Avinash Kaul on the unsung deputy: ‘leave the room if it never sees you’

MUMBAI: Avinash Kaul, former chief executive of Network18 (Broadcast) and co-author of The Next Mountain, has written a blistering ode to the unseen, the deputies who run companies from the shadows while someone else takes the bow.

The post opens not with a thesis but a direct address, “you might be one of them”, before sketching out a familiar office archetype: not the name at the top of the org chart, but the phone that actually rings at eleven at night. “It is your phone that rings,” Kaul wrote, describing the person who “buried” the problems quietly so the one above them “could look composed in the room.” It is a deliberately personal opening, less an essay on a workplace phenomenon than a letter to one specific kind of reader.

Kaul did not dress up the unfairness of it. “I have sat in rooms where the person with the title contributed a sentence and the person without it had carried the entire quarter,” he wrote, adding bluntly that the imbalance “isn’t” fair, and that the person living it “knows that better than I do.” The reasons the title never lands, he argued, are rarely about merit: sometimes the seat above simply never empties, sometimes the person up top needs the deputy too much to ever let them move, sometimes the politics were never going to break the deputy’s way at all.

The post then turns into something closer to a fork-in-the-road sermon, a structure Kaul leans on to force a decision rather than offer sympathy. One path, he warned, lets “the wound run the show”, keeping score on recognition that never arrives until the waiting curdles into bitterness that eventually poisons the work itself. The other, “harder and quieter” path, is to build and carry regardless, because “the value you create is not held hostage to the title you are handed.”

Crucially, he stopped short of preaching indefinite patience. “If the room never sees you, leave the room,” Kaul wrote, calling that brand of reliability “rarer than you think”, a line that keeps the post from reading as a corporate pep talk dressed up as wisdom.

He then folded in his own intellectual property, leaning on a line from his book that legacy is not what one achieves but who one empowers, and extended it to cover those who lift others while never being lifted themselves. The post closes on an unanswered, deliberately uncomfortable question pitched at the reader’s worst nights: if the title never comes, would they still be proud of how they carried the weight, and if not, what exactly were they carrying it for.

No answer was offered. None, clearly, was needed.