Leading Through Disruption: How Today’s Leaders Build Clarity, Courage, and Influence

Virtual Event Recap

Leadership has never required more adaptability and self-awareness than it does today. As part of our Spring LEAP Flagship leadership experience, we brought together three powerful voices to explore what leadership demands in our current moment.

Rishad Tobaccowala (Author, Futurist, former Chief Strategist, Publicis Groupe) shared context for the external disruption facing leaders today while Antonio Lucio (CMO & Corporate Affairs Officer, HP) and Tiffany R. Warren (EVP, CDIO, Sony Music Group; Founder and President, ADCOLOR), focused on the internal discipline required to lead through that disruption with clarity and purpose.

The throughline connecting it all? Leadership today requires courage, clarity, and deep humanity. The future will reward leaders who combine adaptability with self-clarity.

Part 1: Navigating External Disruption

Rishad opened with a provocative frame: the structure of work itself is fundamentally shifting. His message was a call to recognize what's happening.

The Evolution of Work

“68% of people earn income outside of a job,” Rishad outed, and full time jobs are likely to further decline in a world of agentic employees, fractionalized workers, and portfolio careers. The implications are immediate: "Many people on your teams already have side hustles and think of you more like venture capital than a lifelong employer."

His advice? Leaders must shift from managing roles to cultivating craft. Growing talent becomes a competitive advantage.

AI as Alien Intelligence

Rishad reframed AI as a new species of intelligence, one that's under-hyped in critical ways. "AI is doubling every 11 weeks," he explained. "It makes knowledge less valuable and experience less rare."

But here's the opportunity: "As intelligence becomes abundant, distinctly human capabilities increase in value." Judgment. Trust. Influence. Creativity. Decision-making.

Leadership in the Zone of Influence

Rishad's distinction? "Bosses run in a zone of control. Leaders must operate from the zone of influence."

Control means checking, measuring, managing. Influence means inspiring, building, shaping what's next. "Look at your calendar," he urged, "and if you spend 70-80% of your time checking in, monitoring, measuring, reporting, make that less than half. You still have to do that, it's part of your job. But that part is the machine part. Don't make your entire job all machine...machinable."

His point: spend at least 50% of your time on making, creating, inspiring, selling, building. That's where leaders create value—and it's the part most people enjoy anyway.

His practical recommendations:

• Take one hour a day to learn. "Take it from anywhere but from family and self."
• Build the case for the opposite of what you're currently building
• Choose pragmatic optimism. In uncertainty, people look to leaders for stabilizing hope.

"Companies don't transform, people do," Rishad reminded us. Individual growth is the mechanism of organizational change.

Part 2: Sharpening Internal Discipline

If Rishad showed us the external landscape, Antonio and Tiffany brought us back to internal discipline—the clarity, values, and self-leadership required to navigate disruption.

Purpose and Values as Anchors

Antonio reframed purpose clearly: "Purpose is not a what, it is a how."

Authentic leadership begins with clarity about what you value, what steers your decisions, and what your non-negotiables are. "Owning the size of the shadow that you cast," as Antonio put it. Every action sends a signal.

Tiffany emphasized the discipline required: "Get brutally clear on what you stand for. Your values can't be aspirational or performative slogans. They have to really mean something to you when you say it."

She described herself as "built by purpose, powered by vision, grounded by legacy"—language forged through 26 years of work she's never doubted contributes to the world.

What Leaders Actually Control

In times of volatility, Antonio offered three anchors:

1. You cannot control uncertainty—but you can control clarity
2. Provide context to help teams make sense of mixed signals
3. Hope is a choice. "The faith that if you do what you are committed to do with your teams and community, we can affect change."

These are leadership disciplines that stabilize teams when everything else is shifting.

Tiffany emphasized the importance of protecting what matters most: "I create spaces where I'm not the leader, because I do think you need a space where you're not the boss." She shields these spaces fiercely—whether with family, friends, or her community—as places where she can release the weight of leadership without being evaluated. "I'm not being evaluated other than being a sister, being a partner, being a daughter."

Tiffany also spoke to the discipline of holding complexity. Leaders often carry uncertainty, doubt, and emotional weight that cannot always be processed immediately or shared openly with their teams. “I’m very comfortable holding the weight of leadership without immediately releasing it,” she explained. “Some decisions come with doubts and fears that don’t resolve quickly. I understand how to carry that weight while still moving forward.”

Emotional Hygiene and Self-Care

Tiffany spoke candidly about emotional well-being: "I don't expect my team to be my emotional mirror. I have to be my own emotional mirror."

She's ruthless about protecting well-being—both superficial (facials, workouts) and deep (emotional hygiene, energy cleansing, auditing the emotions she takes in). "When leaders model it for their team, it makes their team safe to do it as well."

Antonio echoed this from painful experience: "Taking care of yourself is the most generous thing that you can do for the ones that you love and those people that you care about." He didn't learn this until after falling into depression—without a peer set outside his company, without a mentor, without cultivated friendships.

His recommendation? Build multiple support structures:

• A peer group outside your company (like LEAP)
• A mentor with no fiduciary responsibility to your organization
• A sponsor inside who helps you grow
• Friends who know the good, bad, ugly, and extraordinary of you

Authentic Leadership vs. Being Your "Authentic Self"

Antonio clarified a critical distinction: authentic leadership doesn’t mean never adjusting your style. "As long as you're operating with your values, and as long as you know exactly what you're here to do, you're going to flex and navigate to get that thing done."

He used his family as an example: five daughters, all different. "If we want to get something collectively done, my style is going to have to be modified to each one of them, and I'm not lying to any of them."

The Takeaways

Leadership in disruption requires:

• Moving from a zone of control to a zone of influence
• Choosing pragmatic optimism over fear
• Providing clarity and context in times of uncertainty
• Being flexible in your approach while remaining true to yourself.
• Viewing work as not your purpose, but rather a canvas for your purpose to unfold
• Establishing strong values and non-negotiables that anchor your decisions
• Protecting spaces where you are not the leader to sustain emotional resilience
• Reflecting frequently, because self-evaluation refines your evolving purpose

As the external world is being rewired by AI and exponential change, your internal wiring—your values, discipline, and self-awareness—becomes your stabilizer.

The leaders who will thrive in this next era are the ones who combine external awareness with internal clarity—leaders who can navigate disruption while strengthening the trust, resilience, and humanity of the people around them.