WOMEN SPECIAL …..WOMEN IN CHARGE ...Sunita Sharma

WOMEN IN CHARGE  ‘Never feel that you are different from men’     She dislikes being labelled a ‘woman’ achiever. But Sunita Sharma is the first woman to head LIC Housing Finance (LIC HFL), the country’s second-largest mortgage lender in which Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) controls a 40% stake.     However, she points out with some obvious satisfaction that today women are climbing the corporate ladder more in India than abroad.     “We should never feel that we are different from men. We have to stand shoulder-toshoulder with men,” says Sharma, who will have to transform the housing finance lender into a bank if its application were to be approved by the Reserve Bank of India. Sharma believes that LIC HFL has the operational efficiency and brand legacy to become a full-fledged lender and the task doesn’t seem to daunt her one bit.     Sharma joined LIC as a direct recruit officer in 1981 and has since grown with the company, helping it boost business. In 2008, Sharma was made head of Pension & Group Schemes (P&GS), a portfolio that she grew from Rs 70,000 crore to over Rs 2 lakh crore in her four-year stint. Today, the P&GS business is almost as big as the individual cover business of LIC and contributes 50% of all new business income as against 15% in 2008. Sharma, however, refuses to rest on her laurels and is reluctant to even talk about them. Her focus now is LIC HFL and she says LIC was her past. Sharma, who took over as MD & CEO of LIC HFL last November, says that success can’t be achieved alone. “It has to be team work and people have to believe in you and respond to you.”     She prides herself more as a team player than as an individual achiever and believes in the power of human potential to scale up any business.     Sharma, who has a master’s degree in science from Delhi University, believes that hard work alone is what puts a person on the path to success.     “I don’t remember a time when I was not treated equally because I was a woman. On the contrary, people would often laugh and say, ‘why can’t people think like you, like a woman’,” recollects Sharma, the only time that she in some way credited her own achievements.     Having worked for three decades and held positions in the diverse fields of marketing, personnel and HR, finance and accounts, risk management and equity research, Sharma is a strong advocate of people taking responsibility for their own decisions, especially in matters relating to work-life balance.     “If you decide to take care of your home because it is not possible to manage both home and work, then be happy about it. If you are able to manage without being at home for long and are able to devote more time to office, be happy about that too. But if you are going to carry a guilt, that you neglected your home for office, then don’t work,” she says. Anshul Dhamija TOI140120