#438 Leadership Beyond the Balance Sheet: Saahil Mehta on Productivity, Fulfilment, and the Seven Summits of Success - article by Niels Brabandt
Leadership Beyond the Balance Sheet: Saahil Mehta on Productivity, Fulfilment, and the Seven Summits of Success
By Niels Brabandt
Corporate leadership is often measured by one blunt metric: results. Profit up, costs down — the logic is as simple as it is relentless. Yet executives also face growing expectations to inspire, to nurture people, and to demonstrate resilience in turbulent markets. How can leaders deliver both performance and purpose?
Entrepreneur, mountaineer, and leadership coach Saahil Mehta argues that the answer lies in redefining success itself. In an interview with leadership expert Niels Brabandt, Mehta introduces a framework he calls the Seven Summits, a holistic model designed to align productivity with self-fulfilment.
The Seven Summits of Leadership
Drawing from his mountaineering experience, Mehta challenges leaders to identify their personal “summits”, the areas of life that define true success. For most, three dominate: health, wealth, and relationships. But Mehta insists on seven, forcing leaders to consider overlooked priorities such as recreation, personal growth, or community.
“Each decision has a net effect,” Mehta explains. “Pursuing career gains may boost one summit but erode others. Clarity comes from knowing which priorities are crystal, those that shatter if dropped, and which are rubber, able to bounce back.”
The metaphor resonates in boardrooms where the pendulum often swings between overwork and belated attempts at “work-life balance.” By treating leadership decisions as trade-offs across summits, executives gain a lens for sustainable performance.
Productivity Through Empowerment
Skeptics may counter that listed companies cannot afford philosophical detours. Shareholders demand quarterly results, not leadership metaphors. Mehta acknowledges the tension but insists that empowered employees are the ultimate driver of profitability.
“When my father passed away, I suddenly carried the full weight of our business,” he recalls. “I could have burned out. Instead, I asked: what energises me daily? How do I enter the office with a full battery rather than a drained one?”
For leaders, the answer lies in small, disciplined steps: encouraging energising routines, delegating rather than micromanaging, and asking more questions than giving orders. Citing Peter Drucker, Mehta underscores the shift: “Leaders of the past knew how to tell. Leaders of the future will know how to ask.”
Lessons from the Mountain
The mountain, Mehta argues, offers lessons no boardroom can replicate. Climbing Kilimanjaro or Kala Patthar demands meticulous preparation, team alignment, and pre-decided “what if” scenarios. Errors are not forgiven.
“In business, mistakes often cost money. On the mountain, they can cost lives,” Mehta says. “If leaders prepared for meetings with the same seriousness as climbers prepare for summits, outcomes would transform.”
This mindset — disciplined, anticipatory, and collaborative — is what he calls the “mountain mindset.” Applied to corporate life, it drives both resilience and clarity.
Three Steps Toward Clarity
For executives overwhelmed by competing demands, Mehta recommends three immediate steps:
Define and prioritise your Seven Summits. Revisit them every 7–10 years as life evolves.
Take one manageable step. Big transformations start small — “buy the hiking boots before you climb Everest.”
Write them down and review daily. Without visibility, even strong commitments fade into forgotten resolutions.
Beyond Short-Term Sacrifices
Perhaps Mehta’s sharpest warning is against the myth of “temporary sacrifice.” Too often, leaders justify neglecting health, family, or personal development as short-term trade-offs for long-term gain. In practice, these sacrifices become permanent, resulting in chronic illness, fractured relationships, and disengagement.
“An engaged, energised employee produces far greater returns than one squeezed for every drop,” Mehta concludes. “The choice for leaders is not between productivity and fulfilment — it’s how to design systems where both reinforce each other.”
The Future of Leadership
For decision makers navigating global pressures, Mehta’s framework offers a provocative reframing: leadership success is not measured by quarterly reports alone. It is forged at the intersection of clarity, empowerment, and human sustainability.
In a business landscape increasingly defined by volatility, that may prove to be the most valuable summit of all.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Leadership and productivity. Pauli, many of you think leadership is a lot of time to be spent with people. And yes, you're absolutely correct. However, productivity is what many people measure you on and delivering results. And now you say, how can I do both? And we have an expert on exactly that with me here today.
Hello and welcome. Sahil Mehta.
Saahil Mehta
Neil, it's a pleasure to be here.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for taking the time. And I get straight into the topic. So when someone now says, because I saw your profile and that's how we got in touch, and I see you're focusing on people getting the maximum on productivity, however, also thrive in other areas of life. And that is where many people struggle. They either say it's a bit of a balance, either I focus on getting things done, which means I have to put everything else behind until it sort of gets to a tipping point where I say it's derailing. So I now push to the other end and now I have to sort out this. But then my work life sort of doesn't deliver on my promises.
How can I make both of it happen?
Saahil Mehta
Yeah. What you're describing is like a pendulum swing, right? And it's not until you get a slap on the face that you go, oh, my goodness, something needs to get done. Well, I'll share with you what worked for me and, and the leaders that I work with. And I'm going to use a little bit of my mountaineering analogies and, and experience because I love climbing mountains. So we have something in the mountaineering world called the seven summits. And this is the tallest mountain on each continent.
And they say that when you conquer these seven mountains, you've conquered the world. Right. That's kind of just a metaphor. And so the same way I tell people, what are your seven summits? And by seven summits, these are really the things that matter most to you, which define success for you. It's not a success formula that was shared with us by our families, society, media, education, because, you know, we're all so different. Yet most people, when you ask them what they want, you usually hear something along the lines of money and fame.
Now, how can we all be so different but want the same thing? It just doesn't make sense. And so it gets people thinking that, okay, what are the seven summits that make up success for me? Now, if I said, you might say, why seven, Sahil? Well, if it's three, most people think of health, wealth and relationships.
Niels Brabandt
Yes.
Saahil Mehta
But seven makes you think about the other things in life that really matter. To you as well. Like, I'll give you one that popped up for me, which, and I see it even for many others that pop up, is fun and recreation. Right? So once you've concluded what the seven summits are for you, every time you have to make a decision, you can then ask yourself, well, what is the net effect? Because perhaps it went up on money, perhaps it went up on career, which is maybe where a lot of people may focus, but what did it do to maybe some of the other ones? Like in my case or many others, it's health, relationships, fun and recreation, personal development, etc.
And so by doing going through this methodology, decision making became easier because I find that many leaders that I work with get stuck because should I go left, should I go right? Right. You talked about the pendulum, and they just kind of get stuck in the middle sometimes. So this is giving you a lot more clarity and then enabling you to make decisions more easily.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. So how do people find out about the other summits? Because let, let's face it, my, my summit, if we call it that way, shifted by time. When I was a young person, I said, okay, career is important, friends are important, money is important. The whole health topic only came up for me because suddenly I saw by pure coincidence that some of my friends who were less lucky on the health side suddenly had constraints in their life where I reconsidered and said, look, you can have any kind of money in the world. When this hits you, it's all worth nothing from one day to the other. But that's just one more basically.
So how do I find out what are my seven summits? When I say I'm basically working long hours, I have a lot of tasks to do outside my work. How can I find out what my summits are?
Saahil Mehta
Great question. So the first thing is to identify the seven areas of life which are important. And usually what I do when I work with people, I give a list of the most common 12, and then I say, look, pick from these the seven that resonate most with you. And if there's something that's not on this list, I'm not trying to force you into a decision because it's your definition of success. So you decide for yourself. And I love what you said because, one, you have to give yourself the option that, look, every seven to 10 years, life kind of shifts, right? You might get married, you might get divorced, you might have a child, the child goes to university, a parent passes away, you move countries, you change jobs.
I mean, many things can happen in A seven to ten year period. So you have to give yourself permission that this can evolve over time as I evolve as a human being. And the second thing is that I would say is when you have these seven summits, almost think of them like seven balls that you're juggling, you're juggling them all the time. And some may be more important at some moments in time, which is fine. You need to prioritise the order of them. Right. So it's not just these are my seven, what's the priority at this stage of my life?
And the second part of that is which balls are rubber balls, that if I do drop them by whatever chance or, you know, unfortunate circumstances, they can bounce back. Like we've heard of lots of people who've lost money and then they've made it back, right?
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Saahil Mehta
But then also recognise which ones are crystal balls, where if you drop them, it's like, yeah, they're gonna break. So, you know, I always tell people that you can ignore health to a certain level, as you mentioned, but if it becomes an issue where it's chronic, you're now on medication for life and it's affected you forever. You know, if your relationships get so strained that someone ends up leaving you or says, I don't want to be associated with you, I mean, I know billionaires who, where their kids don't want anything to do with the, with, with the parent.
So was it worth it?
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely.
Saahil Mehta
So you have to know which ones are crystal balls and which ones bounce back, which are rubber balls as well.
Niels Brabandt
I, I think that is a brilliant metaphor and I'm going to challenge that on one count. I've seen you work only for my research. Hewlett Packard, Dell, bank of America, Procter and Gamble, Thomas Cook, really, TATA Group, all global organisations. And when people work there, some people in your coaching or training sessions or your consultancy will say, look, Sahil, I get all that. However, I work for a stock exchange listed organisation and the question they asked me is, did you bring in more money? Is profit up and are costs down? And that's what we pay you for, you and your balls and this and that, all fine, all cool, do whatever you want.
But is the money in the bank? So how do I, how do I as an organisation? Because anyone says people come first. Our employees are the most important people in the organisation. We focus on the people, yada, yada, yada. And the. At the end of the year, the balance sheet is what drives the stock exchange and the shareholders interest.
So how do I balance out these Two that I say, on the one hand, I, of course, want to take care of that. On the other hand, I need to bring in results to the table because we are.
We are publicly listed. We cannot just say, look, we have a bit of a bad two years now because our people are also happy.
Saahil Mehta
Look, it's. It's a great statement and we can. There's lots of arguments on either side. What I will share is the following. And I'm sharing something from personal experience. When I lost my father and we were partners in business, suddenly a lot of work came on my plate and I didn't have any other members of the family or senior folks in the company that I could rely on. It was everything on me.
Now I could continue at the same pace I was and take on that extra work, which was 100% leading to burnout. Or I said to myself, okay, what are the things that energise you every day? You know, how can I make. How do you make sure you do that every morning? So when you step into the office, you're coming in with a battery that's full rather than a battery that's drained. So even if it's not something you can do in the workplace, it's how can you ensure that there's something that the team members can do in the morning, first thing, when they enter the office, or before they come to the office, to energise themselves? Because Even if it's five minutes or 10 minutes, you know, even your phone, if you plug it in for five or 10 minutes, you can get quite a bit of juice in there, right?
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Saahil Mehta
So you want to make sure that they're energised. And then the other thing that it taught me when I suddenly had all this responsibility with no one else around, was what are the things that I'm doing? Which I don't need to, Because a challenge that I find that leaders have, including myself at that time, was, we own too much, we're involved in too many decisions, more than we need to be. And if you look at even people like Peter Drucker, you know, one of the top management gurus of all time, said, leaders of the past knew how to tell. Leaders of the future will know how to ask. And so I started saying, let me shift to become the leader of the future. I started asking around, I started delegating, empowering.
And I realised I'm like, oh, my goodness, these people I've hired actually much better than I. Than I thought. And it's not because I didn't Trust them. It's because I gave them responsibility rather than just telling them what to do. And I'm giving you two.
Two simple formulas. Obviously, it's a lot more complex than that. But like this. If you can make small changes here and there all of a sudden because everyone thinks, oh, I need to make this big leap, I don't know if it's going to work and let's not make it. But if you just say, let's take that small step, you know, on the mountain, I always tell people, put your right foot in front of the left. And once you do that, celebrate. Yay. You know, I'm talking about like when you're doing the summit climb when it's really tough, you're at 20,000ft above sea level and then like put the left in front of the right and then celebrate and just keep doing that.
So take that tiny step and see what happens. And as you see the benefits, you keep adding on more and more things. But ultimately, if an employee is engaged, if the employee feels empowered, seen and heard, you're going to get better results. So you can either try to squeeze every little juice out of them or you can ensure that you've energised them, in which case you'll probably get a much higher return on. On each employee, as well as the time that everyone's investing.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, very well said. I mean, you've been a leader in very challenging fields. I see you've been CEOs of capital companies where the stress is pretty much spot on. Anyone gives you money and says, I actually want more money back in the shortest amount of time. And at the same time, correct me if I'm wrong, but you climbed Kilimanjaro, didn't you?
Saahil Mehta
I've climbed a few mountains, yeah. That's one. One of the ones that I've climbed, yes.
Niels Brabandt
Okay. Just, I mean, few. Kala patar is five and a half thousand metres, even a bit more. Kilimanjaro is nearly 6,000 metres and the highest one is, I hope I pronounced that correctly, 6,350 metres.
Saahil Mehta
Yes.
Niels Brabandt
Do you think that any good leader. Because that needs a lot of preparation, a lot of training, a lot of time, a lot of commitment.
Any of that. You often have leaders who say when you want, and you often have speakers out there who say when you want to have a career, you need to focus on that and anything has to step back. So you have your work and then you have bit of friends and going out or whatever. But that is basically, basically the small violin on the side you have, your main focus, which is work you can't do. You cannot climb any of these mountains without massive focus on that task. Do you think that any good leader needs to have something big in their life which is not work?
Saahil Mehta
I feel every leader has to have something that motivates them to go forward. Right. And what I love about the mountains is like you said, there's a lot of. It's, it's one decision to say I'm going to climb this mountain, but there's multiple decisions that have been made when you say that. Yes, because then there's training, there's food, there's, you know, the equipment, which team to go up with. Even when you go up there, what are the decisions you make that in case stuff happens that is unfortunate that you don't have a conversation and a debate at 5,000 metres above sea level when you can't think straight. But you've already made certain decisions, decisions on the what if scenarios.
So it teaches you a lot. And I just want to highlight one thing. On the mountain, it's not forgiving.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Saahil Mehta
Okay. In our office we have our walls, we can control temperature, lighting, the people, etc and if you make a mistake, what's the worst that'll happen? You lose money, you'll get fired, you. Right.
Niels Brabandt
On the mountain there's always a way to bounce back. There's always, yeah.
Saahil Mehta
If you make a mistake on the mountain, you could be in grave danger.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Saahil Mehta
So I always tell people, how do you think with the mountain mindset in your day to day, how many times have you seen people enter meetings unprepared or just like, yeah, oh, I've got a meeting, let me quickly put something together. No, you can't put a mountain. We, we're preparing months in advance, but that helps. The greatest chance of making it a success.
Niels Brabandt
When you now had to choose because you taught told me about choices with the seven summits, if you now have to choose, maybe some people are listening now and say, I think this is for me. And I have two questions now. Question number one is what are the top three tips for people who say, I need to get more clarity on this, I need to get more focus on this. What are the top three first steps? Because many people will sit here, probably say, I have a billion plates to juggle at the moment, I don't know where to start. How do I get to start? So your top three tips for that.
And of course the second question, how can people reach out to you if they'd like to know More.
Saahil Mehta
Okay, so the top three tips are as follows. The first one is define what your seven summits are and once you've defined them, prioritise them based on your stance in life today. Right. It's from your perspective today. And then in addition to prioritising them, make sure you know which ones are the rubber balls and which ones are the crystal balls. And then every time you get to a decision making point, and I'm not talking about the small decisions, do I buy this brand of milk or that brand of milk? Right. I'm talking about the really real important decisions in your life.
Ask yourself, what is the net effect on these seven summits? Because if it's anyone like me before, I would see one or two areas which would skyrocket, but I didn't realise what the impact would be on the other five. And it turned out to be quite negative. And I see a lot of people saying, oh, I'm just going to make this short term sacrifice for this gain. But I've seen over and over again with the leaders I work with, short term sacrifice ends up becoming a long term sacrifice because there's always something that keeps coming. Oh, it's just temporary. It's just temporary.
It's just temporary. And the next thing you know, chronic illness, family issues, you know, not being fulfilled in life, maybe even mental wellness challenges, I mean, whatever it might be. So let's not get into that trap of it's just a short sacrifice because it's not right. I mean, be very clear about it and be honest with yourself. The second tip that I would give is again, if I tell someone, climb a mountain, oh my God, I don't know if I can do it. It's, you know, I've never done it before. It sounds crazy.
How about buy a pair of hiking boots, let's go for a walk. Let's just go for a one hour hike in the park or in the forest.
Oh yeah, that, that I can do. Just find that one step that is moving in the direction that you would like, that you go, yeah, I can do that. And the third thing I would say is write these things down and look at them daily. So it's always front of mind because otherwise it becomes like one of those New Year's resolutions where you're all excited and you, you say, I'm going to do this and this and this and then, you know, the end of the year.
Niels Brabandt
Smoking. Yeah, yeah. Move more this year. Yeah, yeah.
Saahil Mehta
And then you get to the end of the year and you realise you've done very little.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah.
Saahil Mehta
Right. So. So once you have it written down and you're staring at it or looking at it at least on a quick daily basis, just a quick review, it brings it front of mind and you're just thinking about it. So those are the, the three tips that I would say. And to answer your second question, people can find me on social media channels if you just, you know, for, for example, LinkedIn, you just find me Sahil meta S double A H I L M E H T A or you go to the website www.sahil method.com but I'm fairly active online so you know, it shouldn't be difficult to find me.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, and I mean that's how we got in touch as well. So I think these are the perfect final words for this interview. Leadership, clarity and productivity. Sahil, thank you very much for your time.
Saahil Mehta
Absolutely, Niels. And just as a little token for the listeners, if they go to my website, there's a mental well being quiz that they can take just to get an idea or snapshot of where they are. It just takes a few minutes of your time. Take it. It'll give you a lot of insight.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. Thank you very much.