Dharti Desai Chatterjee

Dharti Desai ChatterjeeJun 24, 2026

You got promoted. New title. New level. New room. And then the first senior level meeting starts and you realise everyone else is playing at a totally different level. Most people get promoted for being excellent at execution. Then they walk into their first senior role and discover the job sort of changed underneath them. They realize that they are only one 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘺. Because senior rooms run on decision-making and clear judgment. Now add a country or industry change on top of that. You are not just learning a new level. You are learning a new level in a room that does not yet know your name, does not share your cultural shorthand, and has no reason to extend you the benefit of the doubt while you figure it out. HBR research found that 60 percent of new senior leaders underperform in their first two years. Not because they lack capability. Because they keep running the operating system that got them promoted in a role that needs a completely different one. The trap looks like this. You delivered consistently so you keep delivering. Harder. And the people already at that level watch and think: not ready yet. Because execution is the floor now. Judgment is the ceiling. And if you crossed a border or switched industries to get here, there is one more thing. The credibility you built before does not travel automatically. Your track record is real. This market just has not read it yet. That is a very solvable problem. Fix it before the room decides without you.

Dharti Desai ChatterjeeJun 26, 2026

Still digging into the AI rabbit hole, and this one made me wonder. What if most "dead" leads aren't really dead. What if they're just 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 dead. Quiet, not gone. Untended, because we stopped giving them the attention they needed. A conversation goes quiet, the CRM marks it cold, and everyone moves on. But the small relationship that had begun didn't end. It just lost its reason to continue. Here's a golden insight: the reason to reconnect almost never comes from you. It comes from a change in their world. A funding round. A new role. A product launch. A team doubling. That's the re-entry point. Not "just checking in." A real reason, tied to something that actually happened to them. The problem was always scale. No human tracks job changes and funding news across hundreds of dormant contacts. So that signal sits there, unused, while the relationship quietly fades. This is where the tool got my attention. It’s called folk. It watches for those shifts across your contacts, surfaces the ones worth a message, and gives you the context behind why. You still decide who's worth reaching. You still write the thing that sounds like you. Here's my honest take after years of building GTM systems. The machine does the watching. The judgment about which relationship matters, and what to say, stays yours. I talk about credibility that walks ahead of you. A lot of that is just relationships you kept warm while everyone else let them go cold. If you're sitting on a pile of "dead" leads that you want to bring to life, check the link in comments below.

Dharti Desai ChatterjeeJun 22, 2026

The hardest career transition happening right now is not losing a job to AI. It is going from leading a team of twelve to being a team of one (or two). Management layers are compressing fast. Organisations are getting flatter. Leaders who spent a decade building the skill of multiplying themselves through others are now being asked to just do the thing themselves. Most get it wrong in the same way. They try to become a junior version of their old self. They second guess their instincts. They slow down to build consensus out of habit. They apologise for having a strong opinion when nobody asked them to manage one. That is not the transition. That is shrinking. Here is what the research shows. Harvard Business Review found that the best individual contributors often become the worst managers because they cannot stop doing the work themselves. CEB data shows 60 percent of new managers underperform in their first two years because the skills that got them promoted do not transfer to leading others. The transition you are making right now is that study running in reverse. The judgment you built leading others is 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 what makes you amazing as a solo operator. You already know which problems are worth solving. When to push and when to wait. How to read what is actually being asked versus what is being said. Remember, you did not become less valuable when the team reduced. You became more concentrated. That is a different thing entirely. Own it.