Are Diversity Drives in India enabling thoughts Beyond Kitchen Cabinets ??

I read an article from TOI Ascent, dated 28^th August 2013 by BIOCON leader Kiran Mazumdar Shaw describing diversity initiative having a sumptuous number of lady employees in the workforce but not many to compete the ladder of climbing upwards professionally.
This has an insight from my journey in this industry for 9 years now. Most women in India fight a battle to live and let live. Be it their work, colleagues, friends, family or extended family, they are driven by the give and receive structure of the position they hold in life. A happy-nappy mood will be swayed into workplace without a second thought and vice-versa in most of the days. A stack of general baggage will be carried from home to work. Most of them maintain a workplace to prove themselves worthy to the society and to the household. Most of the professional growth is for position and power, rather than learning and development. Most of the certification is for the decoration of the business cards rather than enhancement of skill. That is why, less women take the table, lean in, chase their dreams, enhance their skills. More women at workplace sit back, take the corners, find faults and chase others dreams to convert their lives into nightmares.

I have, in the last long league, worked with a number of women colleague some I have reported into directly. I have come the gracious ladies who have been great goal setters with a balanced cliche of personal and professional life while some particular ones who had been the agony aunts showering their battered life over employees and colleagues around the workplace. And the happy-nappy baggage turns into a burnt curry in no time. The highly affected and the unmotivated ones from these workplace hazards are their colleagues.

I hope Sheryl Sandberg took a special vision over this topic and her Indian Workforce Team. While IT giants get aggressive over diversity, they forget to set the standards inside the organization. The diversity leadership team has those few erode inside the system that sets bad example for others. While I had the opportunity be to working with a few very enthusiastic, encouraging and high spirited lady counterparts, I have also had my share of dealing with extremely over obsessed and parasitic element that washes her dirtiest backyard laundry in her workplace and create extreme negativity among the teams.

Women in India need to be liberated and happy from within. A great personal life and a fertile career with a lot of enthusiasm should be a definite lookout that the diversity team should check upon before signing an employment bond with those who are expected to lead the masses and be the showstoppers.

Today, social media plays a major role in our daily life. We often conclude, if not to the fullest but a part of a lot of things over a person’s facebook timelines, twitter handles and LinkedIn recommendations. We should accept the same and go ahead when gathering a good research work before creating the leadership team. For a person who does not have an active social and professional circuit, industry should not recommend a leadership role to her. Interaction and communication is the key factor of any human being to be a leader. To facilitate team spirit and growth for the people contributing to a leader’s growth is the way to perfect leadership. A leader must have a social gesture.“Be the change you want to see in others”, is a famous saying that we quote today for our socio-political structure. Most women in India cannot vow for that. They cannot take the table, they cannot lead a group, and they cannot raise their hands to ask questions in an official or unofficial forum. Their orientation of being a bold and being an extrovert has such an unruly definition of being the bad one, that they often take to being coy and destructive in a silent manner. 

We have reached the 21^st century but our subject ladies in line are still everlastingly tied between being the good and the bad. Being western is bad, culturally. But being oriental is not in, socially. Being the one voicing out matters at home is bad in mannerism, but again being the one voicing out matters at work requires a good knowledge and responsible contribution. Indian women are confused and are constant in opposition with the voices in their head. Being a culturally driven but globally cultivated country, the industry we work for offers us enough exposure to evolve into a global citizen and accept the changes and the new dimensions that our previous generations have never even dreamt about. Indian men have accepted this change. They have a clear margin drawn to stop their inner battle. They have evolved with time and technology, it is a man thing. They accepted the change, they learned the technologies, they have evolved to lead and they have comfortably synced to move on. They do it for the situation and with the situation. 

Our subject womenkind, a very few in numbers, have happily raised a toast with their man-power around, well wished them and taken the changes by their stride. The remaining other “mother figures” of our global teams have curled up into their shells and worked on to change the workstations and cubicles into their kitchen cabinets in order to continue their existance. They are the ones who lead from behind. They never take the table, they sit in the corner and observe. Complicated contemplation of simple and even ignorable issues is their prime discussions. They never come up with a strategy or a presentation to address their team. They do not learn the core values and survive their years over carpet comments. They have an eye to target a crowd who are better than them to be dishonored and the ones in the introvert circle to domesticate them. They have their survival strategy as designed over their kitchen tricks.

In their kitchen, our subject woman type maintains a wide range of recipe for each and every employee stored in a cookbook. She prepares to garnish them accordingly with her secret recipe. However, since her knowledge is truly outlined by narrow domestic walls, she fails dramatically in the presentation of her dishes and finally broods and cries over them. One failure is linked to another. Once a discouragement crops up, she successfully turn the table to one of her targets while she cherishes her responsibility at work as a success to the answer for her failure elsewhere. The battle, the question and the answer and the requirement to prove her existence is again a fight within. 

Leadership cannot be learned and forced out of an individual. It is a skill that can be cultivated out of being a good leader. A good team would help a leader to bloom. This, my dear lady is something you should learn and engrave on your boasting career graph. Create your skills and set an example to groom yourself into a service leader and not a domestic sideline. Women at our workplace need to have a mind more liberated like the men.

I would only conclude by the famous saying, “You cannot open a book without learning something. – Confucius”