Naina Lal Kidwai speaks on leadership, resilience and women’s visibility

At the 6th edition of the Women Achievers Summit 2025, Naina Lal Kidwai, Chair, India Sanitation Coalition & Chairperson of the Board & Senior Advisor, Rothschild & Co India delivered a powerful keynote address that blended leadership lessons, workplace transformation, communication strategy, and the evolving realities of the AI era. Addressing a room full of communication professionals and industry leaders, Kidwai underlined how communication today has become the central force holding organizations together amid rapid technological and cultural shifts.

Opening her session, Kidwai acknowledged the uncertainty that organizations and professionals are currently facing because of artificial intelligence and technological disruption. “And many others, and the fear therein in terms of what AI brings. Those of you in the PR and communication space have to be able to tackle this in some way or other. For your companies, if you work there as consultants, or indeed just for public good, as people get displaced, people fear that next step,” she said while referring to developments at major global technology companies. 

Referring to conversations among global tech leaders including Satya Nadella, Enrique Llores, Julie Sweet, and Bob Swan, she noted that even the world’s biggest minds are still trying to understand the scale of transformation AI will bring.

“We are at a point of time which is really going to be defining for our lifetimes,” she asserted. She noted that while reskilling is becoming critical, communication professionals will play a much larger role in helping organizations and employees navigate this transition. 

Kidwai identified four major themes shaping the modern workplace — collaboration, digital transformation, worker well-being, and evolving leadership. Drawing from her own leadership journey as CEO of HSBC India, she spoke candidly about one of her biggest early challenges: breaking down silos within leadership teams and building a culture of collaboration.

She candidly added, “Everyone gives lip service to collaboration” while explaining how difficult it is to get high-performing leaders to truly work across functions. “When I took over in 2006 as CEO of the bank, my top team was entirely male. By the time I was done, 40% of them were women,” she shared. 

She stressed that communication teams today are no longer just storytellers but strategic enablers helping organizations become more agile, empathetic, and resilient.

One of the most striking moments of the session came when Kidwai narrated how a simple idea from junior women employees transformed workplace culture at HSBC India. At a time when banks largely operated six days a week, a suggestion emerged from a diversity working group asking why employees could not move to a five-day work week. What initially appeared to be a radical experiment eventually became a benchmark for the industry.

“Productivity went up hugely, costs went down because we didn’t have to keep the lights and air conditioning on Saturdays, and it became a win-win,” she said.

Despite resistance from competitors and concerns from regulators, the initiative succeeded because employees embraced the change collectively. Kidwai credited internal communication efforts for ensuring that teams understood the larger purpose behind the shift. “In two years, every bank had shifted to a five-day week,” she recalled.

Throughout her address, Kidwai repeatedly returned to the importance of communication in driving organizational change. Whether it was managing CSR narratives, preparing employees for digital transformation, strengthening customer-centricity, or creating empowered teams, communication, she said, remains the “big connector” across all functions.

She also highlighted how CSR initiatives significantly influenced employee engagement during her years in banking, noting that employees consistently cited the bank’s social impact work as one of the strongest reasons behind high engagement scores.

Speaking about women in leadership, Kidwai shed light on the lack of visibility women leaders historically faced, particularly in sectors like technology and finance. Recalling research from a book she authored featuring stories of 30 women leaders, she revealed that many corporate leaders at the time could not identify women leading major organizations in India, despite them heading some of the country’s biggest companies.

She stressed that platforms recognizing women achievers are critical in ensuring women leaders become more visible, vocal, and celebrated. “We have to keep profiling our women that are succeeding, our women that are doing well,” she said.

Kidwai also spoke about traits she believes define successful leadership in today’s world: resilience, innovation, empowerment, customer-centricity, and strong communication skills. She urged organizations to become more accepting of failure and experimentation, especially as India’s startup ecosystem continues to evolve. On employee well-being, she asserted that even global tech CEOs now acknowledge that productivity can no longer be measured in the narrowest way, and that workplaces must become a much more empathetic world, and build a much more empathetic work environment.

Towards the end of the address, Kidwai delivered one of the most memorable parts of her speech: a powerful reflection on failure and resilience. She argued that Indian companies have historically been uncomfortable with failure, often hiding mistakes instead of learning from them.“The good thing now is, at least in the startup universe, parents are not frowning at their kids jumping into startups because there are enough success stories out there. But for every success story out there, there are those that have failed,” she said. 

Using examples from nature and wildlife, she explained what she called the law of wasted efforts. “For every four attempts a lion makes to find its prey, it succeeds in only one. Does it stop eating because it fails? No, it just goes out there and does it again.” 

Calling the modern world “a jungle,” Naina urged leaders and organizations to normalize failure as part of growth and innovation. “We are going to have to tolerate failure, learn from failure, hopefully not fail all the time, but also create a culture where we understand that failure is part of that success that we ultimately look to achieve,” she concluded.