Balancing Introversion with Leadership with Min Bhogaita

Min Bhogaita is Managing Director of the IdeaLab at Nobody Studios. Since leaving Deloitte, where he worked for 25 years, Min has helped over 14 startups and scaleups grow, pivot, and connect. He also serves as an advisory board member and director for multiple organizations. In this episode of Unlearn, Min shares his experience in the corporate world, and he and Barry O’Reilly emphasize the importance of staying true to yourself. They also discuss how technology is changing the way we work and how startups can benefit from this change. Balancing Introversion with Leadership Min admits to struggling with speaking up. During his school days, his teachers would talk about how quiet he was in class and his aversion to speaking unless spoken to. This was something he had to unlearn when breaking into the corporate world. “I was fortunate in the leaders I worked for - they knew my style, so they would coach me,” he shares. They would intentionally create opportunities for Min to share his ideas and opinions, which gradually taught him to come out of his shell and learn that behavior. “If you can recognize that there are behaviors you need to change, [you should change them].” In a serendipitous turn of fate, it was when he was learning to speak up that Min got to start his own team. Building Confidence Barry asks Min about his leadership experience in various fields. One of the traits Min developed was confidence in himself every time he changed a role. Min admits that he was actually a novice when he transitioned from ethical hacking to forensics. A recruiter’s recommendation that he’d be good in the field inspired him to go into it. “Just because he believed in me, I [went for it],” he tells Barry. “Thirteen years later, I was still in that role and doing the world’s biggest fraud investigations.” Protecting Your Team If you don’t have the right environment, people are going to burn out. This was made evident during the pandemic, but it was true even before then. Min talks about protecting his team to prevent that burnout. “Sometimes [we’d get] a deadline, and I’d push back.” If a deadline was Friday, but the document review was Tuesday, he’d request that submission be moved to late Monday to prevent his team having to work through the weekend. If you’re always pounding your team, he adds, they’re not going to do their best work. Reinventing Min Min talks about his decision to move on from consulting. After having worked in the field for 25 years, he thought it was now or never; he was either going to do it until he retired, or he would reinvent himself again. He was doing more work with founders and startups in the analytics lab, and grew more and more attracted to the practicality of their work. When he left consulting, his network started buzzing. People were reaching out to him, asking him to help them open the door - which, coincidentally, was his open door to new work. “I’ve made more of a living out of who I know as opposed to what I know,” he jokes. Looking Ahead Min’s dream is to have IdeaLabs for Nobody Studios around the world, where people can come in, share their ideas, and get started. Read full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Min Bhogaita on LinkedIn | Twitter