In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws welcomes global executive coach and author Sabina Nawaz to explore the hidden challenges of leadership. Nawaz shares how intense pressure—not just power—can quietly reshape the way we lead, often without us realizing it. Drawing from her time as a Microsoft executive, she reveals key blind spots that hold leaders back and offers actionable strategies to stay grounded, empathetic, and effective. Don’t let stress sabotage your leadership—tune in now.
GUEST A GLANCE
Sabina Nawaz is a global executive coach, speaker, and author of You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need). A former Microsoft leader, she advises top executives and teaches at Northeastern and Drexel. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and other leading business publications.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
WHEN PRESSURE CORRUPTS
Sabina Nawaz candidly shares how relentless pressure transformed her from a caring, engaged leader into someone who was abrupt and dismissive—without even realizing it. She explains, “It is not power, but pressure that corrupts.” As she rose through the ranks at Microsoft while managing high-stakes projects and a newborn at home, she found herself prioritizing efficiency over empathy. She believed she was excelling, hitting every goal, and avoiding costly mistakes. But in reality, the pressure had eroded her leadership presence, and no one around her felt comfortable enough to tell her otherwise. “Nobody around me was telling me that it wasn’t [going well] because power and that difference in hierarchical structure also causes a silencing of the people,” she reflects.
Nawaz was once known for deeply caring about her team—supporting their career growth, work-life balance, and feedback. But when she was suddenly promoted just before maternity leave and returned to a role with direct exposure to Steve Ballmer, the high-intensity demands consumed her. From the moment she stepped back into the office, “the tone and the pace” were set. The shift was so subtle that she didn’t see it until much later. The lesson is clear: leadership isn’t about avoiding pressure but learning to navigate it without losing connection to the people who matter most.
Ultimately, great leadership isn’t just about delivering results—it’s about staying aware of how pressure affects your behavior and relationships. Nawaz’s story highlights the danger of unchecked stress: when leaders become overwhelmed, they risk becoming unapproachable, detached, and ineffective. True leadership means building strategies to manage pressure and ensuring that efficiency never overshadows empathy.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Clinging to the Past
“This is true for any level of management, all the way to CEO. Every time we get promoted, something that worked here is going to look very different to the next that are craning up to look at you. […] What happens is that those strengths can be viewed very differently from the other side of the power gap, if you will. In my case, efficiency […] was a strength of mine. The way it showed up when I was under high pressure—I wasn’t explaining things as well. I wasn’t taking time to connect with people. So it’s showing up as kind of uncaring. There are some other really common blind spots that show up. So if somebody is very detail-oriented, you can guess that’s going to show up as micromanagement. When somebody is very calm, that can show up as ‘this person lacks passion,’ or ‘they don’t care,’ or ‘they’re aloof.’ So there’s nothing wrong with these traits, but they get seen in a whole different way. You didn’t change—your circumstances changed. Your perch changed.”
A Dangerous Leadership Myth
“I’d say the first one to start with is the yeah-but. And often, people say, yeah-but, yeah-but, again, because they don’t think of themselves as that boss. They don’t think of themselves as agents of misery. So they go, ‘Yeah-but, we’re under a tight deadline.’ ‘Yeah-but, this is the busiest time of year.’ ‘Yeah-but.’ And so, I think the first thing to examine is your language. If you’re yeah-butting your way through your day, that’s likely showing up in a very different way to the people who work for you and with you.”
Getting Honest
“People around us cushion us from the tough news. Because who’s going to say, ‘Hey boss, you suck at that’ when that boss determines my future, my paycheck, my promotion, my bonus? And so, we don’t hear the feedback that we need. And simply asking our people and telling them, ‘Hey, give me feedback,’ they’re going to nod, they’re going to say yes, but they’re going to cushion that feedback with a lot of sweetness. And then you don’t know until it’s too late.”
“The Singular Story”
“The singular story is: I have a point of view, I have an idea, or I have an interpretation or a direction I want to go in, and that direction becomes the direction because nobody else is telling me their ideas. Are they afraid to disagree with me? Or if I’m the first one who puts that forth, then who’s going to argue with that? ‘Well, yeah, boss, you’re right. Let’s go in that direction.’ And then we make wrong moves. This happened with somebody who made a big strategic bet on a piece of technology, and no one said anything. Eighteen months into the project, they realized that this was the wrong bet. The reality is—because I had interviewed people later—people knew ahead of time that it wasn’t going to work. But […] they perceived this person as so single-tracked and so confident that this is the way to go, they didn’t want to argue. Also, when they argued, they would get a lot of yeah-buts, so they gave up.”
Establishing Effective Habits
“A micro habit has two characteristics: it’s ridiculously small, and you do it every day. So what’s something you can do every day? […] So I might have a micro habit. Again, during one meeting a day, I’m going to set aside my phone outside of arm’s reach—or even during the first five minutes of a meeting if it’s too hard for you to be detached from your device for the whole meeting. So those are around presence, around listening. It could be around not interrupting. How do I ask a question of curiosity as opposed to interrupting in the middle of what somebody is saying? It could be making sure my own communication is clear enough. Can I ask somebody else to play back what they thought I said so I can make sure my communication was clear?”
Somebody’s Always Watching
“Because ‘how you do everything is how you do anything is how you do everything,’ as somebody wise once said. People are watching all of your moves, and all of your moves are on display—through a megaphone, under a microscope. So every little twitch of your eyebrow is being read and interpreted five different ways if there are five different people in that room. All those things in the margins matter, and sometimes they matter a lot more than what you’re saying—because it’s what you’re doing.”
From Contributor to Leader
“The first thing I think they need to think about is that it’s not about you anymore. As in, it’s not about your work. You have to create an environment for other people to do their work. So what are you doing to create the container instead of the content? You are no longer the content maker; you’re the container holder and shaper. So what does that look like in the actual work? It might be setting really clear goals, directions, and vision. It might be setting expectations and holding people accountable to them. It might be giving feedback—both positive and corrective—very, very clearly so people know what to keep doing more of or less of. So those are the kinds of things that you need to do. And the sooner you can get your hand out of the content pie, the sooner you can be successful as a manager.”
LEARN MORE
Sabina Nawaz’s book, You’re the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need), is available wherever books are sold. Connect with her at sabinanawaz.com or follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Blue Sky.