A new strategy is announced on Monday. By Wednesday, budgets are being revisited, someone is worried about their role, and delivery is still expected to continue as planned. Almost none of that gets resolved by the strategy document. It gets uravels, or doesn’t, at one layer: that of the managers standing between the decision and …
There is a childhood memory that remains remarkably vivid for some of us: the first sighting of a lighthouse. Impossibly tall, unwavering, and reassuring, an absolute beacon of hope calling lost sailors home. For others, this perception may have been shaped by a steady diet of Enid Blyton’s adventure books. And then there is also …
(And Why That Wasn’t an Accident) You may have noticed we’ve been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks. No flurry of year-end posts.No reflective LinkedIn threads.No “here’s what’s coming in 2026” 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 vulnerability—traits dismissed as “soft” or “unprofessional” in traditional corporate environments. Yet, as workplaces grapple with the complexities of today’s 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 “star performers,” 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: “Everyone expects clarity from me. But I’m figuring things out just like everyone else.” 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 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 …
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). …
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 …
Love in leadership? I know, it sounds like something you’d hear at a retreat or from a guru who’s 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? …
