How Great Leaders Build Empathy, Resilience, and Purpose

Most founders spend their early years obsessing over product, distribution, and fundraising. What they overlook is leadership.

Not leadership in the abstract, but the day-to-day reality of motivating a team, listening with intent, and staying grounded through chaos. As the company grows, these soft skills become survival skills. And yet, few are taught how to lead. Fewer still make the time to learn.

That’s why I sat down with Ramesh Srinivasan, a senior partner at McKinsey and a trusted advisor to many Fortune 500 CEOs. Over his career, Ramesh has worked with leaders at companies like Cognizant, Moderna, Nissan, and Delta. His new book, The Journey of Leadership, distills lessons from 600+ executives who’ve led through crisis, growth, and everything in between. 

The main themes that stood out from our conversation were a commitment to fearless learning, empathy, resilience, and the search for purpose. 

Here are my notes. 

1. Fearless Learning

Startups move fast. The founder’s job is to learn faster.

Ramesh spoke about Admiral Eric Olson, who led the Navy SEALs’ most consequential operations, including the raid that took down Osama bin Laden. According to Admiral Olson, every mission is a chance to refine your playbook, irrespective of outcome. 

This holds true for the best founders I work with. They all have the ability to learn in real time. They treat every user interview, investor rejection, and product bug as a source of insight. They’re constantly adjusting their mental models to build sturdier systems for their company.

According to Ramesh, the founders who learn more per unit of experience become better leaders. 

2. Empathy

Most founders don’t start companies because they want to lead people. They start because they’re obsessed with an idea — a product, a protocol, a piece of technology they can’t stop thinking about. But the moment you raise capital, hire a team, or talk to a customer, you’re no longer just building a product. You’re managing relationships. You’re in the business of empathy.

Empathy entails understanding someone’s goals and constraints well enough to align incentives, not just assign tasks. That’s part of what makes a leader effective.

Ramesh shared a story about Frank D’Souza, cofounder of Cognizant. Frank started out as a coder. Scaling the company to 300,000 employees required a different skill set—storytelling, ritual-building, and a deep ability to motivate at scale. 

Stéphane Bancel at Moderna showed the same instinct during the pandemic. When vaccine production hit critical scale, he didn’t issue commands. He asked his team: “How can I support you in making a billion doses?” Of course, the rest is history.

3. Resilience

The leadership journey is filled with failure. Some failures are minor. Others are existential. What separates enduring leaders from the rest is not a lack of setbacks—they just metabolize them faster. In other words, they’re resilient. 

When companies reach a certain scale, something is always breaking. One moment you’re riding high on a customer win, the next moment you’re dealing with churn or a key resignation. Resilience is what keeps you steady through this inevitable volatility. It stops the highs from clouding your judgment and the lows from clouding your belief.

Ramesh spoke about his own system: a therapist, a coach, a yoga instructor, a personal advisory board. Most founders might think of these as indulgences, but he thinks of it as infrastructure that keeps him grounded when things get tough.

4. Purpose

One of the most meaningful insights from Ramesh’s book is that great leaders lead from the inside out. Their work goes beyond KPIs or strategy docs. It’s driven by a deeper sense of why.

But finding that “why” isn’t easy.

Ramesh encourages founders to revisit their “crucible moments” — the events that shaped the lens with which they view the world. For him, it was losing his father at 12. Revisiting that moment gave him a better understanding of what drives him, and why. 

Early-stage founders often worry that they don’t have a purpose yet. That’s fine. Start with what obsesses you. Start with the future you want to exist. Over time, your purpose will evolve. What starts as a technical insight can become a personal mission. But you need to make the time to reflect on it, especially when you’re growing fast.  Otherwise, the company outgrows your ability to lead it.

5. You’re Not the Smartest Person in the Room

Most founders are intelligent and high-conviction. This conviction serves them well as they’re going from zero to one, but can be limiting when the company reaches a certain scale. According to Ramesh, the best founders have a deep understanding of what they don’t know. They don’t pretend to have all the answers. They ask better questions, create the conditions for clarity, and trust their team to deliver.

This also applies to AI. Ramesh and I talked about how generative AI is transforming industries, and how leaders should think about AI adoption. We both agreed that leaders who adopt early, who lean into retooling their workflows and upskilling their people, will pull away over the next decade.

In conclusion

I work with many technical founders making the shift from managing code to managing people. It’s one of the hardest transitions in the startup journey. As the company grows, leadership stops being a side task and becomes the founder’s primary job. It shapes hiring, culture, customer success, capital allocation, and brand building. Each is a source of leverage — but turning that leverage into lasting impact requires more than speed. It takes the ability to stay grounded and grow through chaos.

Ramesh’s book offers a blueprint for founders making this shift. You can check out our full conversation here.