Start With A Win - Vijay Pendakur: The #1 Leadership Mistake You're Making That RUINS TRUST

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

In this episode of Start With a Win, host Adam Contos is joined by leadership strategist and author Dr. Vijay Pendakur to explore what it really takes to lead through disruption. Drawing from his experience at top tech companies and Cornell University, Vijay unpacks the secret to building high-performing teams when the ground is constantly shifting beneath you. From the invisible forces of trust and belonging to the raw challenges of leading through crisis, this conversation offers a bold reframe of leadership - one that is both deeply human and urgently practical. If you've ever wondered how to turn volatility into opportunity, this episode is your blueprint.Dr. Vijay Pendakur is the founder of Vijay Pendakur Consulting and a seasoned leader across tech and higher education, with senior roles at Zynga, VMware, Dropbox, and Salesforce. He previously served as Dean of Students and Presidential Advisor for Diversity and Equity at Cornell University. Vijay’s upcoming book, The Alchemy of Talent (Dec 2024), is a practical guide to building high-performing teams. He also authored Closing the Opportunity Gap (2016), a widely used resource on equity in student success. A faculty member at USC’s Race and Equity Center and recognized as a top DEI leader by Channel Futures and Untapped, he also advises Ezra Coaching and Enterprise Ireland. Vijay lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Katie, and their two daughters, Mira and Savi.00:00 Leadership Is About Relationship00:29 Welcome to Start With a Win00:55 Introducing Dr. Vijay Pendakur02:03 From Education to Corporate Disruption04:02 Growth Happens Through Pain06:28 Why “The Alchemy of Talent”?09:33 Leading Teams Through VUCA13:07 Trust, Belonging, Connection Framework15:08 How to Build Trust as a Leader27:46 Where to Find the Book + Final Thoughtshttps://www.vijaypendakur.com/===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

The leadership task is about relationship. And so when you build the bridge, if you only pay attention to results, you're going to be the only person that walks across that bridge. When you're leading through disruption, some of your premium calories have to go into relationship. Three most important vectors for the leadership relationship. Trust, belonging, and connection. But ultimately, if there's no belonging, you don't have a team. Do your people feel like they have this? And how do we deploy it?

with a win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With a Win headquarters, it's Adam Contos with Start with a Win. We're diving deep with a true expert, Dr. Vijay Penderker. This guy has not only worked at places like Salesforce, Dropbox, and VMware, but he was also a dean at Cornell University. He spent years studying how environments impact performance, whether that that's students or employees. He's the author of Closing the Opportunity Gap and his brand new book, The Alchemy of Talent.

He's already getting tons of buzz on this new book for offering a new way to think about teams and leadership. Get ready to learn how to make your team thrive because Dr. Pendeker is here to help us all start with a win. BJ, welcome to start with a win. Happy to be here, Adam. Awesome. I love this topic.

and you have a brand new book out. I mean, we're going to really dive into really what you call the alchemy of talent. This is a fascinating topic to me. And it's one that everybody needs to really pay good attention to because, frankly, this impacts the bottom line of your business, the soul of your business, and how your employees perform for your customer. So this is huge. But before we start, Vijay, how did you get to the point of talking about the alchemy of talent?

teamwork, disruption, things like that. What got you to this point? Well, I think disruption got me to this point, Adam. You know, I started my professional life in education, and both my parents are teachers. And so I was in the family business. And after 18 years of working at five universities in the United States moving around and chasing upward mobility and having a wonderful career, there were so many disruptions in university life.

And one of them was the pandemic. And having to, I was the dean of students at Cornell University at the time. And I was part of the team that worked on emptying the campus for the first time in 150 years. Wow. And Adam, it was really hard. It was, you know, it felt very precarious. There was a number of stakeholders. No one was happy.

And it was enough disruption that I was like, what can a second chapter be for me? And I went into working on employee experience, right? how do we help employees in corporations unlock their talent? How do we set up the employee ecosystem so that people can do the best work of their life? And I did that at three large public tech companies. And then I launched my own business. So a third form of disruption, which is for sort of like the macroeconomic shifts we've been living in for the past couple of years, prompted me to think about how do I diversify my own risk rather than

working for one employer, I actually think as an entrepreneur. I can work, I can find more security because the world is so disrupted now that I'd rather have a diverse ecosystem of employers so that if one goes down, I'm still able to support my family, pay my mortgage, you know, and, you know, live the life that I want to live. And so that brings me to being, you know, a consultant and a speaker on leadership and teams. And in support of that work, I put together the last five years of working on teams and leadership. into a book called the outcome. I love it. Let me ask you, listening to what you're talking about, do you think we get complacent before the disruptions happen? I think so. I look back in my own life

and the times that I have learned the most are often the times where I'm in pain. I mean, honestly, right? Like just like the good times feel amazing, but they go really quickly and my learning often is pretty flat in those times. And leading a team through the 2008 financial crisis was unbelievably educational. Was it easy? No, right? Very, very difficult. But my learning between 2008 and 2012 was, it was exponential, right, for my growth. Same thing around, you know, some of the hardships I encountered in education near the end of my time in that sector. Going through working in corporations, when we were in hypergrowth on our one corporation I was with was in the run-up to a $10 billion market cap, getting there was amazing. And then we got

acquired and leading through that deal close and change of control and becoming part of another company, super difficult, right? There was a lot of challenge and disruption and frustration, but again, the learning accelerated. And so I know for me, I can't speak to everybody, but I do think that we tend to relax a lot when things are easy. And that's not bad. But I do think that for me, I've tried to shift my own mindset as somebody that talks and writes about disruption so that the friction from disruption is seen as a gift. And it's not about, oh, I wish things were easier. It's let me get the skills to conquer this moment. I love that. It takes me back to that quote of, I don't want life to be easier. I just want to be better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, that's a better reframe of what I just said. Yeah, I mean, it just, it seems like the, the natural progression of humanity. We're either growing or we're dying, right? Yeah. So the, the pressures push on us. They help us grow. We take it easy and we coast and we get worse.

It's, you know, it's like a diet plan, I guess you can say. So, but, I mean, you really started correlating team performance to disruption. And I would love to start diving into your book. I mean, first of all, why the name? You know, the alchemy is an interesting concept to put around talent. So, I mean, why did you name it this? A couple of things. One, you know, alchemy for our listeners, right, or viewers.

Alchemy is, you know, comes from the European Renaissance and this idea of could we find a science that would help us turn lead into gold. But, you know, 600 years later or whatever, it's really like the idea of transformation. Can you take something that currently may be underutilized, inert, underdeveloped, and make it into gold? And for me, when I think back on the high watermarks of my career, Adam, I think about the times I led teams and I was able to see growth from one of my team members and then revisit that moment at the end of the quarter or end of the semester or the year and have them go, do you remember when I was like struggling with that program and I was sitting in your office and it was just like misery and then we solutioned and then, you know, like watching them

gain skills or gain a new mindset or situational awareness capacity to me have been the most rewarding points in my career. And so like alchemy is I think an attractive value proposition to the individual. We all want transformation, right? But it's an even more attractive value proposition to a leader because leadership is hard. And so I think that one of the things I always bring forward to leaders is the incredible opportunity you have to change people's lives and for them to look back on their time with you, on your team, as one of the best moments in their career. That's, that's incredibly powerful. I hope everybody heard that because so many times leaders or managers are focused on the problem and not on the opportunity with the people. So. And the other reference to alchemy on a much

lighter note is growing up as like a total skater, Dungeons and Dragons, punk rock geek, any chance to bring in like magic? There you go. I'm into it. I mean, shout out to the fellow nerds on the call. There you go. Roll the dice, people. Exactly.

Exactly. That's awesome. All right. So let's get into talking about constant disruption. It seems like, you know, particularly, you know, millennial generation, Gen X, things like that have been running through just this series of disruptions, you know, the, you know, the Gen Z got hit in the face with the pandemic. You know, we, we all, or a lot of us had been through like the, you know, major financial

issues of 2007 through 2011 and the recovery and then, you know, some of the other financial challenges, but not major mountains to climb like we had seen before. And then the pandemic hit. And everybody was in a, you know, in all sorts of, you use the word Vuka before. in a Vuka situation, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. I mean, really, it's like you're in, you know, a major dust storm trying to navigate your way home or something like that, but you can't find it. You can't get there, and it seems like it never ends. So, you started applying this constant change into team performance. Tell us, how did you start

breaking that down in order to find some great changes? Sure. So you mentioned Vuka. I love Vuka. I talk about Vuka a lot, right? And so just to recap, Vuka's volatility, uncertainty, complexity, complexity, and ambiguity. You know, Adam, you share often with your listeners and your viewers that you have a military background. It comes from the military. It's a term from the U.S. military and the military college. And to describe a rapidly changing state of play. And in the late 1980s in describing the end of the Cold War and the rapidly changing state of play that the U.S. military was watching in terms of global geopolitics, that was a really healthy acronym.

I would say in the last five years, we've all been in a hot mess of Vucca, right? A whole lot of VUCA. I don't care what kind of job you have, what sector you're in. And so for me, if I'm writing a book about leadership and teams, the first thing you do is you start by reading a whole lot of books on leading teams. I think that's a responsible thing to do at least to figure out like, how do I have an original point of view, right, to add to the body of knowledge. And one of the things I saw is a lot of the books on leadership that are wonderful and a really

like foundational in the in in the field they really assume a stable state of play they assume that we're actually working on a chessboard and I think a better metaphor for work is the chessboard and you have one end in your hand and I have one in my hand and we're going like this like we're doing the magic carpet ride on the chess board right because and so I wanted to write a book where disruption is actually the normative context and then we look at okay so what are simple practical behaviors that leaders can commit to that allow their team to do the best work of their life in disruption rather than like an ideal state book which then you have to figure out how to adapt to Vuka. So that was one thing I wanted to bring forward. And when you talked about

the dust storm, I love that visual and that metaphor. And so I'll start us here. I'm going to borrow from your metaphor, right? You said like it's like we're leading in a dust storm and we're searching for where the stability is. When you're leading a group, and I use this parable often when I'm coaching and speaking and training, when you're leading a group through Vuka, it's likely leading through a hike in unknown conditions. Fog is rolling in. Wind is picking up.

And I, you know, Carolyn Samard is a colleague who introduced this parable to me. So shout out to her. But you're on a hike. You're leading your team through the woods, wind, fog's coming in. You start to hear wolves howling in the distance, right? These are all the kind of conditions of Fouca, and you reach a point where there's chasm. There was a bridge between two cliffs, and that bridge has fallen away. And you turn to the team and you go, we have to build a bridge.

And what happens and what I see so often with the leaders I coach and the teams that I work with is that the leader in the face of the bridge being missing and all the pressure they're under to cross to the other side, hit your goals, hit your KPIs, right? They put all of the calories in material cost, sequencing the project, you know, who has the right skill, who's the engineer, who's the designer, right? You know, let's make sure we get everybody the role clarity. Let's do a racy chart. All of that's important. All of that's important, right?

But those are management tasks. And they're really aligned to an R word results. The leadership task is about relationship. And so when you build the bridge, if you only pay attention to results, you're going to be the only person that walks across that bridge. When you're leading through disruption, some of your premium calories have to go into a relationship. And so my book is not a management book.

It's a relationship book. And it's about the three most important vectors for the leadership relationship, trust, belonging, and connection. In the research, Adam, these show up as like 5x, 10x multipliers on team performance when you're in maximum vuka. And so this metaphor of the bridge, right, if you're going to be a leader that leads to disruption, you have to have a management mindset. Of course, results matter.

But you also have to have a toolbox that allows you to inspire followership. And that's what gets people. When that bridge is built and you go, come on, team. And you just built a bridge really quickly in shaky conditions. Well, they have to follow you across that bridge, Adam, right? So the relationship capital you build creates. an amazing updraft for team performance. And your volume knobs on that relationship are trust, belonging, and connection.

Awesome. And I'll tell you, this is an incredible, you know, this trifecta of ideas you have here, the three most important parts, trust belonging and connection. So many leaders roll into a VUCA environment having not built that trust ahead of time. How, I mean, it's, and we saw that during COVID. I mean, it was the perfect example of people going, I see my CEO like every six months, or I see him at the holiday party once a year or something like that. But the CEOs that were actively engaged with their teams, constant communication and clarity, being involved in the culture of the organization and displaying the values on a regular basis, those people were already present with that trust.

So what recommendations do you have since, you know, obviously leaders are you might as well consider yourself in constant VUCA folks. I mean, it's not going to change. It's always going to be what we have to lead in. So, BJ, give us some recommendations how we can build and maintain that deposit or that account of trust, if you will. Yeah, let's start with build. Let's assume that for whatever reason, you don't have it and you're in disruption, right? And I think it's wonderful if you already had it, like, you know, great. But let's actually start with like you're leading a team.

Maybe it's a new team, right? Maybe there was a reorg after a layoff, you know, like speaking to the world of work, right? Now you're leading a new team and there's more disruption, generative AI, supply chain, shock, tariffs, whatever it might be. And so I always say start with trust because people are like, where do you, you know, how do I know where to go first? Trust is the foundation for all of the next things that come when it comes to performance. And if you don't get the sequencing right, then you don't really get the benefits from the higher order commitments like belonging in connections. So trust is the foundation of your house, of your team house, right? And when I talk about trust, there's so much work out there right in this space.

And there's brilliant writing and there's a lot of really good, you know, guides. But I try and keep things radically simple because one of the things I've noticed in my own life is if I'm leading to disruption, I cannot remember complex models. right my my nervous system is overwhelmed and so my ability to really focus in goes way down so radical simplicity is is really important here so when it comes to trust there's only three legs of the stool one does your team believe you care about their success two can your team take healthy risks with you and three are you reliable will you do what you say and so these are my like three legs of the stool when it comes to trust after for leading teams for over 20 years and then also looking at the research on durable trust

in VUCA and the source code for leaders right there. So what are the behaviors that are going to get your team to go, oh, wow, Adam cares about my success? Well, it's a behavior that speaks to that is how you handle a one-on-one, right? And asking with curiosity questions about an employee's work and saying, okay, I think I can be an unblocker for you here. You've spent a lot of time not getting where you need to be. Let me use my positional leadership authority to actually open that door for you because I want you to be successful, right?

Or you can take healthy risks as me, the second leg of the stool. A lot of times, a huge leadership mistake I see frontline leaders make is that they assume that trust means the lack of conflict, the absence of conflict. And it's not the absence of conflict. It's the absence of fear in relation to conflict, right? really high trust teams battle. I mean, you know, actually a lot of this great research comes from the military, right? When you grow trust on a special operators team, it's not that they don't disagree. They disagree vehemently with each other's ideas, but it doesn't weaken the resolve of the group

because they have the skills and the safety to say, Adam, no, I think that's a terrible idea. Here's what we learned in our last three exercises. I feel like you're ignoring that data. You know what I mean? Like that's a really good conversation. for us to have because as a leader, you're going, great, I'm actually getting better thinking and innovation and productivity out of my group because they are using the strength of their experience and intellect to sharpen each other's ideas, right? And so this thing around you can take

healthy risks with me as around, how do you set the stage for productive conflict? By normalizing that team, I expect for you to come ready to engage with each other. And if all I hear is a bunch yeses, it means we are missing out on the plurality we have in this room, you know, on this team, on this Zoom call, whatever it is. And I expect for you to actually butt heads with each other's ideas without attacking the person and know that this is what is actually going to propel us towards greatness, right? That's simple messaging you can give that is about healthy risk, right? And then the last piece of reliability, that's table fixed. If you're out here building safety and building, you know, the sense that you can take risk without fear, but you are making all kinds

of promises and not keeping them, there's no trust in that room. And we've all actually worked for people that say a lot of things and then don't do them. And you know what happens, right? Trust just withers very quickly because you're not seen as somebody that does what they say. And that reliability pieces is the third leg of the school. Incredible. I love this. I love this, you know, productive conflict idea. And leaders, I mean, I was. just tell you, own it, okay? I mean, the reality is, and I love this statement by a friend of mine, Mark Sparks, they can't eat you. So you might as well be vulnerable and share these ideas freely. You're going to get, you know, let's say shot down on them. You're going to get lifted up

with them. It's all going to happen. But if you just sit there with your mouth shut, you don't ask great questions and you don't participate in the highs and lows of the team, you're not going to get anywhere. So, I mean, that's, that's a fact. Yeah, completely agreed. Completely agreed. And I mean, we can't say enough about trust, right? And look at, let's think about some other things that for 20 years now we've been talking about in the world of work as driving peak performance on teams. A team that gives feedback, right? We know that feedback drives continual improvement. Feedback is my willingness to say to you, Adam, Adam, I was watching you run that pitch deck. And I actually think slide six takes you way off track.

And can we work on fixing it? I've got some ideas, right? That's an amazing moment, right? For you to do a better job with the customer, for me to share my experience with you. And business leaders have been talking about feedback, but they skip the precursor, which is trust, right? And that's why in the book I call it a catalyst. Catalyst unlocks a secondary effect, right?

And so the investment in trust unlocks the culture of feedback. Same thing around rapid decision making. One thing I hear from the businesses I work with right now is how can we make better decisions and chaos? How do we make faster decisions? Because what we're seeing is our teams, key mission critical teams are getting stuck in consensus building. And this is a very natural gravitational pull in VUCA because the leader is going, I don't have all the information because that's the nature of VUCA. You do not have all the information you need. my team is very disrupted, so I'm not going to make a decision because I'm worried about

failing. And I have a huge amount of empathy for that, right? At the same time, leaders make hard choices. So when you, one of the things that we talk about in work is, and in business is disagree and commit, right? This is, and this is one model for making rapid decisions. So I need everybody to come together. We're going to steal man each other's ideas. We're going to push on each other's ideas. I'm going to listen. I'm going to say, okay, over the last 45 minutes, I've heard three good ideas. I'm going with option B, and I need you to back my play. Right? This is a, this is a model for leading through Vucah. None of that happens without trust, right? That's right? Bring the team together. You go, I want you to argue. Iron, sharpen's iron. And

everybody's like, well, what do you think, Adam? And the whole thing goes flat. Or you go, I'm choosing option B. I'm making a command decision. You need to back my play. And they all go, sure and then you know you're out there on the walking the the plank alone because when your team doesn't trust you they do not ride or die for you after you make a command decision right I hope there are a lot of founders listening to this because I think one of the key aspects of being a founder is coming in and making decisions but also one of the key aspects of being a founder is passing that trust and that you know that creation of a team on to those that you bring on to your business so I mean the the reality I

I call it Founder's Syndrome, where they won't release that ability for their team to make decisions. Or, you know, they have to come in and make them. And if somebody makes the wrong decisions, they're like, this is not the way I started the company. So, you know, the reality is founders listen up. Trust building. 10X, your trust building, if you're a founder, because you're not coming in with this vulnerability. Typically, you're coming in with a hard stance on what your business model is. So very important on there.

I want to jump into belonging real quick because I, you know, I love the currency of trust to create the team, but ultimately, if there's no belonging, you don't have a team. So, you know, what can we do to understand belonging, you know, just on a brief flyover? But ultimately, do your people feel like they have this and how do we deploy it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's so much chatter about belonging. And first, let's clean up the signal chain, right? So belonging shows up in the public conversation in a variety of ways. It's oftentimes deployed as a need that some communities have, something we should invest in for specific groups. And there's a conversation to be had there. But more broadly, every human being has a belonging need. And for me, as a social scientist with a deep interest in behavioral science, I always go back to evolutionary biology, right? So over hundreds of thousands of years, Adam, we actually evolved to have a dependency on belonging. We have an internal compulsion to want to belong because the drive to belong makes us form small groups or medium-sized groups. And that was really important for the survival of the species. And what we know about humans is that when we're pulled away from groups, when we're pulled away from meaningful, connection, interconnectedness with others, we actually suffer immensely, mentally,

spiritually and physically, right? There's data on all three of those health indicators that when you are isolated, which is sort of the opposite of belonging, you just start to plummet in free fall. And I think if I think back to 2020, everybody has somebody in their life that had a really hard time in that first year. And oftentimes they were more isolated than others. So we have a fundamental human need for belonging, and leaders need to know this because you lead people through disruption. You're not actually leading products. You're not leading your OKRs. You're not leading goals.

You lead people. Most often your people are the fulcrum that you use to achieve your OKRs and your goals and to hit those audacious sales targets. So if you understand that people, humans, have a need to belong, you can go, great, what do I do as a leader to drive that, to drive that factor, right? That's the right question to be asking. And so what I do in the book is I borrow from a definition that comes from a research think tank called Cokewell, and I break belonging down to four micronutrients. Because when we talk about the word belonging, I think we can relate as humans, right, to the idea of I felt lonely before I felt excluded. That sucks. I don't want that for my team. So what do I do? Well, let's look at the elements of belonging, the micronutrients

of belonging. And there's four. People feel adorable, robust sense of belonging. when they are seen, connected, proud, and supported. Seen is about recognition and respect. Connected is about having healthy, frequent interactions with your peers. Pride is about feeling an alignment between your values and the work of your team and the big wins of the organization. And then supported is about, do you feel like you can make reasonable mistakes and still get up and be respected on the team? you grow on this job or are you a widget maker with no possibility of growth, you know, those kinds of things? And so each of these, Steam connected, proud and supported is a mini roadmap

for a leader to go and do a team level diagnostic, which is, I mentioned this in the book, like do a pan scan of your team, right? What are the opportunities for you to turn up the volume on each of these micronutrients using the available resources in your organization? And there are very low friction ways to do this. It doesn't have to be a heroic effort of, you know, pulling together a global offsite and spending thousands and thousands of dollars because that's not realistic for most people. Right. Awesome. Such great information. Vijay, where can we find more information about you and where can we find your book? Because I'll tell you, this is everybody listening, this is not just a book where you read it and put it away. This is a book you leave

sitting on your desk because it is action steps and it's a workbook for leadership and your team. So you're going to want to continuously reference this. Vijay, where do we find these things? You can find me at Vijaypendocor.com. So you just Google my name and my, I have a home base website that will, you know, keep you a prize of everything I'm doing. And you can find the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble's and all your major booksellers, The Alchemy of Talent, leading teams to peak performance.

Love it. There are so many secrets in this books that we have not been able to hit on today because of time, but I encourage you all to pick it up. It actually has sold out already and now you're able to get it again. So it's a big bestseller in several different aspects on Amazon. So VJ, you're making some big impacts on business and teams here. So thanks for what you're doing. I do have a question that I ask all of the great leaders on Start With a Win. And that's how do you start your day with a win. Well, I have two young daughters, Adam, and so the morning can feel like a bit of a vortex. It's actually, I'm in, I'm in Vuka often in the morning for anybody on the call who has young children. But one of the things I do to try and start my day with a win as much as I can is to find one moment in the morning where I shift from doing mode to being mode. What I notice about young children and my children is that they're just in the moment. They're largely. just they're not trying to get through the task list in order to get out the door on time, which is part of the frustration of the morning. But there's a beauty to them being in the

moment. And so I try and find one small way every morning to shift out of my own task execution mindset into just being with my daughters, which might be playing one song on the piano. I did that this morning with the girls or just telling goofy jokes or asking them what they're looking forward to in school at school today and letting them tell like some circular story that doesn't even go anywhere. It just doesn't matter, right? Like two minutes of being actually like aligns me like on an energetic level with them as people who are deeply present. And I feel better about my morning and I feel ready for my day. Wow. I love this. I mean, be deeply present and spend the time with the loved ones in your life because frankly,

those times go quickly in life. So super important. Everybody, make sure you check out the alchemy of talent. I mean, we're all into building better teams. And this is a playbook for how to do that. Bidj, thank you so much for all that you do. Thanks for educating us on how to make ourselves better. And thank you for starting with a wind. Thanks, Adam. Happy to be here. You know, Thank you.