How Anasuya Gupta transformed CICO Group, an 80-year-old construction chemicals company against formidable challenges—little business experience, a huge personal loss and tangible scepticism from those around her

The article got us thinking: all things remaining the same— customers, products, employees—does a company change when the gender of its C-suite does? Especially, when there’s more Venus, for example. To answer that, we couldn’t have hoped for a better story to tell than that of Anasuya Gupta, managing director and chairperson, CICO Group, a Delhi-headquartered construction chemicals company. In March 2008, Gupta had to take over the company after her third-generation entrepreneur husband Amit Gupta passed away. Needless to say, it was an incredibly difficult time for Gupta— faced as she was with personal loss, two young children grieving their father and an established business that was jittery about its future. Yet, Gupta, essentially a homemaker till then, has done much more than just douse those fears. In the past five years, that she has led the company, it has been on a consistent upswing— both in terms of business growth and operational efficiency—thanks to the many qualities Buchanan mentions in her story about good leadership; qualities that Gupta seems to have in heaps. In fact, Gupta caught my attention precisely because she demonstrated a key qualityBuchananmentions— vulnerability—with such ease at the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network in Istanbul where I happened to meet her in early June. Instead of first telling me about the huge business impact she’s had in the past five years (including doubling the company’s turnover, and completely buying back its private equity investors’ share), she spoke candidly about how she had personally navigated the ropes of business, including coaching her male colleagues on why they couldn’t use the ladies bathroom! Hers is an interesting journey on many accounts, and a worthy case study of transformative leadership. Read on to see the changes she brought on at CICO Group, and how:

Professionalism Discipline

I believe women are detail-oriented; sometimes, to the point of micro-managing. I’m like that too. In contrast, my husband’s policy was “Let Go. Let Be.” I have a certain image of what the office should look like, and that our employees should be well presented. I once even told one of our male employee to shave. In fact, I brought it up at a town hall meeting, saying untended facial hair was not acceptable. Each employee is an ambassador of the company, and each one must look professional. My daughter is constantly mortified that I say these things but it’s important to articulate, I think. Also, when I joined the business, I made a decision to make a few people redundant because I knew they would be roadbloacks in the journey ahead, including a few people who were very close to my husband. My husband never let go of people—ever. People just chugged along, sometimes without adding to their skills, or improving themselves. I view it differently. We have to demonstrate we are a highpotential company. So, when you condone under-performance, you’re setting the wrong culture. What’s the incentive for somebody to be an outstanding performer when even mediocre performers get the same benefits? It was important to be meritocratic and professional. We’ve tried to attract some really good talent, and bring in new people. In the past five years, we’ve also moved from Tally to ERP. We created a proper HR function. The biggest pat on my back really was when CICO won the Best Professionally Managed Organisation in our category at the 5th CIDC Vishwakarma Award 2013. I didn’t go up to the podium to receive the award though. I sent my AVP because I said if we’re getting an award for being a professionally managed company, a professional should go up to get it. This gentleman was so embarrassed. But I told him I was applauding from the audience, and he had to go up. I wanted to send a message to the company that we are a professional organisation, and that is something we deeply value.

Collaboration & Teamwork

One of the first things I noticed when I came in was that people didn’t work in teams at all. They worked in silos, and decisions were taken individually. The left hand didn’t know what the right one was doing. There would be instances where we couldn’t execute efficiently on orders because the chemical needed wasn’t available in the country. I understood what was wrong when I began asking basic questions—had the sales team spoken to the production people before taking the order, or why didn’t we get a particular business after qualifying for its tender specifications? Had anybody talked to sales to find out? More often than not, the answer would be no. I began to fix that. Today, we work in teams. For example, we have a pricing committee now unlike before where only one person would decide the price but when we went out into the market, we couldn’t sell because that price was too high. Yet, it was impossible to get the head of pricing to be flexible. Coming down on price was a big no-no. Now, the pricing committee has three people; and one person from sales has to be there for meetings so we get a sense of the market. It’s important to get all viewpoints, and it’s so easy to do that in the era of BBM and WhatsApp. It takes two seconds to ask—can we go up 50 paise, or come down a rupee? Forget functional teams or managers, even I don’t take decisions singlehandedly. I may agree to disagree. And, sometimes I might push a decision through. But, I listen to all viewpoints, and then take a decision. My husband had the advantage of the company being on his fingertips and he didn’t need to reach out as much for advice. I’ve managed so far only because I asked a lot of questions. A key advantage of being a woman is that we have the strength to say, “I don’t know.” A lot of men don’t do that. I find it very easy in meetings to say—can I get a minute to call my office and find out, or that I’ll come back with the details later. I owe this ability to my B.Ed. education. During that training many years earlier, I was taught that if you go into class, and a child asks a question, don’t camouflage if you don’t know. Don’t fudge an answer. Tell them you’ll find out and let them know. That’s been a big lesson in my life. In any case, nobody knows everything; we’re all learning all the time.

To me, this honest give and take of views and ideas is so critical a need for running a business that I’ve ordered round tables instead of the rectangular tables we have in our conference rooms. In a circle, you feel everybody’s voice is equal, as it should be. Otherwise, the notion of the “head of the table” creates a wrong impression and builds unnecessary hierarchies.

Ambitious Buy-Back

Fortunately, things have changed a lot in the past few years. When I took over in March 2008, we had a turnover of `38 crore. We have nearly doubled that and closed FY2013 with `65 crore. Also, we have managed to buy back the 45.33 per cent share that private equity investor Actis had in our company. They had come on board as investors in May 2000. Buying back our share was one of the biggest challenges I’d set for myself when I joined.

I would keep telling our employees that I want this to be your company entirely, and we must meet that objective together. So, we did our first buy back of 22.67 per cent in May 2010, and followed that up a year later with 11.33 per cent in May 2011. Our final buy back of the remaining 11.33 per cent happened in August 2012. I was certain as soon as I joined that I didn’t want to be questioned about the way I wanted to grow the business, or having to report to our investors. I wanted the company to reflect our voice, to be a vehicle for our ambitions. Today, our 200 people are located across five manufacturing units in Gurgaon, Haridwar, Kolkata, Chennai and Kasna. This isn’t an industry dominated by women.

I’m often walking into conference rooms and seminar halls full of men. The DWEN conference has been such a rarity—I’ve never seen so many business women together!

Diversity & Sensitivity

I think the men have adapted very well to the changes that have taken place in our workplace. There is definitely more respect for women. This is a brick and mortar company. I remember when I came in, I would see people call out to even women with a casual “aye”. I made it clear in an open forum that this was not okay to do. There’s no abusive language anymore. Because women weren’t in leadership positions in CICO before, people didn’t have to watch their actions as much. A more civilised, sensitised workplace is important to me. But, to be honest, I’m not always conscious about being a woman first, and then an MD. The gender ratio has improved at CICO since I have joined. I’ve made efforts to do that but it’s been difficult. I got in a lot of women at first but I have to confess I got tired. So many women I brought in disappointed me; they didn’t seem to have their priorities right. So, I decided, “Ok, let the men come in.” My intentions were good but I got disheartened. So, I gave up for a while. Now, I’ve restarted the process because when women are focused, their results are much better. For example, there’s this young girl in my office—28 years old who is part of the sales force team. She’s from West Bengal, and is posted in Gujarat right now. She uses a moped, and has done a tremendous sales job. She’s been a great inspiration. I thought if we could get a few more women like her, the impact on the organisation would be huge. So, now, I’ve started looking at positions where I think women can really be very successful. See, you can’t completely negate or deny the social context. There are some roles, areas, or factories where I don’t think sending women would be wise. This time, I’m not going to give up easily. It might not work out but I don’t want to have regrets that I didn’t try. As Sheryl Sandberg says, “Don’t leave before you leave.”