Can I Have It All

by Anuranjita Kumar

  2 CONVICTION

  is the belief that enables persistence

  CONVICTION

  ‘Nothing will work unless you do.’

  – Maya Angelou

  DIP IN CORPORATE WATERS

  Knowing what you want and being passionate about the work you do differentiates between the good and the great. Caught amidst different roles, women are sometimes unsure and feel guilty of what they want professionally. Once you have the clarity of purpose, comes the conviction of thought and the plan to execute. Be it a new role or a transfer, to be effective, one needs to be disciplined and be prepared in advance. Finally, conviction is the virtue that lets you accomplish all that you plan for. After all, Rome was not built in a day! It has worked for me because when you take risks, odds cannot be avoided and it is that constant inner mantra that keeps playing inside your head: ‘believe in yourself’. This not only encourages you to continue on your journey but also finally leads you to your destination.

  Be it a man or a woman – climbing the corporate ladder is not easy for either. It is fraught with a lot of excitement and also with quite a few challenges. To remain on the path, you need to be clear, focused and passionate about what you want out of life and how strongly you want it. Then, get ready for the ride with a lot of energy and passion and push yourself towards the goal that you have set for yourself.

  So, to get ready for the race, bear in mind that this is not a hundred-metre sprint, but a long marathon which will last for years. You need to pace yourself out, be ready to spend your energy and keep yourself focused towards the goal post. Pace your race!

  A word of caution: It will not always be possible to plan for all the changes on the way, speed bumps and the highs and lows of this ride. However, having an eye on the final destination will define your journey and keep your life on track, as it did mine.

  Sometimes flexing your path, taking a detour, especially in changed circumstances, maybe the right call so long as it is tied to your larger purpose which is not event-bound. This is what I finally did when I changed my plan of going to the US for further education and stayed back in India to pursue business education. I changed my path and headed to the right destination.

  As stated earlier, I always focused on doing a value addition to the people and environment around me that helped me to add to myself and progress further. At work, value creation is the way I conducted my business and self. I would strategise, problem-solve, execute, reflect and review on how we could make this better. Fortunately for me, a larger purpose in life coincided with my work interests and possibly that made the ride slightly easier.

  A BELIEF IN WHAT YOU WANT

  A belief in what you want to do, driven by your values, which has evolved with your experiences will create a sense of unwavering conviction to do things. Keep searching for your beliefs. Introspect. Search for the values in your heart. This drives my sense of conviction, especially when each experience validates my purpose. If the actions validate the purpose, it creates a state of happiness and fulfilment. If not, then one may want to reflect on and revisit the purpose or associated actions.

  My experience taught me later in life how this belief drove my purpose and also propelled my will to achieve and excel. We are all aware of this fact intellectually but how often do you ask yourself what really matters? What are your values? It is amazing how much we don’t know about the unconscious self. During my lifetime, I have worked the other way around. Many times when I have felt very strongly about a certain goal or experienced an overwhelming sense of emotion to achieve something; I spoke to myself to understand myself better. It has been pleasantly surprising to find the truth about my drivers and conviction. Conviction is the key to not only achieve and remain focused, but it is also a path to self-discovery. It will help you surmount any obstacles and keep you on the right path even though the odds may seem against it. My advice is to keep fuelling your conviction from time to time, by strengthening your ideas and beliefs to ensure that you are on the right path.

  MILESTONE TO MILESTONE MAKES THE JOURNEY

  Your conviction is a strong anchor that keeps you focused on actions to achieve your purpose. However, the purpose is usually long-term and sometimes lifelong as we discover while growing up. There are goalposts in life that keep us on track. School, college, jobs, family are a part of the journey that forms a part of our larger purpose. Purpose can be long-term but goalposts, in my view, will need to be short to medium term, so that we have some reasonable feedback about how we are progressing on our journey. Convictions are these beliefs that keep us moving from one milestone to another.

  As I learnt in the corporate world over a period of time we can have a desire to be in the C-suite. However, what gets us there will need to be planned and measured progressively every twelve to twenty four months from the onset of your career.

  CROSSROADS AND THE WILL TO GO ON

  India is unique in many ways. Ironically, several studies have placed urban workforce participation of women as low as thirteen per cent, while the rural participation tends to be higher at about thirty per cent, probably due to the absolute necessity for women to work in rural areas to maintain a subsistence level. Ideally, one would imagine that, more women in the cities are stepping out to work! Also, while there are several initiatives running for increasing education levels among women, numbers of women in eductaional institutes have increased but a staggering proportion choose not to work, even after earning a degree. As income levels are rising in cities, workforce participation of women is surprisingly dropping! We are truly a country of many complexities with cultural conditioning playing a huge role in these outcomes.

  I have seen so many bright, independent women abandon their careers easily and instantly, with marriage or maternity being one of the most common drivers. Is this a matter of choice or a lack of conviction to carry on in the face of life taking a new turn? And not just corporate careers; there are so many examples of women in the performing arts or film industry who simply stop working once they are married. In India, actresses from the big league suddenly become less popular after their marriage. Is this a common mindset or an erosion of convictions?

  Sometimes this occurs because the decision to work is driven by need rather than desire. Once economically and socially secure in their marriage, the conviction to work, especially as perceived by others suddenly drops!

  In a work life of a woman, there are usually three common crossroads wherein women are challenged to take key decisions in regard to their career. Tiding over these crossroads requires a huge amount of conviction in what she wants and how she wishes to make it work.

  1. Marriage: Most South Asian women grow up and are conditioned to think about marriage as a key milestone and not just a key event in life. This is also driven by a generic expectation sometimes that a woman’s primary responsibility is not that of an earner but of a caregiver at home. This expectation may emanate from parents or family. In emerging markets, where reliable support and baby-care centres are not found easily, it invariably leads to women compromising or redefining their careers to suit the family expectations. As stated above, in spite of the increasing literacy rates for women, a lot of professional women are found at home sometimes by choice or otherwise. Some of this is driven by these social norms.

  2. Mobility: There are women who manage to successfully manoeuvre the marriage crossroads and continue working. But in dual careers, there are times where one partner’s career may lead to a change in location thereby impacting the career choices of the other partner. Mobility being critical for career development for any professional, it requires a delicate balance of the two people’s career preferences and ambitions. However, most often between a husband and wife, a man and a woman, it is usually the wife/woman who voluntarily leaves her job to move with her spouse/partner or asks for a move linked to her partner’s transfer or relocation to another city. It is very rarely the other way around even if the woman has a more fulfilling career
than her partner or husband. In my experience, at times this is driven by women themselves due to social expectations and for the sake of family peace.

  3. Maternity: Having a child is undoubtedly a beautiful experience for any parent. Particularly for the mother, there are feelings of happiness accompanied by some anxiety. A first-time mother usually does not know what she is headed for in spite of all the advice she gets from the experienced women in her family. Holding the child first time in your arms instils the joy and responsibility of bringing a new life into this world. As a mother you give your child your unconditional love and want to see the child succeed in life. It is a critical juncture in any woman’s life. No pre-natal class or advice can prepare one for this! This is a tough crossroad and we see maximum attrition of career women in this situation. It is here that we have witnessed much struggle, given the overwhelming emotions, sometimes lack of support at home and again due to the social norms of care-giving.

  Conviction in your purpose makes this journey easier and provides a boost when one is confronted with such dilemmas. It is the intensity of the belief that propels you forward and provides the much-needed momentum.

  Let’s review each of these in a little more detail.

  MARRIAGE

  As stated earlier, my first job after completing MBA was at a top FMCG as an assistant manager HR. Great company, great practices and great learnings…and I cherished every moment of it during the time that I spent there.

  However, a few months into the company, I realised that having a partner in another leading FMCG Marketing team (an ardent competitor company) was not the ideal way forward for his career or mine. Even though there were no explicit policies, I realised there were softer undercurrents about how this would work out from a personal and professional perspective. Hence, both of us decided to review our options in the employment market after a year.

  We both wanted to pursue the right roles for ourselves as we were driven and ambitious individuals. I found a role with Citi and decided to move on. We then got married.

  Now, jobs sorted, marriage sorted, the only issue was we both were in different locations unlike when we worked together in Mumbai! Sandeep was transferred to Pune and I was placed in Delhi. Our chalked out plan took both us to two different cities!

  Convinced that I wanted to pursue a career and not just a job, I joined the role in Citibank in October 1995. Sandeep continued his role with his organisation, based in Pune. Newly married into a Punjabi family (I come from a different cultural background), I struggled to adapt to everything around me even with my best intent. There was no husband around me to translate subtleties of a new culture and cues for appropriate actions. Sandeep, sensing my struggle, made trips every two weeks. Few weeks down the line, we were yet unsure how we would get together without one of us changing our jobs. Given I was too new in my role, I felt hesitant to ask for a transfer so early with Citi, so Sandeep decided to review his options even though he was doing extremely well in his role as a brand manager. We were both convinced that we wanted our personal life and career to go hand in hand.

  During the next few weeks, he had an opportunity to present in a business review to the then Vice-Chairman of the Company. The review went extremely well and at the end, as Sandeep wrapped up, he was congratulated by the Vice-Chairman, on his performance and his recent marriage. When asked how things were at home, Sandeep spoke about the struggle he and I were going through at a personal level, staying in different cities. The Vice-Chairman understood the dilemma, and told Sandeep that hopefully both the companies could make this work. He made a call to the then CEO of my organisation (an Oxford buddy of the Chairman) and requested him to gauge if there was any possibility of getting these two individuals of two companies working together in dual career struggles.

  Blissfully unaware of all this, I was in a meeting with my manager that afternoon, planning the union activities a few weeks ahead, when his phone rang. On the other side of the call was the then Head of HR for Citi India. Fortunately, there was an open role in Mumbai due to attrition as these conversations were ensued concurrently. HR head checked with my manager if it would be okay for him to consider me for this role given the personal situation I was faced with. He gave him a choice that if he was uncomfortable, I would not be moved. I must confess that my manager was extremely gracious and though it wasn’t easy for him to let me go, he empathised with me which bound me to Citi for a long haul that I did not realise then!

  Sandeep was transferred to Mumbai in another role with his company as well. Seven months and twenty eight days after our marriage, we finally got a chance to be together…in Mumbai. Neither Sandeep nor I had compromised on our careers or our aspirations. Destiny and timing were there to help us through our trying times. Our stars were aligned. This set the ball rolling for a longer roller-coaster journey which was yet to come! Little did I know that it would later be a question of not only straddling two states, but also eventually two continents!

  My experiences tell me that you need to fully believe in yourself and your capabilities for others to believe in you. Destiny is with people who believe that things will work out rather than giving up in despair. People will help you if they feel you are worth it. When you undertake a tough journey, any self-doubt can be a potential dangerous potion that will kill your morale softly. A distilled sense of self-worth instils a strong self-confidence, which is critical for behaviour and your attitude.

  Thoughts, words, feelings, emotions are what really make us; but how many times a day do we pause and think ‘what am I feeling’ and ask ‘why’?

  My career for me has not been just a source of income but a bigger sense of my identity. It gives me joy and makes me complete as much as being a daughter, a wife, and a mother does. Coming from a family with a working mother, I rarely thought there was a choice of not having to work.

  MOBILITY

  Having a partner is all about sharing the joys and sorrows of life together. It is about being strong in the face of adversity and rising together with the tides to move forward. Sometimes couples decide to split home and work responsibilities, traditionally, with the wife focusing more at home and the man at work. At other times, some couples decide to share both these responsibilities in equal measure. Dual careers make this ride even more interesting, more so if both individuals are equally vested in their own and each other’s careers. Often our work takes us to different places, provides us with the relevant experience and exposure that is key to our professional development. A lack of diversity of experiences – be it businesses or locations, narrows down our exposure and hence the career options. The tricky bit is balancing and managing two equally driven and ambitious individuals in a relationship, their careers and aspirations. It is tough but possible if there is commitment and conviction from both people.

  THINK BEFORE YOU JUMP

  Most intra-location moves across roles are easier as they are not disruptive to family life. It is usually the moves across locations which dual-career couples struggle with. Often we see most women opting out of their jobs to make this move happen for their spouse, even though the woman may be doing extremely well with a great career ahead of her. In some cases women may also be performing better than their spouse; however, they make this sacrifice willingly to avoid family stress. I have had numerous counselling sessions with such women and have had some success in having them step up to balance out in a dual career and not give up.

  This requires effort and willingness from them personally. It is the fire of conviction in your purpose, which keeps it going. At an organisational level it required support towards instilling that much-needed confidence for such career women to take this leap of faith. This can be achieved by showing them a career path in the future and by making them more aware of their tremendous potential.

  I have seen cases of some women who decided to change their jobs frequently due to their spouse moving to another location, some took a career break or took up what came their way. In
most of these instances, this may not have led to a career but kept them in a job for the sake of finances and sometimes to keep them occupied. This is where the challenges and compromises come in. When it is not a thought-through choice or a choice under duress, that’s when it hurts. A recent example that I recall was of a friend who was an HR manager of a big company while her husband worked for a finance company. Due to the financial meltdown, the company shut down that division. Her husband decided to take a smaller job in Dubai and relocate. This friend of mine who was doing extremely well and was slated to move on to a bigger role in the company, decided to move to Dubai for the sake of the family. She was unhappy about this decision, however she felt compelled to help her husband in the frustrating situation he was in. Hence she went along with the circumstances. She took a smaller job there and even though both of them are working, they collectively earned lesser than what she did in India with no prospects of growth with the new companies in the near future. I always wondered, could she have changed this? Could she have helped her husband resurrect his career in India? Was this a function of traditional upbringing? Could she not be pragmatic but a bit more persistent? Would her husband have done the same if the situation was reversed? Could her husband approach it differently and pursued something in the current location? I don’t know the answer but what I know for sure is that her company lost one of their most capable employees. She gave up on a great career without necessarily being happy where she is today! May be a little more thought from both partners over emotions may have resulted in a win-win situation for them as a family.