I received some of that advice at a pivotal moment in my career. And if I had taken it, I would have walked away from one of the most unexpectedly rewarding chapters of my professional life. This is the story of that decision. And a case for why, when it matters most, you're better off forming your own opinion.
The Opportunity and the Spanner
When I last changed jobs, the move came with something I genuinely relished: the chance to join a startup, lead a backend division, and build a team entirely from scratch.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to hire your own people, shape the culture from day one, and create something that didn’t exist before you walked in, it’s hard to overstate what that prospect feels like. And for someone who had long had ideas about what a good workplace actually looks like, it felt like the moment those ideas were ready to be rolled out. Then, almost immediately, the complication arrived.
My to-be-boss told me I wouldn’t be leading alone.
I would co-lead the division with Rasika, a young lady who headed another team within the group and was being moved across to this startup. Strong-minded, experienced, with her own ideas about how things should run. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.
Leading a team is one thing. Sharing that lead with someone you don't know, whose working style you can't predict, whose instincts may or may not align with yours — that's a different proposition entirely. I had checked in mentally for this role long before the conversation happened. The idea of turning back wasn't something I wanted to entertain. But the idea of a co-leadership arrangement I hadn't signed up for wasn't easy to absorb either.
I suspect Rasika may have felt the same way.
The Voices That Tried to Decide for Me
Before I had fully processed the new arrangement myself, the opinions started arriving.
One person was particularly emphatic. Either demand independent charge, he told me, or don’t go at all.
Rasika was known to be strong-willed. Navigating shared leadership with someone like that was a recipe for friction. This arrangement, he said with the finality of someone who considered the matter settled, just doesn’t make sense.
“Think through it. Don’t say later, I didn’t warn you.”
He wasn’t the only one. There were other quiet warnings, other nudges toward caution, other suggestions that I was walking into something that would cost me more than it gave me.
And here is what I noticed: not one of those people had met Rasika.
Not one had worked with her, spoken to her at length, or had any direct basis for the certainty they were offering me.
The Decision
I signed up; I will cross the bridge when I get there, I told myself.
The key reason that made that possible was the absence of insecurity. This is worth pausing on, because it’s often about ego, about the discomfort of not having sole ownership of something, of operating without complete autonomy. And those are understandable feelings.
But they are feelings rooted in insecurity, which is a terrible basis for a career decision.
When you're genuinely secure in your own abilities, shared leadership doesn't feel like a threat. It feels like something that could go well or badly, depending on the people involved and how they choose to approach it. That's all it is, and the only way to find out which way it will go is to begin.
So I began.
What Actually Happened
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Two people with strong opinions, both accustomed to having a clear sense of direction — disagreements were inevitable, and we had them. But here’s the thing about professionals who disagree: they find a way through.
Rasika and I always did.
What emerged, gradually and then unmistakably, was something neither of us had anticipated when we started: we complemented each other almost perfectly. The skills I lacked, she had. The gaps in her approach, I filled. Between the two of us, we could cover ground that neither could have covered alone.
We divided responsibilities intuitively, playing to our respective strengths, rarely stepping on each other’s territory, and building a working rhythm that, over time, felt less like a compromise and more like a genuine partnership.
She was more confident than I was, more efficient, and sharper in certain rooms. I was calmer, better suited to the conversations that required patience rather than pace. She had a candid way of opting out of difficult one-on-ones — citing something pressing she needed to attend to — and then confessing afterwards that she simply couldn’t bear to sit through that particular exchange.
Those conversations fell to me. I didn’t mind. That was the arrangement, unspoken but understood, and it worked.
Every team has one or two people who will try to play colleagues against each other, sensing tension and deciding to exploit it. Rasika and I had ours. We saw it quickly, dealt with it quietly, and it never became anything more than a minor nuisance.
Because we trusted each other.
And trust, once genuinely established, is difficult to undermine from the outside. We worked together for three years. In that time, Rasika grew through every responsibility she took on, broke barriers in a way that was genuinely impressive to watch, and eventually moved on to a different genre entirely.
When I look back across those three years, I cannot recall a single episode between us that was unpleasant. Not one.
The Truth About Shared Leadership
Here is what that experience taught me and what I didn’t expect going in: Two strong people don’t cancel each other out. In the right conditions, they multiply each other. Conventional wisdom assumes that in shared leadership, two opinions will collide, two styles will clash, and the arrangement will produce confusion rather than clarity. That can happen. But it is not inevitable.
And the conditions that prevent it are not mysterious: mutual respect, honest communication, a willingness to play to each other’s strengths rather than compete for territory, and the basic security to acknowledge that someone else’s capability doesn’t diminish your own.
Rasika and I had all of those things. Not immediately, and not without effort, but we built them. And what we built, between us, was something neither of us could have created alone.
The Thought to Take With You
At some point in your career, someone will offer you a confident opinion about a decision that is yours to make. They’ll mean well, and they may even be partly right. Know that they could be working with incomplete information, filtered through their own experience and assumptions.
Listen. Consider. Then go and find out for yourself.
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons from lived experience — not prescriptions, just honest accounts of what happened and what it taught me.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.