The Bypassing Performance

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My Sustainable Encounter with Nandita Dandekar

by Albert Schiller

Formal corporate meetings are not forums for truth. They are theaters of performance. In these settings, individuals are incentivized to project success, demonstrate confidence, and conceal the friction that inevitably accompanies any ambitious strategy. A leader who relies solely on these official channels for intelligence is operating with a dangerously incomplete and distorted map of reality. Nandita Dandekar’s leadership doctrine is built on an empirical counter-strategy. She understood that a salesperson’s primary role in a formal setup is not to deliver inconvenient truths but to demonstrate what can be termed “performative compliance”. She notes, "most of these people, particularly the salespeople, will not open up in a meeting setting". To admit a strategy is failing is to risk being seen as a failure oneself. Dandekar’s approach is therefore not to make meetings more honest. She deliberately bypasses performances, treating informal, unstructured moments as the primary source for intelligence-gathering operations.

The Hierarchy Suspension

The effectiveness of this strategy lies in its command of social dynamics. Dandekar found that "you will start getting the real insights, in those breaks, in the lunch and tea breaks". These informal moments pause work but also suspend hierarchy temporarily. The dissolution of official power dynamics creates the psychological safety required for authentic conversation. In this space, her method is not to interrogate, but to diagnose. Her straightforward, non-accusatory question, "Why are things not happening the way we planned?", is a deliberate framing. It positions the salesperson not as a subordinate providing a status report, but as a collaborator in a joint analysis. It was an invitation to share the granular, real-world friction points that a top-down strategy could never predict, respecting them as the true experts on the ground-level reality of implementation.

Noise Resistant

This intelligence-gathering operation requires a sophisticated filtering mechanism. A leader must know who to listen to in a world of competing voices. Dandekar’s method for identifying these key intelligence sources is a two-step process of separating signal from noise. First, she used quantitative performance data to find the signal, the individuals delivering exceptional results regardless of their visibility within the organization. She understood that often, for the quiet high-performer, "Their job will talk for them... their action will talk more". Second, she recognized that the noise in a formal meeting, which includes performative confidence, charisma, and a willingness to speak up, often did not correlate with this signal. Her approach is a disciplined refusal to be swayed by corporate theater. It is a system that trusts the data to reveal who understands how to execute a strategy, honoring the evidence of performance over the art of the presentation.

Translating Art

Once these quiet high-performers are identified, the most critical work begins. Dandekar recognized that they often succeed based on tacit knowledge, a form of intuitive and uncodified expertise. They know how to succeed but may not have a formal model to explain it. Her role, therefore, is to act as an interpreter. She states, "I used to literally catch hold of people, because I know these people, they'll not talk on their own. You have to make them talk". She would listen to their methods and extract the repeatable principles from their personal approach. This is crucial to turning an individual’s art into the organization’s science. She translated personal success into a scalable model by codifying and amplifying these trench-proven techniques. This is the final step in bypassing the performance. It is a system that identifies potential and translates it into a replicable advantage, a necessary step because, as she concludes, "a great strategy not implemented well doesn't give you the results you desire".

So what can we take from her approach?

Questions for Audience

1. The blog deconstructs how Nandita Dandekar bypasses "performative compliance." But can this behavior ever be truly fixed at a systemic level, or must effective leaders rely on informal, "in-between" channels to find the truth?

2. The process of translating an individual's "art" into an organization's "science" is robust. What are the ethical considerations or risks of codifying an intuitive process? Could it stifle the very creativity that made the high-performer successful in the first place?