Hetal Dandia: The Art of Starting Over

A ShePower Special Feature for SheSight Magazine

There is a certain kind of woman who does not wait for permission to begin. She does not wait for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, or the perfect level of certainty. She simply starts, with whatever she has, wherever she is, and she builds from there. Hetal Dandia is exactly that kind of woman.

A leadership development consultant, facilitator, and coach with over twenty-three years of corporate experience, Hetal has built her expertise across some of the world’s most respected organisations, from the hospitality floors of The Oberoi Group and Hyatt to the corporate corridors of HDFC Life and Marsh McLennan, where she served most recently as Director of Talent and Learning. Along the way she has built the systems, the frameworks, and the cultures that develop people into leaders. She has designed talent strategies at scale, led high performing L&D teams, and shaped the careers of hundreds of professionals across industries. And then, in early 2026, she did something that most people only talk about. She walked away from all of it to build something entirely on her own terms, launching her independent practice as a leadership and career transition coach, working primarily with women professionals navigating growth, change, and the harder questions of purpose and identity.

This is her story.

Starting Before She Was Ready

Hetal’s career did not begin with a grand plan. It began with necessity, and perhaps that is what makes it so compelling. With a forty year age gap between herself and her father, she understood early that she would need to become financially independent sooner than most. By the time she was fifteen or sixteen, she was already picking up odd jobs, filling out surveys, manning exhibition stalls, even trying her hand at extra roles in films, anything to earn her own money and build her own confidence.

“All of those early experiences shaped me,” she reflects. “Customer service, professionalism, resilience, how to deal with difficult people, communication, leadership. My first formal job in a five star hotel taught me more about human beings than any classroom did.”

That curiosity about human behaviour, what motivates people, how they learn, what holds them back, became the thread that quietly connected every role she would go on to hold. It led her from hospitality into recruitment, then into over a decade building learning and development in one of India’s largest insurance companies, followed by nearly seven years driving talent strategy at a global professional services firm. She was not following a script. She was following a pull.

The Truth About Leadership Development

Ask most people what they think of corporate training and you get a polite but unconvincing answer. Ask Hetal and you get something far more useful.

“Learning and development is the engine oil of an organisation,” she says. “You may not notice immediately that you are wearing your people down by neglecting it. But over time, the wear and tear accumulates, and eventually something breaks down.”

After two decades inside large organisations, Hetal has seen both ends of this spectrum. She has seen companies build genuine learning cultures, where development is not a single event but an ongoing ecosystem, where managers support growth, mentoring happens naturally, feedback is real, and people are given the space to apply what they learn. She has also seen the other kind: the tick box approach, the training programme that gets announced with fanfare and forgotten within a quarter.

The difference, she argues, is not budget. It is belief. “How your top leaders talk about development, how they model learning, how they treat the idea of growth, that becomes your culture. Learning does not happen only in the classroom. Seventy percent of real development happens on the job. The rest happens through relationships, conversations, and everyday moments. The classroom is only ten percent of the picture.”

This is where she references the 70-20-10 model, a framework originally developed by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, and Robert Eichinger through their research at the Center for Creative Leadership in the United States. It is a model that Hetal has both studied and lived, and one she believes most organisations cite but rarely honour in practice.

The Promotion Problem

One of the most common frustrations in any large organisation is the nagging sense that the wrong people keep getting promoted. Hetal does not shy away from this conversation.

“Many organisations still look only at individual performance when deciding who steps into leadership,” she says. “But individual performance and leadership capability are two very different things. A person can be an outstanding individual contributor and still be completely unprepared to lead others.”

What gets missed, she explains, are the competencies that actually define good leadership: emotional intelligence, self-awareness, the ability to have honest development conversations, to give meaningful feedback, to hold space for other people’s growth. These are not soft skills in the dismissive sense. They are, she argues, the hardest and most consequential skills in any organisation.

“When you look at who should step into leadership, you have to ask not just who is performing well today, but what skills will this role require tomorrow. Those are often very different questions.”

Watch the full ShePower podcast conversation with Hetal Dandia and Dr. CeeVee

Women Who Lead

The conversation around women and leadership is one that Hetal approaches with both warmth and precision. She has worked closely enough with women across industries to know that the challenges they face are rarely about capability. They are almost always about something more internal, and something more systemic.

“Women tend to question themselves far more than men do,” she says plainly. “When an opportunity comes up, a man who is fifty percent sure will often put his hand up and say yes, I will figure it out. A woman who is ninety percent sure will still hesitate and wonder whether she is truly ready.”

The research on this is well established, and Hetal has seen it play out in real time across boardrooms and hallways. What she also sees, however, is something that rarely makes it into the conversation: women are often extraordinarily well equipped for the very skills that define excellent leadership. Emotional intelligence, empathy, the ability to hold complexity, to manage competing needs and perspectives, these are competencies that many women have been developing all their lives, long before they ever sat in a leadership role.

“A woman leader tends to see things from a far wider lens,” Hetal observes. “She cares about her team, about the human beings around her. That is not a weakness. That is exactly what leadership needs more of.”

The gap, she believes, is not in women’s ability. It is in women’s willingness to own and voice that ability, and in organisations’ willingness to recognise and reward it.

Becoming the Architect of Your Own Career

Whether you are inside a supportive organisation or a completely indifferent one, Hetal’s advice lands in the same place. Stop waiting.

“Too many people still operate with what I call a laborer mindset,” she says. “They wait to be told what to do, wait to be nominated for a programme, wait for their manager to identify them for an opportunity. That mindset belongs to a different era.”

What she advocates instead is what she calls the architect approach. An architect does not wait for someone else to hand over a blueprint. She visualises the end result first, maps out the structure, and builds deliberately toward it. “Start with the question: what do I want my career to look like in ten years? And then start building the skills, the experiences, the relationships that will take you there. Nobody is coming to rescue your career. That has to come from you.”

This is not a theoretical position for Hetal. It is autobiographical.

The Leap

In early 2026, after nearly two and a half decades in corporate life, Hetal made the decision to leave. Not because she had failed, not because she was pushed, but because she had been preparing for something else for years and she finally felt ready enough to begin.

She traces the turning point to around 2018 or 2019, when she worked through the Ikigai framework and began asking herself, honestly, what a fulfilling life would actually look like. The answer that kept coming back was about people. Helping them. Coaching them. Creating the conditions for genuine transformation.

“I had been building those blocks slowly for years,” she says. “Learning to coach, developing skills, working with women in particular. There came a point when I realised that knowledge without action eventually becomes irrelevant. So I made the move.”

She is candid about what the transition has cost her. “A lot of people who have had long, comfortable corporate careers do not realise how many different skills and mindset shifts entrepreneurship requires. It has been an exciting journey and a humbling one.”

But she would not change it.

Human in the Age of AI

Ask Hetal what she makes of artificial intelligence and the future of work, and she does not reach for the familiar anxieties. She reaches for an analogy.

“Think about textiles,” she says. “There are thousands of machine-made fabrics available today, far cheaper and far more consistent than anything woven by hand. And yet people will pay a premium for something handwoven. Because the human element is not just about the product. It is about what the product represents.”

She believes AI will do to this generation of professionals what computers did to the previous one: create uncertainty, eliminate some roles, transform others, and ultimately raise the bar for what it means to be distinctly, irreplaceably human. What that looks like in practice is a sharper focus on emotional intelligence, coaching, genuine human connection, the ability to create psychological safety, and to lead with both care and clarity.

“The organisations that will thrive are not just the ones investing in technology,” she says. “They are the ones investing in the people who will use that technology, and in the culture that will allow those people to do their best work.”

She also points to something that does not get said enough: psychological safety, the concept developed by Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, is becoming more important, not less, as younger professionals enter the workforce. “They want the freedom to be uniquely themselves. And that is where creativity and innovation come from. If you constrain that, you lose the very thing you are trying to build.”

Legacy Over Title

At the end of a conversation with Hetal Dandia, you are left with one thing above all else: the sense that she has thought carefully about what a life well lived actually looks like, and that she is building toward it, deliberately and without apology.

She often begins coaching conversations by asking clients to imagine themselves at seventy-five or eighty years old, looking back. What would make them feel proud? What would constitute a life of genuine achievement? “What I have found,” she says, “is that as people grow, it becomes less and less about the titles they held and more and more about the impact they left behind.”

This is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs playing out at a human scale. And Hetal is living proof that the ascent is possible, that you can build a credentialed, respected, meaningful career and still choose, at the right moment, to begin again.

“We came here for a purpose,” she says. “And that purpose is to become the best version of ourselves. Do not waste that. Do not leave that on the table.”

At SheSight, we have a feeling she will not be leaving anything on the table.

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This interview was originally featured on SheSight Magazine’s ShePower Special Podcast. For more inspiring stories of women breaking barriers and creating change, visit our podcast series.

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