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CHANDA KOCHHAR
‘If
my successor is a woman chosen on merit, that is one more reason to
celebrate’
At
ICICI Bank, gender diversity has always been more than hygiene. Managing
director and CEO Chanda Kochhar’s next goals are to have more women on the
board, as well as in the customer base
Zarin Daruwala has been in and
out of her office for the past four weeks to help her son prepare for his
school leaving examinations. Years ago, the head of wholesale banking at
ICICI Bank had first taken time off from work for a similar duty; at that
time, when her daughter was sitting for her secondary exams, the bank’s
managing director and CEO Chanda Kochhar had allowed Daruwala to come in
only for half days and work from home for the rest of those days — for all
of three months. Two years later, Daruwala did it again, this time for her
daughter’s senior secondary examinations.
Such periodic ‘study’ breaks may be rare in Indian
organizations — and rarer still for a honcho in a critical role. Wholesale
banking accounts for half of the bank’s advances and Daruwala is in charge
of some 5,000 corporate clients, both domestic and international.
But then Kochhar, for her part, would know what
she’s doing. As would have those leaders before her, who — as the MD puts
it — “nurtured the culture of gender diversity at ICICI Bank, and ensured
it was a part of the institution’s DNA since inception.”
Kochhar, however, is clear, about one principle
that’s been ICICI Bank’s guiding beacon over the decades: “Reward is on the
basis of capability. Meritocracy can’t be gender-specific,” she explained
in an interview with ET Magazine.
Daruwala, 48, who has been with the bank since June
1989 and worked in the office of chairman N Vaghul (when ICICI was a
development financial institution), knows all about the bank’s obsession
with (merit-based) gender diversity long before it became a mandatory box
to tick. From corporate banking to M&A (at ICICI Securities) to rural
banking, Daruwala has been there, done it all. And it’s not been all about
operating out of air-conditioned offices and travelling business class.
“When I ran the rural
business of ICICI around the time ICICI was merged into ICICI Bank [in the
early 2000s], I would visit places where I would not find a loo for a whole
day,” recounts Daruwala.
Daruwala epitomizes the spirit of gender diversity
rooted in meritocracy that prevails at ICICI Bank. The women work as hard
as — some perhaps even harder than — the men without compromise. Kochhar
says the or- ganization has no inhibitions about the ability of women to do
certain jobs — unlike the bias that prevails in much of India Inc. And the
women have it drilled in them that ICICI Bank is a gender-neutral
organization and that they will not be treated favourably, although the
bank pulls out all stops to ensure their growth and retention. For
instance, other than maternity leave (which can extend up to six months),
the bank also offers childcare leave after that; fertility and adoption
leave are also provided. The objective here clearly is to provide the
support women need during their middle years, when family pressures tend to
wean them away from the workplace. “It is crucial to support women in the
middle years, so when it is time to choose a CEO the talent pool has a fair
number of women,” says Kochhar.
A CEO Factory
The results of such support have been twofold: one, over the years,
ICICI Bank has emerged as a CEO factory of sorts — of primarily women
leaders. A sample: Shikha Sharma who heads Axis Bank and Kalpana Morparia
who heads JP Morgan in India are both former ICICI hands. Lalita Gupte, a
former joint managing director, is today a much-sought-after independent
director on boards of not just Indian companies but multinationals, too.
Then there are those like Vishakha Mulye, a former CFO at the bank who now
heads ICICI Venture, who has found leadership opportunities within the
group. And it’s leaders like
Mulye and Daruwala who could
help ICICI Bank achieve the holy grail of diversity: a board that is well
represented by women members; currently Kochhar is the only woman on the
ICICI Bank board, which has four executive directors (including the MD) and
eight non-executive directors (including chairman KV Kamath).
Of course, it’s still early days to talk about a
successor to Kochhar — she’s only 52 — but don’t forget that her
predecessor KV Kamath began worrying about succession early on. More than
five years before Kochhar was announced as MD in end-2008, he had
identified and begun grooming young talent — many in their 30s — with the
potential to take on leadership positions. Result: he was virtually spoilt
for choice when the time to choose his successor arrived. Kochhar would
doubtless be aiming for a similar scenario, with a large, gender-neutral
talent pool. Ask her whether she ponders the possibility of her successor
being a woman, and she answers with a smile: “We will go by merit and if it
leads to my successor being a woman, it will be one more cause to
celebrate.”
The second effect of a sharp focus on gender
diversity is that ICICI has been able to maintain the ratio of women in the
organization at almost a third since the '80s. “When I joined [in 1984]
more than 30% of the workforce comprised women. We had under 1,000
employees then. We have 71,000 today, and still maintain that number,” says
the MD. That number hits 35% at the entry level, and drops to 16-17% at the
top and middle rungs.
Kochhar adds that women have been working in the
financial services industry for more than three decades now as a result of
which there is a large enough pool to choose CEOs from in the industry
today. She feels information technology may see a similar rise of the woman
CEO in the coming years.
Mulye points out that the best part of the
organization is that individual needs are respected. “This is true for
women as well as men — you can seek a day or half a day’s leave for
attending your kid’s parent teacher meeting. You will not be looked down
upon or lose respect for this, as long as you deliver on your goals,” she
says.
Mulye joined ICICI in 1993 when N Vaghul was
chairman and managing director; KV Kamath came in as managing director two
years later. Mulye says: “All along I have seen the same gender-neutrality
in the organization. If anything has changed, today there is a little more
emphasis on safety and security.”
Daruwala recalls that as her boss in the late '80s,
Gupte would ensure her security in case she was working late. “She would call
and find out or even before that would want to know how I was planning to
reach home,” Daruwala recalls.
That concern has now entered processes. Women
leaving the bank’s offices at night are accompanied by security staff up to
an auto rickshaw and the number of the vehicle is noted. This is followed
up by a call later to check if the employee has reached safely.
An organization with over 20,000 women in the
workforce is a great advertisement for gender diversity but it’s no
cakewalk managing the balance between work and the personal front. “There
are some days when you will not be available for your child because you
have to be at work, and vice versa. You have to accept that. You will have
to give up on your personal time, time for yourself. But it is definitely
manageable to handle both with some hard work and cooperation of the
organization and the family,” says Kochhar.
Beyond the Bank
With Kochhar at the helm, ICICI Bank has expanded its quest for
diversity beyond the organization to its customers. It has designed
specific products for women and reached out to work with self-help groups
(SHGs) — 70,000 of them — in which 90% of the participants are women.
In 2013, finance minister P Chidambaram paved the
way for setting up India’s first separate bank for women — Bharatiya Mahila
Bank — with the promise that women customers will have women dealing with
their banking needs, offering a more sympathetic atmosphere.
It’s arguably a dichotomy: today India’s largest
private sector bank and the country’s largest bank, the State Bank of India
(SBI), are led by women (SBI by Arundhati Bhattacharya). Do women really
need another bank exclusively for them?
Kochhar feels the new bank can only help. “It does
not mean that other players are not focussed on the same. The requirement
is so large it can only do good,” she says about the finance minister’s
efforts.
For example, Kochhar says the efforts with the SHGs
aim to make the women involved with it economically stronger by teaching
them the benefits of small savings, micro credit and micro insurance. “An
economically stronger woman is also socially and mentally stronger. So she
is able to articulate her views on whether there should be a liquor shop in
the village or what kind of a school should be brought into the village.”
Kochhar adds that ICICI Bank has been engaging with
SHGs for sometime now — much before the finance minister came up with the
idea of creating a separate bank for women.
Apart from SHGs, Kochhar speaks about another
initiative of the bank that women are taking advantage of. ICICI
Foundation, the philanthropic arm of ICICI Bank, has been setting up skill
development centres and Kochhar points out that 30-35% of people enrolling
in these are women, many of whom have gone on to get jobs.
Take the example of R Kavya, 19, who attended the
course at ICICI’s Coimbatore centre and is now ready to work as an
electrician. It is something that excites Kochhar — for she says at the
time she had completed her management course, the manufacturing sector was
virtually out of bounds for women. Today, Kochhar’s daughter has completed
a degree in systems engineering.
Kavya had similar engineering aspirations. “From my
childhood I enjoyed working with electrical stuff right from changing
bulbs. My family could not afford the fees for engineering, but now at
least I can work as an electrician,” Kavya says.
Or take 26-year-old Vinita Sharma in Jaipur who
attended the course for office administration. A married woman and a
mother, Sharma had moved to Jaipur recently and felt extremely diffident
about freely moving around in a big city. “After completing the three-month
course in office administration, I feel very confident now and can go to
any part of the city,” she says.
Kochhar feels that just as creating a large
gender-neutral organization provided ICICI Bank with a diverse field to
choose leaders from — not just at the bank but at the various subsidiaries
— the investments in SHGs and training along with reaching out to the
unbanked will spur growth for the bank in future.
“The momentum of growth will come from rural
areas,” says Kochhar, pointing out how the bank has opened 440 new branches
in unbanked villages in the past year and a half and has a 40% share in
Aadhaar-enabled payment services. For a bank that began its rural push more
than a decade ago, success after a long gestation will be sweet. Success by
empowering more women — with the help of more women — will be sweeter.
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