Pioneering the Future: Reflections on The Pathway with Roshni Nadar Malhotra
As the first woman to lead a listed Indian company, Roshni Nadar Malhotra has reached stratospheric heights of business success. CEO of the HCL Corporation, she is a multi-time honoree of the Forbes Most Powerful Women list as well as a passionate philanthropist and the driving force behind VidyaGyan, a leadership academy for underprivileged students in Uttar Pradesh, India. During a special conversation with Fred Swaniker, Roshni opened up about some of the milestones and relationships that shaped her phenomenal journey.
Drawing lessons from their heart-to-heart, here is the next instalment of Mike O’Brien’s Reflections on The Pathway.
This community is incredibly diverse and filled with remarkable people who are striving to disrupt the status quo and create a better future. Even more exciting is the multitude of paths everyone is taking to reach their individual potential. Each path is unique and comes with its own important story that needs to be heard. By actively listening to these conversations, we can learn to collaborate better and amplify the impact we are having individually and collectively.
In the first two episodes of The Pathway, we explored how success often comes from focusing on First Principles like Kindness, Curiosity and Discipline, which lay the groundwork for finding one’s mission as a leader. Upon this foundation, we can start to spin our unique flywheels, allowing our individual strengths to compound over time and accelerate our paths forward. In the third episode, we heard how the different roles that Roshni Nadar Malhotra plays as a mother, philanthropist and a businesswoman have helped her discover her own First Principles and increase her ability as a leader. Her creativity has been enhanced by the diversity of the experiences she’s had.
The Dichotomy of The Pathway
The aspect of The Pathway I have enjoyed the most is hearing about the unique journeys of guests on the show. There is no singular map marking the “Right Path.” Each leader has found something bespoke that works for them. By creating something unique and new, they have been able to differentiate themselves as leaders and bring value to those around them. Charting their own paths has also helped them to identify who they truly are, providing them with confidence to determine when they should “listen and learn” and when they should “take a stand and speak up.”
Those with the best ability to chart a better path forward are those who possess a diversity of experiences.
Watching Roshni’s conversation with Fred, it became clear that she was fortunate to grow up with two parents who acted as Pathfinders. They provided her with the right amount of access but let her navigate her own way (much like The Room’s Pathfinders are endeavoring to do for members.) Through her parents’ support and her own sense of initiative, she gained confidence from a diversity of experiences, which included: training as a classical dancer, studying film at Northwestern University, working as a news producer for Sky News UK and CNN America, and getting involved with educational initiatives. While she indicated that she was nervous when first asked to take on the role as CEO of The HCL Corporation, her father knew she was ready. He told her “to be able to lead you have to dive into the deep … and figure out how to swim.”
The specifics of leading a large IT organization might have been unique, but her journey of charting her own path prepared her. She was able to string together her past experiences in a coherent way and make connections that others with deep vertical domain expertise might have missed. For example, a top priority of hers was to bring more women into leadership roles at HCL. Not only did she intuitively know this was the right thing to do, her prior experience in education (which historically has more gender balance) demonstrated how diversity brings strength to an organization. She also recognized that “the masters of the household at home are women, so they’re probably balancing and juggling a lot better than men are.”
Sometimes, those with the best ability to chart a better path forward are those who possess a diversity of experiences, allowing them to have an intuitive and differentiated perspective.
Finding Diverse People with a Similar DNA
Another insightful part of this episode was the time spent discussing a significant challenge all leaders face: hiring a team and building a culture — “Finding the right leaders at the right time to solve the right problems.” Roshni indicated that this is a problem she is constantly trying to solve: “When you have the wrong people in the wrong positions, it’s incredibly hard to fix.”
We need to surround ourselves with individuals who have similar principles and value systems, yet have taken different paths. Too often, organizations choose to do the opposite.
So as leaders, how do we balance the necessity for diversity to build strength juxtaposed against a desire to hire a team of like-minded individuals who can help maintain a corporate culture?
According to Roshni, hiring is “not about qualifications…one mistake at the top really impacts culture and is hard to fix.”
This is, perhaps, where First Principals come in handy. In prior articles, I wrote about the importance of core values such as Discipline, Curiosity and Kindness. During The Firewalk rapid-fire questions, Roshni was asked to use 3 words to describe being a woman in leadership and she chose “work / life choices.” She was also asked about the 3 core values which were taught in her home growing up, and she chose “respect, competitiveness and staying grounded.” Each of these different values are principles upon which you could base your life and build a culture around.
It’s up to each leader to decide what core principles are non-negotiable for them and their organization. Just like the paths we are all traveling down, there is no right answer, but by forging our own unique paths, we are able to define and refine what we believe matters most. We then need to surround ourselves with individuals who have similar principles and value systems, yet have taken different paths. Too often, organizations choose to do the opposite. They look to hire individuals who have traveled the same path — perhaps having gone to the same University or having had similar prior work experience as other team members — and then they find themselves disappointed when the organization’s values devolve, or when the status quo is perpetuated rather than transformed through innovations and new ideas. The concept is simple, but not easy to ingrain.
At the end of the episode, one question a member astutely asked Roshni was whether she had a litmus test to determine if a potential candidate she’s hiring is “the right fit.” The answer she gave was perfect: “Good people do business with good people.”
The ultimate question that we are all left to ponder is this: How do you hire for “the right fit” while ensuring diversity?
Mike O’Brien is a member of The Room and the Director of Research and Investment Strategy for AVR Asset Management in San Francisco. He founded a leadership consulting firm, Independence Creek Advisors, focused on organisational dynamics and human nature.
