If I could sit down for five minutes with my 28-year-old self, I wouldn’t arrive armed with some brilliant piece of advice. I’d tell him just one thing, almost in a whisper: surround yourself with good people, learn to listen to them more carefully, and understand that true leadership lies in listening, not in making decisions driven by haste and the pressures of the short term. It would be advice that works both ways: I’d give it to him, and he, without knowing it, would continue to remind me of it whenever I needed to hear it.
When you’re young, you feel as though you can do everything. As you grow older, you realise that time is finite, and that you need to choose your battles wisely. I’ve chosen mine: to stop focusing on the trees and start seeing the forest. But that’s only possible when you genuinely trust the people around you, when you’ve built a team that can tell you, without hesitation, “You know what? We don’t need you here. We’ve got this.” That kind of trust, the freedom to step back and let others take the lead, is probably what I value most about building a company around people, rather than just job titles.
Because, ultimately, companies are made of people. Not spreadsheets or organisational charts, but people who get up every morning and choose to put their energy into a shared purpose. And if that’s true, leadership cannot be about giving orders from the top. It’s about being there for your team: making their work easier, removing obstacles, and trusting their judgement, even when you might have done things differently.
I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with a team that, over time, has given me something incredibly valuable: the time and perspective to look beyond the day-to-day. Today, the people I work with do their jobs so well that I can focus my energy on exploring what comes next and bringing new ideas into the company. That’s leadership too: understanding that knowledge is never complete, that every year we learn something we didn’t know the year before, and that continuous improvement is not just something we should expect of the business, but also of ourselves as leaders.
I don’t believe in heroic leadership, in the idea of one person having all the answers and solving every problem alone. I believe leadership reveals itself in the small things: genuinely listening during a meeting, acknowledging when someone else’s idea is better than your own, taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of looking for someone to blame. That humility isn’t weakness. In fact, it’s what makes people want to follow you because they believe in you, not because they have to. That’s why I don’t think leadership belongs exclusively to those who occupy a particular office or hold a certain title. Anyone, in any role within this company, shows leadership when they help a colleague grow, when they speak up with an idea despite the fear of getting it wrong, or when they make a commitment and follow through on it.
If there’s one thing Kategora should never lose, no matter how much further we grow, it’s this: the belief that people are what make a company, that serving those people is the strongest foundation for leadership, and that we will always owe them, and everyone who has placed their trust in us, our sincere gratitude.
