“In every situation, your style of leadership will change," said Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO and chairperson at Salesforce India, at a summit hosted by the cloud-based software company.
The annual gender equality event was recently held in India for the first time, with several in-person and online attendees. The speakers included a diverse lineup of women in leadership across industries such as Genpact’s CIO Vidya Rao Rucha Nanavati, CIO of Mahindra Group, and journalist Faye D’Souza in addition to other leaders from Salesforce.
Bhattacharya, who was one of the panelists at a session on leadership lessons, spoke about changing gears and leadership styles.
During the pandemic, when Marc Benioff, the chair, CEO, and co-founder of Salesforce, offered to send PPE kits to India, she recounted telling him, “India is self-sufficient and is exporting them at one-third the cost of China. It’s not PPEs that we need, we need oxygen." She added, “He arranged for three plane-loads of oxygen concentrators to be delivered to India. That is crisis leadership."
Covid-19 taught us how to face a crisis, she said. “But what it didn’t do was teach us how we could get back from crisis into normalcy because, at that point, empathy takes over everything else," Bhattacharya added. “So, once the crisis is over, one needs to rethink the leadership style, and those who have been able to reinvent can be called successful leaders."
Good leaders are those who can see the future by looking at a few data points. “They have to be visionaries," Bhattacharya said. A visionary is not only someone who can forecast the future, but they should be able to understand these data points and fill the gaps. “If you’re going to be able to envisage what the future is going to hold for you, then you’re in a position to bring your company to a stage where it will be future-proof and future-ready," she said.
The second step to being a good leader is to be able to explain that vision to the team. “It will make the team buy into the leader’s vision," she explained.
And the last step, she said, is to give the team the space to operate. “By doing that, as a leader, you’ll have many allies, a lot more brainpower, and you’ll have attained your vision for the company," she said.
First Published: Aug 03, 2023, 16:04
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