When the classroom is a client pitch

Not many leadership origin stories begin with a whiteboard, a two-hour client session and a partner who stops you mid-sentence to tell you you’re not ready. Yet that moment—humbling, exacting, and oddly clarifying—is precisely the sort of formative encounter that Amit Walia traces back to his time at McKinsey. He recalls entering rooms where outcomes mattered, where every slide, assumption and phrase was tested as if the business in front of you depended on it. For a young consultant, the pressure was not an abstract lesson; it was an immediate performance metric, and it forced rapid growth.

That pressure often begins with a simple human reaction: impostor syndrome. Walia’s trajectory shows how feeling unmoored—like you don’t belong, or that someone will discover you lack the magic all leaders are imagined to possess—can coexist with accelerated capability. In the pressure cooker of consulting, the discomfort of being outmatched becomes a productive tension rather than an existential verdict.

How criticism becomes curriculum

At consulting firms, feedback is not occasional—it’s systematic. Performance discussions happen in the open, narratives are challenged, and the coach’s blunt assessment is framed as a vector for improvement. For Walia, this meant receiving critiques not as personal rebukes but as a map. Each critical comment invited a follow-up experiment: refine the argument, shorten the slide, clarify the recommendation, build a cleaner model.

There is a vital discipline here: criticism that points to behavior and outcomes, not character. That nuance made the difference for a young leader learning to separate what he did (what could be changed) from who he was (immutable). Over time, those revisions compound. A single rebuke turns into dozens of small, iterative improvements that shape thinking, communication and decision-making.

Skills formed under client heat

The McKinsey-to-tech pipeline—anecdotally visible across the industry—does not create clones of consultants. What it does is teach a set of portable muscles:

• Problem structuring: breaking a fuzzy business issue into solvable parts and sequencing interventions.
• Hypothesis-driven thinking: prioritizing the most testable ideas and pruning the infinite to the actionable.
• Communications rigor: crafting crisp narratives that reduce ambiguity for boards, investors and teams.
• Fast learning under ambiguity: assimilating domain knowledge quickly and making defensible calls with partial data.
• Client empathy and stakeholder mapping: creating solutions that account for incentives, politics and human behavior.

For Walia, these skills translated directly into the demands of running a software company: aligning product roadmaps with market signals, converting technical work into commercial outcomes, and stewarding teams through scale while preserving clarity and purpose.

From surviving critique to providing it

One of the most interesting reversals is how someone formed by relentless feedback becomes an architect of culture at scale. Leaders shaped in environments where blunt, specific feedback was the norm often carry that approach into the organizations they lead. The result can be a virtuous cycle: teams that receive timely, concrete feedback iterate faster and learn more quickly.

Walia’s account highlights another element: the move from being advised to becoming an advisor. The skills of listening, diagnosing and prescribing translate into mentoring product managers, engineers and commercial leaders. But the tone matters. The goal is to convert the kind of candid critique he experienced into coaching that empowers rather than diminishes. That’s where the theory of formative criticism becomes practice—adapting a high bar for performance into a growth-oriented, humane leadership method.

Impostor syndrome as a persistent ally

Impostor feelings don’t vanish once someone becomes CEO. Rather, for many high-performing leaders they become a motivating undercurrent: a humility check that keeps them curious, willing to seek counsel and open to being proven wrong. Walia’s recounting frames impostor syndrome not as a pathology to be cured, but as a reminder to remain a learner.

There’s practical wisdom here for business readers: channel the unease. Convert it into structured practices—ask more questions on calls, solicit dissenting views, run small experiments to test assumptions—rather than paralyzing self-critique. In that way, impostor feelings can be converted into a continuous improvement engine.

Why consulting makes for a leadership lab—and where it falls short

Consulting firms act like accelerators: they expose early-career managers to a wide variety of problems, force them to practice communication and feedback, and habituate them to short cycles of hypothesis and validation. That breadth and pace create leaders who can think across functions and manage complexity.

But there are limits. Consulting environments can privilege analysis over execution: building a compelling recommendation is not the same as owning product delivery, engineering trade-offs, or the messy realities of long-term people management. The very traits that make a consultant valuable—detachment, an external focus on problems, reliance on structured frameworks—must be adapted to the endurance tasks of running a company: hiring, culture-building, operational persistence and the slow grind of scaling systems.

Walia’s story illuminates this balance. The consulting crucible taught him to diagnose and persuade. Leading a technology company required layering on operational empathy, technical depth and the patience to see multi-year bets through. The transition involved remembering the lessons of rigorous critique while learning to tolerate unresolved ambiguity and the long tail of execution.

Lessons for leaders and organizations

For the Work news community and leaders at every level, there are several practical takeaways:

• Make feedback frequent and specific: avoid generalities. Point to action, not identity.
• Train through repetition: simulate client-style pressure in internal reviews—short, focused presentations with hard questions sharpen skills fast.
• Normalize impostor feelings: share them publicly as part of a culture of learning so they become a prompt for growth rather than a source of shame.
• Balance critique with sponsorship: pair blunt feedback with mentorship and opportunities to apply lessons in real projects.
• Translate consulting rigor to operational patience: couple short-cycle experimentation with long-term ownership of execution.

These practices can help organizations create internal training grounds that offer many of consulting’s advantages—structured feedback, fast learning and cross-functional exposure—without requiring every leader to go through a consulting house to get them.

Beyond pedigree: the making of modern leaders

What Amit Walia’s story ultimately reveals is less about a single firm and more about a set of transferable habits: a tolerance for public correction, the ability to turn critique into curriculum, and a persistent humility that converts doubt into preparation. Consulting can sharpen those habits early, but they are sustained by deliberate practice in the messy, day-to-day world of product roadmaps, customer escalations and talent development.

For readers tracking the trajectories of modern tech leaders, the lesson is instructive. The origin—whether a management consultancy, a startup, an engineering team or an operations role—matters less than the mechanisms of learning that follow. Do leaders receive clear feedback? Are they put in positions that require synthesis under pressure? Do they learn to translate critique into coaching? Those institutional answers matter more than the name on a resume.

Closing: humility, rigor and the long arc

Walia’s arc from feeling out of place in a roomful of senior consultants to steering a major technology company offers a quietly hopeful model for contemporary leadership. The route was not linear or easy. It was built from an accumulation of small corrections, candid conversations and a willingness to be uncomfortable. The crucible of consulting provided a structured place for those early lessons. But the true test was translating them into a culture where criticism is a tool for learning and where the humbling experience of impostor syndrome becomes a source of perpetual curiosity.

For anyone leading a team today, the invitation is clear: build organizations that teach like a consulting lab—testing hypotheses, criticizing work (not people), and iterating fast—while anchoring those practices in empathy and long-term stewardship. That fusion is where executives like Walia found their stride, and where many future leaders will continue to be forged.