A conversation with Yamini Malpani, who last served as Modern Trade and Exports Controller, Pan India, atL’Oréal, on self-doubt, stakeholder blind spots, and refusing to carry what isn’t hers.
Yamini’s career runs through Grant Thornton,Colgate-Palmolive,Estée Lauder, and most recently L’Oréal,in modern trade and exports, for India Market. But the through-line in this conversation isn’t the numbers. It’s a phrase she picked up in a leadership program and never let go of: not my monkey.
This is a conversation about staying unstoppable without being reckless, about the specific ways women talk themselves into guilt, and about what changes when your definition of success stops being just about you.
Unstoppable Is Not the Same as Unbothered
Who is Yamini right now, across the different lives she’s living?
Unstoppable. Yamini is someone who will not stop if she didn’t get work done by someone, or had to take a halt because she’s making a family, or was not promoted, or was not given a certain rating. Thirty-one-year-old Yamini has not reached here because someone was able to stop her. It’s because she never let herself stop, or put herself back, when a situation came through.
As a woman, there’ll be ten times, twenty times a year when you’ll be told, just stay there, make a family, don’t chase something so aggressively. And if you stay there, you’ll never be where you are today. So being unstoppable is good enough for letting yourself just go. You can have different speeds in life. Sometimes you’ll be moving aggressively, sometimes slow, sometimes smartly, sometimes emotionally. Everything that you do is you. What you are today is just the best version of yourself, anyway.
“What you are today is just the best version of yourself, anyway.”
What stands out is that Yamini doesn’t define unstoppable as constant speed. She defines it as never letting someone else’s timeline decide hers, which leaves room for slow seasons without calling them failure.
Chase Learning, and the Numbers Follow
Across finance, business, and commercial leadership roles at Colgate, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal, what has this journey taught you about the relationship between numbers and the people behind them?
Ultimately you have to know what your bottom line is. As a company, they’re chasing profits, market share. But what are you chasing? For me, it’s learning, at its best. If I just stay back sticking to the numbers, or approving what my marketing team says because that gives me an edge as a finance professional, I will halt my own learning and growth.
Whenever I’m in a meeting, whether I’m senior or junior in that room, I go in as a student. I make sure I come out knowing two things extra, with maybe four things I can do about it, not four things I can say in the meeting to sound good. Business numbers and growth, everything follows if you’re chasing that one thing: being a student your whole life.
“You have to chase a certain agenda. For me it was always learning, and everything else just followed.”
This reframes ambition as curiosity rather than competition. It’s a quieter definition of drive than most corporate advice offers, and possibly a more sustainable one.
The Meeting You Should Have Had With More People
What has been the biggest learning curve in your career so far, and how did you navigate it?
I was leading a presentation to be given to the global CEO, working closely with the India CEO to deliver it. I felt like I just needed one-on-ones with that CEO, all the time, to ensure I was delivering his message. In this journey, I forgot that a company is not run only by the CEO. It’s run by its people sitting in every chair, and every chair is leading through its chair.
So much later, I realised there were fact checks and contributions that could have led to a much more holistic deck if I had touched base with every stakeholder, not just the CEO. Stakeholder management, wherever possible, should be done. In your building, what makes it look good enough for someone to buy a five-crore flat? Not the builder, he transferred it twenty years back. Not the secretary, he doesn’t clean it. It’s the sweeper, who might be earning fifteen or twenty thousand a month. Every small and big contribution matters in whatever you do.
“A company is not run only by the CEO. It is run by its people sitting in every chair.”
The building analogy does a lot of work here. It’s a plain, specific image for a lesson that usually gets stated abstractly as know your stakeholders, and it’s more likely to stick because of it.
Not My Monkey
What is one challenge you think women still disproportionately face when trying to grow into senior leadership roles?
I think it’s a two-fold answer:
First is self-doubt, and not thinking that being assertive is important. If you tell a guy he didn’t do his job well, he’ll say, yeah, I’m okay, I think I was out late last night, and laugh it off with the boss. But tell a woman that, and she’ll be taken aback. She did not do anything wrong, but she’ll think, was I not good enough, I tried my best. Don’t bow down to everyone’s expectation of what they think you should be first, which is self-doubt, which we fall prey to very easily.
Second is not being assertive. Even today, when I know I can just say no, I’ll find ten reasons and ten ways to say no instead of simply saying it. We hold our actual feelings back instead of putting our foot down. We’re multitaskers, we’re amazing at what we do, we contribute to our families emotionally and financially and still show up at the top of our work. So the only thing we should not worry about is not being good enough. You have been good enough all your life.
I attended a leadership program where twenty of the most promising women at L’Oréal were selected. Our mentor told us, when something is not your job to do or not your thing to worry about, your mind immediately needs to say not my monkey. Whenever someone tells you that you should have taken up a job that wasn’t yours, your first trigger should be not my monkey. Then you handle it diplomatically, but in your mind, don’t have self-doubt about it. It’s not your monkey.
“Not my monkey.”
This is the line worth screenshotting. It gives self-doubt a name and a boundary in three words, which is rarer than it should be in career advice.
Success, Recalculated
How do you define career success for yourself today, and has that definition changed over time?
Previously, success would be making my parents proud, shifting to a bigger city, earning well enough to not take money from my parents. Now, things have been added: am I contributing something to someone other than me. Using my money to fund a child’s tuition or coaching they couldn’t otherwise afford, that got added to my satisfaction in career, because I was fortunate enough to do it.
Money is still one of the biggest factors, apart from learning and growth. So my priority is learning and growth, money, and then what I can do with that money other than for myself. My mother tells me, when God gives you more than what you need, it’s not so you can put it in your bank account. It’s because they want you to pass it on to the people who haven’t received much yet. I’m very close to that idea myself.
“When you get more than what you need, it needs to be passed on.”
It’s a small but real shift, watching a definition of success expand from what I earn to what I can redistribute. It changes what winning even means.
Beauty Is Not Just What You Put on Your Face
What is one change happening in the beauty and consumer industry that professionals should be paying much more attention to?
Being Indian today is the biggest opportunity to step into beauty and wellness. We have a big aspirational middle class, a major share of them working women, more than 70 percent of urban women today, up from around 30 percent two decades ago. The biggest thing brands need to pay attention to is not just going after foreign formats, but making indigenously suitable products for the wellness segment too.
Beauty isn’t only what you put on your face or body. It also comes from within, like Ayurveda, which is a practice, not just a product. Wellness products like herbal teas are already helping people with diabetes and obesity. Everywhere else in the world, the science is still about what you put on your face, not what you put inside your body, or the lifestyle that helps you look good. This is still a very unexplored space, and Ayurveda is the one science that can get us there.
“It’s still not just what you put on your face, but what makes you feel good internally.”
What’s interesting is that Yamini isn’t arguing against the beauty industry’s science, she’s arguing that Indian companies are sitting on a category, internal wellness as beauty, that the rest of the world hasn’t built yet.
Go In Thick-Skinned
What is one piece of advice you would give to a young woman trying to build a meaningful career in the corporate world today?
Go into this world very thick-skinned. Don’t let anyone pierce through your mind, your thoughts, in a way that breaks you. It’s a world that’s political, cutthroat, competitive, sometimes clean, but it has the capacity to break anyone, man or woman. When it comes to women specifically, we tend to fall prey to self-doubt and let other people influence our thoughts, our principles. When you have a principle, stick to it. Don’t ever let anyone help you doubt yourself.
“Don’t ever let anyone help you doubt yourself.”
It’s a fitting note to end on, since the whole conversation is really a study in the specific, ordinary ways women get talked into doubting themselves, and one woman’s running list of refusals.
A Note From Decoding Draupadi
The line we keep coming back to is not my monkey. Not because it tells women to stop caring, but because it draws a clean edge around what’s actually theirs to carry. Yamini’s career reads like a long list of things she chose to chase, learning, stakeholders, redistribution, and a much shorter list of things she chose to put down. That ratio feels worth learning from.
If this felt like someone you know, share it with her.
Yamini Malpani last served as Modern Trade and Exports Controller, Pan India, at L’Oréal India. This interview was conducted as part of the Decoding Draupadi Brand Manager Series.
Save this for the next time someone tries to make you doubt yourself. Follow more of the series on @decodingdraupadi.