Neither/Nor
The perceived design of corporate leadership is a fortress of materialist logic, a space where decisions are expected to be stripped of human messiness and reduced to the clean-cut calculus of one fileable balance sheet. Shreya Krishnan’s career is an unapologetic challenge to this template. Her public profile carries the familiar insignia of the corporate world, from the title of "corporate diva" to the process-driven certification of Six Sigma belt. Yet these markers exist alongside the identity plexus of a therapist, a spiritual practitioner, and a vocal author. In a binary world, these worlds collide if not carefully balanced. In Shreya’s world, they are inseparable components of a highly effective operating system.
Her spirituality is not a cryptonite repelling suit that offsets a public career cracking to implode. It is the core programming that confidently runs it. The principles of non-judgment and compassion are integral to the point where they are no longer treated as soft skills taught for compliance, but are hard-edged instruments for objective performance evaluation. The rejection of binary thinking becomes a method for uncovering more resilient and creative business solutions than a rigid, “either/or” framework could provide. Her model presents a simple, testable hypothesis: that the most effective leader today is not the one who splits their humanity into pieces big enough to cope with the responsibilities of work, but to embrace it entirely.
"I think my spirituality informs much of my leadership."
The Identity Plexus
The engine driving Shreya Krishnan’s professional strategy is an internal, non-negotiable standard of creative ownership. She rejects the transactional nature of corporate work, instead viewing each project as an intimate act of creation, her "baby". This framework recasts the corporate leader as an artist and the work itself as a piece that must bear the artist’s "signature." This relationship fundamentally inverts corporate textbook logic, where value is determined by external forces like market validation or a client’s specifications. For Shreya, the output is measured against an unforgivable, internal metric first. Her core principle, that something must "create value for me, for it to create value in the outer world," establishes a radical precondition for her work. Authenticity and personal conviction are core embedded features of the final product.
This artist operates with a diverse and influential set of tools. Shreya resists the modern pressure to cultivate one polished elevator pitch "personal brand," embracing instead the complexity of her "many hats." These are not curated personas adopted for different situations, but distinct, nurtured facets of her identity plexus. The therapist, the spiritual practitioner, the corporate strategist, and the pageant winner are all part of a grown closet that gives her a significant operational range. Her approach is practical, applied self-awareness. She analyzes a situation and consciously lives the tool best suited to achieve the desired outcome. This aligns with the concept of modeling in neurolinguistic programming, which builds on the ability to access and deploy the most effective behavior for a given context. For Shreya, it is the mindful deployment of a multifaceted self.
The quality control for this entire system is personal exhaustion with mediocrity. This relentless standard is one she applies to herself. She describes a drive to "do a little bit more than asked" and "find a little bit more than is being sought," an impulse that comes not from a desire for praise, but from an internal need to do things "really well." This intolerance for her own mediocrity sharpens every tool in the box, at the price that the artist’s signature is always a mark of excellence, validated from within long before it ever faces external judgment.
"It's like an artist or a sculptor. Right? You want a signature to it. You want it to have an identity. And I've always seen things that I work on as things that I'm deeply connected to."
"It's easy to be nice. It's hard to be kind. Kindness is steeped in honesty.
Niceness is not."
Too Nice
In the corporate mill, "niceness" has been weaponized. It is not a virtue but a tool of social control, a mechanism for enforcing a frictionless, misleading harmony that protects the status quo. Shreya Krishnan deconstructs this concept with clinical precision. She defines niceness as "instant gratification," the easy path of agreeability that delays conflict but allows deeper dysfunctions to fester. In her framework, niceness is at best dishonest. It is the act of a homophobic person smiling at a gay colleague at a party, only to denigrate them later, or the manager who avoids a difficult performance conversation, allowing an employee to shovel six feet deep. This culture of niceness prioritizes the comfort of power over the individual's growth and the collective's health. It is a system that seems pleasant on the surface but is corrosive at its core, creating environments where truth is silent and problems grow loud. It is the language of conflict avoidance, a fragile peace maintained at the expense of latent battle.
In Shreya’s model, kindness is a disruptive and far mightier force. Where niceness is about avoiding conflict, kindness is about creating "safe conflict". She argues that "kindness is steeped in honesty," a principle that requires a leader to deliver brutal truths compassionately. This is a respectful and empowering act. To be “nice” to someone is to treat them as fragile, as if they cannot handle the weight of a professional assessment. To be kind means respecting them as resilient and capable of growth and offering them the data framework they need to improve. This approach requires courage and skill. A leader must separate the message from the delivery and present truth free from the shadow of a perceived personal attack. It is a difficult, high-stakes practice that rejects the easy path of niceness in favor of a more authentic and constructive form of engagement.
The choice between these two operating modes carries a disproportionate weight for women in leadership. Shreya notes that women are "constantly expected to be nice," a behavioral mandate that is not applied with the same force to their male colleagues. When a female leader chooses the difficult path of kindness, such as delivering direct, unvarnished feedback, she violates a mandated societal expectation. This violation can result in her being labeled as "intimidating", which carries an unwelcome connotation for the Indian female. Shreya’s method for dismantling this perception is a healing maneuver. Instead of becoming defensive, she gently inverts the dynamic by asking the original question of why someone finds her intimidating. Thus, she shifts the focus from her actions to their perception, inviting them to journey into the internal biases and insecurities fueling their reaction. This strategy reframes a potentially personal attack into a leveling bonding experience of self-awareness, closing the opening gap between spiritual finesse and corporate insecurity.
Broken Glasses
A beauty pageant is a system engineered for layered ISO conformity. It is an arena where pedestal femininity is manufactured, exported, and delivered at minimum cost. For a leader like Shreya Krishnan, a self-declared "tomboy with glasses" whose entire philosophy is built on rejecting binaries and superficiality, entering this display of societal consensus appears surprising. Shreya’s decision to compete in the Mrs. India pageant was a deliberate stress-test, a "social experiment" evaluating the societal spectrum of statistically significant outliers. Would her identity plexus be consumed, would it shatter the experiment ground, or simply prove that within the system, there is space for authenticity to succeed?
The methodology of her experiment required a radical rejection of conformity. While other contestants adapted to meet the pageant's expectations, Shreya occupied a room where she could remain true to herself, stating that she often "did look like their photographer or their makeup artist" rather than a fellow competitor. She did not adopt a new wardrobe, a different way of speaking, or a persona designed for the judges. Instead, she inverted the power dynamic of the competition. She ceased to be a subject to become an agent. She used her platform and access to engage the other contestants in discussions about their shared body image issues, effectively turning the competitive environment into a refined space for observation and collective healing.
Her victory validated her thesis. Her experiment was a success. When confronted with norm-shattering authenticity, an unpopulated space within the system surfaced. Selecting her as the winner revealed a cluster on the spectrum that surpassed the conformity doctrine of the widely accepted standard deviation. Her win indicates that authenticity could not only be an internal state of being, but a force capable of marking its own territory, while building a case for leadership independence. The competition was won the moment Shreya set up camp in an alien land, aching to be discovered. All it took for her was a gentle nudge, a “kind” reminder that she was there.
"She said, No, that's why you should go, because you will break the stereotype of what a woman who wins a pageant looks and sounds like."
Healing Ladders
The modern professional is taught to be a strategist of their own influence. The language of personal branding, platform building, and network scaling has become the default syntax for ambition, creating a market for a performative version of leadership. Shreya Krishnan’s philosophy neglects this enterprise, recasting the strategic pursuit of influence as a subtle but significant act of ego. She argues that any conscious effort to "amplify my circle of influence" is an inherently self-serving goal, focusing on the amplification of the self rather than the impact of the work. This is a quiet but radical refutation of the entire thought-leadership industry. In her model, influence is not something to be hunted or engineered. An influence that must be manufactured is inauthentic by definition. True influence is the unwilled, unforced byproduct of one’s presence and actions. This result cannot be genuinely reverse-engineered as a desired outcome.
Her alternative to the hierarchical ladder of influence is the "circle". This shape contains a different physics of power. A ladder is a structure of individual, competitive ascent, defined by scarcity and verticality. A circle is a non-hierarchical system built for mutual support and collective strength, a space where people stand "shoulder to shoulder," not above or below one another. In this model, power is not concentrated at the top but is distributed throughout the network. Influence does not need to cascade down from a single leader because it emanates from the health of the entire collective. The leader's primary role is not to amplify their own voice, but to create a plane "where every voice is heard," and seen. She believes this is "a lot more sustainable" than the cult of a single personality. This circular logic is the foundation of her approach to leadership, community, and allyship.
Her philosophy culminates in a final inversion of conventional wisdom. Influence is a consequence of authentic living. Shreya calls it the result of "presence,". It is the consistent and genuine application of a whole, integrated self in the spaces she occupies. This presence is the sum of her identity plexus: the therapist's capacity for empathy, the artist's non-negotiable standards, and the spiritualist's non-judgment. This combination creates a field of psychological safety and trust that naturally draws others in. Her ambition is not to expand her circle or build her brand. Her ambition is to be so thoroughly present to leave the circle expands on its own, as a matter of gravity. This is her "un-strategy". The impact is the effect, not the intended cause. The cause is the commitment to a fully realized identity, and the final validation of her core belief: that the most potent force in any room is a person who has nothing to prove.
"Wanting to grow something because you feel it's righteous comes from a space of ego... wanting to create a circle where every voice is heard... is a lot more sustainable."
What I learned from Shreya Krishnan
-
Spirituality is a Leadership Operating System. The most effective leadership model does not separate the personal from the professional but uses a deep, integrated philosophy, such as spirituality, as its core framework for making decisions.
-
Authenticity is a Strategic Filter. An unwavering commitment to a complex, authentic identity is not a liability. It is a powerful tool that actively filters one's environment, repelling misaligned opportunities and attracting those where one's unique traits are a competitive advantage.
-
Kindness is a Disruptive Force. "Niceness" is a tool of superficial harmony that avoids conflict at the expense of truth. True leadership requires "kindness," which is the courage to create "safe conflict" and deliver honest feedback for the sake of genuine progress.
-
Reject Adaptation, Redefine the System. Lasting success is not always found by adapting to a system's rules. A more powerful strategy is to refuse to conform, forcing the system to expand its definition of what is valuable.
-
True Influence is a Byproduct, Not a Goal. The strategic pursuit of influence is an act of ego. Sustainable influence is an unwilled consequence of authentic "presence" and creating non-hierarchical, supportive "circles."
Comprehension Challenge: Shreya Krishnan
Philosophy
Shreya Krishnan’s work is a testament to the power of a fully integrated self. She rejects the false binary between a "professional" persona and a "personal" one, instead using her spiritual and therapeutic principles as the core operating system for her leadership. Her philosophy prioritizes kindness over niceness, authenticity over adaptation, and circular support over hierarchical power. This challenge tests a leader's courage to deploy their authentic self in an environment that rewards conformity.
The Scenario
Imagine 'Rohan,' a newly promoted director at a hyper-competitive, "numbers-driven" tech company. His predecessor was known for a ruthless, high-pressure management style that, while generating burnout, consistently hit its aggressive targets. Rohan's personal leadership style is the opposite. He believes in psychological safety, compassionate feedback, and collaborative decision-making. He is now under immense pressure from his superiors to maintain the division's intense pace and numerical output.
Option A (The "Adaptation" Path): Adopt the company's established leadership style. Maintain the high-pressure environment, focus exclusively on the metrics, and suppress his own more empathetic, "spiritual" approach. This path is "nice" because it avoids conflict with his superiors and conforms to their expectations. It is the politically safe choice.
Option B (The "Authenticity" Path): Immediately implement his own leadership model. Introduce practices that build psychological safety and prioritize "kind" (honest but compassionate) feedback, even if it risks a temporary dip in metrics as the team unlearns the old culture of fear. This path directly applies his authentic self but will likely be seen as "soft" and ineffective by a leadership team that only values hard numbers.
The Task
Drawing on Shreya Krishnan's philosophy, what is Rohan's imperative? Should he suppress his authentic leadership style to conform to the system's expectations (Option A), or should he risk his career to implement a more humane and potentially more sustainable model (Option B)?
Develop the argument Rohan must make to his superiors to justify his choice. How does he reframe his "spiritual" approach not as a weakness, but as a long-term strategic advantage that builds a more resilient and innovative team than a culture of fear ever could?