Pledge 1%'s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Madhumeeta Mhaskey
Salesforce Consultant, TechForce Services
Sydney, NSW, Australia
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
Managing project delivery & client engagement . Team management and mentoring.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
Engaging with people, understanding their pain point in performing day to day business activities using software systems. It's heartening to be able to empathize with the people and collaborate with them to design solutions addressing their issues and improve their experience performing those tasks each time. I enjoy learning the new domains and helping customers to map the business process into the product to achieve the automation eventually making their day to day job easier.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years - what motivates you to keep going?
I feel directionless at times when faced with sustained challenges. But once there is an acceptance of the situation, positivity creeps in and I just try to keep the momentum going. We spend so much of our active day at work, fortunately my role offers to engage with customers and the opportunity to understand/ resolve problems, improve customer/ end user experience is satisfying and it keeps me going.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
We all face challenges or adversaries in personal and professional life and depending on our individual personality we respond. At times we learn from our own past experiences and others experiences. Sometimes we are fortunate to get mentored.
Best piece of advice I received is 'Take one step at a time'
As in if you think of the challenge as one big block it would inadvertently overwhelm you, but if you meticulously probe, every big challenge is combination of multiple smaller one. Pick the smaller chunks one at a time and strike them off, you'll be surprised with the outcome.
It has worked well for me.
What does generosity mean to you?
Empathy for every individual without being judgemental.
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
Businesses always had a key role to play in solving big challenges faced by communities and the world at large. They will have to be agile than ever before in continuously adapting to newer ways of delivering services to their customers. The fundamental step in that direction is to adapt to the workforce needs (e.g. flexible work time, work place, support for other needs) so that they are able to deliver those services efficiently without impacting their personal lives and priorities. Mere engagement with employees is not enough, it needs to be followed by concrete, timely actions to improve employee experience is critical.
At Techforce Services this has been in the culture since inception and has continued till date. I believe that could be a major contributor in our success.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Empathetic.
It is impossible for me to exist with transactional relationship with people I'm surrounded by, may it be family, friends, work colleagues, communities or even a disconnected world at large. Regardless of whether I can make a difference in their lives they matter to me.
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
It's a old song in Hindi language 'Hum Ko Mann Ki Shakti Dena, Mann Vijay Kare, Dusaro Ki Jai se pehle khud Ki Jai kare'
Meaning, almighty endow us the will power to win over our yearning material desires and before I expect courtesy from others or point at their mistakes I turn inwards and introspect and act.
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
Reflect on the positives of the past couple of years and be thankful. It was difficult time but a useful experience.
Travel places to catch up with family and friends in person, some thing that we could not do past couple of years due to the pandemic.
