Advance in Leadership Pt.3 - Annahita Esmailzadeh & Swantje Allmers

As part of our ADVANCE IN series, we had a great Instagram Live with Annahita Esmailzadeh and Swantje Allmers on the topic of the world of work. Swantje Allmers is co-founder of New Work Stories and an expert on modern work cultures. Annahita Esmailzadeh is a tech manager and executive at Microsoft as well as a well-known author and speaker. Last year, we published CENTRAL 23 in Dark Green with her under the motto BREAK THE BIAS.

Here are the most exciting insights and tips from our conversation.

Christina Stahl: What's on your mind right now?

Swantje Allmers: What's really bothering me at the moment is not so much the subject of work, but my private life. How can I stay healthy? How can I implement better routines? I'm using the summertime to develop new routines and prepare for the stressful fall. I've found a new gym and listen to lots of podcasts about health. It's a valuable time to find out what's important to me.

Annahita Esmailzadeh: My house flooded at the beginning of June and is currently being renovated. That means I'm now in an Airbnb and managing the complete renovation of my house alongside my job at Microsoft and other commitments. This year has been very intense, but not in a good way. It's a challenge to get everything under one roof.

Christina Stahl: What helps you to effectively lead yourself?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: For me, it's one thing above all, and I say this again and again: I'm super, super, super selective when it comes to my inner circle. I simply have very, very little time, so I choose all the more consciously who I spend this time with and what energy and vibes these people give me. And that doesn't mean that you have to be super opportunistic about it, but rather that these are people who are also there when it's hard. People who are happy with you about your successes, but with whom you can be just as happy about their successes.

Swantje Allmers: I think it's really important to look at how I invest my time. I fully agree with that. And I would add: Self-management is also really important to me. So looking at it: How much time do I have? What are my projects? What can I fit into this time and how can I set priorities? So that at the end of the day I don't think: “I was somehow busy the whole time, but I don't actually know what I was doing.” Instead, especially when time is short, I need a plan of what I really want to do with my time.

Christina Stahl: I often have the feeling that I simply can't achieve this self-determination, but that I'm already so externally determined by everyone in my team because they all want something from me. How do I manage to regain the upper hand over my own time management?

Swantje Allmers: It always depends on what roles we have and how our job is generally structured. Mine is not so operational, which means I can always schedule larger blocks of time for certain topics. But if you have a job like yours, where a lot of people are waiting for your decision or answer, it's naturally more difficult. But you have to consciously plan time, otherwise you'll be constantly frustrated.
I would first try to understand the patterns. How much time can you realistically plan for? And then see if you can improve your planning accordingly. Then, of course, you can also think about what time you work best and then consciously block it out, e.g. every morning from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. - appointments only afterwards. That's always my biggest learning anyway and also my tip to others: That you look at where you have the best energy and then place the tasks that create the most value there.

Christina Stahl: You both write a lot about company culture on LinkedIn. What do you consider to be a key prerequisite for a positive and supportive company culture?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: One thing I find absolutely essential is the direct supervisor. No matter how great the company culture is, if you and your direct boss don’t fit together, it just won’t work. Culture isn’t something that can simply be given or dictated. A strategy consultant can’t just come in and say, “Okay, from now on, these are our values, and this is how we’ll live them.” Culture is driven by people, and in this case, trulyx from the top down by the leaders in the company. That’s why it’s so important for those in senior leadership and middle management to genuinely embody the values and mission that are being communicated externally. From there, everything else can be cascaded down: how mistakes are handled, whether development is encouraged, and so on. So, I’d say almost everything can be traced back to the boss.

Christina Stahl: One more question for you: How do you deal with leaders who don’t embody the company’s values?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: Ultimately, you can't be successful if you burn out your workforce and fail to keep people intrinsically motivated in the long run. Sure, you can keep hiring very junior people who are eager and willing to go the extra mile for a very low salary, even if it means accepting unhealthy conditions. But experienced and qualified talents won't tolerate that for long. That's why you can’t be truly successful in the long term if you're not a good leader.

Christina Stahl: As a leader myself, I often wonder how to best fulfill this role. I come from a consulting background, where teams tend to be quite homogeneous. Now, I have a very diverse team, ranging from trainees to seniors. Sometimes I struggle to manage these diverse personalities because I realize that each person needs a different approach. My question is: How do I figure out how to do this?

Swantje Allmers: I’d like to add something about consulting. It’s incredibly difficult to build a team in that environment. When you're socialized in consulting, the focus is very much on: What’s my contribution? How do I perform in the project? How can I advance? There’s very little emphasis on how to work together as a team.

Your situation is different now, and in my opinion, much better. It’s not about who “performs” best, but rather about how to best leverage each person’s strengths. I think it’s important for a leader to ask a lot of questions and explore these dynamics. Many leaders feel the pressure to figure everything out on their own, but there’s always the option to simply ask openly and involve the team in these processes. It’s not a new concept, but it’s always valuable to approach it like an instruction manual. What are my triggers? What motivates me? How do I prefer to receive feedback? This helps not only the leader but also the team and fosters a better culture.

Christina Stahl: I’m really proud because we did exactly that this morning internally, and I was able to learn so much from it! Okay, the next question is from the community: Does a company need a vision in addition to values and culture?

Annahiat Esmailzadeh: From my perspective, I highly recommend the book “Start with Why” for this topic. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, it becomes really difficult. It’s challenging to break down goals and keep the team motivated. While some people might find motivation in this, most people I know are driven by the feeling that they are contributing to something bigger. If you’re unclear about what that bigger thing is, it’s incredibly hard to stay motivated.

Swantje Allmers: I find it fascinating where people come from. Often, they’ve previously worked in large corporations and have gone through endless, bloated processes around vision, values, and purpose, where in the end, only a wall decal remained. Everyone discussed it once, but it had no real impact. It’s important to understand why someone might not want that and what their perception of the effort involved is. Many things can be done on a much simpler scale.

Christina Stahl: Anna, the next question is for you: What is micro-management, and how do I know if I’m doing it?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: In short, micro-management is when leaders find it extremely difficult to let go of control, and they not only want to dictate the outcome but also how things are done. This often happens with leaders who were once in a technical role. They were very good at it, and that’s often why they were promoted to a leadership position. However, they struggle to make the switch from a technical to a leadership role and end up wanting to continue their old job. They believe they can do many things better than their employees and have trouble letting go. I always say that micro-management is the most effective way to lose your best employees.

Christina Stahl: I recently experienced this myself. I realized I needed support in product management and brought a colleague on board. We tested it for a month but then stopped. I have a clear vision of how the products should look, and when she did things even slightly differently, it frustrated me—and it was frustrating for her too because she couldn’t meet my expectations. I fell into the micro-management trap without even realizing it.

Annahita Esmailzadeh: But it’s crucial to get past that, or else you’ll just be tying up resources. You can’t scale if you can’t delegate. If you’re unable to delegate, you become the bottleneck for many things. It happens often that leaders hold onto everything and don’t delegate decision-making authority. They don’t trust their employees to make decisions independently or to make mistakes. This leads to nothing getting done.

Christina Stahl: Another question from the community: What’s the opposite of micro-management, and how can I ensure my employees aren’t just slacking off?

Swantje Allmers: I’ve never heard of the term, but the opposite of micro-management would probably be macro-management. If we go to the extreme negative, it would be when I don’t lead at all and leave a huge vacuum. I see leaders who aren’t interested in what’s happening in the team because they’re too focused on their own ego, positioning themselves for the next job, getting featured in magazines, or spending money on PR.

In such cases, people are working in a leadership vacuum, which is just as inefficient. Leadership still means providing direction and a framework and being available when people have questions, need support, or require feedback. Whether this vacuum is worse than micro-management is still up for debate, but it’s equally harmful.

Annahita Esmailzadeh: Honestly, studies show that most people work much more in a home office. When you’re physically in the office, you often have natural breaks, like going to the coffee kitchen, meeting someone, or walking from one meeting room to another, which might take 10-15 minutes. In a virtual setting, you can have a completely different pace.

You can have six calls back-to-back without a single minute of a break in between. In the home office, there’s also a higher chance you’ll eat lunch in front of your laptop and might sit down to work again for an hour after dinner. So, the worry that people need to be controlled to ensure they work is honestly a bit absurd because you can’t make someone work more by looking over their shoulder. You can be just as unproductive sitting in the office.

Christina Stahl: Okay, now to the last questions. How can I establish my role as a leader, especially with older employees, to ensure I’m taken seriously?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: In my experience, whenever I’ve taken on a new team, I’ve initially encountered skepticism—not just from older employees but also from peers and younger ones. Many people have this stereotypical image in their minds that a leader has to be older, look a certain way, and speak a certain way.

But what I’ve really noticed is that in most cases, if you demonstrate that you’re competent, and especially that you’re authentic and reliable, and that people can count on your word, you eventually gain the team’s trust.

Christina Stahl: What qualities do leaders need, and what can be learned over time?

Swantje Allmers: It’s a big debate—I often read on LinkedIn that people say, “Leadership can’t be learned; either you have it or you don’t.” That would call into question all leadership development programs. And I simply don’t believe it. There’s no training that will prevent you from making mistakes, like “Take 25 days of Training X, and you’ll never make a mistake.” It’s also good that things don’t always go perfectly.

There are definitely clear skills that can be taught, like how to give feedback, how to coach someone as a leader, and so on. Many competencies, in my opinion, are learnable. The only requirement is that the person genuinely wants to learn them. If someone doesn’t care and says, “I’m just here to take the next step, and now I have these twelve people who should just do their job while I do mine,” that’s not going to work.

Christina Stahl: My final question to you: What was your biggest learning that you’d like to share?

Annahita Esmailzadeh: For me, when I first started in leadership, one thing I really struggled with was the desire to be liked at all costs. I quickly realized that this doesn’t align with a leadership role.

Now, my goal is to be respected and for people to know they can rely on my word. It’s not my goal to be liked because my role as a leader isn’t to be everyone’s best friend, but to be a reliable, hopefully predictable, and empathetic person that people enjoy working with and who supports them as much as possible in their career journey. But as a boss, you’ll always find yourself in situations where you can’t be liked.

Swantje Allmers: I had to learn to trust my own gut feeling. I’m someone who tends to process things a lot in my head and always finds arguments. Today, I realize that if I’m searching for arguments to support something while my gut feeling says “no,” then I should just drop the arguments. My gut feeling isn’t there for no reason; it’s because I’ve noticed things that my rational mind hasn’t yet processed.

That doesn’t mean you should make decisions solely based on feelings, but if you notice a disturbance, there’s something there. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should break things off, but it does mean you should at least address it, take another look, maybe sleep on it, or perhaps not take the job or hire the person, even if their resume looks perfect, and they tell you they can do everything you want.

That was a big learning for me. I could have avoided many mistakes, but eventually, I got it.

Christina Stahl: Thank you both so much for your time. I’ve learned so much from this.

You can still find the whole Instagram live session here on our Instagram channel.