How to be a CEO and Humanitarian
My Encounter with Deepak Sharma
We assume the skills that create a successful corporate leader are universally valuable. But what if the most crucial leadership instinct in one domain is a critical liability in another?
A leader’s toolkit is assumed to be portable. Its core components of strategy, management, and execution are treated as a master key, able to unlock value in any room. Deepak Sharma’s transition from a 31-year corporate career to the development sector provides a powerful case study that dismantles this assumption. While his corporate life provided invaluable assets, his new mission’s success depended less on the skills he brought with him and more on his capacity to unlearn them. His journey reveals that the highest form of leadership adaptation is not additive, but subtractive: a disciplined dismantling of the instincts that once guaranteed success.
The Corporate Toolkit: Assets and Assumptions
Deepak entered the non-profit world with a formidable set of skills. His team sports experience cultivated his instinct for teamwork, an asset he leveraged significantly throughout his career. This, combined with a natural aptitude for networking and fundraising, made him an effective operator. This toolkit, however, was built on an operating system defined by the for-profit world: leadership as a function of driving measurable outcomes. In that context, a “slightly authoritarian” style is not a personality flaw, but a requirement for efficiency. “Whatever I'm saying has to be followed,” he explains of that mindset. It was a proven model for a system that prizes speed, clear hierarchies, and predictable results.
The Devaluation of Authority
This leadership model, designed for a world of predictable inputs and outputs, was immediately neutralized upon contact with his new reality. The core assumption of his authority collapsed because the context was inverted. A for-profit system seeks to minimize human friction to achieve a goal. The development sector he entered was defined by it; the “highly traumatized background” of the children was the entire field of engagement. The tools designed to create efficiency were useless when the mission was to engage with profound human inefficiency and pain. “I had no experience of handling such children,” he admits. The realization was stark: these are “2 different worlds,” where a “one size fits all doesn't work”.
The solution was not to learn a new management technique, but to unlearn the impulse to manage. This required a complete inversion of his information-gathering process. As a leader, information flows up for a decision. In his new role, he had to go to the source and simply absorb, without the pressure of an immediate directive. This was the “big switch”: the disciplined cultivation of listening as his primary tool. He had to become a “very, very keen listener” and a “very keen observer”. The ultimate test of his leadership, therefore, was not his ability to command, but his willingness to discard his entire proven toolkit and begin again from zero.
So what can we take from his approach?
Open Questions
Many leaders transition from the for-profit to the social sector. Based on Deepak's experience, what is the single most dangerous, yet common, assumption corporate leaders make when they enter the world of social impact?
We all have 'default' ways of operating that work well in one part of our lives (e.g., at work). How can we learn to identify when these trusted instincts are actually failing us in another part of our lives (e.g., in personal relationships)?
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