Selected as World’s Leading Leader, Jitendra Mohan, Chief Operating Officer at Willowood Chemicals is a visionary leader at the helm of Willowood Chemicals Limited, stands as a driving force behind the company’s growth and innovation.
A Leader with a Vision
Jitendra Mohan, equipped with extensive experience and a strategic mindset, has been a key figure in steering Willowood Chemicals towards a trajectory of growth. His vision for the company has been rooted in a commitment to innovation, sustainability, and global competitiveness.
Under Mohan’s leadership, Willowood Chemicals Limited has solidified its position as a significant player in the chemical industry. The company, founded on the principles of research-driven innovation and a commitment to quality, has emerged as a frontrunner in the development and production of Agro-Chemical Products.
In connversation with Jitendra Mohan, Chief Operating Officer, Willowood Chemicals Limited
What makes a strong leader? What are your key leadership strengths are make the strongest attributes of success.
I strongly believe in leading by example to encourage hard work, ambition and enthusiasm amongst team members. According to me, “Leadership is not about position one holds but it is more about passion and how differently one works.”
Success rate is another value, which includes adhering to deadlines and the promised quality of the service particularly when one is dealing with global companies.
Ownership and responsibility to deliver “right from the beginning, from top to bottom.” are other im- portant aspects to make a strong leader.
Another important aspect is in establishing long term partnerships with customers and suppliers.
Core values of ethics, hard work, passion, zeal, aggression, belief in team, time bound completion of projects, urge for continuous success, continuous learning etc. are the key leadership strengths, which are strongest attributes of success.
An accomplishment that you consider to be the most significant in your career? What challenges did you face to reach to the success.
For any individual to join newly formed organization and run the business by taking ownership to achieve its financial growth in parallel with creation of different business and support verticals and integrate them to achieve the turnover of USD 135 million within a span of 10 years is one the significant accomplishments of my career.
The challenges faced to reach to the success were:
- To create verticals, integrate them along with 30 – 35% CAGR growth in business.
- Establishing a new organisation amongst well established peers in agrochemical space of India.
What is a role of leader in these challenging times.
The role of leader in challenging times is given below.
- Resilience: It is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that the team has capacity to meet adversity, setbacks and trauma and then recover them with the objective to meet out the challenges to achieve desired targets and further go beyond them.
- Empathy: Leaders should have the ability to understand the needs of his team and being aware of their feelings and thoughts.
- Transparency: A transparent leader has to tread the line cautiously from being honest to oversharing of information with the team, which is to be done in a composed manner. The leader has to answer questions of his team and hearing out their concerns prudently and judiciously.
- Connectedness: It is very important for a leader to keep his team unified and connected in
order to reinforce the common goals of the team.
- Balance: When working with experienced people who have their own fields of expertise and competence, a leader has to set expectations and clarify what the team is trying to achieve and get their views on the best way to get there. This means that self-awareness is a pre- requisite for balanced leadership.
What is your vision and how do you share that with your shareholders, employees and others?
The vision is to create a research and innovation driven and completely backwardly integrated organization focusing on providing novel crop protection solutions to the farmers in India and globally for sustainable agriculture with aim of becoming a INR 2000 crores company in 2022 – 23 and INR 4000 crores (USD 0.5 Billion) company by 2024 – 25.
The vision has been communicated to all the employees across different business verticals and stakeholders during various meetings, interactions and by e-mails as it is the support and constant endeavour of all stakeholders that will ensure realisation of the vision for the company.
How do you drive active business renovations and how does that impact your sub- ordinates?
Willowood has plans to diversify into sectors related to agriculture like fertilisers, nutrients, biological products, seeds etc. This diversification will definitely help the employees in enhancing their skills, knowledge base, product portfolio etc.
How do you integrate corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility as a part of your business strategies?
Corporate social responsibility is our way of giving back to the society, which has become more important during the current difficult times due to Covid-19 pandemic. We have undertaken CSR activities in the following ways.
- Agro-forestry drives
- Health check-up camps
- Mobile soil testing laboratories
- Providing oxygen concentrators to local government hospitals around our factory during covid-19 pandemic under public-private partnership mode by joining hands with local administration.
- Arranging covid-19 vaccination camps for local communities.
The various CSR initiatives as enumerated above helped us in developing a social image of our company due to our concerns for the various difficulties faced by communities around us. This in turn has helped us in making inroads deep into the villages where our products are readily recog- nized and accepted by the farmers to give an impetus to our growth. The specific strategies during Covid-19 has been to:
- Provide oxygen concentrators to local government hospitals around our factory during covid- 19 pandemic under public-private partnership mode by joining hands with local administration.
- Arrange covid-19 vaccination camps for local communities.
- Create funds for our employees who are impacted by covid-19.
- Establishing protocols and systems wherein the desired covid-19 protocols are properly fol- lowed and also any employee of the organization who are affected by virus are given imme- diate and required medical attention.
What has been your driving force or philosophy in life?
The core values of ethics, hard work, passion, zeal, aggression, belief in team, time bound comple- tion of projects, urge for continuous success, continuous learning etc. have been the inspiration of his life for success and they have always been his guiding principle and force to achieve whatever success has been achieved by him till now and for the success to be achieved in future.
How do you plan to drive your business at a global level?
Willowood already has its group companies in Hong Kong, China, Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia, UAE and operating in more than 45 countries through its customer base. We have plans to start our own companies in many countries in times to come.
How do you define success and how do you measure up to your own definition?
Success is a very relative term and can be judged from three different angles, viz., professional success, personal success and family success. It is important to define targets / goals and then set out plans to achieve them by maintaining timelines, which makes one happy. Success is achieving the goals, which may be related to any part of an individual’s growth trajectory.
It is my constant endeavor to set out targets for the growth of company within the agreed timelines. This can be gauged from the fact that we are fastest company to achieve the growth of USD 135 million in shortest span of 10 years of starting business operations and will be one of the fastest growing company to achieve turnover of US 0.5 billion apart from commercialisation of many innovative products.
In your opinion what is the most significant aspect of leadership?
The most significant aspect of leadership is to lead by example with passion and doing things differently to achieve the desired targets / goals.
Your perception of an empowered society. How far your industry has/can con- tribute for the same?
Empowering the society means empowering females, farmers, economically weaker sections of the society, regionally backward sections etc. We are constantly working wherein we are constantly working towards empowering our female employees through various means and ways and empowering our farmers by providing them novel crop protection solutions, which helps them in reducing their input costs together with improving output costs, which helps in increasing their income. Also, as described above, we are undertaking various CSR activities in the villages around our factories and also in various other villages of India, which directly or indirectly helps in empowering our farm- ers.
Esprit de corps: How do bring fairies and equality to all?
We have inculcated the culture in our company wherein all the team members are encouraged to give their views / opinion in an open and transparent manner with sense of mutual respect and loyalty and ownership to implement any objective, policy, decision and target in the company.
