Charchit
Bakshi

Leadership & approach

Clear on the work.
Human with the people.

I want people to understand what is expected, feel comfortable raising a problem and know that their development matters.

My starting point

Once someone joins the team,
support them fully.

Pre-hire reservations should not follow a person into their day-to-day experience. Once the decision is made, I focus on helping them grow personally and professionally.

The principles

A few things
I keep coming back to.

01

Find the cause.

When work slips, I ask why it happened, why it was not identified earlier and how we could detect it sooner. Those questions help the team turn a missed commitment into a useful process discussion.

02

Make reality visible.

People need the current state of the work to make useful decisions. I share progress, blockers and risks, and use the actual build in internal milestone discussions.

03

Bring a way forward.

I raise risks with practical options. Depending on the situation, that may mean changing priorities, adjusting scope, finding support or discussing a realistic timeline.

04

Adapt the support.

Different people understand information in different ways. I observe what helps someone learn, use it deliberately and make space for questions and clarification.

In practice

The approach becomes real
in ordinary conversations.

Coaching · LightFury

Start with the person they want to become.

When a new hire’s behaviour was affecting relationships with peers, I addressed it privately. I asked what kind of person they wanted to become in five years and committed to supporting that growth.

I also set a boundary: development could not come at the expense of others. Behaviour and peer relationships improved gradually over time.

Conflict · Rockstar

Listen separately. Resolve together.

When two teammates were in conflict, I met each person separately and took notes. The underlying problem was miscommunication.

I brought them together with the facts and reinforced direct communication before relying on second-hand information. The conflict was resolved.

Training · Rockstar

Notice how someone learns.

During onboarding, I paid attention to how each tester understood explanations. When someone consistently learned better through analogies, I reused that approach in later training.

Reference documentation supported the conversations, so new joiners had somewhere to return when they needed an answer.

Accessibility · LightFury

Make support part of the everyday.

I regularly spoke with five or six employees across the floor and kept calendar slots anyone could book for a professional or casual one-to-one.

That contact helped me notice frustration early and understand the actual situation behind a question about work, growth or the team.

Expectations & development

Support needs
clear expectations too.

At Rockstar, formal performance reviews considered proactiveness, defect count and quality, reliability and initiative. I reviewed the work, gave feedback and provided assessments for the relevant leads to consider.

When recurring reporting mistakes appeared, I added them to onboarding material so the whole team could learn from them. At Ubisoft, feedback on individual reports was shared privately while urgent defects kept moving.

For development requests, I considered the person’s interest, current responsibilities and team impact, then involved the formal approver. If access was not yet appropriate, I explained the reason and the pathway toward eligibility.

Influence & responsibility

Understand the boundary.
Still take responsibility.

Leadership beyond direct reports

At LightFury, I had no direct reports. I built working relationships through regular conversations, clear planning, shared information and practical follow-through with department leads.

I helped allocate approved headcount according to bottlenecks and workload. Leadership retained budget ownership and final hiring decisions.

Recommendations with context

I assessed team fit in final-stage screening, leaving technical evaluation to the relevant leads. I explained concerns as evidence-based input and supported the person fully once they joined.

The same approach applied to delivery decisions: make the consequences clear, offer workable alternatives and carry the agreed decision through to action.

See the work behind these principles

Continuing to learn

Understand the conditions
around the team.

My QUT work has given me more ways to examine questions I encountered in team leadership: how growth affects culture, what supports inclusion and how workload can become a risk to people.

Through organisational research proposals, diversity and inclusion analysis, and an IT workload concept, I have explored psychological safety, ethical leadership, research design and responsible use of information.

Explore the academic work behind these questions