About MentorW
Geeta Jain
Founder & Mentor
Geeta Jain is an experienced business leader with a proven track record of over 27 years in managing large organizations and leading diverse functions including Strategy, Operations, Client Management, Financial Planning & Analysis, Project Management and Consulting. As the CEO and Chairperson of CWT India (2011-17), Ms Jain led a 1400+ team delivering “best in class” employee engagement, customer retention and business results. Prior to CWT, Geeta worked with Amex from 1998-2011 in multiple roles, businesses, and geographies, and with The IFCI Ltd. in Corporate Restructuring.
Ms Jain has extensive international exposure having worked in and managed teams across several countries over extended periods of time. She has been in global leadership roles and is regarded very highly by her colleagues for her talent management, inspirational leadership, work ethics and driving business results.
Education: Ms Jain holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics & Social Sciences from Panjab University, Chandigarh (1989-92) and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad (1992-94).
Gayatri Varma
Co-Founder & Mentor
Gayatri is a global executive with over 28 years of HR experience in varied industry sectors across India & international markets. Her passion lies in assisting businesses transform their Human Capital & People Capability to achieve strategic & disruptive shifts in scale or scope. She has been in global leadership roles – most recently, she was with UnitedHealth Group (UHG), a Fortune #10 managed healthcare & insurance company. She has also held leadership roles at Bharti Airtel and American Express. Under her stewardship Amex was consistently recognized as an employer of choice over multiple years. Gayatri is passionate, driven and empathetic with a strong appetite to drive business evolution at scale. Her personal focus has been the fostering of cross-cultural sensitivity in the global corporate environment as well as supporting women leaders to navigate the workforce effectively.
Education: Gayatri is an Engineering Major from BITS, Pilani and a has Management degree from IMT.
Kanwal Walia
Co-Founder & Mentor
Kanwal has held several senior leadership roles in operations and strategic relationship management roles in the USA, India, and Middle East. Her corporate experience spans over 35+ years. Customer obsession and employee engagement have been her areas of focus, and this is clearly reflected in the strong followership she continues to have. As an executive at American Express GBT, she continues to mentor women from various walks of life.
Team of Mentors
A number of senior experienced leaders – both men and women will be available to share their perspective and experience. These mentors are based in different geographies around the world and therefore mentoring sessions will be arranged based on mutually convenient times.
Gayatri Varma
Delhi, India
Deepa Sahasrabuddhe
Pune, India
Geeta Jain
Gurgaon, India
Geetha Rajeev
India
Cathy Nicholls
India
Indrani Maitra
Noida, India
Vishal Sinha
Gurgaon, India
Vinay Chhaya
Singapore
Raja Sekhar Reddy
Mumbai, India
Anand Padmanaba Rao
Chennai, India
Naveen Jain
Gurgaon, India
Kanwal Walia
Los Angeles, USA
Our Mission
For women to excel in the workplace and achieve their full potential.
Our Vision
To provide the ecosystem that women need to succeed in their professional lives; including career planning, counseling, mentoring, skill assessment as well as development planning.
Our Promise
- Access to a diverse group of mentors, both men and women, with varied backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives
- Personalized, highly focused & contextualized discussions with action plans
- A long-term horizon for career planning
- A professional, compassionate and non-judgmental approach
- Strict Confidentiality
Anu Bora
Anu is an Executive Director with Client Associates, India’s oldest and largest multi-family office firm. She has over 23 years of experience in the areas of Personal Banking, Private Wealth and Family Offices. She is a graduate of IIM, Ahmedabad (Batch of 1998) and has in the past worked with ANZ Grindlays Bank, Standard Chartered, American Express and ASK Wealth Advisors in a variety of roles. Her interests include yoga, spirituality, psychology and music.
Gayatri Varma
Gayatri is a global executive with over 28 years of HR experience in varied industry sectors across India & international markets. Her passion lies in assisting businesses transform their Human Capital & People Capability to achieve strategic & disruptive shifts in scale or scope.She has been in global leadership roles – most recently, she was with UnitedHealth Group (UHG), a Fortune #10 managed healthcare & insurance company. She has also held leadership roles at Bharti Airtel and American Express. Under her stewardship Amex was consistently recognized as an employer of choice over multiple years
Gayatri is passionate, driven and empathetic with a strong appetite to drive business evolution at scale. Her personal focus has been the fostering of cross-cultural sensitivity in the global corporate environment as well as supporting women leaders navigate the workforce effectively.
Gayatri is an Engineering Major from BITS, Pilani and a has Management degree from IMT.
Gayatri Varma LinkedIn Profile
Cathy Nicholls
Cathryn Nicholls is a seasoned international professional with a comprehensive career spanning 35 years. Her fields of specialisation cover sales and operations, client management, quality management, people development and corporate communication. Cathryn has worked across Europe, the U.S. and most recently India where she has lived for 17 years.
Cathryn has extensive experience in international project management linked to business transformation and process migrations. The majority of her career has been spent with American Express in a variety of senior managerial roles across the globe.
Cathryn studied Business at Bournemouth University and has successfully completed a series of Harvard Business Courses as well as being a qualified MBTi Practitioner.
Selvakani
Selvakani is a Corporate Leader with over 20 years of HR experience & is a Professional Coach. She most recently was the Head of HR with Mckinsey Digital Labs, the #1 management consulting firm. Prior to that, she held leadership roles with ThoughtWorks, Aveva R&D and large firms such as RBS, IBM & Mercedes Benz. She also has worked with NGOs like Wipro Foundation and Isha Org.
Selvakani was awarded ‘Best HR Leader’ in 2020 by HR Katha. Her diverse experience in the corporate, social sector, consulting combined with her professional coaching and psychology background makes her unique. She is passionate about women reaching their full potential.
Education: Selvakani is an MBA from Bangalore University. She is a certified OD practitioner from TISS Mumbai. She is currently being incubated at IIMB.
Geeta Jain
Geeta Jain is an experienced business leader with a proven track record of over 27 years in managing large organizations and leading diverse functions including Operations, Client Management, Financial Planning & Analysis, Project Management and Consulting. As CEO of CWT India (2011-17), Geeta led a 1400+ team delivering “best in class” employee engagement, customer retention and business results.
Kanwal Walia
Director, Client Services
Dynamic, disciplined and diversified Senior Executive and mentor with over twenty years of experience as a successful strategic operations and relationship management leader across several continents. Creates opportunities and inserts herself as a solution oriented professional and colleague. Her focus over the past couple of decades has been geared towards mentoring women to take on leadership roles and driving their careers forward. Being a storyteller of her past experiences sets her up for candid discussions with her mentees. This has been her passion in her professional and personal life.
Other Interests
- Cultural experiences (travel/reading/networking)
- Playing a variety of sports, horseback riding/swimming/yoga
- Volunteering focused on child education, UNICEF Ambassador within her organization
Monika Saxena
Monika heads a learning organisation called 90 ten Training & Consulting. She has set up this organisation with the vision of achieving high return on the investment made in learning interventions by the organisation that she partners with.
Monika has more than twenty five years of experience comprising of a very interesting mix of Sales, Consulting, Training and Organizational Development in organisations like Samsung, American Express and NIIT. This rich experience helps Monika in synergizing ideal with the pragmatic while providing solutions and facilitating learning interventions.
Monika over the last several years has been engaged in mentoring young women professionals formally and informally. She brings in her practical experiences of managing a fulfilling career in the corporate, entrepreneurial experience and experience of managing a generation Y and a generation Z children at home.
Naveen Jain
Naveen, CEO, Transorg Analytics, is a thought leader in the field of analytics, machine learning and AI. Prior to TransOrg Analytics, Naveen was Vice President with American Express, leading large cross-border teams. Naveen has transformed TransOrg Analytics into an innovative analytics product and services company, which has won accolades such as ‘Top 50 Employers’ by the Silicon Review magazine, ‘Predictive Analytics Company of the Year’ and ‘Top 50 Big Data Companies’ by the CIO Review magazine. Naveen is passionate about creating awareness about ‘Data Science’ at prominent industry forums and tech summits.
He holds an engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering and MBA from IMT, Ghaziabad.
Rajeshwari K
Dr. K. Rajeshwari is a Senior Associate Professor in a leading private B School in India. She has a total of 27 years of professional experience out of which, 15 have been in corporate India where she has served in sales and leadership positions. Prior to this, she completed her PGDM ( MBA) from IIM Ahmedabad and obtained her PhD from IIT Madras. As a faculty member for the last 11 years, she has mentored hundreds of students ; she has written and published a book ‘The New Plan A’– about the challenges that working women face and the various stakeholder interventions required to alleviate these problems. She has presented at Government of India Stand up conference concerning women skill development and her book chapter (‘New normal for the working women during the Covid pandemic’) published through IGI Global, was sought after significantly by the academia and industry.
Rajeshwari is highly empathetic towards the cause of Working Women and conducts mentoring programs for women professionals and frequently participates in webinars and talk shows concerning women. Rightfully she has been awarded the ‘Women Achiever’ Award in 2011 and 2012, (by the industry); and also bestowed with the ‘Distinguished Woman in Management’ in 2017 and ‘Outstanding Woman in Management’ in 2018. She is a thought leader in the area of Women and Management and can be of immense value to mentor students and young professionals as they embark on their career journeys.
Vishal Sinha
Vishal has more than two decades of experience holding senior management portfolios at various travel corporations and in different geographical locations . He is working as CEO for CWT and prior to that he was Chief Operating Officer of TUI India, where he was responsible for growing the business in India. Before that, he spent seven years based in Tokyo, Japan as Regional General Manager at British Airways. During his time with British Airways, he also held several other business development and management roles based in India, the UAE, Hong Kong, China and United Kingdom . Vishal has managed large teams and has a track record of creating successful teams by coaching and mentoring .
Vishal holds a Master of Arts degree from Delhi University, as well as a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK. He is fluent in English and Hindi.
Vinay Chhaya
His mission is to inspire, empower and equip people to unleash their potential and accomplish success while maintaining work-life balance.
Global Executive Leader. Collaborator.
Mentor & Coach.
From his earliest days teaching high-school students to achieve goals, to becoming highly successful global executive leader; there is one thread of commonality that runs through his life – coaching & mentoring! Vinay is a strong believer in achieving great outcomes via collaboration across stakeholders, keeping maniacal focus on purpose and most importantly ‘developing team into highly effective leaders’. Being an artist and an engineer, has enabled him to strike a balance between rational (process) and emotional (people) – a combination ever so crucial to create high performance teams and drive greater success.
Raja Sekhar Reddy
Founder – Squaremeal Foods Pvt Ltd
Founder – Ekalavya Education & Research Foundation
Founder – BizSR Advisory Pvt Ltd
PGDM, IIMA (1994), BTech, IIT Kanpur (1990), CSE. Experience ranging from Business Creation, Incubation & Growth, Corporate & Strategic Planning, Organisation Development, Hospitality, HR Operations, Knowledge Management, Training, Business Process Reengineering, Information Technology, Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Project Management, and a Teaching experience.
Founded Innovsource(2004), grew the company to be India’s 4th largest staffing company and exited. Founded Indian Staffing Federation – an industry body for the staffing industry.
FoundedSquaremeal Foods(2015), runs three restaurants -Mirchi& Mime (fine-dine contemporary Indian cuisine) and Madeira & Mime (resto-bar, serving Multi cuisine food), served exclusively by speech & hearing impaired (SHI) wait staff.
Founded a non-profit, Ekalavya Education & Research Foundationthat works towards sustainable employment of speech & hearing impaired through vocational training. (Ekalavya.Foundation)
Founded BizSR, that helps incubate, curate and groom start-ups forearly stage seed-funding from angel investors.
Neeta Mathur
A post graduate of IMT, Ghaziabad 1995 batch, Neeta completed her under graduation from Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi University. Having a major in HR, she worked as an HR Generalist with South-Asia’s leading engineering consultancy, before starting on the journey of freelancing in HR initiatives.
As a HR specialist, she has been involved in strategic and results-oriented Organizational Development & Change Management initiatives, Performance Management, Assessment Centres, Management Development including conceptualizing and delivering training programs for enhancing individual / organizational effectiveness.
She is a certified POSHA educator. During her tenure as an employee, she was nominated as Head-Women Forum of the organization. Currently, she is involved as being a visiting and adjunct faculty in various prestigious business schools.
She completed MA (Psychology) in 2015 and is a certified Coach and practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
Sonnia Singh
Sonnia has been a sales leader working for over two decades in travel, hospitality and real estate and has spearheaded gender diversity as part of her roles. She has mentored sales teams and developed some outstanding managers and has been a sales trainer as well.
Sonnia is now the founder of Career Studio – her solopreneur venture for career counselling for students and young professionals to identify suitable career streams as well as providing services for studying overseas.
Sonnia is also a certified life coach specializing in career transitions and leadership development. She believes in the power of human potential. She works with organizations who want to develop their employees and with individuals who want to achieve their personal and professional goals.
Indrani Maitra
Indrani Maitra has over 20 years of corporate experience. She has been in leadership roles in JIL IT, S Chand Group Company, Pearson and Encyclopedia Britannica in Sales, Marketing, Business Excellence and Product Management.
She is highly regarded for building high performing teams through coaching and mentoring, improvising sales strategies to scale up businesses, improving brand visibility and product improvements.
As leaders rethink and reconnect to their changing roles, Indrani helps them to redesign their lives and businesses in the emerging new normal.
She is a lifelong learner and is trained in The Science of Well-Being (Yale) & The Science of Success (University of Michigan).
Anand Padmanaba Rao
Anand Padmanaba Rao is a seasoned finance professional with over 25 years of experience in the offshoring industry and has worked with American Express, Deutsche bank and Standard Chartered in various leadership roles managing large global teams responsible for global processes. He has worked across diverse functions including Financial Accounting and Reporting, Controllership, Business Analytics, Transition, Process transformation and redesign. He has good experience in working with cross cultural people across continents in a Global Matrix Environment
Anand is considered a strong passionate people leader,played a very influential role in people’s career development and building high performing teams.He has led various people strategy initiatives including D&I and has been an official trainer for Leadership development programs.
Anand holds a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from Bangalore University and has also completed his CPA from Arizona state.
Anshula Verma
Director and National Head – Talent Acquisition, Ernst&Young (EY)
Anshula Verma is a Senior Talent Acquisition Leader with over 23 years of experience in the areas of Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Talent Strategy.
She has led high-growth recruitment teams for some of the most innovative strategic consulting and technology companies, including Mphasis, Aricent, Agilent Technologies and Ernst&Young (EY).
Anshula specializes in TA transformation, creating high growth strategy and implementing systems & processes that increase efficiency as well as experience for candidates and hiring managers. She thrives on building world class teams to evolve talent acquisition and enable workforce of the future. Her passion for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology drives her to stay abreast with the Latest trend in data analytics and its impact on management.
She is a science graduate with MBA degree in HR and marketing. She enjoys travel, a good read, great food, time with family and striving for bliss.
Deepa Sahasrabuddhe
Deepa decided early on to design a life that would give her a wide range of experiences. With an MBA from IIMA she moved across industries and roles while experimenting with full-time, part time and flexi work arrangements. She worked for upwards of two decades in professionally run businesses, family-run operations, as well as start-ups. This developed in her an appreciation of differing needs of these varied work environments.
She has worked in healthcare, agribusiness, IT, education, market research and business consulting industries. Her work domains include marketing, new business incubation, OD, recruitment, customer experience management, teaching, service design and business process transformations.
Now, she focuses on storytelling for children and young adults and helps MBA students use storytelling tools to improve business communication outcomes. She enjoys theatre and is part of a Hindi theatre group.
Geetha Rajeev
Geetha Rajeev is an HR Professional who has spent several years in the Human Resources function in the manufacturing and ITES sector. She has wide experience in the entire gamut of people practices – from Talent Development, Employee Engagement, Workforce Relations to Performance Management and Industrial Relations. In her last role, she was the HR Leader of a Business Unit of a leading MNC responsible for over 7000 employees. Geetha has a keen interest in Leadership Development and in fostering a healthy organization culture through innovative people strategies. In other roles, she has been a teacher, coach and has also led initiatives related to women’s welfare and wellbeing in the Social Sector.