll get started with the questions right away. So, considering the background that we've spoken about, how are prisons in India regulated? Do states have their own prison manuals or is there a common manual for all states to follow?
👉🏾 Well, so far as the regulation of prisons is concerned, I think there are several acts like the prison act, prisoners act, prisoners identification act, temporary release of prisoners act and so on.
👉🏾 But day to day functioning of the prisons is largely governed by the prison manuals, which are very old. And there is no common prison manual as such for the whole of the country. In 2016, one model prison manual has been suggested xxxxx, and prisons being a state subject, most of the states have their own prison manuals . Few states that have adopted the model prison manual, and tailored it to suit the local requirements. I think this manual is far too elaborate, one, and you know, one size fits all, it doesn't happen. So far as the governance or the management of the prisons is concerned, there are a number of things which need to be incorporated or deleted from the model prison manual. But the fact is that this model prison manual has not been adopted by large number of states.
👉🏾 Yes, most of the states have their own manuals, at least for the first 15 years, they've been changing from time to time, as and when the High courts or Supreme courts are specifically commenting on unacceptable aspects of prison manuals. But at the same time these manuals also contain lot of rules that are not being implemented, but they still remain colonial vintage, like a whipping have not been removed in most of the states.
👉🏾 They still indicate the colonial influence. But many states have tried to revamp these manuals at the state level, but the process is very slow. At least Andhra Pradesh I can tell you it was initiated in 2004 and it was not accepted. And again, second time, five years back, it was proposed, but still it remains with the law department. So as per as the revising prison manuals, as per model prison manual is concerned, the progress is very, very slow and they're not going anywhere. There are several reasons for completely revamping these manuals as per the, model prison manual.
👉🏾 I'll add, You know, Himachal Pradesh it took us five years to convince our home department that we are not taking away any of the powers of the district magistrate or bureaucracy, by implementing this model prison act. There was a huge suspicion, they didn't have any qualms about the clauses of the manual. Then I sat down with the home secretary I said, "You tell me, are you afraid that your power is being taken away" he smiled. I said, "okay, let's touch those things, let's amend wherever you think district magistrate needs to have his say, I'll do it, but I want the larger, good to prevail. This manual needs to be accepted". And after five years, we were able to do it. The second thing about the manual is, it brings so much of economic burden on the state that the Babu sitting in home department needs to know, at least far enough to know how many more crores are going to be pumped into the prison department without any return on investment. So this delays the whole implementation of the manual and no other reason I could see in the last five years struggle in getting it approved.
👉🏾 Yes, actually, I completely agree with Mr. Goyal, you know, the prison manual specifies the standard of human resources and infrastructure for the management of prisons. So the departments requires to enhance human and financial resources to bring these standards for implementation. But at the same time, there are no planning and research wings within the prison departments, which can forecast the requirements of prison for future.
👉🏾 And as Mr Goyal said if we want to meet the standards of model prison manual, after adopting them into the state manuals, it requires a huge recruitment. It also requires a huge financial outlays for which, you know, governments are not ready. So therefore this is very, very important reason for not adopting the model prison manual.
👉🏾 And another trend is the states might adopt it, but they may not do anything, that also I've seen many changes are included in the prison manual. But the prisons are not overhauled or revamped as per the standards, because they will just remain as standards in the prison manual.
👉🏾 Well, it's not a lost case altogether. I can say that in four years, I was able to add 40% more staff in Himachal Pradesh. You have to convince people. Problem that I have seen is why new prisons were not getting made, why things were not moving is something to do with the prison leadership also. I mean if you take interest, if you meet people, put your points across, it happens. The pace may be slow not to your liking, but the change does take place. So I think with persistence things will move, things have moved.
👉🏾 I completely agree, Mr. Goyal, that in Himachal Pradesh one advantage you had is that, you know, your number of prisoners is less, but at the same time, it is your leadership. Similarly, the leadership in Telangana also was very much convinced, especially Mr. VK Singh was very much convinced about what needs to be done. He has done everything within his power to convince the government. When government was not convinced he was able to generate resources for the department. But my own feeling is in majority of the states that the leaders of the prison department are just in charge while they have full-time job in police department. In the adversarial system of criminal justice system that we have, the police when they head the department, they look at the whole issue from the perspective of the victims and that completely colours, the quality of work.
👉🏾 Therefore, my view is that most of the prison leaders, prison DGPs were themselves were not convinced about the kind of quality of work required for the management of the huge mass of people that we incarcerate. For instance, for a year, we are incarcerating some 18 lakh people. I don't think even at the level of BPRND also we have a planning and a researching wing which actually forecast how much of human resources, how much of financial resources are required for the coming 10 years in order to meet the demands of the criminal justice system.
👉🏾 That's one issue, but I feel that since the 80% of prisoners are under trial prisoners, if that burden is not there on the prison department. Then I think within the existing resources also most of the prison management may be able to, give a quality of life for prisoners. But I think the large chunk of resource and the energies of the department is going towards management of the under trial prisoners for whom you can't take up any reformative activities.
👉🏾 Well you see, to give an example of Himachal and North India, the recruitment and prisons is done at two levels. One is at the Warder level, equivalent to a Constable. and the other is at the level of assistant superintendent of jail. So that is the officer cadre. For Warders, you need 12 plus and for assistant superintendent of jail, the requirement is a degree. Even if we say that some qualifications are required, are there any universities training any graduates or undergrads in any programs in corrections, where people could get education and make informed decisions about joining a particular service. So that is where we are caught. And qualifications, it is the same militaristic standards of measurements, of physical measurements, physical fitness tests, and small written test, that's about it. The more important thing is, whatever human resource you induct, how you mould it, that is more important, I think we'll touch upon it later.
👉🏾 Yes. In Andhra Pradesh, in Tamil Nadu, even in Kerala also I see that especially the officer are recruited as part of state civil service. And for most of the people who become, who enter into prison service at a deputy jailer, asst superintendent level prison service has never been a preferred service for them among. It’s not preferred among the revenue police and fire services.
👉🏾 At the same time at the lower level, the qualifications of the staff are also increasing over period of time. For instance, post to graduates are entering into even Warder level positions. Well, this is a very positive development that they will be able to manage prisoners better than the semi-literate warders of yester years.
👉🏾 It also implies these lower level employees join the department only as a stop gap and results in heavy turnover in that department. Unless there is a clear cut opportunities for promotions and job satisfactions are spelt out well in advance then only they will be able to get people who are highly motivated and who will choose the prison service. But I agree with Mr Goyal that it's a failure of universities, which are not able to cater to the needs of this very important part of the criminal justice system that it presents that they're not clearly designing, barring one or two degrees
👉🏾 Well promotions are natural.When they join the service, say Warder can superannuate as an officer. Warder goes on to become head warder.
The promotion, career progression is provided in every service and it may not be as lucrative or as fast as in the police because the department strength is very less in the prisons. So the opportunities would also be lesser, but they are promoted while all the people who need to be promoted, under the non gazetted ranks is done by the DG Prisons himself.
👉🏾 And there is no delay there, unless there are some court cases. But when the nature of the rank changes from non-gazetted to gazetted then it goes to the state public service commission and the home department that is where delay of maybe six months or a year. Sometimes it takes place, but otherwise promotions in the cadre, in the departments are not an issue.At least I ensured in Himachal Pradesh that not even a single higher vacancy was left unfilled.
👉🏾 See, way back in 1980 Mulla committee report says that, there should be at least three promotions for every employee who joins the prison at a lower level. My own experience in two states here is at best they get one promotion. Many times they don't get even that. And in some states like, you know, west Bengal, wherever they care there is a direct recruitment for every level of cadre, the promotions are very hard to come by.
👉🏾 Because lower level cadre is directly recruited at deputy jailer level, deputy superintendent level, assistant superintendent level, jailer level, which actually forecloses the possibility of promotions for the people who enter at the lowest level. This is a very serious de-motivating factor.
👉🏾 There is a high turnout especially among newly recruited with the higher qualifications in some states this needs to be changed. So unless we project clear way forward about their promotions and opportunities, it's difficult to motivate prison officers to commit themselves for the objectives of the prison.
👉🏾 So far as the training is concerned, we can divide it into basic training and in-service training or the refresher training. Now for the basic training, it is generally from nine months to one year. We in Himachal don't have a training centre. We could not start it for want of land available. The most important thing is that people are sent to training academies, training institutions, wherever these are. One is who decides the training curriculum. I have serious issues with the training curriculum, that there is no research gone into devising a training curriculum for the correctional staff. All the Warders, they are trained like a police Constable. Well, some of the functions maybe similar, but largely a Warder is somebody who must be more empathetic than other people in uniform.
👉🏾 What the job entails and what skillsets people need to have like listening, empathy,. These are completely missing from any syllabus devised by DPRND. And when I pointed it out to them, I said, why don't you see the training curriculum of some advanced countries? Learn from them, devise our own, curriculum, which is modern, which is in sync with the reform and rehabilitation ideas. But this is not happening, we are just churning out people in uniform who are insensitive, who are not motivated and looking for better job opportunities in the police or somewhere else.
👉🏾 Is anybody doing training of trainers for the prison staff? I haven't come across one. It may be for PT and drill, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested only in the correctional activities, how to run industry, how to run welfare programs, how to make these agitated people comfortable in the four walls of their barracks. Does anybody provide any training to them? No, there is no curriculum, and when I come to the refresher course, refresher training, most of the people go to ICAS or the the institute of correctional administration, we have three. Or CAPT in, Bhopal. If you look at their calendar of training programs, I think more than 80% of the training programs are on subjects other than prison subjects or the correctional subjects.
👉🏾 So the relevance of the correctional administration institutes is also questionable so far as I am concerned. I would like that, what a prison official needs to learn about his job, about the skills, that is what a refresher course should be able to give him.
👉🏾 Yes. I completely agree with him because see, in most of the states the syllabus for training of the lower level cadre is no different from that of the police constables. So even for the higher level cadre, there is no distinct syllabus that marks them out as reformers. I mean, of course several states do not have even training centres of their own.
👉🏾 And I mean, in some states I can say that lower level cadre are being trained by the police academies because there are no prison academies. Even where they exist, there are no fully trained academicians or researchers to teach the syllabus that is related to objectives of the prison. And it is actually, retired prison officers, of course, who bring lot of practical, but very negative aspects of managing the prisons.
👉🏾 So by and large, after first training at the time of joining, many prison officers never go for refresher courses due to a shortage of staff or because relieving staff for this trainings itself is the biggest problem. So. Only BPRND is trying to, sponsor few trainings occasionally and for the past one year has taken up actual sponsoring preparation of training modules.
👉🏾 But again, this responsibility was given to only the prison officers. Of course, they should be involved there is no doubt about it,...

71: Using gender sensitive communications as a tool to build an inclusive culture

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
The language we use often reflects the widely accepted socio-cultural values, norms, and beliefs that society holds, including roles men/women and non binary people play. For as long as we know language has been used to undermine people making them seem less competent, confident and places an expectations on what people can aspire too. The constant use of such language reinforces assumptions.

E.g. Assumptions that all members of a category (Director) share a gender or that all members of a gender share a characteristic (women prefer to look after children)
E.g. Using gendered pronouns/nouns when you don’t know the gender or using he/him/man as the default

However, language can also be used as powerful tool to help reshape culture and challenge stereotypes. In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Parijat Ghosh and Souparno Chatterjee from PRADAN on the journey and learnings from the past 10 months to building a more equitable and inclusive organisation.

I am super proud to have been invited by PRADAN to support the organisations in unravelling the layers and discovering who they are as an organisation and the gap that exists with who they aspire to be. In the last 10 months, I have run numerous workshops, listening exercises, audits, and had people share 100s of examples on how our culture, upbringing, the books we read, the movies we see, our lived experiences colour our usage of language.

We are nearly at the end of the discovery phase, the next phase will be about mindfulness, and putting all the learning into action - in how we use language to engage with our peer group, with teams, with people on the field, the communities we work with, donors, governments, in the manner in which we write our reports. The measure of success is not that everyone will suddenly be inclusive, but that most people are conscious of the impact of their words, are willing to learn and build an inclusive organisation.

And most importantly it is important to remember that language is not static, it changes and evolves every single day; like it has done since the start of spoken language many moons ago.

Want to know more about the why and what of the gender sensitive communications initiative at PRADAN - listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the transcript
👉🏾 Thank you so much Sudha for inviting us.
👉🏾Good morning Sudha. And thanks for bringing us here and it's a great opportunity to speak with you on this initiative that we have started in the organisation. So looking forward to the conversation.
👉🏾I am Parijat, presently I work with PRADANs research and advocacy team. And as far as my interest are is concerned, I am interested in Adivasi livelihood because we are working ound the questions related to Adivasi livelihood, I'm also interested in the subject of gender equality both within the community, with whom we work and also within the organisation.
👉🏾 I am also a member of the steering group that is integrating PRADANs initiative towards making the workplace better for women as of now and I'm hoping that it will talk more about inclusiveness.
👉🏾 I joined as a development apprentice and after a brief stint, I joined the operations unit. And since 2013, I started working in communications and ever since I've been communicating about PRADAN. I love communicating about PRADAN.
👉🏾 Let me first start with how PRADAN embarked on the journey, why PRADAN took up this whole initiative, not only the gender-sensitive communication but the whole initiative of making PRADAN a better place for women,. So the skewed percentage of women actually has been a concern in PRADAN for a very long time. So I joined in 2004, and since then in almost every annual retreat, this issue was highlighted. And finally in 2014, that then formally instituted a scoping study to understand the reasons for the same.
👉🏾 Why this ratio is so skewed? What are the struggles women go through, and what are the hindering factors for continuing in PRADAN, areas of gaps? So based on that understanding or findings some strategies were instituted. One is women caucus, for all the women in PRADAN. who act as a pressure group, as well as a support for each other. And a regular gender audit within the organisation in all work units, so that we understand the status, present status of the situation and find the gaps and plan according to that. And the third thing was we designed a curriculum for the newcomers, the newcomers are called development apprentice in PRADAN. For them, we designed a gender guide, which talks about gender equality within the organisation.
👉🏾 At some point in time, these were kind of all independent initiatives, there was a need to integrate all those so that all these initiatives, whether we're moving towards the desired direction or not. So In 2017 our steering group was formed and the role of the steering group was to kind of see the impact of all these initiatives, the points of integration etc... So based on the experience so far SG worked on developing a strategy. They came up with a strategy paper last year in 2020/21. And in this strategy, the importance of gender-sensitive communication came up as a very important area. Because all the time we work with human beings, both outside, inside with community, we talk and communicate all the time and that is our work. Therefore our communication actually says a lot about us - who are we, our gender biases, our gendered relationship with the organisation and community we work with colleagues, and our stance towards gender equality. And therefore we started work towards sensitising ourselves about this gender sensitive communication and inclusive language and we started taking help from you.
👉🏾 What Parijat said is absolutely, that's how it has been in PRADAN. But addition to what she said, I think that PRADAN has been working essentially for women empowerment. We found that when we reach out to the poorest of the poor, these marginalised sections, smallholder farmers, they have been put aside from the mainstream walks of development
👉🏾 But if you look at the condition of the women irrespective of their age cycle, the life cycle, you see that they are at a more disadvantageous position in comparison to the men folk.
👉🏾 So there is poverty within poverty. But when you look at the people who are talking about these issues, who are identifying these issues, who are working with those women are men, mainly, majorly. if you look at the percentage that Parijat was referring to, that is heavily skewed towards men. And at the same time, it's not about just women empowerment, but you're talking about women's leadership in community-based organisations, how women will lead the process of change. who are talking about that, who are guiding that process of change, again set of men.
👉🏾 And the organisation, which is talking about women empowerment day in and day out is led by men since its inception. The ED and various other key positions in the management have been heavily occupied by men. So what do you do to change this situation and adjust the situation, address this situation in terms of the gap of what is being preached and what is being actually practised. So we kind of realised that there is a gap and what is that gap and how do you address that gap. So that's how PRADAN thought of embarking on this journey of practising gender equality and thinking in terms of gender sensitivity inside the organisation, as well as outside the organisation.
👉🏾 Right. So, fortunately, as I shared earlier that in 2014, the leadership management unit, which is a top leadership node in PRADAN, that time it was called management committee, they decided to Institute this scoping study. So in the scoping study, they came up with a long report describing the reasons and also they came up with nine recommendations. the reasons were discussed, and then jointly we came up with these three-pronged strategies to initiate with, which shared earlier the caucus in a non formal space. Non-formal I'm saying because it is approved by the organisation, but it's not formal in that sense. So women are, I mean supposed to be encouraged at least in participating in caucus meetings and support each other and come up with issues and inform the organisation.
👉🏾 Similarly the gender audit in the formal space, formally to get feedback on what is the situation and orienting the newcomers from the beginning on the issue. So these three strategies were decided by the leadership. So in that sense, from the beginning officially we had a buy in that we are going to do this.
👉🏾 But when we actually do something, then you can feel that resistance, for example, when women were going to the caucus meetings, so there will be comments like "So you are going to your complaint room.” “We are fearful so we cannot talk with you.”‘We cannot give you feedback because in caucus meetings you'll go and complain about that.”
👉🏾 But gradually we continued and probably the perception of PRADANites also that this is not about what we are thinking. I would not say that it is smooth yet but definitely the situation has improved a lot. They also contributed in identifying issues where policies need to be formulated. So in consultation we came up with new policies and all. So in that sense, it's a long process as I shared that the study was instituted in 2014 and now we are at 2022. So it has been quite a long journey and we can feel the gradual improvement, but obviously, we're not yet there.

👉🏾 I would say we have mixed kind of experience all of the options are applicable to our case, at some point in time or the other. There was a buy-in so there was a mandate from the organisation that we are going to do this. So in that sense, there was an official approval. But because we all are part of this society, which is patriarchal and hierarchical, so we have our inherent biases towards it and the way we respond that is also kind of, many of the time probably unconscious, but that creates a kind of culture. There were not really upfront pushback, but we had to put in a lot of energy and effort to do everything that is part of this gender-sensitive communication or in the overall initiatives. So probably that is one indicator that this is an indirect pushback. There is a group who will be very proactive and everything, but it is not true for the whole of the population.
👉🏾 Right. And I would say that the newcomers or the new generation is far more enlightened in this subject of inclusiveness and gender equality than those who are there for a long time and older, it is difficult for them to actually accept. I would say us, to actually accept that we to have too biases which makes sense biased or not so inclusive.
👉🏾 So as there was kind of an organisational mandate that this has to happen. So there was no question of you know, official resistance towards that and I don't think anybody even think of doing that. People welcomed the first step, but as the various kinds of feedback that started pouring in after the gender audit process happened. After the women caucus started meeting on a regular basis, I don't think everyone was on the same plane or could take up the feedback and same spirit universally, across the organisation.
👉🏾 Tacitly, you could always feel that there still exists some kind of a resistance or ridicule certain points that have come up or that people are trying to change certain aspects of behavioural manifestations. So for example, the toilets were not adequately clean earlier. And the women used to face a lot of issues So the women said that this is a problem, and we need to address this.
👉🏾 And nowadays, if you go to the field offices, you see toilets, which are remarkably clean with some notices"Don't waste water". And "Remember to flush the pot" after you use it, those kinds of very basic messages that you often get to see in public.
👉🏾 Now that they are maintaining it in a certain manner with some basic senses of hygiene and all they say"Have you visited the toilet? Have you seen how it is maintained these days? "Have you seen "how clean it is?"
👉🏾 So that " is something which gives you a feeling that things are not done wholeheartedly. So, as Parijat said we are a product of patriarchy and that patriarchy unfortunately has been practised across generations, it has been practised not only by men, but women also have a major role to play, in ensuring that certain practices are sustained. We've kind of accepted these kinds of social behaviours or manifestations. And now when these also are getting challenged because of a woman caucus, because of gender audit. People are obviously a lot more uncomfortable to accept
👉🏾 Which was hitherto being seen as a very normal life. And when that becomes a challenge that "no, this is actually not what you were supposed to do or the way you should be leading your life."
👉🏾 Then obviously there would be a pushback, but since again it is an organisation's decision that you have to introspect. You have to think through these basic things that people have started accepting So that there is a general sense of acceptance.
👉🏾 Yeah. Sudha, underrepresented groups I mean in PRADAN we are not yet conscious about that. We have not started talking about that. As Souparno also shared that it is mostly around women and our binary understanding on gender, but not in terms of caste or class, or in terms of others who don't conform to this, binary understanding of gender. We are not openly talking about those sort of underrepresentation as of now, but I would share some of the examples of biases that women probably face.
👉🏾 For example one of the findings in the gender audit was that soft-spoken women are easily accepted within the organisation in comparison to those who are not so soft spoken. So then in meetings if the same point is shared by a woman colleague, that goes, unnoticed, but when the same thing is told by a man that gets attention.
👉🏾 Or if two colleagues, one of them was a man and one woman, the team up for, a particular work. Then there's a high possibility that most of the credit for the work would go to the man. And people will consult the man aback about the findings or outcome of the work, but not so much with the women and put in effort for that. I mean, almost all the women who are taking leadership roles, for example, team coordinators, They struggle a lot to get acceptance from their team. In both cases, if they are assertive, then they're told they are dominating. And if, if they're timid they're told to be not suitable for Leadership.
👉🏾 The situation is changing, but still if the themes like gender or SHG groups, nutrition, all those themes are mostly anchored by women. Whereas livelihood, FPOs these teams which are quote unquote masculine those are mostly anchored by men. Things are changing but more or less it is still like that. So there's a long list of such examples where you can actually sense that there are biases.
👉🏾There is a clear instance where this I think was shared in one of the gender audits that when they say about some ideas, when they share something in the larger group where there are men colleagues also, the possibility of getting heard and recognised and acknowledged for their viewpoints and basically taking them seriously has remained a struggle, a point of struggle for women colleagues.
👉🏾 When you are meeting some other stakeholder who is outside the organisation, external stakeholder, If that person is a man it is found that the person would speak to your other men colleague, rather than talking to you. Or for example if you were a team coordinator also, a woman team coordinator, they would prefer to listen to your male counterparts rather than listening to you or responding to them. PRADAN has taken up a very, very liberal stance and approach towards various lifecycle needs of a woman colleague. But despite that that’s a patriarchal expectation that being a woman or the mother, you are supposed to take care of the baby so it's the mother's responsibility. So that is an expectation she is having back home and at office, if she is trying to negotiate with her male colleagues that well I cannot do this job, or I cannot be available at this hour of the day, may I do this at some other time? Often leads to some kind of, either a confrontation or if not a confrontation, then those kinds of nuances come up that she's a woman so we can't expect her to do this. Therefore equality that you are expecting and you have got every right to expect at the workplace, often get jeopardised.
👉🏾 At the same time Sudha, let me tell you that there is also another side of the coin because over here we're talking about gender sensitivity, it's not about just women. Male colleagues also in the organisation and it is not only just for PRADAN, but outside, they are also having similar issues. It's your responsibility to run the family, or you are expected to take these many physical hardships, or you are expected to be good in finances and plan finance accordingly for the family. If you don't do that, if you are not being able to do that, what kind of man you are? You are not a man.
👉🏾 So those kinds of notions exist in PRADAN also, but I'm not trying to equate but I'm just trying to bring it to people's notice that unconscious bias or these kinds of biases exist on both sides.
👉🏾I would say that this journey we embarked on an understanding gender sensitive communication that actually helped probably all of us those who were a part of the process. We have developed an appreciation and acceptance for the fact that all of us have our own unconscious biases and that impact our communication.
👉🏾 So none of us are actually fully kind of there. Creating that acceptance...

70: A conversation on Gihan Hyde on ESG communications

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 03:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
It is phenomenal to meet with women who refuse to conform to stereotypes, are not averse to risks and are very confident of the space they occupy (or seek to occupy). As a Black, Arab, female founder of an ESG Consultancy Communique. Gihan A.M Hyde جيهان هايد wants to use her skills to work on what she is passionate about, challenging stereotypes is not why she does what she does.
Was it necessary or important to mention her race/ethnicity instead of just talking about her expertise? Yes it is…..because people from diverse backgrounds are still not recognised for their capabilities but are more likely to be rejected for what they look like or sound like.
It is widely recognised that ‘racism’ is an ESG problem but the bigger problem is that there is very little diversity amongst the ESG fraternity - the people who advise on ESG (Technical or communications). So, It is great to see Gihan carve out her own space as an ESG communications expert.
As an advocate for equity and inclusion I like to celebrate every win (big or small) so it was great to discover our alignment on things that matter to us and how we can contribute to making a difference. In the episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast we spoke about Gihan A.M Hyde جيهان هايد's journey to ESG, what the 'S' in ESG stands for, the importance of ESG for business, why stakeholders should ask for it, triple top line, social impact, skills for communicators and the people who inspire her.
#sdgs #ESG #esgreporting #inclusion #equityforall #TheElephantintheRoom
Memorable Passages from the Podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you, Sudha for having me. What a pleasure. I've been such a fan of your podcast so it is surreal that I'm in it right now. So thank you.
👉🏾 So hi everyone, I'm Gihan and I'm originally from Sudan, however, I am based in the UK at the moment. If I am to introduce myself from a human point of view, I am known amongst my friends and peers to be very curious, very bold and very, how do I say it......? Courageous, if that makes sense. I am a risk taker by nature and I am not scared of trying new things. Other than known for these three traits, I am also the founder and CEO of a consultancy called CommUnique. We are an environmental, social and governance, in other words, ESG consultancy. We specialise in ESG communications and ESG business model reshaping.
👉🏾 Our job and our purpose, if you may, is to help you all, who wants to navigate the world of ESG, which is going to be the new reality to help you to do it in a very easy way, and a very simple way, but that would result in the most impactful way as well.
👉🏾 Okay, before I say anything about the, why did I do that, I will tell you more about, when did I do that? How about that? Let's start with that. So yes you're absolutely correct. I do have 20 years under my belt when it comes to marketing and internal communications roles. In the majority of the roles, I was always the lead in the department in doing all of these change projects, whether it was with HSBC, Barclays, BP, for example, Phillip Morris, the WHO and the list goes on.
👉🏾 But then when the pandemic hit, I was angry I got really angry. Angry with myself, angry with my peers and angry with the society that I'm living in the UK and the employers as well. The reason I was angry is because… so as I said, I am from Sudan and I am married to someone whose job requires us to leave the UK every three years and then come back to it.
👉🏾 So it was extremely difficult to find roles when I came back to the UK, despite the fact that I've always worked in multi global organisations when I was abroad. But the UK employers just didn't see it as a positive move and instead they couldn't put me in a box, so I was never able to be placed in a box.
👉🏾 So when COVID hit, I faced the same problem. Employers wanted to put me in the box, but they didn't know how. I have a marketing background with PR work involved and internal communication. So they didn't know which box they should put me in. So that made me super angry. The other thing as well, is the beauty of the UK is that it has the most intelligent communication professionals you will find the world, it's a small community. And if you disappear from the community for a couple of years, you are forgotten by the community.
👉🏾 So every time I used to come back to the UK, I used to have to prove myself again and cement my expertise again and again, and again. I don't need to do that. I have nothing to prove. So that was the second reason I was angry. The third reason I was angry is because, if it wasn't for George Floyd incident, the sad incidents, and the Me too movement.
👉🏾I was always disregarded as a candidate, purely because of my name and my ethnicity, even though they wouldn't have a clue what my ethnicity is, you would not know who I am for my name. But I always felt that something was stopping me from getting these high roles and I couldn't put my finger on it.
👉🏾 So these are the three reasons why I was super angry during COVID. I mean I was always angry about it, but as I said to you before we recorded, I am not known to focus a lot on the negatives. I'm very optimistic. I'm an optimistic character,
👉🏾 I focus extremely on my work. I am as a Hawk when it comes to work, but when it comes to the social aspect, I'm extremely absent minded when it comes to these things. So COVID allowed me to sit back and think deeply about it. And this is when I decided to, you know what, enough is enough and I have to create a company. And what I didn't tell you in the introduction is that we're a team at the moment of nine And the majority of us are for underdeveloped countries and underrepresented communities. And the reason I chose to do that, so my business model is all about allowing my fellow communication professionals who are like me from underdeveloped countries to have a platform.
👉🏾 So they come in, they helped me develop the work for our client, but then they can actually use that as a case study towards their portfolios and CVs. So in other words, I do not judge them according to whoever background, whatever ethnicity they're from. Because even if you're a junior, even if you're still starting out, you're more than welcome to join CommUnique and I will train you and mentor you because that's my passion.
👉🏾 And I will prepare you as a communication professional to deal with the developed world, because the way the developed world operates and works, and the mindset is completely different than the Arab world, for example. So my job is to prep you as a communication professional. So that was why I created CommUnique.
👉🏾 Why did I decide on ESG? Basically, it's because I got introduced to it during my time in BP. Without realising that I had been communicating elements of the E the S and the G throughout my career, but I never realised it was called ESG. You know? So it made no sense for me to deviate from my passion and it made no sense to follow whatever everyone else is doing. So what I did is I looked into it. I up skilled myself, so I spent two years studying profusely and taking numerous certificates, so I can understand what it really entails. I don't want to be the technical expert.
👉🏾 I'm not the one who's going to physically calculate your carbon emission. I am the one who's going to ask you, why do you want to calculate your carbon emission and what is the benefit behind it when you do that? What are you planning to do with that? So this is why I decided to pivot and focus on ESG internal communications, but also when I got introduced to it properly and up-skilled, I also realised, gosh, I really need to play my part.
👉🏾 It's a threat, it's going to be a reality and I want to be ahead of the curve, I want to be ahead of my peers. I want to spot the gap and I want to do it. I'm sure you would relate to it as well, where our parents would instil the value of money in us, instil the value of thinking differently.
👉🏾 So that's what my parents have done to me is, rather than giving me a Barbie, I used to follow my father and shadow him in his board meetings, for example, So this is where the entrepreneurial mindset came along and this is why I said, you know, I'm going to take a risk and I'm going to create it.
👉🏾 But yeah, it opened new possibilities for me. It opened new passions. I didn't realise I was so passionate about the planet until I looked into it deeper. And this is why we decided to go and try our luck at becoming a B Corp certified. We're in our last process, we have got it. We're just waiting for the final approvals and if I'm not mistaken, I have been told that we are the first Arab - black female founded consultancy to be certified. So I'm really, really pleased with that really pleased with that.
👉🏾 You're absolutely right. I think Greta Thunberg has a lot to be thanked for when it comes to the E the E is very defined and it's clear, what's not clear about the E is, how would you get the data? So that's what's not clear yet and people were still trying out different ways. The G is definitely, absolutely defined because of the regulations and the regulators and the reporting side. So that's fine. The S is a bit unclear, purely because it was never at the forefront of organisation's mind. The only reason it's now becoming at the forefront again, it's because of the Me too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.
👉🏾 So government has a lot to answer for in a positive way when it comes to the S. So what does the asking entail? The S is basically it's everything to deal with, how an organisation, handle its relationship with its stakeholders and shareholders. So think of it this way, any human interaction or human impact an organisation will have on its people, on its society, on its economy would be the S. So some elements will include employee wellbeing, gender pay gap for example. It will also include community work or charity work in the communities. It will include diversity, equity and inclusion within a workplace. So it's the human aspect of how we operate as an organisation and that's how the S really is defined.
👉🏾 Communication is very, very important for organisations because it's the mechanics that would help an organisation define and shout how they are implementing and saving people and planet. So the reason communication is key is because without communication a company will not be ahead of the curve from its competitors, it will not stand out for its customers and it will not be an investible business. And these are the three reasons why organisations focus a lot on communicating ESG. But the other reason is also the pressure that organisations are facing when it comes to ESG reporting and ESG embedding within their business model. So I'll give you some stats to show you why communication is super important.
👉🏾 So for example 76% of consumers around the world said that they will not buy a product that does not showcase how it is sustainable. So 76% that's a huge number, okay? 53% of revenues, another one, this is my favourite one out of five companies who are small to medium organisations are using ESG as a standard. One in five okay? Three out of four are currently linking their purpose to their sustainability efforts. So great work is being done when it comes to ESG. So why not shout about it? And that's why communication is key. Communication helps you protect your reputation, it also helps you put yourself ahead of the curve. But be aware there's good communications and there bad communications.
👉🏾 For those of you who don't know what the story is (STUART KIRK, HSBC). This person is, if I'm not mistaken, he's the head of the ESG arm for HSBC or at least one of them. And in his speech that he was presenting, he said that there are a lot of nut cases. I E crazy people out there speaking about climate change. Automatically when he said that he got attacked because it's not about crazy people talking, it's the reality. We have data to prove that we all going to lose this world if we don't act fast. So he went under huge time and as a result, he lost his job. But again, there's also an attack against his comms team, because they're saying, why you as the communications team, you would have seen his deck. You would have read his notes. Why did you not stop it? Why did you not highlight that you are going to be using? And again, language plays a huge role when you're communicating ESG because ESG as a topic is a very technical topic, it's a very dry topic and not everyone can relate to it.
👉🏾 So if you're living, for example, let's say in England. You won't be affected as much with the climate change as much as you would be if you're in Madagascar, for example. And if you have been, you're oblivious to it because it's not something we're thinking about at the moment, because we're too busy from a civil war point of view.
👉🏾 So when you talk to Sudanese and you say, "oh yeah, the world is ending, climate change", they're going to look at you and say, what are you talking about? I don't care, I just want to survive, I don't even have water to drink in my country. So you have to be very careful when you are communicating, ESG to make it a localised communication and to make it relatable.
👉🏾 And this is why sometimes a lot of people do think it's a fad and it's just a trend. I personally don't think so. I can see the term ESG disappearing. I can see that. But I can't see the elements within each one of them disappearing, in my opinion, this is going to be our new reality.
👉🏾 And this is why I joke a lot when I try to pitch CommUnique I sometimes say, "oh yeah, we help you navigate your new reality". Because it is the new reality, whether we like it or not, it is coming our way and it's not going anywhere.
👉🏾 Okay, so the podcast that you heard me speak in, it was by a Lithuanian incubator accelerator called Catalystaventures. And as a disclaimer, I'm one of their mentors. So what they do is they help technology companies, they help incubate them and accelerate them and help them go to market.
👉🏾 And I'm actually the only one who is mentoring them on ESG communications. Catalystaventures, the reason they're really big and well known in Lithuania is because they came up with a new concept called triple top line. So for those of you who are not aware of triple top line, I will tell you why should I ask this question.
👉🏾 So there is this triple bottom line. A triple bottom line is the well-known business model that helps businesses to not only focus on profit, but also focus mainly on people and planet along with profit. Because previously companies, they serve the shareholders. Their focus is completely shareholder focus and sales and growth focused. But then in the eighties, a new concept came up and that was mainly the focus on, no profit is important, but you won't get profit if you don't have the right people in place and if you don't focus on planet. So this is where the triple bottom line model came to life. Triple top-line is mainly, rather than just focusing on the operational side of a company and how they operate to focus on business and people and planet. It also looks at how do you manufacture your products as well to be sustainable?
👉🏾 So for example your company and all your operations. So from your workplaces, from your employee rights, from your governance; you're doing everything right according to according to the standards of becoming sustainable. The one part that a company never used to do is actually to look at the ingredients and the way they manufacture products to make it also sustainable. They would look at elements of the products, but they wouldn't tie it with the journey from the beginning to the end. Does that make sense Sudha?
👉🏾 So this is what triple top-line comes in. It factories in the products and the services that an organisation provides as part of your sustainability journey as well. And this is where the triple top-line came into place.
👉🏾 It's very interesting. So the idea is, we've already alluded to it when I spoke about ESG as a fad. But the idea is that if you talk sustainability or if you're spending too much time talking about ESG that you are going to be impacting or sacrificing the company's returns, you know, the business's profit. This is clearly not true like I think some of us who are already on board of this whole idea, we don't believe this to be true. But for comms professionals, how do you convince your leadership and C-suite that this is important to communicate, and this is not only important to communicate it is also important to embed within the organisation
👉🏾 There's several ways you can do that. First of all, my optimistic mind is saying you don't need to convince them because they're already going to be pressured by the investors and the regulators to do that. But realistically, if you really want to convince your leadership team to focus on ESG, And focus on communicating it. You need data with you to support your argument. You can't go to a C-suite and say to them, "oh yeah, I have a feeling that the employees wants us to talk about ESG" that's not going to...

69: What ails Indian policing? A conversation with Jacob Punnose and Jayanto Choudhury

Tue, 31 May 2022 07:15:00 +0000

Shownotes
“Policing is a service to the citizen, when citizen needs the policemen, the policemen should be there at the police station. This is the responsibility of a democratically elected government, this is a guarantee given under the constitution to protect the life and property of every citizen.”
Maintaining law and order is a state subject in India. This means that each of India’s 28 states has the responsibility to ensure an effective and efficient police force that ensures the safety and security of all. Though all states have their own laws all of them are modelled on the Police Act of 1861. This was designed to: control a subject population; isolate the police from the public and obey the orders of the rulers of the day rather than protect the rule of law.
The question is, is this the model we want to keep 75 years after independence and if not what can be done to change it.
√ Public perception of police is at an all time low
√ Police forces in India (both central and state) are short staffed
√ India, the second-most populous nation in the world, has amongst the lowest global police to population ratios at 158 for 100,000. This is inadequate when compared to UN recommendations on 222 personnel per lakh
√ Police personnel work long hours without weekly offs, heavy work load, inadequate training
√ Constables constitute 86% of the police forces and they are generally promoted only once in their career resulting in lack of motivation
There is a difference between the police that we have and the police we need. Experts are clear that policing has to change from merely maintaining law and order and preventing crime to being one that is a first responder in creating a public environment in which all can enjoy every right to the fullest within the framework of rule of law.
In the 4th episode of the podcast Jacob Punnose ex-DGP and State Police Chief of Kerala and Jayanto Choudhury ex-DG NSG and ex-DGP Assam Police talk about the systemic issues that ail India policing - the conditions of work; budgets; internal culture; accountability; public perception ……..
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Well that's a very interesting subject you brought up, and I think we'll take it one by one. And you have listed several questions, let us first start with working conditions. In most states, you have the armed police and you have the civil police. The armed police is over deployed and it's under equipped, they normally have to handle public order situations, and the civil police are understaffed and very thinly spread, in most states. There are some states like Tamil Nadu which have a very, very good spread of police stations, but most states and maybe Kerala as well, but most states, and I'm talking by my experience in the east, whether it's Bengal or whether it's a Assam, that is the situation.
👉🏾 Now hygiene factors are poor, the police to population ratio is inadequate and accommodation provided to police personnel again, there's a shortage and it's substandard. Now if you can improve these and ensure off duty time, you will actually reduce the stressors that impact on behaviour of individuals in the police force. Burnout and even post traumatic stress disorder, these are occupational hazards in field policing.
👉🏾 You know a 14, 16 hour day without a weekly off, is quite normal, and working on festivals and holidays is a must. In terms of structure, I'm only now looking at civil police, because they are the people in the police stations, theres one civil police, for every 14 to 1500 of the population; that's against 1 is to 500 in the U S. And in India, the role of the police is far, far wider than what is expected from a police officer in western countries. In the US they spend about 350 USD, US dollars per capita on police. In India, we spend about US dollar one, and we still continue with the cheap model of a colonial policing. You must remember that when we were a colony, naturally, the rulers didn't want to spend too much on police, their interest was revenue, so they didn't spend much on the police and they expected the police by and large to live off the land.
👉🏾 Now, 80% of the police or more, are the constabulary, and they have a very basic entry level training in most states. Again, as I said India has many states, some states are better than others, but Mr Punnoose comes from a state that is way up there. I have served in states that are way down there. So I will go to the lowest common so to speak factor and he'll probably speak of the more advanced states. Now, most states have no career progression to speak of, the HR, human resource policies are quite outdated. And what's been happening in the past 40/50 years, is whenever there has been a problem of policing, the solution found is to expand and spend more resources on central armed police forces or central police organisations.
👉🏾 Perhaps the perception is that central forces and agencies are less subject to local pressures, that they are better organised and professionally more capable. But if citizens centric policing is indeed an objective, a pivot back to states policing is needed. And if you recall this was envisaged in the constitution. If there are weaknesses in the state policing, remedies must be explored and capabilities upgraded, with central support.
👉🏾 Sudha I agree with whatever Jayanto has just now said. These are big problems for all the police forces in India. If you want to have good policing, the primary prerequisite is that policemen must be enabled to do good policing. Just calling a man a policeman, he cannot make a good policeman. You have to ensure that he's backed up with the necessary resources to do good policing.
👉🏾 Now, as Jayanto just now outlined, the primary problem is gross under-staffing of India's police stations. If I may share the figures, last year we had about. 2.2 million policemen in all the states put together, that's a fairly large number. But if you take the actual number working in police stations. For example the state of Delhi has got almost 75,000 policemen, but how many of them are working police station? if you just take the count, you will find that all over India, less than 5.5 lakh persons working in police stations. Most of the police personnel are working either in on the police units, or in special units, or with regard to VIP security or in crime branch or intelligence, something like that.
👉🏾 Now, basic policing, ensuring the security of the people, responding to the needs of the people or, all this are happening in the police station. And there, we are grossly understaffed. Even now, there are many police stations in India, where the strength in the police station is only 10 or 15. It is here that we need to increase our strength. In colonial priority was to ensure that the people do not rebel and therefore lot of stress was on that order policing. Policing is a service to the citizen, when citizen needs the policemen, the policemen should be there at the police station. This is the responsibility of a democratically elected government, this is a guarantee given under the constitution to protect the life and property of every citizen.
👉🏾 So when the citizens seeks the aid of a police station, for protecting his life, dignity or property, there must be policeman there. In this matter that we have sometimes not been up to the mark. So increasing the strength of the police station. I've experimented with this and we have been able to ensure that almost 50% of Kerala's total police person, are in police stations, that makes a lot of difference. For example, instead of keeping women police in the Mahila battalions. But if you put even half that number in police stations, that improves the quality of policing. So when women and children come to the police station, the presence of women in the police station makes a lot of difference, and to the culture of service that prevails in the police station. So this is very, very important.
👉🏾 And the other things that Jayanto pointed out, very, very important. When you don't have enough number of policemen in the police station, you cannot give them the rest, they have to put in the 16 hours of duty, and often they are not given any weekly off for months together. They don't spend time with their family, their physical health, their mental health, all this is nobody's concern. You expect policemen to behave, well how can they behave if they're constantly under such stress, they have to attend to a variety of jobs. None of these matters gets enough attention or gets any priority in any dispensation. As Jayanto rightly pointed out, if you consider the expenditure on policing by the states of India as a fraction of the gross domestic product or the per capita income of a citizen, you will find it is so minuscule. If you compare it with any developed country and then compare the share that the citizen gives to the police out of his per capita income, it is just a small amount. When you buy the cheapest model, you get the worst tool. That's what is happening. You don't spend money on the police.
👉🏾 In fact, I recently calculated that even in Kerala where our budget it is a reasonably good, I have calculated and found that the total amount of money spent by the people of Kerala on subscribing to Kerala's newspapers in an year, are less than the money that the government spends on police. More money is spent on reading about the police rather than on giving the police the necessary resources with which they can work. So this is a distortion, this has to be seriously corrected. I'm very thankful to Jayanto for pointing out this huge gulf, which exists between our expectations from the police and our ability to xxxxxxxxxx resources and place it at the police station, so that the police can serve the citizens better.
👉🏾 About duty time, about leave, about their training, about their career advancement. This is a very important matter. So 95%, of this 24 Lakha police personnel, 75% of them are constables. Perhaps 20% better head constables, so the balance is 5%. In that 5%, the assistant sub inspector, they may come to about 3% or 4%.
👉🏾 And the top from the DGP to the DySP or or the assistant commissioner, as he's called, that portion will do only less than 1% of the total strength of Indias police force. Now, if you want to refer a charge sheet in court, if you want to investigate their case, if you want anything done, then some sub inspector has to do it.
👉🏾 And how many sub inspectors do we have? So therefore we are limiting our ability to investigate cases by limiting the number of sub inspectors that we have. I had a personal experience, when I joined as an assistant superintendent police in 1977 in Thalassery, after finishing my training, I had an assistant. That person had completed 37 years of service, he had joined the Malabar special police at the age of 17 1/2 or something, and when he was retiring after the 37 years of service, he was still a constable.
👉🏾 That is the kind of career progression that we speak of in the police, the policeman has nothing to look forward to. So you are expecting much, you're looking forward to a policeman who personally has nothing to look forward. So how can you improve anything? So in Kerala, we have done several things to improve this now. Now every single policeman who gets into Kerala's police services can aspire to retire at least as a sub inspector. And if he has joined, rising to the rank of an inspector of police is a great thing for a person who has joined us. Now that keeps him motivated. If he is to rot in the department for 30 years as a constable, you can't teach him anything, he is not enthusiastic about learning anything, he's not committed to acquiring more skills or technology, nothing. Therefore another great reform that must happen is to ensure that the percentage of constabulary, that means the head constable and constable in India's police forces, are brought down 50%. The other 50% must be assistant sub inspectors, sub inspectors, inspectors and DGPs and all. So this is not happening. The minute we do this, we will have a motivated, police force which has got high degree of motivation to rise up in the ranks.
👉🏾 The most important thing is the Supreme court....... everybody is improving the service condition, of the DGP, how he should be selected.......... but DGPs don't really matter. What matters is the constables and the head constables who deliver 95% of the services delivered by the police.
👉🏾 We have implemented most of the Supreme court directives, but I have my reservations about the effective Supreme court directives in improving police. Because Supreme court has not addressed the basic problem of who we bell the cat. So the cat is seen as the politician in government. Now as long as the cat is there and the cat has got the power, belling the cat is a difficult proposition. So political interference in the working of the police cannot be stopped by ensuring that the DGP has a tenure. Because now what is happening is that DGPs are selected so carefully that the most amiable, amenable and accommodating person gets the chance to serve in that particular office. This is uniformly happening all over India.
👉🏾 If you look at the selection process of the DGPs in all the states, including all the stems, post-2006, particularly after 2014, after which the supreme court has been stricter in ensuring that the DGP selection is done in a very very systematic manner, you will find that the most amenable ones have been selected. It has not made any difference to the quality of policing. Because ultimately the problem is what I said earlier, what is happening at the police station level? The Supreme Court has forgotten about the police station. Improving the police station functioning, ensuring that that has better service delivery, insisting that better resources are placed for the police. These things are never looked into.
👉🏾 So Kerala has done much to improve policing at the police station level. So I would like to dissociate from the concept that the great good can result from getting out the Supreme court directives. Because those for example, one directive is with regard to separation of law and order from investigation. Now, separation of law and order from investigation, everybody will in principle agree, there's not a single soul in India who will oppose that. But if you want to implement that, in the field and the police station level, you have to at least double the strength of police available in the police station, then only that separation is possible. The Supreme court directives are silent on that, and there is no mechanism, no means by which this can be ensured. So, if you suggest something that this may be done is a good thing, but unless these things are supported with the means to do it, it will fail. Then again about tenure system. Because it does not answer the question, if there is a misdemeanour on the part of the sub inspector, if there's a misdemeanour on the part of the deputies from the police, what is the mechanism to be adopted? So the benefit of the Supreme court directives have not been actually received by the citizenry.
👉🏾 Most states have implemented it. Kerala also has implemented it. And another of them the experiment has been the state security commission. The state security commission there has been a coming together of the leader of opposition, by the chief minister, so many of the high court et cetera.
👉🏾 But the attitude, the attitude about policing with regard to the state security commission is not a very positive one, this is what I have found. It is to be used constructively, that was the intention. When the state security commission was suggested that there will be a meeting of minds, that there will be a common purpose to attain excellence in policing. So generally the point is everybody's keen to point out the faults of policing particularly to make the ruling party appear in a bad light. And therefore there is aversion on the part of the ruling parties also to give a major role to the state security commission or to pack the state security commission with people favourable to them Now, the springboard, what is a sublingual directive and practically all the states have safe security commission now, but it is not functioning in a very desirable way.
👉🏾 Because ultimately the problem is, resources for the police, conditions of service of the police and accountability of the police. This is the most important. You should have a strong mechanism for police inaction, overzealous police action and police and atrocities. These three activities of the police, they must be made accountable for that and such accountability mechanisms have to be been strengthened. And supreme court has given that directive also. Unfortunately, most of the states are not very strong on the accountability mechanisms and police department is also not very keen about accountability measures.
👉🏾 Now, policing is actually contextual. If you look at Sir Robert Peel's Met in the UK, that was a need that was thrown up by the early sprawl that grew after the industrial revolution in England. Now, if you look at in the U S, in the 1920s August Vollmer's reforms that led to professional policing, these were triggered by the economic growth in the U S after the first world war, technological innovations, like the telephone, the wireless, the motorcar and the emergence of organised crime. Even the other eras of reform in the U S in the 1960s and in the 1990s, that increased support of the federal government for improving capabilities of local centric, law enforcement in the US is local centric, and the engagement of academia with policing practice.
👉🏾 More recently, say in president Obama's time, there was a US president's task force on 21st century policing that called for a return to greater engagement with the community and a change for the trend of increasing militarisation of the police, after the 9/11 terror attacks, Now in the UK, the police reforms and social accountability act of 2011 gave authority to elected police and crime commissioners to get directions regarding priorities to the chief constables of counties and to hold them accountable for performance. Of course, the Home Office continues to identify strategic policing...

68: Roma Balwani: The leadership journey

Sun, 15 May 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
What makes a good leader? Who is a good leader? Are women better leaders? What or who shapes our leadership styles? Why do women continue to be underrepresented at the C-Suite level across the world? These are some of the questions I have been asking my guests on The Elephant in the Room podcast - in an attempt to demystify leadership and what it means because it means different things to different people. For the 68th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Roma Balwani a strategic communications advisor, an Independent Board Director at John Cockerill and former President of Communications at the Vedanta Group.
In 2021, in India just 4.7% of the CEOs are female (slight increase from 2018) and there has been a decline in the number of women board Chairs. The regulatory requirement for listed company’s to have women on boards, has definitely helped increase the number of women directors board numbers (2021 - 17.1% up from 9.4 in 2014). But, women leaders in India are decades away from any kind of parity in the C-Suite or at the Board level.
In this episode I spoke with Roma about her journey, the challenges, opportunities and mentors who helped her build and progress her career. We also spoke about leadership, women and their leadership styles; barriers to women in leadership in India; challenges facing leaders in an ever changing world; the skills aspiring women leaders should focus on; people who inspire her……….
Listen on any of your favourite podcast platforms.
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Morning Sudha, I'm really delighted to be invited to share some of my personal stories of my checkered career in your podcast.
👉🏾 Sure. So I have been the President of the Vedanta Group for almost seven to eight years, and just recently moved into an advisory role as a communication specialist. I was looking after brand and communications at the Vedanta Group. Prior to that, I was also the EVP and Chief communications officer at the Mahindra Group for communications. So both these have been very large part of my career and of course, the career, as I said, is checkered because I've dabbled in many things which are to do with creativity.
👉🏾 So I've been a creative consultant in the past. I have also lived in Norway and worked as a communication specialist there as well. My education has been largely in Mumbai. I've been an economics and political science graduate from a leading college in Mumbai, from Bombay University, as well as done my post-grad in Marketing from Bombay University. And then generally we have been very well exposed to executive education at the Harvard business school as the Michigan Ross school of management, so those have been very insightful leadership training that I have received.
👉🏾 I have over more than three decades of experience as a communications specialist, but frankly, my career in PR started, it was a chance which I took on at the time when I was not a PR specialist. I was a marketing communications manager in a computer education company, which was a very small company at that time. It was just a 500 crore company led by Ganesh Natrajan, and he offered me that role. And I said, I don't think I'm really suited for it because I'm very candid, outspoken, and he said, you know, Roma, that is your speciality and that will hold you in good stead in this profile as well. I said, well, I'm willing to try, but I'm not sure whether I'm a perfect fit for it, but frankly, I think he felt that I could do it more than I could, and I don't think I've looked back since then. And I guess he was right.
👉🏾 Honestly though back then they were only stereotype roles for women. So I started my career and grew in a company called Larsen & Turbo, it is one of the largest manufacturing company, you must be have heard of them. And I actually joined them when I was studying and I was in my college and I grew from the ranks over there. And it was a time I think where I think I learned a lot of things which have helped me in footsteps now. I used to wake up early in the morning, do my classes, rush to work. Even in my post graduation days, I used to do a full day's job and then go to evening classes. You know wait at the bus stop, very tired after that a long lecture. But I think that really was the starting point of my career, where the deal with my father was, that I will not give up education and that's when he allowed me to start my career very young, I think I was only 19 at that time.
👉🏾 Yes Sudha, I think I could say yes and no because every challenge I saw was an opportunity to excel. I remember when I first was given the supervisory role in Larsen & Tubro. I was made to now become the executive assistant to the general manager, which at that time was quite a senior role and a very, very important role working with the then general manager of the company. I was just 22 years old, as I remember, and I just finished my post graduation, got my diploma and I applied for the job. Now somewhere you see in manufacturing companies, the mindset is that they want people who are engineers and who have done their MBA, and I was really not suited with that kind of an education qualification.
👉🏾 And the general manager told me that if you succeed in the next six months, you will be evaluated or you will be pushed back into your old role. And I took up that challenge, maybe I was foolhardy at that time, but when I was given those six months. I know from then on, I had to earn my stripes, each time and I didn't want it any other way. So I think that was the starting point. And then of course, every woman faces some kind of glass ceiling as you grow in your career, but I didn't let that deter me because I had many, many bosses who really supported me and I'm very thankful for that.
👉🏾 My case, it was slightly different, because I had possibly come from a time when leadership or your values start at home. And I was brought up in a home which was a place where the family members are treated equally, whether you were a girl or a boy, and possibly that shaped my independent attitude. And having both educated parents who had moved from Pakistan to Mumbai, and they were both doing well in the way they shaped my career. So I think if I look at that part of my life that possibly developed my leadership style unconsciously. So starting as a shy backbencher in school, I tried to see what is life going to give me. And my father used to drop me to school every day, and every time I tried to match his strides, and I must say those strides were very difficult to achieve, and you can understand what I mean by that. And he helped me gain that confidence that there is more in life that I can do, and from that shy back bencher, I became a person of my own right. Even very young, which is why I started working at a very young age. And then you become a poised and confident leader of tomorrow and I must say my family helped me in that.
👉🏾 But today, if you want to take effective leadership, I think both leadership and communication are intertwined. The best leaders are skilled communicators; we all demonstrate empathy, we demonstrate integrity, confidence along with humility and above all I think we are committed to the work that we do, the organisation that we belong to and we are accountable. I think for me, the buck stops with me; bouquets are welcomed for my teams, but the brickbats are welcome only to me. I think these are traits which you have to develop if you want to be seen as an effective leader.
👉🏾 Oh, absolutely. I mean, leadership styles keep evolving and we have the ability to demonstrate emotional intelligence and we are more self-aware. I think we are decisive, yet flexible and bring to the high table a sense of balance and an equitable mindset.
👉🏾 I completely agree with you as I said earlier, that yes, our leadership styles evolve. And for me, it's important today to see how over a period of time I have delegated, have empowered people to grow as young leaders and that has made them succeed. So I think in the early days, you have to keep proving yourself as a capable leader, you're being direct, then you learn to coach people, then you're supportive and then you learn to delegate to empower. I think I have gone through those stages in my career, and today I am very happy that I'm at stage when I can mentor young professionals and they are potential leaders in the making. And also provide them appropriate platforms to really grow.
👉🏾 So I think this way I have changed my leadership style. I can give you an example when I was called back to Vedanta by Chairman, Anil Agarwal’s daughter, Priya. She did tell me that I need you to mentor me so that I can segue into the organisation more seamlessly because I'm want to do that. And I must say these three years working with her, today she is so confident she has grown to be a poised and humane leader. She's also leading the top management, which is the group management board and leading it to build a purpose driven organisation, which I think in itself is a challenge. But she's taken it up very well, and she's leveraging sustainable development which she saw was my forte to drive the net zero commitment of reducing the carbon footprint by 2050 for the group. Now that is a tall order for a young leader like her, but she has that power of persuasion and not just by the role that she plays as the daughter of the chairman, but as a leader herself.
👉🏾 Sudha I have been very fortunate with this legislation. I was also at an independent director for a company, which is the Indian subsidiary of a Belgian company called John Cockerill. And I've been there with them for almost seven years now in my second stint with them and being a professional. I realised that what I bring to the table as a woman leader, as a woman independent director, really balances the boardroom discussions and makes it much more enriched. And you've seen that data also says that when are women directors on the board, the organisation itself evolves into discussions at the board level, balanced towards CSR, towards sustainability, risk management, which probably is not only dealing with numbers and business, right?
👉🏾 This has helped many boards to really get the right kind of professionals, but at the same time, we are still grappling with the fact that many Indian companies have women directors who are there by virtue of they being the wives of the owners or by actually owning part of that organisation. But what I've seen in the recent times is that they have realised that they have to better equip themselves, so that they can be part of the board deliberations and not just be a figure present because they have to do the numbers right.
👉🏾 So that difference, I'm seeing with many younger women leaders who are coming into the boards, but they're adding value to the boards. Now those are the difference I see in the board compositions and their acumen to be much more useful to the board deliberations, than what it was, let's say a few years back.
👉🏾 So it's not an issue of lack of talent, I think the way opportunities are being created now is far more easier than what it was earlier for people like us. There were few opportunities at that point in time, but for women themselves, they have to develop this self-belief and in their power to lead. If they have that confidence, to take charge, be accountable; then many forward looking organisations will definitely want them on their boards or want them as CEOs in their organisation.
👉🏾 Now take a manufacturing company like Mahindras, they have so many women leaders, leading absolutely male dominated profiles of work. And the women leaders who feel that they are confident to take on these responsibilities, they should grab that opportunity, they should not hesitate. And I notice that many of these women do hesitate and they think that they may not be able to do justice, both to their homes and to their workplace. I think that is a myth that we need to address and make it possible for women to have that flexibility at work where they can still be leading the teams and be able to manage their workplace. And look at it today Sudha, in today's context, we are in a virtual world, flexibilities are being offered to everybody and why not seize the opportunity.
👉🏾 So I think as far as the PR industry is concerned, we surely are in a sweet spot in the sector, right? There are many, many women who are leading many verticals and they're doing very well. There are many CEOs of many global PR firms who are doing well, and I don't see women not taking the lead in the PR field because they feel that they can add more value to a client and create a purpose-driven strategy for them as compared to men who would not possibly think in that direction.
👉🏾 So you will see many women PR professionals, wanting to join this profession, now then earlier when PR was not structured. PR was not a structured function. I must say that about 20 years back when I was trying to put that structure in place, I was then labelled to say that, she managed to bring strategic communication to the high table. But I also was given the opportunity by a very forward looking chairman, like Anand Mahindra. So we have to create those opportunities for ourselves, for the profile of work that we do, that we are not somebody who just writes a press release, once your business proposition is in place. You are part of the business cycle and your function actually adds the dimension right when you start the process of creating a business goal which is what I think what I think is important to understand, and women can do that equally well, or even better than men.
👉🏾 You're right, I think leaders today have to battle and survive in a VUCA world. The pandemic has really shown us a mirror of reality, which was earlier unknown to the world at large. Now you have to adapt to the virtual world because that is reality for you now, and to be able to do that, you have to be able to see disaster coming so that you protect your business. You're seeing that the youth today have a lot of mental health as a problem, which today leaders have to understand, empathise and face it, and also resolve it and manage the young generation when they are trying to grow in this VUCA world.
👉🏾 So I think the whole change which we have to bring in is to be more adaptable, be more flexible to the environment. And then as I always give this classic example, is to pivot effectively, you have to now unlearn your old ways, grow from those failures that you had earlier, start celebrating the small successes that you have now managed in the last two years. Relearn from those experiences and then move forward with much more confidence and new insights; which now will be the key attributes I would expect from any aspiring woman leader. Create your own personal brand, when you associate with a bigger cause than you, people stop looking up to you as a woman leader, who has been resilient who has managed, the kind of adversity that we faced in the last two years and adapted to it, pivoted and still succeeded.
👉🏾 Like I said earlier, women lack their self-belief, they have to get their self-belief absolutely, in the forefront, because if they don't think that they can achieve and succeed. And they can take charge and lead teams. Take for example recently Anand Mahindra complimented a young lady on the shop floor, who's leading a team of 700 people in the Nasik manufacturing unit, and she's leading 700 men right? So I think if you can get that kind of mindset cultivated and you are able to lead in that context, then there are many opportunities that you will get. And I always said that you have to communicate effectively, articulate your vision with clarity, with purpose, make people stand up and listen to you and be guided by you. I think that is also very important.
👉🏾 And then of course, as I said, the adaptability and flexibility to pivot. That is my favourite example of dolphins, actually, you've seen them dance and they dance in rhythm, and why do they do that? Because their leader, their conductor, sends clear instructions, which they follow, else there'll be chaos, right, in any organisation. If you can do that effectively and be articulate enough and give that a sense of confidence to your teams, I think there is no chance they will not succeed.
👉🏾 You know strangely all my role models have been my bosses, right from when I was a 19-year-old and he was a 50-year-old and I would look up to and say, oh my God, he's quite an old gentlemen. He's the one who actually taught the ropes to my corporate career, he taught me what the pitfalls are, how to manage those pitfalls. I think I'm really indebted to him. His name is Mr. B I Bhambhani, he’s passed away, may his soul rest in heaven. He was my best teacher to start with. Then as I moved and evolved into my career, I had the opportunity to work with a very passionate leader called Ganesh Natarajan, who was the one who changed my career path, and I went from marketing to PR and who really had that belief in me that I could deliver and succeed; so he was my second role model. The third one I remember very clearly and I still remember a small little incident, which made me feel so special by him, was Ronnie Screwvala. And I happened to join UTV and wanted to pursue my creative career, and I became one of his senior members, and every birthday, he would bring a cake onto your table, sing happy birthday for you and the whole team would join in. You know, these are small little things, but they seem etched in your memory and did that with every team member. He wouldn’t call you to his room, he would bring that cake to your table and he would sing that song for you. And those are touching moments, right? Those are leadership traits, which you don't find in everybody.
👉🏾 He actually developed my global mindset, he sent me to Tampa, he wanted me to learn a new kind of business proposition, which is selling on television, which was home shopping. It was an unheard of at that point in time. And I learned, and I was exposed to that kind of global mindset to go and see how people work in the US, at a time when nobody thought of it. And then of course, coming to my stint in Norway, I was vey fortunate to meet a Finnish lady, her name was Tuija, and she was the MD of an Indian company called E-Bookers, an e-commerce portal for tourism.
👉🏾 Came back, luckily Anand Mahindra wanted somebody with a corporate background and a global mindset; and I think I fitted the bill and I got that opportunity. And he was the one who empowered me to create the magic of the...

67: Target 33% - Challenges for women in policing in India: Conversation with Meeran C Borwankar and Devika Prasad

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
The third episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast in partnership with the India Justice Report focuses on the status of women in policing in India. Despite the target set by the Indian Home Ministry in 2009 to achieve 33% women in the police force - representation has increased by a mere 5% in a decade. While many states have mandated 10% to 33% reservation for women in the police, not one of these States has met its goal. With one woman in every four police officials, the state of Bihar has emerged as the unlikely champion and the best performing state across India. With just 215000 women, just over 10% of Indian police is female. The share of women among the higher ranks is even lower at 8.7%.
A significant share of policewomen suffer due to patriarchal prejudices, strong masculine work culture and are considered unfit for on-field tasks. Women personnel are usually limited to in-house tasks such as maintaining registers/data, filing FIRs and other complaints, whereas male police officers are engaged in more field-based tasks such as investigation, patrolling, law and order duties, etc. Most stations also lack basic infrastructure such as separate toilets , creche, changing rooms for women.
In this fascinating and eye-opening conversation my guests Meeran Chadha Borwankar and Device Prasad talk about the systemic issues that hold women back, and what actions can be taken to reach the target numbers.
👉🏾 What can be done to help creating a more inclusive culture where women can thrive
👉🏾 Reasons why women in police are clustered at the bottom, and what can be done to promote their rise through the ranks
👉🏾 What states can do to attract and retain women and meet the target 33%
👉🏾 The politics of it
In a recent article Meeran Borwankar slammed the demand for all women police stations as a panacea to pervasive challenges.
“An officer commented that they “compartmentalise women officers rather than give them the independence of work”. It is “a step in the reverse direction” because women officers are interested in all kinds of police work, not just in women-related matters.”

Memorable Passages from the episode
👉🏾 Thanks for having me here Sudha.
👉🏾Thank you Sudha.
👉🏾 Sudha that the current ratio I would say is around 10% plus of the women in police, so we are gradually moving towards achievable target of 33%. But instead of having exclusive recruitment for women, every year, most of the states earmark 33% quota. So that is the reason why the upward movement is slow, but certain states like Bihar went in for exclusive recruitment for women in police. And Bihar, it may surprise most of our listeners, today has about 25% of women. So I don't see a reluctance on part of the women to join police anymore, it was there in eighties and nineties, this century the department has opened its arms for women and they have accepted it. So if we don't have exclusive recruitments, this would be a slow process but if like Bihar, even Himachal today has 19% women, if more than the 30% are recruited every year, then we will reach this target earlier.
👉🏾 Yeah, so just taking from what Meeran ma'am says, the startling rise of Bihar was actually, it went from 7% to 25% women in a space of five years - 2015 to 2019. So I think studying that experience, breaking it down, finding out how did the department do it, what were the ground measures taken, what were the policy measures on recruitment taken? That in itself would be a big eye-opening exercise to understand practically how a police department raised its numbers in recruitment so sharply. So I think it's a good example and it's really encouraging that there are examples like this. Himachal also has seen a rise over this five-year period, Gujarat also jumped from 4% to 12% in the space of five years. So in fact, I think we are seeing increased recruitment of women into the police and so again this question that women are not joining is perhaps not correct. But I'm sure we'll have more conversation about how that is just the beginning of a woman's journey also within a police force, of joining it, getting there. What happens once you're there, that's again a whole another set of issues and challenges which have to be addressed.
👉🏾 I would just say that in 2010 Bihar had only 2% women in police, and in less than 20 years it has managed to take this up to 25.3%. How did it do this, as Devika said, I mean, it's worth a very close study so that we can identify some good practices. But what I would say is that there are only six states, all right, six large states which have women’s share police in double digits. And most of the large states are obviously under 10, and when you look at states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, states known for registering high number of crimes against women, in those states, the share of women police is still quite abysmal.
👉🏾 One thing I would say is that I think the question of crimes against women or crimes based on gender, we can treat those a little bit separately from crimes against minorities and then, if we look at that, then there'll be crimes against Dalits, crimes against Adivasis. So people on the margins in India and the effect of crime on them, or police misconduct on them, all of these are issues on their own and need to be unpacked in that way.
👉🏾 I agree that in a democracy, the police should at least look like and try to represent the society, which it serves. In a country like India that's a very difficult thing to do because of our sheer diversity. So that's something which then a department, the leadership has to consciously keep working at - increased representation of underrepresented groups in the police. And that again is I think a sort of long haul issue just like increased representation for women. It's something which is going to take a long time and it needs a commitment which is not just in the moment or when something happens or is sort of fashionable, but it's a deep-rooted commitment, which then as police leadership changes that commitment shouldn't change. So the institutional commitment to this kind of representation is also something which really needs deep commitment over a long term. But I mean on the question also of how to address crimes, it's a question which needs many answers and there's so many factors at play, so I'll just limit it to this question of representation and I do feel, certainly of underrepresented groups in the police, that is something which perhaps would help.
👉🏾 So while I agree with Devika on all the points, I would take it further and say that police leadership has to first accept the need for broader representation, talk about it, and then go in for policy changes. Devika has highlighted that individual changes are erased once an officer goes out, posted out, is transferred out; so institutional policy changes to give more representation to gender, to minorities is the way out. And for that we have to first admit that we do not have adequate representation of various sectors of society. I know that every year, at least in Maharashtra where I worked, we would not be able to fill the vacancies for scheduled tribes. So even with our best efforts, we could not fill the vacancies and the vacancies would be taken over for the next year. But for gender now we have both 33% reservation and willing young girls, and for that I feel, special the recruitment is what would reduce this gap. From say, one decade which it would take routine, to four to five years as a Bihar they have shown. But to face the reality and to take institutional policy decision is the way I see forward.
👉🏾 So in 2015-16, we conducted a research in Maharashtra because in Maharashtra we started having reservation for women in 1993, and it was more than two decades. So we wanted to see the satisfaction level of women in police and we had a sample of constables and of sub-inspectors, working at the police station level. We did not cover the women working in special units, like control room, traffic or computer sections. And we found that about 20% of women constables, sub-inspectors were extremely unhappy with the environment and with the cooperation given to them by the male staff. So the study highlighted that about 50% of the women are not happy and about 20% of them out of this 50 were extremely unhappy. And they flagged two-three issues, one was that they needed special training, especially because they said they're ambitious and they would like to have leadership trainings. Then they talked of the need for experience sharing workshops. They wanted to know how others among them are coping with night rounds, with small children, with pregnancy and the kind of atmosphere at the field level at the police station, and then this Issue which they flag that they do not get adequate cooperation from their male colleagues.
👉🏾So these three things, I thought if we start working on that instead of confining them to special units. We have them in police stations, we give them the training that they need, we support them during the sensitive periods like a pregnancy, like monthly periods or like post-pregnancy having small children; they would love to work in the field as meaningful contributors to the police station. And it would not only be the gain of the police department or the police stations, but citizens would immensely gain with a healthy, positive and a sensitive, empathetic women at the field level.
👉🏾 I think the crux of the point is this feeling that in CHRIs work and interactions with women police officers, I think this notion that we are not seen as equals by our male colleagues and we're certainly not seen as fit to be police officers by our male colleagues. I think that's perhaps the biggest challenge that women face and everything kind of stems from there. Both at the field in an operational situation, but also in terms of leadership and decision-making et cetera. So until that fundamental inequality, and then also that sense of inequality is fixed. I mean you can recruit many women into the police, but if they are at very junior ranks, at only at the ranks of constable, they are not getting into leadership positions, et cetera, they're not heading operational units like police stations and districts; then there'll always be an imbalance and women will always be marginalised within the police, so that marginalisation is what needs to be addressed and it is still very much there.
👉🏾 So Sudha see we cannot talk about of women and police as a broad category, being one unit. The question you have posed is responded to, handled differently by say women who are in leadership position like women belonging to Indian police service or women who are recruited direct as Dy S.Ps
👉🏾 They I think are able to assert and they are able to handle where they're not getting proper response from their juniors, seniors, or colleagues. And to a great extent, they are able to set these kinds of wrong responses into the correct ones, because they by the very nature of their entry levels, their basic qualities; they are in much better position to respond to and handle an atmosphere which may not be very conducive to their presence.
👉🏾 But even the study which I quoted earlier, the sample was of sub-inspectors and constables, when we asked about the satisfaction level, so dissatisfaction of women constables was much higher than men of constables, which shows that women constables are finding the atmosphere more hostile, or maybe they are not able to correct, align or modify that hostile atmosphere. Women sub-inspectors again, it's a leadership position, field-level leaders, they are able to correct that and ensure that even if it's not very cordial, it comes to cooperative or acceptance levels. So I would say that we can broadly divide the response of the women at the constable level at middle-level leadership, which is sub-inspectors and Dy S.P and at top-level leadership, which is direct IPS.
👉🏾 So Indian police servicewomen face much lesser difficulties than constables, who are also not able to respond the way they would like to. Middle level, I think may not have police stations very accepting, very cooperative, but I must say in Maharashtra they are able to assert. So the constable level needs maximum support training and a positive atmosphere or positive messages from not only their male colleagues, even from female leaders. So that's the way I would like to think that there are three broad levels; field levels, middle leadership, and top leadership and I see maximum difficulties at the police station level at the field level women constables facing.
👉🏾 So I agree that there are different sets of challenges and certainly more acute challenges for women at the junior and certainly at the field ranks and for constables. But I do wonder if there are certain thing which all women have to traverse and face. IPS women might just like mam said, it just might be easier for them, they might be more prepared for those conversations. So the notion that, one that physical strength is such an important part of policing and then tied to that that men are physically stronger than women. And even if that's the case, but there may be other aspects of physicality, which, I mean, it may not be that every single man is stronger than every single women and there may be other aspects which women may be, they may be more agile in other ways, et cetera, there may be things that even in physicality, women will be able to show. But this notion that one, of physical strength and the prioritising of physical strength, and then the other thing of pregnancy and of course monthly periods, it's not something which is just taken on board naturally that when a woman enters your organisation, these are things you have to prepare for.
👉🏾I think women still...... it's almost like facing a stigma, especially in an organisation like the police, where there's a feeling that here is either an officer or woman constable who for nine months may be out of commission this is something that we have to navigate around and it's something which may disadvantage us. So I wonder if some of these attitudes are still running through the police organisation, across the hierarchy and which I think they are also discriminatory and discriminatory based on gender, very specifically, and attributes and experiences that only women go through. So I think that some of that is probably also at play and in some way it will affect everybody. But I mean of course that some, will be able to navigate that much better than others.
👉🏾 I was wondering what Meeran ma'am thinks, why is it important to have a as balanced as possible police force. I mean I think maybe it's important to kind of revisit the fundamental question, a lot of tokenism is going on within the police force that they have to have some women so let's have them at the constable level, let's make it difficult for them. But why is it important to have women in the police?
👉🏾 Because Valay when we think of police we only think of crime. But mind you about 30% to 40% of time is gone in dealing with non-cognisable cases, which means, neighbour dispute, complaints about too much noise, dispute about water; we have so many women coming to police stations, harassment by the family, drunkard husbands beating their wives.
👉🏾So it's not a token if we sit in a police station, I would say women accused involved in crime are less, women victim and women coming to the police stations for non-cognisable cases, is very high. So I would definitely champion that our police station should represent or cater to the citizens as per of the profile of the citizens, since my feeling is that about 40% to 50% of the complainants we catered to, are either women as complainants or as victims. So we must have a much higher number of the women, than the present 10% that the country has.
👉🏾 Okay. Sudha retention is not an issue. The whole country wants government jobs because of the security which they provide. So once inducted, keeping them within the department is not an issue, keeping them motivated, aligned with the purpose for which they have been brought in and to enable them to perform to the best of their abilities; that is an issue which I would say needs more attention, more training, more special training for women.
👉🏾 So, in terms of some very practical measures also that can be taken, like ma'am was saying that recruitment drives helped very much. So how much at the district level are targeted recruitment drives going on so that a police department can really ensure that it's doing everything it can to meet it's a reservation quota. So pre-recruitment, you can't wait for the time of recruitment to suddenly start advertising and you think that women will come. If it is something to be really imbibed, then it has to be a continuous process. So targeted district-wise recruitment drives in states. And if the quota for women for instance stay unfulfilled to carry those forward and ensure that they're only filled by women, even if that takes a little bit more time, rather than by men.
👉🏾 And I think police departments already do it, but conducting yearly baseline assessments of rank wise strength of women, before recruiting, just to see what is the gap and how much has to be filled. So almost like a day to day work, I think would be something which would help. One positive thing, which at least in urban settings, is that for instance, in Delhi, I don’t know if it is still the case, but certainly at the very beginning of the year in January, every district head of a police district in Delhi was a woman. Now I don't know if to April 2022, if that continues because of transfers, et cetera. But I mean, it's really great that that has happened. And I think in Bangalore too, again which is an urban police commissioner, again at the district levels women are coming to leadership positions. So these are some small signs of hope which are leading somewhere, it's not always just lip service, but these are still few and far between.
👉🏾 So annual assessment report, confidential report and they are institutionalised from constable up to the senior-most officer. We write about them and then it's not one person's view, whatever you write your superior has to agree and superior to that has to accept. So that issue of assessing their performance is as good or as bad as of male counterparts. So why women don't leave, I'll give you one example, once I was visiting police lines in Pune, and I found two...

66: Sarah Waddington CBE, MD, Astute:Work : The Changemaker: Driving change through action in the PR Industry

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
CBE, Founder of Socially Mobile, Future Proof and several other initiatives to build a better industry. Sarah Waddington, CBE had the foresight to launch her purpose driven management consultancy a decade before others started talking about Purpose. In this episode I spoke to her about journey 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The importance of shared values for great results and purpose being a commercial imperative in today’s world
👉🏾 What PR practitioners can do to remaining relevant as advisers to the C-suite in a world of flux
👉🏾 #FutureProof and the three things we need to plan for to FutureProof the industry
👉🏾 What good leadership looks like, how women lead
👉🏾 Addressing the the gender/ethnicity gap in leadership in the industry
👉🏾 The vision behind ‘Socially Mobile’ and her aspiration for it
And last but not the least what the Elephant in the Room is for her
“From a leadership perspective the elephant in the room is when people won't recognise or acknowledge their own weaknesses. I'm a flawed leader, I think we all are, there's very few people that I would look at and go they're the full 360 thing. But I know I've made mistakes and I'm human, my intention, I like to think is always right. I always want to learn and I think that's the other elephant in the room, just sometimes knowing you don't know the full picture and back to what you said earlier, when we need to listen better, all of us need to listen better.”
What is the Elephant in the Room for you?
Listen more here….
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you so much for inviting me, I'm so delighted to be speaking to you today.
👉🏾 Thank you for the lovely congratulations. I actually have my investiture in July, so I've got something very exciting to look forward to. And, you say since that news and being able to use that to launch Socially Mobile been quite a special time for me so I'm very grateful for all of that that's been happening. Where to start in terms of starting my own consultancy, well I did a French and media degree, loved it. And in my final year, I was lucky to do an internship and I went to a PR company and the rest is history shall we say. Came back to the Northeast, went into PR agency, then wanted to widen my expertise and went to PR marketing agency, developed my marketing knowledge through an MA and kept my CPD up. And ultimately I got to a stage in my career where I was running three offices for a group up in the north.
👉🏾 And the recession hits, this was about 13 years ago, and I suddenly sensed an opportunity, I was doing less of the day-to-day stuff and I was missing it. And then I had clients who wanted to work with me and weren't getting me but also didn't want or couldn't afford anymore to have agencies with big operational costs, they wanted the consultancy direct. So that's when I actually set up my own company and didn't really look back. And I was really fortunate that back at that time, I did something which was quite innovative in terms of business model, I actually set ourselves up as a remote working agency. And that seems very commonplace now because of the pandemic. But pretty much the first of my kind and I could only do that really because a lot of the private sector and blue-chip companies that I'd worked with, were doing the same and it just became much more acceptable.
👉🏾 So I started there and then as we grew I started to be really interested in the idea of a purpose and social capital. And that's what we started to build the agency around. We wanted to only be working with organisations that were doing good in their local communities. And so that became a key strategy for us in terms of we wanted to do good and therefore the organisations we were working with had to do the same. Through that, as we were advising on purpose, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx there's was an opportunity in terms of the management consultancy. And at the same time, I was working with the CIPR and pushing very much the message that if we were to be a strategic management function, we needed to have that business acumen and the skills that go with it. And so I developed my own and that of the team, and that's how we've kind of got hybrid agency, which is management consultancy with tactical implementation skills in terms of PR and marketing so they compliment each other really really well.
👉🏾 And I think you have the right tools in place, tech is wonderful for that and it's helped democratise things for people, I think. But I have missed the face-to-face meetings because what we've always done is gone to work in our client organisations. We can have meetings, then say can we remote work from here or we take them out for lunch and we have the meeting at lunch. So it's always been very social and very much about the relationship building and useful as it is, you can't quite get that from teams or zoom or whatever your tech have choice is.
👉🏾 Really good question, I'm going to try and break that down at a little bit. I think purpose is really, really important, I think everybody recognises and it's right that it's at the forefront of everybody's minds right now, because of a crisis, a global crisis. We've seen that with the pandemic, we've now got the war in Ukraine, but not just that the climate crisis is the most pressing. And ultimately it needs a collective response, so that means for us individually as people, but also the organisations we work for, combined with policymakers. It's not just down to governments now, it needs everybody to respond, so I think purpose has to be top of the agenda for the C-suite and it has to be something that PR practitioners are advising on and have a really good handle on.
👉🏾 And for me you asked the question, is it important for PR practitioners to have their own purpose or just allowing the client's purpose? My view would be that the great results come when you have shared values when you're both pushing in the same direction and that, you're looking at, for example, the UN sustainable development goals, there may be some that particularly resonate with you. So I think the best results come when you find organisations or an employer that has a very similar focus and I think that's when sweet things happen. The other thing I would say is, what does purpose mean for business at large? It has to be an imperative because, a) we've got an imperative to save the welfare of future generations, and that sounds very dramatic, but ultimately that's what the mission is right now. But secondly, there's a commercial imperative because it's what the public is now demanding. If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer and the special reports they brought out and there's a number of other industry data points that say the same, but it's not just that. So there's the impetus from public, and what's really interesting now is there's also the impetus from people like venture capitalists, who are saying, we are not going to provide the finance unless you can demonstrate to us that you're doing better within your communities. And I think that's really interesting because change only really happens when there's that push-pull effect, and there is that squeeze now, businesses can't ignore it, they can't just focus on the bottom line, they're being forced to address it because of the stakeholders around them and I think that's really, really important for the business community to recognise if they haven't already.
👉🏾 I really really hope so. Every bit of the optimist in me says that but then you look at the energy strategy that the UK government put forward. And it just, for me feels catastrophic at times, but you have to kind of put it in perspective and then use your influence in the best way you can.
👉🏾 I think you kind of nailed it in a question. I think the world's changing every single day, every single week and its small changes, it's things that are really changing the way we work, we live, we think. And I think for practitioners the opportunity is to help make sense of change for organisations, to understand what's happening, to do that kind of forecasting of what's coming next and what organisations need in order to evolve alongside, or even leapfrog some of it. I think that's very much been the case, if you look at the pandemic. Take the NHS is a great example how that has very quickly adopted new technologies in order to maintain a health care service to the public. And it was change that was already coming, but obviously it's had to happen really, really quickly. And I guess it's a case of, I don't think we're done with that change yet. So there's an element consolidation, but looking forward and helping organisations navigate it in the best, most ethical way they can while making sustainable choices that might not feel comfortable because we've all had lots of change, lots of difficulty trading over the last two or three years, so there might not be surplus left. So making just commercial decisions that might cost a lot upfront but be better for the long term, they're really hard to do right now. So it's helping navigate all of that, I would suggest.
👉🏾 This is a just a great question and I love that you asked me this and I'm going to grab my very first Future Proof book. Now you'll know that there's six books, five crowdsourced, two of which are NHS related. But the very first one is dedicated to Dr. John White, who I respect hugely and his writing has covered this, and I'm going to quote, as I did from the book, from a paper that Dr. John White presented to the Swiss Public Relations Society in 1999. Now he talked about what the opportunity was for PR people in the industry. And he talked about success being dependent on practitioners and I'm going to read verbatim "Recognising the opportunity presented by the environment and management needs, taking steps to educate and train themselves and make full use of communication technology to provide reliable, if not indispensable, services to managers; I say seek to deal with complexity and manage successful businesses”.
👉🏾 I genuinely don't think much has changed, it's a bit like the answer I gave before, it's managing complexity, understanding business, understanding technology and making sure that you're taking relevant information back to the board. And helping them make decisions on the back of that, even if you're not a member of the board yourself, you can still influence and I just love that quote. When you look at, what's the opportunity right now? How do we maintain the strategic position we were given thanks to the pandemic when businesses suddenly realised how much they need the communications, and that tells you in a nutshell there, I just think that it will always hold true for me.
👉🏾 This is a really great question and for me, a great leader is empathetic above everything. I think they're in touch with society, the wider political landscape and they're forward-thinking and bring all that knowledge to the role. But ultimately they're value-driven and authentic and they're prepared to make difficult decisions, quite quickly, but obviously will take their communities on that journey with them. So for me, it's all about good leaders build social capital and I mean by that two different things one, they look at their audiences, including their internal audiences can be forgotten at times and they influence those and they bring them on the journey and they also build social capital by doing good in their communities. And I think that for me defines a good leader, they know their strengths and they know their weaknesses and they build a team around them that can thrive and that as a collective can take the organisation forward.
👉🏾 I think this is a very interesting question. And I think the normal answer would be, oh it's about soft skills. I just think we have a different approach, a different perspective on things that might approach things very differently. I think women leaders tend to surround themselves by a real diversity of thought and people which I think really helps when you're making decisions. They will look at their backgrounds and the skillsets of the people around them and draw that in, I'm not saying that male leaders don't do that, but I see it much more within my community.
👉🏾 The thriving communities that I'm surrounded with are often led by women and they deliberately take a community approach, and I love that. I think that's really, really important. And I've always had an issue, slightly off question, but I've always had an issue with people saying, oh, we need to do more assertiveness training for women, or they need more confidence. That's not what they need, they need more support and they need more training and they need more opportunities, it needs to be more of a level playing field. Soft skills are really important in the workplace and to suggest that you need to be able to shout louder to be heard better is completely wrong, you need to actually listen more carefully if that's the case.
👉🏾 100%. I think this is about, firstly finding a workplace that shares your values, I really do think that's really important. If you're going to thrive in a workplace, it needs to be somewhere that you can fit in or that you believe in their mission and they believe in you. And so there's a natural relationship between the two of you, but I think you have to be very specific about the goals that you want and build allies around that, so it's not just about you, it's about actually what you want to achieve on behalf of the organisation and making sure that you use your connections in a powerful way. And I would say, if it's not working for you in an organisation, you've tried different routes, I always say, and it's a hard decision, it's a tough decision, but ship in and ship out. Get out because if they're not going to give you the opportunity, there is something structurally wrong with that organisation. Whatever that might be, whether it's bias or structural racism, I don't know if there's something holding you back and you've tried a whole heap of different ways, don't waste your energy, find somewhere that will value you for what you can bring.
👉🏾 Yeah, once you believe you'll often expend wasted energy wanting to change the place cause you believe in them.
👉🏾 There's two things here for me, and I'm going to talk about the wider issue first, there's a big issue in terms of, we don't have diversity on teams because we don't take a long-term strategic view to it. And there's lots of reasons for that. So, we don't take a thoughtful approach to talent hire. For example, we don't think about school leavers who might not have the right qualifications, people have not had the access to the relevant training. And to try and get those people we need to be in their communities, making our industry an appealing choice and providing the training and education that's appropriate for them. And if you're an employer, obviously there's a cost attached to that. So there's this first thing about actually recruiting diverse talent, which we don't do well because employers are scared to put diverse teams in front of certain clients, or they just like to hire in their image, and we know there's bias in that regard, so we need to break that. So this first thing is about actually how we recruit people, then the second one is actually progression, we're not good at progressing for whatever reason, diverse talents, and if you look at the industry data, we can all clap ourselves on the back and say, well done, we're getting more like black, asian and ethnic minority colleagues into the industry, but actually they're not getting into managerial director-level roles, and we have to ask ourselves a very hard question as to why that is. And they get to a certain point and they leave and that's whether they don't see people in their own image or whether there just isn't progression for them. That's something we very much need to address and that's kind of where we landed with Socially Mobile in terms of an intervention that we specifically brought in to kind of deal with this.
👉🏾 Thank you, it's been a long time in the making. So in 2015, I think it was, when I established Future-Proof and that's because I really was frustrated by the approach to public relations, which seem to very much see it as a tactical function and responsive rather than something where we actually take control and are proper advisors to organisations. So like I said it's about reinforcing the value of public relations to business and to show how it works as a strategic management function when it's done effectively. And and then through my work with the CIPR, I was seeing lots of industry data and I was just really frustrated by the fact that we were becoming a closed shop to people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and people from diverse backgrounds and I found it really frustrating, and every single year I tip up and there'll be a conference or there'll be speaking thing, we all knew this is terrible, we need to do something about it and nothing was being done. And eventually there's only so much you can start by beefing away at the sidelines and I thought you know what, I want to do something that addresses this.
👉🏾 Initially I tried to register Socially Mobile as a charity. It took ages and the charity commission is swamped, and they're way behind where they should be. But the long and short of it is they came back and said they didn't feel that the charitable objectives were right, because the public relations industry was a fairly affluent one. Which completely missed the point of the audiences that we were trying to reach. So what we did is we changed it and we decided we're going to do a community interest company, which we've now done and which would give us a bit more flexibility in terms of the offer, and then the pandemic hit, and we had to pause because we were trying to manage businesses, lives. But it was brilliant because it gave us time to think. And in my head, what I'd wanted to do was fundraise and then connect people who would like funding to find the course that they couldn't afford and do it. That has been the original concept, but it was going to be quite problematic and I realised it was going to be harder again, to try and fundraise the amounts that we would need bearing in mind, lots of businesses had been through a very challenging time and the forecast was still going to be turbulent.
👉🏾 So ultimately it was good because it gave us time to think and I was working with a professional fundraiser when she said, oh, you should look at this fantastic company in Cumbria, they work with ex-offenders and they provide training in order to be...

65: Sophie Standke, Beam Suntory: On purpose and creating a winning culture

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:00 +0000

LinkedIn
How often have you complained about the homogeneity of panels at conferences; teams at client pitches; leadership teams in organisations? My personal experiences over the past decade have strengthened my belief that it is not just important to have representation, equally important is visibility. Visibility that can help to create recognition about diverse leadership and make it the norm rather than the exception. So, I committed to spotlighting and showcasing women leaders from across geographies, leaders who transcend barriers of race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic, disability, neurodiversity on The Elephant in the Room podcast. And also explore the evolving definition and what it means to different people.
Sophie Standke, International Diversity & Inclusion Lead, Beam Suntory is one such leader, passionate about helping create a more inclusive and equitable organisation. In this episode we spoke about
👉🏾 About being stuck, lack of progress and the realisation that not everyone had access to the same opportunities
👉🏾 Recognition that there are different realities, being heard and being taken seriously
👉🏾 Strategies to dealing with the imposter syndrome, fitting in and the importance of values match
👉🏾 Passion and purpose, leadership mindset, changing the leadership paradigm
👉🏾 Leading in a post pandemic world with flexibility and empathy
👉🏾 The importance of acknowledging the systemic barriers and meeting people where they are, rather than a one size fits all solution
👉🏾 Building an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive
“I think being genuinely valued and respected involves more than just being included or feel like you're fitting in. It really involves the power to help set the agenda to help make decisions on how and what work is being done and to have your interests being taken into account. And then in the end, being recognised, for your contributions and being given opportunities to advance. And that's when you see you're actually welcomed in an organisation.”
Who are the leaders you admire and would like to spotlight?
Shownotes
Memorable passages from the episode
👉🏾 Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me Sudha, it's my pleasure and I'm very excited to be speaking with you today.
👉🏾 Well, I grew up in Germany and in East Berlin. So growing up, I always felt a sense of division actually in my own country and even felt that after the wall came down. I always was curious though about what was happening outside of Germany, what was happening in the world. Because I never felt a true sense of belonging, I always felt a bit different.
👉🏾 For example, I don't really identify myself or limit myself to just one country; instead, I'm more curious about what can I learn from other cultures. So for me, it was very clear actually at a very early age that I wanted to have a deeper experience and enjoy the complexities of life that you get from other countries and other cultures. And I had the opportunity to attend an international school in Germany, where classes were taught in English and where I met many students from around the world. And then right after school, right after I passed my A-levels, I actually spent seven months in France where I worked at the bar and I learned French and it was the first time I worked and lived and surrounded by a different language. And I really had one of my most enriching moments there, I have to say. I then came back to Germany and I went on to study languages and business administration, not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I was always guided by my curiosity to experience different cultures.
👉🏾 So what I did, I applied for many different jobs all over the world, and I finally got the opportunity to go to London, where I then started my career in FMCG marketing. And then five years ago, I joined in London, also Beam Suntory, which is a global premium spirits company. I joined them in the marketing department, and then three years ago, I moved to Madrid with Beam Suntory to the European head office. So yeah, that is pretty much my journey so far.
👉🏾 Exactly. Now I'm leading Diversity, Equity & Inclusion for Beam Suntory international and well I have to tell you, I've never planned to become a DE & I professional. In fact, when I started my career, I didn't even know that it was a job and I also didn't even know that one day I would care so deeply about it, right? So what happened was that three years ago, Beam Suntory was looking for D&I volunteers, to really build out the foundations of their D&I journey. And also first of all create awareness for their D&I efforts and their ambitions. And at the time I was sort of not really knowing a lot about D&I, but it really resonated with me because I was at the point in my career where I was sort of stuck. I didn't really progress and at the same time I noticed that not everyone had the same opportunities, but that certain people clearly benefited differently from resources, promotion opportunities or development opportunities, while others really didn't in the same way and I wasn't really sure why I didn't know why. So I put my hand up for leading the first women in leadership employee group and I started to speak and connect with many women in the business and it turned out that we all had a very similar experience and that we all faced very similar feelings in terms of the barriers that we faced.
👉🏾 So I started to run a really in-depth gender assessment to make those challenges that women faced real and to put almost an insight on it versus just a feeling, if that makes sense. And that's when I again quickly realised that there are systemic barriers in place in organisations that affect any minority group, not just women. So I really wanted to contribute my time to help with an equitable organisation on all levels beyond gender and that's really the point when I decided that I wanted to change my career from marketing to become a full-time D&I professional. And it has been, not easy I have to say, now when I talk about it, it sounds like an easy journey. But it took a lot of reflection, a lot of speaking to a lot of different people, but in the end, I'm very lucky that Beam career transition, so to speak, happen for me and that they gave me the opportunity to lead D&I internationally. So that's how it came about.
👉🏾 Great question. Well, so first of all Sudha, I have to say, I guess I'm a bit of a work in progress and I do still face many challenges, right? As well as opportunities to learn and progress from, obviously. But one of the barriers I faced was the barrier to progress really, which showed up in a way that the path to progression was not transparent to me and that opportunities for progression were also not shared with everybody. So again, that's when I realised that there are people that are favoured over others and that there are different rules and resources for different people and that there are also unsaid rules that not everybody learns. And so many of us might agree that all humans are equal and should have the same opportunities, yet we can't, or we don't see the obstacles that others face because it doesn't really happen to everyone. Which leads me to another challenge that I faced, which is to speak up openly about those challenges that I faced, but also to give a voice to the barriers that other employees faced, which is now part of the role I am in now.
👉🏾 And here actually the challenge was not to speak up, but the challenge was to be heard, to be understood and to be taken seriously by people of privilege, that don't even understand because they benefit from the way things are done. And the way things are done, is normal or it's seen as normal. So realities are very different for people, and I guess what I'm trying to say is that organisations need to be ready to hear different realities and people who speak up, like this example, like for me. I was always very open and I probably burned a few bridges here and there, and the people who speak up also need to be mindful of when they craft their message, where is the organisations at, because it can backfire, and that is definitely something that also happened to me. So I guess now part of my D&I journey and also part of my job obviously, is to make sure that we set the rules and conditions that work for everybody, not only for a few. But also to make sure that the systemic barriers are visible, that they are seen as real problems to overcome versus isolated incidences.
👉🏾 Yes, of course, I have, as you say I think it's a very human emotion, I think everybody has probably felt this at some point in their lives. This feeling of...... like we're not good enough or we lack confidence and I think it's a very common feeling first of all, in men and women. And imposter also can show up in different intensity levels, from feeling almost incapable or feeling like a fraud in your job to just feeling a lack of confidence in certain situations. And I definitely had experiences of not feeling good enough, for example, when I moved into D&I without any background of HR. So that said, I think it's important to always reflect and understand why do those feelings occur and then replace them with a motivating or positive thought so I always approach this with a growth mindset and also with my individual journey, because everybody has their own individual journey and we're never perfect.
👉🏾 And it doesn't make sense to also compare yourself to others. So I also always go by the mantra, feel the fear or feel the emotion, but do it anyway and continuously expose yourself to those situations that you might feel uncomfortable about. Because for me, that has been the only way to really learn and grow and also learn to understand that I can do it.
👉🏾 So this feeling of, oh maybe I can't, turns into something I can. So I think imposter is probably something that everybody has, and it's not just one thing. It probably happens over course of life, it comes up in different phases and it's easier said than done to navigate this. But I think I see it as a daily practice, I do really take care of what do I think, what are my thoughts and what do I choose to think daily, and how do I let emotions affect me. So, it’s like a daily practice to manage this, but I think it becomes a problem if imposter hinders your progression.
👉🏾 Yeah well I have to say no, I didn't feel pressure to fit in and the reason is pretty much because I'm very comfortable and confident about who I am and the value I bring. However, I do feel or sense when I don't fit in, obviously. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. And I also think that fitting in again, is a spectrum from feeling slightly different or excluded and again maybe certain moments, or in situations where you feel like you're truly excluded, you're like constantly feeling a mismatch with your values. And in my view, it becomes a challenge when there's no room for difference, when there is no room to show up in the way we want to show up and to be welcomed in this way.
👉🏾 So I think organisations that adopt an attitude of learning and openness and willingness to consider and implement the ideas of others, or just take on board the way they are. And this will really enable them and enable their workforce, but also retain their workforce and just make them more happier and more engaged and that is what research shows. And I think being genuinely valued and respected involves more than just being included or feel like you're fitting in. It really involves the power to help set the agenda to help make decisions on how and what work is being done and to have your interests being taken into account. And then in the end, being recognised, for your contributions and being given opportunities to advance. And that's when you see you're actually welcomed in an organisation. So I think those moments of not fitting in do exist, like the moments of imposter. But if it becomes really a permanent feeling that affects your wellbeing, then I think everybody needs to think about whether they're in your right space.
👉🏾 Yes, I did. I think I probably had many mistakes because I'm also very critical of myself. I think I alluded to this in my earlier response in terms of speaking up. So I consider myself to be the voice of the employees and I feel very okay speaking up about things that people perceive and be a voice for them. And what happened is that I probably chose times, when I spoke up, but not in a right way, using the right words, bringing people properly on the journey, knowing the people I talk to, right? Knowing your audience. So I think that goes back to the learning around, first of all, building your relationships and thinking about how, if you have a crucial conversation, or if you have things that you want to talk about, that are not easy, that might create contradiction or conflict, you need to prepare. And I think I was a bit, maybe naive, rushing in there, believing in good intent, believing, oh, everybody will just feel like I did or I do. So that was probably one of my biggest learnings. I think it was good mistakes, cause you only learn through that.
👉🏾 Yes, I do. I really think the beauty of humanity lies in the complexity and diversity of all of us and I do believe that everybody has their own personal path in this world and with that a unique purpose to fulfil. In my experience, a personal purpose cannot always be identified intellectually necessarily, it really comes from the heart and it's something that we deeply care about, which is intertwined with our values. So for example, I found my personal purpose really with the D&I work but it started as a passion project until I realised it is linked to my values. And until I realised I really deeply care about it and I want to build up expertise, and that I also really enjoyed the work and its challenges, obviously. We just spoke about a few of them. But that said not every passion for example is our purpose, that's why we need to differentiate, and passions sometimes can be a good indication as to where does your energy lead you, but we have many passions, but not everything is our purpose.
👉🏾 Leadership to me is, first and foremost, a mindset, which is then reflected in our daily behaviours and which then also has an impact, a meaningful impact, ideally on the people around you and the businesses. I think about leadership by asking myself three questions, maybe to help; so first of all, do we create opportunities or do we wait for direction? Are we part of the solution or are we part of the problem? Do we have a growth mindset to continuously learn, reflect, and most importantly, support others in the way they want to be supported and include everybody? Do we create safe spaces, or do we lead by fear? And I think great leadership, if those questions are answered in the right way, can be really an engine for doing great things, for unlocking opportunities and potential in people, in businesses. And really can be a force for good that can steer and motivate teams towards like a common goal and this can be big or small, and everybody can be a leader because it's a mindset, it is not a role, it's a mindset. And I think the final thing there, I want to say because we're also having a D&I conversation is that, great leaders come in different shapes and forms. They come from different backgrounds and organisations can move from homogeneous leadership to more diverse leadership, which will take time and preparation and safe spaces. But leadership really shows up and comes in all shapes and forms.
👉🏾 Great question, in my personal view right now, I think the two main ingredients are flexibility and empathy. Flexibility in terms of how we lead people across all levels. So leading across geography really requires a great deal of empathy, understanding and awareness of how different cultures and teams prefer to interact.
👉🏾 So for example, Erin Myer's book which is called a Cultural Map, I don't know if you know this, is a great read to really educate yourself about the very different nuances and preferences. So leaders can really learn to flex their styles and lean into the situation and lean into the teams they're working with. And to me this is similar when it comes to hybrid working. So especially in the current pandemic and people coming back to work, research shows that men are more likely to return to their office, compared to women, obviously, because of their caregiving responsibilities mainly, so they prefer to work from home. And the other insight, which is interesting there, is that 64% of managers believe that office workers are higher performers than remote workers, which leads me to a very common bias, which is called proximity bias, right? Which is the idea, that employees with close physical proximity to their team or company leaders, would be perceived again, as better workers, as better performers, and this can lead to favouritism. So going back to flexibility, I really do believe that everybody, especially women, should be given the flexibility to work in a way that helps them to do their job the best possible way. And going back to flexibility, but also empathy, I think what is important is that managers have conversations with their teams, with their individual employees, and really try to understand what is it that they need, like ask and listen. Don't assume, what is it that they need in their work environment, in their personal life, what is going on for them, and then be really flexible to accommodate their needs.
👉🏾 And the insight here again is that organisations that offer employees this full-time flexibility over when, where, and how much they work. They actually see 55% of their workforce is high performers. So it's really moving to enablement, empowering people because every person knows best, what works best for them and having the trust.
👉🏾 Yes. Well that's probably one of my favourite questions Sudha but I think going back to what we mentioned in the beginning, I think the first step to really enable women is to acknowledge that the barriers that women face are real. It's not isolated incidences; there is systemic bias, there is systemic barriers and research shows that those gender bias shows up in those critical moments, be it in promotion or hiring decisions, be it in talent reviews or those daily micro-moments. For example, who is being heard in meetings, whose contribution matters, who gets opportunities versus who doesn't. So that is really the most important step and...

64: Ramadan - what you can do to support your muslim colleagues at work: Conversation with Uzma Lodhi, Director Internal Comms, APCO

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
It is the holy month of Ramadan (Ramazan) for millions of muslims across the world - a time of fasting, prayer and reflection. My memories of Ramadan(from India) are all about food (Iftar) and sweet sewai. Earlier this week I caught up Uzma Lodhi to hear her thoughts on Ramadan, what it means to her and how important it is for her personal identity, We also spoke about…..
👉🏾 Childhood memories of waking up for sehri with her siblings
👉🏾 The tendency to generalise, to treat communities as monoliths because it is easier to stereotype than not.
👉🏾 Supportive managers and organisations
👉🏾 What organisations can do to support employees
👉🏾 What you should not be doing to create discomfort for your muslim colleagues
👉🏾 Some advise for those fasting for the first time at work
👉🏾 We also briefly touched on navigating Ramadan in a multi-faith household.
For Uzma, Ramadan is an uplifting, joyous time about achieving her inner zen, reflection, gratitude, and clarity. Thank you Uzma for the conversation.
What does Ramadan mean to you and what are your memories of it?
Memorable passages from the episode:
👉🏾 Very excited to be here. I'm director of internal comms that APCO worldwide, I've been here for three and a half years with a focus on employer brand strategy and we're at the beginning of Ramadan, so this is a great time to have this conversation.
👉🏾 What does it mean to me? What does it mean to religion first? First of all, why do Muslims fast? They do it because it is one of the five pillars that Muslims follow. So within that, it's one of the five core pillars and it’s core to the identity of being a Muslim.
👉🏾 Why do I do it? I think I've been doing it since I was a child, but that's not the reason why I do it now. I do it now because it helps me achieve kind of mental clarity and practice humility on an everyday basis. This is a month where I push myself to have a moment of Zen and tranquillity and think about what's important and I think about how grateful I am for everything that I have, that I've achieved and how to help others at this time. Normally I'm very chatty and very loud but it actually for Ramadan it is a moment to kind of take a moment to stop and breathe and that's why I do it. It's a peaceful month and I look forward to it to help me achieve that level of peace I need.
👉🏾 Absolutely, I have these great childhood memories and we could spend an entire kind of two-hour podcast just talking about childhood memories and how amazing Ramadan is. All of us waking up and all of us going down the stairs in our pyjamas at 3:00 AM at that point in the year when we were children doing the fasting. All of us there, my mom cooking breakfast for us and just all arguing, being tired with each other, but doing it because we know we're going to do it, you know, and then eating together when it's Iftar and it's just the most amazing.......... Which is what I aspire to, which is what I want our kids to have those kind of memories. And it's also kind of a form team building as kids, you go through it together. I loved it, it's such an amazing time. And even now at my age, I wake up and there's a group chat with our family and it's the only group chat you're going to have that's completely going full-on at 4:30 in the morning because they're the only people awake, they're the only people that know what you do eating breakfast and, it's perfect yeah I really enjoy it.
👉🏾 No, so experience in working organisations in the UK and in Belgium and I think I've been quite fortunate. I will say that I think I've been quite fortunate in the organisations I've worked in, where they've all shown quite a lot of respect and awareness. And if they haven't shown awareness it's because they purely don't know. So I've had to go in there and educate them and inform them of this has when Iftar is, this has when sehri is. I might be a bit tired in the mornings, but I'm fully committed to doing my role. I might not join a lunch meeting here or there, but that's okay.
👉🏾 And they've all been very supportive. I've been very lucky to have kind of managers I've had over the last 15, 18 years, doing what I do. So I don't have any complaints and I think in the role that I'm in right now and the company I'm in right now, where some of the offices have the room, like a space for you, a quiet space if a person needs it to go and say namaz, that's quite nice. And that's something we should be heading towards absolutely for all organisations, for there to be a safe space for any employee, for whatever reason for them to use it. I'm looking forward to how this evolves for all organisations and all businesses because Ramadan is one month, but there are other reasons why employers should have a safe space and a quiet room for employees to have that moment for themselves if they need it.
👉🏾 I've got memories...... that may be just down to my personality, but I've got memories of me printing off the Ramadan time timetable and leaving it at my boss's desk going. This is what you need to know, I've highlighted these columns, this is when there'll be prayers. But I mean, that was 10, 12 years ago and I was a much younger person then. Yes, I personally do think I have a role in telling people this is what's happening, not just for myself, but for junior colleagues in the organisation as well, where you've said that they will probably not want to say anything for fear of upsetting that balance, it's that perception of, maybe they think I can't do my job if I'm fasting. They can absolutely do their job when they are fasting, it's a great time.
👉🏾 You get clarity on you need to do and not worried about food or what's for lunch. I sometimes find it's even easier to work when I'm fasting, because I have a clear action and I become more focused. It's different for everyone, the whole thing about religion and fasting is very nuanced and your point in education, I know something we've done in our organisation this year, we sent out a one-pager on how to support colleagues, how to respect colleagues during Ramadan. Be aware of when Iftar is, when sehri is, if they've got prayers if your colleagues are observing prayers because it's nuanced some colleagues won't be saying all the prayers during the day, and how to support them.
👉🏾 Do you know where the prayer room is or does your meeting clash with when they've got a personal appointment to do that? When they need to observe a particular ritual, have an awareness, it comes down to that and we've put together this guide that we've shared with leaders this last week to make sure they can help inform how they work with their colleagues and clients and partners. It's a one-step but it's the part of a process right, you have to educate and inform people so they can begin to make informed and educated choices.
👉🏾 No, the term monolith is really interesting. Absolutely not, absolutely not. I don't think you could do it with any religion, as there have always been nuances in everybody's religion and how they interpret it. And, you know this is has really been driven by culture, tradition, family, who you surround yourself with; that might not be either cultural family, and what gets passed down to you. I got asked a few years ago, funny anecdote perhaps, I got asked during an interview process a few years ago, what is the Asian view on Brexit? And I just thought, how do you answer that? There are so many nuances to that that you could become flummoxed with just trying to think about how to layout the answer to that in a verbal conversation.
👉🏾 So monolith religion, no absolutely not. I mean, this is a podcast, but I don't wear a hijab, but I do say my prayers during Ramadan, I do fast I take it seriously. I do take a moment to find, for want of a better word, my inner Zen to remind myself of how grateful I am and how thankful I am for everything that I have. I think there's a scale, right? And you just have to respect that everybody's on their own path when they do Ramadan when they follow a religion. I say there's definitely not textbook, there is a textbook and it is the Quran but people have to read it and see how it works for them in their everyday society as well.
👉🏾 Absolutely, and it's also shaped by their own memories of how they interpret religion, how they interpret Ramadan. You know, I can talk about it from a personal perspective where you grow up and as a kid, you begin how we did it, we began with half-day fasting. It’s all about Eid the end of Ramadan and how you celebrate Eid and the gifts that you gave each other, and you get dressed in your....... I have a Pakistani background, so you dressed up in your Shalwar Kameez, and you go to the Mosque and you see your friends and family, and you have Indian sweets in the morning when you go for prayers. So it's whole thing, there's a whole social event that kids grow up getting excited about.
👉🏾 And as you get older, you understand the spiritual element of it and you do it for the full day and you understand what it brings you. So there's like a learning culture, so I have learned it definitely as to, if somebody else had joined the religion halfway through their life, they've taken it very literally. So no monolith, absolutely not. They're doing for the same reasons, but how they interpret it, the nuances about whether they say prayers, how they celebrate it, how they eat, that can be very different.
👉🏾 Yeah, it's a good question. I think it really comes down to there being two things; there being an awareness and there being a level of respect about the whole month. Awareness about what times your colleagues might be praying or might need to take some time out, even just for rest, it doesn't have to be a religious ritual they need to do. They might need to take time to rest because it is a long day in some of the markets that you might work with. On the other side, if you're doing kind of face-to-face meetings, try to stay clear of having a food component to it, or making sure they're involved in the non-food component part of it to make sure you respect what they're going through at that time. If you're working with colleagues in different times zones, make sure you remember what time they're Sehri and Ifthaar times are, so Sehri is the time they stop eating in the morning and Iftar is the time that they break fast in the evening. Have an awareness of what those times are, so you can give them space on either side of that time to prepare their food and to eat it and say prayers, and around those times.
👉🏾 In terms of what not to do. Don't ignore it, it's a big part of your colleagues, if they invest their time into this, don't ignore it. I think that's the level of disrespect, I mean you can do lots of horrible things. But actually don't ignore it be aware that it's happening, show respect, and ask if they are okay, ask if they need something to be changed within their own working schedule. If you manage people, be aware that Eid is going to happen at the end of the month and we'll get a couple of people taking time off. And also be aware that the day of Eid is never really confirmed until maybe the day before.
👉🏾 So if you always find, oh why is my colleague taking time off and I didn't even know about it until now? It's because we don't know, we know the day before because we have a lunar calendar and our times are adjusted and we find out when it's the right time based on the moon. That's what I think as the dos and don'ts. Be aware, show respect, show awareness, learn, inform yourself, educate yourself.
👉🏾 Well, it's been a while since I first started fasting at work, but I would say if it's the first time don't push yourself, absolutely schedule time for yourself, you have your own calendar, scheduled time for when you need time just to sit down and breathe, close your eyes for 10,15 minutes somewhere. I think power naps if it's your first time and you're in a work environment. Talk to your boss, explain that this is the first time, and I don't know how my body's going to react while working full time. Have the open dialogue, don't be afraid to have open dialogue with your bosses, and say I'm going through this and I want to do the best job I possibly can, help me get there, help me get to that goal and while respecting my process of how I'm doing things. Absolutely make it a two way conversation and don't be afraid to. The first few days of the hardest, so take that into account and look after yourself when you do it. And enjoy it, also enjoy it, I forgot to say that because I do have fun doing this. Have fun doing it, but look after yourself.
👉🏾 Don't be weird about it. Do we ask them a question? Yes, you can ask them the question. The question is advice from non-fasting colleagues, if you don't know, ask, but like check the comfort levels of your colleagues, does this interrupt anything you're doing, when is your Iftar? If you don't know when, your colleague’s Iftar is you have to ask, because you know, you're gonna sit there and be awkward as well and it's going to be an awkward conversation until you have it. It's different for every office, is different for every, I say office because it's where I work, but it's different in every market, in every country, the timings are a bit different. So don't be weird, do just five minutes of research, that's what's there, that's what Google is there for. And get involved, in the office, I work in at the end of the month, we'll have like an Eid lunch to bring everybody back in and see colleagues and have amazing food that's quite nice. Think about how you can help celebrate the end of the month, think about how you can help support your colleagues when they have Ifthaar in the evening, they like to talk about it, they go through a lot, it's worth connecting with them.
👉🏾 Absolutely, have the conversation, that's my one tip, always be open in your communication talk to them. If you want to learn about it, learn about it, absolutely.
👉🏾 Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm Pakistani Muslim, for myself and my partner is agnostic, but he has a Hindu heritage, and we have many conversations. I think, at the beginning of our relationship about how do we find our own path. And it's really about open communication about what are we comfortable with? Where's the middle point? And it's open communication about finding the right path, I mean I fast every day and I have a prayer mat and everything in the house. And you know, for the first Iftar of this month for this year, his parents made food for Iftar, and it was quite lovely because we're bringing together different culture’s food, it was really lovely. I'm not saying it always works, because we will have moments of, oh, wait a minute is that.....? Oh, you're doing that, okay, I don't believe that. And there are those odd moments, but we always made a promise that we'll talk to each other and just see what the comfort levels are and how far we go with things.
👉🏾 I will say it's really interesting to learn about different culture and now it's being integrated into my life. Balancing a mixed culture, mixed ethnicity, both cultures are very family driven, very family orientated and we always focus on what is the same in both, and that's what drives us forward. For the elements that are different, it's a conversation, it's always an open conversation to find our way forward.
👉🏾 Absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking.
Important Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uzmalodhi/?originalSubdomain=uk
Twitter: @nandosgirl
https://bmeprpros.co.uk/the-xec-tutors/uzma-lodhi-senior-associate-director-global-internal-communications-european-marketing-lead-apco-worldwide/
https://bmeprpros.co.uk/the-xec-tutors/

63: Cross cultural influences and leadership in PR with Becky Cho, VP Corporate Affairs, VFC APAC

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
Becky Cho, Head of Corporate Affairs at VFC, APAC is my guest on of The Elephant in the Room podcast this week. Becky has lived and worked across countries and continents and did not take the traditional route into PR. Interestingly she was an art agent before moving to Leo Burnett and then taking on her first role in corporate affairs at Philip Morris in Taiwan.
In the episode Becky speaks about her own journey, cross cultural influences, transferable skills, the barriers she faced while navigating her career, being a disruptor and good trouble maker, leadership, role models, transformational trends for our industry, employee engagement and skills for the future.
We also spoke about the importance of work life balance, micromanagement, over communications and the importance taking charge to craft your own path, being fearless and not being afraid to fail.
As Becky said, ‘we are not brought up to fight, we are brought up to share, to comply and follow the rules. So, figure out a way to accept yourself so that you are not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything. As leaders we need to take the liberty to do basic things for ourselves, like just turning off your phone for the day. Sometimes the most mundane things but hard to do.’
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you, it's really a pleasure to meet you again. It's been a long time and with the COVID world. I cannot tell you what a great surprise when I hear you reaching out because in the corporate world, we really have to do that. Otherwise we don't really get an opportunity to meet each other and it brings us closer if we can meet virtually. So thank you for the opportunity.
👉🏾 Yes, of course. So I have a really interesting, I would say cross-cultural background, so if I'm changing geography, as I'm speaking and making reference to location, please bear with me. I was born in Hong Kong, I left Hong Kong as a teenager and moved to Canada where I continued my education and do my college and university, and actually subsequently I immigrated to Canada.
👉🏾 So I think from an educational point of view, I am raised as a Hong Kong student, British education, I read and write Chinese, completely bilingual. So that gave me a really solid background on culture of my own nationality. But Canada really opened my eyes, I think the East and West was a really good mix for me and it really also opened up a perspective for me later in my career. I wouldn't say skill because I think we all can do and learn skills from different parts of the world, and especially with inclusion, diversity, being such a key focus these days for corporations, I couldn't say more about the mix of Eastern Western in my early education.
👉🏾 Sometimes when are talking about inclusion and diversity, that I would participate in like say the Western part of the world, I feel that having that background, that culture really provide the foundation for a lot of the discussion that's not otherwise available to my Western colleagues.
👉🏾 Yeah, so I think long story short is, I did stumble into many different areas before I come into public relations. I'm not your traditional business school, studying communication, become a journalist and then turn it into PR. That's not the traditional journey. I took a completely unconventional one.
👉🏾 Early in my career, I was actually an art agent, so I guess half of my career is in the arts. And when you in the arts, one very common phenomenon is, you're dealing with a lot of starving artists. And the arts are always fundraising because art itself, it's an industry that needs a lot of support, public sector and, in the private sector, it's so competitive. By nature, I love the arts, so that's a passion I have, I met a whole bunch of artists in my life and I felt like, okay, I can do some PR around it. So that's where I started and in fact, my own sister is an artist herself.
👉🏾 She graduated from college, she had alot of really great painting and I looked at it and I said, well I'm going to market them. So I was very entrepreneurial in my first couple of years in my career and then as I become an agent, I met a lot of advertising people, because they are always looking for art pieces. And so with advertising then I built an agency background where I know about corporations, building reputations through creative elements as well as, quote and unquote, public relations. So I become more of a storyteller at that point using the art language quite a bit, so I also write commentary on photography. So that's how I kind of sharpened my pencil on the public relations skills earlier in my career, but not in a traditional way. So I become a photographer, I was writing for photo journals and then I was also promoting the arts with advertising agency. So all of that was my early career.
👉🏾 And then one day I got a call from one of my client in advertising and that's Phillip Morris. So I was working for Leo Burnett at the time, so Phillip Morris is a long-term client for Leo Burnett. And so what happened is that they said, look I worked with you, I saw your skills, we have an opening in the corporate affairs department and I think you might be suitable for the job.
👉🏾 And so they opened the door for me, out of completely trusting on skills that are transferable, which I think later on, we can definitely talk about it. Having someone who has that vision and believing in me and just inviting me to the job and I got the job, so that's how I stepped into corporate affairs and public relations on the corporate side.
👉🏾 No, it's already my fourth year, so how time flies, right? Yeah, the project we worked on was three years ago and this is my fourth year in VF. So VF corporations have headquarters in Denver, and we own about 12 brands and some of them names that you would be familiar with, the Northface, Timberland.
👉🏾 So they've never really had an Asia Pacific corporate affairs function before I joined. So I was invited to join them. I was working for Adidas at the time, same function, same position and they were looking for someone who had apparel industry experience, but could kind of lead the function in Asia. So I took the job at and joined them in Hong Kong and since then our headquarters for the region have also moved to Singapore and Shanghai. So I'm currently based in Shanghai.
👉🏾 Yeah, for a period of time when I was working for Leo Burnett, I was in Chicago. I was raising a son, he was two years old, I was a young mother. Advertising is always long hours as well, but when I go to the US I felt like, wow, what an eye-opener, I can shut down my laptop and be home by 5:00 PM.
👉🏾 And whereas, throughout my early career in advertising, it's like, you don't get a break. I mean, you're always switched on, you have pre-production meeting at midnight with some producer in Melbourne, like those crazy hours that we work in. So I know where your question comes from but I think things have changed. Things have changed because I think lifestyle requirement and the societal expectation has improved. I have to say that more empathy about young mother, about situations where when you have an elderly person at home that you need to attend to, if you do voice that out, if you do actually announce it, among your team, whether it's to your superior or to the peers, people understand. I do feel that Asia has stepped up to that kind of empathy.
👉🏾 However, what Asia hasn't stepped up is that always drive for performance right? So you have one side, more humane, more understanding requirement to your associates or your colleague's wellbeing, but on the other hand, the hours are still long and it's never switched off. I mean, the crazy thing, Sudha I wanted to share with you in China that I completely try to avoid is that we set up these Wechat, which is similar to your WhatsApp as well. But then these Wechat group in China are famous, famous for setting up one for maybe this project, that one for other projects. But in fact, those projects also overlap so just like the old days when you're getting 10 emails on the same thing, but now it's not just on the email, it's also on your phone, which you know, is like ding ding ding constantly.
👉🏾 So I have to say I do not and I despise behaviour that are over management, over communication and micromanagement. I think those are definitely toxic and not effective, in fact they are the most ineffective way to communicate. As a communicator, I think we should do better. Maybe our peers might not be experts in communicating, then we have to tell them.
👉🏾 So in my career, when you asked me, how do I balance the agenda when the work-life balance is so off, but then I'm also a mother I also have family to take care of. I have been quite vocal about encouraging both my team member, myself and anybody that I work with, to take the driver seats and take care of your own wellbeing first. So how that scenario, and that metaphor that when you go on an airplane, the safety video always says to you, put on your own oxygen mask before you help another person. That's the learning I've always had about work-life balance, is that if you did not have that oxygen mask, you're never going to be an effective employee or be able to help another person.
👉🏾 So I hope that's shared some insight, I just feel that you just have to seek every opportunity to voice the well-being concern, not just for yourself, sometimes it's on behalf of somebody else that you learn about. I'm a nosy person, I'm very disruptive, so probably causing me more trouble than I should, but I also look at it as a way to help myself out.
👉🏾 Yeah. I think those data and also those analytics, I'm also involved in the women council for APAC. I often have to participate in those discussions, so I'm very close, to those data. And as I said in the PR world inclusion and diversity, such a big part. Remember in the old days, there's probably several buckets; one bucket is probably purpose, which is how do you contribute to the community, work on that, another bucket is your performance, right? Which is leading the business and then another bucket is probably green sustainability, doing good for the planet. But now I have a fourth bucket, which we called inclusion and diversity in culture.
👉🏾 So going back to your point about, leadership proportion between gender, I've looked at a lot of data, but the data actually tells me that those balance, whether it's proportional or in proportional, varies. I think I've been very, very fortunate to be in a lot of industries that have a really good balance, in fact at VF our APAC women leadership is 50% so it's like really, really high but that doesn't mean the world is the same. So I think your question is more towards, in every sort of sector or in society that we work in, how do we advance women inclusion in diversity?
👉🏾 I think the most successful women that I know craft their own path. Well, first of all you have to have that fearlessness to be not afraid to fail, and to have friends who are in your corner and walk through open doors and then help you to create that personal space. And back to taking the driver's seats, being on the agenda; now it's easier said and done when you are higher up in the hierarchy than lower down. But I've also seen examples of managers just mid-level positions, but they are empowering other women and they are setting up examples of what I was referring to. Crafting your own path is probably something you have to remember, even if the win is very small. So if there's lower hanging fruit that you can grab onto try those because it's a muscle you have to flex and you always have to remember.
👉🏾 The biggest challenge in my career ironically, has nothing to do with convincing and influencing stakeholders of the organisation or the industry or the geography, that are new to my background. So for instance, I hop on a flight and move my family to Chicago and I have to be managing a team there. And I wasn't in the states, I mean I have education in Canada, but United States is new to me, so I took the challenge and I did that with no prior background. So it has not been challenging because of that. The challenge often comes from my own environment actually. So I remember I moved to Chicago and then I moved back to Taipei and then subsequently to Hong Kong.
👉🏾 And that's when people who are kind of nearest to you and your culture have a kind of preconceived bias or conventional thinking that is hard to break in. I think those are toxic. Someone who is not willing to offer an open door for new thoughts to come in, I've always been a believer of disruption. I want to be a disruptor, but it may not happen too often in your career that you can do that, it might not be available to you, even if you want. So my mantra has always been that, it is our obligation as a leader, or parents sometimes, you know, parenthood, leadership, same thing. I think we should make trouble, the type of trouble that leaves your kids better, that leaves the room that we are in, elevated and the types that let us be proud of ourselves.
👉🏾 I'm going to turn a little philosophical if you don't mind, it's not going to be something that's about skills. So I think leadership, is to understand that power is only positional, but influence is personal. So in my career, I exercise a lot of weather trying to build influence within the community that I work with or help other build influence. So you either have to encourage someone and feed into that influence journey or you build your own influence that you could talk to others and other listen to you. Take, for example, a new CEO, right? There's particular power a CEO gaining when she move and pass on into whatever place she take. But influence on the other hand has a lot more to do with who we are than what our role and title is.
👉🏾 So I was referring to when you're more senior in the hierarchy, it's easier to influence. That's probably not the influence I'm referring to. I'm referring to the everyday influence, no matter how big or small, to build that and to arm yourself with that influence.
👉🏾 You have to, and this minority that we're talking about is not just women or gender, this minority we're talking about can be racial. This minority we're talking about can be societal classes, caste structure. So you just are hit in many different ways and you just have to be firm. If you are excluded, insulted, forgotten, or ignored by the people you give your time to you don't do yourself a favour by continuing to offer your energy in your life.
👉🏾 The truth is that we are not for everyone and not everyone is for you. So I think a lot of the times we have to think about these self-help strategy. When you're in a position that you're stuck, you feel that you are ignored, insulted. If it's available to you, be selective, right? I know sometimes society it's not even available to you, you're stuck. If available to you, be selective, protect your mind, protect your soul and seek your allies, right? So Sudha would be somebody I talk to and she would understand me, I'll give you a call and maybe seek your advice. So those self-help are so important, but you have to realise though, there are millions of people on this planet, and many of them will meet you at your own level and interest and commitment.
👉🏾 Yeah, it's a comfort zone, it's a fear factor, it is how we were brought up. We don't brought up to fight, we're brought up to say, we share, we comply, we follow the rules. But you know self-care is often a very beautiful thing too, like you need to sweat through another workout, that's not what you like to do, but it is self-care, right? And tell a toxic friend that I don't want to see you anymore, that's hard, or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you are not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything. So we as achiever as leaders, in our job; we always want to do that and all the time needing to take the liberty to do the basic things, like even turn off your phone for the day. Those things we need to kind of constantly remind ourselves, but they are not beautiful. They sometimes are the most mundane and maybe even hard to do.
👉🏾 Yeah, role model is a very interesting phenomenon and I have exercised either as beneficior or as someone telling me that, Hey I love to learn from you. So I'm currently a mentor for a couple of women in the organisation and it's a free matching. It wasn't really a requirement, but I love to do it and I would continue to do it as long as there was a need. But throughout my career, especially when I was a younger self, I often seek those mentorship experience as much as I can. So you asked me whether I have a role model, so like many of us, I get inspiration from great leaders of all time, you often see inspirational speeches such as Maya Angelou, such as Martin Luther King, such as Judge Ginsberg. So you do hear and inspired by these great leaders, but what really have been my true role model throughout my career are really ordinary people.
👉🏾 These are just managers I happened to bump into, mothers that I met at schools, grandmother's, students, or maybe just caretaker that I happen to meet. They inspire me, I love to learn from their simple but powerful attitude. So usually these role model possess, a very powerful attitude and often victories, big or small, that everyday life role model may win, that victory could be just getting this old lady into the building herself without walking sticks or wheelchair because we want to encourage her to use her muscles. Something like that, when I watch it, when I see it, they have real inspiration for me because they're so humble
👉🏾 Because they are more approachable and they relate to your everyday life more. So then the learning becomes more real. Of course, I admire my big leaders and historical politicians and philosophers and whatnot, but I still feel that being simple, being, the daily powerful examples, they are really my role models.
👉🏾 Well yeah, I thought about this question. It's a big topic and I don't want to go into too much details on the specific on the technology side of it, I wanted to go into sort of more the holistic strategy. The greatest transformation is very basic. It's basically, I think the way we communicate, right? The 21st century of communication is completely different from how we were used to and how we were brought up. It's faster, it's...

62: Bridging the ethnicity pay gap divide in the UK: Dianne Greyson, Founder, #Ethnicity Pay Gap Campaign

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
Theresa May’s 2017 general election manifesto had a pledge to require all large employers to publish their ethnicity pay gaps. And then Boris Johnsons election manifesto did not contain anything on the ethnicity pay gap reporting.
In February this year the House of Comms women and equalities committee (WEC) said in a report that ‘Large companies should be required by law to publish data on employee salaries, following the framework already in place for gender. Research cited in the report suggests that addressing the pay disparity could boost the UK economy by £24billion a year.
However in March the government peddled back on its commitment and decided against making it mandatory because it did not want to impose additional burdens on employers ‘as they recover from the pandemic’. Instead voluntary guidance is expected to be published this summer for companies interested in reporting.
What about the impact of the pandemic on people from black and other ethnic minority groups?
Analysis from BITC 2021 Race at Work survey (24,638 employees surveyed) indicate that ethnicity pay gap data will not be widely published by companies in the UK until 2075 (53 years) without legislation and government intervention. In 2021 only 19% of businesses in the UK took note of their ethnicity pay gap and only half of them published the actual data.
In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Dianne Greyson, the Founder of the ethnicity pay gap campaign on the government flip flopping on legislation, the need for legislation, data collection and actions required to address racial and ethnic disparities.
As Dianne said, the ethnicity pay gap is not just about making a business case or the right thing to do it is a human rights issue.
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you for having me.
👉🏾 Okay sure. I've been in HR for about 16 years. I run two organisations, one is Equilibrium Mediation Consulting, in that space I do generalist HR. I'm also a qualified mediator,. And also I'm an accredited emotional intelligence practitioner, which is something that I've recently obtained, which is quite good. Synergised Solutions is also the company I run and I run that with my colleague Jacqueline Hinds and that's predominantly focused on diversity inclusion.
And we design and develop our own products and everything is all bespoke to the organisation. So obviously with all the challenges and the situations that organisations and individuals are having at the minute, doing D&I work is so important to us. Because we want organisations to make a positive transition rather than just paper over the cracks, so that's really our stance. You also know that I'm the Founder of the ‘Ethnicity Pay Gap’ campaign, which has been going since 2018. That was born initially out of my own personal frustration of yet again knowing that we are in a situation where we are struggling to get fairness, and through my initial anxiety and frustration about it I started the campaign, which is still going today.
👉🏾 Total craziness. So we could just quickly touch on the gender pay gap and I understand only 24% of organisations now have reported their pay gap. In terms of why organisations haven't even thought about the gender pay gap is because, in my opinion, they don't see it as important as the gender pay gap, where it should be on exactly the same footing. It's not even a poor relation it's even worse than that. And I think that because the government have not picked up the urgency of doing this, organisations don't think it's important to do it. And with the ethnicity pay gap, organisations have been reporting and is now 50% less than it was in the past.
👉🏾And yesterday, as you alluded to, the government have said, "oh, actually we're not going to do this straight away. We will do it, but not going to do straight away. For those organisations that want to do it, we're gonna help you. And the reason why we're doing it is because we feel that because we've gone through COVID, we don't want to put any pressure on you", which is absolutely ridiculous. And I can't really say or demonstrate my frustration with this right now. I feel just so annoyed with the government for saying that, because all they've done is they've made organisations say "oh, well the government has said, there's no rush, so no rush"
👉🏾 As I said in the beginning, I've been campaigning for four years, and I'm just going to give you another statistic, there was a research that came out recently that said that Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities won't get pay parity until 2057. So, I'll probably be dead by then. I don't accept that. So I'm calling on people to really take action here, but we'll talk about that further down the line.
👉🏾 I don't think, as I said, there's no interest in dealing with things that don't relate only to white people. I'm afraid to say, you know, they can quickly react to those things. Right, if it's to do with talking about race, they suddenly get into a tailspin. Because their thought process has always been that way, they can't stop themselves. So they immediately just carry on like they used to, whereas they've got to stop and go, okay, we are in a different environment, things have grown and developed, people need to grow and develop. So, therefore, we need to think about what are the consequences, what is the, as you said, intersectional situation that is causing all these gaps and let's look at it like that. But they won't do it. And that's why we're here today.
👉🏾 Well for individuals, I was thinking about that, I was thinking it's not about it being a benefit, it's about doing what you're supposed to. So if organisations did what they were supposed to do, the individuals who are affected will be in a better place, which will mean that they will have better spending power, which will mean that they will contribute to the economics of this country.
👉🏾 So for them not making the effort to close the gap, not even narrow, to close it completely, it is causing individuals who look like me and you, complete stress and anxiety and the lack of ability to progress. So they might be just renting a flat, buying a place, getting basic things because they're not getting the money that they deserve. And if they carry on in this way, the negativity of all of this, it will have an effect on the community. Because if you suddenly find out that you're getting paid less than your white counterpart, you're not gonna be happy about that, and that unhappiness will spill into your home, and go into your community cause that's the way life goes. And I think we need to recognise there has to be some solid action to make sure that everybody is paid fairly, everybody is able to contribute, everybody's able to go up the ladder without any hindrance.
👉🏾 Absolutely. And I've always said that you know, this is a human right. The human right to be treated fairly. And when people recognise that, they should be moving forward to take action quickly.
👉🏾 Disgraceful, embarrassing, frustrated all the above quite frankly. I just think they should really talk to people like myself and others who could really have informed the result of this, but that just shows you what their intention was. Their intention was to do nothing. That's what that told me. I'm not gonna do anything and when I do do it, I'll do it in my own time. Not because it's the right thing to do because it's in my own time and you've made me do it. So, you know, that frustration is at a high volume.
👉🏾 It is exactly like that, and the fact that they came out yesterday said what they said, it shows that was their intention. So they set the groundwork last year and now they followed it up yesterday by saying, "oh, well, we'll do it, but not right now because we don't think we need to do it because you know, we want to look after our poor organisations, they're suffering clearly and we don't wanna put anymore burden".
👉🏾 What about the burden of the people? The burden of the lack of having enough money to survive. They try to separate the money against the people, but you gotta recognise people are suffering or having hardships because they're not being paid fairly. You cannot separate the two, but they try to separate the emotion, cause they think, well people just think about the money and money is one of those things that xxxxxxxxxx overly about. But when you start bringing in the people and the emotions of people and the fact that those who suffer this unfairness are also the people who are suffering during COVID, frontline workers, all the evidence is out there that Black, Asian and other ethnicities are dying quicker and it all correlates.
👉🏾 It's enough of an excuse. I mean they've got the gender pay gap done, right? I'm sure during a period of time when that was happening, there wasn't as much technology out there to help to support, now there is a lot more technology. Yes, data is important, but it's also what you do with the data. So you can collate all this data, but it's not the matter of showing the data and telling everybody what it shows. If you don't have the action behind it and make sure that you do something about it, it's almost a waste of time.
👉🏾 And if you don't have the resource in your organisation, you can look at getting external resources to help to support you. I know of organisations that do that, and it's not difficult to find. So those types of excuses I won't accept, because it's not good enough. You're putting a barrier to the success of moving forward and getting people in the right places.
👉🏾 Yes, but we're not France, I think in France, you can't do that, this is the UK. I always say to people as a black woman working in an organisation. If I worked in an organisation, if somebody in HR said to me, oh Dianne, I noticed that you haven't filled in the form to tell me, what your origin is? The reason why we need it is because we are going reporting on our ethnicity pay gap and we want to make sure as an organisation that we are paying everybody fairly, that is the reason why we need to get your data, would that be okay? My answer is not gonna be no, because if there is a chance, even if it's a small chance that they can recognise I'm actually being paid less than my white counterpart then I want to know about it.
👉🏾 You know what I mean? So that doesn't wash with me, It doesn't wash at all. It's a weak argument. And you know, I encourage organisations to make sure that they speak to people it affects because only then are you going to get proper results. If you're just gonna be an organisation that's going to do everything from a high level and then you are going to tell everybody after, that is not beneficial. Get the people, involved so they know what's going on and how they can help to move things forward. If they're not gonna take that type stance, they're gonna struggle.
👉🏾 Yeah, I suppose you could cite maybe PWC as one. And, I say that, but yet I'm not saying it with a hundred percent guarantee that they're doing it perfectly. You know what I mean? Because I don't think that really exists, but from what I've seen, they've demonstrated to me that they understand a bit more than others in terms of how it should be done and why it should be done. I'm not using them as a beacon to say that everyone rush ing to them but as one that I know of.
👉🏾 Okay, so initially when we first spoke, I said to you that the reporting is now 50% down. So in terms of what you mentioned there, clearly it needs to be mandatory because there isn't the impetus, there isn't a reason for organisations to do it really. And again, as I said before, the government has now said, it's okay, don't worry. If you are struggling, we'll help you. Which means they can take as long as they like. So there's no time scale for action to do this. They're just saying, oh well if you wanna do it, we can help you do it. And that shows me that mandatory is the way that it has to be, because like gender before gender became mandatory, the percentage of them doing it was very limited. So the so-called evidence that tells you mandatory is the way to go, so there is no excuse. And not only making it mandatory, but also there should be some guidance around what is expected, ie, organisations should demonstrate that they've one, done the mandatory reporting, but two, they have devised some sort of plan action to close that gap. Because as I said previously just reporting the data is not enough.
👉🏾 Yeah, exactly.
👉🏾 Yeah, I couldn't tell you who, but I know they exist and it’s what I had said previously when race is involved, everybody goes into a tailspin and they immediately revert back to negative thoughts and processes like, no, I don't want to do this. Well, I suppose we could just say, well, the gender pay is there pay gap is being dealt with. So there shouldn't be any excuse for the ethnicity pay gap. And It's almost as if they feel that well, you know, we've got the gender pay gap and that should be it. But we've done some research, and blacks women that took part in it said that the 52% have suffered ethnicity pay gap. So they're suffering ethnicity pay gap and also suffering from the gender pay gap.
👉🏾 Sure. So, as I said, the ethnicity pay campaign has been going for about four years now. And we have been encouraging people to talk about the situation and also to encourage the government to make it mandatory for companies to make sure that they do the ethnicity pay gap reporting as well.
👉🏾 But as it was last year, Yes, last year, the 8th of January, I created the ‘Ethnicity Pay Gap Day’, which was again to raise awareness, to get people talking and to get people engaged, so they'll have a specific day to get involved and do something that is gonna help the ethnicity pay gap situation. That has been going quite well. I obviously did the ethnicity pay gap again this year and the launch of the research document, which was the impact on black women, regarding ethnicity pay gap, which can be found on our website, www.ethnicitypaygapcampaign.com
👉🏾 We have lots of supporters who have bought the t-shirt which for me it was about visibility. So I sort of drew reference from the ‘me too’ movement, so that's what I was thinking about at the time, and I thought we just needed a visual representation of solidarity. So I designed the t-shirts that people could purchase and wear, take a photo and share it on social media. Because I think it's a great way of showing solidarity and people will start realising that it's not just me speaking, behind me there are people supporting and that's been a great thing. And we're pushing forward, I'm just now working with an organisation called ShareAction, and I'm an advisory committee member and basically they're going be petitioning the financial sector to start reporting the ethnicity pay gap and that's really kick-starting. Yesterday I posted out some information for people who want to be advocates, to go out and go to some of these board meetings physically or online, and ask questions about ethnicity pay gap and why they're not reporting it or what they're doing to report it. I think that's a great campaign that people should be getting involved with to help to raise the profile. And just because of all that has happened in the last few days regarding this area, we need to step up a gear in terms of activism. Because they're clearly not listening, so we need to clearly move forward and move up a notch to make sure we can get them to listen and get them to recognise we are here on a long haul and we are gonna make them make change.
👉🏾 They could invite me over to have a conversation with them. To talk to them about the importance of it. I do go into organisations and I generally do presentations in terms of explaining to them what it is, what the impact is, what organisations are doing, you know, what you could do as an organisation. And I think every conversation needs to be, bespoke to that client. So, you know, you have to look at the environment that you're in, what other people are doing., If they're doing anything, and even if they are not doing anything you need to be the leader. Someone has to take that first step. There's a lot of information on the ethnicity pay gap site. So have a look at that. As I said previously, if you're worried about the data angle, speak to external organisations who have got experience in that to help, to support you have conversations with your staff networks. I always say, suggest your BAME staff network, even though I don’t like that term but your black and Asian and any other networks you might have in that arena. Get the conversation going, cause you know, the clear thing is communication, if you don't communicate and make an effort to find out more information, you just won't know what's going on.
So it's important that you get involved in conversation. But make sure that you understand what you are getting into before you take the process forward.
👉🏾 It's absolute pleasure. Very important subject to be speaking about.
Important links Dianne Greyson:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgreyson/?originalSubdomain=uk
https://ethnicitypaygapcampaign.com/index.php/about-us-2/
https://www.synergisedsolutions.com/otherserviceofferings
https://ethnicitypaygapcampaign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/EPG-RESEARCH-REPORT-2022.pdf
https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2021/01/07/campaigner-dianne-greyson-pens-open-letter-to-senior-officials-to-end-the-ethnicity-pay-gap/
Links Ethnicity Pay Gap UK:

61: Technology for good, bridging the digital divide: Heddy Ring, Telia Company and Lourdes Montenegro, World Benchmarking Alliance

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

“Digital technologies are accelerants, they are cross cutting enablers of sustainable development. It is not just one SDG that they can facilitate or hinder but it is all the SDGs. That is how central the digital system is” @Lourdes Montenegro, Lead Digital Sector Transformation at the WBA.
While the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies it has also widened the gap between the under-connected and the hyper digitalised. There are numerous examples of those that are being left behind. Across the world the lack of access to both remote and online learning is expected to perpetuate intergenerational inequality and poverty. In the UK there are harrowing examples of the people on the margins being further disadvantaged by the lack of access - this includes older people, those on low incomes or without jobs, the homeless…..
In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast my guests Heddy Ring, Lourdes Montenegro and I discussed the 2nd iteration of the WBA’s Digital Inclusion Benchmark. The benchmark aims to highlight industries and companies that are currently leading the way in fostering digital inclusion to trigger a race to the top, as well as holding underachieving companies accountable.
We spoke about trends, the COVID bump, impact washing👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The surprising reality that progress on digital inclusion is very slow and most companies are lagging behind with very few demonstrating a strong commitment
👉🏾 The marked discrepancy in how companies disclose environmental data vs social and governance data
👉🏾 While Tech companies are gung ho on AI, they are failing to consider the risks. Just 19 of the 150 companies surveyed commit to publicly available principles of ethical AI. Given the human rights implications the numbers are chilling
👉🏾 Techno-solutionism and the fact that most tech for good initiatives are one-off projects
👉🏾 On an average, women make up just 23% if the technical workforce in the 150 digital companies assessed, highlighting the need for more women in tech roles.
👉🏾 And just 15 of the 150 companies disclose that they have the basic processes in place to identity, assess and integrate human rights risks and impacts in their business practices.
I was also surprised to not see any Indian telecom companies amongst the leaders, considering how innovative they have been in making mobile telephony accessible to the poorest and marginalised
If you would like to know more, listen here

Memorable Passages from the episode:
👉🏾Thanks for having us as well Sudha.
👉🏾 Thank you very much. It's a great opportunity to be here and have this conversation with you on this important topic of digital inclusion. Thank you.
👉🏾 That's a great way to start our conversations Sudha. As you know, the WBA is a global initiative that's really devoted towards incentivising and building an accountability mechanism for the corporate sector to really do more on sustainable development goals.
👉🏾 And when we were established, we did a global consultation, thousands of people worldwide, in many different countries; and what came out was that if we are to achieve sustainable development, we really need to approach it from a systemic perspective, you know, think about system change. And what are the systems that we need to change to really achieve sustainable development.
👉🏾And the digital system, was one of those identified in this global consultations, to be really important. Digital technologies are..... maybe we can call them as accelerants, that's how many people consider digital technologies; they are accelerants, they are cross cutting enablers of sustainable development.
👉🏾 So it's not just one SDG that they could facilitate or hinder, but it's the range, all the SDGs. And that's how crucial, that's how central the role of the digital system is. But as we know with the pandemic, it just exploded. And now we see a COVID bump. Did you know there was a COVID bump, in the number of people who are now reported that to be online. So not just a baby bump, but the COVID bump of internet users. But we have to stop and ask ourselves, with the speed of digitalisation, Is it inclusive? Is it trust worthy? So we need to not only accelerate digital transformation, but what kind of digital transformation are we accelerating? Is it one that leaves no one behind, that makes sure that people in all walks of life benefit from technology and also feel safe and secure enough and that the technology itself and the institutions that deploy and profit from technology are trustworthy enough.
👉🏾 So we need digitalisation that is inclusive and trustworthy. So that's why we spend a lot of our time at WBA, actually, we poured a lot of attention into what we call, we label it as digital inclusion, but what it really means is in a broad way, inclusive and trustworthy digitalisation. And the benchmark itself, looks at many different aspects of that from universal access, to digital technologies. So facilitating all levels of digital scales to fostering trustworthy use, but also making sure that companies are conscious enough to, innovate in a way that is ethical, that is inclusive and that is open. And that allows the broadest membership in society to benefit from technological innovation.
👉🏾 So in short, the benchmark is free, it's publicly available, it assesses by 2023, 200 of the world's most influential technology companies. And we've already started that with 100 and 150
👉🏾 I think Lourdes you explained it very, very well. From the company perspective, I think that the digital inclusion benchmark also serves to inspire and to encourage companies to put more efforts into making sure that no one is left behind. And it also enables companies to learn from each other as best practices. So we can improve our own approach and work in this area.
👉🏾 I can start and Lourdes maybe you can elaborate on that. Digitalisation is currently transforming society. So it brings really both new opportunities and new risks and those who are digitally included can make the most out of these new opportunities, while those who are not a risk being left behind; for example, when public services are digitalised, and education, and many social arenas are moving online.
👉🏾 So ensuring that everyone has that access to reliable connectivity and the right digital skills are really a key to make sure that no one is left behind. And when we look at the research, for example, the GSMA's mobile economy 2021 report, it really shows very clearly that connectivity and digitalisation can accelerate progress in relation to all the 17 UN sustainable development goals.
👉🏾 So there is a very clear link between these two topics that we are discussing. And of course what we feel is that the private sector has a very important role in driving the societies towards progress with the SDGs. But Lourdes if you want to add to that?
👉🏾 I think Heddy really encapsulated it very well. And perhaps what I can do is give a few concrete examples so that you know, it concretises in the mind of our listeners. What's the link between digital inclusion and SDGs. If we think of a specific SDG, for example, let's say, No poverty or gender equality, or if we think about health and wellbeing; then we can think of very specific examples where digital technologies actually facilitate that.
👉🏾 So in the COVID pandemic itself, we've been using digital technologies, we've said that during the pandemic, it actually brought to fore and made digital inclusion more personal for us. Because now we're so dependent on connectivity, on digital technologies just the function, in our everyday lives, from our work, what we're doing now, we're talking to each other, children getting educated online, to facilitate, to help prevent the spread of the virus in society, people talking to their doctors via video call and doing all these consultations. So we can really see, concretely that these things can facilitate sustainable development goals. But of course there are risks and harms and that's where we need to also be careful; we need to make sure we protect children online, we need to make sure that we respect data privacy and make sure that data is secure and people feel secure and trust the technology, otherwise they won't be using it at all.
👉🏾 There is definitely a marked difference. So as caveat we've actually tightened and strengthened the requirements in the scoring guidelines from 2020 to 2021, so there's a bit of a challenge in terms of comparability. And the reason we did that is because there's a lot of risks around, you know, impact washing, and we don't want that to happen.
👉🏾 So we want the companies who are at the top to be really at the top, and they're really doing something very substantial. However, we did do a backwards comparison, using the old methodology and what we found is that of the first 100 companies who were assessed in 2020, 43% improved their scores overall.
👉🏾 So using the old methodology, we do see an improvement overall in companies. I think the important trend to note here is that there's a change in the narrative, there's a change in the discourse. So before a lot of the telcos, for example, will be talking about digital inclusion, they consider it, material to their business. But not a lot in the software platforms, e-commerce not a lot in the hardware. But it's spreading now and they're realising that, actually this is important to all of us and that we can frame our corporate responsibility in terms of inclusive and trustworthy digital transformation, because that's closer to your core business. So that's what we noticed, there's really a change in the direction of the narrative.
👉🏾 At the same time, there are some really bright spots I would say. And you will be surprised about the bright spots. So if you think about gender in technology; so we say it's really important that you disclose how many women are in your technical workforce and whether they are involved in your research and development, because you need diverse voices when you're creating technology.
And we're seeing an increase in that disclosure and in that kind of commitment and focus from East Asia.
👉🏾 Yeah, and that's really a bright spot because usually it's the US companies who are leaders in this and that's because they are legally required to do so, they have laws that required this. But East Asians are waking up and companies are waking up. So that's really very exciting.
👉🏾 I can start. There is definitely two reasons. First of all, what I can see from the telecommunications sector perspective; number one, the telco sector has a clear impact on digital inclusion and we know through our recent materiality assessment that we carried out in Telia company, that the sector also has very strong expectations to contribute to digital inclusion from our stakeholders, from investors, from policymakers, from customers, so the expectations are there.
👉🏾 From the other perspective, there is also a very clear link to business; for telcos digital inclusion is about serving our customers in the best possible way, and we know that it supports equal opportunity and human rights of individuals, which is key to making sure that no one is left behind, we also see that digital skills have become, a must have asset.
👉🏾 So by integrating the inclusion perspectives in everything we do, we can actually broaden the customer base, and better meet the customer's needs in this rapidly changing world while at the same time inspiring our stakeholders. and one of the additional perspective from the business angle is that the digital inclusion initiatives also, what we have seen bring the potential of deeper collaboration with the business customers and the municipalities, as well as trust from a broad range of stakeholders.
👉🏾 So I think at least from the telco perspective, what we have experienced and likely also other telcos is that, that we do have these expectations from our stakeholders. And we can really see the benefits for the business in engaging in this. In addition, of course, but this is something that we need to do to really drive the progress towards the SDGs that we have.
👉🏾 I think Heddy touched on the key points, but I just would like to add a bit more and maybe ask if Heddy shares in this suspicions as well or views. You know, so what we're seeing is that the telcos and, even like the hardware companies who have direct customer experience, I think the difference is that they are actually in touch with the customer.
👉🏾 They have a presence, they have facilities, they are in the localities where they are; and they are faced by the needs of their stakeholders, of their communities, of their customers. If you are a platform, a large global platform, you face a disembodied audience and you are further away from the ground, from the realities of the ground.
👉🏾 So there's a lot more challenge for you to understand, what the needs are, but you can, you have the resources to of course overcome those challenges of understanding the needs on the ground. The other we're seeing is a bit of an age factor; so the telcos are definitely some of the more mature companies in the benchmark, they've been around for a while, you know, they understand the world a bit better and the IP and software service companies tend to be really young, and some of them are pre IPO, so they haven't really gotten they're act together yet. But some of them have, that's the good thing they realised, Oh, we're going to IPO this year so we also need to get our act together and how do we frame our corporate responsibility towards the world. So there's also these differences.
👉🏾 Maybe I can start with an overview. So I think what we're seeing is that, there are actually very few companies with a more comprehensive approach towards digital inclusion. I think that's the key, that the comprehensiveness of your understanding and embrace of that responsibility. So those who do have a truly comprehensive approach across all these four areas from access, skills used, to innovation; they tend to do really well and they, what we would call pass. So then we have 27 of those companies globally out of the 150, of course, of which Telia is in the 11th place. So that means that they've gotten very far in terms of comprehensively understanding all these issues and embracing it as a part of their responsibility to society as a whole.
👉🏾 So I think it starts from that, there's a learning curve, the industry is pretty young compared to other industries. So I always say, if you think of the car industry, the technology industry is where it was when we were debating seatbelts or whether people should die in car crashes and whose responsibility it is. So we are in the formation stages of what is good, what the industry should do well. But I think we're getting there and I think that's the key point on where we are, and that's why we see these pretty low numbers, but that is going to improve.
👉🏾 I agree with what Lourdes say. I think this is a relatively new area and clear requirements, expectations and frameworks in the area of digital inclusion are not yet as established as for example, in the area of climate and circularity, when we compare. But I think also that the work that World Benchmarking Alliance is doing, for example, with the Digital Inclusion Benchmark is really one great example of driving their awareness of digital inclusion and the potential for companies to work towards. So this really definitely contributes a lot to the ongoing progress and hopefully within a few years we can see much more progress overall and then companies really stepping up and taking the commitment.
👉🏾 Thank you for that question. Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, the materiality assessment that we carry out on a regular basis, we really found out that this is one of the top material issues for our stakeholders. And in our sustainability agenda, which is also fully integrated into the business strategy, we focus on three prioritised sustainability impact areas. One is climate and circularity, number two is digital inclusion and number three is privacy and security. So this is really kind of decided and overall among one of the top three sustainability priorities. And in addition, we have other sustainability impact areas that we work with in a systematic way, such as children's rights, diversity and inclusion and so on. So focusing on digital inclusion will enable Telia to deliver on our purpose, which is to reinvent better connected living. So it's very clearly linked to our company purpose and we do have a very clear commitment and also tone from the top, to support our digital inclusion agenda, which I think is super important in order to really make the difference and get the progress across the organisation.
👉🏾 I should also mention that there is a geographical difference, because we operate in the Nordics and Baltic's; which are essentially highly digitalised countries with already extensive access to connectivity and technology and intense demands for good network quality. So in our markets, digital inclusion is maybe less about access to essential digital services and devices, and more about the quality of connectivity and securing the proper digital skills for the vulnerable groups in the society that otherwise risk of being left behind.
👉🏾 So in our digital inclusion strategy, we're really focused on providing reliable access to connectivity and building digital skills. And when we talk about access, of course, it is about investing in the 5G and 4G Networks and really making sure that the network experience is very high in between the urban and rural areas, for example, but it's also about accessibility for people with disabilities.
👉🏾 So it's about training the employees in accessibility topics, we have also established an accessibility center of expertise, and one example really is Telias gaming center service that can be provided with customised tools for people with disabilities. So that for example, day centers for youth with disabilities can really get started with access to...

60: India Justice Report Conversations: Budgeting in the Indian Justice System:

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

ShowNotes
The collaboration between The Purpose Room and The India Justice Report came about because we are aligned in our core purpose to contributing our own two cents/rupees to creating a better world. The partnership is about helping raise awareness and understanding of the Indian justice system - so that individual know their rights and familiarise themselves with the workings of the justice system. The aim of course is to discuss how the delivery of quality justice must be seen as a priority and become real in the lives of everyone.
As Maja Daruwala said, “Citizens deserve to be well-governed, the delivery of justice is one of those factors that go into showing whether you are governing well or not.”
My guests for the second episode on the India Justice Report are Surya Prakash BS, Fellow and Programme Director at DAKSH a civil society organisation working on judicial reforms and Radhika Jha, a lead researcher for the Status of Policing in India Report series from Common Cause. The conversation focuses on budgeting in the justice system, the availability of funds, underutilisation, prioritisation or lack of it, access to justice, the quality of justice and more….
👉🏾 The link between a strong justice system and overall growth and economic development. Did you know how much litigation takes place in a country is one of the determinants of a country’s development prospects?
👉🏾 I am sure most Indians who read this post or listen to the podcast don't know that free legal aid is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to all citizens of the country? That nearly 1 billion Indians are eligible for free legal aid? That the system is overwhelmed is another story.
👉🏾 Restorative and reformative justice as an approach
👉🏾 The cost of crime to an economy
And on a wide range of interconnected issues.
Thank you Radhika and Surya for sharing your stories and experiences. This is one step towards enabling a better understanding of the behemoth that is the Indian judiciary. And Thank you Valay for helping to pull it all together.
And if you would like to know more, listen here.
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha for having us.
👉🏾 Thank you.
👉🏾 So let me take that Sudha. So the connection between economic development and the justice sector, it seems to have captured the attention only of economists, or such esoteric researchers, but the common experience wears out this connection very well.
👉🏾 If you don't have trust in a person, you will need to take the extra effort of putting down the terms and conditions. And if those terms and conditions you are sure will not be fulfilled, you will take advanced deposit or, you will be having a lot of plan B plan C plan D, and finally you will end up going into court if many of those are not met. That puts a lot of pressure on the citizens to be aware of the laws and to back themselves up with these legal recourses, which is cost, which is time, which is a wastage of resources. These are commercial, but economic development is not only about commercial transactions. It is also about how citizens trust each other outside of economic transactions too; like your neighbours, like somebody who are just passing by on the streets. If the crime rate is high, people will not go out in the streets late at night, that affects economic activity, right? If people don't have trust with each other, then you will see a rise in crime rate, it could be a recursive loop.
👉🏾 So in India, the focus on justice sector has been on the formal justice system, has been on making sure that the number of judges are increasing. From an access to justice perspective, there has been a lot of talk, there has been a lot of noise about getting people on board. So an analogy that I frequently use is, a lot of the access to justice debate discourse in the country has been like trying to get the people on board a bus, we're all the privileged, the well to do, et cetera, we are on the bus and we're getting the not so well off onto the bus saying, okay, come on to the bus. But you know what? The bus is not going anywhere. It's one thing to get them on board but if the bus is not going anywhere, then all of us need to focus on the engine, on the driver, on the steering, right? And that is where a lot of the next level of discussions in this country need to be focused about.
So when we say it has not been paid attention to, I would nuance it and say these two ways, it needs to be focused more on in the next few years.
👉🏾 So I completely agree with Surya and also I'd like to add that it's not just that we are not paying attention to the justice system in India, but also the prioritisation of the justice system is actually declining over the years.
👉🏾I mean if we just look at the global standards there is the World Justice Project or Rule of Law Index, which ranked India at 79th position. And it has shown a consistent decline over the last four or five years. When we look at only the criminal justice aspect of the Rule of Law Index, our position slips further to the 86th rank. So this is a clear indication of where we are headed.
👉🏾 And I'm not saying that fiscal priority, is the only method of trying to make an improvement in the system, but it is some way to start with. So just to give you an example if you look at the judiciary, if we actually want to fill up the vacancies of the judges alone, I'm not talking about any of the support staff here, we need 5,000 more judges in the judiciary. And there's a shortage of court halls in the judiciary. So just to be able to accommodate the judges who are currently not part of the judicial system, we need at least 3000 more court halls.
👉🏾So if you will fit in the salaries of the judges, the infrastructural cost or the cost of renting, et cetera. This would become a significant budgetary allocation, which would be much higher than what we are allocating right now. For the police, we are spending about 0.7% of our GDP, which is much lower than the global standards. Countries mostly spend between 1 to 3% of their GDP on policing. So this is one of the areas where we need to start focusing on
👉🏾 Definitely. Just to build on what Radhika said just now. Only on the courts and tribunals, we are spending 0.1%, including legal service authorities. 0.1% of the GDP is compared to the other countries, 1%, 2%, it's a vast gap that needs to be made good at the earliest. Anybody who's seen the financials of the courts, the law and justice department and the administration of justice side, can see that there is a shortage of funds being allocated to the courts and tribunals, to the legal services authorities, the prisons, the forensic, to the entire justice system. The justice ecosystem needs more financial support.
But there are some finer points that we need to be aware of before we agree to such a blanket statement. And that is what will make this next half an hour interesting. Yes. More funds are needed, but for what?
👉🏾 A lot of the public sector problems seem to be supply oriented problems. There aren't enough roads or there aren't enough schools or there aren't enough teachers. So justice system in that sense is not different from other public delivery systems, in saying we need more supply-side solutions. So it is, to that extent, very similar. Where, we do depart from other sectors is, how can you say that they are not good? You can say this road is not good, so we need a bigger road or a wider road or a better quality. But how do you say that for courts? We're not talking here only about the buildings, right? We are talking about people, we're talking about the experience and the quality of justice, you know that nebulous thing.
👉🏾 So when we say that there is a bad financial planning, the beast around which we are trying to get our arms, is also very difficult to grasp. So there is poor financial planning, there are reports that bear this out, how there is allocation and the classic example is the 13th finance commission report, which was running from the period 2010 to 2015.
👉🏾 And that allocated 5,000 crores I think Dr. Vijay Kelkar Made that award as head of the finance commission. And out of that, only 1000 crores was spent, 4,000 crores were allocated by the finance commission, but not spent. So there is this question of ability to absorb financial support, but also question of whatever you're getting, are you able to spend it wisely? Are you prioritising, right? So there is definitely a lack of capacity in the justice system to both utilise the funds and utilise it well. And in that sense, maybe it's poorer than other systems, other ecosystems like education, roads or health, because of the kind of people who are in that sector. And I'll pause here and we can build upon this as we go along.
👉🏾 So I think a bunch of issues come into play. There is the resource crunch and the fact that even the resources that are available are not being utilised properly and optimally. But there's also the problem of lack of clarity and direction of the nature of certain projects and the functions that are covered under the project, which are funded by the states or the centre
👉🏾 So I can give you an example of the Nirbhaya Fund, and this is one of the major funding projects But ultimately, we find the funds are being under utilised severely across the states. And we also see that the states very often don't know what to do with these funds, so they end up allocating them to things like CCTVs in railway stations. Nirbhaya Fund for some reason was being used only for, primarily if not only, for the installation or CCTVs in cities and now it's being used for the same thing in railway stations. Which is not exactly a gender safety component.
👉🏾There's also another problem that we see as the underestimating of costs for, areas which are not of high priority. One such area will be the prisoners or the prison inmates, most of whom are under trials, which means that they have not been convicted of their crime. So there is a lot of underestimation in the costs incurred for the welfare and for the basic requirements of these inmates.
👉🏾The mental health of the prisoners, as well as the physical health is severely underreported. Which means that ultimately there are not enough mental health or medical professionals available in the prisons. We found that there's the availability of 1.4 medical staff per prison, and a prison is a large unit. So 1.4 is a very small number to be able to provide facility to the entire unit. Also, there's a factor that we spend a majority of the funds that we get for, let's say policing, on regular expenditures like salaries. So 90% of the policing fund goes towards salaries of the police personnel, in a lot of states, it varies from state to state, but that's the average. So we don't really have any funds left for any kind of new or innovative policing strategies or making the police more people-centric. So these are just some of the issues which play into the bad financial planning of this sector.
👉🏾 So Dhaksh did a survey called the ‘Access to Justice’ survey and followed it up with ‘An Approach to Justice’ survey, this was 2016 and 2017. One of our researchers when he went to a district just outside Calcutta, I think Hooghly it was, and he was asking questions in the court complex and then the judge was kind enough to engage with this researcher and he said this court closes at five. And he said. Why, I mean the court hall is supposed to stay on for at least six o'clock or so, right? The court staff will be there, litigants lawyers. No, I mean, after five the landlord will object.
👉🏾 This is a court and the court is thinking a landlord will object. So what is the problem with the landlord? He said, this is a rented property, actually this property is under dispute in the same court. So the court was running in a building that was under dispute. And then another court hall close by during the court hearings, all of them were squatting not squatting really the cross legged, the Indian cross leg on the chairs. The lawyers were arguing and the judge is sitting on this one. This is highly unusual, what is happening? And then he said, no there are a lot of, these big mice that roam around the courthouse and we were all scared of it. So we're sitting with.......... this is real-life stories of the state of infrastructure in court halls. No doubt at all it needs to be upgraded. No doubt at all it needs to be made world-class; disabled, gender-friendly; washrooms, notice boards. Absolutely no doubt about it.
👉🏾Another example, and I'll stop here. A judge in a district court, there was some discussion we said, this has been addressed in this decision recently or supreme court decision. He said "Sir, hame nahi pata", I don't know how to access the latest judgments to the Supreme court. Supreme court of the country has given a judgment and he does not have access to it, because there is no awareness on how to access it, and then even if there are, the judgments that he can cite, are only in certain databases which need to be paid for officially, otherwise, he'll have to pay it out of his own pocket. So see the ends, the physical side and the knowledge side. We have a lot to do, absolutely no doubt about it.
👉🏾 The controller and auditor general of India, the CAG, from time to time, they do auditing of the performance of police or prison in various states. So they found very interesting findings about how certain funds are being diverted in almost illegal ways.
👉🏾 In 2020, the CAG found that the funds were being diverted towards, villas and luxury cars for the chief of police of the Kerala police. This is a condition we found in one of our surveys, it's called the Status of Policing in India survey, conducted by Common Cause and Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. We found in the survey that almost half of the police personnel face situations where they don't have vehicles to go to the crime scene. They have faced situations where they don't have vehicles for carrying out their basic and most essential duties, despite this, the funds are being diverted towards luxury cars for chief ministers and police chiefs.
👉🏾 So there is always the issue of corruption and diversion of funds which is a major roadblock, but also there's the simple sheer under-utilisation of funds. Very often, not just the police, but the entire justice system, as well as other system that the government, they are not able to spend the entire fund that they've received. Let me just take the example of the modernisation of police force project, which I was talking about earlier, this is one of the funds which has share of both the union as well as the states, to basically build the capacity of the police. The centre provides 75% of the MPF fund and the states have to provide 25%. The provision of the funds by the centre is dependent on whether or not the states have provided their share of the funds. So a lot of states are unable to get any funds at all because they don't allocate their share of the fund to the MPF scheme. And even amongst the states that do, it is consistently almost, or across all the states and over the years, it is under utilised.
👉🏾And also from my interaction with the police officers, it's not always the case that the people, the officials in power are just simply sitting on the funds and not making use of it. It's also problem of the flow of the funds and the transfers and the time that it takes, for the fund to actually reach the implementing agency. There's a study by the NITI Ayog of 2019, which found that in, Bihar and Jharkhand it takes about 190 days to transfer funds from the state treasuries to the implementing agency. So this basically means that half a year goes by, in just the simple procedure of transferring funds. This example is from the health index, but I suspect it's very much valid for the justice sectors as well. I've heard of examples where departments get funds for various schemes in the last month of the financial year, and then they are not able to show the expenditure and ultimately the fund becomes under utilised.
👉🏾This is also often used as a strategy for basically depriving and for the government to say that, see, they don't spend the money, so we will not be giving them more money from next year. So if you transfer the funds very late and the department is unable to utilise the funds properly, then the, budget for the next year, goes down. It then becomes a political tool to systematically deprive certain sectors.
👉🏾 So sanction strength versus current working strength is one delta that needs to be focused on. Now we have done some research which shows that, for example just assume that one court complex had 10 judges and two more additional posts were created, right? They were supposed to have 10, they had 10, then it got expanded to 12. The caseload is the same because it's in that same jurisdiction, that did not decrease the lifecycle of cases, very significantly. However, there is another research report that Manaswini Rao an economist from Berkeley university has done. So she has shown if you're supposed to have 10, but you have less than 10, that does play a role. So when you say more judges, there is a need to differentiate between going up to sanction strength or going beyond sanction strength. We still don't know how sanction strength is arrived at, there is still no scientific basis that we have been able to extract from any conversations we have had on how sanction strength is arrived at. But we can take it to be a rule of thumb and therefore work towards making sure, at least those number of people are there.
👉🏾 For me, it's actually not a question of either-or. So on the one hand, we know that the sector is majorly understaffed. We did a survey with police personnel in 2019, under the Status of Policing in India Report project, and we found that the average Indian police person works for about eight hours a day. And half of the police personnel don't even get a weekly off. So the police are overworked, the judges are overworked, there is no doubt about it. And this can only be resolved through filling up the vacancies at the very least. How essential the police or the sector is, became...

59: Emmanuel Ofosu Appiah, Vice Chair, PRCA REEB on building a fairer industry

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
PRCA’s Race and Ethnicity Equity Board(REEB) was set up in 2020 in response to the urgency and momentum created by the tragic killing of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement. REEB was set up with a view to helping build a fairer, more representative industry. It has standing committee status and two members of REEB(including the Chair) sit on the PRCA Board. And in the short time that it has been around - it has created a toolkit for the industry on ethnicity pay gap reporting; a mentoring programme called PRISM along with continuously advocating for change. As a founding Board Member I am incredibly proud of what REEB has achieved under the stewardship of Chair Barbara Phillips. My fellow board members are a group who motivate and inspire through their actions.
So, I am delighted to have had the opportunity to engage with Emmanuel Ofosu-Appiah, the newly appointed Vice Chair Vice Chair of PRCA Race and Ethnicity Board (REEB) for this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. In his day job Emmanuel is PR Manager at Mercer, he is also a trustee, a mentor and a speaker advocating for a more equitable PR Industry. In this episode we spoke about his journey into PR…..
👉🏾 His internship at Havas, The Taylor Bennett Foundation program and how it paved the way for a career in the PR industry
👉🏾 A tragic experience in his teens that shaped his identity and who he is today
👉🏾 Why so few black men are visible in the PR Industry?
👉🏾 The systemic issues that impede progress
👉🏾 Why it is important for him to lead on conversations on race and ethnicity equity
👉🏾 The role of PRs in spotlighting inequity in the industry
Thank you Emmanuel for the wonderful conversation. And here is a heart warming quote from the episode on what motivates him to do better....
“I've got someone that looks up to me now, that is reliant on me to set a good example for him. And that's what i'm hoping to do. I hope in 15 years time, 20 years time, he will be able to sit down with me and say, "You know what Dad? You set a really good example and I'm proud of what you've done" and that's what I want really.”
Like to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha for a warm welcome. I'm really, really pleased to be here.
👉🏾That's a very good question. Actually, I can probably take you all the way to the beginning. So I studied at the University of Manchester in 2009 and I graduated in 2012. I studied English language, literacy and communications. And pretty much I have no idea around what I wanted to do when I finished university. As you know, at Uni you meet a lot of different people. Everybody comes from different backgrounds and my course was actually quite small, we only had about 35 to 40 people on my course. So our course cohort was very, very close and a lot us kind of shared ideas around what we wanted to do. And, our lecturers organised a session for people from different backgrounds and different professions to come into our university and basically talk to us about their careers.
Luckily for me, there was a really, really kind of lady called Claire, who was working at an agency called Havas, which is one of the biggest kind of global advertising/marketing agencies.
👉🏾 She came in and she spoke about public relations and I was just like, wow, PR, what's this PR thing about. I'd obviously heard about it in the past and I thought, it was all about, drinking champagne and meeting celebrities. I didn't know that there was a whole corporate side of public relations, which is pretty much what I wanted to kind of get into. So after Claire gave a talk around what she did day to day, I said to myself, you know what, this sounds like a really interesting career. My background and my university degree at the time was quite relevant. So I approached her and I said, look, I'd be really interested in doing an internship in your agency. Lucky for me I was basically invited to come and do a kind of internship over two or three weeks. It was mainly focusing on consumer public relations, which is very different to what I do now, but it was working with big brands, such as Greggs, Pets at Home, loads of massive brands. And I built a really good relationship with the MD at the agency and we just stayed in contact.
👉🏾 That summer, I was on Twitter and I saw the Taylor Bennett Foundation program, which is another initiative that's been set up to get people from ethnic backgrounds and diverse upbringings into public relations. And I said to myself, okay, this is perfect for me because; number one I'm black, number two I didn't come from a privileged background and no one in my family knew anything about public relations. So this program by the Taylor Bennett foundation sounded like an amazing opportunity for someone like myself.
And I said to myself, look, I want to get into this program to build on my experience that I had built up in Manchester on the internship. Luckily for me, I was accepted onto the Taylor Bennett Foundation, and that was with Brunswick group, another massive corporate and financial communications firm.
👉🏾 And it kind of just gave me a real insight into what public relations was all about. I understood how to write, press release, review news articles, the actual power of the media relations and what it's all about. So this was a fantastic introduction for me into public relations.
👉🏾 And here I am now 10 years coming up to 11 years next year. It feels like such a long time ago but I can still remember when I was scared to even call a journalist. The first time I had to call a journalist I was shaking. You hear these horror stories of picking up the phone and slamming the phone down on you. So I just had a bit of nervousness around the whole media relations thing. But 10 years on, I speak to journalists every single day now and I don't actually get scared by picking up the phone. I'm quite confident in building relationships with journalists and building relationships with internal stakeholders as well. So as you can see over 10 years, I've kind of come a long way in terms of where I was and where I am now. I really, really am thankful to the Taylor Bennett Foundation and to Havas for giving me an opportunity to kind of get into the industry.
👉🏾 That's a really really good question Sudha, Thank you. I think the Taylor Bennett Foundation was pretty much instrumental for me in getting into the public relations industry. And the reason I say that because as I said before I came from a pretty normal background. Pretty much no one in my family have gone to university before me, so I was the proper first graduate in my family and no one had a white collar career before. So this was the first time I was doing something like this in my career and I had pretty much not many links into the corporate world. So the Taylor Bennett Foundation was a fantastic door because they allowed me to understand the field of public relations, what it's all about and number two, as part of the program, we got to visit so many different organisation in-house and on the agency side. So while I was doing these visits and we were given tours of some of these agencies. I was looking at the companies and doing my research before the next visit that we had and just building my knowledge on the different types of public relations agencies there are, the types of work that these agencies do and what the industry was all about.
👉🏾 So I think the Taylor Bennett Foundation was for me a fantastic door and something that pretty much shaped my career right from the start. Even until now I try to support people that are on the Taylor Bennett Foundation program. I try to mentor people informally as well because I've actually been down that path, I've done the program, I've seen the results of the program and now I can say to myself, look, I'm a case study of somebody that stuck with public relations. I feel that a lot of the people on the Taylor Bennett foundation look up to people like myself and others within the industry from diverse backgrounds. Because they also want to see themselves in leading organisations and leading corporate communications agencies. And I think that's where the industry has a very, very big weight on its shoulders to say look we've got talented leaders within the field, are they being recognised? Are they being given the opportunities to thrive as well? And I think that's what will also support people coming in at the start of their careers as well.
👉🏾 This is a question that I've asked myself a lot over the years. When I came into the PR industry I didn't see much role models and specifically black men in public relations. When I looked at other careers; banking, I saw a few, when I looked into law, I saw quite a few, when I looked into medicine, I saw quite a few. And I was thinking to myself, so why are there not black men in public relations and I think a big issue is that a lot of people, well a lot of black men in the PR industry either, feel that there's not a place for them or it's more of a kind of mental barrier. Whereas some people have been brought to think that being a doctor or a lawyer is more of a, kind of a respectable career from a kind of background where your parents have told you, become a doctor or become a lawyer. I remember growing up and my parents always kind of comparing their friend's children.
👉🏾 So sometimes it's a bit if a peer pressure thing whereas when you look around and you see people of your kind of same skin tone and background doing particular careers, you kind of just follow the train. And I didn't want to do that, I wanted to kind of do the opposite to what everybody was doing because I probably wasn't clever enough to become a doctor and I'm not sure if I really was that passionate about the law to study it.
👉🏾 So I think it's also a case of looking at somebody's issues and thinking about how the industry can reach people from these background. I've recently become the Vice-Chair of the PRCA Race and Ethnicity Equity Board and we've got a really really big, focus on trying to improve diversity in this the industry. Not just with black men but also trying to get more black women into the industry. We've also seen that at the senior level, there's not enough black and senior women role models. We've seen that people from diverse background and diverse women have an even harder time getting into those kinds of senior positions.
So as for me I think there's a lot of work to be done and I believe that we just need to keep talking about this issue and creating solutions with programs like the Taylor Bennett Foundation. The UK Black Comms Network are doing a great job as well, they're trying to really raise the profile of communications amongst the black community; so these initiatives are really, really positive.
👉🏾 But I think for me we also need recognise the people in the industry right now. I'm not talking only about myself because I know there's a few other black men within this industry who are trying really hard to kind of break that glass ceiling. And it's quite difficult when you get to a certain point in your career where you want to kind of elevate yourself and you're not being given opportunity. It's quite hard to see yourself actually growing within that industry. So, I believe in my message to a lot of the agency leaders and the in-house kind of global heads and head of communications is that, if you see talent from a diverse background, you need to give them a second xxxxxxxx to really prove themselves.
👉🏾 Sometimes it's just a case of giving them additional responsibilities and just seeing how they can deal with it and I think that's how people grow by being challenged. I know that's how I've grown in my career so I definitely feel that there's opportunities for people to really stretch themselves and grow in their careers as well, especially when they're from diverse backgrounds.
👉🏾 That's a really, really interesting question actually.
I would say there was a really, really dramatic experience that I had at age of 15 years old, I lost one of my closest friends during my school days, he was actually stabbed to death in London. It was a very well-known case, his name is Kiyan Prince, he was a football player for Queens Park Rangers at the time. He was stabbed to death outside of our school. And I was right there when it happened and that was a very traumatic experience for me because I was very, very young and you don't go to school thinking that one of your best friends will be stabbed to death. And I think once that happened, it really changed my view on life. I realised that look your life can be taken at any minute. You never know when will be your last day. So while you're here you need to make the best use of your time and make sure that you add your value in whatever you're doing, whether that be school work, whether that be working with young people. Just adding value and giving back and that's something that I've held onto ever since my friend passed away. And I've always tried to say to myself if he was still here, what would he be doing? I would probably see him in a premiership now, I'll probably have some VIP tickets in the box and everything, you know. To me in terms of how I look at life as well, I don't want to look back and be like, I didn't reach my full potential. Because I know that if he was here he would have reached his full potential, so that's always encouraged me.
👉🏾 Even during the most difficult times in my career, where I felt like I'd not excelled in certain areas or have made a mistake. I would think back to where would Kiyan be now and what would he be doing? He'd probably be overcoming challenges, just like I'm trying to overcome. So it's always something that's in the back of my mind that encourages me to keep going. And yeah, I'm just hoping that, he would be proud of who I am today and I think I'm really, really, grateful I've had people around me to have supported my growth. Even people like yourself Sudha. When I joined the PRCA Race and Ethnicity Equity Board, you supported me from day one and everybody else on the board has really shown me support in terms of just listening to my views. I'm not an expert in everything but as you said your experience is valid and I believe that every experience I've had in my career has allowed me to do a lot better in my next kind of position. So yeah, I'm really excited for the future and yeah, I'm sure that I'll probably have more experiences as I develop as a PR professional and that will also shape me as a person as well.
👉🏾 I definitely agree, that Black Lives Matter has made things move a bit quicker. I think before the whole incident with George Floyd, there were issues around racism. People were scared to talk about it. I believe that when George Floyd passed away, it kind of just took the lens away and people actually saw that there was some deep-rooted issues around racism, all over the world, not just in the US, because it's not just a US issue.
👉🏾 I think the one thing that we need to talk about here is George Floyd was murdered in such a horrific way, there's so many people all over the world that are being tortured and so many bad things are happening behind closed doors that we just don't see on a daily basis. We were just unfortunate at the time to see that incident recorded live on TV.
👉🏾 I think now every business is trying to understand where can they play a part in this whole game around social responsibility? How are they treating their diverse employees? Is there a level playing field? Are people being paid equally? If we talk about pay and equity within the PR industry, there's a massive gap between I'm sorry to say, black and white PR professionals. And I'm not sure why there's such a massive gap but, it's something that the industry has started to look very, very seriously. And I know there's some agencies that are doing a fantastic job to try and really close that. It just goes to show that, what if George Floyd didn't pass away or what if this was not recorded, would people take notice of this issue? I know that so many black professionals and asian professionals who have been kind of pigeonholed in a way to say, oh, just do this, this is what you've always done. They're not really given equal opportunity sometimes, and that's just not fair.
👉🏾 So I think Black Lives Matter is a great initiative because it's allowed people to kind of take action now and I hope that the PR industry will continue this conversation 10, 15 years, 20 years from now. When I think about what I do today around diversity and inclusion, it's not just about me, it's just about putting my face out there. It's about telling a story and basically letting people realise that we really need to really value the talent that we have from diverse backgrounds because if all the diverse were to leave the industry, I think the PR industry would be a very, very different place to what it is now. And I hope, through the work that we're doing at the PRCA, Race and Ethnicity, Equity Board and what we're hoping to achieve this year, is just to create even more progress around race and ethnicities. I'm hoping that we can make some really really good progress in 2022 and beyond.
👉🏾 Wow. This is a very interesting topic, I think, well looking at it from my point of view probably one of the issues is a lot of people enter the industry via people they know. And sometimes it's a case of are we really bringing in the best talent, into the industry, or are we just bringing people in that look and sound the same. That's something that I've heard time and time again.
👉🏾 In the PR industry, everybody looks the same, there's not enough diversity, but you need to look at where is talent being sourced from? That's the number one question, are you actually having an open recruitment process. Now with LinkedIn, at the end of every job application, you will see, ‘we encourage people from diverse backgrounds to apply’, but when those people do apply, are they even given an opportunity to interview? Are people just being shut down at the application process, we encourage you to apply, but you don't get an interview.
👉🏾 How do we as an industry, expect people from diverse backgrounds to feel even confident that they will be able to rise in an industry when they can't even get through the door, that's one of the big things. And there needs to be a...

58: Decoding Sustainability Communications: Blanca Civit Sarda, World Benchmarking Alliance

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
Did you know that we are already two years, into the 'Decade of Action' - which calls for accelerating sustainable solutions to meet the SDGs. This is the decade of reporting, on where we are; what we have achieved; and what still needs to be done as we race towards the finish line. Also, there is increased scrutiny on the contribution or lack of by multinational enterprises in achieving the SDGs; the side projects which are great PR but not much else......
My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast, this week Blanca Civit Sarda from the World Benchmarking Alliance talks about sustainability and sustainability communications. We also spoke about........
👉🏾 The importance of understanding the science and language around sustainability
👉🏾 Green washing, blue washing, rainbow washing....The proliferation of misinformation and challenges it creates for addressing real issues around environment and sustainability
👉🏾 The UK Green Claims Code
👉🏾 The challenge of breaking through the noise and sifting through the monumental data overload for impact
👉🏾 The intrinsic link between inclusion and sustainability for a 'Just Transition'
👉🏾 Why collective purpose and collective action are critical to achieving the SDGs....
We also spoke about Blanca's journey, the challenges she faced with Dutch or English not being her first language as she worked in different countries; her take on leadership and advice to aspiring women leaders.
What she said really resonated with me, especially this one
'Speak out, don't stay silent because you don't change the world by staying silent'

Memorable Passages from the episode
👉🏾 Thank you. Thanks for your time and this interview.
👉🏾 So I'm originally from Reus, a small city in Catalonia, not so far from Barcelona.I was born and raised there and studied there. Also at my university, I studied a bachelor's in journalism and one in advertising and then later a masters in corporate communications and PR, public relations for the ones who hear PR. And I do work now at the World Benchmarking Alliance as the communications and earned media lead, being part of the communications team but also taking care of the press office.
And my background is in public relations but also journalism, different sectors; corporate sector, financial sector across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain. So quite a pan-European focused experience on mainly the corporate sector. And now I work in a nonprofit, so the World Bench Marking Alliance is a nonprofit organisation that looks at incentivising companies into taking action towards sustainable development goals and sustainability in general. So it's very interesting what communicating sustainability can be about.
👉🏾 Well, first it's important to define what sustainability means in the context of your own communications role. And that depends a lot on whether you represent another company or an investor a nonprofit or a government project. And I worked for all of them and I can assure you that these are all four very different ways of communicating sustainability. Maybe one will require more proactive media campaigns, for example, or another will focus on consumers or risk and crisis communications. So sustainability is also a very broad and complex topic. So I think the most important is that you believe in the project that you represent and have passion for it. And I think you will need that because once you specialise, for example, in the environment or human rights, you need to be very ready to read lots of research, follow very closely your policy and regulatory developments, monitor certain issues in the news and social media, and that at a certain speed.
👉🏾 So, we're living in a decade of delivery of the sustainable development goals and as a consequence, there's a lot of reporting, a lot of talk and often a lack of agreement too. So When I talk to my communications colleagues, we'll agree that our job requires a lot of learning new concepts, understanding science, especially around climate, lots of UN jargon, lots of acronyms, you know, ESG, CSR, SBTI, COP. So a useful skill to have here is the ability to keep things simple, both from a language and visual perspective and avoid using words like net zero or carbon negative, or eco-friendly, in your marketing materials without even knowing or doing your research first. When communicating sustainability, you're likely also to work with lots of data and research and often one needs to translate complex information into something appealing, and it has a lot to do a thing with the ability to learn, understand, and filter out what works for your audiences, so you can make a real impact.
👉🏾 Yeah. So I think the main challenge for us when you work, for example, with lots of data and research around sustainability, is that you really need to have skill to identify what's relevant in there. What's relevant for your audiences from a communications perspective, but also to translate how these audiences will receive or understand sustainability or what you're trying to communicate. So I think for us definitely our main challenge is like from all the noise and all the amount of data that there is out there, some data is of course facts and scientific; climate, for example climate scientific data. But others could be fake news on social media. So how do you differentiate from all that noise and how do you focus on the message and the impact that you want to create with your different channels in that case. So that's I think, one of the key ones, and I think that connects very well with what we're seeing these days, which is a lot of greenwashing.
👉🏾 Yes. I think your own media channels such as a website or your own social media channels are important to communicate and to really land a message that you have. But I do think that media, like traditional media has shifted also the focus towards reporting more sustainability. Being more sceptical about company pledges for example, covering more big sustainability events like the one we saw in Glasgow last year COP. I think there is a space, it's just that sometimes the way it works the industry of media at the moment, it needs to focus a lot on the headlines and the urgency and the click baits and that's how they survive. But sometimes there's not enough space in mainstream media to actually get into the detail of the issues. And that's how some companies and marketing gurus take advantage of that landing greenwashing.
👉🏾 If we look at the past two to three years, we reached a point that we see lots of companies practicing not only greenwashing, but also now there is blue washing, rainbow washing, et cetera. So the first and oldest danger of greenwashing is misleading consumers. Individuals are starting to understand that a product with a green logo or recycled packaging doesn't mean that it's better for the planet or for your health. So in short, I see a huge gray area right now with companies using lots of smoke and mirror techniques, sophisticated language that sounds scientific.
👉🏾 That needs to stop and it needs urgent regulation. For example, we've seen the recently in the UK about the Green Claims Code that it's going to punish fashion brands for false eco claims. Another danger of greenwashing for companies is the backlash that they can receive from a PR perspective. If their communications are too ambitious and creative to celebrate milestones, but the company actually doesn't walk the talk. For example, having fundamentals in place like a proper strategy, with actionable goals or being transparent and ethical, that is very damaging.
👉🏾 And media and journalists are great at spotting these gaps, and they have an important role educating both the public and the actual company leaders in this. But also as a consequence, what I see is that for every good company that's actually doing good out there, there will be five more companies, with press releases full of greenwashing. So in the end, the company or heroes, let's call it like that, they don't really get the praise or the attention they deserve. However, I think the most dangerous part of greenwashing is about the fact that in the end, none of it helps our planet and our people. And there is research out there showing us that greenwashing has a greater societal and environmental costs beyond the misleading of consumers. So in the end, all this cloud of noise threatens the actual progress and real action that we urgently need.
👉🏾 Well, that depends a lot on individual, but I believe that purpose is very important. Like I do value companies with purpose and I do believe that in the future we will see more of that and it has shifted already. Sadly, we live in a capitalist world where the majority of the companies - their purpose of course is to make a profit to benefit from something from the sales. But I do see a change and I wouldn't say that change is necessarily driven by consumers, but definitely, the newer generations are aware of the impact of companies in the world. Therefore they already demanding, for example, more sustainable products at all levels, right? You would like sustainable clothes and sustainable or ecological food or have even sustainable investments.
👉🏾 So, of course, the consumer angle is important to get companies to have more purpose. But I think what we've seen now and where it's getting dangerous, that the companies identified that that's the need, therefore, shifting towards that behaviour and what we've seen, of course, consumers have power but I think that's not enough.
I think you also need companies to have a purpose, to have a better society and planet but also you do need governments to apply the real regulation that will also drive change and I think having purpose is probably not enough to fix the world, that was probably the point that I wanted to make.
👉🏾 Having a purpose is probably not enough to fix the world. And by that I mean that a company can have a great mission to build a better world, but it needs to go together with accountability and action in order to achieve it. So the problem that we are facing at the moment is that there aren't any mechanisms in place to hold companies accountable. So without that accountability, that talk is cheap and all these pledges turn into greenwashing.
👉🏾 So how do you get there? Well I think first all the business leaders of these big influential companies, for example, they need to be the ones leading the change. Because if they truly want to fix the world, as they say, they already have the power and the resources for it. And of course, as a consumer, you can also decide from which companies you want to buy and investors can do the same at a larger scale.
👉🏾 Governments can also help creating the appropriate regulation and NGOs and media can also act as watchdogs. So what you need in the end is a collective purpose and a collective action towards the same direction otherwise, we're going to get lost in the process it will be too late by then and of course, that can sound utopic but we are really starting to see solutions, reports, there's data, regulation, frameworks, standards, you name it; they all hint us that we can get there if we can agree on the basics, but it will be a long slow and painful race probably. And one thing that's what gives me hope that if there's one thing that the COVID pandemic showed us, Is that if we get enough time, money, and powerful people to agree on something, we can find a solution for it.
👉🏾 Yes. The World Benchmarking Alliance, just for context, we try to identify the 2000 most influential companies that will actually make a difference. So from all these 2000 companies, we've seen examples of companies that are changing we start talking to them and they actually engage and interested in making a difference. But also, we can see with our data who are the ones who are not doing it well. But just to be truly independent and not get into these 2000 companies, I'm going to name a couple that perhaps motivate me to do my job and that I really admire their communications.
👉🏾 So the first and one of the companies/brands that incentivise me to get into sustainability was Lush Cosmetics based in the UK. I think they have done a great job from animal rights perspective taking care of their social operations, everything around Lush has to be ethical. So they're not benchmarked in our work. So but I really admire them. I think Patagonia is also doing a great job from an organisational operations perspective, communication story towards investors, but also the communications and projects that they do around consumers recycling. So I really admire their work too, from a communications perspective.
👉🏾 Yeah, that's a very good question. And it's also difficult because in order to communicate authenticity, you just need to be authentic and you just need to believe it have not only passion or purpose, but just generally walk the talk and do what you say.
So I think that's the main difference, right? Between the companies who are actively communicating sustainability well, because they are sustainable. It's not only about the communications part, that's just the last part I would say. And the ones who do greenwashing, who actually just spend the budget that they could spend with sustainability project to decarbonise, for example and they just spend that money in marketing to create a great campaign to celebrate they planted 1000 trees.
So it's just down to very a basic skill which is just being honest, and if you're working in an organisation that, you do see that there's no transparency, no honesty, go and ask questions to your managers or to your board.
👉🏾 It's just not down to any particular skills. I think it's just generally that your company or your organisation and embeds whatever sustainability means to them, into the whole core of their operations, of their leadership, of their employees and only with that, then you can have a successful sustainability campaign, I think.
👉🏾 We are currently facing an incredibly challenging environment to fight misinformation because opinion started to overpower information and the truth and facts. So it's scary to think that a viral tweet of a random guy can now have more impact than an editorial column of a journalist who has been in the profession for 20 years. So it's really impossible to blame one single person on that, because both journalist and communications professionals can be the problem and the solution of misinformation.
👉🏾 In order to address the challenge, I think the effort must be collective and it starts by being skeptical and always asking questions. Educate yourself and learn from quality sources. And you can also choose to engage only with professional and verified journalists if you are a communications professional, but also do your research first and check for example who's financing that publication or look for quality independent publications who contrast their sources and use data, independent data, from different organisations.
👉🏾 For example when I look at my PR approach, I always try to also strive for quality over quantity. So I always prefer to chat with only two expert journalists maybe, who are really eager to analyse and even question, the facts that I'm telling them. And I prefer that than over a hundred bots or journalists sometimes, who just copy paste a press release into their website. I think there's enough information overload and the first who can stop that are communications professionals and being mindful about how you communicate, the language you use and how that could be read or translated. So before also drafting a press release, I will always try to challenge my team and my colleagues saying, "Hey, is that really necessary?"
👉🏾 Yes, definitely. So we've been studying that actually, The World Benchmarking Alliance as my colleague Natasha, she was in one of your previous episodes talking about the concept of 'Just Transition.' And 'Just Transition' is just purely that, that sustainability or climate, because I think most of the people relate the word sustainability to climate communications. That is absolutely linked to the effect on people, so people and planet go together. Any disaster that you see right now in the world, It's most likely to impact more on a part of the society or a geography that are more disadvantaged. And any, for example, decarbonisation efforts that you make, it's going to have an impact on that local community or the workers of a factory.
👉🏾 So it always has consequences, and for us, I think the way we see it, it's even broader than that. It's not only about the climate change and the social aspect of it, but we really see that there is a very urgent need for a whole transformation at a systems level. So we're talking about, re-shifting what's happening in the financial world, what's happening in the tech digital world that is allowing us to have internet right now. The food system, that it also involves a lot of taking care of the land biodiversity, nature, it's all linked together. So we can't solve a climate problem or a human rights problem without having the rest working in place and that's the main challenge of the century probably.
👉🏾 I think leaders need to listen to people. And I think in the past, I don't know, I think it depends also what do you consider a leader? What's the definition of a leader, right? Often at least represented in media and in the communications context, you would see, leaders represented in tech industries, probably billionaires, probably famous people who are really loud, out there with lots of different channels.
👉🏾 But I think people forget that leadership and leaders are everywhere, not necessarily only the ones you see in the media. And I think it would be wrong to assume that every leader has to be like the ones that represented as a mainstream. So anybody can be a leader, regardless your power, regardless your influence, could be a leader in a small team of four or you could be a leader for a whole country.
👉🏾 So at the end of the day, I think for me...

57: Leading with Purpose: A conversation with Jean Tan, Corporate Affairs Director for Mars Wrigley Asia

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
In 2022 as an industry we should be able to reflect the diversity of the societies in which we live and try to influence. The same is true for leadership and when we speak about women in leadership there is a huge need to showcase ethnic and cultural diversity also. There is sufficient data to show that role models and leaders who look like us are critical to ensuring our diverse workforces are able to grow and thrive. And of course it is also vital for inspiring future generations of practitioners.
My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is the Corporate Affairs Director for Mars Wrigley Asia, Jean Tan. A seasoned professional with over two decades of experience in diverse sectors. In this episode we spoke about her journey to Mars Wrigley
👉🏾 Her take on Purpose, what it means for organisations
👉🏾 Communicating organisation purpose stakeholders not just as a comms strategy but as a business strategy.
👉🏾 Purpose as a multi-year strategy rather than a one off campaign
👉🏾 Engaging authentically on issues, where you have the right to have a voice in and the credibility and resources to shape positive change
👉🏾 Integrating social justice responses into organisational risk management and crisis communications practices
👉🏾 The drivers of inclusion journey in South East Asia. Systemic, structural and self driven barriers women leaders face
👉🏾 What it means to lead in times of flux, transformational trends and much more.....
"Purpose for me is really more of a propeller and a guide. I see it as a decision-making lens that can permeate both big and small choices in life. For me, purpose isn't already joined up, neatly framed and forever unchanging statement. It evolves as life evolves and it motivates me to set meaningful goals. So I really see purpose as a accumulative outcome of setting and reaching meaningful objectives"
Like to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the episode
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts with you and your listeners.
👉🏾 My name is Jean, I'm Singaporean. So I'm joining you from Singapore this afternoon and I've been in the reputation and corporate affairs business for coming to two decades now. I was trained as a journalist, but I started my career in PR and marketing before eventually making a pivot into corporate reputation, public affairs and employee engagement. I've worked for different industries and agency and in-house roles, including automotive, financial services, hospitality, technology and now FMCG.
👉🏾Thank you. It's been just a little over a year since I joined Mars. I have to say it wasn't my plan to start a new role in the middle of a global pandemic, but sometimes life happens that way. I was actually enjoying the autonomy and learning a lot by running my own consultancy but Mars offered the opportunity of joining the FMCG industry, which has always been intriguing to me. And in a role that ticked all the boxes, including the chance to lead and shape reputation and policy leadership across a dynamic region like Asia. So when you factor that in alongside the chance to work for billion-dollar brands, like M&Ms, Snickers and Extra in a purpose-led organisation, it was really a no brainer.
👉🏾 Purpose for me is really more of a propeller and a guide. I see it as a decision-making lens that can permeate both big and small choices in life. For me, purpose isn't already joined up, neatly framed and forever unchanging statement. It evolves as life evolves and it motivates me to set meaningful goals. So I really see purpose as a accumulative outcome of setting and reaching meaningful objectives.
👉🏾 I think if an organisation wants to attract the right talent, investors and consumers; you really don't have a choice but to be purpose led, it is no longer a nice to have. But at the same time, organisations need to realise that stakeholders are also wise to companies for merely purpose washing. The pledge over progress era for me it's way behind us. What we want to see and what we want from credible companies, tangible actions, visible progress and real investments and resources put behind whatever the company's purpose statement is. And on this point, there was some interesting takeaways from the 2022 Edelman Trust report.
👉🏾 This trust is now the society's default emotions, and this is largely driven by governments and the media who are feeling a cycle of distrust. And on the flip side, businesses are seen as the most trusted institutions and people are expecting companies and company leaders to step up and shape conversations as well as policy decisions on critical issues. So companies have this incredible opportunity and a huge responsibility to be purpose-led.
Now, this doesn't mean that you shy away from the fact that you're here for commercial and profit-making objectives. It's actually making sure that your narrative and your strategy address both purpose and performance and actually show the world how one can actually drive the other.
👉🏾 I think it's extremely important to bring purpose to life for our internal and external stakeholders. First and foremost, it's a competitive advantage to have a meaningful well-thought-out and sustainable purpose strategy. And it's really important to separate the two, this is not just about a communication strategy. We're talking about a full business strategy that sees purpose integrated into the entire ecosystem of how you operate and how you make big decisions. Then you have to overlay that with a compelling internal and external communications program, because if purpose is not brought to life, then it's five fancy pages in an annual report or a nice poster in the employee cafeteria.
👉🏾 In terms of best practice, I can share a few, so starting with the most important one, I think, which is purpose must be owned by the senior leaders. And it starts with the CEO, not comms, not HR, this cannot be seen as a functional responsibility or a passion project. Then. I think the second-best practice is really critical to integrate and embed the purpose before you communicate. If your company policies, how you hire, how you onboard, how you promote and develop your people, how you manage conflict, how you market your products, how you work with your suppliers. If all of these do not reflect your purpose, you're just not going to get traction and you actually risk the reputation backlash of being seen as just virtue signalling.
👉🏾 At Mars, we're a firm believer of acts, not ads. So the other best practice and this links back to the first point, is making sure that you bring your purpose to life through tangible actions. Another point I want to share is leadership buy-in is paramount when it comes to communicating purpose internally. So make sure that your leaders are equipped and empowered to be your purpose ambassadors.
👉🏾 I would also challenge companies to even link this to our leaders KPIs. So this is something that gets measured, this is something that gets really looked at from a performance perspective. Finally, think about purpose as a multi-year strategy rather than a one-off campaign. From experience, a lot of energy and resources tend to be invested right at the beginning, at the launch phase where it's new and shiny, and then everything tends to fizzle out. Now purpose takes time to grow roots and gain credibility. So factor that into the planning and execution and ensure that purpose gets top billing so to speak in your annual priorities. So in summary integrate before you communicate, then activate and reiterate.
👉🏾 The question of social justice is a really topical one and I don't have all of the answers but what I'm really clear about is you have to lead from your purpose when it comes to the positioning that you wish to take whether it's good or bad, be very clear and be very consistent in their positioning.
👉🏾 The other point here is engaging issues, you feel you have the right to have a voice in. So you have the credibility and resources to shape positive change. So for instance, we are in the business of making chocolate and therefore cocoa sustainability. Making sure that we protect human rights within the cocoa supply chain, that's something that we feel very passionate about and we feel we have a right to actually speak up about. So that's what I mean by engaging in issues, you feel you have the right to actually try and shape change.
👉🏾 A more tactical point here is to integrate social justice responses into your risk management and crisis communications practices. So you get the right protocols and processes in place. Pre-align the response of known hot topic issues facing your industry. Don't wait for a crisis to happen before you start thinking about a narrative. Final point, it's equally important to know when to walk away from what issue, don't get drawn into the fray with the noise.
👉🏾 Another great question Sudha and I'm really glad we're focusing more on inclusion rather than diversity because inclusion is really the how of diversity. I have to say this is quite a difficult question because Asia isn't one market and you know the DEI issues differ from country to country. I do think gender equality, especially accessing equal economic opportunities would probably be one common theme across the whole region, so that's probably a solid jump-off point for most countries.
👉🏾 The other thing that I like to see more is conversations around the historical expectations on gender norms and gender roles. I would like to also take this chance to highlight a great opportunity, what we sometimes don't think about is 85% of all registered companies in the Asia Pacific region are owned by a family group. And more than 20% of the world's top family businesses ranked by income are based in Asia with revenues of almost 2 trillion. So family businesses here are not only economic propellers, but they have increasing influence over ESG and DEI topics with next-generation family leaders taking over the leadership positions.
👉🏾 So as we see that leadership change, there's a huge opportunity to also see shifts in DEI, ESG and other purpose related themes. So I think this is very exciting and probably deserves to have far more air time.
👉🏾 Well, from what I'm observing, there is huge appetite for change and for creating a more equitable environment. Due to societal expectations grounded in cultural values, some of these change conversations may be more challenging to have at home, which is why I think workplaces can become really powerful platforms to ignite new thinking and create a safe space for these conversations.
👉🏾 You know, MNCs like Mars have and we'll continue to invest across all dimensions in terms of skills, technology, and cultivating the right environment to drive more inclusive change. But I think in this part of the world, one of the issue is how to have difficult conversations around gender roles, as well as a broad range of topics, considered to be sensitive, or even taboo because of the cultural norms and expectations. So while I have no immediate solutions, I personally believe in the power of storytelling and representation. If we have more shared stories of lived experiences that are diverse and celebrate all of our differences, I think we have a better shot at creating an environment that people feel like they can belong.
👉🏾 Wow, another huge question. So, biggest barriers to progress for women in the industry? I see it in three lenses. So the first lens would be systemic barriers and these are much more embedded and based on pretty hard to challenge cultural norms and expectations, like for example, a woman should prioritise marriage and childbirth over her career.
The second barrier is more structural. So these are barriers that are linked to organisational setups. As an example, most communication and corporate affairs teams are quite lean. So the opportunity to get a top job is narrower. Then there are also self-driven barriers, one thing I often hear is, "oh, I'm in communications, so I don't need to be that good with numbers" or "Communications is a transferable skillset, so I don't really need to get under the skin of any business or industry to do my job well".
👉🏾 I'm glad to say that I believe we're seeing systemic barriers breaking now a lot more, representation plays a huge role in normalising female leaders who are balancing and integrating professional and personal aspirations. And you Sudha your perfect example of that. I think structural barriers can be overcome, if you don't see your career as one linear progression, I would advise younger practitioners whether you're male or female to broaden your CV at an earlier point in your career, so your progression isn't limited by how one company chooses to structure its communications or corporate affairs function. And also where possible gain cross-functional experience so you have the option and the expertise to work across multiple functions, makes you more valuable.
👉🏾 Self-driven barriers is pretty hard, I think it requires the drive and discipline to become more than just a functional expert, and by the way, if that's what you're aiming for, that's perfectly fine as well. What I'm saying is, if you are aiming for the top job, then you need to get out of your functional comfort zone and really make sure that you bring business and financial savvy to the table.
👉🏾 Yeah, nobody likes change unless changes is positive. So it's difficult to lead in times of flux and uncertainty. I will say that even though it's challenging as a leader, provide the certainty of transparency. You may not have the answer, but give your people the certainty that you are there to communicate often even if you don't have the answer and you will come back to them with the answer when you have it. You know, this is very natural, people look to leaders for guidance, when it comes to uncertainty, when it comes to times of crisis. And so I believe as a leader, one of the best thing that you can do is to cultivate this environment of trust and assurance, and that really comes through your leadership style and your ability to communicate.
👉🏾 One thing I'll add as well as that people look for information when they don't have a trusted source; they start rumours, they get you know into little echo chambers. So I would say that even though I understand there's a very fine line for listed companies, one of the leadership obligations and responsibilities especially in times of flux and uncertainty, is to communicate and really lead with the trust and credibility.
👉🏾 In terms of the transformational trends, I would say that historically companies used to see our function in communications or even government relations as more of output function. But these days I think companies realise that we are uniquely placed to shift mindset and attitudes. And this is different from marketing because it's different from just getting people to buy a brand, to buy a product.
👉🏾 This is demanding something more fundamental and much more emotional. We're talking about loyalty, about changing mindsets. So I think the transformation here is that we will see a lot more behavioural scientists potentially joining this function, rather than just people trained in communications. And I think a lovely matchup is when you've got behavioural science along with, you know, the right use of data to really start nudging people towards the kind of mindset shifts in attitudes that you need as an organisation.
👉🏾 Another transformational trend, and I think this is more of an opportunity. Companies are incredible in marketing, in selling products or brands externally. We're very good at identifying different demographics. We're very good at understanding them deriving consumer insights so we can get them at the right time, at the right place with the right messages. We're not so good at that internally, so the opportunity here is really bring the external best practice into internal communications and actually start seeing our people as diverse and as varied as our external consumers.
So I love to see how we can really start bringing more of the external communications and marketing best practice into internal engagement and start really changing internal communications again from a more kind of output channel-driven function into something that has strategic relevance and can really add value.
👉🏾 Thank you Sudha, it's been amazing, I really appreciate the opportunity.
Follow Jean Tan on
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeantan17/
Important links
https://www.provokemedia.com/latest/article/mars-wrigley-asia-names-corporate-affairs-director
https://conferences.marketing-interactive.com/pr-asia/jean-tan/
https://www.dailyadvent.com/news/ab30b8567d6c160b51dc2e9739c6c0d6-Mars-Wrigley-Asia-Names-Corporate-Affairs-Director
https://globalwpr.com/events/international-panel-debate-the-future-of-work/

56: India Justice Report with Maja Daruwala and Valay Singh

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
The Elephant in the Room is my learning and listening project. Something that started out during a period of deep introspection and despair evolved to also becoming a passion project. But being passionate means always trying to do better and living up to the committed purpose - to shine a light on issues of inclusion & inequity. In this case it is about spotlighting the importance of access to justice for everyone in society. The partnership with the India Justice Report is also about getting ordinary citizens to understand the justice system better - so that they are better able to exercise their rights.
My guests on this episode are Maja Daruwala, Chief Editor of the India Justice Report, and a barrister from Lincolns Inn and Valay Singh, Project Lead of the India Justice Report. We spoke about the purpose behind India's first ever ranking of states on their capacity to deliver justice. The report measures the structural capacity of state based instrumentalities of the justice system against their own declared mandates.
We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The reality that not everyone has the same experience of the justice system. For the most marginalised and vulnerable in any society, access to justice is often beyond their reach and always too costly
👉🏾 What really matters to citizens? Access to justice, speed of justice, the improvement of ground level infrastructure, locaslisation etc....
👉🏾 Why women that are recruited into the justice system inevitably find themselves confined to the lowest rungs of the justice system
👉🏾 Lack of representation in the justice system and the importance of reflecting the population for the justice system itself must be just. The inability to change being indicative of prevalent bias in the system.
👉🏾 The fact that most citizens are not aware of their fundamental rights, because of lack of education on the same
👉🏾 COVID 19 and it's impact on the exacerbating inequalities across the justice system
We also spoke about support from stakeholders, trends and what success would look like.
Like to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Common Cause India Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative DAKSH Tata Institute of Social Sciences - Prayas Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy How India Lives.
#accesstojustice #sdg16 #benchmarkingforabetterfuture
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Love to be here. Thank you so much for having us.
👉🏾 The India Justice Report is the first of its kind, quantitative assessment of the capacity of the four pillars of the justice system. What does it do? It takes data from only government sources, it divides it into these four pillars: police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid. It then further divides into six themes of: infrastructure, workload, human resources and diversity, trends. And then for each theme it has a bunch of metrics or indicators, these would be, you know, the share of women in say police, it would be the judge to population ratio, it would be the case load. Let's go to legal aid it would be the coverage of legal aid in a particular state.
👉🏾 So it brings all these siloed data sets about the different pillars of the justice system in one place and it ranks 25 states divided into two clusters, one cluster being the 18 large and mid-sized states and then seven small states. So for the very first time, we have a resource where you can see how the capacity of a justice system in a particular state is either as whole or for one of the pillars or two of the pillars. This is what India Justice Report does, this is what it has added to the discourse around justice in India.
👉🏾 Yes, there isn't anything of this kind at the moment and also it doesn't have any subjective assessment. What do I mean by that? We would like to, but we haven't gone and surveyed the public, we haven't gone surveyed say select sample size of lawyers or applicants or policemen. What we have done is, we have looked at what are the benchmarks our state has for itself; so what is the percentage of women it has decided for itself? And we see has the state met its quota for women? Has the state fulfilled its quota SC or SC/OBCs? Has the state fulfilled its own sanctioned capacity of police officers? That's what we do. We do not provide our own judgments, which we of course have, but we have not done that in this report. Therefore, it is a sort of as pure reflection as possible of the prevailing capacity of justice system in India.
👉🏾 Well as the subtitle says, the India Justice Report is an assessment of the capacity to deliver justice. We often talk about, in fact the whole conversation is about the lack of access to justice, the slowness, the bias, some of the difficulties within the police, the status of prisons, the conditions in prisons and so on. And there is a kind of hand-wringing about it. But then we wanted to look at solutions, but solutions have already been suggested many times.
👉🏾 One of the things that people don't look at, are the nitty-gritty of capacity. How many people are in this work? How much money do they get? What is the workload that they have to cope with? What is the infrastructure that they work within? So we wanted to put that out, in a simple way where people could understand it and then looking at it holistically, looking at all of the pillars holistically, through not opinion, but through facts, through statistics that the government itself publishes.
👉🏾 Look at police, prisons, legal aid and judiciary to begin with. And then every year build on it, make comparisons and see what has improved and what is deteriorating. To basically give a tool to people to look at: policy makers, media people, influencers. So that when we talk, we argue and we discuss on the basis of facts, rather than any kind of perception.
👉🏾 Actually, the benchmarks are there already. If I can give you an example, for instance, reservations of schedule caste, schedule tribes, that's already there in government policy. How many women should you have in the police? That's already there benchmark is there of 30%/33%. There are general policies also, there are model builds, there are model proposals that are put forward, the centre gives the state guidelines. So there are many benchmarks that are already set.
👉🏾 As far as third-party audit is concerned, I wouldn't put it that way, it was never intended as an audit. An audit seems to suggest a kind of judgment. But here the facts are put in front of you as given in official data. But from that, then there is an easy pathway to analysing. Especially where there are comparisons; why is one state doing so much better than another? Why is year on year, things not changing? What is the intention of the state? If five years ago or 10 years ago, you had 7% women in police and now after so many years you still only have 10% in the police and they are clustered right at the bottom, then it throws up a conversation.
👉🏾 It throws up questions about what is the recruitment practices? What are the practical difficulties of bringing women into the police? Are the excuses that are made are the reasons that are given enough? Are they logical or could be changing mindset? I can give you a good illustration, one of the reasons for not bringing in more women into the police, apart from the usual thing about the police being dangerous and macho and so on and so forth, is there is not enough facilities for women. Not enough toilets; where can women go? Now this is interesting, it's very practical, it sounds very logical. But my question then would be, how long would it take you to build toilets? And if there are toilets already, why are they exclusive to men? Why are they not given to women? If your intention really is to bring about gender parity?
👉🏾 We were not working alone, you very kindly said that it was the India justice team. But the team is actually comprised of six or seven NGOs who are specialists in this: Common Cause, Centre for Social Justice, DAKSH, CHRI, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Prayas. And we had a data partner in 'How India Lives'. So we had a lot of thought people who had been working for a long time. And it was they and the Tata Trusts who this report was nested at that time who sat around and conceptualised, what are the things that we would like to look at that are really vital to providing justice. You have to have human resources; you have to have budgets; proper budgets; you have to assess the workload. Is the infrastructure, the human resources; the budgets sufficient; is the workload too heavy and how do we assess trends? How do we assess whether things are going to improve? What is the intention of the state? Because over 10 years you get elections, you get bureaucracies changing by attrition, you get governments changing by election.
👉🏾 So is there a proper policy; is our policies being followed; are manifestos being followed and who is oversighting these things. We would have liked to have done much more, but I should say this is a baby report, this is a nascent report. We've only had two iterations, two editions, and the third one will come out in 2023. So it was to make a beginning that was rational and reasonable on which we could build. Some of it was of course dictated by the availability of data. But as we have gone along and become more and more educated, we are able to correlate across other reports as well. Like crime in India and researchers, et cetera, are going to use this and take it much further. It's going to be a building block and each year we hope to add a little bit more.
👉🏾 Last year we added a bit on training; on technology. One of the things that we really realised was how little money there is spent on training. Across the board, it's usually around between 1 to 3%, if it goes up to 3%. And yet when you think about it, training creates the fundamental mindset, culture for the police, for the prisons, for the judiciary. And you look at the policy for instance.
👉🏾 I give you an example the policy change across the years in prisons is to look at rehabilitation and the integration of people into society who come into the prison system rather than revenge and retribution. This is the world over but the question to be asked is how much of the training actually takes you there. And if your training facilities are understaffed, under-resourced, haven't changed their curriculums for years. The promise of using human rights as the baseline and a organising principle for your training has actually not been realised. Then you recognise why the culture in prisons is such or the culture in policing is such. And this is what the report actually takes you to.
👉🏾 I think ranking, I was very nervous about it frankly, because it creates the kind of controversy that you don't want, and it then goes into party politics and so on, so forth. But I think the ranking has been very, very useful. People should be ranked government should be ranked, for the performance that they provide to the people. And we mustn't be mealy-mouthed about. And this ranking is not a ranking that is based on my opinion or yours. It is a ranking that they themselves have given us the statistics for. Our government has given us the statistics. We have no cause not to believe the statistics, and therefore you live and die on the sword of statistics
👉🏾 And I think that one of the things that the ranking must be seen as is not merely a competitiveness within each other. Like Maharashtra arguing with Tamil Nadu with Telangana. But rather it should be seen as a benchmark that you're making the effort to improve your state itself. You want to be first and you want to be first next year as well and the year after that as well. The other thing that I would like to point out very much is that these rankings, because they are made up of pinpoints of information, by changing two or three things, you can actually improve the entire rank of the state.
👉🏾 So some states for instance Bihar, the first report it had a poor showing on women and then suddenly due to increases of women in the police, they improved it quite dramatically and their ranking went right up. Now like all statistics, statistics only tell half a story, we have to also accept that. So each time we make the report, we try to nuance the report so that it is more and more accurate in terms of the reality that is on the ground. But low hanging fruit; reducing the number of undertrials, reducing the congestion in prisons, improving the amount of money that is spent on legal aid or your contribution to that, the state's contribution to the central budget can change your entire ranking. The changing of the entire ranking is, I would say, as a citizen are incidental. What really matters is the value you give to your citizen. The speed of justice, the access to justice, the improvement in ground levels infrastructure, localisation.
👉🏾 Actually it depends on how you measure feedback. If it is a question of getting noticed, we have been noticed, we presented to the NITI Aayog, which is the highest policy-making body in the country. We have presented to state governments, bureaucrats have been interested in understanding what's happening.
👉🏾 Everybody has welcomed this notion of having this holistic report to look at. It will definitely act as a reference point. There's no doubt about that. The media has been extremely kind, if you like, there's lots and lots of mentions of ourselves in the media. Where I see an outcome is I see that some reporting or much reporting is now quoting much opinion reporting, is quoting the India Justice Report as a validifying factor. So you're getting this mix of opinion and statistics and a reaffirmation of an argument because the India Justice Report shows it. So from that point of view, also there is a good outcome. I cannot say to you, because I wrote this or because we showed this, suddenly there was a huge change.
👉🏾 But undoubtedly bureaucrats, legislators, et cetera, are feeling that okay, if we are to be better, and people do want to be better, then we must improve X or Y. Whereas in Orissa, there has been a public interest litigation on decongestion of prisons. The Chief Justice has taken on board a lot of the stuff that we have said so that he has the statistical arguments to point out to the people that he is giving direction to. And it becomes a monitoring tool also.
👉🏾 In terms of the judiciary, for instance, I think the statistics that are showing up, 40 million cases, a shortage of judges, a tremendous shortage of judges, a tremendous shortage of infrastructure. Budgets that are stagnating or going up very, very little. And I haven't calculated in real terms how much they are going up. We are seeing that in the high courts, the cases have gone up by 10% and in the subordinate courts by 5% and there is long pendency, and this is going to have a huge knock-on effect.
👉🏾 Now it's not only the India Justice Report that points it out. But as we go year on year, we can now project what's going to happen in the next few years. And it is frightening and people will start paying attention. This hiatus that we have had to go through during the COVID time, nearly 24 months of it. When the courts have not been able to function, simply because of the physical constraints or sickness, courts closing down, et cetera; presents a moment in which to think radically and change things radically because going on as usual is going to only drop us in the mire in a terrible way. And in the absence of this fundamental organising principle of 'Rule of Law' in a society, the breakdown of society is almost prophesied. And I think that this kind of dead serious stuff can be bolstered by something like the IJR but it is plea to change things, because this is never going to be business as usual. Business as usual is going to lead to bankruptcy.
👉🏾 As I said, I don't think it is at all feasible to continue in the same vein as before. You're going to have to take radical steps. A great deal of these steps lie in the bailiwick or the mandate, or the state government. How prisons are functioning, how justice is dispensed. You're going to have to create imaginative solutions, and they are there, they are there in those musty reports that have been lying there for years and years and years. But at the moment there is perhaps not sufficient incentive or push from the public, as well as there is a great constraint of finances. And that makes the struggle, to increase human resources, to increase infrastructure. But again, I think it's a false economy to say we don't have enough money to hire judges and we don't have enough money to improve training.
👉🏾 There are two ways, there are many ways, but two of the ones that I can easily talk about is just to increase human...

55: A conversation with Dr Titilola Banjoko, Chair, Board of Trustees, IRC UK, on the refugee crisis

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
Dr Titilola Banjoko Chair of the Board of Trustees UK, IRC was my first guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast. I invited her back to talk about the humanitarian crises facing the world, with a record number of 274 million people expected to be dependent on humanitarian aid in 2022.
The 2022 IRC Watchlist - a public report that warns global leaders, policymakers and concerned citizens not just where crises are deepening but why they are deepening and what can be done about it
The three C's: Conflict; Climate Change and COVID and its impact on the humanitarian crisis
The void in global leadership on the refugee crisis
UK's commitment on refugees
The funding gap
The importance of changing the negative perception on migrants and what they bring to society
The refugee integration program, role of diaspora communities in supporting assimilation and her priorities for 2021
Want to learn more, listen on your favourite podcast platforms
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Good evening Sudha and may I say Happy New Year to you and your listeners.
👉🏾 I think what's changed in the interim for me personally, is that we are beginning to see the structural instruments respond to racism. As you will recall, previous to that people would get away with a lot of things that otherwise they shouldn't have. And if you take some groundbreaking legal court cases in the States, as an example, where the expectation by a lot of people was business as usual, people could get away with things that were, wrong and that turned out not to be the case. So I think it does send a message to everyone there are consequences. And when people are aware there are consequences then there is consideration given to actions that are going to be taken by everyone on both sides.
👉🏾 So I think that has really been helpful because to me that was a landmark and I'm sure you're aware of the cases that we have seen, you know assume that they would not be found guilty and turns out actually they would be. And then also we have seen where lots of people who have, even here in the UK Cricket, it has given people the ability to come out and actually within our court structure, in parliament to ask questions of why things are happening and people now understand that actually what you used to do before is no longer acceptable.
👉🏾 So for me, I think it's given boldness, it's given confidence to the BME community to come out and speak of things that they probably wouldn't have dared do before because you would assume there are no consequences. But now that there are consequences and people have confidence and assurance in the system, people are coming out and actually speaking of instances and incidences that have happened in the past and actually it's given its due consideration and process. I'll say it takes you on that journey where actually things are going to change and are already changing.
👉🏾 It's been challenging. I mean, as everybody knows, the world has changed, the world is not what it used to be because of the pandemic. And the pandemic, is not a health issue, because it has consequences on everybody's life. And countries have become very insular in what they want because they are protecting their own citizens and we see that. So there are lots of things, when I took on the Chairmanship, I thought we will continue the journey, things will get better, but actually, things have got worse. So if you think about the space in which we operate as a humanitarian organisation, we now have in just 20 countries alone and the list is endless of countries that are faced with humanitarian challenges. You have over 274 million people in just 20 countries that are impacted and of those 80 million in some countries, when you add the total top 20 countries, actually, they're displaced globally and then you also have a considerable number of millions displaced internally.
👉🏾 When I spoke to you last, I don't think I don't think there was a coup in Myanmar, the fight in Ethiopia has gotten worse, there's the insecurity, Afghanistan that wasn't a change in the structure when I spoke to you. So the three C's, we're now calling it - conflict, which includes insecurity and decades of war; climate change; and COVID. So those three C's have actually really made an impact and if you think about it, Afghanistan is the crisis after the conflict. Ethiopia is climate change and conflict. Yemen, people forget that that is a cumulative impact of the war that has been going on and people have forgotten about that war. Nigeria has growing insecurity. South Sudan, tension, Democratic Republic of Congo there's conflict and there is disease because Ebola still happens regularly in DRC. Syria, it's a decade of war, I mean, can you believe that? And then Sudan has also had political tensions and then they have regional droughts and conflict. And I haven't spoken about the other countries like Honduras, where there’s violence and climate change impacting on that. Lebanon.
👉🏾 Sudha, can I just say, when you add all those three things together and what really has made it more challenging has been the fact that as I said if you take the impact of COVID. So the impact of COVID is either on the health, it's on the economic situations of the country and it has meant that countries have actually become more insular and I'm sure you've heard a lot about the vaccine inequities across the world.And that countries are actually more insular in terms of, what can I get for my own country, I'm not really interested in another you know, as much as what people say and therefore it has economic impact in countries that are already vulnerable before COVID and more people, therefore, want to move.
👉🏾So you have more refugees, you have more political asylum seekers and when I say refugees, I'm even talking about even those seeking better economic situations and that growing hunger and displacement, is even in countries that you might think are stable. So you will get people from Pakistan, you get people from Bangladesh, but they're still refugees for various reasons, whether economic or non-economic. And women and girls, and the marginalised groups always are the most vulnerable in any country, whatever that group or community is, they become more vulnerable to these impacts of climate change, conflicts, insecurities and Covid. And that really for me, has really been an eye-opener in terms of what people are facing.
👉🏾 Obviously the resources will never be enough, but I think there are two key things that we've been doing. One is we have what we call annual watch list, which we publicise every year. And the 2022 highlights, I will say systemic failure. And it's broken into four key themes: First of all state failure, so most states are failing to actually fulfil their basic responsibilities towards their citizens. And as every country is accountable for its citizens and instead they're making things worse either through omission of what they should be doing or actually doing the wrong things. So if you give examples of the vaccine, as an example. In most countries, actually the people that are first in the queue are probably the elites, the ones in power, the government, whereas the communities where they're more vulnerable are not. And the same way, even economics when there is not enough, who gets the most.
👉🏾 Then there is diplomatic failure, I mean as we all know, peacemaking is really not where it should be, instead it's dominated by geopolitics, rivalry. The global good is not really, I would say, being adhered to. So this last year or so, there's been reduction in aid that goes into countries and people are protecting themselves because of the economic impact on their own countries. But we live in a global society where actually, we are interconnected and the lack of peace in one country does have consequences for other countries. And that's why you see increasing people on the move, whether through legal or illegal channels.
👉🏾 Then there is a legal failure. The system of international law has not really kept up with what it's responsibilities are. Growing crimes against humanity. There are people who are being killed in countries where we're operating and they're doctors. The idea that doctors, there are certain places that are sacrosanct under international law, that you should not be using war as a weapon. But in some countries now hunger is being used as a weapon. And that really is creating starvation and famine. And then of course there is operational failures, the system and the way we work together to be able to address the humanitarian crisis.
👉🏾 So I think for us in IRC publishing that report really highlights to key decision-makers, the actions they need to take on those four areas, either as a state/diplomatic. So we have lots of multilateral organisations that is their role, making sure that the legal instruments internationally are being applied. So for me that's one thing, then the second thing is obviously, resources that is required. So one of the things we've done in IRC, it's not just the states and multilateral organisations or indeed private organisations, but even citizens of the world. Global citizens being aware of the humanitarian crisis. So we've done a lot of work either through: fundraising, mobilising individuals, either through targeted or even mass approach, so that people can do their collective bit.
👉🏾 So we're using instruments to ensure that people are aware. For some citizens globally, it's just the awareness of what is happening. Because as you will know Sudha, if I take the Afghan crisis, what we're seeing on the television, actually did move people. And when the recent unfortunate incident of migrants dying, when they're trying to cross the channel, grabs people's attention. But what we need to do is get people to understand that it's not until it's in front of you on the screen, these are things that are happening behind and they're things that can be done either through, global giving or indeed states playing their role.
👉🏾 I mean, for me on a personal level, I think there, first of all, has to be recognition that you might think you can close your borders. People will say, "Oh, we'll stop them from coming and we build whether they're physical walls or legal walls, and stop people from coming". Every citizen of the world would always want to aspire better than where they are. And when conditions that push them are greater than what is going to stop them, they will move. My personal view is people will die trying, people would prefer to die trying than not do anything and sit down and wait for death. So I do believe that there is something for us as UK citizens to understand our role in the global community, not our role as in UK and forget the rest of the world, it doesn't work that way.
👉🏾 And actually people find it very interesting that people want to come to the UK. And I'm sure you've heard jokes before Sudha, where people said, when you were all colonies, you spent half of the time telling everyone how the UK was the motherland and you trained people in English and you set up the English structures and, well Great Britain to some people means Great Britain. And therefore the ultimate goal, whether it's a fact or not, or is a perception, is Great Britain. And I've heard people say, well, that was years ago. No, it's not, the structures created in many of the colonial countries are so entrenched and deep, even into schools, the educational system, therefore people still see coming into the UK as the get-out card.
👉🏾 So I do think there is something about the UK working with countries on how they can improve within those countries. Because guess what? 90% of the people actually do not need to leave if things were better in their countries, either economic or political. I gave the example of the COVID vaccine, and that just gives you an element of what's happening, where there are countries now where we're on the booster. While some people have not even had the first dose in some countries. And then people said, oh, they donated a lot of vaccines to many of these countries, but they donated vaccines with two, three weeks to ensure they give out the vaccines, that logistics doesn't work. So I don't know if you are aware, a lot of countries actually have had to more or less throw them away because there was no way they can mobilise infrastructure to deliver it in two weeks. And if it's use by date has expired, it is not a vaccine, it is dangerous. So therefore they've got rid of it.
👉🏾 Those are things that we need to consider because you are dependent on these countries. A good example, is the Philippines is well-known in the UK as an exporter of healthcare workers and it's embraced by both the UK and the Philippine government. But what they've put in place is good infrastructure, legal infrastructure, and even support to the Philippine government. So it becomes a win-win the Philippine government relies on the remittances that its workers will send back and the UK government relies on the workforce both win. And that is what needs to happen.The challenge for the UK is, as we are not part of the EU, we now need to have bilateral agreements.
👉🏾 Yes, it is actually. So at the IRC, we have what we call a 'refugee integration program' in Southeast England, which we call Rise, which is rapidly expanding. And that program offers resettled refugees, the knowledge and confidence to thrive, equipping them with skills, to be able to assimilate into their local communities as well equipping their local communities to be able to absorb them. And one of the tools, which has really helped, is also the countries they're coming from, the communities that are here.
👉🏾 One of the things that is really very good is the fact that we do have a very vibrant BME community in the UK. And they offer a resource and a tool to be able to support the refugees coming. And the beauty of working with the IRC, you then begin to recognise, and actually that there are many people who you might not assume to be refugees, had a refugee background, but they're so assimilated people have forgotten. They're doctors, they're nurses they're even politicians. So there are tools and their communities that do help them to absorb. And if we take the Afghan as an example, there are many Afghan doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals, some of them are consultants well established in the United Kingdom. And they're able to offer advice using their own lived experience.
👉🏾 So one of the things we have on the IRC, when I started we've now got trustees with lived experience as refugees or coming from crisis countries. So they're able to tell you their experience they've got what they went through, and how you can support them. But one thing I always say to people never underestimate the resilience of the refugees. And many of them have gone through unimaginable circumstances to get to the UK, either through the journeys they've taken or what has happened to them. So giving them the right tools and support and indeed using the advantage. And we've got the benefits in IRC of learning from Germany, as there were lots of refugees that went to Germany. They've got a massive program there, learning from Germany, learning from the US as a global organisation. What's best practice in integrating people within the society so they can thrive.
👉🏾 I will say that we are on a journey and we have started moving the perception. Because what we didn't have before was platform for people who have been refugees to tell their stories. So when we take Afghan as an example, and I know doctors, nurses from Sudan, from Somalia, from Syria who were ex refugees and when they tell the story of how they've assimilated and what they're doing and using them as voices, even in our fundraising and our advocating, it begins to say to people,"Oh, I didn't know my doctor was an ex refugee; oh, I didn't know this minister was an ex refugee". And these are the sorts of things that in fact I remind people.
👉🏾 This is not new, what we had missed was the narrative. What people saw was the negative narrative, and we've got to elevate the positive narrative. During COVID, the number of ex refugee doctors and nurses that worked all throughout COVID, and are still working cause we're not out of COVID. It's just a testament to the fact that we have not given people that platform to air their voices. And that's what we need to continually do. So people can see that ultimately the society benefits when many of these refugees are successfully integrated.
👉🏾 Well, actually the US with a change of government have changed, which is good. We now have the US stepping up a lot of their commitment that previously had more or less been put to the background and that is excellent and good. I think one of the challenges obviously is the impact COVID has had on the economy of most countries. And therefore that meant that many of them, especially the UK, reduced their donations and private companies are also impacted by COVID. And therefore we're not seeing it as something that actually was essential. And what we just need to do is shift that dial, so people do see it as essential because it is in everybody's interest.
👉🏾 As an example that the whole world gets vaccinated or at least 70% of the world get vaccinated. We've learnt that all it takes is for one or two to travel. And they don't have to be refugees. If we want the economy to pick up again, that has to happen. It could be a business person from the UK traveling to another country to ensure that they bring investment into the country that comes back with the virus. It could be your citizen going to that country that brings it back, that is the way it works. So in that context it requires leadership. It requires global leadership, I mean I read a news article recently, which I thought was very impressed by, where a lots of shareholders of all the pharmaceutical companies are now saying that the CEOs will not get their bonus. If they haven't increased what they are giving to the developing countries and that they wanted to see those numbers. And I thought that was good, that shows to you, the demonstration of individuals, what they can do. Because guess what? They might not listen to everybody else, but they will definitely listen to their shareholders. That brings in accountability and when that brings in accountability and that's where it is. So it's accountability of the private...

54: TÊTE-À-TÊTE with Deepali Gupta journalist and author Tata Vs Mistry: The Battle for India's greatest business empire

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
Journalists and PR professionals don't always trust each other, even though there is a mutual dependence - journalists are wary of spin, and the PR pro is worried about a negative angle or a hatchet job. However, it is possible to foster trust based on good ethics, respect and professionalism.
My guest Deepali Gupta is a journalist with nearly 2 decades of experience working with some of the most prestigious Indian and global publications (Indian Express, Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Economic Times). Deepali is also the author a book 'Tata vs Mistry'.
We reconnected when she moved to the UK last summer with her family; as diaspora forging a new relationship based on our shared stories, experiences and love of India.
She is not my typical guest, but I grew interested in talking to her when I read about how skewed the ratio is between men and women business authors. In the episode we also spoke about Deepali's journey to becoming a journalist covering finance, equity markets, conglomerates
👉🏾 Why she decided to write her first book on corporate India's growing up moment and biggest boardroom battle
👉🏾 How she prepared for it with material mostly available in public domain (approx 9000 pages of information)
👉🏾 And of course focus on some of the issues that she dealt with in her book on governance, trust, conflict, succession planning, independent directors, family run businesses
👉🏾 We also spoke about her experiences in the newsroom and what it takes to succeed as a female journalist
👉🏾 Her much delayed next book (due to COVID) and a new beginning in the UK
Memorable passages from the episode:
👉🏾Thank you so much for having me here. It's lovely to be here.
👉🏾 So I've been a journalist for a little less than two decades. I started with the Indian Express group, then went away to Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal and finally settled into a nice role at the Economic Times. I quit the Economic Times towards the end of 2018 with a mission to write a book.You know the outcome of that. It's called 'TATA vs MISTRY'.
And to be honest, I landed in journalism purely accidentally. I come from a family of professionals who are overachievers in their academic fields and I wasn't one of those. So even though the charter for me was perhaps to follow a PhD in physics or coding and science related. I don't think I fell in that category. So when I finished my college The Hindu group came and gave me an offer and said, well, you finished English literature, why don't you consider this as a profession. And that actually took me to St. Xavier's to go on and finish a post-graduation in journalism, per se.
In hindsight, there couldn't have been a better profession for me. But this was a field that gave me a foot in every door, it allowed me to ask questions. So I landed up covering technology from an enterprise perspective, from an innovation perspective. I covered pharmaceuticals and again, the jargon over there can be quite intimidating, but it's fun once you've gotten the hang of it. I did equity markets, financial policy, RBI policy. And that breadth of coverage kind of landed me into a role in mergers and acquisitions and conglomerates. And that of course is, like I said, it all sort of lines up to....
👉🏾 So to be honest this is a very welcoming profession for women, contrary to perceptions. When I joined journalism, the perception was that this is a dirty profession for loose girls, right? I don't think that I agree with that, I think that my experiences have all largely been clean. Yes, you have that occasional brush, but I think that's true in life in general. So my newsrooms have always been clean, it's been a great arena to foster conversation, to foster intellectual thought and I do think that you are seen as a peer in the newsroom.
That said, I think the hours are needed and at some point in your life, in my case, I went through maternity and there is a lean period. But I don't think that you can grudge anyone else putting in more hours than you. Your focus had changed, you went away and did something else and then you came back to it. By the time you have come back to it, if you're writing regularly, then you continue to get that much more. Breaking back into that feels like you're reinventing the wheel, but I mean that's par for the course, it's true for any profession. I think journalism is one of those professions, also because it's public, you can always very openly collate what your success rate has been. But it's a great profession for women.
👉🏾 Okay, so let's go back to the journey. Now I've been writing on TATA companies from the beginning of my career. I mean, if you track finance in India, then it's very hard to not write about a TATA company, they're in everything. And I think from TCS in tech to TATA Chemicals they're everywhere. So, I've written about various TATA companies throughout my career. In 2016 when all of this was unfolding, I was very actively involved with covering an issue that the group was having with their Japanese partner in the telecom ventures. And this was NTT DoCoMo, and it was a very bitter feud which was going on between the Japanese partner and the TATA group about settling some arrears on equity. It was bitter to the point that governments had been involved. I mean, the prime ministers of the two countries had had a conversation about it.
👉🏾 So I was in the thick of that and on the Friday before the final firing, I got a call from a source saying watch out for Monday - I can't say anymore and he hung up the phone. And I said, watch out for Monday? Okay, let me go back and think about it, and I said, well this has to relate to TATA DoCoMo. So I went through my entire contact book, and I didn't find anything, there was no major development going on in TATA vs DoCoMo. Then it just sort of passed right, the weekend came around, we got busy with other things. And then Monday came, the board meeting was scheduled for Monday. But it didn't seem like anything was going to happen, because prior to the board meeting there was no announcement. So I flagged to someone in my office that, you know, just keep an eye out, there’s this is board meeting going on, something may come from it. And I went away to another meeting at an office and I'm sitting with this executive and in his office, on one wall is a television screen, which is running a ticker.
👉🏾 My phone is kept on the table, suddenly my phone buzzes and buzzes and then on the ticker it says, 'Cyrus Mistry fired.' And the person says, "You journalists, you write anything to be able to get an exclusive look at this. I mean, how can Cyrus Mistry be fired?" and I mean, to be honest, nobody had ever thought something like that would happen, that too at such short notice and my phone continues to buzz. So I said, you know what, I'm really sorry to cut our meeting short, but let me just step out and take this. And so I stepped out and it was in fact a firing and the release was a one-line release, "As of tomorrow, he will not be coming back to office". So I rushed back to my office and then, of course, the next day battle lines were drawn.
👉🏾 So it was just one of those stories, you know, stakes were high, drama was high. But more importantly, this turned out to be a churn of stories for a period of three or four months, where every day it was a front-page article about what was going on and who was saying, what about the group and there were leaks from inside. There were sources who were calling us up to say, well, you know, have you looked at this aspect? Really, really involved on the day-to-day coverage of what was unfolding. And two years later, by the time the judgment came out, the dust had kind of settled, people didn't remember, it took all of us a minute and a Google search to be able to go back and see what it was that the key points were. So when we looked at that first judgment of the NCLT that came out - in my mind this was a growing-up moment for corporate India, it spanned well beyond the TATA group. And that was the reason why I decided to pick up the subject.
👉🏾 So the starting point was my very first interview when I phoned up this gentleman and I said, I want to write on this subject, I wanted it to be chronicled for what it was. Can I come in and have a chat with you? And the interview was fantastic, he gave me wonderful quotes and he gave me a lot of salacious gossip. And then I got up and I said, thank you very much. It was lovely talking to you. He said, but you must remember one thing. This entire interview was off the record and if it ever comes back to me, then I will say that I never spoke to you or have never met you. And at that point, you know, it was one hour of complete, you know, I was rubbing my hands one minute and I was on the floor in a puddle in the second. But that kind of made me realise that everything needs to be corroborated, everything needs to be chronicled and everything needs to be documented very carefully if I was going to write on this subject.
👉🏾 And so began the research process, the first step was to go to the libraries and because both of these are very, very old established business houses. The older libraries, like the Asiatic society and some of the other ones in Mumbai, do actually have a longish chronicle of what has happened with them. I went and made friends in strange offices, like the charity commissioner of Mumbai. It's this little, slightly dilapidated office, which is dusty and has a whole lot of peons running around. And it has only manual records, nothing digital. But it has all the records of the TATA Trusts, which kind of oversee the TATA business, they have a majority stake in Tata Sons. So I went and I frequented that office a fair deal to bring out some of the establishment deeds of the trusts and some of the public disclosures that are made there. Newspaper archives were my friends.
👉🏾 My PR colleagues were really surprised cause I called up a couple of them and I said, well, you know what? I'd like to interview you, you've been in the thick of things. But of course, I couldn't tell them why I wanted to meet them on the phone because by this point, I wasn't sure anymore how much scrutiny was going through. So I just told them that, can we meet? And one of them actually came with a list of possible things that could have gone wrong with me, that they would want to correct. And I said, well you know what, no, I have no complaints. I actually want the tables to be flipped for a change where I'm asking you questions and I want you to tell me what your experiences have been.
👉🏾 And then of course came the lawyers who are so suave and who knew exactly how to spin you around in circles. But I did get some pointed answers even in those legal offices. And so by the time I was done, I had plenty of information, a pile of about 9,000 pages worth of documents and of course all the other books and papers, which I had collated. So it was reasonably well documented by the time I got around that.
👉🏾 At the very base I would say the issue was of communication. At its most basic, but I think if you take it to the next level, I think it's a matter of perspective. Ideally in any organisation, you want the maverick innovation of Steve jobs, as well as the financial prudence of Jack Welch. But, in real life, those two managerial positions are at contravention to each other. What happened was the difference between a promoter's perspective and a professional's perspective. The TATA group has historically never been one to chase profits. They've always chased, futuristic planning, cutting edge technology. If you look at their charter, which dates back to the early 1900s, the charter is to further science in India. The charter is to create innovation in India and it's not so much balancing out profits, and therefore the point of view that the previous chairman of TATA have come at the group, has always been that of innovation and of fostering growth at perhaps the cost of profit.
👉🏾 Now if you look at it, Cyrus Mistry was the very first non-TATA family Chairman to come and take that seat. And by this time the group is so large that it's answerable to stakeholders. Not just shareholders, but there are banks involved there are international arms involved, there are governments involved, and therefore he has to come at it from a professional perspective. And therein lies the need to meet profit focus, to meet shareholder expectations, to have image building. And just before this entire firing, there is this article that The Economist has written about flab in the TATA group. And that Cyrus Mistry has been unable to cut that flab back. And you know, what the shareholder community is expecting is very different from what the traditional point of view has been. And therefore, I think if you were to ask me, where was the single point of failure in that relationship? I think it is this, I think that they are not coming at the problem from the same perspective.
👉🏾 So let's analyse a little bit about what the succession process was for the TATA group. Why was Cyrus Mistry chosen to be the person to succeed Ratan Tata. At the end of the day, that list of 14 people who were being interviewed, included the CEO of Pepsi globally, the co-chair of Deutsche bank. So why was Cyrus Mistry a better fit for the role than some of these other people? And I think the answer to that lies in what is documented in the minutes of the board meeting, where he's appointed to say, well he's the outsider insider. He's not someone who is completely from the outside, but at the same time, he is not completely on the inside. And while that was supposed to work out rather well, it also put him again in the wrong place because there's the founder perspective, who's thinking, well he understands this perspective and he'll fall in line, and there is the shareholder perspective, who's thinking, well, he's an outsider, he's not an insider, therefore he will think about it in a different way. So it does put him in that spot.
👉🏾 And as succession goes, therefore, what is the process? Now the process itself of selecting him was rather strange. He was a committee member on the selection team. He was not supposed to be a candidate at all. He was someone who was interviewing candidates.
I mean if you're looking at family succession, for instance. The child of a promoter is often involved with many of these things. Therefore, can you say that this is an independent selection and an independent succession plan? And it's not necessary that it's always the best thing for the company. In many cases, it is better to get a family member who will be passionate and who will think about the company as their baby, rather than a professional who is looking to get a salary and then check some boxes and get on with life, right? So the fact that all the eggs of a promoter are in the basket - the organisation, may actually play to the strength of the organisation. Therefore, every organisation has to consider which process, but the mingling of the process is probably not a good idea. It's either an independent process where you get a professional chief or from the outset, you set out to say, well, this is going to be a family thing.
👉🏾 So that's the process of selection. And of course, it also opened up the process that companies could follow. Things that can go wrong, things that they should be wary of. So this was a big lesson in succession planning, and I think any other group would not have been taken as seriously, but because the TATA group is associated with its transparency and its generally good governance practices, they tend to set a precedent for everyone to follow. This was a widely watched succession.
👉🏾 Conflicts are inevitable. I mean, if there's human emotion involved and often there is especially in promoter driven companies, then conflicts are inevitable. But things that organisations can do is to put in place a mechanism of how to address these conflicts, if they do come up. For instance, there can be a sort of a blueprint on when there is a disagreement between management and the board. What steps will be taken, perhaps there's a third party evaluation that needs to happen between what the board is saying and what the management is saying. That said the chief way of resolving any conflict is communication and understanding, mutual understanding because the board is still dependent on what the management discloses to it. No matter how deep the board may want to get into the details of the organisation, it is it's key directors or key executives that control the flow of that information. So in some cases, what companies do is to create multiple lines of reporting. So for instance apart from the CEO, the chief legal officer and the chief financial officer have separate dotted lines to the board. But again, it comes down to the same thing. It comes down to resolving conflicts with communication and full disclosure.
👉🏾 So what leaders can do to foster this, is one ensure that there is completely open communication between various levels within the organisation, ensure that there is some sort of a one-on-one rapport that gets set up, between the top few echelons of the organisation. Failing these, there is always the option of third party mediation and of course at all points in time what safeguards any organisation is to let the independent directors in fact be independent. Instead of trying to partner them and have offline meetings or build consensus, if independent directors can be allowed to have their own views and their own thoughts without perhaps being at the risk of being axed from the board, then they themselves can become mediators for when there is a conflict such as the ones that we've seen.
👉🏾 There are a few examples but I don't think that they are publicly disclosed. I mean, conflicts can arise for the strangest of reasons. In 2017 I think there was a Kotak committee report which said, well part of good corporate governance is creating a succession plan and that created endless amount of conflict. I mean, it was a really uncomfortable scene for many boards, because the other board members had to nominate a potential successor for someone who was sitting in the room and who would probably not agree with a potential successor. In some cases,...

53: The Age of Responsibility with Dr Mukund Rajan

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
It's a new year, a new day and The Elephant in the Room podcast is ready with its first episode of 2022. My guest Dr Mukund Rajan is the Chairman of Ecube, an investment advisory focused on transforming the climate and ESG landscape in India.
The focus of this freewheeling conversation in this episode is around ESG and Dr Rajan's latest book 'Outlast - how ESG can benefit your business' which he co-authored with Col Rajeev Kumar
We also spoke about the drivers for change including climate and environmental exigencies and changing stakeholder expectations👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Demystifying the jargon around ESG
👉🏾 The value of organisational 'Purpose' in the 'Age of responsibility'
👉🏾 ESG as a transformation trend that will enable companies and countries to meet their development goals
👉🏾 Big issues that corporate India can champion in building a fairer workplace and society
👉🏾 ESG as a competitive advantage and a race to the top and those who are getting it right
👉🏾 Linking ESG performance to executive compensation
👉🏾 Preparing for internal and external disruptions
👉🏾 Can be put ESG in the driving seat to drive social impact and sustainability when funds are essentially driven by profits?
Memorable passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
👉🏾 Well, the book itself is I think quite straightforward in terms of the partnerships. So HarperCollins published my previous book, The Brand Custodian, and they proposed the idea of a book on ESG, which was beginning to get a lot of currency in India. They jumped on it and said, they'd be happy to publish.
In fact, I understand this is the first book on ESG in India, that's come out. Colonel Rajiv Kumar was my colleague in the Tatas and when I was the brand custodian at Tatas, we both worked on a whole bunch of issues and also saw a number of ESG crises, up close and in person. So when he retired from the group, we had sort of made a mutual commitment that we'd write something together. And here we are I think almost two years after we made that pact and we've got a book out.
👉🏾 The subject itself is one that, as I said, is gaining a lot of currency. But, in 2018 you know, I left the Tatas and I started my own firm called Ecube. And Ecube as a name suggests is drawn from three E's Engage and Empower for ESG. The whole idea of the firm was to really support the transition of corporate India towards better ESG performance. And critical drivers at the time that my co-founders and I saw were, obviously a lot of the focus in corporate governance, that was happening in India, but equally growing concerns about climate change as a major issue within the E of ESG. So we really thought the Indian market would be getting ready for much greater focus on ESG issues. And thanks to a lot of the research and the reading one was doing, it made sense to put all this in a book form and make it available to a wider audience.
👉🏾 So, the two go hand in hand Sudha. And you know, as I mentioned in the book, I sort of outlined the way in which this whole focus on corporate responsibility, on concerns around sustainable development has really been evolving over the last few decades. But certainly human kinds ability to go into outer space and looking at the earth as a tiny blue marble from outer space reminded everyone that there is only this one Earth that we all share. And then going forward into the 1980s, you had the Brundtland report, which made the concept of sustainable development famous. Then in the 1990s, you had the Rio Earth summit, the increasing focus on global environmental issues, big developments. I think towards the late eighties and early nineties, obviously the collapse of the Soviet Union and from a world which is sort of fragmented and polarised between, you know, the non-aligned nations, the Western block, the Eastern block, you had this gradual tendency moving towards one interdependent global market. So I think in the context of all of these developments there’s been much greater light that has been shined on what is the role of the private sector, businesses and corporates in the context of the kind of new society that's emerging. And obviously greater integration interdependency and also the fact that technology is coming to your help now on a variety of issues, means there are more choices that could be made in terms of the way in which we are to take development forward.
👉🏾 In all of that context, I feel that really we are now poised at a new sort of juncture in human history where there's much more information available, with all kinds of stakeholders, the public thanks to the ubiquity of the worldwide web, has much greater access to information. And therefore the demands for accountability from corporates are much greater now. And therefore this is a new age of responsibility where if you're not careful, you can upset stakeholders in some part of the world, and pretty soon see your business, your market share collapse. And that's one of the points we make in the book, that Indian corporates, I don't think have yet sort of woken up in large numbers to how swiftly the terrain is changing. It's a bit akin to what we saw 30 years back in India 1991 when you had the economic reforms in India, evolved from really a socialist economy, scarcity economy into one that's as much akin to a free market economy. And at that juncture, many corporates that weren't prepared for change really, bit the dust and this time around as well, if companies don't understand the expectation that stakeholders, not just in India, but overseas, including deep-pocketed investors have from them, they could stand to lose out big time, so it is a new age of responsibility.
👉🏾 On the question of purpose, you know, I have a quote in my book which interestingly enough is actually Larry Finks quote at BlackRock. And I think probably it's the best sort of definition I've seen of what purpose can do for businesses. So it's something that really is quite profound. So he says "Profits are essential, if a company is to effectively serve all of its stakeholders over time, not only shareholders, but also employees, customers, and communities. Similarly, when a company truly understands and expresses its purpose, it functions with the focus and strategic discipline that drive long-term profitability. Purpose unifies management, employees, and communities. It drives ethical behaviour and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders. Purpose guides culture, provides a framework for consistent decision making and ultimately helps sustain long-term financial returns for the shareholders of your company".
👉🏾 I think that's the best example I've seen of what purpose can do for businesses. So you're quite right that it's integral to this whole idea of us moving into this age of responsibility and companies that are not purpose-driven, that don't have a clue about why they are here and which stakeholders that you are really tending to serve, to the best of the ability through their products and services. I think it will very quickly sort of get found out. So I think it's critical to explaining to your audience, you know, what you really stand for.
👉🏾 So SDG is another acronym. So there is this whole mess of acronyms out there that have a lot of people scratching their head, wondering what these all really mean. But no, think it's all part and parcel of this evolution that we are seeing. So call it by whatever name you want, the fundamental point is that - there is an expectation of corporate responsibility whether it's expressed through your commitment to different sustainable development goals. Whether it's expressed through your demonstration of performance, on what are called material ESG issues, nobody's expecting every company to be equally good across the spectrum of ESG issues, but those that are material to your industry, you should be good on those.
👉🏾 I think that expectation is now qualitatively different and more measurable than perhaps at any previous point in human history. Like I mentioned, the availability of information is so widespread now, that if you have a plant in a muffasil area in India for instance that suddenly starts leaking emissions on big scale, this is something that can get protest as far away as the United States and stakeholders will take action. That is qualitatively different from the kind of impacts that you would have seen say 30, 40 years back. And because of technology also, people have the tools now to do something about these issues.
👉🏾 So I think the visibility, the scrutiny, all of them are qualitatively different of a much higher order. And the expectation of accountability therefore is also of a much higher order. And ultimately it's back to basics, right? We're expected to live the right values, we're expected to comply with the law, you're expected to do your part in really contributing to society and to the development of the community. That's what sustainable development is all about. You want to leave the world a better place than what you inherited. Otherwise, future generations are going to be extremely critical and upset. We've already seen that in the behaviour of millennials these days, much more environmentally sensitive and conscious.
👉🏾 The good news is, I think governments are beginning to be responsive, they're understanding that civil society has these concerns. If anything the last couple of years, thanks to COVID, I think a lot more people, that are much more in tune with nature and understand, you know, the context in which we've been allowed really to impose the natural environment. So I think governments are also now beginning to play their role with regulation, with policies that are on the whole, I think, proving to be more beneficial. We saw at Glasgow, whole bunch of governments coming together and talking the right talk about what they want to do to avert climate change.
👉🏾 And we are all in this together, I think that's the one big thing that global environmental issues have really done for us. The fact that, very similar to the same stance we take on COVID, nobody is safe until everybody is safe. You can't deal with the global environmental issue unless everybody collaborates. So I think that need for collaboration means that there are many more agents of change who are keeping an eye on what's going on and trying to collaboratively engineer the changes that are going to be important if human kind to survive in the long term.
👉🏾 So I go back to the point about materiality. I think every business when it thinks about its ESG impact and where it wants to or needs to improve, we look at what is relevant to its business. And on the S, I mean, the S is a combinations, it's essentially social. So the combination of elements that may be relevant to the people within your business, your employees, for instance. In India contract labour is a big issue for instance. And it applies to the communities around you and outside stakeholders that you impact the human beings who live in those communities.
👉🏾 So you really have to decide, you know, what kind of organisation you are, where you have the greatest impact, what kinds of communities you need to engage with, and what kind of performance you want to demonstrate going forward. Pick out the most material issues, and then focus on those. So in India for manufacturing, for instance, I think contract labour is a major issue.
👉🏾 That terms and conditions under which many, many people labour and work are quite unfair a lot of the time. They work under contractors who don't necessarily provide them the benefits they're meant to under the law, that could be a big issue. The complexion of the workforce which is part of your organisation is another big issue. In India as I pointed in the book, two major challenges that you see across the board, one is gender diversity and the other is recruitment of members of the scheduled caste, scheduled tribe communities. Again you'll see that in the power structure, whether it's corporate India, whether it's the judiciary, whether it's a representation in parliament. These communities, women, the SC-ST communities, the physically challenged are all very, very poorly represented.
👉🏾 So if you want a more equitable society, if you want a more equitable framework in which stakeholders are willing to support what you stand for, you need to do something about where do you see a gross sort of inequality and I think many companies can do a lot of things to address these issues. Starting with the recruitment policies, the kind of support to provide people within the workforce, the kind of encouragement they give and to some extent affirmative action. So I think there's a range of things that you can do once you've identified really where you as a company are operating and where you can have the greatest impact and influence.
👉🏾 And not enough companies actually apply their minds to that, they sort of take the situation as something that exists and do very little change it. And my proposition is, if you don't start interesting yourself in the kind of society you are already living within, pretty soon you could see social strife, and in a country like India with the levels of inequality and poverty, it's not surprising that you've had many sort of situations where local communities have erupted in defiance of the operations of a particular corporation and that doesn't bode well for the future. So before it's too late. I think all businesses need to really understand the context in which they're operating and do more to show that they really are caring and concerned about the future.
👉🏾 No, absolutely not. I don't think it has anything to do with your stage of development as a market or an economy. I think these principles, I mean take human rights, for instance, I don't think it matters whether you're a rich country or a poor country. Human rights are human rights and should be respected regardless. And India, I think has so much work to do. I mean, take the issue of affirmative action in particular, in favour of schedule caste, schedule tribes. You know, you go back around almost 14 years to the 2006, 2007 period, when you had the UPA government at the centre and there was a lot of talk at that time about potentially instituting reservation in the private sector.
👉🏾 You already have reservation in the public sector for schedule caste, scheduled tribe communities. But there was talk about introducing it for the private sector. And then you saw a flurry of activity for a few years when India corporates tried to put their best foot forward in order to avoid government action, legislating this kind of reservation. But somehow the tempo has been lost after that. So some of these issues are not new. They are well understood, they're well known. Take the issue of gender diversity again there are World Bank studies that actually demonstrate that female participation in the labour force has actually shrunk by 5% in the last 20 years.
👉🏾 So this is not something that we were unaware of 20 years back, and it's not gotten better, it's gotten worse over time. So I don't think your stage of development has anything to do with this. I think it's just a function of one legislative pressure. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in my book, too often corporate India responds when the heavy hand of governments suddenly looms large. And until then they sort of coast along doing very little, there are obviously honourable exceptions to this, including some of India's largest firms. I was privileged to be part of the Tata group for 23 years and I know that in Tatas a lot of these issues are taken very seriously and the group tries to do its best. But there is enough scope for Indian businesses to change and as I keep repeating in the book, if they don't realise that these concerns are becoming quite strong and change fast I think they will have a very heavy price to pay.
👉🏾 Absolutely and that's a big worry, but you know, I mean each corporate house in India, the largest companies are controlled mostly by some of these corporate houses. I think they're beginning to get it and most of them are trying to do something about it. If I take an issue like climate change now as a major ESG issue, I can see that a lot of, at least the larger companies which also have significant exposure overseas, they have footprints in other markets they're aware of trends around the globe. I think many of those businesses are really putting their best foot forward, being quite smart about the way they're thinking about business in the future, trying to put in place strategies to address the climate change issue. I mean, one of the best examples is India's largest private sector company Reliance Industries, despite being in the oil and gas space, has announced 2035 target to get to net zero. Talking about deploying huge amount of investment in new spaces like green hydrogen. So I think the larger companies probably already get it, and are beginning to do the right thing.
👉🏾 As you go into the small and medium enterprise space, I think you have many more challenges. Many of these businesses don't have, the surplus capital to be able to make the right investments. They don't have the kind of exposure which large corporates do to international trends. They often don't know what the best new technologies that are emerging, where they can be procured, which ones they should take a bet on, what kind of risks they're embracing. And that's the space where I really worry about the future that, many of the smaller businesses you know, how quickly can they adapt to these new changes and if they're also at risk of getting excluded from the entire commercial process going forward. There are already suggestions that you're seeing increasing concentration take place in the Indian economy with the big getting bigger, particularly after COVID and the introduction of the GST regulations, the formalisation of the economy. And this is a trend you're seeing in other markets also. A lot of the tech firms now are so big, they're giants with trillion-dollar plus market...

52: My first year of podcasting with Sudha Singh

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
Something to celebrate before winding down for 2021. The Elephant in the Room podcast is a year old (slightly over actually:) 💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽 When I launched The Elephant in the Room last year, I knew that it was going to be a weekly podcast - that is the sum total of what I knew for certain. Beyond determination and hard work there was nothing else to recommend me or The Elephant in the Room. But, here we are 52 weeks later ......... And what a fantastic journey it has been 💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽
I am full of gratitude for how far in my learning journey I have come, because people were willing and supportive of a newbie podcaster like me. I would like to thank each and every one of my guests for being an enabler, willing to share their knowledge and learning.
With eagerness and anticipation I am now, looking forward to embarking on the next 52 weeks - to continuing to push the agenda on inequity and exclusion in our industry, in our workplaces, in society and in our personal lives. And to ensuring that I stay true and rooted in the purpose of the podcast.  But, before that I am going to take a break, the year has been brutal and it has taken a toll on all of us including me. I am going to revive and recuperate with my cheerleaders (my wonderful children), count my blessings and be back in the new year with some exciting announcements.
Meanwhile, if you are passionate about doing something, step forward and seize the moment. If I can, you can.......Don't let fear stop you.
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Hey everyone, welcome back to the 52nd episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast. I really wanted to use this opportunity to review the past year. And what a momentous year it has been, with unexpected highs and some expected lows; of amazing friendships and brilliant networks; of saying yes to many things and being assertive about saying 'No'; of speaking up and leaving the reticence behind; of being awake and mindful to doing good and being a facilitator for positive change; of trying to rid myself and others of self limiting beliefs and giving myself the permission to fly. Yes, it has been a wonderful journey and I am full of gratitude.
👉🏾 A year and some days ago I launched The Elephant in the Room podcast. I was nervous, as expected and there was a huge amount of trepidation in my mind about launching the podcast. It was to do with the purpose of the podcast - this was to be my learning & listening project, but it was also an opportunity to create a platform for people to speak about their lived experiences, hear from experts on issues that are taboo and deserve to be mainstream. Did I have what it takes to successfully run such a huge project - to make a commitment to turn up week after week with good content; stories that people wanted to hear; advise that people would want to take on board. Would I be able to attract listeners and followers with my credentials and credibility? Then there was the sheer logistics, background research on the topics, identifying and lining up guests week after week, the technology - what sort of mic should I have; what platforms should I host the podcast on; what were the steps...... It all seemed liked a lot of risk to take; too much learning to do; too much faff....
👉🏾 What kept me focused was the accountability to Janet Murray's wonderful network that I have had the privilege to be a part of. Janet is a fabulous leader, who believes in leading by example - she is committed, hard working and is constantly engaged in trying to figure out how best to bring value to the members in the network. In times when we are a bit lost, there is something to be said about being a part of something bigger - which helps you take one step after the other. So, definitely a big shout out to Janet. And I don't have to repeat how horrible COVID has been for people across the world especially for marginalised communities. For me it helped me focus my mind on my newly founded purpose; launch my podcast The Elephant in the Room and also my consultancy The Purpose Room. What was incredible was that I did not get asked questions anymore, on why I had decided to launch a virtual consultancy - the move to virtual workings and meetings validated my conviction about the future of work being hybrid.
👉🏾 I don't think it was just for me but the year has been hyper busy - perhaps it was to do with the uncertainty; the constant state of flux... There was a sense of urgency. It felt like everything needed to be done as of yesterday. Like millions of people across the world I spent an inordinate amount of time learning. This was fuelled to some extent because we had opened up our world to possibilities and also perhaps because we had taken back some time. And that has been great all around, everybody comes out a winner.
👉🏾 Continuous learning and upskilling is how organisations have kept or are keeping employees up to speed with the necessary skills to do their jobs efficiently in the world today, but are also equipping the workforce with future skills. And it has been a great way to keep them committed and engaged. It has not been smooth sailing all the way, we know that organisations have had to adapt their employee learning portfolio, some things have fallen by the wayside but on others there has been a huge opportunity for innovation., which is very important for organisations. But it is also important for organisations to be conscious of the fact that not everyone has had the time or the mind space or the drive to engage in learnings. The last year is strewn with anecdotal accounts of people being burnt out and struggling with just getting by from one day to the next. Smart organisations will keep that in mind while designing future learning programmes.
👉🏾 In 2018 when I was forced to reassess my professional life because of the barriers to entry as well as progress for leaders like me, I decided to hit the pause button. It was a deeply depressing time, full of angst but I was forced to consider the good that came off it. The pause gave me time to focus on some very important personal issues but also freed me up to make commitments that I had been thinking about for the longest time but not acting on. People of colour and particularly women are shy about bringing attention to themselves with conversations about gender, race or colour, leadership. While, my clients and teams will know me as a confident articulate person, I have always been hesitant to draw any attention to myself and keep out of the spotlight.
👉🏾 As a leader my advice to peer groups, colleagues and friends has been face your fears and last year I decided to follow my own advice. I stepped into active volunteering and made a commitment that henceforth I would spend a percentage of my time using my knowledge to do better and be better. To supporting things I was passionate about - that is when I became an advisor to PRADAN; a volunteer campaign champion on Justice for Rohingya Children for Save the Children; and last year I put my hand up to be a founding member of the Race and Ethnicity Equity Board at the PRCA and this year to be the Co-Chair of the PRCA Equity & Inclusion Advisory Council. It has been an incredibly rewarding journey and I cannot think of a better use of my time.
👉🏾 Letting go of the idea of a linear career path to leadership, is one of the hardest things I have had to do in my life. The idea that an alternate and equally or more satisfying career existed was not something I was ever interested in exploring. To a large extent I would say that was to do with me being generally risk averse; or fearing the unknown. It is also to do with our socialisation, our culture which creates that bind for us. For most people their identity is largely tied to their work or occupation, to what they own and what they earn. In hindsight that seems like a totally messed up way to define ourselves. But, it took me two to three years to unlearn and create a new path for myself and to accept that that there are different routes to leadership and fulfilment; embrace my identity; my choices and also my newly founded purpose. I discovered that in my 50s purpose has a very different meaning to what it was a decade ago. Now, it is about being intentional and authentic towards reaching a desired goal, towards challenging the status quo. In my 30s and 40s(like millions of other women) my purpose was about maintaining the status quo for fear of upsetting the fragile balance that is our daily lives. Today, it is something that drives me to be brave, to dream, to push the envelope every single day on things that matter.
👉🏾 As I look back to the year gone by, I take a moment to pause and reflect on the purpose of The Elephant in the Room podcast, the what, the why and the how. Most podcasts start with the end goal of monetising the podcast. Since money did not enter the equation for me - it freed me up, in a sense that I was neither chasing numbers, awards, nor sponsors. A key principle for me, has been since I conceived the idea or I thought of the idea of starting a podcast, was to not compromise on the integrity of my endeavour - so no sponsors or partners - telling me what to do or stymieing my style:) Like I have said earlier, The Elephant in the Room is my listening and learning project. And how brilliant is it that I get to share this learning with everyone. The end goal for me is to ensure that I am able to get in diverse voices on issues that are important for me but also for broader society. So, brilliant most of the time. But, occasionally it has been difficult putting in all the hard work and not seeing any money flow from it. I am aware that this has to do with our attitude; our conditioning, our expectations. Of course, the ubiquitous social media and the need to compare does make it harder. However, I am very happy to say that these were momentary blips - I have a mantra, and my purpose written down in bold and upper case and I review it when I feel overwhelmed and that helps me get back on track. You could try it:)
👉🏾 So, 52 weeks later, it is not difficult for me to encapsulate the good that came from launching the podcast - there is not just one thing, there are many , many good things actually. There has been so much learning from each of my guests, the topics we have covered, the issues we have discussed - whether it is to do with racism; climate change; inequality; inclusive leadership; purpose; fairness; equity............the learning has been phenomenal. Since The Elephant in the Room is a weekly podcast it has meant that I need to reach out to people who I admire, but in my previous avatar would have never dreamed of talking to. It has meant feeling uncomfortable asking people for their time, to believe in what I was doing or trying to do. The learning is that people are kind, generous and supportive - I cannot thank my guests enough for taking a chance on a newbie podcaster like me. One of the biggest positives for me has been the discipline that is required to turn up week after week - it's a lot of hard work. I edit the transcripts, create the show notes, the social media posts, the updates to the guests - there is no work around that. But, when it is done there is a sense of pride and achievement. And I love, absolutely love, hearing feedback from people - it is motivating and energising.
👉🏾 I say this all the time but the last year has reaffirmed my faith in humanity. I truly believe that the world is full of wonderful people - kind; generous; who open their hearts and mind to you. And along the way I have met with amazing and brilliant people who blew my mind with their knowledge and more importantly empathy. For every one person who rejected the offer to be a guest, I had two who were happy to come with me on the journey; who were willing to share their knowledge and experience. The Elephant in the Room podcast would not be what it is, and I would not achieved my purpose if these wonderful human beings had not made the time for me - so forever grateful for their contribution and getting us to where we are today in our first year.
👉🏾 A lot of people ask me if I had everything figured out when I launched the podcast.
Ha ha, and I would like to say, No, Not at all. I had misgivings right until the time I published the first episode.
I am a big planner. If I could I would plan my life to within an inch, I would.
So, I was nervous about the technology; the actual recording; the entire process because all of it was new to me. Should I use a mic, should I not use a mic? What platform should I record on - some of the decision making on this was taken away from my hands due to COVID - which was wonderful - I did not have to think of a recording suite after that.
The Intro/Outros; the name; who was going to be the first guest, who would be the right choice for this episode or that episode; the format, Q&A or just talking. I knew for certain that I did not want seasons; that I wanted to have a weekly podcast because that was the commitment I wanted to make.
👉🏾 So big No, I did not have everything figured out on the podcast or when I launched my consultancy The Purpose Room. I am still figuring some things out; learning; adapting; fine tuning every single day. And I think, it is okay to do that and give ourselves the permission to do that. We often let the fear of failure and the unknown hold us back - my advise, if you feel passionately about something go do it - at best it will be a success, at its worst you will know it doesn't work. The truth is - the learning and experience will set you free. Free to not be held back by your fears.
👉🏾 Aside from the occasional angst, I can confidently say that The Elephant in the Room podcast was the single biggest thing that gave me a sense of pride and also satisfaction. Does that mean that I have everything right and have everything figured it all out? Of course not. So, I am going to try and do better on all aspects, on topics, guests, how we engage with the content, how we reach more listeners and perhaps enter an award or two - though I am not entirely convinced. But, what I can say with utmost confidence is that I will work hard to do my best. And I am looking forward to announcing some exciting content partnership in the new year. The partnership will help The Elephant in the Room live up to its commitment to mainstream conversations that deserve to be mainstream, for how critical they are to all our lives.
👉🏾 In the first year The Elephant in the Room podcast was about new and diverse voices on issues of inequality and inequity. We are getting into year two with a bit more structure, more focus on best practice; success stories; pushing the agenda on women leadership; ageism; climate change etc and at all times considering all of the above through an intersectional lens. There is tons of exciting stuff and I am looking forward to the next 52 weeks. But, before that I am going to take a break to recover from the exhaustion and the continuous need to be present; I spend quality time with my children who are my constant cheerleaders, reinvigorate and renew. I will be dropping in new episodes during the coming weeks but meanwhile, take a break, breathe in and relax. Adieu, Au revoir and Namaste from The Elephant in the Room podcast
Follow Sudha Singh on:
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudha-singh-424ba53/
Twitter: @Sudha1404
Podcast: The Elephant in the Room : https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396
Website: https://thepurposeroom.org/
Important Links:
👉🏾 https://www.provokemedia.com/ranking-and-data/innovator-25/innovator-25-2021/innovator-25-emea-2021
👉🏾 https://www.provokemedia.com/ranking-and-data/innovator-25/innovator-25-2021/innovator-25-emea-2021/sudha-singh
👉🏾 https://www.vuelio.com/uk/blog/fairer-representations-of-disability-in-pr-starting-the-conversation-with-mark-webb-and-sudha-singh/
👉🏾 https://www.communicatemagazine.com/industry-updates/moves/2021/sudha-singh-annoucned-co-chair-of-prca-diversity-network/
👉🏾 https://www.prca.org.uk/REEB-Story-QandA-Sudha-Singh
👉🏾 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396?i=1000536469957

51: How indigenous people can be climate champions on the road to a low carbon economy in India: A conversation with Satyabrata Acharyya PRADAN

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 06:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:
It is a fact that across the world indigenous people are on the frontline of climate crisis, they are particularly vulnerable to the extremes of climate change. Deforestation, unseasonal rains and shrinking water supplies are already impacting their precarious livelihoods. As a follow-up to my conversation with the World Benchmarking Alliance on a 'Just Transition' I spoke with Satyabrata Acharayya a veteran at PRADAN, working with indigenous communities in 7 of the poorest states in India. I was keen to understand what governments, multi-laterals, donors and the third sector are doing to articulate and embed concerns of indigenous people within India's roadmap to a low carbon economy.
We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 COP26 and expectations
👉🏾 Feminisation of Indian farming; women farmers bearing the brunt of climate change
👉🏾 The Tribal Panchsheel Policy; understanding the importance of ownership of natural resources for indigenous communities and the potential benefits.
👉🏾 Role of India's indigenous people in sustainable management of resources and being at the forefront of battle against climate change
👉🏾 The high demand from developed countries and the private sector to align with partners for carbon sequestration (offsetting). And exploring sequestration as a concept sustainable for the communities that PRADAN works with
👉🏾 We also spoke about how India's National livelihoods programmes that currently offers financial support or livelihoods to the most vulnerable in India can help them in the fight against the climate crisis;
👉🏾 PRADAN's projects that are designed to mitigate the challenges of climate change and the partners on the journey.
Want to learn more, listen here?
Memorable Passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you so much Sudha for this opportunity extended to me. Thank you so very much.
👉🏾 I am a Satyabrata Acharyya, I work in an organisation called PRADAN, which stands for the acronym Professional Assistance for Development Action(PRADAN). So PRADAN is a pioneering initiative in India that tried to professionalize development sector, especially in civil society space. So it was formed in the year 1983. I did my masters in agriculture and then I joined PRADAN. So PRADAN has operations across, mainly in the central as well as eastern Indian region. So I joined in Bihar which is now Jharkhand. So I continued in Jharkhand in that region for almost 26 years. I worked with tribals, I worked with forest dwelling communities and a large number of women. Currently I'm based out of PRADANs head office. I anchor PRADANs operations across locations.
👉🏾 You see, this way of industrialised growth this way of agriculture even our own lifestyles need to undergo changes. There is absolutely no doubt about it. It's now apparent that effects of climate change is quite apparent in our life. And especially those who are dependent on nature, a large number of farmers in India, I'm finding that they are really facing huge risk.
👉🏾 So I would say that, one of the outcomes would be that India should actually suggest changes as well as bring in investments especially for carbon sequestrations, especially for undergoing these kind of structural changes, moving towards more carbon-neutral kind of situation, so that's something which I am very eagerly looking forward to. As well as I would also say that this whole conference should actually make people aware of what are the different measures being thought of and it should also bring common people on board.
👉🏾 So the world is not aware of what's being discussed about this kind of climate change and the measures in the previous COPs, but this COP is something which is very important primarily for two reason. I think that COVID has made us very conscious about the way we are carrying out our lifestyle, our life, our agriculture, our industry, is the kind of economy growth that we are visualising. Something which everybody is understanding that large number of people are actually facing huge vulnerability, that is one. The second part is also about effects of climate change day by day becoming very prominent and it has started affecting lot of people. People specially living in the coastal regions, as well as people who are living in the peninsula region. So that's something which is very important. So I think that it requires a kind of a good awareness about how the world leadership, as well as the corporate is actually thinking about taking different measures.
👉🏾 It's a very important question. And I would say that there are two-three things which actually characterises, our client group. One is that we work with farmers and Indian farming, about 85 to 90% of the farmers are actually small and marginal farmers. So owning less than let's say two hectares of land many of them are actually owning less than one hectare of land. So they are marginal farmers, very large proportion. So any climate uncertainties are actually hugely affecting, this a group of people. So one way is that any uncertainties affect peoples, let's say food security, which is so basic to human existence, human life. And so food security is very deeply affected. Many people, I see that they're unable to meet their food requirement from their own production. So that is something which is extremely important.
👉🏾 Second is with the farm holdings are getting smaller over the years, as well as because of climate uncertainties, the income from farming has become so less and so unpredictable that the young people, specially the men, they are leaving their farmlands and moving to towns and cities, taking up jobs, as manual labourers. Some of them, who are better educated find, opportunities in the skilled sector, but most of the cases, people go there for doing manual job. Now the other part is, who actually then runs the farming system? So you can find that over the years, Indian farming has undergone considerable feminisation. So large number of women, you can find that it is predominantly in places where we were, like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, parts of West Bengal, large part of Bihar, while men migrate, the responsibility of running the small farms, these are fallen on the woman. And it has not come to the woman by design, it has come by default. So what has also happened is that they're not fully prepared, they don't know the technology, they're not adequately equipped with knowledge and skills. And on top of that, mainstream systems are also not, very aligned to support the woman.
👉🏾 So for instance, if I require access to credit the Kisan credit card, you know it requires land ownership. The women since they are not landowners they can't access Kisan credit card. They can't access subsidies from the government because they are not the owners of the land. They cannot access 'minimum support price' from the government because they are not registered farmers because to become registered farmers, you require land documents. So that's not in their names. So in several cases as I find that it requires a much more systemic approach in order to help the government understand that, Indian agriculture is facing a different reality and much of that agriculture is actually run by the women. And the women are also facing both on one hand, lack of knowledge and skills and access to government support. On the other hand, there are these terrible consequences of climate changes. So it is actually adding huge complexity and I find that people are losing food security, people are losing incomes besides losing access to water, losing access to good quality seeds.
👉🏾 So I would say that PRADAN has been always talking about the problems of small holder farmers, specially the way the small holdings are currently being managed and the kind of problems that the women they run the show, so that is one aspect. The second aspect is that how do you also invest more and more, organised public investments around conservation of water, conservation of soil, conservation of landscape, how do you plant more trees, how do you improve hydrology, how do you make the soil much more biologically active.
👉🏾 So these are the areas where PRADAN has been very systematically engaging with the government. And I think that these are the need of the hour. Besides at a later stage I will definitely talk about our experiences of carbon sequestration, which is now increasingly assuming importance in our intervention strategies.
👉🏾 I would give two examples Sudha. One is about this project titled Usharmukthi Project, which is currently being implemented in West Bengal. So there is a kind of a collaboration between department of rural development and Panchayati Raj. PRADAN being the no one dilgence agency and then there are large number of CSOs. So West Bengal has its share of highlands, especially if you just look at the districts of Purulia, Birbhum, Bhankura. So there are six districts which are drought prone and where the farmers actually suffered a lot because of uncertainties of a monsoon. Much of the area is actually monocrop areas, so it can't have second crop because of the lack of irrigation et cetera. So using the MGNERGA fund, how do you actually treat five lakh hectares 500,000 hectares, a big area, how do you treat it in a manner by which you preserve soil? Because these are highly undulating areas with moderate rain and with rain coming down so often you find that, because these lands are untreated, these are not properly bunded and terraced. So with every rain it washes away the precious top soil and most of the time you can find that the rivers emanating from these areas, they are also periodically sand filled and filled with silts et cetera, and the rivers go dry.
👉🏾 So in such kind of situation it is important that we take a kind of a watershed approach starting from the ridge to the valley. And then you treat the land, you try to preserve as much of water as possible and then go for planting large scale trees and then at the same time, you go for recycling the stored water for a second crop, if not a third crop. So that is a kind of a comprehensive treatment that we are doing it. Through a kind of a participatory process, people-centric planning process where we are engaging with a large number of small holder farmers, especially the women, understanding their concerns and trying to see what best can be done and trying to address their concerns of lack of irrigation, uncertainties of monsoon, uncertainties of food security, et cetera, and try to see what best can be done. And accordingly we have actually now come up with a kind of treatment measure on a very large scale, with involvement of Panchayati Raj institutions, so Panchayat civil society organisations, PRADAN and government of West Bengal.
👉🏾 So there is a kind of a very large scale, consorted, orchestration which is happening in these areas, with focus on reviving and revitalising a big chunk of watershed area, a big chunk of land area so that you can grow multiple crops, you can then very effectively address the constraints of water, constraints of food security faced by the people. And at the same time unleash a large number of ecosystem services. On similar lines we have also kind of taken up a similar project in Chattisgarh, its called Chattisgarh mega watershed development project, again with participation of civil society organisations, PRADAN, the department of rural development and Panchayati Raj, as well as different donor agencies who have also come forward with the same kind of objective. So the whole understanding is that how do you safeguard large number of small holder marginal, holder farmers, as well as woman from the effects of climate change, climate uncertainties so that they don't lose the food, they don't lose out in terms of income, et cetera.
👉🏾 I've given two examples, but there are several examples where we have actually integrated climate concerns and tried to develop some actions. These are not kind of problems which can be addressed by doing things at a moderate scale, these are big problems, requires a bigger collaboration requires more number of stakeholders to be involved and think about the larger scale.
👉🏾 Especially in this areas where agriculture is predominantly rain-fed, so agriculture is anyway 'Baghwan bharosey' in this area. So to that extent people take a kind of a fatalistic view. But the other part is that agriculture, solves one problem which is food, food availability, because much of the agriculture is subsistence agriculture, but besides food you can also see that people require water for domestic purposes round the year, people require water for their livestock, people require water for constructing their houses. All the available water bodies are getting dried up by the time it reaches February or March, so creates terrible, terrible problems. So that's something which is to be understood and people are saying that the number of rainy days are less, but whenever it rains, it rains so intensely that often there is no way to check the water. So it breaks the bunds, it breaks the available water bodies and it creates havoc many a times, even in the undulating areas, the lowlands get flooded and it damages the crop. It actually triggers huge soil erosion. So these are the kind of catastrophic effects people have started understanding and started articulating that it never happened earlier in their living memories, even the older people they're also saying that these are great problems.
👉🏾 And the other part is about that it actually then affects the quality of agriculture, reduces food production, affecting productivity of all kinds of crops. So you find that, unable to sustain themselves in the villages, there is large scale migration. So migration is not always aspirational in these areas, so many a times you find that people are migrating because of the fact that there is a severe shortage of food at the household. Even if the public distribution systems are working but people do require money to send their kids to the school, treat their elderly people for any health problems, so on so forth. And they find that there are problems of income opportunities locally so agriculture is no longer, productive and remunerative enough for them to hold them in the local areas.
👉🏾 And in our villages, wherever we are working, we are very consciously making people aware that these are the effects of climate and unless we change our way. So there are problems that they're going to face and they need to take all the adequate safeguards.
For instance, I can tell you that paddy requires large volume of water, paddy requires a stable water supply. The problem is that, if you are fully dependent on paddy always you can meet failure in agriculture. What we are trying to do you can go for more of crop diversification. So in the last six, seven years, you can see in our project areas, large scale adoption of pulses, oilseeds and different kinds of vegetables, which actually can withstand, tolerate occasionally droughts and sometimes intense rain. So these crops are now gaining popularity, there are varieties which are drought tolerant, so these are now getting more and more accepted in the local areas. Also in order to withstand shock, people are also now getting diversified into, let's say livestock cultivation, small ruminants. So these are the kinds of ways by which we can actually help people to diversify the risk and try to withstand the shocks that they are facing out of climate uncertainty.
👉🏾 So firstly India has also recognised under it's constitution that the existence of scheduled tribes and there are also certain kinds of guaranteed protection enshrined in our constitution, I think a very important approach that government of India has taken in 1974, in the planning commissions, they have actually taken up a kind of an approach called, tribal sub-plan approach. our planners they thought about doing more in the spirit of equity, so there are special funds called special central assistance created for the tribal sub-plan areas. So it gets certain kinds of government support for infrastructure, as well as education health of tribal communities their livelihoods et cetera, so that's something which is important for us. Also in each of these states, you have tribal welfare, welfare departments created and at the centre we have this tribal welfare minister which actually oversees it and each of the tribal states, the governors that actually the custodians of the scheduled areas. So they have been also entrusted with certain kinds of powers.
👉🏾 From 95 onwards, there have been this discussion around Panchayati Raj act in scheduled areas so PESA something which is very important. They have actually recognised that tribal village councils are extremely important for them. So basically something which also suggests, the rights and entitlement of their tribal communities over all kinds of natural resources. So suppose if you want to buy land, if you start mining, you have to take permission from the gramsabhas. That's something which is extremely important. So basically actually, empowers local communities, especially the gramsabha with this kind of powers natural resources, et cetera. So if you see , to what extent this PESA has been enacted. I would say that, there are variations, while PESA have been, to a great extent adopted. But in case of Jharkhand, you will find that, still there are long way to go. So depending on, to what extent you have actually devolved power. So these are all, actually democratic, decentralisation processes. And to what extent you have actually devolved this power right up to the level of the gramsabha is something which actually then sees that, the poor people and the tribals in the indigenous community, they have power to control over their natural resources.
👉🏾 Very Important question and I would say that PRADAN'S whole approach actually revolves around supporting local communities and their collectives to take decisive actions that actually improves their lives and their livelihoods. I would say that it is extremely important that people start seeing their stakes, so what is at stake is something which is extremely understood, extremely important in this context and the kind of leadership Sudha we have experienced and seen, specially in conservation of natural resources is something which we are also greatly enthusiastic, greatly encouraged by the fact that we are finding that women just because they live in the villages, they are much more articulate about the...

50: Moving from success to significance as a mantra in the second act with Shilpa Ajwani, Founder UnoMantra and SheMantra

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:30:00 +0000

Shownotes:
In the 50th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast my guest is Shilpa Ajwani, a strategy consultant & leadership advisor to consumer/lifestyle enterprises and Founder of two startups UnoMantra and SheMantra.
As two women leaders we were keen to use our conversation to explore the barriers faced by women in leadership, her second innings; passion projects; spirituality, being a mother, her identity....👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 Challenges she faced as a woman leader in the direct selling industry
👉🏾 Women and their self-limiting beliefs
👉🏾 Being overlooked and the importance of taking charge of one's own career and life
👉🏾 Her journey to becoming an entrepreneur and launching UnoMantra and SheMantra
👉🏾 The shift from success to significance as a driver in her second act
👉🏾 Redefining leadership:traits of aspiring and potential leaders and our ability to learn or nurture leadership traits
👉🏾 The importance of resilience and adaptability for managers and leaders
We also spoke about what drives her to do better each day or who/what inspires.
Want to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable Passages from the podcast
👉🏾 Hello Sudha, so glad to be here with you and your audience today.
👉🏾 My name is Shilpa Ajwani and I'm the founder and CEO of UnoMantra, which is my strategy consulting and leadership advisory firm. This is my second act, an act of an entrepreneur. But in my first innings, I have been a corporate professional, creating a successful career in some really well-known multi-national corporations, such as Oriflame and Tupperware brands, where I had my last date as the managing director for Tuppaware brands in India. I am the mother to a 19-year-old and feel very proud to have fulfilled that role to really my satisfaction and that's something I always talk about in my introduction Sudha, because I think I'm a nurturer at heart and that's an important part of me as well. In the pandemic last year, I founded a community for women-led coaching and consulting enterprises called Shemantra. And that is something which is a passion project and that's something I love to do. I also am very passionate about creating gender-equal organisations and that's something which takes up a lot of my time as I am passionate for the cause but, more importantly I'm driven to do something about it as well. So that's me Sudha.
👉🏾 So that I do not know if that will sound spiritual today. I'm at that stage where I honestly feel that that would be my most honest answer when it comes to answering any question on my identity. I identify very closely as a human being and that's it. I feel I'm this tiny little particle of the universe and that really keeps me humble.
👉🏾At the same time, I have realised that I am the universe. And that makes me feel extremely powerful. So I think, you know, today I'm able to make peace that the humble side is me and has to be me. And at the same time, there's a very powerful Shilpa because she is also the universe. Everything else in my journey on this planet will be a blessing in the form of different roles I'm gifted to play. Starting with when I became a daughter. And then, you know, I became a wife and a daughter in law. Always have been friends and many, many other relationships with people around me. Then I became a mother which I think was a turning point in many ways for me personally. And then of course, there's this whole professional aspect of me which I think introduced me really to the outside world, not just, you know, in my city, in my country.
👉🏾 But that gave me exposure to know and make meaningful relationships with so many people around the planet. So, all of these you know, are me. And Yet none of these is me. These are all gifts or blessings that we get as, we journey through life, is how I have you know, decided to see it. Call it "wearing a different lens as one starts to get some gray hair".
👉🏾 But this is what really, you know, gives me a lot of peace. Otherwise when we start to sort of live the identity of, for example, a CEO or a managing director, it's very easy to, to adopt only that mono identity. Or if I just have the identity of being a mother or a wife and, you know, everything in my life just, just is about that.
👉🏾 Then somewhere we will feel not really complete When any of those things suddenly get taken away from us, then we are at a loss. However, when I choose to see myself as a human being journeying through life I think, you know, everything just falls into its own perspective. And I like that.
👉🏾 This is a question, you know, today, when I look back, I think I have an answer. However, when you know, I was in the early years of my corporate career while still growing in my career. I have actually no inclination that I was a woman leader , right?. Such was perhaps call it, a blind spot, call it ignorance. But for me it was blessed because it just allowed me to show up wanting to do my best work to be fully committed, to growing myself and my organisation and making my own contribution without the whole idea of Gender. Making me either someone who was less able or more worthy. In either of these scenarios. Right. So I think I could bring my most authentic, natural self without over thinking about any of those aspects. However, you know, as I started to grow, I realised that, you know, in more and more rooms round me to be firstly, one of the few women and then ultimately to be perhaps one woman in a room full of men over a period of time.
👉🏾 And then to always have leaders, the ultimate leader, the CEO, or the Managing Director to be always a man. And then, somewhere, I think it, it started to create some questions in my own mind and I realised that you know, perhaps, there wasn't anybody who had held my hand and mentored me to actually make me think that I could actually one day be at the helm of affairs of organisations that I truly loved.
And then once that realisation started to set it, you become a little bit aware that there are biases that you encounter in the everyday. And, and when I saw that I was someone who was respected, the results were great. I gathered courage and I asked one of our you know, super bosses in one of our meetings about my future and roadmap and all of that.
👉🏾 I said, No, "do you see me as someone who could be leading this organisation?" And He, you know, his expression is something I will not forget because it was like, he looked extremely surprised as if that didn't even cross his mind. And he said, well, "I think you would be a great number two, but I, I honestly don't know if you can be a number one."
I said, "Fair Enough", not everybody can be a number one. There can after all be only one number one, I said, "can you elaborate what would make me qualify to be a number one or what makes me disqualified?" And, just, you know, making me good enough to stay at a number two, if at all. And he honestly didn't have a great answer to that question.
👉🏾 And that is just one of the instances I'm sharing with you Sudha. Of course, all of us might have many, many more, but that was my realisation that you know, for too long, I had allowed other people to determine what my career should look like? At what pace should I grow? What are the roles that I could or could not really be good enough for?
👉🏾 And that's where I realised that our career and our life are our responsibility. So I chose not to blame him. I chose not to look at myself in a way that would disempower me. I took it as a challenge, that "Oh Great!, you know, my eyes are opened and even if It's a foolish try, but I would want to know what really is the barrier between me at that number one position.
👉🏾 How can I get it? And then in the next couple of years, I was a managing director. I was in a leading role and did that for a decade before I set out to be an entrepreneur and set up my own firm and become a founder and CEO there as well. So that's one instance.
👉🏾 So yeah, so I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur and on my birthday, I think it was my 45th birthday, which was a fantastic birthday. I really sat down and I started to reflect upon how life has been so fa also professionally, my entire journey. And I had a lot of gratitude when I did that little exercise Sudha, because I felt that I was blessed with a lot of success from a very young age.
👉🏾 And of course, it came with hard work and you know, grit and, and a lot of persistence. At the same time, I just wouldn't take away from the fact that it was a successful career. And then I asked myself one question. I said, you know, I have seen a lot of success. What does it take for this success to become significant?
👉🏾 And I think, you know, asking that question and honestly answering that, gave birth to the idea that the time is now. And of course, it took a few months from the time I thought about it to really, you know moving out of the corporate world with my own idea of what I wanted to do, giving it form and shape, and then getting started off as an entrepreneur in 2019, early 2019.So success to significance is the driver.
👉🏾 So Unomantra is a strategy consulting and leadership advisory firms. So I break that up into parts. The leadership advisory bit is what I will start with. So when I take on my work with organisations and I primarily work in the consumer and lifestyle domain
So, brands, which are in the beauty and personal care space, health and wellness, food and beverages, home and lifestyle, fashion. So anything which you and I would consume, I'm in love with the entire consumer and lifestyle businesses. I've grown brands and organisations all my life and it's a natural extension of what I know the best. So I work in that domain and as a leadership advisor, what I do is that when I go in I work first with the founder or the CEO and the leadership team more as a mentor and advisor to them. I help them unpack their personal purpose and I help them to find meaning and connect that back to the organisational purpose.
👉🏾 Many times organisations haven't sat down and articulated, why do they exist, what really is at the core. So that's the bit I start with when I take the strategy consulting piece that we really uncover the purpose. Which I think is a great point of differentiation, but it's also a great way to inspire, the founders themselves, the leadership team and everybody in the team. Then we really sit down and we talk about the strategic roadmap with purpose at the core and once the purpose is clear, everybody's aligned to it. I see the energy of just working with that team the before and after completely different.
👉🏾 And with that excitement, then we talk about all the things which make an iconic organisation of tomorrow, and that's what I'm driven to create. So we talk about the go-to-market strategy, the brand strategy, the people strategy, the financial strategy, everything that is needed. But I say that those are bells whistles but purpose is the real deal. And once that is clear, you can build strategy and actually convert that strategy into brilliant execution. That's what I do, strategy consulting and leadership advisory. And that's the proposition of Unomantra.
👉🏾 So purpose is at the core and for me I have to really spend a lot of time in unpacking my own purpose and articulating that. And once that clarity really was defined for my own self with that inspiration, I actually created the proposition for Unomantra Sudha and that's ``where I feel that purpose is what wakes me up every morning.' Most all mornings without an alarm, because it's creating an excitement, right? To go out and do some great work and to make that contribution that, the whole significance piece. I see that coming through every day as I get down to work. The second act I feel is going to be an evolution. It's not a revolution, I like to see it as an evolution of who I was, because the learnings are very much something that I will take from what I did in the corporate world for more than 25 years. I've had my fair share of setbacks, challenges, mistakes, oh my God, how many? Learnings, lessons, some really big ones and some fantastic successes as well, which I feel very proud to own.
👉🏾 I have had the big privilege of working with exceptional people, learning from them. And I have also been a good student reading, observing, discussing, having brilliant conversations with people on businesses and what really is an iconic business all about and how have businesses that have endured stood the test of time? What had they done differently, that we love them as consumers, their stakeholders have so much of respect and they can make profitable organisations and sustain them over a period of time. So for me, I think the second innings is really an evolution and coming from everything that I'm hungry to share of what I know and I have gained so richly and so beautifully in the last 25 years.
👉🏾 When I look at barriers and I work with so many women as a mentor, very very closely, and I worked both with professionals as well as entrepreneurs today. I like to look at the barriers in a way that I can describe them as intrinsic and extrinsic. So I start with intrinsic because I think that's extremely important.
👉🏾 You know, thanks to all the social conditioning and a lot of it, inherited generation to generation. What we do find is that women tend to grow up with a lot of self-limiting beliefs. A lot of boundaries are already defined for them in terms of what can you aspire for and what you cannot. And when somebody is told something enough times that tend to believe it, right? And one of the biggest things that shows up in every research that I get to read about women and what really stops them, what's the biggest barrier. The biggest barrier turns out is confidence or the lack of it. So I think, self-limiting beliefs, the lack of confidence and this ingrained social conditioning creates a very powerful, system inside a woman which actually nags her and stops her and allows the imposter syndrome to show up every time she decides to get out of her comfort zone actually stretch the boundaries. So that's one piece of it and an extremely important one to have a deep authentic conversation and sometimes they're not even aware that this is happening to them, by themselves, right?
👉🏾 The other aspect, which is better known and now, beginning to also be understood and researched and spoken about thankfully, is the extrinsic piece, where we see that there is a closed society which has also decided the roles and responsibilities that we should or should not have across genders. And I think that somehow is deeply entrenched and that's where sometimes the family becomes the first place where the woman is pulled back rather than propelled forward to go for her dreams. That’s one of the first things that I see. The other piece which is really spoken about is that we tend to lose women and India we see has a decreasing percentage of women in the corporate workforce year on year now, thanks to the three M's you know, marriage, motherhood, mobility. And I think these have been very classic in terms of just putting an end to just so many brilliant careers.
👉🏾 Today though there are a lot of returning programs where women can even come back after motherhood. But I have such horrendous stories of extremely talented women who have to just give up everything that they had worked so hard for and they just didn't get the respect, forget equality, forget equity. They just didn't get the basic decent respect every human being deserves. Just because they became a mother and chose to go back and work in the same organisation. It's amazing to me and apart from that, I think there are, many other, some of them are more exposed, some of them are below the layers, but they're working all the time.
👉🏾 Sometimes differential access to technology sometimes, differential responsibility level. So look who are the caregivers, the primary caregivers. So we get hit by a pandemic suddenly, whose responsibility do seniors at home and the babies at home become? And logically who is then expected apart from keeping everything intact at home, also look after everybody who's at home. And good luck to them, if they also try and nurture their dreams at the same time. So things like these, I think the pandemic exposed so much of what was already happening and these are just few of the things that I can talk about. When I work with entrepreneurs access to funding, to know-how, to even mentorship, I mean all that is rare. Access to networks, completely missing, there are no valuable connections a lot of women themselves build, or they are seen as the right to build those. So they don't even have the right to build those as for many, many people. So I think it's a complex mix of many things happening inside and outside and around a woman. But together they very, very capably keep the woman back and she has to fight against all possible odds to go out and do what should come naturally. So yeah, there's a lot happening out there.
👉🏾 I think the debate can go on for the next billion years Sudha on this one. But I have a view that all of us are born with certain strengths and what's important is to take help and recognise those strengths as early as possible. And then work on honing those strengths and in that sense, everybody is a born leader because a lot of those strengths, which you have as a human being, as a person are also extremely good at you being a leader. So like I said, I think nurturing is a strength that I have. Now that's not just for moms, but you know, you could nurture other leaders in the organisation you work for. You could nurture an entire organisation, and you could nurture a country, right? As a political leader. So, these traits are just an extension of what you can apply in the corporate world.
👉🏾 And thankfully, a lot of the traits such as empathy, nurturing, being a better listener are collaborative working styles. They were seen as feminine and not really worthy of so-called "great leadership". But today, I mean, I think we're talking a very different language and a lot of the men might have to actually go back to school and learn a lot of these. That brings me to the other part of it. Once you have awareness, and you have the ability to get access to information on, what

49: Organisational purpose and leadership in a post pandemic world with Nitin Mantri Group CEO of Avian WE and the President of International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO)

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 03:00:00 +0000

As we navigate a world in a constant state of flux, there are deep discussions around what organisational purpose actually means, not just as rhetoric for public consumption but the systemic actions organisations need to take in order to live their values.
For the first time in decades we are also redefining leadership and the must have skills for leaders of today.
In the 50th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Nitin Mantri, Group CEO of Avian WE and the President of International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO) to explore the boundaries of purpose and leadership.
We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 What it means for a brand to have purpose at its core
👉🏾 Redefining the business of business in the context of stakeholder responsibility and accountability
👉🏾 The role of the C-suite and CEO in articulating and living organisational purpose
👉🏾 Leadership in a post pandemic world and inclusive leadership
👉🏾 What comms practitioners are doing to step up to the challenges; trends in India
👉🏾 How can aspiring leaders in our industry keep pace with the change?
👉🏾 And actions agencies need to take to ensure they are future ready and fit for purpose?
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Thank you for having me.
👉🏾 I believe that while purpose was important I think even before the world was turned upside down by the pandemic, purpose was gaining importance in the boardrooms. The pandemic just accelerated the whole pace and it's now become a business imperative. And from 2019 to 21, the expectation for brands to create stability in uncertain times has risen by 20%. So just to give you some excerpts from a report, in previous years Brands in Motion global reports established that consumers expect brands to have a purpose, humanity and authenticity.
👉🏾 In 2021, what we call the bravery mandate clients expect purpose to inform organisational decisions on how to speak and act on societal issues and purpose initiatives at a given point. And the report actually finds that the brands that will flourish in 2021 and beyond are the ones with the courage to take bold actions and make strong stances with the full understanding that not everyone will approve of them.
So for example, consumers and B2B decision-makers surveyed for the 2021 Brands in Motion report rated environmental sustainability and income equality among the top issues they wanted brands to address. 71% respondents felt that brands have an obligation to engage with social global issues when they impact and stakeholders. And they're more likely to purchase or recommend products or services from brands that address, societal issues. I'll just touch upon one more thing here, which is purpose washing. And I would say that purpose does have its pitfalls as well.
👉🏾 So even though brands across industries are taking up social good marketing, there are instances of purpose washing. People or brands eager to gain eyeballs and profit, brands are choosing causes that they think will strike a chord. So in fact, the Brands In Motion finding on purpose washing talks about this, it says that, despite a rising expectation, brands perceived impact for societal good remains flat. And 52% said that brands that take stance on societal issues are just trying to sell more products and services. So the audience want brands to help, but they aren't yet convinced that brands are delivering. So the task ahead for brands is to bridge this sort of disconnect.
👉🏾 So when we say a brand is purpose led or has purpose at it's core. We mean that brands are rooted in their own values and are clear what they stand for. So, even if part of the audience doesn't want to hear it. They should be clear about what it is that they stand for. So, these brands ground, their purpose statements in long-term quantifiable action. Microsoft talking about reduction in carbon all over the world by 2030 for example. Truly purposeful brands build on their core promise and makes longterm single issue investment to build a purpose credibility endurance. So, the idea is how do you do it, finding your purpose and leading with it? Purpose has become a must have and therefore determines not just which brands or how they'll stay viable in the next few years, but in my view decades to come. So that's how important it's become.
👉🏾 I strongly believe if you follow purpose profits will follow. So I think in this sort of what I call the new fractured world, profits won't be possible if you're not purposeful. So, I mean what will happen if your consumers don't want to buy products, if you don't follow purpose. So it may be tempting for brands to shift focus towards their own financial worries or financial priorities, I mean should treat the balance between purpose and profit as a zero sum game right?
So, if you withdraw from your purpose and stop contributing to creating and supporting a better more sustainable future, then in my view there will be no profits in the end. So today's audiences want it all. In fact again to quote from a Brands in Motion study saying that silence isn't an option and that kind of cosy middle ground is shrinking fast. But the opportunity might be for brands to step into their own light and tell the world who they really are and follow the purpose. I think it's a great opportunity in my view.
👉🏾 Well, yeah I mean, several brands. I think some of them have done some really wonderful work. Reckitt is a client we worked with for many years now and Reckitt has been engaged in a multi-year mission to improve the health and hygiene of communities in India. About 750 million people live without access to basic sanitation and more than 120,000 under the age of five died from diarrhoea for example. Reckitt has provided a whole skill development training for sanitation workers. Their brand Dettol has launched a hand-washing curriculum for school children and after COVID hit, Dettol donated product care packages to more than 150,000, and this is not just India. Even in the UK, they donated packages to 150,000 NHS workers. And donated media space to the government for public health announcements.
👉🏾 So there's Reckitt for example, then there's McDonald's they're doing a lot. I'm just moving away from COVID, they're doing a lot with people with disability and they've created something called Eat Equal, which is a specialised packaging solution to eating a burger with one hand, easier for people with lack of mobility. Giving an example of Godrej, in India, they have a huge land base in Vikhrohi and Godrej & Boyce's wetland management services teams has been managing and conserving one of the largest mangroves in Bombay. And taking their efforts a notch higher they've actually joined hands with WWF India to further strengthen the conservation efforts and promote awareness of that area. I mean, it's quite amazing what they've done. So multiple examples, not just India, but across the world
👉🏾 Good question I think brand purpose is a group commitment, right? It cannot be farmed out to a department or project team. So it cannot be that this is my team that will just work on purpose of the company or the organisation.
It has to be a group commitment and genuine purpose doesn't kind of sweeps through down from leadership or shareholder, it'll actually come down from the company's heart and soul, its people. Really and it belongs to everybody so if the whole company does not belong to it, it'll never be successful. So it has to go down from the C-suite to the interns, rising organically together. And you know purpose begins at home right. So this is how brand purpose will truly work when every single person in an organisation believes in it and is driven by it and the brand's purpose in the DNA of the company by and large.
👉🏾 So before brands try to save the world, they must ensure that their own organisations are in order. You know you can't run mental wellness campaign if your managers are sending emails at 3:00 AM in the morning. You know, so purpose has to start at home. In fact, again our Brands in Motion survey respondents rated employees as the group executives need to communicate with the most more than customers shareholders and media. So 75% of executives should communicate with employers about their personal position on issues at least every six months, that's the report. So there's a lot that people are doing around it.
So for example in India, we are running a campaign, you know, as you're aware, India was struck badly by the second wave of COVID in April this year right. And many people lost loved ones, they were impacted at one point. I can tell you we had 50% staff away because either they were impacted or they were taking care of loved ones. And, we really thought what will be best when people will really be involved and as soon as the second wave was over, we launched a campaign called, 'Puri Tayari hai kya', it's a campaign around getting people to follow COVID appropriate behaviour and encouraging to vaccinate themselves. And it's still running we launched this in September I think and it's going to go on post-Diwali. And that's where I think people want to get involved in it because they were so badly hurt by the second wave. So I think we need to take that perspective. It has to be inbuilt within the organisation
👉🏾 So one is employee engagement, they really need to communicate frequently. C suite executives who show courage to communicate frequently and with authenticity will stand out as leaders in my view. And I think, CEO's like Microsoft, Satya Nadedla, Bumbles Whitney Wolf are speaking out in a very, very personal way, for example, and doing so very frequently. And I think they have changed a lot of audience perceptions. I think also leaders are coming to terms with their fears and limitations while acknowledging the same in others.
👉🏾 They're coming out to be more authentic. The 86% of leaders surveyed in our report, they said they have become more introspective during this time. This introspection has become the starting point in my view for a whole new leadership paradigm. So hardwired into believing that a leader should be stoic, relentless and fearless, the whole leadership concept revolved a lot of infallibility in the past. So Covid happened, and the pandemic exposed a gap in health, administrative systems and the vulnerabilities of our personal/professional identities. So now leaders recognise importance of acknowledging, what I would say, human imperfection and leading with compassion. I think that's the way the role has evolved for leaders, it's changed to that extent.
👉🏾 I think the first and the key leadership trait is listening for real. I'm adding the words for real, right, so I think it's not just about sitting listening to people, but for real. Again I'm saying it for the umpteenth time. But it will start with the employees, it will start with your people. Leading today requires listening without judgment. The new age leader must be open to engaging in difficult conversations to set things right.
They must be available to their people always. For example, during the first pandemic lockdown in our firm, we had set aside an hour a day to listen and address people's concerns. Managers held regular connect sessions with the teams, and talked about how they can manage things better.
👉🏾 Secondly, apart from this thing, you need to practice empathy. So inclusive leaders need to reach out, connect with people during a crisis. In fact, this is a crucial step, right? This realisation changed the way at least I led my teams. In fact, I got COVID in the first wave, in September last year, it's been over a year now. I shared with them about my COVID experience right. I was very open about it because during the first wave have a lot of people were not even sharing, it became like a stigma. When I got Covid I actually addressed the issue upfront - that I have COVID right and how I dealt with it. So empathy is very important and sharing is very important and finally, I think we've talked about this but people over profit.
So, inclusive leadership means prioritising community emotional wellbeing above organisational practice. And we need to take an active role in initiating and maintaining relationships with diverse groups, both inside and outside the organisation. So I think those three things would be very important for new leaders.
👉🏾 I think the 18 months have given us that opportunity to radically rethink how we connect with one another right and how we share ideas and collaborate. I think some of the best campaigns were devised and executed during the lockdown, a lot of people were like, it's not going to happen, we may not be able to create it, we may not be able to do this or that. But honestly, nothing changed. I mean, we did some great campaigns, we delivered everything. So what I think communicators have done is they've fast-tracked tech competence to meet the demands of their stakeholders, right. They've adopted future-forward technologies that encourage what I would call digital agility amongst all team members.
👉🏾They've implemented interactive hyper-responsive campaigns suited to the new reality. AI is something that people are toying with today. I don't know how much it'll be successful. We're tried to build work cultures around holistic wellbeing, I think that's really important and then I think just the fact of how do we listen to people, right? Listening I mentioned to you earlier, practitioners today need to work with more teams.
👉🏾 Some trends I would say to consider would be accelerated digital transformation in the new normal really. Increased integration of data and creativity. So how we use data to build creativity, understanding larger geopolitical shifts today, because there's been realignment completely from a geopolitical perspective right? So, all those things are happening in India and those are trends, I think, which I don't think are far away from global trends either.
I actually think that the Asian culture per se was more about working in the office a lot compared to the West because the West was still doing a lot of flexible working and they will still work remotely but in India and a lot of Asian markets it wasn't happening and people were still of that mindset that people need to come to office, right? And I think that's been the biggest shift for a market like India and for industry like ours.
👉🏾 Yeah, I think it's changed in two ways. One COVID has changed it to the extent that we are working with people remotely. We are doing remote working and we need to just think of different ways than how we are going to create campaigns et cetera. Secondly, I think the industry itself has changed. I'm talking from India perspective, we no longer amplifying things, divergent thinking and creative shaping of PR strategies are becoming the hallmark of our industry.
👉🏾 I think we'll have to be real and compassionate, leaders have to listen, learn, and engage with employees and take a harder look at their own behaviours. We must be able to articulate our personal values. I would say we have to be in a constant state of introspection that would kind of enable people to reflect on the beliefs and acknowledge actions and how they in fact impact organisations.
👉🏾 I think the two other big things would be that, one be open to change. I think we just realised that one thing, that change is going to be a constant now, and that's going to be very, very important. I mean today we've opened our office, right? After 18 months in September, we asked people to voluntarily come to office if they want to. Some really want to come back to work, some really don't want to come back to work. And I think we'll all have to find that midway, so all have to be open about change. It's not going to be like COVID is over and we're now going to be back to office at the same pace. It's going to be different and maybe two years later there'll be something different. I don't know. So it will all in my view, keep changing and we have to be ready for that change.
👉🏾 How our agency is going to ensure the future-ready and fit for purpose. I think we'll just have to act with more, I would say boldness and conviction and bravery and start on a solid foundation. We have to define our purpose and values and make that mission statement our North Star and guide everybody around that. I think agencies have to walk the talk. We do advise our clients on how they have to act with purpose, but I think what is going to change is about how agencies will walk the talk and act with purpose as well. So, we'll have to stay our course as well.
👉🏾 So for example, we've taken on three issues this year right over the last year and this year. We did three pieces, we said we are going to focus on, one mental health, because that was a big piece for us because of the pandemic. We've done multiple things with people, we run a campaign called we care internally. We have an employee assistance program where people can call this helpline talk to somebody, in confidence for free anytime they want. We've got experts coming into the office and talking, We did something yesterday with Dr. Parikh, from Fortis hospital, for everybody on world mental health day. And the 3rd piece we're doing is around diversity. So we tied up with rainbow literature festival, which is a literature festival for the LGBTQ community. And we took out a book called Consciously Speaking, which was on how to use the right terminology when working with the LGBTQ community because people did not know how to address people in different ways. And that's something we did on our own, we launched it. FICCI helped us, and it's pretty good and we're doing the second launch now of that book. So we took on these three broad areas on working with us as purpose for us.
👉🏾 Good question. So I'll just go back a bit, I worked in India for a few years and I went to the UK for a few years and I came back. And when I came back I said, how do I contribute back to this industry right, which has given me a lot. And I think I did a couple of things.
I started teaching and I think that was one way of giving back to me. And of course, also talent was a big issue in our industry and I thought, what better way than to kind of hone talent and get people...

48: The importance of a 'just transition' to a low carbon economy: Natasha Zervudachi World Benchmarking Alliance

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Carbon neutrality, De-carbonisation, Carbon credits, Carbon offsets, Carbon sequestration, CFCs global warming, Adaptation fund, Kyoto Protocol, Bali Roadmap, Paris Agreement, G-77, UNFCCC are terms we are increasingly getting familiar with as more and more people across the world engage on issues of climate change.
To that list add 'Just Transition' - an initiative of the World Benchmarking Alliance(WBA). In light of the crucial role the private sector has to play in achieving a low-carbon world, the WBA intends to assess 450 of the world's most influential companies in high-emitting sectors on their contribution to a just transition by assessing their alignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement alongside their approach to addressing the social challenges of a low-carbon transition. The assessment covers what the companies are doing to respect the rights of workers, communities and the most vulnerable as they work towards low-carbon goals.
To learn more, I spoke with Natasha Zervudachi from the WBA about sustainability and sustainable development 👇🏾👇🏾
👉🏾 The big challenges facing our planet
👉🏾 How are governments and the private sector ensuring that as we work towards addressing climate change, we're not creating even greater inequalities or creating mass unemployment or increased poverty as a result of that transition to this new, more carbon neutral world? What we can do to ensure a 'just transition' that is fair and equitable
👉🏾 What the WBA is doing to incentivise businesses to encourage uptake, learning from best practice and roadmaps for those at the start of the journey
👉🏾 Steps the WBA is taking to ensure that 'just transition' balances voices from global south since advocacy on climate change and de-carbonisation is dominated by voices from global north
👉🏾 The importance of embedding concerns of marginalised people in the design of the assessment
👉🏾 The short term and long term ambitions of the WBA for the initiative, the 'Just Transition Coalition' and much more
To learn more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the episode:
👉🏾 Thank you so much for having me. I'm a massive fan. So it's a real, real pleasure to be here and to get to speak to you today
👉🏾 Really, really good and interesting question there. I guess to give listeners a tiny bit of a background on who I am and where I come from. So I'm speaking today on behalf of the World Benchmarking Alliance, which is a global organisation that essentially develops free and publicly available assessments and benchmarks to measure company progress and performance towards the sustainable development goals, and the Paris Agreement. So I think, this question as you said, we can definitely see that it's being talked about much more. It's appearing within public reporting. But what we have found for our benchmarks is that there is hugely still like a massive disparity of approaches when it comes to sustainable development and the reporting of progress on that. And I would have to say that certainly for many companies, it is still either completely missing, or we do still see it as purely kind of a tick box exercise or a compliance exercise where it's purely kind of meeting legislation, rather than being kind of fully integrated into the business strategy. So if for example, we recently did a kind of holistic assessment of all 2000 companies that we've benchmarked, within our benchmarks and these are the 2000 companies that we've identified as being the most influential companies in supporting the systems change that's really needed within their industry in support of this UN Sustainable Development Goals. And of those 2000 companies, we found that 775 of them aren't even mentioning sustainable development goals within their corporate communications. And when we kind of throw our benchmarks, dig deeper, those companies that are talking about sustainability, a lot of them it's still kind of smoke and mirrors tactics or greenwashing rather than that true integration of sustainability into their business practices
👉🏾 Yeah, definitely. I mean, as you said, with COP26 is in full swing. It would be certainly be remiss to not say that climate change is the glaringly obvious kind of biggest challenge that we're facing as the world. But the truth is, so many of these challenges that we do face when we talk about sustainable development, they are very interconnected. So you can't kind of look at each challenge in a silo
👉🏾 And when you begin to dig into the UN Sustainable Development Goals, I think this becomes really apparent. If you start to look at them as individual problems and try and treat them as individual problems you don't get very far. So if we take climate change, for example, or lack of action towards climate change, that is going to have a huge impact on things like access to water, poverty rates, health and well being, gender equality. I mean, the list really does go on. And I think, companies therefore, really do need to take a holistic approach to sustainable development. And they need to be much better integrating kind of looking at those sustainable practices and approaches, both across their business and their value chains in more strategic way exactly as you were saying, rather than these kind of side projects, big PR pieces that sound really good and you can make good sound bites of, but you're not really changing the way that you're doing business. And I think that's the key, really
👉🏾 So at WBA we take what we call a kind of systems approach to sustainable development, which means we're focusing on the whole interconnected nature of the sustainable development challenges rather than on a single specific element in isolation. So I think, the reality is, the issues that are facing the planet and humanity, they are so interlinked, and they all impact on each other massively. So, we're talking here today about the Elephant in The Room. And I think for me, the real Elephant in The Room is how do we ensure that as we tackle climate change, we are ensuring that that transition to a lower carbon economy happens in a way that doesn't leave anyone behind and is just an equitable for all people
👉🏾 Yeah. We released on Monday, so yeah two days ago. We had our public launch event yesterday. I guess, first maybe just in case there's any listeners that might not be familiar with the term “Just Transition” it's essentially what I was just talking about. So how are we taking an integrated approach to sustainable development challenges and in this case, specifically, how are we ensuring that as we work towards addressing climate change, do we ensure that we're not creating even greater inequalities or creating mass unemployment or increased poverty as a result of that transition to this new, more carbon neutral world
👉🏾 I think it's very clear when it comes to the climate crisis, what that mission is. We need to halve global carbon emissions by 2030, we need to ensure zero net emissions by 2050. But what does that actually mean for the huge number of people that currently work in those industries that we’re sort of saying you need to go. So, if we look at oil, coal production, we're saying that these industries essentially cannot exist in 20/30 years if we're going to meet these net-zero goals, but there are literally millions of people that currently work in or rely on these industries and they have done it for generations. Proportionate number of those workers and especially as we look further down the supply chain, are based in developing countries. And if we look, one at the direct employees, that's one big issue, but then we've got the supply chains, we've got the communities around those workers, that all rely on these industries and they're all propped up by these industries. So as companies are developing their net zero emission plans, they need to be building in to those strategies. How do they ensure that as they transition, they're making sure that they are bringing people along with them to avoid any negative impact on people and they're supporting those people into new and green jobs
👉🏾 So what we've developed at the World Benchmarking Alliance is a methodology and a set of six indicators that basically assesses how a company is doing exactly that. So we look at how they're developing their plans, we look at how they're engaging their employers in these conversations so that they're making sure the employees are part of those decisions that are obviously going to be impacting them most. Then we look at how they're developing the skills of those workers so that they can transition into these new industries, these new green jobs. And then we also look at how the companies are working with governments to ensure that social protection systems are adequate and to ensure that the companies are not locking governments to create the enabling policy environment that will ensure that this transition is just and is equitable
👉🏾 The assessments that we released on Monday, so we looked at 180 companies from high emitting sectors. And what we basically found in those assessments is there is currently a striking and very systematic lack of action by companies to do this work on a 'Just Transition'. So whilst a lot of them have low carbon strategies, very few are actually working to identify prepare for and then mitigate the social impact of those strategies. And out of that 180 companies we found that only 9 scored 50% mark on the six 'Just Transition indicators.
And really, most companies right at the start of this journey and what this means is that there's essentially those 180 companies just in themselves, they employ eleven million workers, so those workers are potentially being put at risk if they're not being included in these decisions about how the company is changing. And that's the conversation we want to start and that's what we want to engage companies in
👉🏾 So no it's not just oil and gas. So our benchmarks are all focused on company progress towards the sustainable development goals. So our initial assessments have looked at 100 oil and gas companies, 50 electric utilities companies and then 30 car manufacturers, because these have all been identified as high emitting sectors. But then in terms of influence and who are the benchmarks intended to, so they are partly intended for companies to understand where their gaps are to understand how they perform against their peers. But then they are also intended for the use of stakeholder groups such as investors and NGOs and civil society organisations and policymakers all of whom work with and have the ability to influence corporate progress and also to hold companies to account
👉🏾 It's not mandatory in the fact that companies aren't obliged to engage with us and they're not obliged to do better on the benchmarks, but there is no ability to opt out. So, we basically select companies based on how influential they are within the systems change that we have identified as needed within their industry. So if you're on that list as a company, we will assess you, you don't sort of get the opportunity to opt out. We also do try and engage companies in the assessment process and we try and engage them in the feedback process. And they do have an ability to kind of feed in to that and to learn from us as well. We want this to be a useful tool for them not just a kind of naming and shaming
👉🏾 And with these 'Just Transition' assessments, for example, we found that a third of companies have engaged with us which, considering this as a pilot year is really great. We think that's a really positive sign already and hopefully that will only grow year on year. The way that we sort of incentivises companies, I guess is creating this race to the top but it's also about providing anyone that's lagging behind with a roadmap of what needs to be done. So we say it is in the company's favour if they engage with us. In the report that we just released on Monday there's a large number of best practice examples and case studies of those companies that are doing this really well
👉🏾 And what we hope is that, that gives companies, one it sort of takes away company's abilities to say "this is too hard, we can't do it" because here are companies that can and they are so here have a look what they're doing and learn from their best practices. And then it's also about as I said sort of giving other stake holders, like investors, like policymakers, kind of concrete data, that they can actually then use within their sphere of influence, to be able to incentivise further action
👉🏾 That's a really good question and it's something that we do `consider a lot at the World Benchmarking Alliance. So Inclusivity is one of our core values. And I think it's early and continuous engagement and inclusive dialogue is key really. At World Benchmarking Alliance, we try to ensure that we're inclusive both with the companies that we assess, but also the allies that we work with, and the countries that we work in
👉🏾 So this is one of the key reasons why, when we look at companies we’re basing that on that influence rather than just their size or their turnover, we look at things like where are their subsidiaries based, where are their supply chains based, because this often is in the Global South. And it's also where we have a number of colleagues that work all over the world, colleagues based in Asia, South Africa, South America, and that's to ensure that we have kind of an on the ground ability to engage with companies with allies and with partners kind of locally
👉🏾 That's another great question and definitely, in developing our assessment methodology, so we had an advisory group made up of 16 people, those people all have expertise within 'Just Transition' topics specifically but they also bring the perspectives from a number of different stakeholder groups such as labour unions, civil society business and employers, policymakers. And we made sure that those voices were based across all five continents. We also then went through a public consultation stage to ensure that our methodology could be consulted on and we could get feedback publicly. And we held a number of round tables for feedback as well
👉🏾 And going through that process, we were able to ensure that the views of a huge number of stakeholders were taken into account, in particular, those that were focused on, vulnerable and marginalised groups in society as you said. And what this has kind of resulted on in our methodology through having those voices at the table a number of our indicators specifically assess how companies are ensuring that vulnerable groups, so women, migrant workers, indigenous communities, are included within their transition plans. But it's also even more importantly in a way is looking at how companies themselves are including the voices of those people that they see as most impacted within their own company in supply chain because for each company that's going to be different. So our assessment looks at how companies are doing that, how they're engaging with workers and with those communities, to ask them what they need, what they want, how they can be brought along on this journey. Unfortunately, what we found in our assessment sort of to date, only 8% of that 180 companies currently are demonstrating that they are engaging those workers in those communities in social dialogue. So it's sadly not currently happening the way that it should be, but it's certainly something that we're really supporting and we're really looking at through these assessments
👉🏾 But at the moment as I said companies do seem to be very near the beginning of this journey. We've only seen that 7% of companies have actually made a public kind of time bound target to mitigate the social impacts of their Just Transition on their workers, communities and business relationships. So it's certainly area thats a lot of room for improvement
👉🏾 Yeah, definitely. So I think the very short term practical steps at WBA is we'll be integrating the Just Transition methodology, so this new pilot methodology that we've just released the first assessment of by Monday, we'll be integrating that into our climate and energy benchmark. So next year, we'll be assessing 90 transport companies and we'll publish that in Q3 2022. And we hope having that much integrated approach will mean that we're assessing companies on their environmental and social risks and impacts and how they impact on each other within each company. But in terms of the kind of longer term ambitions and impact, we are at the same time publishing our results. We've also launched what we call the Just Transition Coalition. So this brings together again, going back to those other stakeholders like investors and policymakers, and also research and academia brings them together collectively to work on Just Transition impacts and drive impact on the ground through what we've identified within our assessments. And within that coalition, those different stakeholder groups will make commitments depending on who they are and depending on their unique position within the ecosystem of influence. They will make commitments on how they can support this
👉🏾 So for investors for example, they might commit to engage companies to create better just transition plans and then commit to base their investment decisions based on the quality of those plans. So that's kind of what we want to get to and what we want to drive towards. And I think in terms of what does success look like, I guess again, on the very high broad level, success would be that the necessary transformation to a low carbon economy doesn't lead to mass unemployment, doesn't lead to the collapse of entire communities. And it's also actually taken as an opportunity to fix some of the economic injustices that we currently have existing in our society. I guess for us at WBA it's about encouraging action and being part of the ecosystem and providing clear, robust and simple metrics that can inspire companies, investors and policy makers to move on this journey. You know, as I said earlier, the 'Just' part of the transition really needs to stop being the elephant in the room when we're talking about climate change, the race to net zero, it's not a race against each other. It's a race against time. And we're only going to win that race if we run it together. And we ensure that these impacted workers and impacted communities aren't left behind
👉🏾 I mean, I'm going to remain hopeful, I think it has to really, if it doesn't happen now, then we are all going to be in a pretty terrible state of affairs. And I think that's what I really do hope that it's not all just talk, and we walk away from this without, really moving the needle and creating the catalytic changes that needs to happen. There's got to be action behind these commitments. And I think that's the key
And again, making sure that when we're making these...

47: Demystifying Polarisation: A conversation with Laura Osborne and Alison Goldsworthy

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 03:30:00 +0000

The last 18 months have deepened the divide amongst people across the world. These divisions have been amplified by the worsening social and economic realities of a post pandemic society. As individuals the fissures mean that households/friends are often on different sides of the divide, neither side willing to concede or find middle ground. The ubiquitous social media platforms that have made our world shrink are often the battlegrounds to perpetuate ideologies along with a liberal doses of misinformation. What does this mean for all of us (not just comms practitioners)?
To dig deeper into this phenomenon that threatens to tear asunder the world, I spoke with Laura Osborne and Alison Goldsworthy, two of the three authors of the book "Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other". We spoke about the inspiration for the book and the collaboration amongst the three authors
👉🏾 The essential premise behind the book
👉🏾 Affective polarisation and what it means
👉🏾 The role of misinformation and uncertainty in reinforcing divisions
👉🏾 Recognition of polarisation as a business risk and preparedness
👉🏾 What leaders can do to prepare for impact of polarisation
Want to know more, listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable Passages from the interview
👉🏾 Thank you for having us.
👉🏾 That is in essence true. So Alex, our co-author, and then Laura, who's on the podcast with me today and myself. We all used to work at the consumers association 'WHICH' in the UK and just really enjoyed working with each other. And really respected each other's knowledge and talents because we were good at things, that the other person wasn't, in general. And then I went out to Stanford and that was just in the year 2016. So Brexit had happened, Trump was going on and I realised that the way that we worked from different political backgrounds and reaching across divides was really very unusual. Particularly that we all enjoyed it. And then what really tripped me onto it was, I was sat in a room at Stanford, we helped put on a course on depolarisation in the aftermath of the election, and an audience member asked some people who'd voted for Trump who were on a panel. "Can you tell me about a time you've changed your mind and why?" And you could feel the entire sort of tenor of the room change as people answered that question. So Kat who's a friend who voted for Trump, talked about how she had been raised as a Roman Catholic to believe all gay marriage was wrong and then had gone to college or uni and had a roommate who was a lesbian and was really ashamed of her prior beliefs and couldn't believe she thought it and all of that kind of thing. And when she said that the amount of people who softened was significant because they could see that engaging was worthwhile.
👉🏾 And I was telling this story to Laura and Alex, and it began to morph into a podcast that's we should ask people with our backgrounds and politics and business and behavioural science, about a time they changed their mind and why, and 'Open Democracy' leapt at the idea they absolutely leapt at it. And as a result, we went from there to then getting a book deal and quite unusually, you hear tales of people collaborating as authors and really not getting on. And the three of us are closer now than we were when we were at 'Which'.
I was talking to Laura the other day and saying, can we have this as a monthly supper club for the rest of our lives. It's so much fun. And I get so much wisdom from these two women that it's really valuable. So I guess that's how the book came about. Laura might want to expand and answer the bit of the question I didn't about like what the essence of Poles Apart is
👉🏾 Thanks Ali. And I think that's absolutely right. We were, I think really pleasantly surprised about how we managed to work together all the way through this in a way that was really constructive and where we all made each other better at what we do. And I think when we started to write the book, what we really wanted to do, it might sound a bit hackneyed, was something that was quite solutions focused.
👉🏾 So I think there's a lot of work on polarisation, you know, excellent work on why it is such a difficult issue for society to grapple with. Not so much of it that's written in a way that a wide audience can interact with it. And perhaps not so much of it, that's written in a way that has a big focus on what you can do about it in your lives. You know, accepting that there are these kinds of system-level issues, what each of us can do to make a difference everywhere we interact with it. So I think, for us, the real premise behind the book was what can you do to bridge those divides? Not just accepting that they exist, but what might we do about it.
👉🏾 So if I pick up a bit there and Ali I might hand back to you as well. I think the central premise behind it, Sudha was that, the divides can be bridged, but it's not easy. You know that there is not one quick easy silver bullet for all of the divisions that we see around us, that it's a complex phenomenon, but that we can break it down.
👉🏾 And that actually, when we do that, each of us individually can start to pick some of our beliefs apart and especially our beliefs about other people and about other groups. And that we can learn a lot about how we try to persuade other people. You know, what we should really do if we genuinely want to have a conversation rather than an argument about something, you know, and the tools that can be applied to that. I think a bit for us as communicators as well, reflecting on where we might have in the past, inadvertently made some of that worse. You know, Ally I don't know if you want to talk a bit about your campaigning experienced there, but I think, you know, it was understanding where some of the divisions that you might deliberately create can backfire, become problematic.
👉🏾 And I think it's sort of exactly what Laura said. So I made my name as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser. You know, at which I built a base of millions of people who I could get to take an action almost whenever I asked them to do. And as I realised sometimes some of those actions are like, from emailing your MP, to sharing something on social media, to signing friends up, you know some of them were extremely worthwhile. Occasionally I might, and comms professionals, who listen to this, might have known it was a slightly weaker requests that I was making. But I would still see hundreds of thousands of people doing it. And that was great, it made me feel really powerful and I thought we were bringing about change and often we were. And then when Trump started to happen and when Brexit happened, I realised that maybe I hadn't always been as responsible as I should have been, or that people could build these huge movements, which is much easier in 2021 than it was a hundred years ago because of tech and none of us ever really thought about, were we creating any damage with what we were doing.
👉🏾 And the answer was that we probably were, and that also started me thinking, cause I was a bit inclined to be like, oh God, these people, all these other people, it's everybody else's fault. And then I was like, actually, It's a bit my fault. In fact, the more I thought about it, It was really quite a lot my fault, what was going on and if you don't all have a really good, critical mass of people, respecting norms or rules of engagement, then things actually start to fray quite quickly. As people are seeing as polarisation is rising in general, around the world where you are in India, where Laura is in London and where I am in the US are, are all places where polarisation is rising to very dangerous levels.
👉🏾 So, I think often when you think about polarisation, we think quite narrowly about our views on particular issues. And I think the question historically when talking about it's been focused very much on how far apart those views are, but actually as Ali touched on talking about those groups that were being created before, identity is also a really important part of that. And those issue-based differences, quite quickly become differences of social identity. And when that happens, there's obviously a kind of feelings, more than facts, aspect of that. And people increasingly dislike and distrust those from opposing sides, irrespective of whether they actually disagree on a specific issue.
👉🏾 And once we group in that way, those kind of labels that we adopt for the us and them groups come to act as proxies for all kinds of differences and beliefs and values and behaviour that actually go far beyond the groups themselves. And it's this that's known as affective polarisation. So it's that sense that it's moved into identity. It's very much moved into us and them and the us and them don't actually really have to disagree on very much, but there can still be very significant divisions.
👉🏾 So it's a big question, isn't it? And I think maybe I'll answer it in two parts which you need, the first is given that how affective prioritisation operates, It's not particularly difficult, as Ali said to activate those divides. They are very emotional, they are much more present and palpable when we're in times of uncertainty or when we feel under threat.
👉🏾 So you know the sort of perfect storm of a pandemic and economic uncertainty. There's lots of things that make people vulnerable to the activation of those groupish divisions. And I think what misinformation does, is both obviously mislead people to think in some cases, you know, the divides are more explicit and worse than they are. But in others it worsens that sense. And so we know people respond much more strongly to negative news, to bad news, and it will trigger certain responses. And a lot of what that does is just reinforce those group identities. So there are real kind of risks there. I know Ali, you did some really good work on fake news for the book. I don't know if you want to give a couple of examples there.
👉🏾 On fake news, which is one it's really hard to up-to-date a position once you've taken it. And once you've taken it publicly, which was one of the challenges of misinformation, is often it's designed to be particularly triggering and not always by terribly genuine actors who want to do things. So one of the classic examples is, you know, foreign interference in elections, they could have a preferred candidate and people often think nowadays in terms of Surkov who is not quite as influential as he was, but in Russia and how he deliberately would fund extremes to try and get sort of misinformation out there. There's some evidence that, that happened in Scotland done, certainly in the U S.
👉🏾 So that's one of the problems with misinformation, another thing actually is people they don't want to fall for misinformation. People find it really hard to believe that they have fallen for it and they particularly find it hard to believe people like them will fall for it. But the people from the other group all of them, I never fall for misinformation. It's all those other stupid people, for that other group that will fall for it. Almost all of us will fall for it in some way at some point and it can be a bit embarrassing when you do, because everyone likes to think that it doesn't affect us and it does. And that's one of the really big ways that it plays into polarisation and could be very challenging how it can amplify our existing beliefs. And suddenly you can end up down a spiral holding onto something very suddenly, which is really tricky to undo. There are some ways that Laura has talked a lot about solutions that you can help to reduce the effect of misinformation, which is one, partly to become better at spotting it and falling for it.
👉🏾 There's a very neat game that some guys at Cambridge uni did called the 'bad news quiz' which asks people to go through and try and spot fake news and in a sort of funny and humorous way. And it sort of gets you to try and spot which might be a fake account or where, a message might've been taken over by someone else. And what's really neat about this game is that one acts as an inoculation against you doing it. So you start to get better at spotting things in the future, but also the role of humour that they play in it. And if you're able to laugh at yourself or find something funny, it's much easier to detach yourself from your prior belief and to generate a bit of empathy either for yourself or for others and go from there. And so that's how it goes with misinformation, of course, the concept of misinformation itself or disinformation, both of them slightly different things, but they're not new either. Again, they've been used for a very long time for often nefarious purposes. Let's put it that way.
👉🏾 And that's where this question about people by the time they changed their mind its so important right? And because people find it so hard to remember a time that they'd done so, or that they might've been taken in by misinformation or something like that, because this is slightly simplifying it, but it activates the same parts of your brain that can feel pain almost. And so that can be physically painful almost to admit that you've got things wrong and to change your mind if you're not very careful about things, and then also we're quite programmed to forget that we do do it because we don't like to hold that dissonance in our heads. And that can be very challenging for people as individuals and for leaders and for how.
👉🏾 Children are great bonder across divides. So one of the things you might want to talk about in a second is, you know, how do you try and solve things, people you might disagree with? And one of them is to find out something you have in common with them that you don't otherwise and talk about that first so you kind of fool your brain into thinking you share a group and kids and motherhood. And suddenly you bond across divides and it can be really powerful. So yes big up for the kids, though not necessarily at 3 am when they are keeping me up.
👉🏾 So I'll kick off and I'll bring Ali in, in a second, I'm sure. But I think probably the first key thing to say with the work on genetics is that, there is no specific gene that exists for a particular political leaning, you know, socialism or conservative or more liberalism. It doesn't really work like that, but what our genes do, do is dictate our sensitivity to things. And so our genetic makeup and the way it interacts with our environments does shape the way that we, both perceive the world and respond to it. So there is some really interesting work as you mentioned there, Sudha about epigenetics and how all of those processes work together. And I think one thing that really stuck with me was the role of our regulator genes in this process. So, for those who don't know much about genetics, which included me before we did the book, the differences in our structural genes or what it explains, the differences in how we look and the difference in our regulator genes partially explain the differences in how we behave. So it's really the way that the two of them interact. And so the interaction of those genes can influence how we respond to the environment around us. And, obviously, all of this stuff comes from when we were living as prehistoric creatures, trying to survive in the wild and forming groups and a lot of this stems back from those kinds of early days of humanity, but it does help to help to explain some of why we can be more or less prone to engaging in different types of groups. Why we can be more or less sort of small C conservative, and how that interacts with our environment.
👉🏾 And, I think if Alex our co-author were here, that's the other point she would probably make is that how critical that wider environment is in terms of those interactions. Because what you experienced and how you are raised and the people that you grow up around, they will all shape some of how you think. And there's a really interesting statistic actually on how increasingly focused we are on wanting our children to marry people who have a similar political outlook to ourselves. So, 30 years ago only 5% of Americans cared whether their child married someone of a different political.......... may be difficult is the one different.
👉🏾 But today that's nearly half and about a third of Democrats who say they'd be actively displeased if their child married, outside the sort of preferred, political party, which I think shows you how strong some of these kinds of political partisan in groups are becoming. Ali I don't know if you want to add to that.
👉🏾 I think this was one of the bits of the book that as we were researching, it made me more uncomfortable if I'm honest. And I just had to learn to live with that discomfort because I very much wanted to be like, of course, I'm in charge of my own views. My genetics doesn't shape my politics. I'm my own woman, I'm really independent. And actually all the evidence is that's not the case. It's an interaction as Laura said of the environment and the genes that you have. And one of the example that we use in the book a sort of a classic one, though a slightly more extreme one is, if any of your listeners have seen the film Free Solo, which is about a guy called Alex Honnold, who's a climber and he climbed El Capitan, which is a 3000 foot or a 1000 meterish climb in a slab of granite rock in Yosemite national park here without ropes. He just went straight up it and it's an astonishingly brilliant film. But, Alex doesn't have a normal response to risk as you might imagine in that thing, a bit of the brain called the amygdala for him, it just doesn't really activate from the environment. But the amygdala, which you know, is like, oh, I'm feeling a bit threatened by this, or I want to try and conserve things or do things differently. That can be activated very differently in different people.
👉🏾 And of course then if you're more conservative and you feel more threatened, the clue is in the name, you also tend to vote more conservative and go from that, and that will interact with your viewpoint and that makes perfect sense to me. But is also, as I say, slightly uncomfortable for someone who had previously been like no, free wills how we do things. What it is, is that you might be someone who is naturally more inclined maybe to collaborate or to like say to respond to risk and to threat differently And you can see that in children or in other people, and in the differences in how they behave already.
👉🏾 Well, well, that's a great question. So uncertainty can generally, it's not always the case, but uncertainty generally amplifies divides. And if people think about it, as you know,...

46: Finding your voice and identity with Chandana Agarwal

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 06:30:00 +0000

Shownotes
My guest on the 46th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Chandana Agarwal, President North, 82.5, Ogilvy Group, India. With over 2 decades in advertising she has helped launch and build brands in India that have been appreciated globally and have gone up to win international Creative and Effectiveness awards.
In this episode we talk about her growing up as a girl in Hyderabad; her lived experiences; her journey into advertising
👉🏾 Surviving/thriving in agency culture; fitting in and being more 'man than a man'
👉🏾 Unpacking what it means to be a single woman in India; shifting the victim mindset
👉🏾 Norms of beauty, a legacy of India's colonial past
👉🏾 Setting up the Marigold Society for Performing Arts, how it anchors her sense of femininity, beauty, giving her a voice and an identity beyond work
👉🏾 Setting up Subah, an initiative to support women who have lost their husbands or partners in the pandemic
👉🏾 The people who inspire her and being her own favourite person.
Thank you Chandana for sharing your time, for being driven by your dreams and passions.
Memorable Passages from the episode
👉🏾 Thank you so much Sudha for having me over and it's so lovely what you're doing, bringing so many perspectives and point of views from different cultures together. So hats off to you.
👉🏾 Yeah, so we're two siblings, I'm the younger daughter of the two of us really. Thankfully I grew up in the South of India. We're North Indians who grew up in Hyderabad. For the listeners who don't know where Hyderabad or how India works, Largely there is the Aryan culture in the North and there is the Dravidian culture in the South. Hyderabad happens to be a cosmopolitan city in the South and that's when I grew up. It was a bit of a mixed bag for me, really thinking back. My father comes from a very large family and he has many younger brothers. And I think after my mother all his brothers ended up having daughters and therefore my mother kind of bore the cross of starting the trend of having only daughters and I think somewhere it rubbed off on my psyche. I was made to feel, almost grateful for being alive.
👉🏾There was a lot of pressure on my parents to say, I wish you had a son, the younger child should have been a son. Though my parents never consciously or subconsciously even hinted at that, but I think that baggage, that pressure was always there. There was a great hurry to be financially independent. I was always excelling at what I did, because I don't think there was luxury to kind of take life as it comes. All my choices in my subjects was based on the career prospects that they would open up rather than what I really wanted to do. And I just think that what I'm saying is not unique to me. It's true for the entire generation of women, all of us that grew up at that time in the country.
👉🏾 So yeah, there was a hurry to kind of learn how cycle to learn how to kind of get on a scooter you know you were just in a hurry waiting to grow up and make yourself useful.
👉🏾 That's an interesting story in itself. In the year that I was graduating from my MBA Institute, there were not too many marketing companies that came to the campus and I did not make it to the few that came. And I kept crying and crying and weeping and my father kept trying to reach me and I refused to come on the phone, obviously, there were no mobile phones in those days. And finally, he got across to me and he said, "Bhai, what is happening? Why are you crying?" And I was like, My career is over I have not cracked a job. And my dad told me one thing that stood me in good stead. He said, a company only gives you a job, you make your career. And that just propelled me into taking things in my own hands. I left the campus, I took a bus to Bangalore. I went knocking to various advertising agencies and I thankfully cracked a job with FCBUlka.
The rest is history as they say or we make history as we go along.
👉🏾 No Sudha, I think you or we or all of us at that time, got into a kind of tunnel vision. We wanted to fit in. We wanted to prove that we are more 'men than men' around. We kind of dressed in a certain way, we spoke a certain language. We wanted to prove to the world that we could take it on our chins and still stand tall. All of us and I shouldn't be talking for everybody, but me personally, I'm very ashamed to admit this, but I used to say, "Oh my God, there's a woman driver, I don't know what is going to happen".
👉🏾 So you wanted to disassociate yourself from being a woman and you tried really hard to be more man than a man even. I guess at that time it didn't faze us, we were all hungry, we were all trying to fit in. We all wanted to kind of prove to the world that we could be as good. Looking back, I do believe that a lot of time could have been saved. A lot of work could have been more productive. A lot of heartache could've been saved if we were who we were. But I don't think any of us realised at that time that we were curbing who we intrinsically are.
👉🏾 I remember, I started smoking because most of the conversations would happen in the balcony outside and you wanted to be a part of that conversation. I would see matches because I wanted to be a part of conversations and sports does not interest me at all because I believe unless you've played a sport you can't really vibe with it. Following matches and to smoking and to living a certain way. Women should be born in their forties and then they should find the way back. I think forties is so liberating
👉🏾 I just think firstly there’s somethings about being a single person, which are universal irrespective of the gender or the country, which is you need to do create self-love. You need to love yourself enough. You need to kind of value yourself, respect yourself, find yourself interesting enough to spend time with yourself. You need to be extremely disciplined, I think, because I've seen a lot of friends from home being single is a phase right? They're single for the weekend, or they're single for a week. And the choices you make are very different. But being that this is your life, then you need to lead a certain way.
👉🏾 So I think those are some of the things that are universal about being single. And then there are somethings which is, what happens when you fall sick? The fact that the society looks at you be a little more dishonourable or that many friends don't want to save your number under your name, the fact that women friends don't want to invite you on the weekends when they are with their family.
👉🏾 So there's a lot into being a single woman and then there is the whole world of do's and don'ts about being a single woman in India, in Haryana right? Which is one of the most patriarchal societies in the world, which is the whole judgemental-ness of people. The fact that right from the security guard to your next door neighbour is looking at you suspiciously,
👉🏾 So yeah, I think that being single, there is so much expectation that you start seeing yourself as a victim and every small incident becomes a symbol of something larger. And I think somewhere in my head, I changed that about seven years back and that's led to a very positive attitude, both in my own reaction to the world and I think in turn the world's reaction to me. If I called the carpenter home to do some repair job, and he came about 2 hours late, in my mind I used to process it as, because I am a single woman and because I'm a woman who's asking him to come and he knows that there's no man in my house, he believes he can get away by taking it for granted. And when I change that to believing that I'm not the victim, he's a poor guy, who's working somewhere else and maybe his job didn't get over on time and I started seeing him as the victim, I think everything for me has changed since that time. It's very easy for me now. I think everybody respects me for who I am and what I do.
👉🏾 So I think the long and short of it is this, that it's not easy to be a single person anywhere in the world. You need to love yourself, but you also need to kind of change the mindset. I think it's more in our minds than in the world's mind and if you become a giver I think everything is easy.
👉🏾 Sudha I think, I was an extremely complex and complicated child now that I look back and think about it. Because I was a north Indian who grew up in south and I was dusky complexion as I continue to be. There was a lot of finger pointing, that happened. I used to dread the time that I used to go back to visit my relatives during my summer vacations because I constantly heard she's become like somebody who belongs to Madras, which essentially means that you're dark complexion, and there would be a lot of conversation with my mother to say, get her to eat this, get her to drink this. Why don't you take care of her, why don't you do this? How would she get married? So being dark was something that was looked down upon. Constantly, you know, things like this colour will not go well on you. Red you can't wear, Yellow you can't, this lipstick you can't wear.
👉🏾 Every time I went for a wedding. I was made to dance on 'jiski biwi kaali' and I used to dread that. But at that time I used to go and hide and run. And I remember I used to give my new clothes to my best friend to wear because I thought it would look better on her. So being dark complexion, dusky complexion was one thing and then there was this whole thing of being the son, not being the son, being a boy, not being a boy, being a girl, not being a girl.
👉🏾 So between these two, I really didn't know who I was what I wanted to be and what is it that I wanted to project to the world. I think since then I've come a long way. And I'm extremely comfortable with who I am and I can wear all the colours that I want to. I wear all kinds of clothes that I feel very good about being who I am. So I believe that women are almost cordoned or boxed off as per the society's norms of what being beautiful is. And that's been true for so many cultures rights? So I guess it's the same thing that continues and I think it's up to us to kind of feel good and then feel beautiful.
👉🏾 That's true. There can't be an excuse for this yeah. The first excuse comes to my lips is , that's what the market buys, but hey, there's no excuse for that.
👉🏾 I just think that there's never any one thing that leads to an action like this. I think lots of things in the universe come together, collude together to kind of push in a certain direction. In my case when I look back at why this happened, it can be one or two triggers, but this space Marigold and dance occupies in my life is something that possibly words cannot capture.
👉🏾 It's made me anchor my sense of femininity, beauty. It's given a stage, it's given a voice, it's given a language to who I really think I am. In fact, people say that I use my hands a lot more than most people right? So they believe that I carry the aura of being a dancer in my corporate world as well. So specifically at that point of time in my life I used to learn dance at somebody's house and for whatever reasons she didn't want me to continue there. So there was reason for me to kind of start my own academy because dance I knew was going to continue to play an important role in my life.
👉🏾 Dance itself had given me a lot of joy, a lot of confidence, a lot of beauty. And I wanted to spread that to other women, and that was the other reason why I wanted to start Marigold. So while all of this was happening, I just think through dance, I've connected to so many beautiful, wonderful, strong women from fields that I would've never interacted with earlier. I've created good karma because I get such lovely messages for being the medium through which people have fulfilled their childhood dreams of being on the stage, of continuing dance, of being cured out of their depression and grief.
👉🏾 Also, I think professionally the glass ceiling exists for women, no matter what we say and very frequently our sense of identity starts getting fused with the designation on our visiting cards. And I know you've gone through struggle with that for some time. And I think Marigold somewhere allowed me to create a cushion for myself. It allowed me to define myself in a way that wasn't just linked to my job. So in that sense, I'm really, really grateful for having found dance or for dance having found me.
👉🏾 Thank you for bringing it up, it's something that we started on the 17th of May. I went through COVID all alone right? And that was a vulnerable time for the entire world and being alone kind of brings out various insecurities to the fore right? So I first started by creating a volunteer group in my own condominium, where I got the RWA to invest in a few oxygenators, a few cylinders and a few steroids, life-saving drugs to say that we know we need to have this in our condominium, God forbid any of our own residents feel that. Because in my own head, I was just battling with this whole thing that God forbid, something happens to me, who do I reach out to what will happen to me? So I think it came from self-defence and it just opened up a world to me. We all saw the outpouring of humanity that happened.
This is essentially for women who've lost their husbands or partners to the pandemic. And we realised that no, this kind of grief is very, very unique. In the sense, most of them were not able to bid goodbye to their partners and this was all sudden, it happened in a period of 10 to 15 days. Most of them saw their husbands go to the hospital and then never come back. They were not there as a part of the last rites. They did not get to experience the grief and therefore live through trauma. And there was a need for these women and what they're going through, nobody else can go through and there's nobody who can talk to them about it, except for other women who are going through a similar grief.
👉🏾 And therefore Subah is our attempt at creating an ecosystem for women by doing multiple things. So a) We're an ecosystem and we've got tie-ups with lots of coaches and counsellors and we train them on grief handling. Each Braveheart as we call them, because we don't like to use the word widow. Each brave heart is assigned a buddy or a coach depending on her life stage. We do a lot of career counselling, we've helped women restart their careers. We've got tie-up with some of the best people in Korn Ferry who kind of train women, how to create their LinkedIn profile, how to apply for jobs, how to prepare for interviews. We do a lot of financial advisory in terms of all the money that they're getting from their husbands PF account, gratuity, et cetera. How would they invest it to make sure that their kids future safe. We do a lot of taxation consultancy. We do a lot of legal consultancy. On the Saturday we are doing a session with what is the emergency first aid you can give to children because all of them are single parents now. So yeah, the attempt is to be able to create an ecosystem of volunteers and supporters who can help Bravehearts rebuild their life.
👉🏾 We've got 178 Bravehearts. We're a community of 320 people as of today, so that’s a 170 Bravehearts and the rest of them are volunteers. So out of the 176, I think we've touched everybody's life in some way or the other. So there's a WhatsApp group, there's a Facebook group, they all connect with each other. They've now formed almost city-wise circles and we've got people from US, Australia, Bihar, Assam across the world. And they all find support within their own age group. We've got a Noida group now who meets offline once in a week, they go to each other, so children's birthday parties etcetera. So I think somewhere Subah has brought a ray of light not just the 176 Bravehearts but to the 300 odd people in the community.
👉🏾 I think Chandana is evolving, I think we're all work in progress. I don't think Chandana can be captured in one or two words or adjectives. I love being a woman, right? I love the feminine gender and we are on the first Navaratra which celebrates the feminine energy. I absolutely revel in being who I am, I love myself. In that movie 'Jab We Met this woman says 'Main aapni favourite person hoon' (I am my own favourite person).
👉🏾 I also believe I'm a woman of action, I'm extremely resilient. I think life makes you resilient, I don't think any of us is born like that. But yeah, I think who I've become today is a strong, resilient, opinionated, khadus woman being who she is. I think I'm spoilt and I take pride in it.
👉🏾 I think self-made people inspire me, I think I'm complex about not having the pedigree that I would've wanted. I would have want it to be a Harvard graduate, which I am not. I believe that people who create themselves, people who kind of, build themselves up from scratch are people I respect and admire.
👉🏾 And there’s inspiration all around I think all of us are Mothers. I think the Bravehearts that I interact with are phenomenal women right? For me, 2 things that I respect in people are honesty and resilience and the ability to kind of be self-made to not be faced down by what life throws at you. And I think an average woman inspires me. All women, I think face so much and go to so many challenges.
👉🏾 Not at all Sudha, Thank you so much and tight hug.
Follow Chandana Agarwal on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandana-agarwal-3313816/
Twitter: @0dc21330495d4b2
Marigold Society of Performing Arts: https://www.facebook.com/kathak.marigold/
Important Links
👉🏾 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/how-you-label-something-will-define-how-far-it-can-go/articleshow/77829066.cms
👉🏾 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/boxed-in-stereotypes-how-women-have-been-depicted-on-the-screen/articleshow/81132029.cms
👉🏾 https://gurgaonmoms.com/sharetocare-series-with-chandana-agarwal/

45: A conversation with Koray Camgoz, Director of Communications PRCA

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes:
In the 45th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with the unflappable Koray Camgoz, Director of Communications and Marketing at the PRCA. For many of us in the industry he is the 'go to' guy for anything to do with the PRCA.
Koray is passionate about DEI and has been deeply involved in all PRCA DEI initiatives including REEB and EIAC.
In this episode we talk about the last 18 months, its impact on the PRCA, the industry, restructuring of the PRCA Board, and the launch of the Race and Ethnicity Equity Board(REEB).
👉🏾 We also spoke about the memorable/scary moments from the last year;
👉🏾 Progress on DEI in the industry
👉🏾 The Accessible Communications Guidelines launched in partnership with Current Global
👉🏾 PRCA's partnership with DWP for the 'Kickstart' scheme and it's success
👉🏾 PRCA CMS as a gold standard for inclusion and accessibility
👉🏾 The people who inspire him in his personal and professional life.
Memorable Passages from the conversation:
👉🏾 Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with
👉🏾 So I graduated back in 2008 really at the height of the financial crisis. So I graduated in English at a time when there were very few jobs available, not just in public relations, but in the economy generally. So I undertook quite a wide range of internships, I worked on placements and internships in charities like Action Aid and also the Department of Works Press Office before going back to university.
👉🏾 So I went back to uni the following year and I did a master's in media and communications at Brunell and then a few months later, I moved out to New York and I joined an agency called Tiberend Strategic Advisors, who are kind of a healthcare/financial services firm. And I worked with them for about six months before moving back to London and then joining the CIPR where I stayed for almost I think seven years in total in various roles working in policy and then lastly as PR manager for three years, and then joined PRC Ain 2019. So it's been about 10 years in total now, since I started.
👉🏾 It was a really interesting time. So I think obviously that the events of last summer really kind of accelerated the appetite for change and the urgency that everyone felt. I think to be honest with you, the industry has been well aware of the need for change on diversity, inclusion and you're asking specifically about race and ethnicity, and I think that the awareness of the need for change has been there. And it's been something that people have spoken about and committed to in various ways. But what we saw last summer was a kind of a massive accelerant in the urgency of it.
👉🏾 So I've worked on diversity inclusion issues and initiatives for the best part around eight years in various capacities. It was something that I worked on while I was at the CIPR as well. And as I said, I think there's been some good initiatives and some good work that's taken place, but last summer, just kind of really heightened the need for genuine and meaningful change.
👉🏾 So for us, what that meant was really creating something brand new. We wanted to create something that was not only championing best practice in the industry and making sure that we were providing all the opportunities for Black, Asian and ethnically diverse professionals that we could. But also something that would help keep us accountable as well as an association. And I remember, I think you were part of that. At the first meeting of REEB where we were discussing kind of ambitions and what we wanted to do and it was quite rightly pointed out to us by the committee itself, that our board was unanimously white at the PRCA and that was something that was indicative of the problems that we were trying to solve.
👉🏾 So it was down to us to address that situation and it's something that we managed to do quite quickly, although we're still at the very early stages of that process. I think we're now up to about 20% of our board who are from diverse backgrounds. So it's something that we are increasingly conscious of and REEB really has guided our efforts on that.
👉🏾 And I think that in turn gave those volunteers the confidence and the assurances that we were serious about this being something that genuinely grounded in creating meaningful change for the industry.
👉🏾 I think it's important to know that everybody on the board, the board as it was and indeed as it's now, really acknowledged the gravity of the situation. And as I said at the beginning, I think what happened last summer was really a wake-up call. And I think people have been aware and cognisant of these issues for a number of years. There was a renewed sense of urgency, and that was felt by members of our board as well and as you quite rightly point out there were a number of people who made the decision to step down. People like Tony Langham at Lansons, is a good example of that and I think what that did was create space for other people to join.
👉🏾And those people, as you've quite rightly pointed out we owe them our thanks, but we are also increasingly aware that it's what should happen, and it's the change that needs to happen if the industry is serious about moving on and taking a real stride forward when it comes to race and ethnicity in PR.
👉🏾 Yeah, there are many. Probably more scary than memorable. I would say, I mean obviously, we went through what every organisation went through at the outset of the pandemic, which was flat-out fear and uncertainty really. We furloughed quite a large number of staff members and unfortunately had to make redundancies as well. So that was a really tough time. Tough for the people that had been furloughed but it was also tough for the staff who are still there really, and delivering more output, more campaigns, more events than ever before but just with fewer people on hand. So it was a very difficult time. I've got two small children at home as well so it was particularly, when the schools were closed, it was a really, really tough time. So that was definitely the hardest point I would say. Another point that sticks out was not long after really our first major virtual conference, which was the international summit, which took place in May of last year. That was a real game-changer for us because it was the industry’s first virtual conference, there was a certain amount of trepidation over how it works and whether we'd be able to deliver it on the scale we wanted to with quite a depleted team.
👉🏾 But in the end we put on a really great event. We had 700 people join across two days from all around the world and that was unprecedented for us. And I think, more importantly, it proved that this model could work and there was a future in the virtual events space and that really was a lifeline for us, so that is another one to put out. And finally, probably the most positive memory was just a couple of weeks ago when we had our summer reception in London, which was just a lot of fun, we had around 200 people come along for that and to see people face-to-face again, and to meet people who I'd met online for the first time was a lot fun and yeah, that was a really happy memory.
👉🏾 So I think one of the great things about working for a professional is body is that when a crisis hits or when there are hard times, I think you see the very best in the industry. You see people volunteer their time and fundamentally I think crises like these bring out the whole point of a professional body because it's all about community. It's all about networks, support, development, learning, and these are all the values that really come to the fore during a crisis.
👉🏾 And they absolutely did for us last year within days really of the pandemic being declared, we were really inundated with requests from people who wanted to support. And as a result of that we created our "COVID-19 communications task force", which was really the vehicle for support that ran for the rest of the year and it delivered a whole number of webinars, free consultation services to any businesses that needed help and then alongside that, it also produced some really practical guidance on how to steer your agency through a downtown like this. And for many it was a lifeline and since then we've been contacted by a lot of people, who've been really grateful for the support that they've provided and that was led by I mentioned Tony Langham earlier, who's been hugely helpful in that regard, but also by Rachel Friend and Rod Cartwright as well. So yeah all of those people I think deserve an immense amount of credit.
👉🏾 So that came about through us speaking with George Coleman. So George is the CEO of Current Global, he's incredibly passionate about accessibility and inclusion. So George grew up with a deaf father and really have been kind of pivotal in creating and driving best practice communications in terms of accessibility. So we've worked with George's team to produce quite a comprehensive guide about 34 pages long and it's really just packed with insight tips and templates that you can go away and apply to your own day to day role. But I mean it is such a massive issue and it's one that I feel like the industry the is sleeping on at the moment. You have 15% of the world's population that have some form of disability of one form or another. And when you consider all of the collective buying power, you're talking about a massive audience, which is currently being excluded. So for comms professionals that's a real opportunity to engage a new audience and that hopefully will be supported by the guidance that we've developed in partnership with Current Global.
👉🏾 Yeah I would just add that a lot of the changes to that are just really straightforward and simple and I'll hold my hands up, that I wasn't aware of quite how simple some of them were, so for example, we've now put on in excess of 200 virtual events since the pandemic began. But we only since working with George we've realised how easy it is, for example, to include live audio captioning on zoom events, which is something that we now advocate. Similarly, Microsoft accessibility checker, which is a really great free tool that anyone can use and you can use it just in the way that you would with the spellchecker. So there's lots of really simple and easy steps you can take to improve your comms and your accessibility.
👉🏾 So Kickstart launched earlier last year, I think it was on March last year. Fundamentally it's a scheme that's designed to support young people aged between 18 and 24 who had been to the most at risk of long-term unemployment as a result of the pandemic. Essentially the scheme involves employers creating six months placements and then being reimbursed for the salaries for those young people by the government. So essentially the government is funding these placements, it's a really brilliant initiative. It's one that our members have responded to incredibly well. We've created over 80 roles for young people who would otherwise be on universal credit and yeah, it's something that, we're incredibly proud of.
👉🏾 Obviously the government is seeing the urgent need to kind of help young people because whenever there's a big crisis or an economic downturn on this scale, invariably it's young people who come off the worst and we've got good relationships with the DWP and with other government departments and we quite quickly recognised the benefit, not only to society for this, but for the PR industry. And we became a gateway organisation very quickly. So we are essentially helping members to take advantage of this scheme.
👉🏾 It is and it's something that I think globally is respected as kind of a hallmark or a Kitemark because of excellence in our industry. So those that aren't familiar with, the CMS stands for the Communication Management Standard, and it combines various elements of ISO 9001 and 'Investor in people' with criteria that is specific to PR and communications, it's available to consultancies, it's available to in-house teams, and it's also available to virtual teams as well. So it was introduced a long time ago, it was introduced in 1998. It's been continually updated, it covers various aspects, kind of business planning, financial management, client satisfaction, diversity, et cetera. But I think the good thing about CMS is that it's always kind of developing and it's always learning because best practice itself is always moving, particularly in this industry.
👉🏾 So we're always talking with industry experts and outside the industry on how it can be improved. And accessibility is certainly one of those areas that we're doing that one as well. But you quite rightly say I think in this day and age, businesses are looking for more ways than ever to prove that they are not only committed to making profit but actually just committed to being good businesses around and having a positive impact on society.
👉🏾So the CMS is really a powerful vehicle for organisations of all types to be able to do that. And to be honest with you, it's proved very popular, particularly over the pandemic. There are a lot of agencies, large and small, and in house teams as well, who are taking advantage of it. And the good is that once you are accredited and you've completed it, you're eligible for our matchmaker service, which is an opportunity to win new business as well.
👉🏾 I think the first thing to say is that there's never been a better time, I think to enter the industry. Personally, I've been hugely passionate about diversity and inclusion, since I started working in the industry. I think that this is a great time because I think agencies and in-house teams have never been more aware of the need for change. So I think the fact that we have a new generation now, who are able to come in and help create the change that this industry needs is really exciting. So my advice would be, be a hundred per cent committed to yourself and to your own personal values, don't feel the need to assimilate or adjust because it's in your interest and it's in the industry's interest for you to be true to yourself. And then on a more practical note, I think this has always been the case in PR I think as much as you can try and develop your networks, blog, access communities, use the PRCAs networks and services to try and build your profile. And yeah, I think it's an incredibly exciting time to work in the industry. So that would probably be my advice to the next generation.
👉🏾 That's a good question, there’s probably like a professional and a non-professional example. On the non-professional side, I'd probably say my dad is probably My biggest inspiration. He's now 82 but he is in great shape, touch wood. So he's just an incredibly driven person who is incapable of standing still and always doing something. So he was born, in quite primitive circumstances in the 1930s in Cyprus and worked his way to London and built a small business and even now to this day is still working hard and in various capacities. So I'd have to say him.
👉🏾 And then in a professional capacity I'd say Scott Galloway, he is a marketing professor at NYU, I'm just such a huge fan of his and I find him really inspiring to listen to because a lot of his advice is just about life and happiness and making sure that we're keeping sight of the things that are really important in our lives and I think that is a really important one for those of us who work in a fast-paced industry like ours.
👉🏾 It's a pleasure. Thanks very much for having me and thanks for all your help on REEB and with the various PRCA initiatives and of course, for all your leadership on the EIAC as well, we're really grateful for all the brilliant work that you've put in.

Follow Koray Camgoz on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/korayc/?originalSubdomain=uk
Twitter: @KorComms

Read more about Koray:
👉🏾 https://www.prweek.com/article/1591923/prca-poaches-ciprs-koray-camgoz-head-communications-marketing
👉🏾 https://commshero.com/commshero-week-event/koray-camgoz/
👉🏾 https://www.vuelio.com/uk/blog/koray-camgoz-appointed-head-of-comms-and-marketing-at-prca/
👉🏾 https://wadds.co.uk/blog/2020/5/27/pr-will-re-emerge-from-covid-19-leaner-smarter-and-better-connected
PRCA DEI news and links:
👉🏾 https://www.prca.org.uk/REEB
👉🏾 https://wadds.co.uk/blog/2021/4/21/accessible-communications-guidelines-published-by-prca
👉🏾 https://www.allthingsic.com/prca-publishes-new-accessible-communications-guidelines/
👉🏾 https://www.prca.org.uk/membership/groups/sectoral/eiac
👉🏾 https://www.prca.org.uk/event/4930/change-for-good%3A-building-an-equitable-%26-inclusive-pr-industry
👉🏾 https://www.vuelio.com/uk/blog/prca-gateway-for-dwp-kickstart-scheme-greenlights-60-new-pr-jobs/

44: A journey to understanding the Indian caste system with Sudha Singh

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Parallels have been drawn between racism in the west and casteism in India - both are social constructs, both privilege groups of people, limiting the life chances and horizons of millions of people because of where they are born
For everyone interested in race, an understanding of caste it essential. Pulitzer Prize winner and author Isabel Wilkerson says, "We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all: the caste system"
Since, I re-started my DEI journey a couple of years back after hitting a career wall I have been advocating for a fairer, equitable and more representative industry and society. As a founding member of the Race and Ethnicity Equity Board at the PRCA and Co-Chair of the Equity and Inclusion Advisory Council, I am passionate about what I do and am determined to help bring change.
I talk about about race, ethnicity, equity and inclusion all the time, so I think it would be very hypocritical of me to not talk about caste - the proverbial elephant in the room and the pervasive inequalities and inequities it breeds.
So, over the coming months I will be speaking with subject matter experts, thought leaders, academics and individuals to throw more light on this behemoth that castes a dark shadow over our society. I am no expert, so this is an exercise in learning and mainstreaming conversations about caste and hearing perspectives from those who continue to be marginalised and afflicted by it.
My hope is that people stop considering being 'caste blind' as the gold standard for fairness (both in corporate India and society); and start acknowledging the deep divisions that exist in our society and the caste penalty that millions of people pay every single day.
In this episode I also speak about 👇🏾
👉🏾 India's affirmative action programme a world first that is enshrined in its constitution which was written by a visionary, intellectual giant and Dalit, Dr B.R.Ambedkar
👉🏾 Isabel Wilkerson and her take on caste in India
👉🏾 A recent Pew Research Centre Report on religion and caste in India
👉🏾 Caste, Privilege, and its manifestations
There are also a few sound bytes from people sharing their personal views on caste in 2021
#societyandculture #inclusion #fairness
Listen here👇🏾👇🏾
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396?i=1000536469957
Memorable Passages from the Episode:
👉🏾 Welcome to The Elephant in the Room podcast. Today's episode is about caste, what it means to me, my personal experiences, the Indian constitution and a recent Pew Center Report. This episode is standalone but over the coming months I hope to explore the various dimensions of caste with subject matter experts, individual and leaders from the Dalit community and my broader network. In today's episode you will also hear voices from people across India and their personal views on caste.
👉🏾 What does caste mean to me? As someone who grew up in India, I have always been conscious about caste and it's insidious hold on our lives and how it permeates the very fabric of our society and being. With the advent of new technology, and 24x7 media - caste inequities and atrocities are more visible now than it was a decade ago. But, like most people caught up in the humdrum of life, I have never done anything about it - except to push back if it threatened to infringe upon parts of my life.
👉🏾 When I launched The Elephant in the Room podcast last year, it was with a view to mainstreaming conversations that are taboo, speak about people's lived experiences and give voice to issues that are important to building a fairer and more just society. As an advocate for equity & inclusion it would be downright hypocritical of me not to talk about the deep inequalities that exist in the society from where I come. So this is my opportunity now to learn about this behemoth that castes a dark shadow over our wonderful land.
Vox Pop
👉🏾 For most professional Indians their social identity is rooted in where they work, their designation, what they earn, what they own - which is linked to class. Once you have crossed that barrier there is a guessing game, about where they are from based on their surname. Indians are notoriously curious, aspirational and interested in other people's status and standing in society - this is usually to size up and see where they stand. And it is not considered rude or nosy to know about the history of a person who is perhaps standing in front of you in a queue within 10 mins.
👉🏾 When I was in school, people often thought I am from southern India because I was one too many shades dark to be a North Indian. After marriage I took my husbands surname - Singh - which is ubiquitous for northern India. People often ask me are you Punjabi/Sikh? And if I said no, they wanted to know where I was from then. My parents were born in the Rajput community but are not from Rajasthan. I felt a sense of shame admitting that my parents were from Bihar a state in Eastern India - being called a Bihari was like a slur - the associated stereotypes were - uneducated, backward, cannot speak English and of course, Bollywood has contributed to perpetuating that myth. Regional stereotypes abound in India. The other factor for me was that I felt I belonged to the state where I grew up, rather than where my parents came from - the values, the culture, the people - it all resonated with me.
👉🏾 So, what does it mean to be a Rajput, were there some norms, behaviours that one had to adopt because you were born a Rajput. Not in our household but that does not mean that those norms did not exist or do not exist. Being a Rajput accorded me numerous privileges at various touch points in my life - so much privilege that I did not realise that I was different. My first experience with exclusion was only when I moved to the UK, and became a minority and outsider. That experience deepened my empathy and understanding of exclusion and what it meant to be the other.
👉🏾 Isabel Wilkerson is the author of 'Caste: The lies that divide us' and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. And if you don't already know, she is the first woman of African American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. On the Indian caste system she says and I quote:
"A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through generations."
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, the flashlight cast down the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources: which caste is seen as worthy of them, and which are not; who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence: who is accorded these, and who is not."
And if you want to know more about Isabel Wilkerson there are links at the end of the shownotes.
Vox Pop
👉🏾 In India caste and religion are strongly intertwined - one is the lifeblood of the other, they feed off each other. There are many who would disagree, but this is not a question of our personal beliefs but of ground realities. I grew up in a household where there were no conversations about caste or religion. Religious occasions were treated as high points in the year for cultural and social interaction. Holi was about colours and abandon; Durga Pooja was about new clothes and Diwali was about food, clothes and extended families.
👉🏾 Like most middle class Indians of a certain age - my brothers and I went to a convent school. That they were run by catholic nuns did not matter and that we had to go to church and learn hymns did not matter either to my parents - as much as the fact that they taught in English and the standard of education was good as per the expectation at that point in time. A lot of the convent schools were subsidised by the government - so fees were low and they were encouraged to have students from economically disadvantaged background. The extent of co-mingling and friendships I cannot really comment on - but I was friends with most of my classmates and nobody at home was controlling or telling me to engage or not engage with certain groups.
👉🏾 I feel proud to say that India has the largest and most comprehensive affirmative action programme in the world. It is enshrined in Indian constitution. And the constitution written by a visionary and intellectual giant and Dalit, Dr B.R Ambedkar.
👉🏾 And just to demystify the word Dalit. What or who is a Dalit? Dalits were the lowest in the caste hierarchy, the untouchables. Gangadhar Pantawane, a Dalit writer from Maharashtra defines Dalit as a notion of change and revolution. He says,"What is Dalit. To me, Dalit is not a caste. Dalit is a symbol of change and revolution. The Dalit believes in humanism." Dalitness is a matter of appreciating the potential of one's total being.
👉🏾 Fundamental Rights are enshrined in the Indian constitution; including the right to equality, the right to freedom and the right against exploitation. In an attempt to correct historical injustices, the Indian constitution banned discrimination on the basis of caste. And in a world first introduced affirmative action announcing quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for people from scheduled castes, tribes and the lowest in caste hierarchy. This was a concerted effort to correct historical injustices and provide a level playing field to the traditionally disadvantaged.
👉🏾 Affirmative action has since expanded to include new categories and the Indian Supreme Court has capped reservations at 50 percent of total jobs and seats. In 2021 caste is a sensitive topic of discussion, the affirmative action programme is controversial as numbers of employable Indians grows and jobs become scarce. In a fiercely competitive education and job market - caste, especially the quota system is a potential flashpoint.
Caste is the principle that drives electoral politics and like everywhere in the world politicians are not averse to pitting one community against the other as they fight for votes and quotas.
👉🏾 For an equity & inclusion practitioner I am fascinated with the depth and breadth of the Indian affirmative action programmes but also the learnings on how much angst it has created in communities who are not beneficiaries. For us to understand the success or failure it would be important to have a detailed caste census something that does not exist at this point in time. And for which major political parties have been clamouring in the last year.
👉🏾 Highly educated Indians are fiercely protective and proud of their caste and the social norms that come with it. Does it mean that they are all discriminatory? In India, caste is not just limited to Hindus, Muslims and Christians also have the caste system - something that is unheard of outside the country. People convert to escape the dogmas of one religion but in their new religion they continue to have a low status inherited from their past life.
👉🏾 Today, Caste is definitely, the big elephant in the room. It is not something the middle class or upper classes speak about or acknowledge. I have had fierce debates with perfectly decent human beings about caste and 7 out of 10 individuals in urban India will tell you - that corporate India believes in meritocracy (which in itself is deeply flawed); that the media is indulging in sensationalism on atrocities by attributing a caste dimension to the story.
Vox Pop
👉🏾 The immediate trigger for this episode was deeply personal and troubling experience. My 30 year old niece fell in love, which in itself is troublesome for her conservative mother, and to top it her beau comes from a working class background and from a caste perspective is low ranking. There are so many things that are wrong with this situation a) the lack of decision making power a 30 year old girl has in 2021 is not just disturbing but worrisome. b) The role of patriarchy in the decision making process.
👉🏾 They say art imitates life and this entire episode had the makings of a melodramatic Bollywood movie. The biggest concern in the family was, ' What would people say'? 'We are going to lose face?' 'What if it does not work out? Kudos to my niece for standing up to the family - but her strategy was more around wearing them out. When I consider my own girls and their ability to make their own decisions - I feel proud of them. Not because I have allowed them to do that - that is not a power I have to give. But, because I have inculcated in them the importance of treating everyone with respect for who they are and irrespective of where they were born or what caste or religion they belong to. We must be able to live the values we espouse and show our children and future generations that change is possible and that there are people in world who are taking the necessary steps to enable that change.
👉🏾 A Pew Research Center Report from June states that nearly all Indians today identify with a caste, regardless of their religion. The survey finds that three-in-ten Indians (30%) identify themselves as members of General Category castes, a broad grouping at the top of India’s caste system that includes numerous hierarchies and sub-hierarchies. The highest caste within the General Category is the Brahmin, historically the priests and other religious leaders who also served as educators. Just 4% of Indians today identify as Brahmin.
👉🏾 According to the report most Indians do not feel there is a lot of caste discrimination in the country, and two-thirds of those who identify with Scheduled Castes and Tribes say there is not widespread discrimination against their respective groups. This feeling may reflect personal experience: 82% of Indians say they have not personally faced discrimination based on their caste in the year prior to taking the survey.
👉🏾 Still, Indians conduct their social lives largely within the caste hierarchies. A majority of Indians say that their close friends are mostly members of their own caste, including roughly one-quarter (24%) who say all their close friends are from their caste. And most people say it is very important to stop both men and women in their community from marrying into other castes
👉🏾 While not obviously visible in the metros, caste permeates all aspects of social life. And this complex hierarchy is based on a highly regressive book called the Manusmriti written a 1000 years before Christ was born. In rural communities caste hierarchies are more open and obvious - with lower castes living on the outskirts, not allowed to share water from well with upper castes and upper castes sanctioning intercaste marriage.
👉🏾 I have not read the Manusmirit neither has most of India. Hinduism where this caste system is embedded is not prescriptive on one seminal text to be followed to be a true Hindu - so it beggars belief why people would continue to drag this thing that does more harm than good into the future. According to me progress is when human beings adopt new and better ways of doing things and let go of the old. So why not for this antiquated social construct? Perhaps because it helps protect the power and privilege of a few.
Vox Pop
👉🏾 There is no one homogenous India, no linear thinking about what is right or wrong; often times it is opportunistic, cash your caste when it takes you forward. And by no means am I the only person of Indian origin who feels only horror at the continued marginalisation of poorest and most disadvantaged in the country.
👉🏾 I will end with a quote from Dr B R Ambedkar, "Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire which prevents the Hindus from co-mingling and which has, therefore, to be pulled down. Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind.” “The caste system does not demarcate racial division. The caste system is a social division of people of the same race.”
👉🏾 Thank you for listening to today's episode and if there was anything you found interesting do drop me a line, I would love to hear from you and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast - The Elephant in the Room. And look forward to seeing you again next week.
Follow Sudha on:
Twitter:@Sudha1404
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudha-singh-424ba53
The Elephant in the Room Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-elephant-in-the-room/id1540074396
Website: www.thepurposeroom.org
Important links:
Pew Report: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/06/29/attitudes-about-caste/
👉🏾https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/what-attempts-to-measure-indias-caste-system-get-wrong/
Isabel Wilkerson: Caste: The lies that divide us
👉🏾 https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898574852/its-more-than-racism-isabel-wilkerson-explains-america-s-caste-system
👉🏾 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india

👉🏾...

43: Mantras for navigating workplace barriers with Romeo Effs, CEO Lumorus

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Shownotes
The Elephant in the Room podcast is back this week with our guest Romeo Effs, Founder and CEO of Lumorus, a global consultancy focusing on addressing the disconnect, inequality and upheavals within society that stem from a lack of sustainable, forward-looking governance and leadership.
In this episode we speak about his name (Romeo), journey from Jamaica, a fairly successful international corporate career..........
Experiencing racism in the UK
His views on adapting like a chameleon (or Code-Switching) both as a survival tactic and as a strength
The epiphany that prompted the setting up of Lumorus
Why it is important to take an intersectional lens to address issues around equity and inclusion
He shares his mantras for men of colour navigating the barriers in society & the workplace.
Role models and what drives him on this journey of change

We also spoke about the concept of 'bringing your whole self to work' currently bandied about as the panacea to all ills. Success of the concept usually rests upon the idea of psychological safety within teams and organisations.
To put a cat amongst the pigeons - should we not consider whether we really need to bring our whole self to work? Or only those parts that enable us to fulfil our potential and thrive? And what does that mean in reality.
Romeo also believes that people of colour have been over-mentored, what they need now is sponsors - people who open the doors to roles, promotions, bonuses, prestige projects within the organisation.
If you want to know more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the podcast:
👉🏾 Right, So I'm Jamaican, I was born in Jamaica but I have mixed heritage. There is a mixture of Cuba, German and a mixture of yes, Irish, African going on. And so I spent most of my life growing up in Jamaica, my dad used to be an accountant. And my mom was an English literature teacher. So yeah, all my values and everything that I live by now was because of that childhood or growing up in Jamaica. Yeah.
👉🏾 So you're right. I did move mid-career. I moved to the UK when I was 35 and it just happened by chance because I came to the UK to study, to do my masters and the intention was to return to Jamaica. I had my businesses there, I was very involved in politics. I was on a trajectory to be either a member of parliament or being appointed an ambassador or a senator and given a ministry My political mentor at the time became prime minister, which I worked with him on in terms of the campaign. When I came to the UK, I went to a really, really great university Cass Business School, it's now called Bayes. And while there, I was able to have a tremendous network of individuals from all over the world. People from Bangladesh, from India, from Greece, from Africa, from the UK. But, I was able to meet a lot of these amazing individuals who were just kind of exposing me to other stuff that was happening in the world. And I created this quantitative method called the xxxxxxxxx test, which while doing my master's, which is a quantitative method of analysing risk in supply chain, financial risk.
👉🏾 And so while at the conference, my dissertation was sponsored by, I think the third-largest software manufacturing company in the UK called AG Barr PLC. So I moved to Scotland and lived there for about four months, doing this study this research on their supply chain and just being there and being able to see how they operated, being able to travel to their different locations across Europe and just seeing how things work.
👉🏾 I quickly realised that in Jamaica, I was a big fish in a small pond, but in the UK, I had the ability of growing into a whale because it was like an ocean. And so I then started exploring the notion of staying in this country. And then after I did my dissertation, the company AG Bar PLC then hired me for a year. And so I ended up staying. And quickly after I was headhunted into Accenture which was also another massive eye-opener because I was able to travel, work with the likes of Marks and Spencers, DHL, Ericsson, Nokia.
I was travelling, Africa, Europe, all across America and I learned a lot. And so for me, the whole notion was, why don't I just soak all of this up? Because when I got much older, I would be in a better position to contribute better to my country, Jamaica, if that's what I wanted, And to come back to your point in terms of what do I think attributed to that level of success that I've had here in the UK?
👉🏾 I would say it was definitely my Jamaican origin and roots and the way I was brought up by my mother and my grandmother. Because when I came to the UK, people had to point out what racism was to me because I thought people were just being rude and I would just pretty much kind of tell them off. Because I grew up in a country where everyone looked like me, the prime minister, the doctor, the xxxxxxxx, everyone looked like me. So for me it was like, why someone treating me different? Why am I different from someone else? Why am I so-called quote-unquote, exotic? Why am I ethnic? What is ethnic? Right? I had to learn all of this. And it wasn't until then I started asking, what is this racism? And I had to be taught what racism was. But my mother/grandmother they instilled ethics, a sense of integrity, a sense of morality. A sense of believing in myself and a sense of spirituality. , which I think is the basis of who I am and it taught me the whole notion of, you are the only person that can set limits for yourself, right? You are in control of your life. You are the painter that painting that masterpiece. And so you have control, no one else has control in terms of where you go or what you achieve.
👉🏾 So that kind of drive was instilled in me that look, no one can set limits to you. And in Jamaica we have the saying, "down the road me a go". Meaning, I am heading in a certain direction. And when someone said "down the road, me a go" it simply means that if you're in my way, I'm going to either go over you, under you around you, whatever, but get out of my way, because that's the direction I'm heading in.
👉🏾 In certain circumstances, it can either be a strength or a survival technique. And you're right. I wrote about this in my book 'Enthusiasm Unchained.' And the reason I say that is because I remember working in corporate, I was not able to be my 100% authentic self. And companies keep saying, oh, you should bring your hundred per cent at work. But to be honest with you, if I bring my hundred per cent Jamaicanness at work, that is not going to work right? People are going to look at you strange, they're going to report you. All of the stereotypes that they have about Jamaicans or people from ethnic background, is going to come up. So it is not true, that people from an ethnic background can bring our a hundred percent to work.
We have to choose what we can bring into work. And what I found in the UK was that, yes I had to be a chameleon. When I'm home with my community, I behave in a certain way. When I leave to go to work, I behave in a certain way. When I was in corporate, they had this thing called dress down Friday. Dress down Friday was never applicable to me because, if I dress down, first and foremost, the minute I go and get on the tube, I'm being stereotyped right? Especially if I wore something like a hoodie or something, which I love, I love hoodies.. As a Black man, people just start looking at you strange right? White old women start clutching their purses and all of that because they just have this stereotype. So for me in corporate, it was a survival technique and this is what I say to a lot of ethnic minorities that I coach and mentor in corporate. If corporate UK is where you want to survive, if that's where you want to build a career and be successful, you have to understand that it's a game and you have to be able to learn how to play that game. And learning how to play that game is code-switching, which is another term, right? You have to learn how to fit in, how to build this executive presence, which is a term or a feeling which was developed by, white straight male, to be honest with you. And so you have to be able to understand what that is and be able to develop that in order for you to grow.
👉🏾 So yes, for me, it was an advantage because I learned that quite quickly. And also a survival technique. But yeah, being a chameleon and being able to switch is very important. I'll share a story with you, in my early career, this was when I was in consulting. I got called by someone from HR and got a complaint that people believe that I was being aggressive in the office with my language. And I was like, what? And they're saying, sometimes you're nice and calm, but then sometimes you raise your voice and you start speaking in a language that no one understands. And I got to realise that what was happening was that sometimes I was at work and I would get a call from an elderly relative back in Jamaica. Now I know my great grand Uncle or my great grand Aunt, don't understand the Queen's English right? And in my culture, if you try and speak to them, as we would say, you're speaky spoke, are you trying speaky spokey with them by speaking the Queen's English, they see that as being disrespectful.
👉🏾 So when I'm at work and they call me, I would go straight into my Jamaican dialect. And that was the issue, right? People thought I was being aggressive because I would switch right away and start speaking to my elder in my Jamaican dialect. And if you understand Jamaican, we can be very harsh in terms of the way how we pronounce our words. And then I had to start educating people around the whole notion that look, I can't call my elderly aunt or my elderly relative and start speaking the Queen's English because as far as they're concerned, I'm being disrespectful if I do that. Right. So that's how I have to be able to communicate with them. So those are some of the nuances that even though corporate UK wants to say, they want to be inclusive and they want diversity. They want diversity and inclusion on their terms, right? Not in the authentic true sense of what it needs to be.
👉🏾 When I work with corporates, I tell them, I'm like, look, you guys need to stop telling people to bring their a hundred percent to work, because that is impossible.
If I was to bring my a hundred per cent, although I'm bald right now, I'd probably cornrow my hair or have it in locks. On my dress down days. Oh my God, like I would just turn up in some Jamaican outfit. I would bring my plantain, and rice peas and my jerk chicken in the office. So, it's not true for them to say that. And that goes for most people as well, actually. Unable to bring your a hundred percent to work.
👉🏾 So Lumorus started when I left corporate in 2014. And so it didn't start as Lumorus, it started out as something else. So when I left corporate, I really wanted to do something that I felt could make a difference. Because while I was in corporate, I started a number of networks for people from an ethnic background to help them to kind of progress because in most of the organisations that I work in, the UK, I was the only person of colour or the only Black person at that level.
👉🏾 And so I would seek out these other people from ethnic descent and I would coach them, I would mentor them. I would make sure that they have what they need. I would become their sponsors. I would be their voice in the room. And my last big corporate role was working for a company called Mitie Group PLC. And while I was at Mitie, I was their group director of supply chain and projects, Mitie is 85,000 people in the UK, there were about 3000 directors. I was the only Black director at the time. But of 85,000 people, 50% of them were from an ethnic background because, the company is one of the largest facilities management company, security firm, engineering, most of the people who work, you know this, are people from an ethnic background. So I designed a project to diversify the supply chain and started looking for suppliers from a diverse background. So woman-owned suppliers, ethnic owned suppliers, suppliers from an LGBT and disabled background. And I found it very hard to find them, and those who I found they didn't have the skills or the know-how in terms of dealing with a company of our size, because Mitie is listed company. And so I embarked on a one-year program in terms of training some of the suppliers in order for them to be able to do business with us.
👉🏾 And over that year, we trained I would say about 200, 250 of the suppliers and we incorporated about 120 or so of them in the Mitie supply chain. And won a number of awards across Europe for this work in supply chain diversity. I spoke at the house of Lords. I helped to write policy documents, that number 10 used, in terms of supply chain diversity.
When I left corporate, I wanted to kind of continue in that vein because I just had this inbuilt feeling that I needed to continue helping and using my knowledge and my skills to help people to gain the success that they need as well. Between 2014 and 2018, which is when the name Lumorus evolved. I did a number of things, one was when I left corporate I started a small private equity called Aspire group. And we were investing mainly in ethnic owned businesses. And I would bring my skills to these companies, help them to build their strategy, help them to get funding, help them to grow. Within 12 months I grew the business from 0 to 27 companies in the portfolio.
👉🏾 And I did that for about two years and then I had, an epiphany, in 2015 I suffered a brain aneurysm. So I lost sight, I lost mobility, I couldn't speak, all of that. I remember being in that hospital and the doctors kept saying to me, Mr. Effs you're suffering a brain aneurism. And I remember quite clearly just lying there and just saying, I'm like, God, listen, this is not a request right now, this is a command anywhere you have those healing angels, I don't care where they are. You need to send them right now because I have shit to do. Right.
👉🏾 And I remember just lying in the hospital for eight weeks. I was in a room that had a window, but the window looked out on a wall. There was no television, no nothing. This was after I came out of intensive care and I just had a lot of time to think. And I remember, one night I was just there thinking, what is happening? Like, I lost my most prized job in 2013, my job title, like back when I was at my Mitie was the king of my being, it open doors for me right. And so after losing that job I got extremely depressed. Because I lost my mantel, I lost my crown. And I remember feeling the same way when I was going through this, with the aneurysm, because the aneurysm happened at a time when I just signed one of the biggest deals for the private equity firm to help distribute funding for a government program throughout the south of London.
👉🏾 But Lumorus didn't evolve until about a year or two after that. So, I had all of these three different things going. I had the boardroom secretariat, I had the strategy consulting. I had empire builders, which was dealing with the ethnic business and ethnic minorities, et cetera. And I still felt as if there wasn't that connection and I wasn't on the right path. And that realisation also came after the brain aneurysm, because I was just thinking that, if I had died, what would my legacy be? What would they say at my funeral? What were the things that they would talk about?
👉🏾 And so we started out by writing the word legacy, framing it. And so the legacy then turned out to be this foundation, which I named after my mother and my grandmother called the IBRIE foundation. Which works a lot in developing countries, helping to develop the next leaders, using young people and especially focusing a lot on women initiatives. And then we said, how the hell do we fund that? And then that's where the business And so we kind of looked at the three entities that we were working on and we looked at the stuff that we were really good at and we pulled those out. And then we saw where they all fitted in the notion of governance, organisational health, and sustainable business practices. And so that's what we currently do at Lumorus.
👉🏾 So we say IBRIE foundation is changing the face of leadership, one individual at a time, and Lumorus is changing the face of leadership, one institution at a time. So we work with companies around to make them more purpose-driven. We believe that companies should operate in a way that is good for both people. And when I'm talking about people, I'm talking about their employer population. And, their customers, the community that they work in, planet, around the environment and also the wider community and the wider world, justice issues, et cetera. And to be profitable as well but to be profitable in a way that is sustainable. Not only for them, but for the business as a whole.
👉🏾 I strongly believe that we have an obligation for those of us who have kind of gone through some of the obstacles and paved the ways. We have an obligation to help those that are behind us right. We should leave trails so that people can understand and see, oh yes, okay this is how we kind of get there. I currently run a mentoring circle, which has about 30 people from around the world. I also do a youth shadow board where I have a group of young people that I take into the boardroom with me so that they can understand the whole notion of governance and how businesses work. Because, I strongly believe that boards are the custodians of the culture of an organisation. And the board sets the tone in how the organisation is governed and run and the impact that it has. And businesses are very powerful instruments in our society, right? They donate to political parties. They lobby to change policy. They have people that work in them that live in communities.
So if you can impact the people within the organisation in terms of the way, how they think and the stuff that they believe and inspire them to do good and to change and transform, they will take those new kinds of thinking into the community and there's a snowball effect.
👉🏾 Good question. `And especially on the back of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year. I had to seriously stop and reflect. Because, yes, Lumorus we do a lot of work in...

42: A conversation with Saleem Khan, British Asian Trust on responding to the pandemic in India

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0000

A conversation with Saleem Khan, British Asian Trust on responding to the pandemic in India: It is difficult to forget the harrowing stories/scenes of patients dying for lack of oxygen in India earlier this year, when it was ravaged by the pandemic. A BBC report called it 'A nightmare on repeat'. It was heartening however, to see governments and businesses the world over step up to support India during this terrible crisis. Amongst those responded swiftly was the British Asian Trust that raised over £5 million for its 'Oxygen for India Emergency Appeal' with over 20,000 people donating.
My guest on the 42nd Episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast is Saleem Khan, India Director of the British Asian Trust (BAT). In this episode we spoke about
👉🏾 BAT's unique model of harnessing the diaspora for supporting the development work it does in South Asia
👉🏾 BAT's $11 million Education Development Impact Bond. And how impact bonds are innovative financial instruments to raise funding for the social sector
👉🏾 The continued funding squeeze on the social sector exacerbated by COVID and the role of innovation and collaboration in addressing the shortage
👉🏾 The changing expectations of donors and how quickly they have adapted to be more flexible/accommodating allowing programs to pivot to address the COVID crisis
👉🏾 Shifting focus of donors to end outcomes
👉🏾 India Recovery fund with a focus on 1) Increasing vaccine uptake 2) Sustainable Livelihoods 3) Supporting children orphaned due to COVID including their mental wellbeing
The conversation was uplifting and energising because Saleem is a glass half full kind of person. If you want to know more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Memorable passages from the episode
👉🏾 Lovely to be here Sudha and thanks for having me.
👉🏾 It definitely was and you're right, I've spent more than a decade in Citibank and then close to seven years with a UK based private sector firm. And overall experience of more than two decades on the, private sector side.
I remember that phase, it was about six years ago where, you hit that phase in life where in your career, you've come to a point where your learning's just plateau and you don't tend to enjoy what you're doing really. So I needed to look at doing something different. And I wanted to, I started evaluating sectors, which are growing sector, sectors that I can apply my skills aptly and sectors which require those kinds of skills. And that's where, I identified the social sector and frankly for me, unlike most, it was not just the motivation of doing social good. It was the mix of being able to apply my private sector skills into an area or a sector which would really benefit out of it. So this was about six years ago and then social sector was considered to be like a retirement option, something that you'd take up, when you hang your boots. And people would call it like a Jholawala job where
👉🏾 In fact, when I took up this option that I had as well. I had people calling me and having serious conversations "what's wrong with you, what has happened?" Or some making jokes "Oh it seems like you've made a lot of money and then now you're just going to the world of social good". The sad part about the social sector is, one, at that point in time I thought there was some incredibly talented people, but there was a need for a lot of private sector talent, to come in and to work upon building that sector one. Two, it also was marred with this whole reputation that, in the social sector, you don't get paid at all. So you would take like huge salary cuts, will go into that job because you just want to give back to society, et cetera. And what I've seen changing over this last six years Sudha is a lot of that has really changed. One, there has been absolutely brilliant movement from the private sector to the development sector, after me I saw some amazing people who have joined the sector and people have come to realise that if you need good talent, you need to pay to get that talent. So a lot of that has also changed and that's leading in a lot more private sector talent coming into the development sector.
👉🏾 My motivation was to start with a new sector applying skills into that sector, but right now, I think it's incredibly motivating to be doing social good, supporting your country really making sure that development is happening and I've been fortunate to work with some incredible organisation in the sector as well.
👉🏾 So British Asian Trust actually was set up about 13 years ago by our founding patron, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and members of the South Asian diaspora. And diaspora communities are people who have a South-Asian origin but currently do not reside in those countries. For example, Indians who are born in India who have an Indian origin, but do not currently live in India, but feel very very strongly about issues in India, want to come forward to support and to address this issue. So you're very right in saying that the British Asian Trust has actually done an incredible job of harnessing the support of the diaspora community. Our work is really talking for itself.
And you are already aware that British Asian Trust with the South Asia focus is currently working primarily in four countries, which is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Just by the design of the fabric of India, the vibrancy of the social sector here, a large part of our work has remained in India. But all that at the back of the incredible support that we enjoy from the diaspora.
👉🏾 Firstly, just to clarify impact bonds are not bonds that get listed or traded. They are a form of an innovative financial instruments, where investors come forward and provide flexible funding, which essentially acts like working capital to service providers to carry out interventions. Now, outcomes are pre-agreed and outcome targets are predetermined. There are outcomes funders are those who join the consortium and pay for the delivery of outcomes and they pay back the investors the working capital, with a fixed return on the delivery of the targets.
👉🏾 The key here however to note is, that the funding involved is flexible and it allows service providers to focus on their delivery of the required outcomes without really worrying about reporting, activities, inputs, et cetera. So B.A.T actually brought together a consortium of investors and funders, for this education impact bond, which incidentally is the world's largest education impact bond.
👉🏾 It includes the Michael & Susan Dell foundation, Comic Relief, Mittals, BT and the investors here are UBS Optimus. It is an initiative which is bringing thousands of children from the communities in India, read and write better. And it's completed three years of the four years of the intervention and this included one year of the COVID challenge and is delivering excellent education outcomes.
👉🏾 So B.A.Ts endeavour is actually to test out, new and innovative finance instruments and put out evidence to create this market in India. And I'm talking ahead of time but, currently we're at the helm of launching a similar initiative on the skilling side, which is going to be with the government of Indias' National Skills Development Corporation(NSDC). It is timely right now because of the COVID impact and the issue of unemployment in India. This particular initiative is going to bring thousands of unemployed youth of India actually, back into jobs. Help them stay in jobs and there is going to be a deep gender focus on this. The focus is going to be on women and girls really. It's a very very exciting initiative where the government is coming in for the first time into an innovative instrument like this, there is international capital partnering along with local CSR capital. So we'll be making that announcement very soon and we're hugely excited about this solution.
👉🏾 That's absolutely true. Actually, a different kind of fundraising. And COVID, if at all has challenged the overall status quo. I mean traditional ways of fundings have been seriously challenged Sudha, right now. So it is time to innovate, it is time to partner, it's time to collaborate and come together and do large scale intervention. So that's what initiatives likes these are all about.
👉🏾 So you're very right Sudha, COVID has definitely hit us hard and basically the overall sector has been significantly impacted and more specifically grass root organisations, where the situation is not looking very good. But let's look at the positives that the situation has currently brought. Firstly, the sector has come together closer and that has resulted into such strong collaborations. And collaborations are not easy, to form as you will agree. But we saw so many collaborators taking shape, it's continued to do absolutely brilliant work by complimenting on each other's strength, that's one.
👉🏾 Secondly, innovation has come right to the centre of the table, traditional ways of funding, like I said earlier, like grants etc.... these have been seriously challenged and now innovative ways of fundings are being tested out. And most importantly, the government has been extremely forthcoming, right now. And as we saw in the last few months, forthcoming in having dialogues, they are wanting to see how they can partner with private capital to do longer-term impact work. And that is resulting into some brilliant public-private partnership, which is the best way for carrying out long term development work at scale and have also, with the government involved, you have answers for sustainability as well. So, all in all, I think it's worked out brilliant for the sector. The challenges have been there, but slowly I think we'll tide over to that and what we are left with at the road ahead is looking incredibly exciting. So I'd like to take a very positive lens to that Sudha.
👉🏾 On donors, let me be frank, we witness donors being super flexible and accommodative off the COVID situation Sudha. Being flexible and allowing programs to be pivoted to the current situation and also flexibility of the usage of funding, which is so required. Many examples of donors, taking a pause on the programs and supporting organisations to sustain and tide through this situation. One thing I must highlight here is that that has definitely been a shift in mindset of donors. And that shift in mindset is they are now more open to focusing on the end outcomes and not really worry about tracking activities, inputs which traditionally was happening.
👉🏾 So, for remaining relevant actually now to your other part of the question, organisations need to be able to make that shift as well. Shift of focusing on end outcomes and having flexible funding but also be comfortable with the fact that the funding will be applied only if the outcomes are delivered. So it's not an easy transition, for NGO's on the ground. In fact the British Asian Trust is actually currently driving a piece of work which working with on the ground NGOs to help them become outcomes ready as we call it. The initiative basically aims at building NGOs of the future who will be able to receive large scale multi-year funding with capacity and an understanding of delivering end outcomes really. So we are now currently testing this model out with a bunch of NGOs on the education side. But the whole idea is to really do this at scale and truly create NGOs of the future in India.
👉🏾 You're very right. Firstly we had an excellent 'Oxygen for India' emergency appeal. It brought together thousands of individual donors, included trust foundations, corporates to support India and tide through the emergency situation with a very tight focus on oxygen, which was the key issue at that point in time. And as the situation has now improved we've started focusing on the recovery phase, and have launched the India Recovery Fund, which focuses on three key areas.
👉🏾 Firstly increasing the vaccine uptake by building capacities of the government, so we have better reach to the rural and remote India, because the only long-term solution to this issue is vaccination, so there is a focus on vaccine uptake. Secondly, focusing on providing immediate and sustainable livelihoods to communities who've been severely impacted due to the current lockdown situation and huge loss of jobs, actually. And lastly, focus on children, children who've lost parents due to COVID and also focusing on the children of the communities, there are socio-emotional impact, focusing on their mental wellbeing, of our children. So these are the three areas of our focus. The support so far has been incredibly encouraging, and we hope that we continue to strengthen this intervention with more and more donors, including the diaspora coming forward to support this initiative as we take it forward.
👉🏾 Wow. Sudha as I mentioned earlier, truly there's no better time than now to be a part of this brilliant sector. The feeling of waking up every day and continuing this journey of supporting the development of our country and that with brilliant colleagues of the British Asian Trust is incredibly motivating and energising for me every day. So yeah that really keeps me going. And it's just the motivation of the work that you do and the satisfaction that you take back before you sleep every day, is a great feeling.
👉🏾 Wonderful talking to you Sudha. Thank you very much.
Follow Saleem Khan on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saleem-khan-73387774/?originalSubdomain=in
Twitter: @saleemkhan_73
Follow British Asian Trust:
https://www.britishasiantrust.org/
Other important links:
👉🏾 https://www.britishasiantrust.org/support-us/bat-insights/oxygen-for-india-with-he-alex-ellis-nachiket-mor-dr-ajay-nair-saleem-khan-and-farzana-baduel/
👉🏾 https://www.britishasiantrust.org/support-us/india-recovery-fund/
👉🏾 https://www.dtnext.in/News/TopNews/2021/06/11195644/1300328/London-cycling-event-to-raise-funds-for-Covid-relief-.vpf
👉🏾 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56909285