(And Why That Wasnโt an Accident) You may have noticed weโve been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks. No flurry of year-end posts.No reflective LinkedIn threads.No โhereโs whatโs coming in 2026โ announcements. That pause was deliberate. Because December has a habit of doing something subtle but powerful to us. Even as calendars …
For decades, women in leadership have often been criticized for qualities like empathy, collaboration, and vulnerabilityโtraits dismissed as โsoftโ or โunprofessionalโ in traditional corporate environments. Yet, as workplaces grapple with the complexities of todayโs world, these very traits have emerged as critical to success. Consider Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, whose …
Everyone loves a reliable leader.The one who delivers, holds the line, and steps in before a problem becomes a crisis. The steady one. The go-to. But for many โstar performers,โ reliability slowly becomes a trap.The pressure, the solitude, the constant expectation, all add up. At first, you call it a phase. A busy quarter. A …
A senior leader I work with said something that rings true for most leaders: โEveryone expects clarity from me. But Iโm figuring things out just like everyone else.โ That sentence captures a quiet truth of leadership today. The world keeps shifting, technology, geopolitics, even what people want from work, and what work expects from its …
When I first read Patrick Lencioniโs 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 …
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, Iโd dial the landline number of his office (I didnโt know the extension). …
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 doesnโt have a clear solution, just layers upon layers of shifting variables. At some point, I found myself longing for a simpler time, a …
Love in leadership? I know, it sounds like something youโd hear at a retreat or from a guru whoโs never had to meet a deadline. But hear me out what if I told you that the same thing that makes a band of superheroes unstoppable might also be the key to leading a high-performing team? …
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. Itโs as if our brain mistakes a messy spreadsheet or an uncertain future for …
๐๐ ๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐๐ง๐ฌ๐ฐ๐๐ซ ๐ญ๐จ “๐๐จ๐ฐ ๐๐ซ๐ ๐๐จ๐ฎ?” ๐๐ฌ ๐๐ฅ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฌ “๐โ๐ฆ ๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฒ,” ๐๐ญโ๐ฌ ๐๐ข๐ฆ๐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ฎ๐ฌ๐. How often do we respond to โHow are you?โ with โIโm busyโ as if that somehow validates our worth? Jennifer Garvey Bergerโs conversation on The Conscious Hospitality Podcast with David Arraya made me realise that busyness is often a mask. …
