Name: Rajshree Mahesh

Title: Vice President

Organisation: ANZ

Experienced Delivery Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Banking and Insurance Industry. A self-motivated and highly customer-focused leader with over 18+ years of rich experience in Software Development, Production Support Management, Team Management, Release Management and end-to-end Delivery Management of projects. Skilled in ITIL and Agile practices.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Rajshree's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

The challenge is managing relationships and ignoring politics and image in the work environment. This includes gaining managerial support, managing up, influencing others, and getting buy-in from other departments, groups, or individuals.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I have grown from being a developer to a delivery manager. All my experience has been in IT and software. I have played multiple roles in my career from developer, technical lead, delivery lead, Release lead, Service manager, environment manager, delivery manager and many more. Each role has taught me something different to learn and I believe in nonstop learning. Having performed many roles, I transitioned myself into a leadership space to mentor, guide and manage a high-performing team.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

I start my day with a to-do list and prioritise them. Structuring my day is about making sure that the number of hours I spend doing an activity matches my priorities and making sure I allocate some amount of my team to learning something new every day that allows me to be with the latest technology and to be present always. When I finish my day and go to sleep, I recollect and plan on how I can make the next day better than today.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

Being a great leader requires several soft skills that can be learned and improved over time. Effective leadership isn't just about making decisions and telling people what to do– it involves motivating a team, communicating well, listening to feedback, and coming up with innovative solutions to problems. I have recently learned to delegate more and empower people to do their best. Allow people to fail, but they will learn from it.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Successful Women Think Differently by Valorie Burton. This book talks about how successful women make decisions differently. They set goals differently and bounce back from failure differently. This book has given me a different perspective on thinking and how to bounce back from failure. Every failure is a learning in itself. Just move on and do even better next time and avoid failures.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Don't complain, fix it. Be in the present (be it tech stack, soft skills, give the present 100% of your focus)

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

When I was an individual contributor, I was asked to pick up my manager's position as he was leaving. I was hesitant about my ability to be a techno manager and did not pick up the opportunity. But after 2 years the same position was again offered to me. This made me think that If I had picked up the role 2 years ago, I would have been seasoned already. So whenever an opportunity knocks at your door, just grab it with both your hands. At most what will happen is you might fail, but you learn better when you fail yourself than someone failing you.