Coaching For Leaders

Sunita Sah: Defy Sunita Sah is an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational psychology, leading groundbreaking research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. A trained physician, her research and analyses have been widely published in leading academic journals and media entities including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harvard Business Review, and Scientific American. She is the author of Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes*. We often think of defiance as a snap judgement. Yet, it’s so much more nuanced and purposeful than it often appears. In this conversation, Sunita and I explore the common patterns of defiance and how we can all do a better job of standing up for ourselves. Key Points We follow bad advice – even when we know it is obviously bad – to avoid appearing unhelpful. Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. True defiance is not a snap judgement; it’s a process.