Rethinking What It Means to Lead
Professor Michael Gibbs, AB ’84, AM ’84, PhD ’89 (Economics), discusses ‘uncommon leadership’ with Ruchira Chaudhary, MBA ’13 (AXP-11).
- By
- January 15, 2026
- Leadership
Ruchira Chaudhary, MBA ’13 (AXP-11), was a student in Michael Gibbs’s Managing the Workplace and Corporate Governance courses while enrolled in the Sokolov Executive MBA Program Asia. As the two stayed connected, trading help and advice over the years, their relationship has evolved into one of dear friends, colleagues, and collaborators.
Based in Singapore, Chaudhary is a C-suite advisor, a leadership coach, and the author of Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership. An adjunct faculty member at several top-tier business schools and a cofounder of the Uncommon Leadership Academy, she has coached senior executives across Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Gibbs, AB ’84, AM ’84, PhD ’89 (Economics), is the Konstantin Sokolov Clinical Professor of Economics. What follows is an edited conversation between the two.
Michael Gibbs: What do you understand good leadership to be?
Ruchira Chaudhary: Exceptional leaders—or uncommon leaders, as I call them—are multipliers. They lift others as they rise. When they go higher, they take others along with them. In the book, I reframe leadership as leaders who coach and build others. It’s not about building their empires or building millions in revenue; it’s about building their people.
The concept truly speaks to a large cross-section of leaders. That was my initial brief—a book that is for anybody who leads teams—because as I started to do the research and began peeling back the layers of the onion, I realized this didn’t pertain just to someone in a corporate setting. It pertains to anybody. I discovered that coaching is a life skill. It’s about the ability to ask, not about telling others how to do things. It’s not about you or your playbook. You don’t have authority just because you’ve done it yourself a million times. It really is about helping people go higher by tapping those reservoirs of creativity within themselves. We have a dearth of that way of thinking in the corporate world, and even in nations, today.
I should emphasize that this is not a “nice-to-have” thing. When you enable leaders, you elevate organizations, and when you do that, it’s about business impact. In classic Chicago Booth style, I’ve woven in not just examples but research, data, and best practices. At the end of the day, it has to amplify your business impact. It has to help you achieve your business goals.
Gibbs: You work with CEOs, the C-suite, and leaders who are one level below. But as you said, your book is not necessarily about the C-suite. It’s about how everyone is a coach, even people with no teams to lead. Parents are coaches in exactly the way you described—and when you say leaders are coaches in how they bring up others, that’s what teachers do as well. That resonated with me.
Chaudhary: As a consultant, I was always at the periphery of organizations. I came in to do interim roles—interim head of strategy or interim head of HR. Or I came in after an M&A to help with postmerger integration. I did not have teams. I was a one-woman show.
But that means the ability to take others along is even more important. When you lead by impact and influence—not because people have to report to you or are accountable to you—it completely changes the dynamic. And this, more than ever, is when you have to ask people what to do, not tell them. When you express the desire to help people go higher, and you say, “I’m in your corner, and my only role here is to make you shine brighter,” they will open up. They will give you candid opinions and advice, and they will support you. You don’t have to listen to everything, but that’s what good coaching is. You have to give people a voice.
Coaching is not just about having a structured conversation twice a year in a conference room. It is that, but it’s also in everything you do. That’s the core of my message. It’s about asking questions. It’s in-the-moment nudges. It’s about giving exposure to people. It’s about giving people opportunities.
As you have done for me, Mike. Much of the teaching I’ve done is because you nudged me into it. I would never have thought about it. As for my writing, you and my spouse can share the credit jointly. You nudged me and nagged me and constantly said I had the right ideas, and that the world needed to see them. Left to me and my inert self, I don’t think I would have gotten there. That’s good coaching.
“When you lead by impact and influence—not because people have to report to you or are accountable to you—it completely changes the dynamic.”
— Ruchira Chaudhary
Gibbs: How have you taken these lessons out into the world?
Chaudhary: The CEO of a financial-services organization picked up the book at an airport and then called to ask if I could convert it into modules that would be useful for his sales team. The success of that got me thinking. I built more individualized modules, many more, including for clients like the Gates Foundation and DB Schenker (now DSV). That turned into using insights and research from the book to give full- and half-day interactive sessions, where participants learn how to coach each other.
I’ve developed a few more frameworks, one of which has been formally incorporated into Harvard Business School’s certificate programs in leadership and coaching. I’ve also teamed up with a senior consultant and graduate of—where else?—Chicago Booth, who was my colleague at Medtronic, where I’d done a fair bit of consulting work. We came together to form the Uncommon Leadership Academy. In addition to corporate workshops, we’re building e-modules and an AI assistant that will guide users through them. Much like a contained large language model, the assistant will have a database of all my writings and everything that I’ve ever taught. Our hope is to—perhaps one fine day and I don’t know when that is—leverage AI technology with a digital twin of myself. This is not about building an empire or leaving a legacy behind. I truly want to build more leaders in the world, because when we have leaders who lift others, good things happen.
Gibbs: Your next book. I’ve been nagging you about it. How’s it going? What is it about?
Chaudhary: I’m close to finishing it. The book—call it a sequel—explores a central theme of coaching, though this time I’ve shifted the lens inward. I did a number of interviews and podcasts for the first book, and I often received this question: What if you do not have a leader who can be your coach?
Gibbs: Most people, in other words.
Chaudhary: My reply was, “If it’s not your boss, then maybe it’s a colleague. Maybe it’s a family friend.” And there were people who insisted, “No, there’s no one.”
Gibbs: Most of us had a tormentor, not a mentor—me included, in my first job!
Chaudhary: That’s true. And that made me pause and reflect. There are a whole bunch of studies about how our modern day has connected us, but in so many ways has also isolated us. We are lonelier than we’ve ever been. We are burdened with so many things.
You can go to people for different types of advice, even mentoring, and you’ll get prescriptive advice. But to have coaching, someone who asks powerful questions so that you can find the answer yourself, that’s hard to find—unless you cultivate it, or you’re just plain lucky enough to have somebody like that in your corner.
The hybrid and remote working environment also means that managers are overburdened or absent. They have very little time for the people on their teams. Those frequent check-ins and those classic water-cooler moments are all going away. Just pausing, chatting with someone, finding out how their day was, or giving feedback—we’re increasingly overlooking those things.
The framework is about understanding how to be your own coach, how to prioritize, and also how to have better cross-functional collaboration so you can be better every day. You may be facing a toxic relationship, personal or professional. Or in the throes of grief—I’ve experienced it; you’ve experienced it. You may feel that things are not going your way and that you aren’t able to get going again. I want to give readers the tools and frameworks to help them build their self-coaching muscle for moments like these. It’s about resilience, and it’s about reframing. It’s about getting up when that’s not easy. For all of these times, we need to work on building that muscle now.