Susheela Palaniswamy

I attribute my success to my biggest supporters, my mother and father. My mother raised 5 children and still excelled in her career. She retired as a joint director of industries and commerce, and even though her basic degree was in chemistry, she maintained such good work ethics that when she goes back to her office today at 85 years old, people still recognize her. She taught me that hard work and sticking to your goal and delivering that goal, no matter what comes, pays off big time. My father always mentioned that just providing fortune or money will not get you to success or satisfaction in your life. He said he would give us the best education possible, and it was up to us to make the money or the value we wanted to bring out in our life. Till date, I hold to both their words and their wisdom. Another person I want to mention is my daughter, who is on her path to doing her medicine after finishing her neuroscience degree. Many times when I go low, I just think of her, and I think that if she could do so much at such a young age, then I'm sure that I could learn from her. I also want to pay my highest respect to my professor, Dr. Kishore Mehta, who is the lead of the Wind Engineering Group at Texas Tech University. From the day I joined as a student to now, he has been an inspiration. Very recently, I went and met him after 30 years of my education, and he still comes to work every single day and still delivers. Because of him, Lubbock and the whole university and cities and a lot of engineering fields have benefited.

To work hard and network, build relationships.

Keep learning and being open to opportunities.

The biggest challenges I face are constantly changing deliverables. In my work, we may start with something and then end with something else. What you're committed to in a particular contract may not be the deliverable that you end up with, especially in an Agile methodology. So constantly fluctuating deliverables happen, and I have to bring my team back or my counterparts back to focus and converge them into value-based deliverables. Beyond that, there are a lot of challenges when it comes to people and personality. Learning and being a servant leader definitely helps when working with people. But there are situations where you cannot always exercise that because of the deliverables, your dollar cost, and your ROI. Sometimes you have to step up and make that decision in a more affirmative way. You have to bite the bullet and move on so that the whole team can benefit and the project is a success.

From the way I have been brought up, I value not leaving a mark of negativity when I walk out of a place. If I leave a particular project or a particular conversation, I definitely like to take the value saying that I have delivered to the fullest for the betterment of that project or deliverable, whether it's an action, a document, or a particular project. The second thing is the ROI, the return on investment. Did I provide the return for the investment that the organization invested in me? That's something I always look at. Sometimes that means making hard decisions, but I have to think about why I was hired for that particular role or why I'm there at that particular time. I believe there is a purpose in a particular person being at a particular time in a particular place. Beyond that, I'm very mindful of others' time as well. I don't believe in holding somebody to the last minute so that they can deliver under pressure, because not everybody can deliver that way. I try to give some lag time or lead time wherever deliverables are not getting done based on the estimate. I try to encourage my team members, my counterparts, my C-level suits before me or below me, and other teams, so that I can get those deliverables done. I take much interest in getting the whole group to work together to have that deliverable, because just by walking alone, you don't have as much fun. You want to either win or lose together, but for the most part, win.