Renuka Koranne

I don't want to give a traditional reply, but of course, my family comes first. My parents are the biggest pillars who provided me the wings. I'm a single mother child, so my mother did everything she could to support me in my dream to come to the U.S. from India. Coming to the U.S. meant a lot of financial investment and showing trust towards your kids on whether they'll be successful. My husband is my second most important pillar. I found a lovely partner who said if you want to be a CEO, go for it, don't worry about the home, I'll take care of it. He told me that if I want to have that ambition in my life, have it, and he'll support me. Even when I joined Amazon Robotics with very odd working hours, working with Chinese people, working at nights, I couldn't really contribute a lot to my personal life, but he understood that and supported me. I've also been lucky enough to get good mentors in my work throughout my life. I've always been fortunate to have really good managers who turned out to be my mentors, and I'm in touch with most of them till date since I started my career. They guide me, see my achievements on LinkedIn, and when I get promotions or good feedback in year-end reviews, I remember the skills they trained me in. I think it takes a village for a woman to be successful. I've just been fortunate enough, starting from my family, my husband, and my mentors.

I think it's more about understanding what you're really good at and what you enjoy. There's a difference between what you need at the moment versus what you really like doing. You might not necessarily be really good at doing what you like. I think you should understand your strengths, truly, and try working in the field that you feel you are more powerful or strong enough in, so that you'll enjoy the work as well as progress in your career. Because unless you don't enjoy your work, it's hard to be passionate about it and progress in the field.

I think it's very important to be yourself. I don't feel that you need to be someone who needs to please others to like you. If they don't like you, it's their loss, I would say. People who are true to you in their respective relationships will always come back, no matter how many agreements or disagreements and conflicts you have with them. A woman has a lot of roles to play in life, starting from being a daughter, then sister, then wife, mother, and even a pet parent. In all of these responsibilities, you kind of lose sometimes yourself and try to please everyone - make sure your kids are happy, make sure your husband is happy, make sure your parents are happy, make sure your boss is happy - but what about your happiness? While it's very important that you manage all of these roles, it's also very important to be yourself and not lose your own identity into this. Have some time, find some time to do what you like, find some time for your self-care or for your self-grooming. You can call it whatever you want, but I think that's what I would suggest.

I was always in the automotive field, and automotive is always full of patriarchal sections. You will hardly find women - there are only a few women that you can count on fingers who are very successful in the automotive field, especially where you have a lot of dominance from men. The biggest challenge I faced in my previous role was that there are very few women in leadership roles. In Michigan, the only automotive woman that I know who's a CEO leads GM. If you look at Stellantis, if you look at Ford, most of the people, at least 90% of the people in the C-suite executive teams are men. For women to come to that level, it takes a lot. You have to be very thick-skinned and strong-headed to be in that, and not everyone is able to withstand some of the bullies. There are bullies, there are a lot of opposition, plus if you are at that age where you have kids, it's always a trade-off. That's the challenge that women do face a lot in their professional lives. If you're passionate about your work and have a backbone to disagree, and at the same time have customer satisfaction along your way, I think that goes a long way for you to prove yourself in a group of teams who are already led by men. It's difficult to progress as fast as men could do in such fields, be it negotiations, be it sales, be it the C-suite in the company.

In my work life, I think we have some Amazon leadership principles that I got a good star for in my last annual review. One is customer satisfaction, but not to a level where you really go overboard. Of course, you push your comfort zone, but not to a point where you just agree to anything. I think it would be a combination of having a backbone to disagree if you really don't agree with it, and customer satisfaction. You can have internal teams as your customers, and if you work towards what they actually need and satisfy that, you might really get good feedback on striving for the team to be successful. A project is not driven by one person - you have a lot of customers that you need to work with, both internal and external customers, that you need to keep happy. But at the same time, you know what is good for the project. If there's any unrealistic demand, I think it would be a combination of customer satisfaction along with having a backbone to disagree if you don't think it's a good idea. Just don't be a yes man all over.