While appreciating the women employees at Lenskart, Shark Tank fame Bansal writes, “I’m cautious about sharing them to not make it easy for all the head hunters to go after our best talent”
The global goal of Women Entrepreneurship Day is to ignite innovators, changemakers, aspiring entrepreneurs to spark up the expansions and advance the inclusion worldwide. Given the boasting Indian scenario in startup landscape, only 15 per cent of the unicorns have been held by women out of total 107 unicorns.
Peyush Bansal, Co-founder and Chief Executive and People Office poses questions, “How come 4/4 of our International Heads are women? How come 60 per cent of over 2000 optometrists at Lenskart are women? How come 48 per cent of the entrepreneurs on Shark Tank India are now women?”
In line with Women Entrepreneurship Day, Lenskart’s Bansal has written a long post on his LinkedIn profile. Bansal appreciates women professionals, entrepreneurs, global leaders and has laid even more emphasis on women who he works with at Lenskart.
Shark Tank India made waves on the Indian silver screen last year. The business reality show provided entrepreneurs in the country with a stage to present their business.
Shark Tank India show provided a platform to homegrown startups to pitch their ideas, raise funds from the evaluators and investors involved in the show which they named as ‘Sharks’.
Peyush Bansal is one of the Sharks with Anupam Mittal, Shaadi.com; Namita Thapar, Emcure Pharmaceuticals; Aman Gupta, boAt; Vineeta Singh, Sugar Cosmetics. The Second season of the show is scheduled tobe released in December 2022.
Peyush Bansal ended the post and writes, “While I have a 100 more examples from within Lenskart of phenomenal women leaders, I’m cautious about sharing them to not make it easy for all the head hunters to go after our best talent.”
Bansal further shares his personal perspective and broadly categorises it into segments. Below given is his own words-
Putting Purpose before Self: In high growth companies, the leader needs to put aside personal ambitions and focus solely on the company’s mission. In so many instances, I’ve seen women put their loved ones first before themselves. While men are ramping up now, for ages, women have been keeping the larger good of the family in mind and steering it forward.
One of our first employees is Amrita Prakash who has played the role of Receptionist to HR Manager to GM Operations. Right after her first baby, despite all our resistance, she was in the factory managing her new born & booming orders – this is the level of selflessness women bring to an org.
Adaptive to changing environments: From menstrual cycles to maternity – women adapt throughout their lives yet keep winning every time. This is super important capability in fast growing companies, as the environment keeps changing and a leader needs to be agile.
Emotion and Empathy: You can’t win the World Cup with just skill, you also need emotion – empathy for customers, the cause, the environment and employees is one of the most important traits of a great Leader.
Women I feel, again, tend to display this trait very successfully. A perfect example is my fellow Shark Namita Thapar. While we’re all busy juggling Shark Tank schedules and work, Namita makes a point to arrange full-of-love lunch for all of us (that’s sometimes the only thing we look forward to in the day! – this compassion of a leader is must to build teamss.
Discipline and Multitasking: I don’t think I need to even make a case here. Alongside all the agility, one thing that is underrated but needed most in organisations is Discipline – discipline of planning, discipline of following through, discipline of meeting commitments.
From friends, family to work, I really don’t know how they do it, but women multi-task better than most. After a long day of Shark Tank, when Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal and I are cribbing about lack of sleep – our co-Shark Vineeta Singh walks in talking about her Midnight run stats as she trains for Iron ‘Man’.
Women have worked hard and in fact, used challenging circumstances to their advantage – to develop traits that are now proving to be exactly what we need in the new age of leadership. The stats therefore don’t come as a surprise!
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