PepsiCo's Saakshi Verma Menon Advocates Empathy In Leadership

Saakshi Verma Menon, Senior Marketing Director, Africa, Middle East and South Asia, PepsiCo has emerged as an influential leader, proving her calibre across her experience at The Coca-cola Company, Uber, Kimberly Clarke and now PepsiCo.

Menon says, “I am a mother to two young boys, Riaan and Raghav and it truly takes a village to bring up children. I am fortunate to have a husband who is an equal parent to our boys. I am lucky to have my mother play a huge role and pitch into our responsibilities to enable me and my husband to pursue our careers.”

She adds that she has never been apologetic about her desire to balance work and life and that her family comes first.

Menon asserts, “PepsiCo's flexible work policies enable women to be able to manage both their responsibilities at home as well as at work with great ease.”

She states that at PepsiCo, the diversity of their associates across geographies and every individual’s own space is recognised and celebrated. According to her, this is critical to the long-term success of the business.

Menon notes, “We support gender equality through a programmatic approach to DE&I with three pillars of priority. Investing in women across the talent cycle which includes increasing representation in management roles, investing in the development of women leaders and enhancing women’s networks through our Women’s Inclusion Network (WIN) Employee Resource Group (ERG). Strengthening inclusion to foster engagement and belonging for all our associates through our culture and fostering robust partnerships across our value chain whether it be women suppliers or funding women entrepreneurs to assist women farmers.”

She advises young women to aspire to be an empathetic leader and not an empathetic woman leader. The most important value to her is empathy.

Menon adds, “When you see inequality at your workplace and you don’t speak up, you are doing the biggest disservice to yourself and women around you. View your career as a criss-cross and not as a ladder. Recognise that you are not a superwoman, there will be days when you are not the best mom, the best wife or the best employee and that is alright.”

She explains that at the heart of innovation and creativity lies getting close to the consumer and identifying unsaid and unmet needs. The best innovations are the ones which make the consumers' lives better, simpler and more fun - and most of the time it is things the consumer never articulates that they want. Menon, with her team, ideates constantly, is in touch with consumers and works with the power of a shared collective curiosity of the team.

The Senior Marketing Director recognised that she was raised in a home where she grew up without thinking that her gender would come in the way of her achieving anything she wanted to do.

She highlights, “Often being the only woman in a board room full of men, I never saw myself as someone who couldn’t do something that a man could. It is the biases of others that often make them feel that I couldn’t do something just because I was a woman.”

Menon emphasises that this became more prevalent in the later years of her career when she embraced motherhood, where sometimes it was assumed that she would not give her all to the job or that she would have more constraints than her male counterparts.

She mentions, “I dealt with it by always speaking up when I felt that I was being given a certain privilege or disadvantage just because of my gender and forced conversations around gender equality. Men today should be seen as much as caregivers as women are and I have forced that conversation many a time in my career.”

Her message to women around the world is to never evaluate what one can or can’t do basis their gender and to invest in themselves, their growth, learning and the women around them.