Leading With Intent: How Insight’s Leaders Empower and Accelerate Employee Growth
“My early mentors were super impactful, and I still quote them today. They taught me the importance of soft skills, like imprinting goodness in others and helping them discover and develop their passions. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to develop not just individual contributors, but future leaders of the business.
I think it’s important to be vulnerable and real. As leaders, people put us on a pedestal, but we’re all human beings. Sharing our failures and successes creates relatability. I’ve learned from my failures, and I believe it’s not a failure if you take a lesson from it. So that realness, that vulnerability, and willingness to share experiences goes a long way.
Understanding your team and recognising that they are human is fundamental. They need to understand the bigger picture and how it translates down to their work. Communication is key; the ability to relate and communicate is one of the most important soft skills we can have.”
“Everyone has something unique to offer the next generation, and it’s important to make yourself approachable and available. Increasing surface area with other teams and making connections is key. It’s easy to work with the same people every day, but there are so many great resources out there. Getting out of your sphere of influence or expanding it intentionally is crucial. Ask other leaders if there’s anyone up-and-coming on their team who’s interested in mentoring or being mentored. Giving back is important at this stage of your career.
Once you connect in a mentoring relationship, it’s important to get to radical candor quickly to figure out if you can offer value to your teammate.
Figuring out quickly whether you’re a good fit or if someone else would be better is helpful. Creating a safe space is necessary. Agreeing to be candid and talk about the good, the bad and the ugly is a commitment to growth.
As a leader, vulnerability is necessary to share failures and mistakes. That’s where the real learning happens. Creating a space committed to truth and vulnerability helps.”
“When I first started in this industry 25 years ago, there weren’t many females, and it was intimidating. At the first company I worked for, I was the only female who was not in an administrative role. And it took me two to three years to find my voice in a male-dominated industry. I would go to meetings that I was asked to participate in but not say anything. Instead, I would send my boss an email after the fact, and he would get so frustrated with me because he’d tell me, ‘That’s the idea we needed.’
Find your voice. Be confident. Be okay with the fact that not everything is going to be a bullseye or a home run.”
“I love the concept of a leader’s intent, where we tell someone the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ but not the ‘how.’
By allowing people to think about the ‘how,’ that’s a great way for people to build confidence and learn about themselves. We’re called to act before we’re ever truly ready. I’ve seen many teammates rise to the occasion and deliver after receiving a solid leader’s intent.”
“There are two mindsets that are non-negotiable for me: a growth mindset and a learning mindset.
A learning mindset is about humility. If you think there’s nothing left to learn, it’s a dangerous place to be. There’s always more to learn, especially in this industry, which I love.
The growth mindset is more personal, but it translates to the people you lead. Because the growth mindset extends not just to you as an individual, but to making sure that you have a growth objective for everybody in your team. The best way to keep attrition low is to have invested leaders who prioritise their team’s growth. If people are growing, why would they leave?
Leaders are more important to the people they’re leading than they realise. People often look to leaders to provide answers and direction, but counterintuitively, it’s the smart people on the team who have the best ideas. A leader’s job is to create the space and permission for those great ideas to come forth.”
“I’ve always been a technologist at heart. I built my first computer at age six, but I never thought it could become a career. I started as a programmer for a bank in Australia and considered myself a good technologist for the first 10-12 years of my career. But I aspired to leadership and proved myself as an individual contributor to earn my first leadership opportunity.
That’s when I learned that everything that got you there stops the day you become a leader. Starting as a leader is like starting your career at ground zero again, and that’s an important lesson I learned.
My first leadership role was running a practice in an area outside of my technical background. I couldn’t be the smartest person, so I focused on hiring and enabling those who were experts.
That philosophy has carried through my entire leadership journey, and it’s the best lesson I’ve learned. I encourage others to adopt a servant leadership approach. Leaders should be focused on serving others and helping them grow beyond what they could achieve alone.
Being granted a leadership opportunity means you were an expert in your area, fully within your control. And the most bracing leap of faith is to suddenly feel that you are out of control. But to be an effective and scalable leader, you have to give up control. If you’re prepared to make that leap and put your energy into empowering and accelerating others, it goes faster and is more rewarding.
Leadership can become a very ego-driven objective if it’s not kept in check. Don’t lose your humility. My career and success personally has been so much richer and larger thanks to the smart people around me. The expression goes: On my own, I can go faster. But together, we can go further — and that’s the mantra of good leadership.”
“As you move forward in your career, you transition from doing the work to managing the work to leading the people and teams. It’s less about owning metrics and SLAs and more about growing and developing leaders on your team. That means handing things over to others, even when they’re not fully prepared to take it on. That’s the job. Amplifying impact is about growing leaders at the company, which is the most important part. Setting up the next generation for success is key.”
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