Melody Wilding: How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It’s by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you’re not.

Melody Wilding: I’m Melody Wilding, bestselling author, human behavior professor and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let’s put psychology to work for you.

Q4 is right around the corner, which means you are heading into the highest pressure, most consequential stretch of the year. I’m talking about budget reviews, planning meetings, year-end performance evaluations. Each one of those conversations is a chance to influence the projects you’re on, the resources, the access you get, even how you position yourself for opportunities into next year.

All of this means you are getting more face time and contact than usual with decision-makers. And I know if you’re listening, you want to make sure your communication and how you’re showing up is on point, that your ability to articulate what you have delivered, to defend your recommendations, to make your case, that all of that has to be at its absolute best.

Because let’s face it, with executives, you’ve got maybe five minutes, probably less, to make a compelling point before they just tune out or write you off as rambling. And I also know that you are someone who is aware, perceptive, you care about your performance, so it’s understandable if the nerves creep in and you start getting in your own head.

You may be mid-slide and you start worrying, “Are they impressed? Are they bored, skeptical? Am I emphasizing the wrong things? Should I keep going or should I just shut up and stop talking?” My guest today knows exactly what that is like. Raji is a Speak Like a Senior Leader alum and a senior manager at Adobe, where her work powers products that are used by millions of people.

She’s a deep technical expert with a 20-plus year track record, and her strategy for convincing stakeholders around her was probably a little like yours: give more detail, show more diagrams, pile on more proof that she is smart and competent.

And Raji was exhausting herself, spending four, five hours prepping, agonizing over small details of her deck, mapping out entire systems to try to make her ideas bulletproof so they would be immune to criticism, only for leaders to politely say that her approach was pretty dense. In this conversation, Raji breaks down how she went from over-explaining all the technical details to packaging her ideas in language that executives could act on.

She dives into so much, including the number one communication skill that ended years of confusing feedback she was getting, “You have great content, but it’s the wrong packaging.” She talks about the mistake technical experts make when the stakeholder asks for something impossible, how to talk about your accomplishments so leadership hears valuable contribution, not bragging.

You’ll hear how she leveraged Speak Like a Senior Leader to cut her prep time per meeting down to just 45 minutes, so that she could reclaim 20-plus hours back a month for promotable strategic work. You’ll hear how stakeholders went from being confused to telling her, “This is exactly what we need,” and started looping her in on decisions she had been left out of, and even how her VP gave her a recommendation that opened a door for a potential hiring manager.

None of this came from luck or some innate charismatic personality. It came from learning the science of influential communication and then practicing it with feedback and coaching until it became second nature. That’s exactly what we do inside Speak Like a Senior Leader. Doors close for all of 2026 on Monday, September 28th.

That is just a few days at the time this is being released, and we will not be opening up enrollment publicly again for at least six months. So this is your chance to get the coaching, the training you need to transform how you are perceived from someone who is great at execution but not yet ready for the next level to instead come across with such clarity and confidence leaders say, “We need more of them.”

Go to speaklikeaseniorleader.com to get the details and secure your spot. Link is also in the show notes. All right. With that, let’s get into my conversation with Raji.

Melody: Raji, thank you for being here with me. I’m so glad to have you on the show.

Raji Raghuraman: Thank you Melody for having me on this show. I’m very excited to talk to you today.

Melody: Yeah. So first, before we dive into your experience and Speak Like a Senior Leader, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Raji Raghuraman: Awesome. So a brief introduction about me. My name is Raji Raghuraman. I have been in the data industry for 20 plus years as a data engineering manager. Currently I’m a senior data engineering manager at Adobe, leading architecture for products used by millions of users. That’s Photoshop, and pretty excited.

I have a very long work history both here in United States and in India, and I have spent much of my time honing this hard skill in technical leadership, translating complex situations into workable solutions that are sustainable. That’s a little brief intro about myself.

Melody: Oh, fantastic. Thank you for sharing that too. I mean, what a cool impact to work on literally a product that is a cornerstone of so many people’s lives and livelihoods. That’s so neat to just think about the ripple effects of your work. So, okay. Now you were saying you have been a deeply technical person for a long time. What was going on for you in your career or frustrations you were feeling when you first joined Speak Like a Senior Leader? What was happening for you at work that made you think communication, and especially executive level communication, is something I need help with?

Raji Raghuraman: That’s a wonderful question to start this podcast. So, for 20 plus years, I built my career on being a technical authority in my space, the data engineering space. I’ve worn different hats being a leader all through my life right from the beginning of my career, and I could architect solutions that are petabyte scale.

Large teams, like in eBay, I was managing the risk and decision science data engineering team, mentoring teams, motivating people, delivering complex results. But when I joined my recent company, something really shifted. My manager had a very different working style than what I had been used to.

Because usually I’m a very proactive person and I take ownership, and this was slightly different. And instead of thinking maybe I need to communicate differently, I started thinking, why isn’t it working? Because usually it just takes three months for me to work with any new manager. They understand my working style, they appreciate what I bring to the table and all that.

But this was different. I started feeling super frustrated, but more than that, I felt I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do, right? So I was like, let me search through, and that’s how I found you on Spotify. And my realization was technical excellence is not enough anymore, and I needed help, true help.

And I searched so many resources like books, went to a few other folks to understand, but nothing helped. You know how the Speak system has been helping me for the last three months. So that’s how I stumbled upon you.

Melody: Fantastic. You know, and it only works if you do it, and so the implementation and the application is key, which I’m excited to get into, ’cause you are an action taker through and through, which I love and respect. For the person listening to this, I think they can relate to that, where there’s a change, you have to work with a different stakeholder or a new leader, and then all of a sudden you have this expectation and you start with excitement a lot of the time. Like, oh, okay, great fresh start. But then the rubber starts hitting the road and you start hitting tension or conflict, or you’re just talking at each other or past each other. And then we can get into this space where it sounds like you caught yourself right there, but a lot of people get into thinking, I’m dealing with someone who is difficult, instead of at least embracing the idea that maybe we are just different. For you on a day-to-day basis, for the person listening, I think it would really speak to them: what did it feel like day to day to have your communication not be landing with your manager?

How did you realize that maybe that was at the crux of the challenge?

Raji Raghuraman: Again, very good practical question. So I felt like the gaps kept surfacing. No matter how thoroughly I explain things, I would walk through the constraints, the dependencies, the blockers. Everything communicated, not just once, maybe more than once, but the same concerns would come back around.

I’m like, did I not explain this well enough? So I would prepare, add more details, more diagrams, more proof, but still it wouldn’t land. That’s when it clicked. Oh, it is not just my technical details. I was probably answering the wrong question. I was explaining how things would work or wouldn’t work.

But what was needed was reframing on what it meant for the business, for the timeline, and for the decision in front of us. And those were totally different conversations. So this was like a bottleneck on really understanding the question before I could articulate the answer, and that was the pillar that I was sitting on.

Melody: Hmm. That’s so interesting. You said, “I needed to really understand the question before I could provide an answer.” Is there an example that comes to mind for you of how trying to understand the other person’s motivation or lens changed how you presented something, or how it was received by them?

Raji Raghuraman: Yeah, definitely. So we were trying to build some dashboard, and we didn’t have access to the underlying data, so I was explaining why that is not possible. But then, because honestly we didn’t have direct access to the data, I was trying to get into the actual implementation. I was explaining that, but rather, eventually what I understood after I came into this program is understanding the motive and addressing the motive

is the most critical skill that I learned, or that I was lacking before. Don’t try to jump into the solution. Try to address the concerns on why is even that being asked. So once we start addressing the problem from its source, it becomes a different challenge to solve. So that was the revelation I had coming into this program.

Melody: Yeah, and we talk about this inside of Speak Like a Senior Leader — the idea that, especially at your level, building the skill of figuring out the question behind the question, and that gets to the motive. The question may be, “Well, where is this at? What’s the status?”

Right? And you provide whole detail about all the features that have been updated and the timeline for the new ones. But really the question behind the question is, “Are we going to miss our deadline and am I going to have to give the executive team bad news or not?” That may be more of the emotional need and motive behind that question.

And if we just dump information on them, it’s going to create frustration. And in your case, I know you had received some feedback that you were technically strong, but you had to reframe your content, I think, is what you said —

Raji Raghuraman: Yep.

Melody: — with you.

Raji Raghuraman: Yep.

Melody: For you, what did you take that to mean, and how have you implemented that and reframed your content?

Raji Raghuraman: That feedback I received a couple of years ago, and again, when I received the feedback, I was confused because I didn’t have this communication framework at that time. I was like, I’m providing all this data — and it was within this data science team, it was not with executive leaders — and that’s why I was confused.

I am used to thinking that the team needed to know the technicalities so that they can apply that in the day-to-day work. That was my motive behind sharing the technical details, so I was confused when I received the feedback: “Hey, your content is great, but you need to package it differently.”

So that was confusing to me because I was not pretty clear on how to implement that. It was vague feedback, and that’s where, when I came to this program, I understood that people don’t need to do everything that we have been doing to make them understand what they need.

They just need to know what they need. They don’t need to know all the complexities under the hood. And it’s not like a teaching moment where I’m trying to explain things so that they would implement more optimized data science workflows. I mean, my goal was that, but again, it was landing differently.

That understanding I learned only after coming to the Speak program. So that was another good lesson that I have learned. Definitely worth mentioning.

Melody: Yes. And in terms of packaging content, for the vast majority of people listening here, we spend a lot of our time building PowerPoints and decks and presentations that we have to give — slides, in other words. And I think that is also a big part of your role, where you’re having to present strategy or ideas or what have you. You have had some pretty big changes and time savings in terms of the amount of preparation and angst going into that process. So talk to us, because I know you had a really great result with how much you’ve cut down what’s going into making all of those slides.

Raji Raghuraman: I have

Melody: Yeah.

Raji Raghuraman: benefited a lot from the framework on presenting, especially on the Speak system. So I can certainly share one or two on that. My current role has a big piece on working with the privacy and legal team to implement a privacy policy for my current team, which would mean that I have been working to consolidate this complex set of information

to bring back to the leadership in the privacy team to make them understand our use case better. And I used to spend — this is just one use case I’ll take — I used to spend like four to five hours thinking, okay, what are the things that we need, how complex our systems are, how many tables we have, how many privacy columns we have.

So I would go into too much detail, including talking about retention policies, compliance matrices, and the whole system mapped out, in fact, so that I felt they have confidence that our case is pretty strong to take as a use case. But when I used to prepare this, it used to take four to five hours of my time.

And the worst part is when I present this, the team would get lost and ask, “Okay, what are we actually being asked to do here?” You have shared so much information, and people would be very polite and say the contents are rich, but what are you asking out of that? But after coming to this program, I realized, oh my gosh, I was just dumping so much information.

No need. So I realized, and with the framework that I learned — categorizing, calling out key conversations, I love the three-category callout — we have this framework to have a clear ask right at the beginning of the presentation so that people know what they can expect, and then driving the conversation with a set of categories and then

flags and whatnot. So this framework has really helped me, and I have cut down my preparation time to under 45 minutes from four to five hours. That’s such a huge saver for me, and it’s not just the time for me, but it’s also the time that I’m saving for the people who are coming into that meeting — 30-minute meeting, they can get a clear picture of what I’m asking.

So it’s basically ruthlessly prioritizing their time as well as my time on exactly what they need to know, what they need to decide, and now I have more confidence when I walk into a room that my content is clearly framed for this audience, and it’s not the same content

every time. I do that now for all the meetings based on the audience — I prioritize and shape my content. Again, content is the same, but how I package it, based on what I need from the audience, I’m packaging it differently. So that’s pretty exciting and a ton of time saved. Thank you so much, Melody, again for helping us to see the problem

from a different lens, because I was not realizing this before.

Melody: I love this so much. There’s so much to unpack here. A few things I want to highlight: yes, number one, what a huge burden off of you to have four and a half plus hours back in your day for other more important work, as you were saying. Just to have those shortcuts or frameworks — like we say in the program often, learning executive presence, or whatever you want to call it, executive-level communication, is not just this art that some people naturally have. It comes down to internalizing these ways of thinking, and what I hear you saying is you’re now using that as: okay, here is this structure. Every time I have an idea that I have to distill down, I go to my toolbox. I know the general structure, and I can pop things into there and flex and adapt as needed.

Which is wonderful to kind of shortcut that process for you. Just the point about making other people’s time efficient as well — that really deserves to be underscored, because executives are impatient. If they are spending their valuable time in a meeting, they want to go, go, go.

And they want to make sure that the information being presented truly needed their live presence to take this in, right? And this is where I see a lot of people go wrong — they don’t upfront provide a structure or a roadmap of “here is where I am going with this conversation, here is why you need to listen,” which only builds frustration on the audience’s side because “why am I listening to this?

Where are you going?” It makes it so much more likely they’re gonna hop in and interrupt you and say, “What’s the key idea here? What do you need from us? What do you need us to do?” And then that throws you off. It becomes this whole mess. And so being able to upfront also project that command and authority of “okay, I am taking you somewhere valuable” also lessens how much people are jumping in, and it makes your ideas more portable and shareable, because they can retain it better when there is a structure to how you’re presenting the ideas. They can say, “Oh, I remember Raji said, in this area with the privacy, this one key point she said.”

We’re almost giving people these mental markers of the important information, which makes it stick in their head, which makes it more shareable going forward. I love that, because I think it is our natural impulse to say, “Let me try to stuff as much as I can into this” — the numbers, the tables, to show I did my work because I want it to be bulletproof.

I want to show I put a lot of effort. I want to be able to answer any question that comes up and say, “Oh, I have the data for that.” But ultimately it backfires on us, because then people zone out — they zone out because it’s too much information, and they perceive, “Oh, she may not know how to be concise. This is too windy.

I don’t know if she can operate at that higher level.” So there is such a cascading effect from making that type of change. That is wonderful. So, speaking of you being more confident, commanding, having that authority — I know you had said before the program, self-advocacy wasn’t something you really did for yourself. How have you rethought that? How does self-advocacy look like for you now versus what it did before?

Raji Raghuraman: Honestly, this just reframed my thought process about advocacy after coming into this program. But this is still in progress to be really harnessed, because there is a lot going on — work has been extremely busy for the quarter, and as we were talking, we are not able to implement everything that we are learning, though we are super excited about everything. But definitely my internal thought process has shifted, because one thing I was able to reflect and understand is,

I have been too modest all through my career, because the working style in India has been very different than in the United States. And I was heads down literally for 20-plus years of my career waiting for the manager to notice. And whenever you used to tell us, “Hey, this is how people used to work,” I was like, “Okay, that’s me.”

So, but here is what has shifted. I used to lead with my track record and hope the ask was implied, which means: here are the metrics, and here is what I’ve delivered. And I used to assume the recognition would follow. And it did follow, for the initial couple of years, because — as I said — I was leading teams right at the very beginning of my career because leadership saw leadership potential in me.

But slowly things have started changing, even in the industry, right? It has been an ever-changing dimension, but I didn’t change — that was the problem. How I was projecting myself and how I was calling things out. Now if I’m thinking about some of the accomplishments I’ve done, I’m like, I have never called those accomplishments out loud.

This is a learning moment for me: how to tie my contributions to what the organization can see, what the leadership can see potentially. And instead of calling out or bragging about things, I learned how to tie that to what leadership is looking for, so that it would look like a natural shift or contribution I’ve made as part of my role in any company.

So that’s a big shift for me.

Melody: And it’s really about making your progress contextual to why it matters, right? We’re always asking why does the person on the receiving end care to hear about this? And like you were saying, tying it back to business impact. And also, we talk in Speak about how self-advocacy can be an obligation that you have in your role. We have an obligation to keep the leaders around us, our colleagues, informed of what’s going well, how people are progressing, because they need that information to make decisions about resourcing, about which projects go ahead, about strategy. And so if we think about it that way — almost more as I’m sharing this in service of our goals in the business, instead of in service of just myself, to make myself look good — it

Raji Raghuraman: Yep.

Melody: becomes more purposeful rather than just, “I’m bragging about myself.”

Raji Raghuraman: Exactly. Yes.

Melody: But speaking of bragging, I want you to brag about yourself a little bit. We talked about how you cut down the time of your presentation prep vastly. What have been some of your other biggest achievements or results that you are most proud of, and the difference you’ve seen now that you’ve been applying these skills?

Raji Raghuraman: I think the biggest underlying thing is about learning communication styles — how people process information. I’m emotional, a sensitive striver, is the keyword I used to use all the time. So I have learned — again, this is one of the biggest revelations I had — that people process information differently.

And as I said, I have not met people like this before in my career, which is — I would say it’s surprising that all through my 25-plus years of career, I’ve never felt people were very different from my communication style. But learning different communication styles and adapting to their language has been the biggest game changer for me.

And if you asked me, have I mastered that? No, but at least realizing — yes, that’s an area I do master — that’s one of the biggest lessons I have learned. And the second one is expressing the impact. Again, being in the data engineering space, I have been supporting the data science team for at least the last close to a decade.

But what I never translated is how data engineering work is enhancing the science velocity, accelerating it. So this program has taught me the “so what” ladder — how my work is impacting the science team, what they’re delivering out of that, what the business is getting out of that.

It’s like a second line of thinking that you have enabled us to do, because — as I called out before — I used to put my head down, do my work, move on, because there’s always so much work to do, and it never occurred to me that I need to understand the bigger picture, because I was too busy continuing to do more, more, more.

But again, doing the second line of thinking is not going to take all my time — it’s just that conscious effort that has to be made to realize what impact I’m bringing to the business, and it has been mind-blowing, literally. So those are the two callouts I wanted to make, because those two things are just the best return on my time in this program.

Melody: Incredible. And just as you’re referring to the idea of second-order thinking — that’s a process we teach, a concept we teach inside of the program, so that you’re getting from “here’s what I did” to “why it matters.” And that’s where everything lives. So as you think about how you’ve been applying the insights with communication styles, how you’ve been packaging your content differently, how you have been using the second order to express more of your impact, what are you seeing in terms of how people are responding to you differently, the types of opportunities you’re getting?

What’s shifting for you?

Raji Raghuraman: I would say that I have started seeing differences — especially, more than other people start seeing, I have started seeing a lot of things in myself, right? That’s the biggest thing — how I am processing information, how I’m preparing, how I’m showing up to these meetings, because that’s the foster success metric.

And I can also say that people on the other end have also started seeing some differences, because I think one of the biggest advantages I had — I used to articulate in writing, using the framework that you have taught, to have a potential hiring manager open my email, which had my VP’s recommendation on my profile.

So that’s another thing — people have started to see the impact of implementing this framework. But at the same time, with my recent conversations with the privacy and legal team, they are able to see the difference, because now they’re like, “Wow, yes, this is exactly what we need.”

To drive to this decision — but we are also looking for just one thing. Before it was all bloated; now they are able to clearly see the difference in what I’m bringing, and they’re just asking for the particular question they’re looking for, which I feel is a big success so far.

And I feel like it would need at least one more quarter to see the perception changing at the other end, because the current has been slightly different in my mind right now. But I’m hoping to see this perception change a lot in the coming times.

Melody: It definitely accumulates, and as you said, perception takes time to change. People may need multiple encounters with you to form a pattern or to form that idea of the reputation or credibility that you have — they need multiple touchpoints. And even in this conversation, you’ve alluded to it — yes, it is meetings, but it’s also one-on-ones with your manager, hallway conversations, emails, how you present project plans. I think a lot of us think about communication and only think about the meetings — the all-hands or the quarterly business review.

We don’t think about the Slack messages we’re sending every day, or that email we send that we actually need to get opened. So I love that you have taken more of this holistic, well-rounded approach, because then people are forming their opinions of you through those multiple touchpoints — and for you to feel confident as well going into that communication,

I’m sure that comes through in everything that you do as well, because you feel more secure and you feel better about how you’re putting yourself forward. Incredible. Okay, last few questions for you. In terms of the structure of Speak Like a Senior Leader itself, and all of the different things we offer inside there — the live coaching, the async, the lessons — what have been some of the most valuable parts for you?

Raji Raghuraman: I think — I mean, I really like all the aspects of the Speak system, but if I have to anchor on what moved the needle most for me, it’s shifting my style based on who is in the room. I called this out a little bit before, but I wanted to unpack this. I used to communicate the same, regardless of the audience, because I felt

technical depth, lots of details, full context, would speak for itself. I wanted people to know my backing, why I am telling them something — that was my motive before. But Speak taught me that’s not the case, literally. That’s what I learned. And now, when I’m able to clearly have this thought in my head that a legal conversation is looking for risk and mitigation,

a business review needs impact and trade-offs, and a one-on-one with my manager is about clarity and commitment — I’m the same person still, but I have learned different languages, and how that fluency changed how I perceived myself, in fact. Again, to be honest, I’m still mastering it, but having these tools in my toolkit, I’m able to rethink — instead of just being blank or not knowing what to do, now I know exactly how I can

package information for these different audiences. So that’s a big callout. And the second one is composure. I felt like, okay, I was composed, because we are all professionals, we know how to be composed and we don’t react in the moment and all that stuff. But there is a difference I learned — just being not reactive

doesn’t mean composure. It’s about actively projecting confidence under pressure. I have had tons of conversations, especially in the last quarter, when situations have been challenging — ambiguous feedback, a complex stakeholder situation — and I have tools to stay grounded.

Now I know exactly what to tell them and how I can buy more time when needed. And that has really changed a lot for me, and I feel like composure signals that I can be trusted with more responsibility, especially if I’m in a room with executives. So that has brought a lot of confidence for me.

Melody: Oh my gosh, that is so wonderful to hear, ’cause yes, those moments where you have to push back on someone, or someone’s being very critical about a decision — those can really throw you off. And if you are reactive — I like to say you want to make yourself proud in those situations —

and if you snap at that person, get defensive, jump down their throat, that’s probably not going to feel great for you afterwards, right? Like, “Oh, why did I do that?” And so just being able to have — as you were saying, it’s not being totally non-reactive. Sometimes you do need to show a little bit of emotion to show the seriousness of the situation, but it’s your ability to be diplomatic, to guide the discussion towards a solution and the future, instead of just re-litigating the past over and over.

It’s all of those little elements and touchpoints. All right, Raji, thank you so, so much for being here. Are there any final words you want to share for anybody out there who is considering the program, who maybe is where you were before — they’ve tried things, listened to podcasts, read books — what would you tell them?

Raji Raghuraman: Yeah, I would highly recommend this program for anyone in mid-career or any level of their career, if they want to improve upon their communication, how they present themselves, how they can translate the value to the executive team. Because everybody wants to grow, everyone wants to feel

recognized and satisfied in their role. I would highly recommend this, because I found Melody through this podcast and I really advocate for you, because it’s not like — we are getting benefit out of this program, and I’m really grateful to you for conducting this program in such a way that all the support structures are integrated and working in harmony, right?

I mean, this could have been a dream that I have realized in 2026 — best decision has been joining this program for me, and I wish I found you a decade ago. Thank you so much, Melody, for having me in this program.

Melody: It means the world to hear that. And like I said, it only works if you do it — you are active, you are in the community, you’re posting questions, you submit for calls, and you are applying it. And we always say, we could teach you everything in the world, we could teach you these frameworks, but if you do nothing with them, nothing’s going to change.

And so I just want to give you kudos for being open and willing to experiment and try things differently. It has been amazing to see your results. It is only up from here. So again, thank you for joining me today.

Raji Raghuraman: Thank you.

Melody Wilding: Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening — it’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self-assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.