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 …
A few weeks ago, a Gen Z cousin and I were talking about career plans over coffee. When I asked if they were eyeing a leadership role, their response was disarmingly candid: “I don’t want to be the person stuck between unhappy employees and demanding bosses. I’d rather do meaningful work, learn, and live a …
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 …
This is back in the day when we only had landlines. My father was a General Manager of this large pharmaceutical company. He used to keep so busy that I rarely saw him much on weekdays. However, almost every day after school, I’d dial the landline number of his office (I didn’t know the extension). …
“…Because I’m happy Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof Because I’m happy Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth..” I’ve been humming Happy by Pharrell Williams for the last couple of days. You know how a song gets stuck in your head, and suddenly, everything seems to …
A few years ago, I had a moment of realization that changed the way I think about leadership. I was working on a particularly thorny challenge one of those problems that doesn’t have a clear solution, just layers upon layers of shifting variables. At some point, I found myself longing for a simpler time, a …
Yes, we know—it’s a bit of a cliché to start a Women’s Day post with Maya Angelou. But honestly, nobody puts it better than she does. So sometimes, cliches are good. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them …
The Leadership Catch-22: Why Complexity Trips Us Up (and How to Beat It) A funny thing happens when we face complexity: instead of leaning into it with curiosity, our nervous system often sounds the alarm. Fight, flee, freeze anything but engage. It’s as if our brain mistakes a messy spreadsheet or an uncertain future for …
𝐈𝐟 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 “𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮?” 𝐈𝐬 𝐀𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 “𝐈’𝐦 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐲,” 𝐈𝐭’𝐬 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐏𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞. How often do we respond to “How are you?” with “I’m busy” as if that somehow validates our worth? Jennifer Garvey Berger’s conversation on The Conscious Hospitality Podcast with David Arraya made me realise that busyness is often a mask. …
More often than not, the greatest obstacles we face aren’t external challenges they’re the mental traps we’ve unconsciously created within ourselves. These subtle yet powerful barriers can cloud our judgment, limit our growth, and obscure our path to authentic leadership. And lead us to look for external solutions when the challenges (and hence solutions) potentially …
