In 1984, a 17-year-old girl arrived in Sydney from Tehran with almost no conversational English, no network, and no plan. Within weeks, she was sitting across the table from immigration officials, helping enrol the rest of her family in schools, attending medical appointments, and serving as the only cultural bridge for her parents and a younger brother who spoke no English. Ghazaleh Lyari looks back on that first week in Sydney as the start of many opportunities that served as a springboard to her current leadership career.

Four decades later, Ms Lyari is Co-Head of Investments at the Australian Business Growth Fund (ABGF), Australia's only purpose-built growth capital fund for the small and medium enterprise sector. Backed by a public-private partnership between the Federal Government and six of Australia's leading banks, ABGF manages more than $500 million in capital through minority equity stakes of between $5 million and $15 million per investment. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Computer Science from UNSW Sydney and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and has built a diverse career spanning Wall Street investment banking, Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom, entrepreneurship, and private equity.

Ms Lyari, who delivered a presentation to AGSM @ UNSW Business School students as part of a recent leadership week, outlined the principles that have supported her through her career to date.

The myth of the linear career

Ms Lyari opened with a nugget of truth that often underscores many careers: almost none of the major steps in her professional life happened according to plan. "You're all ambitious, you have plans, you're quietly optimising your future, working out the right moves, the right firms, and the right sequence. I was in your shoes three decades ago at another university on the other side of the world, planning my every move,” she explained.

“Three decades since, and three careers later, I can tell you that almost none of the defining moments of my professional life arrived according to plan, almost none of them came with any certainty attached, and the skills that have mattered most were not the ones that showed up on any job description."

She joined IBM as a software engineer in 1989. A few years later, while studying for her MBA, during a summer internship at IBM's New York headquarters, a chance conversation over drinks was the catalyst for her next career step. An investment banking intern told her she had a "snowball's chance in hell" of getting a job on Wall Street. But, with a full-time offer already in hand, she decided to find out and shifted from IBM into the world of investment banking, with roles at J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank.

She then moved to Silicon Valley at the start of the dot-com boom with no finance network, no roadmap, and no plan. After a decade, she returned to Australia, built a retail food business from the ground up (in an industry she knew nothing about), and then entered private equity in her forties, spending six years as a Director at CHAMP Ventures before joining ABGF.

"I climbed a ladder, and then I started at the bottom on another one, deliberately, every single time. I gave up status, I gave up the comfort of being the one person in the room who knows what they're doing,” she said. “I became a beginner again deliberately, and I want to be honest with you about what that felt like. It felt very uncomfortable. There's a particular kind of exposure in being visibly incompetent in a new field, especially after you've spent many years building competence and respect in another."

What she came to understand from these experiences is that new chapters in your career are important because they are cumulative, more than sequential. Her science background, for example, gave her fluency in technology that few on Wall Street had at the start of the dot-com era. Her banking experience helped her understand the language of capital and investors, which made her a more effective entrepreneur.

"There's a particular kind of exposure in being visibly incompetent in a new field, especially after you've spent many years building competence and respect in another"

GHAZALEH LYARI

Her experience in starting and building her own business gave her empathy for founders that no spreadsheet analysis can replicate. "I don't look at careers as ladders,” she affirmed. “My career has been a portfolio: a portfolio of chapters that compound in ways that you cannot really foresee at the time. The best opportunities in my life looked more like detours when I got to them."

This perspective is a timely one. The current generation of university graduates faces a rapidly changing world of work, with AI already impacting many industries and potential job opportunities. "The people who will thrive, in my humble opinion, are not those who mastered specialised knowledge,” she pointed out. “They're the ones who learned how to learn. Those are the ones with intellectual humility to start again. Those are the ones who understand adaptability is not a backup plan, it's a strategy."

Decision-making under uncertainty

The most critical and practical skill in leadership, according to Ms Lyari, is also the hardest to learn in a classroom: making decisions in uncertain times and circumstances.

Early in her career, she made decisions the way she had been trained to, through data, models, and stress-tested analyses – an approach which is rigorous and defensible for certain decisions. But many decisions that determine organisational outcomes are often made based on incomplete datasets, where options are not clear-cut, and when decision-makers around the table wait for someone else to go first.

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"One of the most common failures in senior leadership is delayed decisions, not bad decisions. Leaders who are genuinely talented, analytically sharp, strategically sound, and well-intentioned will sometimes sit on a difficult decision for months, hoping that the situation will resolve itself, waiting for more information, telling themselves that they're just being thorough when they're really just being uncomfortable,” she said.

The cost, she argued, can be enormous and usually invisible until the damage is done. For example: an underperforming executive who should have been moved earlier, while the team lost confidence and capable people left; a strategy that stopped working but kept receiving funding because revisiting it would mean admitting a mistake; a problem everyone could see (and nobody would call out). "Indecision itself is a decision, and usually the most expensive one on the menu,” Ms Lyari said. “It just disguises itself as caution."

She said that the leaders she respects most are those who can say, "I was wrong." Here is what the evidence now shows, and this is what we're going to do about it today.’ No drama, just intellectual humility to follow the facts where they lead, even when it's uncomfortable."

The discipline of difficult conversations

One of the most underestimated skills in leadership, according to Ms Lyari, is the willingness to have difficult conversations. She is known for being direct and for addressing difficult issues when necessary, though it can be uncomfortable at times. This is a muscle (not a personality trait) she has spent decades building.

"The first time I had to navigate a board process involving a consequential decision about a member of the executive team – someone I had worked with closely, someone I had invested in professionally and personally,” she recalled – “I lost a lot of sleep. I rehearsed the conversation, and I second-guessed myself. I wondered if there was a version of events where I didn't have to be the one doing it. The 10th time I've had to have a difficult, highly consequential conversation, I still found it hard, but over time, I learned to hold the humanity alongside the necessity. I learned how to be clear without being unkind. The discomfort did not disappear. I simply learned how to act through it."

This approach also relates to how Ms Lyari assesses potential candidates for her team. "I ask them to talk to me about situations where they'd had to deliver a difficult message and how they did it. This is, to me, far more important to know that someone is able to do that than knowing how to do complex financial forecast modelling,” she said.

On warmth and strength

This brought Ms Lyari to her fourth theme: the persistent myth in leadership culture that warmth and authority are in opposition. "There is a persistent myth in leadership culture that authority requires a certain kind of hardness, and to be taken seriously, you must project toughness, and that warmth is soft and soft is weak,” she said.

“I've spent most of my career being the only woman in the room, and for a long time there was a quiet expectation, never explicit but always present, that in order to be credible in those rooms, I should align to a particular kind of authority: harder, more detached, less openly caring,” she said. “I refused that consistently, and sometimes at a cost, and over time I came to believe not as a consolation, but as a genuine conviction that it was exactly the right refusal."

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The leaders she most admires are those who can exhibit both simultaneously: who can deliver a hard message without losing the relationship, hold a firm position without making the other person feel diminished, and be the most direct person in the room while still being the one most people want to talk to. She was careful to note that this is not solely a point about gender and emphasised that trust is the foundation of influence and built through warmth: "Strength without warmth can compel, but warmth with strength is what actually moves people.”

The compound return on judgment

Ms Lyari closed by drawing all four threads together. While technical skills age, industries change, and AI reshapes entire professions, she noted that judgement compounds. Judgement is built through lived experience. "I have lived through three economic crises. I survived a revolution and a war before I was 17,” she explained.

“I've started four careers. I built things and closed things and made decisions, some brilliant and some wrong, without the comfort of knowing how they would end. Not much rattles me anymore, not because I became reckless, not because I stopped caring about the outcomes, but because I know what I'm built of. Equanimity is not a personality trait; it's accumulated judgement. It's the compounded return on every hard decision, every honest conversation, every moment of starting over."

"I built things and closed things and made decisions, some brilliant and some wrong, without the comfort of knowing how they would end"

GHAZALEH LYARI

While she acknowledged that AI could replicate certain forms of judgment (and will likely go further as the technology develops), the judgement she described is not of the analytical kind. "It lives in the weight of a real decision with real consequences, in the leadership that survived an honest conversation, in the moment when data pointed one way, and everything you had lived pointed another, and you had to choose,” she elaborated. “That remains a deeply human domain."

Ghazaleh Lyari's 5 key leadership takeaways

1. Careers compound; they do not simply progress. Each chapter builds capabilities that may only become legible several moves later. Adaptability is not a contingency plan; it is a strategy.
2. The most expensive decisions are the ones that are not made. Delayed decisions, dressed up as caution, cost more over time than wrong ones. Commit to the best available option, watch what it produces, and change course without making it a drama.
3. Willingness, not ability, is what separates leaders in difficult conversations. Avoidance always accumulates cost. Candour framed as an act of care, rather than authority, is both more effective and more honest.
4. Warmth and strength are not opposing forces. Trust is the foundation of influence. Leaders who hold both, who can deliver a hard message without losing the relationship, carry the most durable authority in any room. 
5. Judgement is the asset that compounds most reliably. In a world being reshaped by AI, specialised knowledge has a shrinking half-life. The capacity to act without certainty, admit error, and choose what matters over what looks good: these are the capabilities that appreciate over an entire career.