I have heard it in townhalls, written it in culture decks, and said it to my own team more times than I can count : ‘bring your WHOLE self to work’. For the better part of a decade, though, what it actually got read as was something soft: put a plant on your desk, mention …
This is from my days working in an agency. A week after our company announced a restructuring, I sent Piyush, one of the strongest designers on my team, a message that read, “Can we talk tomorrow about the onboarding redesign? I expected more from the second half.” I typed it between meetings and sent it …
I am a relatively new driver. An anxious one at that. Which means every time I get behind the wheel, my nervous system is already doing more work than it probably needs to. It also helps very little that I drive in Delhi. And yet, every day, I pull up to a traffic light and …
I am walking into a pitch meeting. The slides looked impeccable. The numbers were absolutely defensible. My team, on stand by with a rehearsed strategy. Under my blazer and the calm face however, my body is preparing for an unknown danger. The heart rate has shifted. Breathing has become shallower. The body, in its ancient …
A simple truth we keep running into: every organisation wants to stretch, grow, and sometimes reshape—but none of that is easy if the middle is stuck. Unfortunately that’s where leadership capacity seems to run thin. Thriving organisations run on a leadership engine, leadership that’s visible across the organisation. Their real strength seems to lie in …
Leadership lessons from the hive. We’ve been thinking a lot about bees lately. Not in a garden-glancing way, but thanks to Thomas Seeley’s research on how honeybee colonies make decisions. Their process? Surprisingly relevant for corporate hives too. When a bee colony needs a new home, after a storm or when space runs out, they …
When I first read Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, one phrase jumped off the page: fear of conflict. It triggered a memory from my early career, sitting in a leadership meeting where a young manager disagreed openly with the CEO. The room went still. You could almost hear people silently begging, please …
I was just entering my middle management years when I was handed my first real opportunity to lead something from scratch. A large-scale project that didn’t exist yet in form, but was full of potential. It was all heart and all grit. Long days, high stakes, but the joy of creating something meaningful made it …
At 8:00 AM, the boardroom is calm. By 8:15, the CFO is pushing back on headcount. By 8:27, your inbox pings with a client crisis. And by 9:00, you’re already on your third coffee, wondering how you’re supposed to think strategically when you barely have time to think at all. Sound familiar? For most senior …
Lessons in Leadership (From the ones who taught us how to cross the street) I was recently doom-scrolling through Instagram when I came across a Simon Sinek video I’d seen before but hadn’t really heard until then. In it, he draws a parallel between parenting and leadership not in the way of coddling or caretaking, …
