Learning to Read the Room

I grew up as a minority in India, learning early how to read rooms, listen carefully, and adapt. When you live between identities, you pay attention, because it’s how you survive and belong.

That way of seeing followed me across countries, cultures, and organizations. I often found myself moving between worlds — engineers and designers, executives and frontline teams, global strategy and local context. First, I used that skill to identify un-articulated needs to design new products.

Later as I led organizations and large scale change at Fortune 100 organizations, I noticed that the often invisible things that actually shaped outcomes were rarely the things being discussed in meetings.

Sure, you had the organizational hierarchy and the way things “should happen”. But Influence moved through informal relationships. Trust was built in the margins.

The leaders who made the biggest difference over time weren’t the loudest. They tuned into informal networks, listened deeply, built trust across boundaries, and knew when and how to act. At the same time, I watched many new leaders miss this opportunity to lead differently. Capable people, expected to move fast before they’d had time to understand their context. Given mandates and goals but not space or support. They would ultimately burn up, opt-out, or settle into the status quo.

Hyphal grows from this tension. And from a conviction I keep coming back to: a new role or a promotion is one of the best moments in a leader’s career to change how they lead. A moment to reset, to take stock. Most people let it pass, drawn into the gravity of the immediate. We built this to make sure you don’t.

— Niteesh Elias, Co-Founder

Story Is How We Navigate Change

I came to this work through stories.

Story is how humans navigate change. It’s how we make meaning of what’s happening to us, how we build trust with the people around us, and how we figure out who we are in a new context. Every leader stepping into a new role is, whether they know it or not, in the middle of a story they’re still trying to understand.

Growing up in a bicultural family on the Texas-Mexico border, I learned early that the same event looks completely different depending on where you’re standing when it happens. The lesson: that listening is the only way to genuinely understand someone else’s story, has shaped everything I’ve done since: my writing, my teaching, my work with organizations.

What I bring to Hyphal is a belief that language matters, that the stories leaders tell about themselves and their teams shape what becomes possible, and that the most powerful thing you can do in a new role is slow down long enough to really hear what’s going on around you before you decide what to do about it.

Leadership is a practice of attention. And attention, like any practice, gets stronger when you do it alongside others.

— Brooke Shaffner, Co-Founder

Listen and Build

Professor Jeffery Yip has spent his career making the case that listening is a key leadership skill — it’s the core mechanism through which leaders earn trust, read systems, and create the conditions for real change. His research and teaching center on what he calls “listen and build”: the idea that the most durable influence a leader can have comes not from authority or expertise, but from the trust that accumulates through genuine attention over time.

As a strategic advisor he brings to the program both rigorous research and decades of working with executives navigating exactly the kinds of transitions Hyphal is designed to support.

Where Strategy Meets People

Melissa Lenk has spent her career at the intersection of strategy and people, which is where leadership actually happens. Across government, non-profits, and global corporations, she has designed and led programs that give new leaders what they most need: a real understanding of the human system they’ve just stepped into, the informal networks, the unspoken rules, the relationships that actually move things.

That’s the work she’s built a career around. Her insights, drawn from decades in global foreign service and organizational development at places like Honeywell and Cargill, help inform our work at Hyphal.

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