Shannon Finney/Getty Images for TIME
Chanel’s CEO continually raised her hand for the toughest assignments throughout her career, and she sees this as the driver behind much of her success.
In an interview with LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky for his video series The Path, Leena Nair said she was always pushing boundaries, which was her main piece of career advice.
“Always put your hand up for the difficult job,” Nair said. “If you’re staying in the comfort zone, it means you’re comfortable. That’s why we call it the comfort zone. You need to put your hand up for the difficult things that others may not volunteer for and give it everything you’ve got.”
During her three decades at Unilever, Nair led HR across South Asia, became the company’s first female chief of HR, and launched initiatives to aid the company in reaching gender parity, such as “Career by Choice,” which helps women re-enter the workforce after a career break.
Nair was one of three people in line for the CEO role at Unilever when she received the offer of the top job at Chanel. She started at the luxury fashion brand in January 2022.
Nair told Roslansky she didn’t have many female role models while growing up in the city of Kolhapur in India. But she always aimed high and remembers having “big dreams.”
She recalled one event at the girls’ school she attended when she was eight or nine years old, where the students were all asked to stand up and say what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“People were saying all sorts of things — teacher, homemaker,” Nair said. “And then I stood up and I said, ‘I would like to be the Prime Minister of India‘ to lots of nervous laughter in the room, some sniggering, 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 her male cousins were doing and decided to try engineering. However, after receiving her degree, she quickly realized this wasn’t for her and decided to attend business school.
She landed a Unilever internship in Hindustan and stayed at the company for 30 years.
In her early roles there, she realized the “privilege and responsibility” of being the first woman in the Indian bureau to do many things, such as going into a factory or completing a night shift.
“It meant I had to make it easier for those who came after me,” she said.
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