From doing it all himself to leading with clarity

When Prakash Hurrhunghee was promoted to Director and Head of Data at DealX in late 2018, it wasn’t a small step up. It was a full leap into the unknown.

With the previous operational director having left the business, the fast-growing Mauritius office suddenly fell on Prakash’s shoulders – all of it. “It was quite brutal,” he admits. “Suddenly, I was responsible for everything: people management, salaries, admin, procurement, operations. I just said yes to everything. But I quickly found myself, and my core team, struggling.”

Like many high-performing managers stepping into strategic roles, Prakash had built his success on being reliable and hands-on. He wasn’t just overseeing things; he was in the trenches. But now, with the business scaling rapidly and major new projects on the go, that way of working was no longer sustainable. What had once made him effective was now burning him out.

At the beginning of 2019, Prakash started working with a Grow coach to help navigate this new chapter of leadership. What followed was a deeply personal, professional, and transformational journey.

The early coaching sessions were eye-opening. Prakash’s coach gently but consistently held up a mirror to the way he was operating. “All of these things you’re doing, you need to start letting go of them,” he was told.

It wasn’t easy. “It was a big paradigm shift,” Prakash reflects. “I’d take a step forward, then step back again. I had to learn that empowering others didn’t mean losing control. It meant setting outcomes, not dictating every detail, and accepting that their way might look different to mine.”

This mental shift, from doer to enabler, was the start of Prakash’s evolution into a strategic leader.

His coach worked with him to clarify what this new role required: contributing insight to executive strategy discussions, simplifying data into key takeaways, and creating space to think, not just execute. Together, they redefined what success looked like in his leadership role, not in terms of output, but in terms of influence and impact.

But the real turning point came during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Working from home, Prakash found himself chained to his desk 12 hours a day. “There were days I wouldn’t move. I was having lunch, dinner, everything at my desk.” The stress was constant. When his doctor warned that he was on track for a serious health complication by the age of 50, something clicked.

Rather than ignore the alarm bells, Prakash acted. He changed his lifestyle dramatically, dropping 20 kg, embracing regular exercise, mindfulness, and journaling, tools he had already discussed with his coach but now embraced fully.

The effect was profound. “I started to feel better, not just physically but mentally. I regained my confidence. And that showed up in how I led.”

His coach noticed it immediately. Prakash was no longer sitting back in meetings, slightly withdrawn. He was present. Upright. Leaning in. His voice grew stronger. His presence grew bigger.

With renewed clarity, Prakash began focusing more deliberately on his team.

With increasing demand on the data function, it fell onto Prakash to work out how to significantly ramp up output. It became clear that the existing team structure wasn’t suitable to support the needed increase in output and headcount growth. He needed to work out an organisational design that could support growth, putting in place the right roles, management layers, and processes to scale effectively while maintaining quality and cohesion. Some technically brilliant team members had been placed into management roles, but without the leadership skills to thrive. There were interpersonal conflicts. Clashes of personality.  Behaviour that didn’t reflect the company’s values.

It fell to Prakash to create the right structure and culture, and to do so with courage. That meant initiating difficult conversations with team members whose behaviour wasn’t aligned with the company’s values. He had to step in when interpersonal tensions flared and hold his managers accountable for learning how to lead, not just execute. Some individuals needed to be coached more closely, while others had to be moved to positions that suited their strengths. It wasn’t easy, but Prakash understood that without clear expectations and decisive leadership, the team wouldn’t be able to operate cohesively or grow sustainably.

Just as importantly, it also meant looking inward. “He was remarkably self-aware,” his coach recalls. “He was willing to examine how his own behaviour contributed to team dynamics. And he didn’t just reflect, he changed. He was willing to acknowledge that some of the negative behaviours he was seeing in his team had, in part, been influenced by his own earlier leadership style, whether through micromanagement, lack of clarity, or avoidance of difficult conversations. Rather than become defensive, he chose to take ownership and model the kind of accountability he expected from others.”

Those efforts began to pay off. Over time, Prakash put the right people in the right roles. He set clear accountabilities. And he began leading not through control, but through trust.

As Prakash stepped back from the doing, he started focusing on the thinking and talking that drive performance. He got crystal clear on team objectives, specific, measurable goals, and ensured his team understood them.

Instead of overworking the team to meet targets, he empowered them to find creative, efficient ways to deliver. “We used to do a lot of overtime,” Prakash shares. “But we started tweaking our workflows, shifting team hours, testing new ways of working, all to gain efficiency.”

The results were dramatic. The team now needs to do very little overtime. Output has massively increased. Client satisfaction has improved. And perhaps most importantly, team members felt ownership of the outcomes.

In addition, as his coach reflects, “One of the powerful techniques Prakash used as a leader was to establish a clear rhythm of tracking and sharing progress. After setting measurable goals, he worked out how to track progress towards those goals, built systems to monitor progress, developed simple, visual reports, and shared these regularly with the whole team”. This created energy, alignment, and accountability. The team could see where they were winning, and where they needed to push harder. 

Following the acquisition of DealX by Morningstar Credit Analytics, the Mauritius team emerged as one of the cornerstones of the company’s future global strategy. The trust and performance of Prakash’s team had helped earn that position.

“We’ve built a team they can rely on,” Prakash says. “Not just technically strong, but aligned, agile, and outcome focused.”

And while he’s quick to deflect credit to his broader team, it’s clear that his leadership has played a foundational role in that transformation. The changes he led, from redefining his role, to strengthening his team, to building systems of accountability, enabled the Mauritius office to take on significantly higher volumes of client data processing and scale the team from 12 to nearly 60 people without compromising quality or cohesion.

Prakash’s journey is a powerful reminder that leadership growth isn’t just about learning new skills, it’s about unlearning old habits. It’s about redefining what leadership means, and who you need to become to serve your team and your business well.

If Prakash hadn’t let go of his old mental framework and daily operational activities, freeing himself from the daily operational overwhelm he experienced early in his leadership journey, he would never have had the space to work on critical leadership activities like thinking through organisational design, moving the right people into the right positions, preparing for difficult conversations, coaching his managers, as well as designing and building systems, all to help unlock remarkable performance from his team.

His coach reflects: “Prakash was always open-minded and eager to learn. What made the difference was his willingness to apply what he was learning, to reflect honestly, and to do the hard personal work.”

Today, Prakash leads with clarity, confidence, and compassion. And the business, and people, around him are thriving because of it.