Not quite a man's world

The construction business is male dominated. Workers on sites may be of both genders, but supervisors and project managers have always been men. Until Gagan Singh came along. In an issue that celebrates professional achievements by women, her story bears telling though she is not on the power list. As CEO of project development and services at Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) India, Singh is one of four running the company. There’s no other woman in JLL globally who does what she does; all other project development directors and CEOs are men.

At first sight, the petite silver-haired woman looks like everyone’s favourite schoolteacher—a bit of a pushover for all her efforts to be stern. But appearances are most certainly deceptive in Singh’s case. She oversees a department that brings in around 20% of the company’s turnover, where 10 senior executives, all men, report to her.

And she gets her way without being part of any clique—no mean achievement in an industry run by the old-boys network. “I’ve never been the evening networking type. Sure, you do lose out on that, but in the long term, your work has to speak louder than the friends you make.”

Her work speaks so loudly that most people forget she’s a woman in a man’s world. Anuj Puri, country head for Jones Lang LaSalle and the man who hired her, says, “The thing is that I, like many others, just don’t see Gagan’s gender when we deal with her.” That’s also largely because she doesn’t see it herself. If you start thinking of gender, either as an advantage or a disadvantage, it’s the end of the line, she says.

“If young women want to enter this business, they have to realise that their gender is not a disadvantage,” she adds. But anyone who wants to enter her line of work must be prepared for the noise and mess of a construction site, the crude language, and the mud and dust. It’s not a big deal to work in such conditions, she says, as she walks across a plank balanced between piles of dirt at a site.

Once a week, Singh visits project sites such as the Indian School of Business campus in Mohali, or the recently completed JW Marriott in Chandigarh that Jones Lang LaSalle is managing. At these sites, she’s all business, talking with contractors about the thickening qualities of cement; or the optimum capacities of generators and heavy-duty air conditioners; and missed deadlines.
She’s equally at home in the boardroom, where she’s been known to haul up executives who get easily distracted. “Senior guys have no business to be reaching for their BlackBerry smartphones, coming in late, and not focussing on the agenda being discussed,” she says. “If they are to earn respect, they have to give it.”

The boardroom was actually where Singh was headed. She began her career as an accountant in Ranbaxy Laboratories’ financial department in 1975. After many companies turned her down, she was almost “willing to work for free” for the pharma company. In 1983, she moved to Nepal to join the Soaltee Group, one of the three largest business groups in the country, as an accountant. She left Soaltee as vice president of funds and planning.

She returned to India in 1997, and joined clothing company Benetton as chief financial officer. Her ability to manage franchisees and negotiate bad contracts into winning deals led her to become the CEO of the joint venture between Benetton and the DCM group.

Vivek Bharat Ram, promoter of DCM, says the early contracts had loopholes galore. “The agreements were faulty, making them win-win for franchisees even if the joint venture lost money. Plus there were a thousand avenues of corruption in terms of what products a franchisee took back,” he says. Singh managed to rectify those agreements. “If her negotiations had backfired, she would have lost her job,” says Ram. She didn’t.

After a 10-year stint, she decided to move on, and joined Jones Lang LaSalle as chief operating officer in 2007. But barely a month after she was hired, the company merged with Trammell Crow Meghraj, a property consultancy. Singh’s initial charge was handling the merger details, and that gave her a crash course on how the real estate industry worked. But once that was done, she found that her position had become redundant in the new structure. Puri offered her the job of overseeing project development, and Singh hasn’t looked back since.

The responses to Singh and her job have not been uniform. While many are willing to defer to her experience, some find it difficult to deal with a woman in this job. She speaks of one executive from a rival company who tried to put her in her place. “Oh, so you’re head of projects. Running a kitchen’s also a big project,” he told her.

The normally patient and smiling Singh decided enough was enough, and told the executive exactly what she thought of him and his manners. Judging by her sternness when she mentions the incident, it’s difficult to imagine the man ever dared to patronise her again. All she says is: “If you’re being pushed around, at some point you push back.”