To infinity and beyond

MBA alum Rosanna Ponnen, often shares Buzz Lightyear's iconic catchphrase "to infinity and beyond" with her nieces and nephews, encouraging them to believe they can achieve whatever they set their hearts on and to be ready to respond to opportunities when they present themselves. It's a tenet she herself has lived by, and it has taken her in many an interesting direction. Most recently, since completing her MBA at Henley Business School and becoming the inaugural recipient of the Renewal Foundation award for her MBA research dissertation, which looked at the role of purpose in employee retention, she's embarking on a new chapter to develop this work further. The Renewal Foundation honours research focused on creating positive change in the world, and she's eager to see where it leads.

Education has always grounded me. I had a break from studying when I had my son, but I always knew I was going to do a master’s degree, the challenge was, in what? I wanted a programme that would open up career options. Both my husband and my colleagues recommended the MBA degree. I was apprehensive because you always hear how difficult and intense the MBA is. We were still in the middle of COVID at the time and my son was still quite young. The thing about the MBA is that there’s never a perfect time to do it. Once you’ve made the decision, you just have to go for it, and you need to have the right mindset.

An MBA really is the most crazy time of your life. It involves so much change in your way of thinking, you find yourself wanting to break out of certain norms and you’re the one who actually initiates quite a lot of the changes. This upheaval is a major factor in why I chose my research topic. Some of the personal reflections during the MBA brought up things for me and set the train in motion.

Henley encourages a lot of personal reflection on ‘What is it for? What is my higher purpose?’ Purpose came up all the time. I was trying to think of a way to relate that to my work; it had been a challenging time for my organisation, and I was managing a complex team at the time, and I wanted to find a way to make a real difference. That’s why my research started looking into the challenge of employee retention in the energy sector and how organisational purpose and ecological commitment can influence retention positively. When I shared the work with my employers, they were very positive about it, and I am now actively working to create more awareness among peers at my work around these issues too.

I dedicated my MBA dissertation to my late mum and my dad. Had it not been for the love of learning instilled in me by my mum and the stable environment provided by my dad when I was growing up, it would have been difficult to focus on learning and making something better of my life. I’m very grateful to them for that. Family support is vital for an MBA, I could not have made it without the encouragement of my husband and my son.

I’m so pleased that my research was well received, and I’m honoured to be the inaugural recipient of the Renewal Foundation award. It’s a testament to the fact that you can accomplish anything. When you put your heart and soul into something, people can see that it is reflected in your work. I’m excited to see where it goes and the impact it will have. As part of the award, the Foundation is providing support for me to develop the work further. I’ve proposed a few ideas about developing it in the context of renewable energy because my research focused more on the coal and electricity industry. I’ll be able to take it forward with different research techniques, surveys, and a broader reach, as well as develop certain recommendations that were emerging.

I think the challenging thing about this research was that it touched on so many things. It was quite rewarding when my supervisor at the end mentioned the handling of such complex concepts because you could literally digress into so many aspects. When I was interviewing people in my organisation, for example, I got a sneak peek into their lives to find out what they were thinking with COVID hitting so hard and the working world having changed so much. This could have been a whole research topic on its own!

I didn’t expect that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would emerge as such a critical component of the whole research. It highlighted that even when all the basic needs are met, one can still be unsatisfied at work. Traditionally things like compensation, remuneration, job security and benefits would feature as factors that would make an employee stay. But these were not the kinds of things that were emerging. People want to find meaning in their work, and to understand how it contributes to society. This is something that kept coming up in my research – when people are looking for jobs, they want to be purposeful, to know how their work fits in with the bigger picture. It’s something organisations need to consider if they want to attract and retain employees. Organisations need to understand and be able to clearly articulate what they stand for. This is where leadership and staff engagement are so important, as it’s the employees who are ambassadors for an organisation.

Another thing that the research highlighted for me was how important relationships are between managers and their employees and within a team dynamic. Relationships – the camaraderie between people, are vital for organisational success. We need to find a way to retain talent in this country by investing in our workforce, which will also help with unemployment and give people hope. This is where my research will have an impact.

You can never really say you’ve arrived when it comes to understanding people, but I can definitely say I’m better at it thanks to my MBA. I started out very much the introverted IT person at work. Managing people forces you out of your shell, which is a good thing. That’s when you start to understand people, because life is all about people. And it was the thing that set me on the path to choosing my research topic.

While at Henley I grew overall as a person. I’ll never forget what one of the lecturers said: so often you start this journey for a specific reason – self-endorsement or career progression – but there are so many unexpected insights that come out of the MBA. You might just find yourself, or it could simply be the realisation that you are happy where you are at a certain point in your life. I think the unexpected direction that the MBA has taken me in, thanks to my research dissertation, can definitely be classified as an unexpected new direction for me.

As I always say to my nieces and nephews, it’s like the quote from Buzz Lightyear in the Movie Toy Story: “to infinity and beyond”. All things are possible, and you never know when new opportunities will open up for you. You just need to be ready to respond when they do.