Leadership is often described in sweeping terms – vision, influence, strategy – but its true contours tend to emerge in the day‑to‑day realities of work, study and transition. At London Business School, those realities are unusually intense: enterprising professionals from around the world converge in a high‑pressure habitat where ideas are tested, egos collide and careers are reshaped. In this crucible, leadership is no longer an abstract competency on a CV, but a lived experience that can challenge assumptions and change trajectories.
This article explores what I’ve learned about leadership through that lens: the missteps and course corrections, the quiet moments that mattered more than the big speeches, and the ways in which LBS’s diverse community has redefined what it means to lead in a volatile, interconnected world.
Cultivating credibility in the classroom how London Business School reshaped my view of authority
Before arriving on campus, I equated leadership with position and volume: the person at the front of the room, speaking the loudest, wielded influence. London Business School dismantled that assumption in the span of a few intense terms. In lectures and project work, I watched professors and classmates who rarely raised their voices yet commanded the room through clarity, consistency, and competence. Authority stopped looking like a badge and started looking like a practice. It was built in the way people prepared, how honestly they admitted what they didn’t know, and how carefully they listened before they spoke. In that environment, the old binary of “leader” and “follower” gave way to a more fluid reality where credibility was continually earned, not permanently granted.
LBS also made this shift tangible through everyday classroom rituals that rewarded substance over status. You could feel the difference when a comment was grounded in data, when feedback was anchored in respect, and when a challenging point was made without theatrics.Over time,I noticed that those who shaped the discussion most were frequently enough those who:
- Backed their views with evidence,not just confidence
- Shared credit and took responsibility when things went wrong
- Asked probing,curious questions rather of delivering monologues
- Adapted their style to the needs of the group,not their ego
| Old View | New Reality |
|---|---|
| Title creates trust | Trust creates influence |
| Speak to be heard | Listen to be credible |
| Never show doubt | Admit limits,show rigor |
Leading through questions not answers the power of curiosity in high performing teams
In the classroom and in boardrooms,I’ve seen that the leaders who unlock exceptional performance rarely walk in with ready-made solutions; they walk in with better questions. They treat meetings as laboratories, not tribunals. Instead of asking, “Who’s responsible for this mistake?” they probe, “What are we learning from this, and how do we adapt?” This shift from answers to inquiry slows down ego and speeds up insight. Curiosity becomes a performance multiplier: it surfaces hidden risks, draws out quieter voices and challenges the complacency that often creeps into successful teams. A simple set of recurring prompts can quietly rewire a culture:
- “What are we missing?” – normalises dissent and second-order thinking.
- “Who has a different view?” – signals that disagreement is an asset, not a threat.
- “What would have to be true for this to fail?” – builds disciplined scepticism into ambition.
- “If resources weren’t a constraint, what would we try?” – releases constrained creativity.
| Leader Habit | Team Effect |
|---|---|
| Asking before telling | Builds ownership,not compliance |
| Probing assumptions | Exposes blind spots early |
| Inviting dissent | Improves decisions under pressure |
| Admitting “I don’t know” | Creates psychological safety |
Over time,this question-led approach reshapes how teams prepare,debate and execute. People arrive to discussions with data, hypotheses and scenarios, not carefully defended positions. Hierarchy becomes less about who has the loudest voice and more about who can frame the sharpest questions. The most effective leaders I encountered at London Business School didn’t abdicate direction; they used inquiry to align autonomy with strategy. By consistently asking clarifying, stretching and sometimes uncomfortable questions, they turned strategy into a living conversation rather than a static document-and in doing so, made curiosity a discipline rather than a personality trait.
From case study to boardroom translating LBS leadership frameworks into daily decisions
In lecture halls, leadership frequently enough arrives neatly packaged: two-by-two matrices, decision trees and case protagonists who reliably reach a tidy conclusion by page twelve. The reality I encountered back at the office was far less cinematic. What LBS gave me was not a script, but a set of lenses. The familiar tools-stakeholder maps, influence grids, psychological safety checklists-stopped being academic when I used them to decide whom to bring into a crisis meeting, how transparent to be about a missed target, and when to slow down a “perfect” plan that lacked buy‑in. Instead of chasing textbook certainty, I began using these frameworks as disciplined questions, testing my instincts against a structure that forced me to see beyond my own priorities.
- From charisma to clarity: swapping heroic speeches for explicit decision criteria.
- From gut feel to guided judgment: checking instincts against stakeholder and risk maps.
- From speed to sequencing: pacing decisions to match organizational readiness.
| Tool | Boardroom Question | Daily Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Stakeholder Matrix | Who wins, who loses, who blocks? | Choose who gets the first call. |
| Decision Tree | What are our real options? | Clarify trade‑offs in one slide. |
| Psychological Safety Lens | Will people speak truth to power? | Open meetings with risks, not wins. |
Over time, the most valuable shift was invisible: frameworks moved from the flipchart to my calendar. I began designing weekly agendas around intentional tensions we’d studied in case discussions-short‑term vs. long‑term, efficiency vs. learning,performance vs. wellbeing-and asking my team to surface where they felt the pull most acutely. In board updates, I now pair financial indicators with a simple list of leading human signals:
- Energy: how stretched key teams feel.
- Voice: whether dissent shows up in the room.
- Learning: what we would do differently next quarter.
None of this looks revolutionary in a slide deck.But in the flow of emails, one‑to‑ones and late‑night budget calls, these small, structured questions have become the quiet architecture behind my decisions-anchoring ambition in evidence, and theory in the messy, moving target of everyday leadership.
Building inclusive influence practical habits for earning trust across cultures and hierarchies
Influence, I’ve learned, is rarely about the loudest voice in the room; it’s about who feels seen and heard. In classes, project teams and alumni boards, the people who shaped outcomes were often those who invested in understanding difference before pushing for agreement. They built credibility by asking questions that reached beyond job titles: “How does this land in your market?”; “What would make this proposal workable for your team?” Small, consistent gestures – pronouncing names correctly, rotating who speaks first, sharing pre-reads early for non-native English speakers – quietly redistributed power. These habits signal: your constraints matter, your context matters, you matter. Over time, that attention compounds into trust, and trust becomes permission to lead change across cultures and hierarchies, not just within them.
Practical inclusivity is a discipline, not a slogan. I’ve watched effective leaders hard-wire it into their daily routines:
- Shape the room: Set norms that protect dissent and make it safe to disagree “upwards”.
- Slow down to speed up: Build in quiet thinking time and written input so reflective voices aren’t drowned out.
- Translate power: Explain unwritten rules, decisions and trade-offs in plain language, especially to those furthest from the center.
- Share the spotlight: Pass the microphone, credit ideas precisely, and sponsor people who are not in your image.
| Habit | Signal |
|---|---|
| Asking “Who’s missing?” | Your voice isn’t optional |
| Summarising in simple language | Understanding beats jargon |
| Rotating decision leads | Authority can be shared |
The Way Forward
the most striking lesson from London Business School’s approach to leadership is that it is less a destination than a discipline. The cases, simulations and classroom debates matter, but they serve chiefly to expose the gaps between who leaders are and who they need to become. Closing that gap is ongoing work.
What emerges is a portrait of leadership as a practice rooted in self-awareness, sharpened by data and dissent, and tested in real time against shifting markets and expectations. It is as much about listening as directing, as much about ethical judgment as commercial acumen.For LBS,the measure of success is not the number of frameworks students can recite,but the quality of the decisions they make when the answers are unclear and the stakes are high. If there is a single thread running through these lessons, it is this: leadership today is defined less by certainty than by the willingness to learn in public, adjust course and bring others with you.
