63: New Narratives, Beyond Binaries

In the second episode for the women’s special in the month of March, Gayathri and Chitra from PM Power Consulting are in conversation with Jacintha Jayachandran, Author, Coach & HR professional and Sushma Joshi a communication & employee engagement specialist who have worked for tech companies. They share stories of their non-IT roles and working with IT professionals and cover topics such as  - Coming to IT by accident; the journey from pharma and journalism to IT Understanding the vocabulary and language  Culture shocks and back to work after a decade, stepping from a victorian era to plush officers Building relationships versus being pushers, connecting with business to build partnerships in IT HR in IT as partners in governance rather than policy or process makers 7 blind men and the elephant, perceptions about the role of  communication & employee enagement   Importance of respect and understanding roles to becoming a powerful collaborator and active listener to enable the right culture Software people love their data points and HR can bring more agility leaving aside ego Moving  towards a  Narrative 2.0 where we can do career pacing.  Discovering and enabling women’s core strength work  The empty nest syndrome and tapping into an ecosystem to pace and chart alternate career graphs Having role models and getting success with happiness is key Networking a super-critical act and starting with your local organization  Staying authentic to yourself and expecting the same from others without judgement Our guests - Sushma Joshi is the Employee Engagement, Culture and Experience Leader at Symantec in Pune. She is also a passionate DEI evangelist. Sushma started her career as a journalist with the Maharashtra Herald and came to the IT world after a break of a decade when she joined Nihilent Technologies and later Persistent systems. She has spent the last 13 years with Symantec where she has a diverse set of roles across such as a global content strategist, communications consultant to the leadership team, partnering with engineering product groups to drive innovation and driving employee engagement. Sushma has a BA (Hons) in English from University of Kolkata and Bachelors of Communication and Journalism, media and mass communication from the University of Pune Jacintha Jayachandran In a span of 25 years in professional life, she has been an integral part of and led teams in defining best in class talent management practices in organizations such HP, Infosys, OnMobile and in the past 10 years as an entrepreneur has co-founded 2 organizations; Transcendix a Training and Development organization and LeadNOW an organization enabling women to start, stay and soar in their careers by providing research based solutions. Jacintha is a seeker, a learner, a human in the pursuit of living a meaningful and authentic life, also an entrepreneur, author, teacher and public speaker; who has inspired over 40,000 participants in various learning and coaching engagements across organizations and domains and geographies. She is Trustee and chief volunteer at HopeWorks foundation which is currently impacting 500 girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to live , learn and grow with Hope. She has also served as the evangelist trainer , member/head ethics committee and compliance and coordinated all Posh related processes at Infosys Technologies, Infosys BPO, OnMobile Global Ltd. Eli Lilly, SFL, Enquero Global amongst others. She recently co-authored and published the book Words Matter aimed at women and girls. Jacintha is certified in change management from Cornell University, certified in conflict management through mediation by Meta culture and is a post graduate in Social work from Bangalore university