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By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 3:28:38 am

The Space That Speaks

Some people step too close without realising it. Others recoil the moment we enter their personal space. In boardrooms, cafeterias, client meetings or even casual workplace conversations, the invisible boundary between comfort and discomfort is crossed more often than we admit. And every time it happens, something subtle but significant shifts. A colleague feels disrespected. A client feels pushed. A partner silently withdraws. Space may be unseen, but its consequences are very real —...

The Space That Speaks

Some people step too close without realising it. Others recoil the moment we enter their personal space. In boardrooms, cafeterias, client meetings or even casual workplace conversations, the invisible boundary between comfort and discomfort is crossed more often than we admit. And every time it happens, something subtle but significant shifts. A colleague feels disrespected. A client feels pushed. A partner silently withdraws. Space may be unseen, but its consequences are very real — especially in today’s workplace, where one misread signal can erode trust faster than any spoken mistake.   A few months ago, a mid-sized consulting firm approached me with a puzzling problem. Their young team was technically brilliant, but client retention had dropped sharply. After observing a few interactions, the issue became obvious: enthusiastic associates were unknowingly leaning too close, interrupting personal bubbles, and making global clients uncomfortable. Nothing was ill-intentioned — just unaware. Yet that small behavioural gap had created a Rs 1.6 crore revenue leakage over the year. Once we worked on spatial awareness, presence and non-verbal communication, the same team rebuilt client confidence and closed three major renewals within a quarter.   This is why personal space is not a “soft” concept. It is strategy. It is reputation. It is a non-negotiable part of personal branding.   When people think of personal branding, they imagine polished LinkedIn profiles or impressive introductions. But the truth is simpler and deeper: your personal brand is your behaviour. It’s the distance you maintain, the respect you signal, the safety you create for others in a conversation. Space is communication — silent but powerful. When you don’t understand where your boundary ends and where someone else’s begins, your interactions unintentionally send the message that you lack awareness, sensitivity or professionalism. For a leader, this can appear as dominance. For a young executive, it can appear as insecurity or over-eagerness. For a business owner, it can cost trust and business.   Modern workplaces are more global and more culturally diverse than ever before. In India alone, teams now collaborate daily with counterparts from the UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the US — each with very different expectations of proximity. What feels friendly to one culture feels intrusive to another. When employees are not trained to navigate these subtle differences, the company brand is what ultimately suffers.   And here’s the truth companies often overlook: you cannot build a strong organisational brand without strong individual brands inside it. When employees understand boundaries — emotional, verbal and physical — they communicate with clarity, empathy and confidence. They carry themselves with the ease that clients trust. They handle negotiations better. They build relationships faster. They close deals without friction. The company’s culture becomes more respectful, more refined and more reliable.   I’ve seen it repeatedly while working with founders, leadership teams and fast-growing organisations: the fastest way to elevate a company’s external image is to elevate the personal brand of the people representing it. Not through scripted behaviour but through awareness — especially in the small, often ignored details like space, body language and non-verbal cues.   These details decide whether your teams come across as polished or unprepared, mindful or careless, leadership-ready or still learning.   If any of this feels familiar — a slightly awkward handshake, a colleague who stands too close, a new executive who unintentionally intimidates a client — it’s more than a social inconvenience. It’s a branding issue. And one that’s entirely fixable.   Because when people feel respected in your presence, they trust you. When they trust you, they listen. And when they listen, they say yes more often — to ideas, partnerships, renewals and opportunities.   If you’re a business leader who wants your teams to communicate with maturity, presence and global sensitivity, you can reach out for a complimentary consultation call here : https://sprect.com/pro/divyaaadvaani Strong personal brands build strong company brands. And it all begins with something as simple, as silent and as powerful as space. (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

The Race for the BJP’s Next ‘Pradhan’

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The dust has barely settled on Bihar’s assembly election, but within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the contest that truly matters has quietly begun. Nitish Kumar is back in the Chief Minister’s chair, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has been revived with fresh confidence and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already shifted his gaze eastward, declaring West Bengal the next great battleground. Beneath the roar of victory, is a more consequential question: who will lead the BJP itself?


The term of the party’s national president, J.P. Nadda, formally ended in January 2023. Since then, extensions have carried him through the 2024 general election and beyond, stretching his tenure to nearly six years or effectively two full terms. The election for his successor has been postponed for two and a half years. Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently hinted that a new party president would be chosen after the Bihar verdict. Now that verdict is in, expectations have sharpened.


Top Contenders

Bihar matters not merely as another state election, but as a showcase of organisational craft. Two figures at the heart of the BJP’s Bihar campaign - Dharmendra Pradhan and Vinod Tawde - have emerged as the leading contenders for the top post.


Tawde, a former Maharashtra minister and seasoned organisational hand, is widely credited with operating behind the scenes to engineer Nitish Kumar’s return to the NDA ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections after the Bihar leader’s brief but consequential defection to the Rashtriya Janata Dal in 2022. That political homecoming reshaped the arithmetic of the national alliance. Tawde’s reputation as a backroom operator was further burnished in Haryana last year, where the BJP surprised many by securing a majority on its own. The strategy, seat management and coalition arithmetic bore his imprint.

Pradhan’s performance in Bihar has been more visible and perhaps more decisive. Appointed as BJP in-charge for the state last September, he arrived under a cloud of scepticism. With limited time to plan and an OBC identity that some saw as a mere nod to caste equations, expectations were cautious. Instead, he ran the campaign with methodical quietude. From prioritising issues and shaping the message to choreographing the Prime Minister’s rallies, from pacifying internal rebels to smoothing relations with NDA partners, Pradhan’s hand was evident at every seam of the campaign.


Pradhan’s rise has been built on a string of calculated bets. It was he who first argued that the BJP should break formally from the Biju Janata Dal in Odisha and contest independently - a move that many initially regarded as reckless. Last year, the gamble paid off handsomely when the BJP captured power in the state on its own. Earlier still, in the 2017 Uttarakhand elections, Pradhan and Nadda, as joint in-charges, steered the party to a comfortable majority. Few leaders in today’s BJP can boast such a consistent record of reading the political weather.


Organisational competence is not the only currency in the contest for the presidency. The post is also an ideological trust. Despite the BJP’s growing openness to inducting leaders from rival parties at every level, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its ideological fountainhead, still prefers its national president to be a product of the Sangh ecosystem. On this score, both front-runners fit the bill. Pradhan and Tawde cut their political teeth in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the RSS’s student wing.


Educated, articulate and relatively young by BJP standards, Pradhan is unburdened by major personal controversies. His years as Union petroleum minister from 2014 saw him oversee the politically potent Ujjwala Yojana, which brought cooking gas connections to tens of millions of poor households and became one of the Modi government’s most effective welfare-political hybrids. His lineage, too, reassures traditionalists: his father, Debendra Pradhan, was a minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet.


Tawde’s résumé is weighty, but his liabilities are harder to ignore. He is over 60, and questions over his educational credentials have periodically surfaced. During last year’s Maharashtra assembly elections, he found himself entangled in a controversy over alleged cash distribution at a hotel in Virar. Earlier, the BJP suffered acute embarrassment in the Chandigarh mayoral election of 2024, where the Supreme Court overturned the party’s tainted victory and declared the Aam Aadmi Party candidate the winner. Tawde had been entrusted with strategy there too.


The name of Bhupendra Yadav, the powerful general secretary and a former ABVP activist, too was floated about. But he has since been tasked with overseeing the BJP’s campaign for the 2026 West Bengal assembly election, this effectively removes him from immediate consideration for the national presidency.


As the BJP prepares to choose the organisational custodian of its next electoral decade, it is not known yet whether that custodian will, quite literally, be a ‘Pradhan.’ But the answer, insiders suggest, is now closer than ever.


(The writer is a political commentator based in Pune.)


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