Gunjan Kedia, U.S. Bank - Closing Keynote - DS4A: Women's Summit 2020 Finale

Thank you for including me. I must say that I was feeling a level of energy when I was reading about the program and reading about what all of you have accomplished that I haven't felt for about 25 or 30 years, when I was sort of in your chair. Congratulations to all of you. First of all, I just want to say we have some 13 minutes together. I thought I'd speak for 10-15 minutes, give you a sense of what my background has been, what I've learned along the way as I have gone from my engineering days to where I am today, but then I'd love to do questions because I'm never sure I'm addressing what's actually in your mind if I just give a speech. So think of what you'd like to ask and we'll go over that if that's okay.

Well, let me start by just telling you a little bit about my journey. I, as the police said, I did enter engineering as an act of defiance, so to say. Every young woman at the time, not because I'm Catholic but because it was a free school, free private school, and I went from that kind of environment to a nearly all-boys environment. We were about eight women in our program, electronics and communications, and as you can imagine, an engineering school in Delhi was quite dominated by boys. I will tell you the upside of that is one, I have seven really good friends. The eight of us went through the four years as this sisterhood that will stay with me forever. But I also got very comfortable with just being different. And one of the things that I hope all of you will experience over time is that moment when it doesn't matter that you're the only one, or you're angry that there aren't more of you, or it can literally make you feel like it is just okay, and it is a matter of time. I hope that's the type of positive attitude you bring to it.

When I was finishing up my engineering with all intentions of joining Siemens, my father late in his life got a job at the World Bank in Washington DC, and it suddenly changed the options I had in front of me because he had the ability to pay for an MBA, which otherwise you would never have coming from India. So I came to Carnegie Mellon. I got used to a whole new society, and I for the first time learned the word diversity. In my world, I was short or darker-skinned, and suddenly I came to a whole world where I was not just the wrong gender, the wrong height, the wrong religion, the wrong color, the wrong whatever you say. But I will tell you, it took me a very short period of time to not start defining it as wrong, but just different and okay, because there was a lot of curiosity that my friends had about me. They enjoyed and appreciated and thought it was quite exotic that I had grown up in a completely different environment, and I learned to feel very comfortable. So I hope all of you will also arrive at the point when your friendships have nothing to do with what you look like or who you are.

I was lucky enough to have a group of friends and a group of mentors that showed me that it is definitely not just possible but frequent. Then I graduated, and it was not easy to get a job for me, I have to tell you. Straight from India, coming to an MBA where if any of you have been in MBAs or are studying that now, you're into the job process right after you graduate, and I was just socially very inept. I was a bright kid, I knew my substance, but I did not know social graces in America, and I made a lot of mistakes. My first interview, which I talked about a lot openly, is with a sports team called the Penguins, and I had no ability to make social conversation. After sort of flunking quite dramatically my first couple of interviews, I had a very good friend, his name was an Indonesian Chinese who had grown up in the US, and he pulled me aside and said, 'You just need to learn some things.' So he taught me the basics of social conversation, and I'm very grateful to him because again, I say you find friends in strange places. Once I mastered that, I started to do better in my interviews. I was very comfortable with consulting; it was a profession that came easy to me.

I became a partner very quickly at McKinsey. You know, it's a high-pressure career; your roles come very quickly. While a lot of it was flattering, a lot of it was very positive, let me talk about one thing that was not so good about it, and I've had to work hard to unravel that. McKinsey was a very formulaic career path. You went from being an associate, and if you did well and didn't get fired, you became a manager, and if you did well and didn't get fired, you then became... and it was very well understood that it would take this much time to get from one step to the other. Well, I have since learned that sometimes you've been fired, but no one has actually told you; it's just you realize that something's not going well with your career, but nobody actually told you that at some point they decided you were not going to be promoted. Those are skills that are learned in the corporate setting, where women in particular really do struggle with this notion of not always knowing what the rules are and how we can succeed. The more senior you get, the less opaque it is to know exactly how you succeed. So one thing I would say to all of you is, you are much closer to school than you are to organizational careers, but remember one thing: in school, it's very formulaic; you know how to get grades, you're told what to do. You're training yourself to deal in an environment that is more uncertain. Start by simple things: if you find yourself getting superbly irritated because somebody didn't tell you exactly how to get from point A to point B, train yourself to get used to uncertainty without getting hassled by it.

After 2004, I had had eight, nine, ten years of a very successful consulting career, and then I had a baby. Ashwin was my first son; he's now 17. And it changed completely how I thought I could have a career. I very clearly remember I was taking the flight back from Nashville, and I said, 'Oh, baby just went to sleep,' and it was a very clear moment in my life that I did not want to live every day regretting being half an hour late. So I made a very quick and very sort of mature decision to have a job that was still good, but it let me go home. So the thing I would say to all of you is, maybe it's babies, maybe someone you care about gets sick and you want to make a decision and be with them, maybe you get sick, maybe you find that there comes a time when you will not be able to climb Mount Everest unless you do it over the next two years. Whatever happens, life has a way of living itself while you are planning your career. And here's what I did: I had a more relaxed career for about four years when I had both my children. My husband was building a software company at the time, and it allowed him to travel, but I could be with the children and I could sleep a little bit. I had had a very physically intense career, and I could be home a little bit. So I would say to you, take care of yourself. There will be times in your career when it feels overwhelming. Instead of saying I either have to quit my career or I have to have a family or my hobbies, think of an in-between, because you'll have a chance to get back into a different routine. Just don't quit completely, don't get upset about it, and don't let your health get completely destroyed in the process as well, because careers are long.

So then I joined US Bank recently. Let me close out my story with what I've learned here. I was very senior when I joined US Bank; it was about four years back. I was the Vice Chairman of Wealth Management. And here's what I feel: everybody's looking at you all the time, and they're looking to see what are you going to change. Because most senior people come in because there's an aspiration to do something different or something better, something new with the business. Have respect for people who have built the business before you. So one thing I have learned is first seek to understand why the business was built the way it was. There are a few things that you don't know. You know, especially for younger talent, which I think all of you are, there's so much passion to change the world that most people don't stop to say, 'Well, how did it work for the last 200 years before I was born?' Just a little bit of curiosity about what's already working in the world and what got us here will make you that much more successful when you have your own ideas to share. So I'll close it out with just one note of congratulations to all of you. I am always deeply grateful when I'm invited to join a group like yours, and let me tell you why. You are diverse and accepting of diversity, and I love that. My kids, you know, they don't think in terms of genders or race because they live it every day, either socially, in person, or through their internet networks. And I think you are coming to our workplace with a mindset that these differences that my generation have obsessed about may be irrelevant. You also bring a level of confidence about the fact that the world can be better, and you don't have to accept the things that are truly not so nice about it. So I would say, don't ever lose that ethos. Come into the workplace with that mindset.

Well, I'll tell you, even today in 2020, we are still celebrating a lot of firsts. But the compromises I don't have to make today in the quest for that role. I started my career when pants were not allowed for women, and I know most of you are chuckling to say how is that even possible. And I'm not talking about yoga pants, by the way; even dress pants were not allowed when I started. I come here and I don't ever hear of women needing to hide the fact that they are pregnant. I don't hear of women who lie about why they're leaving home because they actually wanted to be at a parent-teacher meeting and pretended that they were playing golf with the client. I don't do all of that. So what I would say is, my aspiration is not what all of you will achieve, but how you will change these environments.

You know, let me say one thing to you. I personally believe this impostor syndrome is the same narrative as women hate women and kill each other. I personally think it's rather, to be honest with you, it is very natural to feel a level of insecurity and uncertainty when you take something on for the first time. And if you think that is specific to women, ask any sports player how they feel when they're first walking into the field, or any man how they feel. I do think women are quite harsh on themselves and their own confidence level. And I'll give you one specific data point. You know, I run the wealth management business, and we do surveys. Women don't feel as confident. But now I have started designing different surveys, and instead of just asking how confident you feel, I ask them 10 questions about the type of decisions they make around their finances. And guess what? They do better than men. So here what we are learning is women are actually making very good decisions; they're actually doing the right things, but somehow they put it all together and grade themselves 20 points lower. So I would say if you're feeling a little bit of nervousness because you're taking on something new or something impactful, that's normal. Most of us feel that way, but that doesn't mean you're an imposter in your job.

Data normalization. See, now this is what I hope you guys will do: call out some of the way these surveys are done, because they're leaving questions asked to prove out a hypothesis that may or may not be right. And you know, real insight does come from asking a different set of questions. So that is a very good kind of summary. Data normalization. Next time I'm going to use that. Somebody uses me, I will say it's data normalization that's the issue.

Well, one thing I would say for all of you as you build your careers, there are certain sets of skills that are very different skill sets. The worst mistake people make is they get so enamored by the skill sets that got them from phase one to phase two that they double down on them and underestimate the need to learn the next set of skills. And that's something, there's a lot of literature out there, but if I could simply say, when you do something, when you're a star doer and you become a manager, it's actually a very stressful thing because you have to give up everything that you're most good at and delegate. And delegate means teaching others to do things even though you know you could do it faster, better, quicker, and save yourself more time. Don't ever fall into that trap. It is much better to take three times the time to enable somebody else. The notion of organizing work among the team, delegating, that's kind of management skills. That's very difficult, by the way. People management is one of the more difficult transitions to make in your career. Then leadership becomes different. At that point, you have people on your team that can manage on their own, they can run with things, and that's when vision and strategy and motivation becomes more important. It's not about teaching people only, it's not about organizing the work. You want to be the one telling people, 'Are we going to the moon or are we not going to the moon? Are we going to cure cancer or are we not going to cure cancer?' Because the teams will respond to your vision, they'll respond to the culture you create. So I always say, simply ask yourself whether you are in the right role.

Thank you. You inspired me equally. Thank you for letting me join you. Congratulations again.