Leadership Roundtable 2026: A Leader's Journey From Self to Impact
- Young Women's Leadership Connection
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
On 23 May 2026, YWLC's Leadership Development Subcommittee hosted our Leadership Roundtable 2026: A Leader's Journey From Self to Impact, bringing together four remarkable leaders for an honest, intimate conversation on what it truly means to lead with purpose.
This event also marked a meaningful milestone for YWLC. Since first introducing our Leadership Competency Framework in 2022, centred on Leading Yourself and Leading Others, we have continued to evolve our approach to leadership development. At the Roundtable, we unveiled Framework 2.0: an expanded model that adds a third dimension, Leading With Impact, reflecting how leadership grows from the inside out, and ultimately into the world.
The Roundtable was designed as a living expression of that framework, a space to hear how these competencies show up in real careers, real decisions, and real moments of doubt and courage. Our speakers, Asilah Azil (Co-Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company), Emily Poon (CEO, Singapore Institute of Directors), Leanne Robers (Co-Founder, She Loves Tech), and Winnie Yap (Managing Director & Head of Global Payments Solutions, HSBC), generously shared their insights. Here is what stayed with us.
Leading Self: Know Yourself Before You Lead Anyone Else
Your blind spots are not failures. They are invitations.
The panel opened with a grounding reminder: most leaders skip straight to leading others, when the work has to start from within. One of the most practical tools shared was the Johari Window, a simple 2x2 matrix that maps what you know about yourself against what others see. The quadrant most of us ignore is the one we cannot see, our blind spots. These are not areas of weakness to be ashamed of. They are the places where, with honest feedback and the courage to look, meaningful growth happens.
The takeaway is not to wait for a formal review or a moment of crisis to seek that feedback. Build the habit of asking. Build the relationships where people will tell you the truth.
Self-awareness is not the same as self-doubt.
Both show up as inner voices, but they serve very different purposes. Self-awareness grounds you. Self-doubt holds you back. Learning to distinguish between the two is a skill worth practising.
Write your purpose statement, even when the first draft is terrible.
Purpose was a recurring theme throughout the panel. The advice was clear and a little uncomfortable: start writing. Your first draft will be vague, generic, and possibly embarrassing. That is part of the process. Purpose is not discovered in a single sitting. It is refined over time, through experience, through failure, through paying attention to what feels aligned and what does not.
What makes it worth doing is this: once you find it, purpose sits above any job or organisation. It becomes your compass when opportunities arise. It is what makes the big decisions, which role to take, which to walk away from, when to speak up, feel clearer rather than paralysing.
Leading Others: Influence, Visibility, and the Conversations We Avoid
Confidence is a muscle, not a trait.
In her breakout session, Asilah Azil drew on McKinsey's Influence Model to reframe how we think about building leadership presence. Influence, she reminded us, is not about authority. It is built through role modelling, developing others, reinforcing the right behaviours, and creating genuine conviction in the people around you.
Central to this is confidence, not as something you either have or do not have, but as something you train. The mechanism is simple: set small goals, make a genuine effort to achieve them, and let those wins accumulate. Momentum builds gradually. Excessive self-criticism is one of the biggest barriers to stepping into leadership opportunities, and learning to quieten that inner critic is itself a leadership act.
Visibility, too, is intentional. It is built through strong relationships, through saying yes to opportunities before you feel fully ready, through consistently showing up in ways others can see. As Asilah put it directly: if you are not visible, you are not visible.
Stop defending territory. Start protecting shared outcomes.
Winnie Yap's session on boundaries offered useful reframes of the day. When navigating difficult stakeholders or demanding superiors, the instinct is often to defend our position. But that framing puts us in opposition. A more effective approach is to redirect the conversation entirely: "What is the outcome we are both trying to protect?"
This one question changes the dynamic. It depersonalises the conflict. It invites collaboration rather than confrontation. And it is much harder to dismiss.
Winnie also challenged the room on what kindness really looks like in leadership. Avoiding hard conversations is not kindness, it is avoidance. Withholding honest feedback denies people the chance to grow, and it demoralises the high performers around them who see underperformance go unaddressed. Authentic leadership means delivering hard truths with care, not sidestepping them.
Hard conversations require trust to land.
Emily Poon's breakout session went deep on the mechanics of difficult conversations. Her core message: the work happens before the conversation, not in it. Leaders who consistently show up, make their values clear, and build genuine rapport create the conditions where hard feedback can actually be received. Without that foundation, even the most carefully worded feedback will fall flat or land as a threat.
When performance issues arise, keep the conversation factual and well-documented. Use KPIs, data points, and specific examples. This keeps the discussion professional rather than personal, and gives the individual something concrete to work with. And when it comes to decisions like managing someone out, Emily's question is a useful anchor: have you done right by this individual, by the team, by the organisation, and by the business?
Silence, she reminded us, is not neutral. It allows problems to compound, morale to erode, and the burden to be passed on to the next leader.
Leading With Impact: Resilience, Sustainability, and Running Your Own Race
Resilience is not endurance.
Leanne Robers opened her session with a distinction that reframed how many in the room thought about their own capacity. Endurance is pushing through at full force until you collapse. It works in the short term and it extracts a cost. Resilience is something different. It is the ongoing practice of reflecting, recalibrating, and re-energising as you go, so that you arrive at your goals fuller, not depleted.
Many leaders reach a milestone and feel strangely empty. That hollowness is often the cost of mistaking endurance for resilience.
The key, Leanne explained, lies in understanding what happens to us physiologically under pressure. Our brains process threat before they process reason. When the nervous system senses danger, the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for rational thought and wise decision-making, goes offline. What remains is survival mode: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop. This is why leaders sometimes make decisions they later cannot explain.
The goal is integration, learning to work with all three layers of the brain so you can lead from a grounded, discerning place rather than from reaction.
Your body is always signalling. Learn to read it.
One of the most practical parts of Leanne's session was on body attunement, a skill that many of us, particularly in high-performance cultures, have trained ourselves to ignore. Shallow breathing, shoulder tension, a sinking feeling in the gut: these are not signs of weakness. They are data.
A simple starting point: check your breath. A healthy resting breath is approximately 4.5 seconds in and 4.5 seconds out. Slowing your breathing deliberately sends a signal of safety to your nervous system and brings your thinking mind back online. This is not a wellness exercise. It is a leadership tool.
Expanding our emotional vocabulary is equally important. On average, people can only name three emotions. Yet there are over 200 recognisable human emotional states. When we cannot name what we are feeling, emotions run us from the background. When we can, we understand why, and we regain agency over how we respond.
Impact without sustainability is a short story.
The final theme that wove through the day was sustainability. Passion and purpose are not enough on their own. The question every leader must ask regularly is: am I getting as much as I am giving? If not, burnout will end the impact you set out to create.
A useful framework offered was Ikigai, the Japanese concept of finding your reason for being at the intersection of four things: what the world needs, what you are good at, what you love, and what sustains you financially. Where all four meet is where lasting impact lives. Purpose alone, without the financial or personal sustainability to support it, is a short story.
A Closing Reflection
What made this Roundtable powerful was not just the calibre of the speakers, but their willingness to be honest. About the hard moment, about what they got wrong, about the boundaries they struggled to set and the conversations they wished they had had earlier.
This event sits squarely within YWLC's Leadership Competency Framework 2.0, reinforcing self-management and self-awareness, emotional intelligence, resilience and courage, and the ability to lead and influence across all levels.
