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BlogSeptember 7, 2026

That first disclosure…

What happens when someone says, “I don’t want to make this formal”?

Or “I don’t want any trouble. I just needed to get it out of my system.”

That sentence or something close to it, is where most workplace safety breaks. Not in a policy, or in an Internal Committee inquiry. But in a corridors, in hushed coffee breaks, in the ten seconds after a person decides to say something for the first time.

The IC exists for what happens after someone crosses that threshold. ICs exist to provide redressal and protection from retaliation. But most people, most of the time, never cross this threshold.

The machinery we built and what it doesn’t cover

Most organisations I connect with are confident that they have got POSH compliance under control. They have complied with what the act says- an IC in place, the annual training, the ninety-day inquiry timeline, the composition of the committee, the format of the written complaint.

It’s evidence that our systems are built to offer redressal, not to create an environment where every one feels they can speak up and make it formal, and if they do, they will be heard, and the matter will be resolved.

And that is why, many keep silent.

And that is why the full purpose of the act- prevention, protection, prohibition and redressal, remains unfulfilled even 13 years after implementation.

What that moment is actually asking of you?

We misread this moment of disclosure constantly. When someone tells a manager or a colleague that something happened, and immediately adds that they don’t want it to become an issue, they are are actually silently seeking validation and permission. They’re testing something narrower: can the person in front of them hold what’s just been said, without dismissing it as nothing ? Is the person in front going to be the rock solid support that they need to cross the threshold?

Most of us get this moment wrong. Since the person does not want ‘to make an issue’, we sympathise and gently tell them to let go. Sometimes, we question- is it such a big deal? Sometimes we opine- never heard anything like this about him. And even sigh with relief when the conversation ends.

But that is where trust and confidence gets broken.

Unconsciously we have signalled silence is better than speaking up. We have signalled that it is ok to let it go. We have normalised wrong doing. And in the process silenced several others who might have spoken.

Both Prevention and Prohibition fail.

The promise you you should and shouldn’t make.

Here’s where most well-meaning managers slip and it happens entirely out of kindness.

They say, “Don’t worry, this stays between us.” The instinct makes sense. But once a manager knows something that could constitute harassment, Indian law and most organisational policy create a real obligation to act. “This stays between us” is often a promise you can’t keep.

The more honest move, the one that actually respects the person in front of you, is to tell them plainly that they should connect with someone with the IC. You should tell them that they should not discuss with other colleagues as this can at a later stage become a challenge for confidentiality. You shouldn’t try to judge or evaluate. You should simply listen, and nudge in the right direction. Offer support and confidentiality.

What the rising numbers might actually mean

IT services and banking alone account for most of the sharp rise in complaint numbers across India’s listed companies, complaints nearly tripling in some sectors between FY22 and FY25.

So what does that rise actually mean?

More harassment? Or more people finally trusting a system enough to enter it formally? Probably both and probably unevenly. Trust isn’t spread evenly across a company. It flourishes wherever leaders and managers have visibly, consistently, unglamorously done right by the people who came forward before.

The closely guarded secret

If you actually want to know how a company handles this moment, don’t read the POSH policy. Look at who employees informally go to when something happens, and I mean actually map it, not assume it. In almost every organisation I’ve worked with, that list is short, three or four names and it’s almost never the officially designated first point of contact. It’s whoever has, over years, earned a reputation for taking the right call.

Sometimes that’s a manager. Sometimes it’s someone in a completely unrelated function who has nothing to do with POSH on paper.

Organisations often don’t know who’s on that list for their own workforce, which means they’re relying entirely on the judgment of people they’ve never trained, never briefed, and never thought to ask.

A mature POSH ecosystem prepares people for these conversations too. It also knows, by name, who’s already having them.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/first-disclosure-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–munsc/

BlogAugust 31, 2026

The Ninety Days That Decide Whether She Stays

The resignation lands in month twenty-two and everybody is surprised by it. She was well regarded. There had been no complaint. The exit interview records a personal decision and a family consideration, and the file closes.

The decision was not made in month twenty-two. It was made across about ninety days after returning from maternity leave, nearly two years earlier, and nobody in the organisation was watching while it happened.

The 2026 AIMA and KPMG in India Women Leadership Survey puts it precisely. Women’s exits are rarely driven by declining aspiration. They reflect accumulated organisational frictions, role design constraints, and uneven support during critical transitions.

In Indian organisations, the transition that goes unsupported is the return from maternity leave.

What actually happens in those ninety days

Most of it has been normalised over decades, which is exactly why it goes unmanaged.

She comes back. The account she ran has been split between two people, and both of them have now been doing it for six months. Everyone agrees she will pick it back up, and nobody has said when or how much. In the meantime she is given a set of tasks that are undeniably real and but peripheral.

The interesting project started in month four and is well underway. Nobody excluded her from it. She simply was not there when it was staffed, and restaffing a live project is disruptive, so the question never gets asked.

Her manager, who is caring and means well, is being careful not to overload her. That care expresses itself as fewer asks, lighter work, no travel. She experiences it as being set aside.

None of this is hostile, or even intentional. Every individual decision in that sequence is defensible. And by day ninety, a version of her role has settled that is smaller than the one she left, and everyone has adjusted to it, except in her mind.

The resignation arrives eighteen months later and gets recorded as a personal decision.

What this has to do with your leadership pipeline

More than it looks, and this is the part I would want a talent function to sit with.

Every women’s leadership programme operates on whoever is still there. It draws from the manager and senior manager population as it exists on the day nominations open, and it can only develop the people in that pool. Which means anything that removes women from the pool before they become eligible is, in practice, a selection mechanism sitting upstream of your entire development investment.

And that is what an unmanaged return is. It is not neutral attrition. It filters on whether a particular manager happened to handle a particular ninety days well, and has nothing to do with capability, ambition or potential. The women who come through it with their trajectory intact are the ones who had a good manager that quarter.

So you can commission an excellent programme, deliver it well, and still watch senior representation refuse to move. Not because the programme failed. Because the pool it drew from had already been shaped by something nobody was managing.

Return design is talent selection, retention and pipeline building. We have simply never called it that, and so it never got that attention.

Why this transition specifically

Because it is the only major career transition that most organisations treat as an absence rather than a change.

We onboard external hires. We increasingly onboard internal promotions. We have almost nothing for the person coming back, because the mental model is that she was here, then she was away, and now she is here again. Nothing to design.

But she is returning to an organisation that has moved, into a role that has been redistributed, with a life outside work that has structurally changed, and with her own confidence in a place it has not been for years.

The design that changes the outcome

What I have seen work is unglamorous and largely free.

A portfolio conversation in week one, with a named date for full restoration. Not a vague assurance that things will get back to normal. A specific agreement about what returns, when, and who is accountable for making sure it happened.

A staged ramp that is agreed rather than assumed. The difference between a plan she participated in and a plan applied to her is the difference between support and sidelining, and from the outside those two look identical.

One protected piece of visible work in the first quarter. Something that puts her in front of people who matter, chosen deliberately. This single item does more for trajectory than anything else on the list, because it interrupts the story the organisation is otherwise starting to tell about her.

And a check-in at day ninety with someone who is not her manager. Her manager is usually the person whose well-intentioned decisions created the drift, and is therefore the least able to see it.

The number that would settle this internally

If you want to know whether this is happening in your organisation, do not run a survey.

Plot your regretted attrition of women against months since return from maternity leave. Not against grade. Not against tenure. Months since return.

Most organisations have never cut the data that way, and in most of them the pattern is visible immediately. It is a query, not a project, and it converts a conversation about culture into a conversation about a specific window with a specific cost attached.

The ambition was never the issue.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ninety-days-decide-whether-she-stays-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–iuxlc/?trackingId=gw%2BdN0lYOo4WQlaot3E50g%3D%3D

BlogAugust 28, 2026

Is Your Women’s Leadership Programme Optimising a Stage They Have Already Left behind?

Fund the programme, run it well, and three years from now the senior numbers will look roughly as they do today. Not because the programme did not work. Because a meaningful share of the women it was designed for will have left the organisation before they ever became eligible for it.

Most women’s leadership programmes in India are built around the move from manager to senior manager or above. Reasonably so. It is the step where the numbers thin out, and it is where our global reference points tell us to look.

In the Indian context, I think we are arriving several years too late.

The break that happens at return from maternity

The maternity transition removes women from the pipeline before the promotion gap can be measured on them.

Not always at the point of leaving. Very often at the point of coming back, and often not immediately. A woman returns, finds her portfolio has been redistributed and only partly returned, discovers that the interesting project went to someone available in month four, and stays another eighteen months before concluding that the trajectory has changed. That exit gets recorded as a personal decision, and in one sense it is. But the conditions were set in the first ninety days after her return, by an organisation that was well-intentioned but simply had no architecture for the transition.

Run a leadership programme for manager-level women in an organisation with a weak return-to-work design, and a meaningful share of your talent has already left that population before becoming eligible. The sequencing is off, and it is off in a way that is very hard to see from inside an annual plan, because the two things are usually owned by different people and reported in different packs.

I would go further. In some organisations I have worked with, the single highest-return leadership intervention available was not a leadership programme at all. It was a structured, staged, properly resourced return.

The second break nobody plans for

There is a later one, and it gets discussed far less.

Care obligations for parents and parents-in-law arrive for many Indian women in their forties. That is precisely the decade in which the move into genuine senior leadership happens, when travel increases, when roles become geographically spread, when the job stops fitting neatly into predictable hours.

What the organisation observes at that moment is a capable woman becoming less available and less forward-leaning. What the organisation records is a mid-career decline in ambition. What is actually happening is a capacity constraint arriving from multiple obligations, at the worst possible moment, in a culture where that particular obligation is normalised and therefore not planned for.

We have built some vocabulary around maternity. We have built almost none around this. And so it goes unnamed, gets misread as motivation dip, and quietly ends careers that had another fifteen years in them.

Why this keeps getting misdiagnosed

Both of these are capacity constraints. Both get filed as motivation and ambition problems.

It is the same error we make with first-time managers, where we look at someone drowning in a new role and conclude they were a wrong decision. The solution provided in training. The training is necessary to help them with the transition, but it will work only if systemic barriers are removed as well.

A capacity constraint cannot be trained away. It can only be designed around, and designing around it needs ownership and effort.

What I would check before starting anything

Before the next women’s leadership programme is signed off, three things are worth knowing.

Where your women actually exit, plotted against the maternity transition rather than against level. Not attrition by grade. Attrition by months since return.

What happens to a returning woman’s portfolio, and who owns getting it back. If the answer is her manager, and nothing checks whether it happened, then the answer is nobody.

And whether anyone in your organisation has ever asked a woman in her forties what she is carrying at home. Not in an engagement survey. In a conversation, by someone who could actually do something about the answer.

None of this is a reason to stop running leadership programmes. They matter and done properly they change trajectories.

But if you can walk into your next planning conversation with attrition plotted against months since return rather than against grade, you will be holding something far more persuasive than a programme proposal. You will be holding a diagnosis, and the investment case tends to make itself after that.

Find the leak first. Then decide what to build.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-womens-leadership-programme-optimising-stage-sonica-snmxc/?trackingId=gRPSshd47Z5VAwkeblOxFQ%3D%3D

BlogAugust 26, 2026

The Difference Between a Programme and a Pipeline Is What Happens to the List

At the end of every women’s leadership programme there is a list of names.

Everything that matters about that programme is decided by where the list goes next. Not the faculty. Not the framework. Not whether it ran over six months or six days.

If the list goes into a folder, it was a development experience. Valuable, probably appreciated, and largely invisible to the organisation within a quarter. If the list goes into the succession conversation, with the CEO in the room and roles attached to names, it was a pipeline intervention.

Same content. Same participants. Entirely different outcome. And the difference is a design choice, not a budget one.

You can predict this before the programme starts

There is an easier tell than the list, and it is available on day one.

Look at which budget the programme is funded from.

This is not about the quality of the function holding the money. It is about where obligation sits. When a programme sits entirely on the DEI or L&D line, the business has no stake in the outcome. Line managers will release their people and say supportive things, and they will treat the whole thing as something happening adjacent to the work, because nothing in their own year depends on what comes out of it. That is not resistance. It is just how accountability works.

When a business co-funds it, the business head turns up. Not for the opening address, but to the sessions where the participants are actually working, because the money came out of a number they answer for. Their questions change the room. And when it ends, they want to know what to do with the people, because they paid for the development.

I have watched the same curriculum, delivered by the same people, produce entirely different results across those two conditions.

Which makes co-funding one of the most powerful moves available to you, and it is worth going after even when your own budget could cover the whole thing. Ask a business head for a third. The money matters far less than what the contribution does to their sense of ownership, and it converts a programme you have to defend every year into one the business is invested in protecting and promoting.

What we measure, and what it conceals

Almost all evaluation in this space stops at the individual. Confidence, satisfaction, self-reported readiness, would you recommend it to a colleague. All of it collected within a fortnight of the programme ending, when everyone feels good.

Which means a programme that changed twenty women’s self-belief and nothing else looks identical, in the reporting, to a programme that changed twenty women’s careers. That is not a measurement failure on anyone’s part. Those are the measures the market has always supplied, and they get collected because they are what the platform produces.

But it does leave you defending an investment with the weakest evidence available, in front of a CFO who deals in lagged outcomes all day.

The measures that would separate them are not exotic. Promotion rate of participants against a matched comparison group at eighteen and thirty-six months. Retention against the same group. How many of the names appear on a succession slate two years later. All of it already sits in your HRIS. It needs patience and a decision made early, not new instrumentation, and the first time you put that comparison in front of a leadership team the conversation about this budget changes permanently.

The uncomfortable version of sponsorship

The other thing that determines what happens to the list is sponsorship, and most of what we call sponsorship is not sponsorship.

The 2025 Women in the Workplace report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey found that 65 per cent of employees with a sponsor were promoted in the previous two years, against 35 per cent of those without. Yet only 31 per cent of entry-level women report having a sponsor, against 45 per cent of men at the same level. The organisational response to that gap has been to assign mentors and coaches.

A mentor gives advice, which costs the mentor nothing. A sponsor spends their own credibility on someone else’s behalf, in a room the person is not in, at a moment when being wrong will attach to them. That is a bet. Assigning someone to make a bet, with no consequence to them for how it turns out, produces a calendar invitation rather than an advocate.

If sponsorship is to be real, the sponsor’s own review has to reflect what happened to the person they sponsored. Almost nobody does this, and it is the single clearest line I know between organisations where these programmes convert into succession pipeline and organisations where they do not.

Three questions you should at before embarking on a women’s program

Whose budget is this coming from, and what does that person want out of it.
Where does the list of names go on the final day, and who owns it after that.
What will we measure at eighteen months, and have we agreed on it now.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/difference-between-programme-pipeline-what-happens-sonica-1ngec/?trackingId=4DzNd%2FkqClTUtSFgpT29wQ%3D%3D

BlogAugust 24, 2026

Why We Still Run Women’s Leadership Programs (And It Isn’t Hypocrisy)

Every time I sit across from a CHRO defending a women’s leadership program, someone in the room asks the same question. If we truly believe leadership should be gender agnostic, isn’t it a contradiction to run a program that singles women out? Sometimes it’s the women themselves who ask it, sitting in that very room, wondering why they were invited into a program. Why are we in this room?

I understand the discomfort. But the answer to that question doesn’t lie in the boardroom, the classroom, or the organisation’s diversity charter. It lies in the way our society is still built.

It Isn’t About the Boardroom

The stereotypical roles we assign to men and women haven’t disappeared. They’re just harder to see than they were thirty years ago, when they showed up as explicit rules and gender norms. Today they show up subtly, inside families, inside expectations, and they cut just as deep.

A young woman professional starts her career the same way her male peers do. Then the pressure to marry begins, usually before she’s ready for it to. A newly married woman is expected to plan a child soon after. A new mother is expected to make the child her first and only priority, regardless of what she’s built at work. A daughter, married or not, is still expected to be the one who looks after ageing parents and in-laws when the family needs care. None of this shows up in a performance review. All of it shapes what a woman brings to the table when she finally sits down at one.

The Head Start Nobody Talks About

In my work with organisations across sectors, I’ve watched capable women walk into rooms already carrying a full day’s labour that their male colleagues never had to account for. Handling pressure from immediate and extended family takes real emotional strength, sustained over years, not a single hard conversation. Handling the daily expectations, the school run, the ageing parent’s medication schedule, the in-law who needs a call, takes time and effort and energy that has to come from somewhere.

Picture a woman who is up at five to make sure everything at home is taken care of before she walks into the office by nine. She sits down in the team meeting to present her proposal, across the table from colleagues who have spent none of the emotional, mental, or physical energy she has already spent since five that morning. They are being evaluated on the same scale, in the same meeting, as though the four hours before nine o’clock never happened.

This is not an even playing field, and we need to stop pretending it is.

What This Actually Demands of Her

Getting to that meeting and performing well in it requires a woman to have built a specific kind of strength that her male peers were never required to build in the same way: the courage to prioritise her own work in the middle of competing family demands, and the ability to say no to people who have never had to hear it from her before. That is not a soft skill. It is the discipline a woman leader has to develop simply to arrive at the same starting line as everyone else in the room.

Women’s leadership programs exist to build and sharpen exactly that discipline, and to give women the tools, the sponsorship, and the language to hold their ground once they have it. That is not a favour to women, and it is not a contradiction of the belief that leadership itself should be gender agnostic. It is what makes gender agnostic leadership possible in the first place. You cannot judge two people by the same yardstick when one of them started the race four hours earlier than the other, carrying weight the other never had to carry at all.

Until the load at home is shared as evenly as the ambition at work, we owe women that head start back. Not as charity. As correction.

Build the pipeline. Name the load. Level the field before you judge the race.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-still-run-womens-leadership-programs-isnt-aron-she-her-hers–2fvdf/?trackingId=KEROgo0tS7C30%2BWEpTtwkA%3D%3D

BlogAugust 21, 2026

The Gap Opens at the First Promotion, Not at the Top

Most of the attention in this field goes to the boardroom. Board representation, C-suite percentages, the woman who did or did not get the top job.

I understand why. Those numbers are visible, they are reported publicly, and they are the ones your key stakeholders read about.

But if you are trying to work out where to put finite time and budget for a genuine pipeline that reaches the top, the number that should concern you most is much further down.

The step where it actually opens

Ninety-three women were promoted to manager for every hundred men last year. For women of colour, seventy-four. Those figures come from the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, drawn from 124 organisations employing around three million people, and the pattern has held for eleven consecutive years.

That is the very first step off individual contributor. Before any of the maternity penalties, before the senior-leadership travel demands, before most of the things we usually reach for as explanations. The cohort is already uneven at the point where it becomes a management pipeline at all, and every subsequent stage inherits that arithmetic.

Which means an organisation can run an entirely fair process at every level above manager and still end up with the C-suite it has. The distortion was introduced early.

Why this changes the target

That statistic describes a decision made by a manager deciding on promotions. It is not a statement about the women in question, their capability, their ambition or their readiness. It is a statement about a judgement call made by someone else, about them, usually with imperfect information and under time pressure.

So an intervention aimed at the candidate is aimed one level below where the decision sits. However good the programme is, however engaged the participants are, it does not touch the decision maker.

This is worth naming out loud in your next intervention design conversation, because it reframes what you are commissioning. You are not looking for a women’s development programme only. You are also looking for something that reaches first-line managers at the moment they decide who is ready.

What reaching them looks like

The good news is that this population is easier to influence than senior leaders, because there are more of them and they are less invested in defending existing outcomes.

A few things I have seen work.

Make readiness criteria explicit before the promotion round rather than during it. Most first-line managers are not applying a biased standard deliberately, but in the absence of clear and defined, standards they default to resemblance. Someone reminds them of themselves at that stage, and that feels like evidence.

Ask for the counterfactual in calibration. When a manager says someone is not quite ready, ask what specifically would make them ready and by when. This single question converts a feeling into a development plan. Often the inability to answer why someone is not ready can alter the decision itself.

Report promotion ratios by manager, not just by business unit. Aggregated to a division, the number disappears into the average. At manager level it becomes visible, and visibility does a great deal of work on its own without anyone needing to be confronted.

And put the promotion decision itself into your first-time manager training, because that is where the habit forms. A manager decides who is ready for the first time in year one, and whatever they do then, they tend to keep doing.

Where this leaves your women’s programme

It does not remove the case for it. Women’s leadership programmes do real things: they build visibility, networks, sponsors, they surface talent the organisation had not noticed, they change what individual women believe is available to them. They enable women to identify their success goals and chase them uninhibited.

What this changes is the systemic barriers they encounter.

A programme aimed at women cannot close a gap produced by promoting managers. Sold on that basis it will underdeliver, and the next budget conversation becomes harder for you than it needed to be. Sold alongside a managerial intervention, with the promotion ratio as the shared measure, it becomes part of something that can actually move.

The gap opens at the first rung.

That is where the design should start, and it is a much cost optimised place to work than the boardroom.

Link –https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gap-opens-first-promotion-top-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–qjw1c/?trackingId=tWaInHja2uURaiZgm8basw%3D%3D

BlogAugust 19, 2026

Manager Stress Is Not a Workload Problem

Four in ten employees who tell their manager they are burning out and say the manager then did nothing.

This is not indifference.

It comes from Eagle Hill Consulting’s Workforce Burnout Survey 2025, run by Ipsos across a national sample of more than 1,400 US employees. The finding sits inside a bleaker one. Only 42 per cent of burned-out workers tell their manager at all, and among the minority who do speak up, the same proportion again, 42 per cent, report that nothing followed. It is American data, and the Indian picture has its own texture, but I have sat in enough Indian boardrooms to see the same pattern.

What that second 42 per cent actually describes, in my experience, is a manager who listened properly, cared genuinely, and had no idea what they were permitted to do next. And that is a very different problem from the one we have been trying to solve.

Because the wider evidence on manager stress is by now hard to argue with. A global leadership study last year found seven in ten leaders reporting a sharp increase in stress, with 40 per cent actively thinking about leaving. Managers show up consistently as significantly more likely than their teams to report stress at levels they themselves describe as alarming, and they take less leave than the people who report to them, not more.

We answered a control problem with a capacity solution

Our response to all of this has been almost entirely about volume. Reduce the meeting load. Audit the calendar. Introduce a no-meeting Friday. Bring in a wellbeing platform. All of it well-intentioned, much of it useful at the margins, and almost none of it touching what is actually happening to the person.

Because a manager’s stress is not primarily about how much they are carrying. It is about what kind of thing they are carrying.

Why this stress is a different kind

When you are an individual contributor, your anxiety has somewhere to go. Before the promotion, stretch nights ended at 2am with the deck finished. The deliverable is late, so you stay up and finish it. The client is unhappy, so you fix the work. There is a direct line between the worry and an action you can personally take, and that line is enormously protective, even when the hours are brutal. Long days are exhausting, but there is an action plan.

Management blurs that line. A new manager lies awake about a conversation they do not know how to start. You are accountable for outcomes that other people have to deliver. The delivery slips because someone is struggling, and there is no amount of your own effort that resolves it. Someone is quietly disengaging and you can feel it in the one-to-ones without being able to name it. A restructure is coming that you did not decide and cannot explain, and you will be the one who has to sit in a room and answer for it. The responsibility is total but the control is partial, and the human nervous system does not handle that combination well.

This is what I mean when I say a manager’s stress is not workload related. It is not stress about their work. It is stress about people, held on behalf of people, in a role that has been given the accountability without the levers.

Once you see it that way, the standard interventions stop making sense. Giving a manager two hours back on Friday afternoon does very little for someone who is struggling with a disengaged team member or hesitating to have a hard conversation. Reducing their meeting count does nothing for the person who has been asked to deliver a message they privately disagree with. You cannot solve a control problem with a capacity solution, and yet that is what most wellbeing strategies are quietly attempting.

What actually helps

What actually helps is narrower and less glamorous than a wellbeing programme.

It helps to give managers somewhere to put the load. A peer group of other managers, meeting without their bosses present, doing nothing more sophisticated than describing live situations to people in the same position. Half of what makes this stress corrosive is the belief that it is personal, that everyone else is coping and you are the one struggling. That belief does not survive twenty minutes in a room of peers, and I have watched it dissolve in real time.

It helps to be honest about where a manager’s authority actually ends. A great deal of manager stress comes from being held responsible for things nobody has given them the power to change: compensation bands, headcount, a policy. When we are explicit about the boundary, we are not lowering the bar. We are removing blame that was never fair and that managers absorb silently because they think admitting it would look like weakness.

It helps enormously to teach the referral architecture, which brings us back to where we started. Knowing what support exists, what a manager is permitted to offer, when to involve HR, when something has moved beyond their competence and their circle of control and influence entirely: this is a skill, and it is a learnable one. We currently treat it as common sense and then express surprise when four in ten of those conversations go nowhere. Nobody freezes because they do not care. They freeze because they do not know what to do next.

And it helps for senior leaders to model the thing they keep asking for. Managers do not take leave because their own leaders do not take leave, and because the organisation has built teams with no redundancy, so a manager’s absence is a genuine operational problem. This is not a mindset issue to be fixed with a communication campaign. It is a systemic design flaw, and it should be treated as one.

Who is holding them

We have spent several years telling managers to look after their teams’ wellbeing, and we have made them the most important variable in it. Research now puts a manager’s influence on someone’s mental health on a par with a spouse’s. That is an extraordinary thing to place on a person, and we have placed it on them without asking who is holding it for them.

Manager burnout will not solve with a wellbeing calendar.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/manager-stress-workload-problem-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–xiugc/?trackingId=JgC44M%2B6LZkm9fqkKrtuMg%3D%3D

BlogAugust 14, 2026

She waited until everyone else had packed up and left.

I had just finished a session on managing performance, the kind I have run a hundred times, and she had been quiet through most of it. Now she was standing at the edge of the table with her notebook still open, asking me something that was not on the agenda.

“How do I go back and be their boss on Monday, when on Friday I was the one complaining about the workload with them?”

I have thought about that question for years, because it is the one that I had struggled with myself, when I made Manager for the first time, and it is the one that actually decided how I and my work showed up.

We had spent the morning on objective setting, on how to structure a one-to-one, on giving constructive feedback, two way conversation and active listening. All of it useful. None of it touching the thing that was making her jittery.

Three transitions, not one

Here is what I have come to believe, and it comes from first hand experience. Not everything I did was right, I floundered and learnt. But I wish someone had hand held me then, guided me.

When someone becomes a manager for the first time, three separate transitions begin at the same time.

The first is the task transition, the move from doing the work to enabling it. Delegation, prioritisation, running a review, setting objectives. It is teachable, it is observable, and it fits neatly into a two-day agenda, which is precisely why it dominates every curriculum I have ever been asked to look at.

The second is the identity transition. Someone who spent years becoming genuinely good at something walks into a job where she is a novice again. Her sense of professional worth was built on work she could point at, and overnight that work belongs to other people. What she feels is an identity crisis. It gets described, if it gets described at all, as a strange emptiness at the end of the week when she cannot say what she actually did that week.

The third is the one she was asking me about. The relational transition. Authority on paper arrives instantly. Authority in the room has to be earned again, in front of people who remember the earlier version of you or dont know you at all.

Most first time manager programs focus on the first and leave people to improvise the other two.

What improvising actually produces

This is what leaving them to figure it out looks like. The identity transition, left alone, produces a manager who delegates the work without trust, starts micromanaging, keeps redoing the work others deliver, because that is where she still feels excellent. It is not a delegation problem. She is holding on because letting go makes her fearful, invisible and stressed, and nobody has told her that the feeling is normal, expected, and temporary.

The relational transition, left alone, produces the manager who fears being misunderstood and over-invests in being liked. She defers the hard conversation in week three because the friendship is still warm, and defers it again in week eight, and by month six the issue has grown to a size where the correction, when it finally comes, lands as arbitrary and disproportionate. The kindness in month leads to the harshness in month six.

And here is the part I think should change how we design for this. A first-time manager who has genuinely settled her identity and rebuilt her relationships will work out delegation on her own, usually inside a quarter, because delegation is a practical problem and she is a practical person. The reverse never happens. Nobody has ever attended enough workshops to feel like they belong in a room where they have not yet earned trust.

What would change this

So what do we actually do?

We name the competence dip before it arrives : Telling a new manager that she is about to struggle at her job for roughly a quarter, that this is a feature of the transition and not a verdict on her, changes what she does with the feeling. Unnamed, it becomes a dent in self-confidence leading to imposter syndrome, and the retreat into individual work begins. Named in advance, it becomes something she can work with.
We give her language for the conversation she was asking me about, rather than leaving her to improvise it : The explicit discussion with a former peer or a new team member about what changes and what does not, held in the first fortnight, is worth more than any module on difficult conversations. Most new managers avoid it because it feels awkward. It is awkward. It is also the highest-return awkward conversation of the entire first year.
And we put her own manager into the design, not as a stakeholder who receives a briefing email but as a participant with obligations of their own: what to ask about, what to stop escalating, what to protect while this person finds her feet. The identity and relational transitions get worked out in the space between a new manager and her boss. They do not get worked out in a classroom.

None of this is expensive. What it asks of us is a willingness to admit that the part of this we are most comfortable teaching is not the part that determines the outcome.

The part that stays with me

I answered her question that day, and I hope I answered it well. What has stayed with me is that she waited for the room to be empty before she felt she could ask.

Teach the task. Name the identity. Rebuild the relationships.

The order matters more than the content

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/she-waited-until-everyone-else-had-packed-up-left-sonica-cxkne/?trackingId=2PB%2B3RWNgylUVq4wKK3tWg%3D%3D

BlogAugust 10, 2026

AI Can Write the Strategy. It Can’t Sit in the Room.

Someone said to me recently: why do we still need to build strategic HR business partner capability? AI makes the strategy now. It even tells you what prompts to use.

I didn’t spend my energy arguing. But the question stayed with me long after the conversation ended, because it assumes strategy is the deliverable, when in my experience, it has never been the hard part.

What actually happens in the room

Picture an HR professional with five years of experience sitting across from a business leader with fifteen years, discussing budgets, workload allocation, engagement and belonging scores. In my work with organisations across sectors, I’ve consistently seen what separates a good HR business partner in that room, and it is not the comprehensiveness of the presentation. It is business acumen. It is the confidence to hold a point of view under pushback. It is a grip over the talent landscape, inside the organisation and outside it, sharp enough to know which numbers matter and which are noise. And underneath all of it is a conviction, genuinely held, that HR is not a support function reacting to what the business decides, but a business-critical function shaping what the business decides.

A brilliantly generated deck does not carry that conviction into the room. The person presenting it does, or doesn’t.

AI changes the tool, not the test

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. AI can genuinely contribute to this work, and I’d be doing the profession a disservice to pretend otherwise. It can surface patterns in attrition data faster than any of us can. It can draft a first-cut workforce plan, model scenarios, even flag risks we might have missed. None of that is in question.

What is in question is what happens after the AI has done its part. Because the moment that HR professional is in the room, and the business leader pushes back on the budget ask, or questions whether the engagement dip is really a talent risk or just a temporary blip, the strategy on the slide stops being the thing that matters. What matters is whether the person defending it has the acumen to reframe the argument on the spot, the confidence to hold ground without becoming rigid, and the conviction to say, clearly, why this matters to the business and not just to HR. That is a different set of competencies, and it is not one any tool builds for you. It is built the way it has always been built: Through Prep, through mentorship, through being in rooms like this one often enough.

The role AI cannot automate

This is why I think the timing of that comment was exactly backwards. As AI absorbs more of the analytical and administrative load, what is left for the strategic HRBP to carry becomes more concentrated, not less. Someone still has to be the conscience keeper who asks whether a workforce decision is fair, not just efficient. Someone still has to be the navigator who can read a turbulent moment, a restructuring, a leadership change, a culture under strain, and know what the organisation needs to hear, not just what it wants to hear. AI can inform that judgment. It cannot own it, because owning it means being accountable for the consequences of what you say in that room, and accountability is not something you can prompt for.

So the answer to “why build this capability” is not that AI is a threat to be defended against. It’s that AI has finally cleared enough of the clutter for us to see what strategic HR business partnering was actually always about, and it was never the deck.

Build the acumen. Hold the conviction. Own the room.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-can-write-strategy-cant-sit-room-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–g5yhc/?trackingId=upY6AT0kI5R%2BZdYQ5xA1ng%3D%3D

BlogAugust 7, 2026

The Analyst Who Stopped Raising Her Hand

There is a moment in organisations that I’ve started paying attention to over the years.

It isn’t when someone resigns. By then, the decision has usually been made long ago.

It’s much earlier. It’s the moment a capable employee quietly decides, “I’ll stop putting myself forward.”

Most managers never see that moment happen. A few months later, they’ll say the person has become less engaged or doesn’t show enough initiative anymore. What they rarely connect is that these behaviours usually begin with one small interaction that seemed insignificant at the time.

I remember one such interaction very clearly.

A young team member, let’s call her Ananya, had been asked to prepare her first important client deliverable. She worked hard on it, stayed back to finish it and sent it to her manager for review. She opened it late that evening. There were things she wanted done differently, so she rewrote almost the entire document herself and sent it to the client before she came into work the next morning.

When I spoke to her later, she genuinely believed he had done the right thing. “I was just trying to help,” she said. And I believed her.

This is not a story about a difficult manager. It is a story about a welll intentioned manager who hadn’t realised that her job had changed.

When Ananya opened the document the next morning, she didn’t find comments explaining the edits or a conversation inviting her to think differently. She found a document that no longer looked like something she had written.

I’ve often wondered what went through her mind.

Not because the edits were unfair. Managers should absolutely improve the quality of work before it reaches a client.

But in the absence of a conversation, people usually fill in the blanks themselves.

Maybe she concluded she wasn’t ready. Maybe she thought she wasn’t as capable as she had imagined. Or maybe she simply decided not to put too much effort anymore.

Whatever she told herself, something changed after that.

Her manager noticed it months later. He never connected it to that document.

Good intentions don’t always build confident teams

What fascinates me is that I’ve seen versions of this story many times since.

The managers involved are rarely controlling or insecure. More often than not, they’re high performers who built their reputation by producing exceptional work. When they become managers, they naturally continue doing what has always worked for them. They edit. They step in when something isn’t perfect. They solve problems before anyone else has the chance to.

From their perspective, they’re protecting quality.

From their team’s perspective, they’re slowly teaching people that the safest option is to comply, not to think differently, to question status quo or volunteer new ideas.

Success has been redefined

Somewhere between being an individual contributor and becoming a manager, the job changes in a way we don’t talk about enough.

Success is no longer measured by the quality of what you produce yourself. It’s measured by what other people become capable of producing because they worked with you.

That’s a difficult transition.

We celebrate the promotion, hand over a larger team and assume people will naturally move from being the best individual contributor to helping others grow.

Many struggle, get stressed and burnt out.

That’s because the transition was not enabled.

Culture is built in moments nobody records

Over time, those habits leave traces.

You see them in meetings where everyone waits for the manager to speak before offering an opinion.

You see them in teams where people stop taking ownership because experience has taught them the work will eventually come back with someone else’s edits.

You see them in capable employees who quietly choose safer assignments over stretch opportunities.

By the time organisations begin talking about disengagement, those patterns have often been developing for months.

That’s why culture can rarely be understood only through surveys or exit interviews. It lives in everyday interactions.

We at Marching sheep have always maintained- An employee experiences an organisation through their managers. And if managers are not enabled to invoke critical thinking, healthy debates, welcoming diverse perspectives, then we are slowly stifling the culture.

The help that comes too late

The engagement survey results that show alarming belonging scores, or the dwindling talent pipeline because of high attrition, that is when solutions are sought in leadership programmes, workshops and frameworks. But by that time months, years and decades have passed. Habits, beliefs and behaviors become deeply entrenched. Unlearning feels painful.

This is reactive solutioning. But as they say, prevention is better than cure.

What if we started building our CXO pipeline right from that first time manager, wherein we built the capability and the capacity to lead others to succeed.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analyst-who-stopped-raising-her-hand-sonica-aron-she-her-hers–cklfc/?trackingId=92Ex8dmU%2BkbM%2FJETU3Ws2w%3D%3D

BlogAugust 1, 2026

The Biggest Leadership Gap Today Is Not Strategy but Manager Readiness.

One pattern has become difficult for me to ignore.

Organisations spend months refining strategy, but comparatively little time preparing the managers expected to bring that strategy to life.
Perhaps that’s why so many well-designed strategies struggle once they reach the real world.

In my experience, execution is rarely where the strategy breaks down. It’s where managers are left to interpret, communicate, and lead change without enough preparation.

A few reflections on why I believe manager readiness may be one of the most overlooked leadership priorities today.

I’m curious to hear your perspective. Have we underestimated the role managers play in turning strategy into reality?

#firsttimemanagers #managers #managerialcapabilities #workforcedevelopment #thoughtleadership

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sonica-aron-she-her-hers-17499a1_firsttimemanagers-managers-managerialcapabilities-activity-7488435747801358336-1y5c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABS2WgB8dIo4r2vjNbQcDRxB1z3vkSekis

BlogJuly 22, 2026

We’re Still Teaching Leadership Like It’s 2006. Today’s Managers Need a Different Playbook.

Lets pause and reflect.

If someone became a manager for the first time today, would we train them differently from how we trained managers twenty years ago? Purely on instinct, the answer should be yes.

But the reality is very different.

The examples may have changed. The slides look more modern. We have added conversations about wellbeing, hybrid work, and AI.

Yet beneath the surface, much of the thinking about leadership still belongs to a very different workplace. The workplace where managers usually had more information than their teams, decisions moved slowly through hierarchies, careers followed predictable paths, and stability was often the norm.

But today’s workplace looks very different.

Knowledge no longer sits neatly with the manager. A graduate can use AI to explore a problem in minutes. Teams are increasingly made up of specialists whose technical expertise exceeds that of the person leading them. Employees expect feedback in real time rather than once a year. Careers are no longer linear, and uncertainty has become a permanent feature of work rather than an occasional disruption.

Yet many organisations are still preparing managers for a world that no longer exists. Add to it the nuance of stereotyping the younger generation as impatient, not committed or loyal.

We no longer need the manager to have all the answers but should know how to get their team to have all the answers.

We do not need managers to command and control, but to enable and empower.

We need managers who speak less and listen more.

We need managers who can delegate with trust and not micromanage.

We need managers who just do not fill performance appraisals but spend time helping team members navigate ambiguity, rapid change, conflicting priorities, and constant reinvention.

Perhaps the biggest shift is this.

For years, managers created value by having answers and doing it all.

Today, they create value by helping teams ask better questions.

That is a very different capability.

The strongest managers I work with are not the people trying to prove they know the most. They are the ones who create environments where people think more deeply, challenge assumptions respectfully, learn continuously, and make better decisions together.

That requires a different kind of confidence. Not the confidence that comes from always being right.

The confidence to admit that someone else may know more. To change direction when new information emerges.

To say, “Let’s figure this out together,” without feeling that authority has been diminished.

Ironically, I believe AI has made this even more important.

As information becomes increasingly accessible, leadership becomes less about knowledge and more about judgment.

Less about providing answers and more about creating conditions where good thinking can happen.

That is not the leadership playbook many of today’s managers inherited. It is the one they now need.

If we continue preparing managers for yesterday’s workplace, we should not be surprised when they struggle in today’s.

Leadership has changed.

Perhaps it is time our leadership development caught up.

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/were-still-teaching-leadership-like-its-2006-todays-sonica-s4r9c/?trackingId=C14pKo%2FkSoCn6%2BONyWj7Sw%3D%3D