TED Talks Daily - What's your leadership language? | Rosita Najmi (re-release)

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

In a globe-trotting career that has spanned corporations, governments, nonprofits and philanthropy, Rosita Najmi has often found herself translating among them. Instead of focusing on leadership style, she makes the case for becoming fluent in the languages of leadership, explaining how it can help you adapt to audiences across industries and collectively achieve your goals.(This episode originally aired in 2024.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. If you've been in the working world for a while, you probably have some sense of your own leadership style, or at least the leadership styles of the people around you. Collaborative, decisive, hands-off. But global development economist Rosita Najmi says leadership styles might not be the thing to focus on. Many leaders obsess over leadership style when really they just need to get over themselves. Sorry, leader, it's not about you.

What's more useful is to adapt and personalize your leadership to be the leader, the situation, and the people involved need. Rosita, an Iranian refugee who grew up in rural Tennessee, has lived and worked across more than 30 countries. So she thought she knew how to move between cultures and languages. But she was in business school when she realized that leadership has its own set of languages across corporations, non-profits, philanthropy, the public sector, and more. In this talk from 2023, she shares why being a multilingual leader is key because good leadership isn't about having one fixed style.

It's about learning how to translate for different audiences. That's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. As an Iranian refugee who grew up in rural East Tennessee and someone who studied, lived, and worked in over 30 countries, I thought I knew how to navigate across cultures and languages. I was wrong. There I was day one of business school,

getting my bearings and hearing an alien language. It wasn't English, French, or my native Persian. It was a bouleabase of languages, jargon from across the organizational multiverse, the corporate world, the nonprofit sphere, international development, and the public sector. It was weird. In business school, I thought I'd learn about leadership styles.

What I found were leadership languages. And I learned that by becoming conversant in these languages, that I could communicate with and contribute to all of these worlds. So how does one become multilingual? Here's my story. In college, I went to West Africa to study microfinance and economic empowerment. Seeing a large public health need,

I co-founded and led a nonprofit, collecting medical supplies and money. We saw what collective action could yield, and we were creative with our advocacy and our fundraising, with campaigns like Band-Aids for Benin. Along the way, I studied different leadership styles, autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, servant, collaborative, transformational, and more.

I read books, attended trainings, and I even had the privilege to study with some of the greats and to work with General Colin Powell and Dr. Mye. After all of this, I became convinced that there's no best type of leadership. So many of us just default to one style or another, similar to how we're born with our native tongue. But this default style doesn't work in every situation. Many leaders obsess over leadership style when really they just need to get over themselves. Sorry, leader, it's not about you.

What's more useful is to adapt and personalize your leadership to be the leader, the situation, and the people-involved need. It's not so much style as language, the living vernacular of each discrete community and culture. The successful leader will aspire to be multilateral. to speak fluently with all groups and to translate among them. In 2012, while working at the Omidyar Network, I was one of the sponsors of a two-year study of 12 impact investing funds.

One of the ahas of this project was that the most successful funds were those led by multilingual leaders, people that could communicate across the corporate, nonprofit, philanthropic and public policy perspectives. These leaders also made sure that others on their team were multilingual. This came to me as a bit of a surprise. I expected the secret sauce to be in sophisticated financial modeling or some other type of complex analysis.

According to this study, the multilingual leader will describe their work as being unremittingly financially driven, business-speak, moving the needle on social and environmental challenges, nonprofit and philanthropic speak, while addressing systemic market failures, public policy speak. The study further found the need to be conversant into four industry languages.

There's a finance, nonprofit, government, and international development. The multilingual leader was something that seemed very familiar to me. This really rang true based on my own experience of patchworks across these sectors. And it took me back to that first weird day in business school.

Now that we've described the how, let us turn to the what. Where should leaders focus? I will modestly propose three topics that cut across issues and together we'll double-click on one of them. Data, climate, power. How each of these sectors measure the impact

and even the timing, the tempo, and the tools that they used for each could not be more different. Say you're the private sector at one end. You have accounting on a daily, a weekly, a monthly, and quarterly increments. The public sector, you're working on multi-year election cycles.

The nonprofit and philanthropic sector, well, you may give yourself 15 years or even a generation to reach a goal. Yet, all of these sectors must come together to reach these outcomes. To make it real, let's look together about how these sectors can come together to address power with the focus on gender equality. Say you're a public sector leader,

you have the unique ability to create equity, a level playing field, so everyone has a fair shot. You can create regulations and incentives to increase the use of gender data. You can set goals for women on boards and in public office. You can practice gender budgeting, and you can mandate paid care.

Say you're a leader in the business sector. You can design products and services that unleash the economic power of the female customer. You can fortify and diversify your supply chain with women-owned businesses, and you can invest in your female talent pipeline with pay equity and leadership opportunities so that your corporate decisions are more inclusive.

Or maybe you work in philanthropy or international development. You can help remove the barriers, whether formal or informal, that influence how power is distributed. You can fund the research and training that both the public and the private sector need to do their part. You can fund campaigns and grassroots efforts

that influence social and cultural norms. And you can help get women in decision-making roles in their households, in their communities, in their countries, in economies. The multilingual leader can be conversant and use the languages of all of these sectors to identify the root causes

and then collaborate together to find the solutions to these complex issues. So here is over 20 years of experience distilled into one sentence. Don't fret over your leadership styles, focus on your leadership languages. So over to you, Leader, which languages are you going to learn next? Thank you.

That was Rosita Najmi at TED Women in 2023. This talk was originally published in January of 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced. and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos,

Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Sunglarnivol. Additional support from Daniela Balereseo, Christopher Faisi Bogan,

Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban-Ban-Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey-Lott. Learn more at podcasts. dot ted.com. I am Elise Hugh.

I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.