Aravind Menon

We spend a lot of time measuring businesses through numbers. Revenue, margins, growth, customer acquisition, productivity, valuation. Numbers are useful because they tell us whether something is working. But they also have a strange way of making a business look smaller than it really is.

A company may look like a collection of contracts, invoices, products and salaries on a spreadsheet. In reality, it is a collection of people trying to build lives.

That distinction becomes clearer as a company grows. A salary is not really a salary when you look beyond the bank statement. It is rent for one person, school fees for another, a medical bill somewhere else, groceries, a loan repayment, a parent's medicine, a child's weekend class, or simply the ability to say yes to something that was previously out of reach.

This is probably one of the least discussed parts of entrepreneurship. Founders spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how to create value for customers and shareholders. We talk about creating jobs as a consequence of growth, almost as if jobs are a line item that appears automatically when the business gets big enough. But there are real human beings sitting behind every one of those numbers.

And their lives don't end at the office door.

When someone joins a company, you are not really employing one person. You are, in some small way, becoming part of the economic system around that person. Their income travels home. It supports people who may never know the name of the company that made it possible. It creates a little more stability in households, and sometimes a little more ambition too.

That thought has changed the way I look at growth.

Of course, I want the business to grow. I want better clients, stronger products, healthier margins and bigger markets. Those things matter. A company that cannot sustain itself cannot sustain anyone else either. But somewhere underneath all those ambitions is another reason to keep building: every time a business becomes stronger, it has the potential to create more room for other people to move forward.

There is something deeply satisfying about that which doesn't show up in a quarterly review.

You might know that your company has a certain number of employees. What you don't always see is the much larger circle around them. Parents. Children. Spouses. Siblings. Families. Small businesses they spend money with. Schools they pay. Homes they maintain. Plans they are finally able to make because their income is predictable.

The actual footprint of a company is often much larger than its office.

And perhaps that is why I have become less interested in the idea of building a company simply to make it big. Big is easy to measure. The more interesting question is what happens because it became big.

Did people become more capable? Did they become more independent? Did they learn something they couldn't have learned otherwise? Did their families get a little more secure? Did someone get an opportunity that would otherwise have been unavailable?

These are difficult things to put into a dashboard.

There is no KPI for the parent who can finally stop worrying about a school fee. There is no metric for the person who gets their first meaningful promotion and realises they are capable of much more than they thought. There is no quarterly report that captures the confidence that comes from knowing your income is going to arrive next month too.

But these are outcomes of business just as much as revenue is.

Perhaps we need to think of employment differently. Not as charity, because it isn't. A company and an employee are both creating value for each other. Not as a favour, because that creates the wrong relationship. And certainly not as something a founder should take personal credit for.

It is simply one of the consequences of building something that works.

You build a company. The company creates work. The work creates income. The income moves through households and communities. Those households make decisions, spend, invest, educate, build and sometimes create something of their own.

The interesting part is that the founder rarely gets to see the full chain.

And maybe that's the point.

We often talk about leaving behind a legacy as though it has to be something monumental. A company with a large valuation. A building with your name on it. A product everyone remembers.

I think there is another, quieter version of legacy.

Years from now, there may be people whose lives are slightly different because they once had a job in a company you helped build. Their children may have had different opportunities. Their families may have had a little more stability. They may have gone on to build something themselves.

You may never know most of those stories.

But somewhere inside the numbers, they are there.

And that makes the P&L a little more interesting.

Because sometimes the most important thing a business earns isn't money.

It is what that money makes possible.

There is one employee engagement exercise no HR team needs to organise. No forms, no surveys, no anonymous links. Just leave the meeting room. Seriously. Walk out for five minutes and listen to what happens next. You might learn more about your organisation in those five minutes than you did from the last employee engagement survey.

I’ve always found it interesting how quickly the atmosphere in a room can change when the person at the top walks out. The conversation suddenly becomes lighter. Someone laughs. Someone says, “Okay, now can we actually talk about this?” And then comes the sentence that probably should have been said while the boss was still sitting there: “I don’t think this is going to work.” That’s when you know you have a problem.

And let’s be honest, leaders often make this happen without realising it. We like to think we are approachable. We tell people, “My door is always open.” But sometimes the door is open and the conversation still isn’t. You can tell people to speak freely all you want, but what really matters is what happens when they actually do. What happens when someone tells you your brilliant idea isn’t brilliant? What happens when a junior employee challenges your decision? What happens when someone says, “I think we made the wrong call”? Do you get curious, or do you immediately start explaining why you’re right?

Because employees are paying attention. They remember the person who spoke up and was dismissed. They remember the person who questioned a decision and was labelled “difficult.” They remember who stopped getting invited to meetings after disagreeing with someone senior. And employees are very good at learning from other people’s mistakes. Eventually, they stop speaking up. Not because they suddenly have nothing to say, but because they realise there is no point saying it.

That’s when you get the most dangerous kind of workplace: one where everyone appears to agree. Every meeting ends with, “Sounds good.” Everyone nods. Everyone says, “Absolutely.” Everyone leaves the room. And then the WhatsApp group begins. That is not alignment. That is theatre.

I would actually be suspicious of a team where everyone agrees with me all the time. Either I have somehow become the most intelligent person alive, which is unlikely, or people have become very good at telling me what I want to hear. I’d much rather have someone challenge me. Tell me the idea is bad. Tell me we missed something. Tell me the customer won’t buy it. Tell me I’m looking at the problem from the wrong angle. I may not agree with them, but at least I know what they really think.

And that is one of the most underrated privileges of leadership: having people around you who are willing to tell you the truth. Of course, that doesn’t mean every meeting should turn into a debate club. Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is just another form of nonsense. But good teams should be able to disagree without fear. You should be able to challenge an idea without attacking the person behind it. You should be able to say, “I think you’re wrong,” and still have lunch together afterwards. That’s culture.

Culture isn’t the posters on the wall, the fancy words in the employee handbook or the annual survey where everyone somehow becomes “highly engaged.” Culture is what people do when nobody important is watching. And sometimes, culture is what people say when the important person has just left the room.

So the next time you walk out of a meeting, don’t wonder what your employees are saying about you. Ask yourself something more useful: “Did I create a room where they could have said it to me?” If the answer is yes, congratulations. You might actually have built something valuable. If the answer is no, don’t blame your employees for having conversations without you. Maybe you gave them a reason to.

Because leadership isn’t about making sure everyone agrees with you. It’s about making sure people don’t have to wait for you to leave before they can tell you the truth. And if you really want to know what kind of leader you are, you don’t have to ask your employees. Just leave the room.

Originaly written on LinkedIn

A few years ago, I sat in on an interview where the candidate was, on paper, almost perfect. Good experience, strong credentials, articulate, confident, and clearly knew the industry. The interview was going well until someone asked the inevitable question: “Do you think you would fit into our culture?”

The candidate paused for a moment and said, “I’m not sure. I’d probably disagree with some of you.”

There was an awkward silence.

Someone laughed. Someone else tried to soften the question. The candidate continued, “I mean, if you hire me because I agree with everything you already believe, I’m probably not going to add much value.”

I remember thinking that was probably the most interesting answer we had heard that day.

It also made me think about how casually we use the phrase “culture fit” in hiring. It sounds harmless. Almost responsible. We want people who understand how we work, who get along with the team, who share our values. All of that makes sense. But somewhere along the way, culture fit has quietly become a convenient way of hiring people who make us comfortable.

And comfort is not always a good thing in a business.

Think about the meetings where everyone nods. The strategy sounds brilliant. The presentation is polished. Nobody raises a difficult question. Everyone walks out feeling aligned. Then, two days later, someone privately says, “I actually thought the idea was terrible, but I didn't want to be the only person saying it.”

That is not alignment. That is fear wearing a corporate shirt.

The best teams I have worked with have never been teams where everyone agreed. They were teams where people could disagree without worrying about what would happen to them afterwards. Someone could question the strategy. Someone could challenge the timeline. Someone could say the customer research didn't support the decision. Someone could even tell the person at the top of the room, “I don't think you're right.”

And the meeting could continue.

That last part matters.

Because hiring people who challenge you doesn't mean filling the organisation with professional contrarians who disagree with everything just to prove they are clever. Nobody needs that person. You say “Let's go left,” and they say, “Why not right?” You say “Let's go right,” and suddenly they have a TED Talk on why the road itself is a flawed concept.

That's not constructive disagreement. That's just exhausting.

The people you want are different. They challenge assumptions because they care about the outcome. They ask uncomfortable questions because they see something you may have missed. They bring experiences you don't have and perspectives that don't naturally occur to you.

And sometimes they will be wrong.

That's fine too.

A healthy organisation doesn't require every disagreement to produce the correct answer. It requires enough disagreement for bad answers to be examined before they become expensive decisions.

I have always believed that a leader should be slightly uncomfortable with the people around them. Not because the team is dysfunctional, but because if everyone around you thinks exactly like you, you have no real advantage. You are simply multiplying your own blind spots.

There is also a difference between hiring for shared values and hiring for shared opinions. I absolutely want people who believe in accountability, honesty, ownership and doing good work. Those are foundations. But whether they think my strategy is brilliant, whether they agree with my approach or whether they would have made the same decision I made yesterday is completely different.

I don't need another version of myself sitting across the table.

I need someone who sees the things I don't.

This becomes particularly important as companies grow. When you're small, founders often make decisions based on instinct. You know the people around you. You know how they think. You can walk over to someone's desk and have a conversation. But as the organisation grows, there is a temptation to hire people who will preserve the way things have always been done.

That is exactly when you need the opposite.

Growth should introduce new thinking into the organisation, not just more people to execute the old thinking.

Some of the most valuable people in a company will not be the ones who make leadership feel brilliant. They will be the ones who occasionally make leadership rethink things.

That can be uncomfortable. Nobody enjoys discovering that their great idea isn't actually that great. Nobody likes being told that the strategy they spent three weeks developing has a hole in it. And nobody particularly enjoys hearing, “Have we considered that the customer might not care about this at all?”

But businesses don't improve because people protect our egos.

They improve because someone is willing to challenge them.

So the next time we're interviewing someone, perhaps we should ask fewer questions about whether they will “fit” and more questions about what they will bring that we don't already have.

Will they challenge our assumptions? Will they tell us when we're wrong? Will they see opportunities we might miss? Will they make the conversation better, even when they make it more uncomfortable?

Because I don't think the goal of hiring should be to find people who fit perfectly into the organisation we have built.

The goal should be to find people who can help build the organisation we haven't imagined yet.

And if that means occasionally hiring someone who makes you uncomfortable, disagrees with you, questions your decisions and refuses to politely nod in meetings, that's probably not a culture problem.

That's probably culture doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Originally written on LinkedIn