Dr. Deepa Nagarajan is a seasoned leader with 29 years of experience in multinational companies. A pioneer in OKR implementation for governments and NGOs, she has led 55 projects across four countries. A bestselling author, her work is referenced in leading business schools.
In an engaging interaction with Women Entrepreneurs Review Magazine, Deepa shares her insights on navigating the tension between leading her own business and advising large corporations while ensuring strategic alignment. She discusses balancing innovation with market expectations, turning challenges into growth opportunities, and fostering a goal-setting culture that empowers women leaders with agility and sustainability.
As an entrepreneur, how did you navigate the tension between leading your own business and advising large corporations, while ensuring strategic alignment across diverse teams?
It wasn’t hard on the beginning. And even later, it was never a tension as such. One principle I had to live by is ‘practice what you preach’. In fact, I accepted it as a challenge. How can I make sure that my models that I recommend to my clients actually work in different scenarios? Can I do it for my own organization? Would that be a good proof of concept? And how do I assimilate all the learnings from different projects to create the right outcomes for clients? This approach was always in the forefront. I just aligned my organization’s growth to my customer’s growth. The success story began there.
As a woman entrepreneur, what unique obstacles have you faced in balancing innovation with market expectations? How did you turn these challenges into growth opportunities?
I strongly believe the challenges as a woman entrepreneur are not very different from those as a corporate professional. You have to make your voice heard. And you have to build a strong personal brand. And then, in entrepreneurship, you also need to enable yourself on financial literacy parameters. This was a challenge yes, but it was the beginning of a new learning journey through networking and working towards steady growth. For any business to sustain revenue flow is important so my focus was to draw on all my experience as a corporate leader to ensure I had a good client base through referrals and testimonials.
Through your experience coaching leaders, how do you approach fostering a culture where goal setting not only drives success but also empowers women leaders to take charge of their growth?
One thing I have witnessed several times, is that setting goals without having the right growth framework doesn’t work. Many organizations use growth models like OKRs or OGSM to set goals but fail to extract the real power of these frameworks to create a paradigm shift in organizational processes and culture. Without good leadership, there is no questions of sustaining any growth or managing any organizational systems. Women play a huge role in helping establish an organization’s cultural tenets and solidifying it and the leadership roadmap of an organization should make way for genuine meritocracy – irrespective of the gender or archaic work practices.
Given your work across different industries and countries, how do you maintain a sense of purpose while adapting your consulting approach to various organizational cultures and challenges?
There is only ONE purpose for any good consulting firm – the ability to create great outcomes through structuring and systematizing the organization for growth. This binding principle is the pinnacle around which success stories can be woven – irrespective of geography or industry where the client operates. The entire engagement process for any consulting company has to revolve around the client’s pain points and what they intend to achieve. Negotiations and the power of influence also play a key role for successful consulting along with being able to back them up with solid data. We call this model 3DM – Data Driven Decision Making. That’s at the core of our approach across organizations, domains and countries. These principles always work.
What lessons have you learned about the relationship between diversity and organizational performance?
One thing that is important given how AI driven the workplaces are becoming is to promote meritocracy and data=driven decision making over unsustainable, feel-good initiatives. There is enough research done on the tangible results of keeping a purposefully diverse workplace with a healthy balance of merit and qualification as well. Like they say, data speaks for itself. All that the clients look for is sufficient evidence and reliable data to incorporate any progressive idea into their overall strategic frameworks.
When working with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, how do you tailor your approach to goal-setting to ensure that both agility and long-term sustainability are prioritized?
The basic principles of strategic goal-setting remain the same irrespective of the size and industry of the organization. These principles are the postulates of mathematics – for example, the syntax, structure and the system require for a successful OKR based goal-setting exercise is the same for any type of a company. What does change is the designing of the pace, approach and execution framework. The rigour and the depth of engagement also may change. In this sense, having done 100+ projects globally over the last 8 years, there is no scope to cut and paste the approach for one company in another one. There is a detailed assessment that we complete before designing the right approach for the organization. It usually is a month-long exercise to ensure that the model is both agile and stable.
