Aditi Chauhan is Vice President, Life Sciences & Industrial Business at Emerson Test & Measurement. Over an 18-year career spanning India, the UK, and the US, she has led businesses across product, sales, marketing, strategy, and operations. She is drawn to hard problems, from businesses that need turning around to teams that need rebuilding, and believes leadership is about creating clarity and bringing people along when the path forward isn’t clear.
Here’s how she does it.
Responses have been condensed and lightly copyedited.
Leadership Lessons
Be Curious Before You Are Certain
My children have changed five or six daycares or schools before either of them has turned ten. Every time we’ve moved countries or cities, I’ve worried about whether they’ll fit in or make friends. And every time, they’ve walked into a school knowing nobody and, within days, started finding their place.
Adults carry far more assumptions with us. Living and working across different environments has challenged what I once thought were universal truths about leadership and success. Sometimes the right answer is to move faster; sometimes it’s to listen longer. Sometimes leadership means speaking up; sometimes it means creating space for someone else to do it.
Carry what matters from where you came from, but arrive somewhere new, curious enough to discover that there may be another way.
When Things Are Messy, Make the Next Move Clear
When I stepped into my current role, I inherited a business that had been declining for several years. There were issues across the product portfolio, customer engagement, technical support, and execution. There was no single answer and certainly no quick fix.
I couldn’t tell the team exactly how the story would end. What I could tell them was what we knew, what we didn’t know, what mattered most, where we would focus, and who owned what.
We built the right team, got closer to customers, made choices about where to invest, and changed direction when the evidence told us to. The business has now delivered eight consecutive quarters of growth, and I’ve seen leaders across my team grow in confidence and capability.
In uncertainty, people don’t need false certainty. They need enough clarity and trust to take the next meaningful step.
Career Advice
Say What You Want. Then Go Earn It.
For much of my early career, I kept my professional ambitions to myself. I worried that saying them aloud would make me appear overly ambitious. A mentor eventually told me to find my voice and speak up.
So I started being much more explicit. At one point, I went to our CFO and said, “I want to run a business eventually in my career. And I want to learn how to run a P&L. Will you help me?”
She became a mentor, connected me with the right people, and gave me opportunities to develop capabilities I would later need. That taught me something important: nobody can sponsor an ambition they don’t know you have.
The second half of the advice is equally important: go toward the hard problems. My career has grown the most when I’ve taken on something that wasn’t working or wasn’t fully figured out and committed myself to making it better.
Say what you want. Then build the experience to deserve it.
Energy Booster
Borrow Someone Else’s Perspective
Some of the people who energize me most are friends and mentors who are incredibly smart in ways that are completely different from me. I love deep one-on-one conversations where I leave thinking differently than when I walked in.
Increasingly, some of those conversations happen on long walks with my nine-year-old son. He’ll listen to me explain a problem and ask a beautifully simple question: “Why can’t you just ask them?” or “Why are you doing it that way?” And every once in a while, I realize I don’t have a particularly good answer.
I’ve realized that I don’t always recharge by switching my brain off. Often, I recharge by switching perspectives. Give me a thoughtful conversation or a question I’ve never considered, and I usually walk away with more energy than I started with.
