Women Leadership Symposium at the Prevention & Intervention 2023 Conference

Shrilla Banerjee about how to inspire women to be leaders: “We need to grow our own self-belief.” Watch the video for guidance on enhancing personal skills and advancing into leadership roles.

Shrilla Banerjee:  Well, there are some self personal changes we need to institute. We need to grow our own self-belief. We need to understand that work-life balance for men and women is difficult. We have to have some humility. It’s known in the world of business that actually women don’t like making mistakes. But actually, we need to make mistakes because we can learn from our mistakes. We need to build our support network. We’ve heard about that today; that’s very important, both personal and professional. You need to have a network. When you succeed at something, own it. Women are very good at saying, ‘Great, this is a really good team effort, we did a great angioplasty, we got a great result on whatever, on that paper…’ But actually, if it’s you who’s written that paper, if it’s you who’s done the stent, then you take credit for it. And also, continue to take on challenges. I really liked Professor Gulati’s speech this morning, which is about planning and being strategic. Because this is something women are not good at. We often just stumble into careers, and we carry on thinking, ‘Oh yeah, this is good, I’m managing to do everything great, I’m very grateful.’ But actually, we need to have directions and strategy, and we need to have a bit more focus.