Transformational leaders encourage, inspire, and motivate employees to innovate and create change. The change that will help shape the future of the company. They are the leaders that accomplish great things by setting an example. They are open-minded, deeply committed, and always lead with humility.
Sudharika Gogna is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience in driving intentional transformations. As the Director of Operational Excellence, she is involved in leading process excellence teams, enhancing process improvements, global operations, management consulting, and program management. Moreover, her high-velocity ideas and concrete execution continue to add immense value to multi-million-dollar global companies.
In her professional journey, Sudharika Gogna has had the opportunity to work with some of the best leaders. She says, “ I always try to imbibe those learnings in my leadership style. As a leader, I feel successful when I help others feel successful.” Sudharika is a visionary thrilled by a desire to experiment and as a leader, she has seen her visions come to life.
Additionally, her chief impact is through her sense of what could be, the excitement about working with different people, or an interesting mix of people, technologies, projects, and ideas. “I find joy in the process of turning chaos into simplicity and bringing that into my leadership style all the time,” she asserts.
A beautiful concoction of two cultures
Sudharika grew up in India in a small city that had a very large influence on her life. The vibrancy of the place along with its diversity, education, and comfortable quality of life shaped her childhood.
She belongs to a thick middle-class family where her independent mother held her and her brother to high standards of discipline and responsibility. She recalls, “My mom was a single mother raising two kids and many of my early leadership lessons came from seeing her manage all her roles so efficiently. She was a mom, a working individual, and a caregiver all at the same time.”
She also grew up heavily influenced by sports like basketball where her earliest memory as a leader was as the school captain of her team. She learned to lead a team by combining everyone’s individual skills to win many games and championships.
Growing up in India, she believes she has experienced it all — the cultural diversity and its charm. It taught her compassion, embracing differences, and cultivating a passion for culture. After spending the first half of her life in India studying and working, it was work that bought her to the United States; it was here that she started to build her life and family.
Her knack for creative initiatives
Sudharika Gogna has played many leadership roles in her career and in her recent role as a global head of transformation and Quality was multidimensional. Being a Lean Six Sigma practitioner she typically uses the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) mindset to drive a consistent approach.
It included building operational resilience, including in-process design, organizational change, and collaborating on product priorities. She also designed and lead complex global initiatives for both operations and go-to-market teams and worked as a key product owner and stakeholder by collaborating with product and design teams.
This ensured the teams build the right products for users and customers. In addition, she brings the ability to build strategies from the ground up and implement them, while passing along the knowledge of their operations to the right people.
She now will be using her skills to transform and lead the strategy and execution of global expansion efforts
There are many methodologies in the market for problem-solving approaches. As a company scales and starts to enter new markets, it creates more sophisticated products or services that will inevitably create more complexity. This is the starting point in understanding why and how things happen before they become increasingly complex.
Sudharika shares, “I try to keep things simple and focus on the essentials. I typically follow a process where you first understand the situation and the challenge I am trying to solve. Once the situation is clear, I bring the focus to defining the problem.”
Keeping things clear and crisp is Sudharika’s mantra. She believes it’s important to find a root cause of a problem, develop alternative solutions, and then test the solution. She adds, “Always pilot your solutions and test for repeatability.” This helps her to implement the solution and evaluate the outcome.
Cultivating the right mindset
Being an industry veteran, thought leader, advisor to executives, a lean six sigma master black belt among many others roles, Sudharika believes that there is no perfect definition of work-life balance.
She feels the pandemic has, especially, blurred the lines between work and life, and figuring out that balance has gotten trickier. Additionally, being remote has created an environment of multitasking, distractions, and overworking.
To combat burnout, Sudharika follows this advice in life: “Being a mom, a wife, a leader, a mentor, a daughter, a friend you end up wearing multiple hats with multiple balls in the air. You need to know which balls are glass and which are rubber. You will understand that work is most of the time a rubber ball which when falls bounce back, however, family and health are the glass balls which will shatter if you drop it.” The understanding of this concept helps her strive for a balance in life.
She has a realistic schedule and not a perfect one. Some days she ends up focussing more on work and other days are reserved for her family and herself.
Her consistent breakthroughs
Sudharika’s journey, personally and professionally, has been riveting. Growing up in two different cultures and across two continents has shaped her into an amicable global leader.
She recollects, “I started my professional journey out of college working with GE and spent years implementing business strategies, as well as leading and managing a high performing team to solve the supply chain inefficiencies.”
With over 20 years of experience in management consulting, organization strategy, and design and implementation of large-scale enterprise transformation and innovation programs, she has gained expertise within the supply chain, operations, and finance processes in various industries including GE Aviation, Genpact, Brookfield Asset Management, Cognizant, and Flexport.
Furthermore, she has led operational excellence programs to drive business value, implemented digital strategies to enhance manual processes, and built methodologies to bolster strategic initiatives. Along her journey, she has grown immensely and thoroughly enjoys the work that she does. She believes that her background in working across different cultures and places has made her resilient and adaptive.
Looking back, Sudharika Gogna is proud of her accomplishments and where she stands today. But if she had to do something differently, she would have disciplined herself earlier and built intentional downtime, to re-generate the energy. “It is equally important to need down-time as much as we need our show-time,” she adds.
Her life’s philosophy
Sudharika’s life resonates with one of her favorite quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.’
Hence, her advice to emerging and aspiring women leaders would be to believe in yourself and your potential. “Keep the vision, know the difference between a manager and a leader. In the end, trust your talents, work hard, enjoy the journey and celebrate your successes. And find a mentor,” she concludes.
Her upcoming diverse plans
Sudharika has achieved many milestones in her career, but she still has the fascination to create better things.
She is thrilled about the future as she would continue to focus on supply chain optimization, design and transform processes, implement advanced technology and build strong strategies. She is also passionate about working within businesses to transform them from the inside out.
Sudharika loves being on the east coast, and spending time with her family. Her future also involves executing key strategies and eventually, starting on her own.
