Early in my career, I kept hearing the same question in job interviews: why have you changed so often? New roles, new companies, new fields, on paper, my CV didn't follow a straight line. What the interviewer really wanted to know was whether I would stay.
Honestly, it never bothered me much. But it did make me pause now and then and look back at my journey. And one thing was clear to me even then: restarting companies, leading restructurings, building new business in India, driving innovation in the Netherlands, working with teams from Russia to the Philippines — all of this would become valuable at some point in my life.
Today I can say it more clearly: the landscape has changed, and what once looked like a lack of focus is now one of the most valuable things a leader can bring.
When I entered the working world, leadership had a fairly clear definition. The leader was the one with the answers. Authority came from position and tenure. Strategy was planned years ahead, decisions travelled top-down, and good employees executed reliably.
Working across countries, I saw this model in different shades:
Cross-cultural research describes these differences along a few dimensions: how much hierarchy people expect, whether business runs on the deal or on the relationship, and how directly things are said. Germany sits at the direct, deal-focused end. Singapore expects more hierarchy and reads more between the lines. Hungary sits somewhere in between.
Three very different cultures. Yet in all of them, the leader was the one at the top who knew the way. Edgar Schein explains why: culture lives not only in what we can see and what we say we value, but in assumptions so deeply held that nobody questions them anymore. The ladder was one of them.
Careers mirrored that model. You picked a discipline, became an expert, and moved up one rung at a time, ideally inside the same company. Loyalty was measured in years. A CV with many changes raised a question mark, because it didn't fit the ladder.
That model worked in a world that was comparatively stable and predictable. It rewarded depth, control and consistency. It was not designed for constant change.
My own path never looked like a ladder. I started in direct marketing and CRM, running agency operations in Singapore, the Philippines and Hungary and building new business in India. There I learned that every relationship with a customer is earned, one interaction at a time. From there I moved into branding, where I learned the lesson that has guided me ever since: a brand is a promise you have to keep every day. Then came digital experience and technology partnerships, and later transformation consulting, where brand, customer experience and technology meet. Today I work in boardrooms, as an advisor, innovator and as a and as a coach for leaders. I held roles from direct marketing in Asia to CEO, managing director and management board positions, and worked in and with Germany, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, Singapore and the Philippines.
Looking back, the thread is clear: from the customer to the brand to the whole organisation. Each step widened the scope of what I was helping to change.
Each move was a deliberate choice to learn something I couldn't learn by staying. One concrete moment, e.g.: When we built a new business in India, I had no playbook and a team that worked very differently from what I knew. I learned to lead by listening first and to make decisions before I had all the answers.
Alongside the roles, I kept investing in learning: as a certified business coach, in the Excellence Program for Supervisory Boards at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, in AI business strategy at UC Berkeley, in circular economy at Cambridge Judge Business School and most recently in the Santander Global SW50 Leadership Programme at the London School of Economics in 2026. It gave me research and frameworks for much of what I had experienced in practice, and several of them appear in this article.
And I realised that what I learned in branding applies to leadership, too. A leader is also a brand: people don't follow the title, they follow the promise and whether you keep it, every day, in every culture.
Looking back at those interviews, I don't think the feedback was wrong for its time. It measured me against what was required then: depth in one lane and visible loyalty. But the landscape has changed faster than the yardstick, and today the requirement is broader than what that model could see.
Research now backs this up. At IMD, Ric Roi and Misiek Piskorski found that companies succeeding at both running today's business and building tomorrow's are led by people who can do both. This "ambidexterity" correlates with having held diverse roles across a career. Their conclusion: non-linear paths give leaders the range to drive performance and transformation at the same time.
The idea isn't new, it is just finally being applied to how we read careers. More than two decades ago, Daniel Goleman found that leaders with the best results don't rely on one leadership style. They use most of them in a given week, switching like a golf pro chooses clubs for each shot. Leaders who master four or more styles create the best climate and business performance. LSE's Connson Chou Locke makes the same case for ambidextrous leaders who switch seamlessly between different types of behaviour.
In other words, what was once read as restlessness is increasingly understood as range: the ability to connect perspectives, translate between disciplines and stay effective when the ground keeps moving.
The shift is not cosmetic. Boston Consulting Group described it early: in a turbulent environment, leaders must create the conditions for networks of people to reach shared goals under uncertainty — leading through influence and shared purpose instead of command and control. Since then, digitalisation, the pandemic and now AI have accelerated that shift dramatically. Change is no longer a project you finish before returning to business as usual. Business is change.
The numbers point the same way. In the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect 39% of core skills to change by 2030. After analytical thinking, the most-demanded core skills are resilience, flexibility and agility (67% of employers) and leadership and social influence (61%). Leadership and social influence saw the biggest rise in importance of any skill, up 22 percentage points.
What stands out to me: none of these are skills you acquire by staying in one place. They are built by moving, adapting and learning again.
At bempowered, I call this approach Leading with Range: turning the breadth of your experience, every role, industry and culture, into a clear leadership promise that empowers the people around you. In practice, it comes down to five things:
1. Tell your story as a portfolio, not an apology. If your path has turns, own them. Name what each step added and the thread that connects them. Herminia Ibarra warns against clinging to one fixed version of yourself: your leadership identity is a story you keep revising as you grow. A coherent narrative turns "many changes" into "broad perspective"
2. Know when to ask and when to decide. In complex situations, nobody has the full picture, so create clarity on purpose and direction, then draw out the knowledge in the room. But questions aren't the only tool, sometimes the team needs you to say: this is what needs to happen. Be honest about which moment you're in. Say what is already decided and where input will genuinely shape the outcome; research on change shows that participation builds buy-in only when it is real.
3. Make learning a leadership habit — and make it safe. Unlearning and relearning is now part of the job description. Set learning goals, not only performance goals: Ibarra shows they make us willing to experiment instead of protecting our image. Then make it safe for your team to do the same. In one study reported in Harvard Business Review, 69% of employees in hierarchical cultures regularly kept concerns from senior leaders, mostly because they believed nothing would change, or feared being labelled difficult.
4. Translate between worlds. The biggest value often sits at the interfaces between brand and sales, tech and people, strategy and execution, one culture and another. Researchers call the cultural part of this cultural intelligence: knowing how other cultures work, wanting to engage with them, adapting your behaviour, and noticing when your own lens distorts the picture. You don't learn that from a book. You learn it in a team in Manila or a negotiation in Budapest.
5. Build trust before you need it. Influence has replaced hierarchy as the main currency. Trust has two sides: confidence that you can deliver, and confidence in your intentions. Both grow through consistency, transparency and genuine interest in people. Research on executives also points to integrity and courage as two of the strongest predictors of performance so choose courage over waiting to feel confident.
And for organisations: stop reading non-linear CVs as a risk. Ask what the person learnedat each step. You may find the adaptable leaders you are looking for were in your applicant pool all along.
The next years will reward leaders who can hold stability and change at the same time who give people clarity even when they can't give them certainty. That is less about having walked a straight line and more about having learned to navigate many terrains.
If you have ever been asked why your path is "so varied", consider this: the world has caught up with you. The question is no longer whether you climbed the ladder, but what you bring from every terrain you have crossed.
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Sources
Boston Consulting Group: Adaptive Leadership — New Leadership Rules
IMD: Switching roles builds the ambidextrous leadership you'll need (May 2025)
IMD: Are your leaders ambidextrous?
World Economic Forum: Future of Jobs Report 2025 — Skills outlook
Goleman, D.: Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review, March–April 2000
Ibarra, H.: The Authenticity Paradox. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2015
Locke, C. C.: Ambidextrous leaders: switching between two types of behaviour seamlessly. LSE Business Review
Schein, E. H.: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th edition
Meyer, E.: The Culture Map
Earley, P. C. & Mosakowski, E.: Cultural Intelligence. Harvard Business Review, October 2004
Laker et al.: research on employee silence, Harvard Business Review
Newton, R. & van Dick, R.: research on consultation and buy-in, Journal of Change Management
Malhotra, D. & Lumineau, F.: Trust and collaboration. Academy of Management Journal, 2011
Sosik, J., Gentry, W. & Chun, J.: The value of virtue in the upper echelons. The Leadership Quarterly, 2012
