When A Corporate Leader Gets an Inventive Makeover
When I met Sowjanya Shetty at the Green Theory café/restaurant, in the kind of setting that the erstwhile city prided itself in – colonial bungalow, chiming bird song, leafy garden, white gazebos – I couldn’t help but dwell on how apt our meeting place was. After all, Green Theory marries nostalgia with contemporary yearnings. Sowjanya, whose eyes mirror the silver sparkles in her hair, also inhabits fluidity, transiting as she has from high-powered corporate leadership roles into a creative makeover.
She is currently the founder of AttitudeMakeover, inspiring through her podcast, candid blog pieces and workshops, the kind of changes she has effected in her own journey. Even as she engages with a range of fascinating guests, Sowjanya is unabashed about wanting to morph her own attitudes. After all, as she admits, regardless of past successes or titles held, we are all works in progress who can learn from others. The following are some insights I gleaned from our conversation and from her content snippets.
Recognize and Target Your Deficits
Soon after marrying her childhood sweetheart, Sowjanya and her husband, Shameer Ayyappan, moved to the U.S. She was armed with an engineering degree and technology experiences at BEL and Honeywell. At Philadelphia, where the couple landed, Sowjanya accepted a pre-sales job at SeaChange International. But she had to contend with two drawbacks: her own unfamiliarity with American culture and an intrinsic shyness. As she puts it, “Culturally, the US was a complete shock.”
She knew straight away that a relatively introverted persona would hardly make headway on a sales job. Instead of being weighed down, she signed up for a side hustle to help with both aspects: as a Radio Jockey for a Hindi radio station in New York. The Hindi songs might have granted her a cultural anchor, while the extroverted “Jockey” persona dissolved her earlier shyness. Moreover, the informal setting introduced her to American nuances at an accelerated pace.
That wasn’t the only side gig she accepted. She also ran a cigarette wholesale shop in her off-hours, an experience that taught her the innards of business. Such know-how helped her, as a pure techie till then, to master the drivers of customer experience.
Confront Your Personal Relationship With Money
People have different psychological relationships with money, beyond the commonly cited scarcity or abundance mindsets. In making a career change, and particularly when moving to a creative domain, one has to establish whether one can financially and psychologically withstand the diminished earnings.
Sowjanya had encountered precarity at an early age. Her Dad, who was contending with diabetes, died when she was just three years old. Her younger sister was a six-month-old infant. Suddenly bereft of a partner and an income, her mother scrambled to acquire shorthand and typing skills to facilitate an entry-level job at BEL.
“Very early on, I realized what financial pressure is,” Sowjanya says. She watched her Mom, who needed to manage her asthma, her new job and two heartbreakingly young children, ferry her salary in an envelope. In her kids’ presence, she would apportion the cash for their various needs, inculcating a necessary frugality in her daughters.
Growing up in scarcity, Sowjanya does not take earnings for granted. She confesses that she still remains anxious about money. But she has also watched the manner in which her attitude towards money has evolved over the years. Severe childhood curbs led to spendthrift phases in her own salaried life. She reins in such urges by setting limits on her credit cards.
Since “money” remains a critical factor when plotting career transitions, she and Shameer have carefully planned their finances over the years to enable risk-taking. While her own appetite for risk is larger than her partner’s, the couple has forged a tenable middle ground. She said, even while working, they always approached their jobs with a sense of fragility: of how “tomorrow could be your last day.” They have consciously averted loans to expand their lifestyles.
Moreover, with Attitude Makeover, she is infusing it with the energy and vigor she displayed at her corporate roles. By professionalizing the business in all its dimensions, and by staying attuned to listener and viewer metrics, she hopes to monetize her efforts soon. In the meanwhile, her cashflows are boosted by corporate and personal workshops.
Engage with Diverse People
When her husband needed to leave the US to return to India, Sowjanya stayed on for a while at her American job. She used this time to gain a very diverse set of friends – many of whom expanded her horizons and spurred her questioning of cultural givens. She encourages young Indians who may not have an opportunity to foray abroad to step out of their comfort zones – whether that be a big city, small town or village – and live independently in order to expand worldviews and question belief systems.
Her engagement with diversity persisted when she returned to India and rose to senior leadership roles at HP, GE and Microsoft. Rather than seeking to work with marquee brands, she always sought experiences that would be transformational in some manner. Right through she consciously engaged with employees across different strata – from villages or tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Some employees were first-generational college attendees or people who had surmounted immense class barriers to break into these places. She observed that Indian workplaces offered a mélange of backgrounds that would be hard to find in relatively more homogenous rich country workspaces.
Broaden Yourself With Side Gigs
One aspect that stuck out in Sowjanya’s story, was her relentless pursuit of side hustles. Despite parenting a daughter, and working full-time at demanding corporate roles – for instance, as the first India-based Master Program Manager at HP, a Chief of Staff at GE or a Director at Microsoft – she has never stopped being involved in other gigs. Besides her Radio Jockey role at New York, and being the manager of the cigarette shop, she has jostled many other ventures along the way.
At one point, she started an enterprise called Bubblewrap to gift experiences to customers. During another phase, she teamed up with her husband to create Badlo India. The intent was to rope in smart college students to work at premium retail outlets. “It involved training them in sales and to be feet-on-the-street at high-end stores.” Unfortunately, the couple ran into an unexpected roadblock. They faced many molestation complaints from students. “It opened my eyes to grassroot level challenges that are different from the corporate world,” Sowjanya says. She realized too that such ideas required sensitizing men accompanied by broader policy changes.
Shutting shop after a couple of years, she was keen on bolstering her storytelling skills. As an avid listener of podcasts, she tried podcasting. She built a 7-series podcast on the experience of transgenders in the Indian corporate environment. Even here, the going wasn’t always smooth. Many of the trans people she reached out to, at first, did not respond. Later, she connected with others through the Alternate Law Forum. The four trans people who narrated their stories shifted her own perspective.
“They told me about everything – love, home, marriage, living, work. I realized we cannot assume anything about anyone.” The narratives sensitized her to how constrained belief systems can hurt others. “Imagine someone looking down at you constantly,” she says. The stories expanded her own empathy, reinforcing how social and emotional intelligence are more critical than sheer IQ.
Get a Mentor
Right through her career, Sowjanya has actively sought mentors, coaches and sponsors. In turn, she has also mentored many aspirants and employees.
For her new enterprise, Sowjanya sought a mentor who could guide her through the mechanics. She interacted with veteran podcasters to ensure that her own outfit projects a best-in-class finesse. She also contracts with a team of specialists to craft the design, the social media activity and other elements that support a constant churn of new content.
Moreover, her podcast guests, who detail their own journeys and rollercoaster careers, inspire listeners to undertake similar transformations. It’s a platform that impacts many, helping them maneuver their own challenges.
Remain a Learner
The term lifelong learning is bandied about to the point of becoming trite. In Sowjanya’s case, however, I can’t help but notice how she consciously uses both trivial and large life moments to draw lessons.
Besides, her zeal for learning also stems from a deeper place. Going back to her childhood, when the family had lost their sole breadwinner, her mother emphasized that only education could haul them out of their cramped existence. And insisted that Sowjanya and her sister feature among the top five ranks in class. Given that Sowjanya’s wider horizons and hard-won freedoms are an outcome of her slog at school, college and at workplaces, she continues to absorb teachings from people, experiences and life itself.
She suggests three critical takeaways, from her own journey, for anyone contemplating midcareer shifts:
- Establish your financial position and relationship with money: If you have this aspect figured out, you can lead a more purposeful life.
- Understand your own value proposition: You need to know who you are and what impact you can bring to the table.
- Adopt a Growth Mindset: While all of us contend with life struggles, it’s critical to focus on social and emotional growth.
It’s worth tuning into her podcast or reading her blog to glean other zesty life lessons.
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