Lessons in Humanitarian Leadership

Leadership in a crisis looks nothing like leadership on an ordinary day, and I learned this the hard way, more than once. My earliest lessons in this were not from a classroom but from watching how international institutions actually functioned — the gap between the policy language in a conference room and the reality of the people that language was supposed to serve.

My years in Brussels, working under a Member of the European Parliament and later engaging closely with the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe, taught me how policy is built: through negotiation, patience, and an enormous amount of listening before any decision is made. Representing that work at conferences in Turkey, Armenia, Italy and the United States exposed me to how differently the same humanitarian challenge can be understood depending on where you are standing. What looks like a straightforward solution from one vantage point often looks naive or incomplete from another.

Supporting the Praksis Organisation’s work in Athens, providing economic, social and medical assistance to vulnerable populations, added something policy work alone could not: proximity. It is one thing to discuss vulnerable populations in the abstract. It is another to sit across from someone and understand, specifically, why the systems meant to help them were failing.

When I returned to India and eventually founded The Rising World Foundation, I carried both of these lessons with me — the discipline of policy thinking and the humility of proximity. Humanitarian leadership, I have come to believe, requires holding both at once. Pure policy work, without proximity, risks becoming disconnected from the people it claims to serve. Pure proximity, without any structural thinking, risks becoming a series of well-meaning but disconnected gestures that never add up to lasting change.

The hardest lesson, though, has been about pace. In a crisis — and I think particularly of the second wave of COVID-19 — leadership means moving as fast as circumstances demand, even when the resources or certainty you would prefer are not fully in place. In ordinary times, leadership means resisting that same urgency, because sustainable change is rarely built at emergency speed. Knowing which mode a moment calls for, and having the discipline to act accordingly, is perhaps the single most useful thing I have learned in this work.

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