What you owe yourself at work, regardless of who is leading you.

Most conversations about workplace integrity start with leadership. The assumption is that culture comes from the top, values are modelled by the people in charge, and the rest of the team takes its cues from what is shown.

This is true, but it is also incomplete. It quietly removes the responsibility from the person doing the work and places it entirely on the person managing them. And it leaves you with no framework for the days when the leadership is absent, distracted, or themselves still figuring it out.

The work you do is not only a reflection of what you have been taught, or what someone above you has told you to do. It is a reflection of your own judgement, your own values, and your own ability to apply empathy alongside cleverness when you execute. Corporate politics is unavoidable. Your delivery, however, is entirely your own, because you are the one taking information, synthesising it, and acting on it.

There is a version of professionalism that is not inherited from above. It is held by you, for you, regardless of who is in the room.

A few things I think this version asks of a person.

1. Be a human first.

Before you are an employee, a teammate, a manager, a direct report, you are a person with a value set. The job is not the source of those values. It is a place where those values are tested.

One value I have chosen to hold, over the years, is to never be derogatory about the people I work with. Not in conversation, not in inference, not in the small ways that creep into how you describe someone when they are not in the room. When a colleague drops the ball, my default is to assume they have forgotten, or misjudged the situation, or had something else competing for their attention. Not that they are out to get me, and not that they are bad at their job. Generosity of interpretation is the first thing I extend, before anything else.

2. Empathy is part of execution, not separate from it.

The default story about competence at work treats it as a function of intelligence, speed, and cleverness. These matter. But empathy is what allows cleverness to land in a team rather than just in a deck.

A manager of mine spent years teaching me to pause, reflect on what was actually being said, and then respond. It took longer than I would like to admit to internalise it, and now it feels strange to do anything else. The pause is the whole game. It is also where empathy lives in practice, not in principle.

The harder version of this is detaching from a heated situation while you are still inside it. Stepping back enough to see the people in the room for who they are, including their strengths and their limits, and still doing your best work for them. Not just for the colleagues you like. For the wider room.

3. Your work is your record, not your manager’s.

The instinct to do work because someone is watching is a natural one. The instinct to do work because it is the work is rarer and more durable.

I am mindful of how I am perceived at work, because I have seen how people are described in their absence and I have been on the receiving end of perceptions that did not match my record. So my own conduct is something I lead from regardless of who is in the room. I do not bully. I do not refuse instructions. I do not make people feel small in a meeting, whatever their title. Dependability is my core, and I would hold to it whether anyone was watching or not.

4. Information is not currency.

Holding context close, becoming the only person who knows the brief or the client preference or the workaround, these things feel like power. They are actually fragility.

Some people sit on information because they think it makes them important, or indispensable. It does neither. Information inside an organisation is never created by a single person. It will come out. Sitting on it is just insecurity or narrowness of vision dressed up as leverage, and it tends to be visible to everyone except the person doing it.

5. Withholding information in time is a failure on you, not a strategy.

Not sharing what you know, when you know it, with the people who need it, is one of the more common ways people misread their own role. It is often dressed up as discretion, or judgement, or knowing how to handle things. Most of the time it is none of those.

My default is to communicate early and in writing. Email, message, voice note, whatever the channel needs to be, but always in a form that leaves a trace. I learned this from a manager who sat across many forums, gathering the small instances of what was happening around the office, and weaving them into her view of teams as much as her view of campaigns. Watching her work showed me how much of the larger picture is invisible to any single person, and how much of it depends on people choosing to share before they were asked.

A version of the same point shows up when people mistake politeness for authority. A manager who entertains your input, who hears you out, who lets the conversation breathe, is being courteous. They are not handing you the decision. The cleaner way to locate yourself is to look at the responsibilities you have been given, and the people you have been given them alongside. Your role is described there, plainly.

Your primary job, in almost every role, is to inform the right people at the right time.

6. Clarity about your role is a contribution, not a limitation.

A good employee is openly clear about what is theirs to do and what belongs to someone else on the team. Not as a way of drawing lines, but as a way of making sure the work gets done by the right person, in the right order, with the right inputs.

I cannot start a project, now, without putting this in place first. I assign by capability, I document what I expect from each person, I share the document with the team, and I treat the document as part of the foundation, not as paperwork. It is the thing I build everything else on.

The failure mode on the other side is when someone reaches above and beyond their scope, into work that is not theirs, or over the head of the person they should be working through. That is not ambition. It is a misread of the structure, and it is a shortcoming the person making it usually cannot see clearly until much later.

7. Having information is not the same as having permission to share it.

There is a separate discipline from sharing information in time, and it is knowing who you can share it with. People make this mistake often. They confuse being told something with being entrusted to pass it on.

When a manager raises something with you in confidence, even something that seems small, like timekeeping or attendance or how a colleague has been showing up lately, the confidence is part of the instruction. The conversation was had with you because it needed to be had with you. It was not a briefing for you to take horizontally to your peers.

The test I tend to apply is simple. Who was this said to, and was that on purpose. If the answer is “to me, on purpose”, then it stays with me.

8. Hierarchy exists even in flat structures, and reading it is part of the job.

A lot of modern organisations describe themselves as flat. The intention behind it is good. The misreading of it is that hierarchy has disappeared, when what has actually happened is that it has become quieter.

I recently set up a RACI inside my part of the organisation, because chaos was emerging from people confusing what input meant. Input does not mean the whole plan gets reworked. Sometimes input is a note. Sometimes it is something held for the record. Sometimes it is a perspective that will shape the next version but not this one. Conflating these is a hierarchy-reading failure dressed up as a process problem.

I also adjust how I work to the room. When senior leadership is in a meeting, I keep the language tight, because their time is short and the conversation should respect that. When I am with my team, I ask for full detail, because the failure mode at that level is sitting on things people think they are managing on their own.

9. Do not use other people’s mistakes as a shield for your own.

When a manager raises a concern with you about your conduct, the only useful response is to look at your conduct. Not at someone else’s. The instinct to deflect, to point at a colleague who did the same thing, to redirect the conversation toward a peer who was worse, is one of the most damaging habits a person can build at work.

Deflection tells the person above you two things at once. That you have not absorbed the feedback, which makes you harder to promote into more responsibility. And that you have misread where you sit in the structure, because you have started taking decisions on behalf of your manager, or escalating sideways and upwards in ways that were not yours to escalate.

The cleaner move is older and harder. To hear the feedback, sit with it, and address what is yours to address. Whatever someone else did or did not do is a separate conversation, between them and the person who manages them. It is not your inheritance to wield.

10. The exit is part of the job.

How you leave is the final piece of work you do in a role. Not a footnote to the work, part of it. This is as true of leaving a company as it is of leaving a team, a project, or a reporting line you have been part of for years. The handover, the last conversations, the leave you do or do not take, the version of the story you tell on the way out. All of it is observed and remembered, often more clearly than the months that came before.

I have always done full handovers, every time I have exited a role. Not because I had to. Because the discipline of leaving a role well has actually worked in my favour over time. It removed any perception that what kept me in my position was the information I was holding close. It made visible the part underneath, which was the version of me that operated regardless of the information. The handover became proof of what I was, not a cost I paid on the way out.

11. Your standards are yours.

It is not about carrying a rulebook of standards from job to job and trying to install it wherever you go. It is also not about killing yourself, metaphorically, in service of perfection. You can be easy about most things and that is healthy.

The standards that matter are the ones that come from your own reflection on who you are and what you actually stand for. Not the ones you have adopted from a culture, or a manager, or a peer group. The ones you have spent time with.

Where this matters most is in the moments when politics, hearsay, and noise are pulling at you. If you have not done the work of knowing your own value set, you have no place to stand when the noise gets loud. If you have, you can detach. You can let the work be the work, and the gossip be someone else’s project to carry.

The deeper standard, the one that travels with you, is different. Someone else will always come along and do your job better than you. What people remember is not the deliverable. It is the cohesiveness of who you were while you did it. That standard is yours.

12. Grace at work is its own form of currency.

There is something quieter that runs underneath all of this, and it is grace. The way you hold yourself when things are not going your way. The way you treat people who cannot do anything for you. The way you respond when a meeting goes badly, when a project slips, when feedback lands harder than you expected, when a colleague behaves in a way you would not have. None of this shows up on a deliverable. All of it is noticed.

Grace is not the same as being agreeable. It is not about saying yes, or smoothing things over, or pretending the difficult moments did not happen. It is about carrying yourself in a way that does not make those moments worse for anyone else, including yourself. It is the choice not to retaliate, not to gossip, not to perform an injury for an audience, not to score a small point at someone else’s expense when nobody would have stopped you.

The reason this matters more than people realise, particularly in the industries I have worked in, is that the rooms are smaller than they look. The same people come back into your life at different stages of your career, in different configurations of seniority, in different companies, on different sides of the table. The person you were ungenerous with at thirty often shows up again at forty, and they have not forgotten how the last interaction went, even if you have. The only kind of liking and disliking that should ever matter to you is the kind that follows you through these reappearances. The rest is noise.

The people who carry themselves with grace are not always the loudest in the room. They are often not the ones who get the most credit in the moment. But they are the ones whose names come up later in the quieter conversations that decide things, the ones people choose to work with again, the ones who never have to explain themselves twice. That is not a small inheritance to build over a career.

The work you produce is not only the sum of what you have been taught or instructed to do. It is the sum of your judgement, your values, and the empathy you bring to executing in harmony with everyone else around you.

That version of you is not built by the org chart. It is built by you, in small decisions, on ordinary days, when nobody is watching.

Worth being deliberate about.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What really is this feminism we're all screaming from the top of buildings about?

I've denied being a feminist. To friends, strangers, lovers, et all. 

But through my own journey I've begun to question, think, map what might have given rise or even brought about the thoughts on the matter for people who declare or credit them selves as 'feminists'.. But that perspective needs a much more deeper understanding.

Let me begin to first explain how difficult and at times how convenient it is to dodge any responsibility. I can be rebellious and fight for equality in this 'mans world', forever more misunderstood than ever appreciated or i can simply choose to be submissive and leave it to others to be taken care of.

I'm not allowed to be rude or aggressive or hold my stand on issues and viewpoints and more often than not its taken for granted that i will eventually give up. 

That weakness is in built. 

That strength is a connotation of only physical endurance in opposition to being to my better understanding - empathetic, unbiased, understanding, vigilant, sensitive and forgiving nature which in a mans world are often traits marked by or connoted to great leaders.

I'm expected to know how to cook, clean, take care of the house, willing to bear children, maintain friendly relations and balance family dynamics before i express my needs and dreams as an individual in this world.

My persistence is usually labeled as a tantrum and my behavior classified as incompetent and unacceptable by people. I'm labelled psychotic, crazy, demented, slut and easy by those who refuse to peer deeper into my ambitions, what i want to stand for and values from the safety of their own environment and values they have been brought up with.

I have to battle being declared the 'weaker sex', eve teased, passed comments at, shown the glass ceiling at work, shown my place at home and even by those i chose to open up out of love...shown my place eventually if not gradually.

First appearances, looks, poise, manners even vocal pitch are put way before my achievements and personal strengths, character traits and individuality. Heck i should mention i have hooted right back on two occasions and once caught a guy by his collar for passing comments and making kissing noises at me. Only i can say how terrified i was inside to have tried something of that sorts in India and alone - where the onlookers do nothing more that stare back or look through depending on convenience.  

I admit, I've even told my should have been husbands mother once of his misconduct and been severely shot down for doing so. A woman cant even confide in another woman without her taking personal offense. Shouldn't she have simply scolded her son and empathized? I am not incompetent, I wouldn't dare ever question anyone's rearing abilities, but couldn't it have been considered that what the said boy was doing was so wrong that it drove me to complaint or reach out? Rather let me also tell you the outcome, i was accused for being disgraceful and burning the bridges. Even when i take into account that initial rage to my complaint might have caused a stir but a mother understands eventually, which also i assume is true. Or so i would like to believe. 

Human values do go for a toss really, i mean - would an 'ill-wisher' muster the courage to retaliate? 

Our actions are forever seen in different light. If i flirt easily or mix well with a large crowd I'm automatically declared 'border-line loose charactered' and then gossiped about or kept a keen eye on for any chances to reinforce the title with mistakes or events or instances. A boy or man in my position on the other hand might be called jovial or outgoing. If i pursue a love interest relentlessly i am called materialistic or greedy or delusional or crazy. If a boy does the same he always deserves a chance, because he is always suppose to be seen as going out of his way? 

No one takes into account that woman first focus on the smaller things, gestures, small adjustments, ritual's. We're far more practical even when romantically involved, somewhere adjusting and keeping our wishes second. But when and if a situation so arrises when we need support and it takes time to normalize   things, men are allowed to move on, give up, blame us for it all, not taking into account the smaller acts of love or kindness. 

Heck i say, if all the woman in the world took a week of from their PR jobs, the world would go to war. Social dynamics, eye for details, emotional intelligence are clearly not one of mans best virtues. 

And who says woman gossip the most? At least we do it in positive light or even just to close set of friend we would trust with our lives. We don't give away more intimate details till of course its something hilarious or something we don't have answers to. 

But men? Having experienced first hand, men will share everything from love life, money spent, sex life, even to the extend of showcasing how far a woman is ready to go, or fall or sacrifice without really understanding the underlying message - she's in love. She trusts you, ready to believe in you, she might have had a late realization even about how much. 

Of course that's unlike men, if they make mistakes they must be forgive immediately. Or a verdict must be passed with due consideration. When we make mistakes? The verdict and titles come immediately. (Ok, or maybe on the last 3 parra's I'm an Indian. And a mildly conservative one, but very sensitive to words and gestures and follow up actions.) 

I am a 'daughter' before i am an actress. A 'mother' before i am a CEO. And these titles don't just implicate the celebration of what i have simultaneously achieved, rather they have every now and then been used to show me my final position and role in society.

I have no personal choice when it comes to loving someone, be it our ethical tradition of arrange marriages where men chose their wives, or modern day love stories where the men feel so utterly flattered about being perused-ed that they will find all sort of ways and means to talk dirty about you, bring you up in conversation, keep you away, show anger, disgusts in acknowledged that its unacceptable. Alas, if i stand for a person i love and i'm shot down, how do i stand for things i love and still be accepted...?

If things go right in a marriage or relationships its his achievement, if something goes wrong its her fault. If a woman cries its a mood swing or drama, even manipulation! But if a man sheds tears its because he's been deeply hurt, done wrong to or been cut deep to his soul. If he did something wrong he was confused, if a woman did something wrong it was 'planned'. 

I am strong, i refuse to hurt myself to prove a point. To inflict self injury or pain. I refuse to sulk in sadness. Because i believe its not why someone fell in love with me, its not the woman who later in life would be able to bear the brunts of life along side her man, over bigger issues in life if she fails now. But more often than not - its easier to classify us as fast, heartless, emotionless than appreciate how we chose to project our internal struggles. 

Human values go for a toss when gauging our spirit in more humanitarian terms over issues closer to home. A mans feelings and efforts are kept way above a woman's. A taste of our struggles and feelings can send them running for the hills. Even when we constantly fight for equal rights for all, better living standards for all, equal treatment for all, in sense of greater issues and masses. This mindset starts at home, nurtured in everyday relationships, and far before they become dirty words and cause political up stir in a country. 

A minister might beat his wife everynight, or a boss sexually harass his secretary in the confined space of his office, a ex boyfriend might be relentless, even bringing down his entire wrath on to his ex-girl friend while proving an entirely different point or trying to project his greatness to his current love interest or larger audience. All becuase he moved on? And what a great struggle that must have been? (personally men who say things like 'my ex was psychotic, how much have they grown over years? Who is fueling their chuvanistic outlook? Its us, us woman, men and society at a much more basic level.) 

I am a woman, over history i have been labeled the cause of all problems somehow, somewhere, in someway or the other. We've made greater leaders, raised worriers, supported the ambitions of husbands and lovers, been the all knowing, all bearing wives of presidents, extra working hands on field's of landless farmers, supported entire famille in the absence of husbands serving in the military for decades at war. Silently, responsibly, but its overlooked. 

Acknowledgement often comes in much more shallow forms 'celebrating womanhood' through beauty pageants, ribbon cutting ceremonies, involvement with smaller matters of state, sidelined to the stands or magazine covers or used as hangers even.

What really is our stand? Where exactly do we stand? Where do we draw the line? 

"No regrets" generation.

You date so much that then it doesn't matter. The concept of being someone's first or being someone's last has become diminishingly insignificant over the decades. How we look or they looked, what they did, how we acted, all seems fine to us. In that moment when we were happy we were ok so we don't look back to ever say "oh god! Look at who I was or who I was with!" Ever.

That, simply because we regret less, we're wiser, we learn from our mistakes (or maybe not) but we defiantly seem to want to make a lot of them for our own 'good'. But we're happier with ourselves, we judge less and don't care about others opinions as much as our own. We carve out our own personal identity and have no fear or hesitation in putting it out there for the world.

We believe in fate and destiny even if our view is very broken or skewed. But who says the meaning shouldn't have changed over years? Hence sometimes they go unnoticed or unappreciated by the previous generation but we do know better. And let me refocus, 'we're happier'.

We actively engage in discussions about and give more time to understanding the difference between then and now in context to ourselves yesterday and today and then between out generation and the previous. Which is a good thing, cause while we recollect, we don't nestle. We're ok with outcomes and just fine with where we end up. Hopeful for better, but just fine. We don't think much of the future like our previous counterparts. We know it'll be different but as far as personal human dynamics go, we have stopped making assumptions. We know we're moving at a much higher speed than someone in our shoes even just a decade ago and hence were ok with comparison with the past, with what has already existed than assume about the future. 

As shallow or empty the words "No regrets" may sound, it makes perfect sense to us. To us it means giving everything sufficient chances and enough heart that when we look back to it from the future we never wish we could have done anything better or left out any scope of effort we didn't put in to think maybe we lacked somewhere.

We're far more dynamic and adjusting and calmer and open about our wants, desires and the way we intend to bond with people and places we wont wait for the rest of our lives to see, time we can put aside or even the amount of risk we can readily take for all kinds of things important to us.

Live, Love, Drink, but don't forget to rethink.

Lets put the notions and trivialities of our daily lives aside.

You job, my friends, your car, my phone, our hobbies, our families, our friends, our enemies, who we have now become or who we pretend to be. 

What does it leave us with?

A bundle of emotions, memories, opinions, conclusions, resolutions and feelings. 

Now lets take away the facade of ego, pride, revenge, jealousy, ill feeling, pre-convinced notions, political and cultural alignments and competitiveness. 

What does it leave us with now?

Reason, honor, honesty, practicality, our core personalities, all clinging the hand or rather the little finger of the grown up us. 

In short, it leaves us venerable. Child like, confused, sensitive, lost, hesitant, emotional. 

now take a deep breath. 

Try sustaining this frame of mind.

Let the overwhelming feeling of putting up notes and masks of self defense settle, till you begin to breath easy, till your pulse rate normalizes again. 

Now think of me. Picture my face. the touch of my skin, the curls of my brown hair, looking into my brown eyes... enough thats enough. 

Now in all honesty ask your self. 

Do you really hate me? Or want nothing to do with me? Or treat me like a stranger?

When i put a smile on your face, when i awkwardly conveyed my feelings, when i hurt you with dead honesty, when we just spoke about life and the future, did it want to make you change? 

To leave me alone, to see me as a habbit, an addition that needed to be put an end to?

Didn't we put ourselves out there, agreeing to risk the pain and hurt when we began to be friends at all?

On our best days, happy days, did you for even for a moment feel that it was probably going to be the happiest you'd ever be?

I did. And even if you decide to lie now and say you didnt, i know you did. 

But now coming back to reality, i am glad we've both grown. 

I suppose there were more realities and lessons and evolutions our personal character had to take till we made that one last final commitment. 

I feel more confident, driven, i have lesser mood swings, i dont feel the need to be subtle about how i feel or what i need to convey. I am unafraid to shine, i am proud be me myself more than ever. 

I am not guilty, and i have stopped being harsh on myself. I can have anything in the world, or resist anything in the world if i willed myslef to. And for once, i know what love feels like. 

You do too dont you?

You have seen the difference between feeling extreme affection, love and lust for another person haven't you? You do indrestand the difference when you try your best to convert one into another out of pure excitement or conveniance or inconvenience or a story to tell in your tomorrow? 

But in all human nature and false anger and prideful conviction we don't agree or want to agree they are all different, it just stages. 

We want to belive that the both of us, it was just another time. 

That better is yet to come.

We have better right now or it could be. 

Even when we know it can naturally exist or already exists elsewhere.

I have come to realize how broadening of our individual perspectives or rediscovering who we are or what we want to be do doesn't necessarily have to do with traveling far and wide to look for it. 

That sometimes, it merely is a realizations that comes to us after committing the same mistakes over and over again sometimes. 

When we find time to go over our entire lives, sometimes realizations don't come from new experiences, merely acknowledging old ones. 

And in that exact moment sometimes you realize, that the answer might as well lie in the newness of a fragile relationship, but it sometimes already did exist in the past and in the present and we feared taming it. 

Taming the essence, because it would take long sessions of reconciliation, baring our souls to the known, being known, without opportunity of pretense bending and bowing both backwards and forwards. But for what?

Only for that one thing that really matters. 

Love. 

So how afraid are you really? Of taking a good look at your own life and the life that has been and that could have been and making something of it thats real, permanent and not in passing. 

They say draw the line at the sacred number 30. 

Life, love, womanize, but if you cant find it in you to stop then you never will, and the best things would have long past you. 

Hopefully now, coming back to reality of as you exist, you need to find the time to look back at what matters, what didn't and where the truth lies and go on to pursue it in time. 

Or i hope you do. 

Or for lords sake have peers with enough sense to help knock realizations back into you. In time.