Nyla Khan
Strategic Leadership Partner
Board Certified Coach
About ten years ago,
a question began shaping everything I do.
Why do intelligent, well-intentioned leaders hesitate when the stakes are highest, particularly when decisions require long-term, sustainable thinking?
Growing up between cultures taught me early that leadership is rarely neutral. It is shaped by power, identity and competing expectations, long before it becomes a job title.
Over time, my curiosity led me deep into the psychology of decision-making. Not just what leaders decide, but how they decide, and what quietly constrains them.
It took me into systemic innovation, startup ecosystems and organisations operating across the spectrum, from highly hierarchical corporations to radically decentralised models.
My work at MeaningSphere, a self-organising enterprise experimenting with distributed decision-making, became a live laboratory in collaboration, power, autonomy and accountability. We tested how far distributed leadership could go, and where coherence and culture still mattered.
That experience was a stark reminder: leadership is rarely constrained by strategy alone. It is constrained by relational dynamics, clarity of judgment and the capacity of people to move together under pressure and ambiguity.
Leadership Vanguard:A Live Laboratory in Complexity
The Leadership Vanguard was a 10-month experiential programme I led for cross-company cohorts across Shell, Unilever, HSBC, Mastercard, Baker Hughes, TATA and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Co-designed with Paul Polman and Ajay Banga, the programme immersed next-generation C-suite leaders in real systemic challenges.
We worked inside real constraints, real trade-offs and real ambiguity.
The objective was to expand strategic range, collaborative competence and judgment in volatile environments.
I led field experiences in Turkey, India, South Africa and Singapore, grounded in systems thinking and human-centred design, connecting corporate leaders directly with grassroots innovators and communities at the centre of complex global issues.
In 2017, I co-founded Embark with a Unilever leader from the Vanguard programme - a reverse-mentoring initiative pairing senior leaders from organisations including Unilever, IKEA, Kraft Heinz, Mastercard and Ben
& Jerry’s with talented young refugees.
Rather than abstract diversity conversations, Embark asks leaders to engage directly across difference, confront blind spots and build relational range. The result is stronger judgment, deeper empathy and more nuanced decision-making in complex environments.
Across all of these contexts, one pattern became clear: when leaders deepen systems awareness and relational intelligence together, they make better decisions, and bring people with them.
Today I work with senior leaders and executive teams navigating restructuring, integration, growth and cultural strain - helping them align diverse teams around shared visions when pressure and ambiguity threaten cohesion.
My work integrates:
Systems thinking and structural clarity
Strategic relational intelligence
Experiential leadership development
Executive coaching for high-stakes 1:1 decision contexts
If you lead in complexity, and want to grow your team’s capacity to move with alignment and conviction, I’d love to talk to you.