Guest Blog: Six Months of Leadership in the Wild - Lessons from the Trenches
Screenshot taken from one of our recent coaching calls 😀
Hi, Kelly here! I’m excited to share this guest post from my client Rupesh Parbhoo, an Engineering Manager with 14 years of experience leading digital transformations across the energy and software sectors. With global experience spanning the USA, Qatar, Papua New Guinea, and India, Rupesh has built his expertise inspiring diverse teams and driving business outcomes in complex, multinational environments. In this blog, he shares the journey behind his LinkedIn newsletter "Leadership in the Wild" and the powerful lessons he's learned about the practical side of leadership and management.
I decided to feature Rupesh’s post because it gives my blog readers a sense of how I coach others. Admittedly, it’s also gratifying to get to hear about the results of my work with a clients. Thanks for reading - and please do check out Rupesh’s LinkedIn newsletter!
In January 2025, I launched Leadership in the Wild, a LinkedIn newsletter. Six months have flown by, and it’s been an incredible journey. Originally, I planned to post just once a month. But once I started writing, the ideas kept flowing... so much so that in just under six months, I’ve published (not 6 but) 16 articles (including this one) and have reached a growing audience of curious, thoughtful leaders.
Being a bit of a data nerd, I even built a table to track themes and engagement. There’s probably more insight to dig into, but I’ll save that for a future newsletter.
As I reach this milestone, I wanted to pause and reflect on why I started this project in the first place, and the key people who helped me take the leap.
Leadership is hard
Initially, I was torn about the focus of my newsletter. I always felt that organizations glorified leadership, talked about it constantly, but rarely discussed or valued management.
There’s no shortage of books and TED Talks on leadership: inspiring vision, driving transformation, chasing the next big thing. And yes, all of that matters. But somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about management: the real, gritty, practical art of getting things done. Of translating lofty vision into daily action. Of leading a team through the mundane, the messy, and the meaningful.
After reflecting more deeply, I’ve realized I don’t want to draw a hard line between leadership and management. (For more on that, check out this great piece: Do Managers and Leaders Really Do Different Things?) What I really want to explore is the how. How do you lead? How do you make the abstract concrete? Communication is at the center of it all, in both leadership and management. That’s the thread I keep coming back to, and the theme that runs through every one of these newsletters.
“Keep learning… out loud.” -Kelly Soifer
In early 2023, Kelly Soifer, MA, ACC , a leadership development coach, was brought in to lead a group of frontline managers at Seeq Corporation to talk about something that often gets overlooked: not just leadership theory, but the practicalities of management. It was a 12-week course focused on the “how-tos.” Not vision, not charisma, but the real, daily work of making things happen. This was especially needed in engineering, where the role of the manager is often undervalued. Quoting Google engineers in 2013:
"In their hearts they’ve long believed that management is more destructive than beneficial, a distraction from ‘real work’ and tangible, goal-directed tasks." (source)
In contrast, the training conversations turned out to be some of the most grounded and useful leadership conversations I’ve ever had. We were learning in real time from peers across the organization. (Shout out to Sharlinda Salim Sachithananthan , Kjell Raemdonck, P.Eng, Joanna Zinsli , and Krista Novstrup!)
Check out a sampling of our curriculum here:
What is leadership?
What is management?
Emotional intelligence
Intercultural dynamics
Communication: asynchronous vs. synchronous, how to use various messaging tools, etc.
Team-building (distributed, remote, hybrid, in-person)
1:1s and performance management
Recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding
Time management
Like all good things, the program came to an end. But I wasn’t ready to stop learning. That’s when Kelly gave me a simple challenge: keep going. Keep learning, but this time through reflection and self-study. She encouraged me to document what I’d learned over the years, working across functions, countries, and cultures, and to pay attention to what I was learning as it happened.
I didn’t have a blog or a big following. I wasn’t an influencer, I was just a working manager leading an engineering team. But she helped me see the possibilities of creating a public newsletter on LinkedIn.
I realized this could be a way for me to tell real stories, process my own thinking, and maybe spark a conversation with others figuring it out too.
Today, the newsletter is still primarily a space for reflection. While I absolutely love the engagement and connection it brings, my core intent remains the same: to learn out loud and hopefully help others along the way.
What started as a once-a-month newsletter quickly picked up momentum. The ideas kept coming. It’s become one of the most fulfilling parts of my professional life. And it all started with Kelly’s nudge: “Keep learning, out loud.”
What’s Next
As I mentioned earlier, while I’m always curious to see what resonates most, I plan to continue writing organic content grounded in my day-to-day leadership journey. The stories, reflections, and lessons will keep coming, because the learning never stops.
If you're a manager seeking leadership development that’s practical, real-world, and refreshingly honest, I highly recommend working with Kelly Soifer: https://ksleadershipdevelop.me/. Her programs are thoughtful, actionable, and rooted in what actually matters to people doing the work. Whether you’re new to management or a seasoned leader looking for a tune-up, she’s the kind of guide who helps you grow from the inside out.
My newsletter wouldn’t exist without Kelly’s encouragement, and I hope reading it encourages you to take the next step in your own leadership story.
