A Saturday Well Spent At The LLOYDS SHEROES Summit 2016

Ever since the details of the LLOYD SHEROES Summit, 2016 was out, I was contemplating on whether to go for it or not. The topic came for discussion amongst a few like-minded friends, yet none of us were sure. Then, a blogger invite came by mail, and that made me consider it seriously.  The final push came when I got a call from Raba of Sheroes, asking if I would like to participate as a blogger. And that's all that I needed to make up my mind. I made plans with a friend who had already signed up for the Summit (this was her 4th time and she has attended all the SHEROES Summit so far!) to go together. The event was scheduled to happen at the Lalit Ashok in Bangalore and we reached the venue by around 8:45 in the morning. After the registration process, we were greeted by Sairee Chahal herself, the women and driving force behind Sheroes.

A few of us with Sairee Chahal

The theme for this year was Work Life Bank Balance - quite an interesting theme considering that usually the talk always revolve around the Work Life Balance and the Bank Balance part is something that is never spoken out loud. After the introductory speech and presentation was made, the event started with a 'fireside chat' by Sairee and Harsha Kumar, who was the AVP, Products at Ola Cabs before she moved to become Principal, Lightspeed India Partners Advisors. The half an hour chat revolved around her experience at OLA. Harsha spoke about how career planning requires a lot of self awareness. She spoke about the startup culture and how working in a startup means living and breathing your company. When asked what it takes to work with a startup, she summed it up in two words - zero excuse! Her mantra for striking a work-life balance inspite of working 24*7 was to focus on your priorities at any moment. At times, you have to put your foot down and it requires a balance where both parties need to compromise. Her outlook to work was inspiring in many ways. What struck with me the most was her statement that every challenge that comes your way is not a problem, but an opportunity; once you realise that, then everything else falls in place. Reaction to anything that doesn't go your way is to find another way. This is so true - the power of finding solutions, the power of taking things positively!

The CXO Panel

Next session was the CXO Panel discussion and consisted of Amit Somani (Managing Partner, Prime Ventures), Anita Kakar (Company Secretary, Lloyd Group), Saroja Yeramilli (Founder, Melorra) and Narendra Bhandari (GM- Developer Experience and Evangelism, Microsoft India). The discussion revolved mostly around getting back to work after taking a break and combatting the problems that comes with it. To me, the star of the show was definitely Ms. Saroja Yeramilli, who has worked with Tanishq, quit her job three years back to help Nandan Nilekani with his election campaigns before starting up Melora, her jewellery venture through which she wish to reform and disrupt the jewellery industry. Sensible jewellery is what she is aiming at to bring to the public. My favourite piece of her advise was "think of your career as a marathon and not a sprint"! She emphasised on the fact that never let anyone tell you that you can't take career breaks and cannot come back - "When I quit my job, I enjoyed that as well". In fact, Mr. Amit Somani too shared with us about his two breaks in his career and how he utilised it to his benefit. He also quite aptly mentioned how the biggest problem in India is that we feel apologetic of the breaks and sabbaticals. When the panel was open to questions and discussions, a very prominent question was raised as to how everything seemed glossy when they spoke about their careers and to give insight to the failures they experienced and how they tackled it. Mr. Narendra Bhandari pointed our rightly about how it is not rosy always and how each person has their share of struggles. To which, Saroja added that you need to think of failure as a challenge and everyday there definitely is going to be a challenge to overcome. A valuable lesson also came from Ms. Anita Kakkar who said we need to decide what we want to do and we need to choose the kind of pressure that we want to handle. The post panel discussion with the audience revolved mostly around how it was difficult for most women to cut through the HR call to get a chance at the interview round once we mention that we were on a maternity break, no matter how good we are at our job. The best answer to this came from Sairee herself, who closed the discussion with a "chances are that the job you need comes out of a conversation. It may not be there out on a job portal. So keep networking and put yourself out there!". Very true!

Future Of Work Panel

After a short tea break, we were back with a Future of Work discussion with Sakshi Vij (Founder, Miles), Sampad Swain (Founder, Instamojo), Srivatsan Chari (Co-founder, Cleartax), Kavita Chowkimane (VP - Sales and Marketing, Portea) and Dhanya Rajendran (Founder, The News Minute). The discussion, for the most part, revolved around the option of work from home and how feasible it is. The keyword for future of work is flexibility and remote working. Ms. Kavita pointed out how the future of work needs to be a mix of technology and people's attitude. While there were arguments about how work happens best when you are at office and not home, a person working from home may not yield the best result and a boss would prefer her subordinates in front of her when it comes to getting work done, Mr. Srivatsan rightly pointed out that we need to see effort as directly related to output. As long you produce the desirable output, it doesn't matter where you work from. There were concerns from the attendees about how disconnected they felt when they were working from home while their peers were at office, how they missed out on appraisals. Mr. Sampad stated a valid point where he said that every organisation needs to define their level of flexibility. To me, the rockstar of this session was not the panel members, but the emcee, Shreya Krishnan who pointed out exactly what I had in my mind - you need to set out your work space, no matter where you are working from. Work from home doesn't mean you do the housework at the same time as you are working. Your work time needs to be set, no matter where you are working from. And regarding the peers at work, who raise their discontent about people working from home, you need to look inward and not outwards and corporates need to shut such thought process. Sairee topped it off by saying how work from home may not be the optimal choice, it may not take you to the CEO's chair but it will definitely enable you to stay connected. With this, we broke off for lunch and some networking before the noon session started.

Lightening Pitches

Post lunch we had the lightning pitches where we had two women entrepreneurs pitch their business. The first pitch came from Ms. Hemlatha who started the 49to499.in, an online retail store where you can find everything under Rs. 499. She spoke about her plans to scale it up, her marketing strategy and in general about how her business worked. The second pitch was by Anusha Bhushan from smoodies.in, where she talked about her product, the first packaged smoothies. Her mantra is commoditising health" and her drink is a combination of fruit and juice. She brought six drinks to distribute, and the super cool emcee, Shreya conducted a fruit quiz and the winners got to taste the smoodies. There was time for one more pitch and we had Mr. Swapnil, who operates the Hindustan Motorcycling Company, a premier adventure travel company providing a variety of adventure holidays. I am so in love with their moto - "Go humble, come wise"!

We got one too!

The lightening pitches session was followed by an amazing dance therapy session by Ranjani Santhanam (Founder, Palindrome Concepts & Solutions). This was an amazing, energetic session where she had everybody grooving to the music. I'm sure that none of us wanted this session to end and all I could see by the time it ended were smiling faces around me!

Ranjani Santhanam

The LLOYD SHEROES Summit 2016, came to an end with the Good Girls Show by Vatsala Srivastava (Director, Bindi Bottoms). Vatsala is the founder of Bindi Bottoms, a platform designed to use stories of women to map how India is changing with time. She shared two such stories with us and she is one of the best story tellers I've met in my life. She took all of us along with us deep into her tale and it felt like we were experiencing the story than listening to it!

The Good Girls Show

If I was asked how was the summit, I would not say that it was an eye opener. But, I had an amazing time, meeting wonderful people, sharing stories and discussing women and work. Though I felt the 'Bank Balance' discussion left out of the Work Life Bank Balance, overall, it was a well-organised, enriching summit. Also, I must add, apart from the SHEROES team, there was one more person who rocked the entire summit - the emcee, Shreya Krishnan. She was a crowd puller be it with her five minute belly dancing teaching session or getting the crowd on the feet and making them bond with the person next to them with a back rub and even standing her ground and making valid points when some of the points from the panelists were not resonating well with most of us across the stage. She was indeed a rockstar!

One last pic!

While before the meet, I was contemplating whether I should leave after the morning session, I'm glad that I stayed back, because the post noon session was out of the world. It left me energised, happy and recharged, most of all. It was definitely one of my best, well-spent Saturdays!