A leader can spend authority on themselves -- on appearing decisive, on appearing in control, on appearing irreplaceable.
Or they can spend it on the people around them -- on giving them the ball back, on creating conditions in which other people's confidence and capability can grow.
Over a long enough horizon, the second compounds in a way the first never does.
And that's exactly what Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has done.
A few weeks ago, at an IPL game at Ahmedabad, Kagiso Rabada was hit for over 20 runs in his first over by Virat Kohli -- five boundaries in a row.
Most captains would have rested him.
Shubman Gill brought him straight back for his next over, and Rabada took Kohli's wicket.
I have been thinking about that small captaincy decision ever since.
It reminded me of a story Satya Nadella tells in the opening pages of his book, Hit Refresh.
He was a teenager in Hyderabad, playing for his school team. His off-spin was being hit all over the ground. The captain walked over, took the ball from him, and bowled the next over himself. Then he walked back and put the ball into Nadella's hand again. Bowl the next one, he said.
Nadella took wickets that day.
Years later, Nadella would understand what his captain had done.
The captain knew the season was long. He knew that a young bowler whose confidence broke early would carry that break for the rest of the year. He spent a small amount of his own positional capital -- stepping in, demonstrating he could bowl -- to protect a team-mate's capacity to keep contributing.
Most of us, when we are given authority, instinctively use it to assert. We take the ball away. We do the thing ourselves. We solve the problem visibly.
The captains in both these stories did the opposite. They used their authority to put the ball back. They used their platform not to perform but to lift.
And here is what has stayed with me.
This required a particular kind of confidence. Only a leader who is not anxious about his own status can afford to make someone else look good in his place.
This is, in essence, the difference between being the hero of a story and being its architect.
The hero takes the ball.
The architect designs the conditions in which other people can keep bowling.
It is a distinction I have come to think of as the central question in modern leadership and it is the spine of the book I wrote for senior managers, Lead Less, Build More.
Nadella's career is, for me, the cleanest contemporary illustration of it we have in global business.
He became chief executive of Microsoft on February 4, 2014.
The company he inherited was not in obvious distress -- revenues were strong, Windows still ran on most of the world's personal computers, Office was still on most of the world's desks.
But anyone looking carefully could see that Microsoft was riding the inertia of an earlier era. It had missed mobile. It had been slow into cloud.
Inside the building, the culture had hardened into what ex-employees would later describe as internal warfare. The annual stack-ranking process -- in which a fixed proportion of every team had to be rated as underperformers regardless of how the team actually performed -- had taught a generation of Microsoft employees that helping a colleague succeed was, in measurable career terms, harmful to oneself.
A hero would have arrived with a 10-point plan and a list of executives to fire. Nadella did neither.
On his first day, he sent an e-mail to every Microsoft employee. He did not announce a restructuring. He did not name an enemy. He wrote about why the company existed at all.
A few weeks later, his wife Anu -- who had been raising their son Zain, born with severe cerebral palsy in 1996 -- gave him a book she had been reading. It was Mindset by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.
Nadella has said openly that this book became the foundation for what he then attempted at Microsoft.
The distinction Dweck drew between fixed mindset -- the belief that ability is innate and finite -- and growth mindset -- the belief that ability is built through effort and learning -- became, in Nadella's vocabulary, the difference between a culture of know-it-alls and a culture of learn-it-alls.
Stack-ranking was abolished. The annual review was rebuilt around what people had learned and how they had helped others learn.
Hackathons were introduced at scale.
Notice the move. Most chief executives who arrive at companies in trouble change what the company does. They announce strategies, kill products, acquire and divest.
Nadella did all of these things too -- LinkedIn and GitHub were not small decisions -- but he did them downstream of something more fundamental.
Before he changed what Microsoft did, he changed how Microsoft thought.
That is the architect's instinct. The hero rearranges the pieces on the board. The architect rebuilds the board.
The numbers are now well known.
Microsoft was worth about $300 billion in market capitalisation when Nadella took over. By early 2025, it had crossed $3 trillion and it sits at roughly that level today.
The company that had missed mobile is now the central infrastructure provider for the artificial intelligence era, through its early and unusually large bet on OpenAI.
But the figures are not the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is what changed inside the building.
Five years into Nadella's tenure, journalists were writing pieces about how Microsoft had become cool again.
The interesting question was never whether Microsoft was cool. The interesting question was what had happened inside the company such that talented people who would previously have left for Google or Amazon now wanted to stay.
The answer, I think, is that Nadella had built something that compounds.
A fixed-mindset organisation reorganises by replacing people.
A growth-mindset organisation reorganises by changing what people are allowed to attempt.
The first is dramatic, visible, and tends to produce short bursts of improvement followed by reversion. The second is invisible from the outside and tends to compound over time.
After a decade, the gap is enormous.
Now I want to tell you about Zain.
Zain Nadella was born in 1996 with severe cerebral palsy. He could not walk. He could not speak. He required round-the-clock care for the entirety of his 26 years.
Nadella has been candid about his initial response. For years, he has said, he asked the wrong question. Why has this happened to me?
It was only by watching his wife shoulder the daily work of caring for their son that he realised the question itself was wrong. Nothing had happened to him. Something had happened to Zain. His job was not to grieve a different life he had imagined. His job was to show up as a father in the life that actually existed.
I dwell on this because it is the source code for what Nadella later did at Microsoft.
Empathy, in his vocabulary, is not a soft skill. It is the capacity to see past oneself -- past one's own preferences, plans and ego -- to what is actually in front of one.
A leader who cannot do this reads every customer's problem as an instance of what they already know. A leader who can do this reads every customer’s problem as a question requiring fresh listening.
Zain Nadella died in February 2022, at 26.
The line that has stayed with me is one in which his father describes how Zain shaped him as a leader. The child who could not speak, he has said, taught him almost everything he knows about how to listen.
I think about that line often.
Indian corporate culture has, for understandable reasons, developed a deep tolerance for hierarchical leadership. The boss decides. The boss' presence is the engine of the room. The boss takes the ball.
There are versions of this style that work and I have seen many. But Shubman Gill in Ahmedabad, an unnamed schoolboy captain in Hyderabad fifty years before him, and Satya Nadella across three decades at Microsoft, have all been making the same quieter case for a different way.
A leader can spend authority on themselves -- on appearing decisive, on appearing in control, on appearing irreplaceable. Or they can spend it on the people around them -- on giving them the ball back, on creating conditions in which other people’s confidence and capability can grow.
The first feels safer because the outputs are clearly attributable to the leader. The second feels riskier because the outputs, when they come, are attributable to the team.
Over a long enough horizon, however, the second compounds in a way the first never does.
Look at Microsoft today. Nadella is still chief executive. The story is not closed. But the company is no longer dependent on his personal genius for its functioning.
The growth-mindset language is now used by managers four levels below him, in countries he rarely visits, on projects he has never heard of.
The mission statement he wrote in 2014 -- to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more -- has become the internal compass engineers use to settle arguments about what to build.
The architecture is no longer in his head. It is in the building.
This, in the end, is the difference between heroes and architects.
The hero is the leader whose presence makes the organisation function. Take the hero out of the room and the room loses its centre.
The architect is the leader whose absence does not show because the structure they have built is loadbearing on its own.
Heroes are easier to celebrate.
Architects are harder to spot, precisely because they have done the work of making themselves less visible. To Lead Less and Build More is, in the end, to choose the second.
Most of the work of building something larger than oneself happens in small moments. They do not announce themselves.
The captain hands the ball back.
The chief executive, on his first morning, writes an email about why the company exists rather than what he intends to do.
The father stops asking why this happened to me and starts asking what his son actually needs.
None of these are dramatic. All of them are architectural.
Some legacies are loud. The most enduring ones are quiet.
It is what it is.
Suresh M K, the author of Lead Less, Build More, is an executive coach and a strategic advisor with over 40 years of experience in finance transformation and training leaders.