Rashmi Dastidar
Head of Compliance
APAC and EMEA, Snap Inc
1. What prompted you to start coaching with Vandana?
There were a lot of compelling reasons – I needed to move to the next phase of growth in my career, and I needed an expert to help me identify and achieve my career goals and I needed a fully-actionable plan.
When I entered into a coaching engagement with Vandana (we have been in it for two continuous years now), I was amazed by the tangible unlock it created – I had a career plan and I was actively working on it. There were both strategic and tactical career and life unlocks.
2. What challenge were you trying to solve working with Vandana?
I wanted to create the roadmap and the architecture of the next phase of my career, by playing to my strengths and having another pair of expert eyes and trained safe hands help me put the structure of that plan together. And I wanted to start my journey as a coachee with someone who is thoughtful, a life-long learner and a professional who has a large body of experience of what it takes to build a credible career as a women leader in Asia and Vandana understood my motivations, my ambition and the opportunities that I wanted to create for myself.
3. What was the solution, outcome of your challenge/s?
Vandana provided the framework of how I should think about building the next phase of my career, she coached and nudged me into putting together short- term and long-term goals and the plan of how to achieve that.
She kept me honest on my goals and accountable to timelines. She was also another pair of senior leadership eyes that had my back where she was firmly on my side unlike mentors/sponsors who might be constrained by various factors including conflict of interest issues and sphere of influence restrictions.
4. What did you enjoy about the process of being coached?
I was motivated to plan and create the next phase of my career instead of it just happening to me.
Being a coachee gave me full control and ownership (for the first time) of my career, made my career goals possible in alignment with what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.
There were immediate tangible results when small and big goals began to be met in this coaching journey of two years.
I hope to be a life-long coachee with Vandana. And my advice to all my people is just one: get yourself an executive coach and have full control/ownership of your career.
