Tanu Tiwari moved away from a team of six people she’d managed in London. Within months, every one of them had quit. When she finally got them on a call to ask why, one of them told her: “You were the shit umbrella. We didn’t realize it until you left.”
That’s the conversation this episode is built around. Tanu spent 18 years inside global tech and Fortune 500 companies before becoming an ICF certified leadership coach and founder of The Conscious Leader Company. Her forthcoming book, Disengaged: Turning Passive Teams into Proactive Microcultures, opens with a story about the moment she found out how badly she’d handled someone quitting her team, and what she had to admit she’d done wrong.
We start with the numbers. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace put global engagement at 20%, the lowest since 2020, with manager engagement down from 31% to 22% since 2022. Ten trillion dollars in lost productivity globally. Every region declined. Tanu’s thesis is that Gallup can describe the problem but can’t prescribe the fix, and that the fix lives at the level of the individual leader, not the org chart.
From there we get into:
The shit umbrella vs. the shit funnel. Every leader either absorbs pressure from above and protects their team from it, or passes it straight through. Tanu walks through what each looks like in an actual meeting, not just the concept.
The three S’s. People stay engaged when they feel seen, significant, and safe. Tanu argues you can run every management decision through those three filters and get a clear answer on whether it helps or hurts.
AI as an excuse, not a cause. Tanu’s take: most companies blaming layoffs on AI had a business model problem first, and AI gave them cover.
Her own postpartum story. Working through labor on Slack. Flying to a trade show and pumping in a stairwell five months later. The moment she realized her identity and her job had fully merged, and what that cost her.
If you want to see where your own team’s culture stack stands, Tanu built a free AI diagnostic tool trained on her book’s framework. It’s on her website.
More from Tanu:
Her Substack, Invisible Lessons:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bytanutiwari/
Website: The Conscious Leader Co.
Podcast: Coach Me!
The Updraft is research, field notes, and conversations about the parts of leadership no tool can practice for us. Changing the system from within.
I’m Dan Korus, founder of Kestryl Edge. I spent years learning leadership the hard way and this newsletter is so you don’t have to. Also. As well. Like I did.
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