Introduction (lean In By Sheryl Sandberg)

Hello Everyone!!!

Hope you are doing fine. This is my first post in Indusladies. But I am one of the silent admirers of the site. I want to start writing chapter wise book reviews for all leadership related books I read. I thought this would be of immense help to all the budding leaders in our forum. But there is another selfish reason. It will keep me motivated to read more and more books.

Let’s jump into the topic right away. You may wonder why I choose the book “Lean In”. Yes? No? huh.. I take that as a yes. The primary reason, me being a woman, I feel that this book highlighted the hiccups women face in various situations amazingly well. But Sheryl Sandberg shares a lot about her experience, which I found useful for both men and women.

Let me start with my life. I belong to a society where women and men are not treated equally. Actually women are considered a burden. Parents have to care for their safety, spend money for their marriage and so on. Dowry is something which has become an integral part of the society. As I grew up, I heard people say these things to my parents very often – “Why are you making your daughter study? It’s just waste of your money.”, “You have no sons. Life is just difficult for you”, etc. You may wonder why I am talking about me. Let's come to the point.

This book clearly illustrates something termed as “Internal Barriers”. Each and every one of us may possess some internal barrier such as ‘I can’t do that’, ‘I shouldn’t speak in front of men’, etc. To become a leader, the first step is finding your internal barriers and overcoming that. Is that the only barrier? No. There is something called external barrier too, which has been put in our path by the outside world. That is something pretty challenging to break through.

A close friend of mine recently delivered a baby. After her maternity leave, she has to join work. But the main problem arose then. Who will take care of the kid? As a woman, should she offer to quit so that she can take care of the kid? That’s what our traditional society expects us to do. Now she has to make a choice. This is one of the external barriers which may hinder her growth. Of-course, she had a workaround. She admitted the kid in the creche which is 2 km away from her workplace. She checks on her kid everyday during her lunch time. She eats fast and does a quick check on her kid. It’s hectic for her.

When I saw this, something struck me. I wondered why there is no creche inside our office premises itself. All the companies are talking about diversity and recruiting women employees. But if there is a creche within the premises, it will provide a great support to mothers like her. Isn’t that true? Now, who is going to emphasize on implementing this plan? Her? Let’s think about it. She is not into top management. If she tells them, do you think they will really implement? The answer is definitely no. I am not saying that they won't consider but driving it to completion is the thing which matters. I am not blaming anyone here. But we find more men in the top management. They may not even know the difficulties women face on day to day life.

Just in case, if a woman is part of top management, situations would have favored her and many more like her. It's basically because we know the difficulties and we can actually relate to it. You agree to that, don't you? Sheryl emphasized the same thing in her book “More women in power”. Women’s life would be a lot easier when we have more women in power. They would have faced all the issues we are facing now, wouldn't they?

Let’s all lean in and think about these things. The change starts within us. I will get back to you shortly with the review of the first chapter in the book – “The Leadership Ambition Gap: What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?” Until then, See y'all!