Debarshi Kanjilal

I've spent fifteen years inside some of the world's most recognizable professional services organizations, doing the work of building leaders and the teams they lead. Not advising from the outside — building from the inside. That distinction matters to me, and it shapes everything I write here.

In that time I've led more than forty career progressions, designed learning experiences that contributed to two and three times business growth for the organizations I served, and won nine Brandon Hall Awards for excellence in learning design. I've sat in the leadership team conversations where the hard decisions get made. I've made bad ones and good ones, and spent a lot of time understanding the difference.

Leader Garage started because I kept having the same conversations — with managers newly promoted into leadership, with senior leaders navigating situations no MBA course prepared them for, with practitioners trying to think through the actual mechanics of building teams that perform. The quality of public writing on leadership is mostly thin: either too abstract to be useful or too prescriptive to be honest. I wanted to write something different.

The essays on this site cover six areas where I've done my most sustained thinking: decision-making, teams and communication, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, organizational culture, and leading through change. They're written from the inside of the work, not from above it. I try to say what's actually true, including the parts that don't resolve cleanly.