Six months into her first management job, Anu Bharadwaj got the feedback no leader wants to hear: she was too intense, she pushed her team too hard. She was stunned. She was only asking them to do what she would do herself.

Anu Bharadwaj began at Microsoft building video games, then made a bold leap to Atlassian in 2014, where she rose from product lead on Jira to COO and then President. Along the way she shaped Team Anywhere, led one of the company's hardest cloud transformations, and kept returning to a single question: how do teams actually work better together?

I came to this conversation as someone who made the same early mistake she did. In my first years at Microsoft I was known as Mr Plus, always asking for more, always raising the bar, until coaching taught me the difference between driving people and leading them. Anu and I share a Microsoft DNA, and most of this episode felt like comparing notes.

In our conversation, we explore: 
→ Why leading people is never about you, and the manager feedback that taught her the hard way 
→ How a values exercise she runs with every team becomes the real source of psychological safety 
→ Energy management over time management, and why self-care is not selfish 
→ Why an AI rollout fails when leaders treat it as a tools problem instead of a human fear 
→ What an AI-native company actually looks like, and why judgment stays human

"When you lead people, it is not about you. It is about them. You want to understand what they want, and take them to a place they want to go." Anu Bharadwaj, former President of Atlassian

If you have ever pushed a team toward your finish line and wondered why they were not following, this conversation will stay with you.

RELATED EPISODES

• Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks head coach (2021), Learning to "always compete": https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/9268299
• Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer (2022), Empowering people to achieve more: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/10382268 
• Ranjay Gulati (2023), Creating purpose-driven teams: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/12903145

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