RUNNING THE SHOW
FEMALE FACTOR : Where women are and where they want to go
In New York and London, women remain scarce among top bankers despite decades of struggle to climb the corporate ladder. But in India’s relatively young financial industry, women not only are some of the top deal makers, they are often running the show.
HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS and Fidelity International in India are run by women. So is the country’s second-biggest bank, Icici Bank, and its third-largest, Axis Bank. Women head investment banking operations at Kotak Mahindra and JPMorgan Chase and the equities division of Icici. Half of the deputy governors at the Reserve Bank of India are women.
In a country where parents in some areas still prize boys over girls; where overall female literacy rates are poor, the banking industry’s wealth of women in management may seem surprising. But women in the industry, many of whom have also worked in London and New York, say India provided the right combination of supportive, mostly male, managers and a diverse work environment that did not require them to be “one of the boys” to succeed.
This “isn’t a golf-playing, beer-drinking homogeneous culture,” said Naina Lal Kidwai, group managing director and country head of HSBC in India and a former head of Morgan Stanley’s investment bank in India. Male bankers and managers run the gamut from devoutly religious to devoted family men to late-night socialites.
Women “could join the workplace on their own terms,” Ms. Kidwai said. “You still have to network, you still have to work hard, but that made it easier.”
That means India is without an old Wall Street staple: Women who feel they must act like the stereotypical male banker to advance. There are no swaggering “masters of the universe” in this group. Top female managers regularly wear saris and talk openly about their children and husbands.
These women handle many of India’s biggest deals — raising $9.7 billion for the power company NTPC or negotiating Vodafone Group’s purchase of an $11.1 billion stake in Hutchison Essar. Almost all of them are in their 40s and 50s, are from wealthy backgrounds, went to excellent schools in India and abroad, and graduated at the top of their classes before excelling at the bank they joined. So they often enjoy the same status as the men who were their competition and their banking clients.
Banking may be more of a meritocracy than other professions, women in the business say, because there is an easy way to keep score: Look at the bottom line.
“You got your next big challenge based on your performance and your potential, not whether you were male or female,” said Chanda Kochhar, chief executive of Icici Bank, where women make up 40 percent of the senior management. Mrs. Kochhar has been at the bank for her entire 25-year career, moving from corporate to retail banking, then directing the international business before becoming chief financial officer.
India operations of big global banks constitute a tiny portion of overall profits, because debt markets and deal size and volume are smaller than in developed countries. But India’s importance has grown as investment banks bet on emerging markets for growth and simultaneously move more complicated jobs to India to cut costs at home.
So sometimes these women oversee more employees than many top managers at the banks’ headquarters. About 11 percent of HSBC’s 331,000 employees are in India, for example, and of JPMorgan Chase’s 220,000 employees, nearly 7 percent are in India.
One in five of India’s big bank, insurance and money-management companies is headed by a woman, according to a study by the headhunting group EMA Partners. By contrast, there are no women leading major American or European banks, and no woman has ever run a Wall Street investment bank.
Bosses sometimes gravitate toward women in India because they think “women are less corruptible, more straightforward and above board most of the time,” said K. Sudarshan, managing partner, India, for EMA.
In terms of compensation, none of the women interviewed said they had ever felt they were paid a different amount than their male counterparts.
“Here salary is totally nondiscriminatory,” said Usha Thorat, the other female deputy reserve governor at India’s central bank. The idea that women might be paid less for the same job as men in the United States “came as a surprise to me,” she said.
At the same time, women in banking in India say they have always felt more pressure than men. “Always, that is a given,” Ms. Kidwai said. “It was very clear we had to perform better and work harder.” She added that the women now heading banks had often been the first women hired in their early jobs and had been “watched like hawks.”
And they all relied heavily on a support network of family and India’s cheap labor pool to help watch their children. Some enlisted mothers and mothers-in-law for child care for months or years, and all of them employed full-time nannies and maids. The length of maternity leave differs from bank to bank, but the average is about three months.
Meera Sanyal, head of RBS in India, started working in India at a branch office of Grindlays Bank in Calcutta, dealing with a barrage of upset corporate customers and a unionized staff that resented her for replacing an older man. She revamped the way the bank handled clients, according to profitability; learned Bengali to communicate better with the local staff; and ultimately convinced reluctant unions to accept automation, though it would mean layoffs.
She was working at Lazard in India when she became pregnant with her first child. She recalls that when she told her boss she wanted to work flexible hours after her baby was born, he said: “Are you crazy? We’ve invested a lot of money in you.”
Rather than quit, she said, she vowed to work so hard until she gave birth that Lazard would feel it had gotten its money’s worth. She wrapped up a deal on July 6 and delivered the baby a day later. After that, her boss reconsidered, allowing her to work flexible hours for the same pay. There are several men, she said, who “made it possible for me to do what I wanted to do.”
Now she is doing the same for other women at the bank. Recently, a risk manager said she needed to quit because she was pregnant and had been prescribed bed rest. Ms. Sanyal suggested that the bank set up a home office instead that would allow her to work from bed. After having a healthy baby, “she’s back at work and absolutely a star performer,” Ms. Sanyal said. “Small things like that cost us nothing,” she added. “It is just a way of being more flexible.”
Kalpana Morparia, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase in India, had some simple advice for Western banks that are trying to increase the number of women at the top. “Just be gender neutral,” she said. “Men are just as smart as we are.”
Article publié par “International Herald Tribune Magazine”
Les valeurs féminines font leur entrée dans le monde de l'entreprise
"Les 7 clés du leadership"
Philippe Wattier, fondateur du Cercle du Leadership m’a invité en décembre au lancement de cet ouvrage audacieux, écrit collectivement par Emmanuelle Barbara, Pierre-Ignace Bernard, Bruno Chaintron, Laurent Choain, Jean-Michel Eberlé, François Eyssette, Jean Michel Garrigues, Valérie Gauthier, Françoise Gri, Gilles Marque, Alexandrine Mounier, Didier Petelet et Martin Sergent.
Les travaux de Leadership Women Association sont cités dans cet ouvrage, trouvant ainsi une diffusion auprès d’un lectorat constitué de personnes faisant autorité pour leurs travaux. J’ai ainsi découvert avec jubilation, un livre qui met non seulement en avant la pertinence des valeurs féminines dans le monde du travail mais recommande également vivement leur mise en œuvre au quotidien.
Ces réflexions, ces confirmations, ces propositions apportent des réponses à tous les hommes et les femmes soucieux(ses) de l’avenir de l’entreprise dans notre société. De chapitre en chapitre j’ai dévoré des analyses, des états des lieux sans complaisance des différents paramètres qui structurent nos entreprises actuelles. La pertinence des réflexions développées dans cet ouvrage et la qualité de ses auteurs nourrissent l’espoir que les états d’esprits sont à l’aube du changement tant attendu, ainsi qu’en témoigne le texte en 4ème de couverture :
« Sous l’effet conjugué des nouvelles attentes des salariés, des entreprises et des marchés, les conditions d’exercice du leadership connaissant aujourd’hui une mutation sans précédent. Rassemblant les expériences et témoignages de professionnels, cet ouvrage examine les sept clés d’une pratique réussie du management dans les années 2010 : l’exemplarité du dirigeant, la conscience de soi, « le savoir-relier », la résilience, l’engagement sociétal, le sentiment d’inclusion et la recherche de sens. Autant de clés qui aideront le leader à appréhender différemment sa mission. Une réflexion stratégique qui s’adresse aux chefs d’entreprise, aux cadres dirigeants ainsi qu’à tous ceux qui exercent un leadership de management ou d’influence. »
En accord avec Philippe Wattier et Jean-Daniel Belfond dirigeant des éditions l’Archipel, vous trouverez quelques extraits dans la rubrique BIBLIOTHÈQUE.
J’espère qu’ils vous inciteront de vous précipiter dans les librairies à la sortie le 5 janvier ou de le commander via internet. Il ne me reste qu’à espérer que la version anglaise suivra la parution française dans les plus brefs délais !
Dominique Reiniche, Présidente Coca Cola Enterprise Europe
Les valeurs féminines en entreprise vues par Dominique Reiniche
Aborder le management des entreprises par le biais des valeurs féminines et masculines qui caractérisent chacun d’entre nous, hommes et femmes, peut dans un premier temps paraitre quelque peu audacieux et purement intellectuel. Eh bien, pas du tout! Vous allez découvrir que ce regard est très éclairant.
La réflexion et les propositions faites dans l’ adaptation française de l’ouvrage américain de Mike Burke et Pierre Sarda s’adressent aux managers, hommes et femmes, du XXle siècle. Ils, ou elles, y puiseront, nous l’espérons, de nombreuses idées pratiques et concrètes pour appliquer un management à la fois stratégique et quotidien encore plus performant. L’ouvrage leur sera également utile dans leur vie personnelle et dans leurs relations avec leur famille et leurs proches.
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LES SEMINAIRES
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L’innovation face à la résistance au changement
Avec la globalisation et les nouvelles technologies, on assiste à l’abaissement de nombreuses barrières à l’entrée et à l’avènement de nouveaux comportements liés aux réseaux sociaux, véritables relais d’influence et de transparence. Le contexte change très rapidement et plus que jamais créativité et adaptabilité sont devenues essentielles à la réussite de l’entreprise. EN SAVOIR +
MIXITE - FLEXIBILITE - OPPORTUNITE
La dynamique de la diversité, la complémentarité des opposés, le potentiel créatif du groupe …. sont des facteurs qui ne peuvent plus rester ignorés dans l’orchestration d’une société moderne. Pourtant, quand le discours vient à parler des hommes et des femmes dans l’entreprise, nombreuses sont les pirouettes pour éviter d’y consacrer trop d’énergie dans les faits. Si les dirigeants de la majorité des entreprises françaises font office de bonne figure en signant des chartes sur la parité, sur l’égalité des hommes et des femmes ou le développement durable, peu sont ceux qui se soucient de la cohérence entre leurs paroles et leurs actes.
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NEWSLETTER
