Making difficult decisions easier
Women leaders narrate incidents when emotional intelligence helped them make difficult decisions:
Shikha Bagai: Emotional intelligence helps one specifically when one faced challenges/crisis like economic turnover or industry upheaval. For example, at the time of the Lehman crash of 2008 it was very tricky to manage multiple stakeholders and situations that could have really led to substantial losses. In these times, it is emotional intelligence that has helped me stay on course and not give up, while taking the people along. When we try to do things which are inherently difficult, for example when I was the CFO in Aditya Birla Health Insurance, it was emotional intelligence that has really helped me. These were times like trying to accomplish multiple objectives and trying to pull multiple people in together.
Rishika Dasgupta: During my stint with Citibank, EI set me apart from others while I was managing the CEO escalation management desk. I cannot really single out any incident but can definitely say that the customers I managed over the years are the very reason for the position that I am in today. There is a difference between showing empathy and feeling empathetic. You must actually feel it to be able to demonstrate it in your actions/ behaviour.
Sunita Handa: Most recent example is that of running State Bank of India’s Global IT Centre (GITC) un-interruptedly when suddenly faced with the outbreak of covid and the nation-wide lockdown. Even though I had enforcement capacity at my disposal, true success of a leader lies in getting most people to choose to follow the leadership - which could, under distinct circumstances, demand sudden, unsettling, unprecedented changes to their daily lives. My approach has been a perfect mix of directiongiving, meaning-making and empathy.
I think this came out of my self-trained emotional competence.
In a second example, let me take you back to 2002, during the horrific Gujarat riots, when I was heading an SBI branch on the outskirts of Vadodara city. A high profile refinery, a govt. security agency and a large oil conglomerate (all SBI customers) located in the vicinity had special vans to pick up and drop their employees. So, after about a week or so, when the disturbances slightly subsided, some of these people started coming to their offices by those vans. They needed banking services (mostly cash withdrawals and funds transfers). I and some of my colleagues felt that if we drove to office with caution, not going near a shouting or unruly crowd on the way and wore our office badges, there should not be problem in reaching the branch and opening it for a few hours every day.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that 10 out of total 48 staff members volunteered to come, and hence we decided to open the branch daily unless it was totally impossible. Although all of us had our own vehicles, as a further safety measure, I requested CISF that in case we need any assistance in returning home, they would escort our vehicles or drop us home. There were very few customers in the branch but whoever came, thanked our staff profusely for keeping the branch open in their hour of need. When most branches and the lone ATM in that area were non-functional, functioning of our branch generated a lot of goodwill. Making that possible not only required courage and calm mind but also the assessment of situation, our capabilities and constraints etc, the essential ingredients of EQ.
Purvi Bhavsar: I have a very interesting example to quote. When I got promoted as a Cluster Head from being a Branch Manager, I had to move to a different city. My son was just 5 years old then and my husband’s practice then did not permit him to move at a short notice. It was a very difficult decision for me to choose between family and my career. I am very passionate about my work and my career and took a call to move to other city without family. I could manage this only because of self-confidence and ability to balance my roles as a mother and as a manager.
Rajashree Nambiar: I took a big risk by moving from a multinational bank culture to an Indian promotor led culture. When I shifted, I was a women leader put up on a top of a company where there haven’t been too many senior managers and this culture was very alien to what I have worked in for 22 years.
What I did first was to build a new team and I looked into the existing talent pool within that company. I travelled a lot to meet and understand people and create personal relationships with them and to mitigate their concerns of a new CEO coming in and changing things.
When the new people started coming into the organization, I used my EI to understand what sort of attitude and behaviour these people have and what are desirable. I spent a lot of time in merging the two.
Usually when a new person comes in, the whole system disrupts or blows up. Since I spent a lot of time on the old as well as new people and a lot of effort
in merging them both, the team stuck together and became a strong leadership team. This is a clear example of how I used emotional intelligence. Or else, I would have been an alien and rejected by the whole system.
Rupa Balsekar: Firstly, BFSI has undergone a sea change in the last 10 years. Further, we live in times when change is coming at a faster pace, and we are dealing with rapid social change given our young demographic. It is imperative that we listen actively, be open to continual adaption, and manage change better.
Loveena Khatwani: There was a time when something had gone wrong at work and I was struggling to evolve a solution. Various charts and permutations / combinations with checks and balances did not seem to help. At that point of time someone senior walked into my cabin and told me: “I need to tell you something that you can practise and he went on. It took me a while to understand the advice and say it is ok. This made me self-aware that things do go wrong – but how you deal with it is what matters. Firstly, acceptance that things can go wrong helps you deal with the situation much better. Practice this regularly saying ‘it’s ok’ and you will move on.