Chanel's CEO continuously raised his hand for the most difficult assignments throughout his career, and she considers this as the driver behind a large part of his success.
In an interview with the CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Roslansky, For his series of The Path videosLeena Nair said she was always pushing the limits, which was her main career council.
“Always throw your hand for difficult work,” said Nair. “If you are staying in the comfort zone, it means that you are comfortable. This is why we call it the comfort zone. You have to get your hands for the difficult things for which others may not be voluntary and give it everything you have.”
During her three decades in Unilever, Nair managed HR through South Asia, became the first woman's HR manager of the company and launched initiatives to help business achieve gender parity, such as “Career by Choice”, which helps women reintegrate the workforce after a career break.
Nair was one of the three people online for the role of CEO at Unilever when she received the offer from the first job at Chanel. She started at the luxury fashion brand in January 2022.
Nair told Roslansky that she didn't have many female models growing up in the city of Kolhapur in India. But she was still aiming high and remembers having “big dreams”.
She recalled an event at the school of the girls to which she attended at the age of eight or nine, where the students were all invited to get up and to say what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“People said all kinds of things – teacher, housewife,” said Nair. “And then I got up and I said:” I would like to be the Prime Minister of India “has a lot of nervous laughs in the room, some sneering, because I was determined, I was ambitious. I knew I wanted to have a voice in the world, I didn't know how.”
Nair looked at what his male cousins did and decided to try engineering. However, after graduating, she quickly realized that it was not for her and decided to go to the business school.
She won a Unilever internship in Hindustan and stayed in the company for 30 years.
In her first roles there, she achieved the “privilege and responsibility” of being the first woman in the Indian office to do a lot, like entering a factory or finishing a quarter of the night.
“It meant that I had to facilitate the task of those who came after me,” she said.
