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Their winning ways

Photo:Vipin Chandran

Young and ambitious Clockwise from left : Chitra Menon, Anand James, Vinod K.G. and Sreekumar Thekkeveettil, the winning team from Geojit Financial Services

They came up trumps, the young managers of the team from Geojit Financial Services, bagging the 26th Young Managers Contest 2008. As they debated and explained, acted and expressed on the subject, Managing Diversity

Challenges for India Inc., the four, though from the same company, were new to each other. But they managed their diversity well just as they tackled the competition in professional style. As the team lifted the KMA-Toshiba Anand

Trophy the jubilant group was excited but not complacent.

They are not resting on their laurels yet but readying for the next regional round in Chennai. Vinod K.G. from the Marketing department and a team member has his eyes set on something still higher. On hearing the results he said softly, “Chalo, dili chalein, let’s go to Delhi”. For that’s where the finals are to be held later this year.

And from now the competition for the team gets tougher, sleeker and smarter.

But then these are young managers, full of strategies and ‘fundas’, meeting targets and reaching deadlines. They know the name of the game. And they have proved their mettle here.

Ask them what was it that won them the trophy from among the contesting seven teams and they reply in chorus, “Though we all four come from different departments of the company and are as diverse as can be, we gelled extremely well as a team.”

And it was this gelling of the four from the Marketing, Financial, Customer Care and Legal & Compliance departments that proved to be the winning factor.

Said Dr. Francis Cherunilam, Director - Albertian Institute of Management and one of the jury members, “The group stood out in the broad coverage of diversity of business environment with particular reference to liberalisation and globalisation. Their style of presentation too was different and good.”

And the difference lay in the question-answer mode that the team adopted. “It was a simple exercise of asking questions and answering them, a format that’s easy to comprehend. I think that worked to our advantage,” said Sreekumar Thekkeveettil, from the Legal & Compliance Department who answered questions posed to him by Chitra Menon from Customer Care department. “I was initially wary when I saw the audio-video presentations of the other teams, for we did not have anything so professional but then this question-answer exchange was more like a skit. It got the audience interested,” explained Anand James, Sr. Commodities Analyst. He recalled happily how Chitra was hysterical and at a loss for words when she broke the news to him over the phone.

And now that the team is preparing for the next round what will their strategy be?

“We have to condense our 30 minutes presentation into 15 minutes as that is the rule for the next stage of the competition. This will require high coordination from the team members during change over and slide transitions

and every word has to be spot on. This would entail stepping up the preparation levels,” says Anand.

And so the focussed team has stepped up the preparations as they get set for the next round of the competition on August 1 in Chennai.

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