Podcast Themes

With 25 actions on the menu, how does a leader choose wisely in the moment? Hitendra’s answer is disarmingly simple: a 10-minute pre-meeting pause — set positive intention, clarify your goal, select one or two actions from the menu card, then visualise.

Hitendra asserts that we are not fixed personalities but bundles of capacities — the same manager who is “not empathetic” at work might tenderly hug their child at home. The real skill of leadership, he avers, is not acquiring new traits, but intentionally activating the right states we already carry within us.

Leadership has long been measured in two dimensions: behaviour and performance. Hitendra introduces a third — the inner life. He lays out his framework of five energies (Love, Purpose, Wisdom, Self-realization, Growth) and 25 actions that leaders can deploy in any human moment to consistently produce breakthrough outcomes.

Hitendra makes the case that the real “moment of truth” of leadership is the small, human moment — a feedback conversation, a difficult negotiation, an instant of conflict. He calls these “breakthrough moments” and has spent 15+ years cataloguing over a thousand of them to decode what separates transformational leaders from the rest.

Roopa Kudva speaks about how entrepreneurs scale up their leadership as the organization grows.

Stephen MR Covey speaks about how a lot of us grow up in the context of scarcity in our early years but as we grow to leadership levels, we need to embrace a very different paradigm of abundance to lead by trusting and inspiring. He speaks about how we might have scarcity of resources but we all have access to an abundance of possibilities.

Carol and David speak about their M.O.V.E framework; M – Mindful, O – Options Generating, V – Validating the Vantage Point, E – Engage and effect change. The key, they say, borrowing from Viktor Frankl, is to create the space between stimulus and response.

Michiel Kruyt speaks about how our behaviour comes in the way of our learning when the stakes become higher. He speaks about the link between how team members listen and the link with learning.

Pradeep Chakravarthy speaks about how potential rulers were encouraged to patronize the arts and the humanities. He refers to the Hitopadesha and Rayavachakam (written by Krishna Deva Raya) and the wisdom contained in them.

Rajiv Vij speaks about how leaders can be thoughtful about what they delegate thereby creating bandwidth and mind-space for themselves to engage on the most impactful set of activities.

Harsh Mariwala speaks about how he has grown as a leader over the years and how he has gone about seeking feedback from the people around him. He speaks about the criticality of setting the right climate for feedback for people to tell him what they think of him.

Darleen DeRosa speaks about how leaders and organizations have thought about apprenticeship in these times. Rohit Kale (who leads Spencer Stuart in India) speaks about how peer mentoring has been impacted in these times but also goes on to speak about the silver lining here as this provides opportunities that didn’t exist earlier for some colleagues to experience the “moment of truth”.