Introduction
When Shimona Mehta sat down with the CEO of the company she'd bet her career on and told him a senior leader was hurting the people underneath him, the answer she got back wasn't a plan to fix it. It was a promotion, offered so she could move closer to the problem and act as a buffer. Months later, when that same leader crossed a line the company could no longer explain away, the board still wouldn't let him go. It would cost too much money.
That's the moment Mehta, formerly Managing Director of EMEA at Shopify Plus \[CHECK\], says taught her the hardest lesson of her career: a company's stated values only count when they're inconvenient. On this episode of Everyday Leadership, she walks through the jobs, bosses and identity conflicts that built her sense of who she actually is at work, and why she now describes the whole thing as a progressive journey in self-awareness.
A Career Built on Progressive Self-Awareness
Look at Mehta's career on paper and the jump doesn't make sense: an entry-level consumer relations role at a Canadian frozen food company to running Shopify Plus across EMEA for a global hyper-growth tech company. Two paths that don't appear to align at all.
Her own explanation is simpler than a strategic masterplan. "My career's been like a progressive journey in self-awareness," she says. "Each thing I've done has taught me a little bit more about either what I'm good at or what I love to do." Every job, including the bad ones, was data. The throughline wasn't ambition for its own sake. It was attention.
Own Your Career, No One Else Will
Mehta's first real lesson in ownership came from Steve \[CHECK\], the president of Jane's Family Foods \[CHECK\], the quarter-billion-dollar company where she started out. He'd become president at 39, and when he saw her frustrated at being overlooked, he told her plainly: "I always did the job that I wanted, not just the one that I had." He hadn't waited to be handed opportunity. He'd already been doing the next role before it was offered to him.
The second thing he told her has stayed with her for fifteen years: "No one else in this world was responsible for your career except you." No one was going to notice quietly good work and reward it automatically. She had to name the direction she wanted and ask for the path.
That lesson became her own leadership philosophy. As she puts it to the teams she's led since: "Your job is to figure out what direction you want to head in, or what destination you'd like. Then my job as a leader is to create the path for you. But you've got to tell me what you want."
Learning What You Need by Being in the Wrong Place
Mehta's next move, into a customer-facing role she hoped would put her in rooms with senior decision-makers, landed her in what she calls one of the most toxic environments she's ever worked in. She knew within two to three months it wasn't right. She stayed for nine.
The delay wasn't indecision. It was image management. "I was really concerned with how it would look on my resume and my LinkedIn if I left so quickly," she says. She told herself she could stick it out for eighteen months. She lasted nine before she couldn't take any more.
The lesson she took forward wasn't just about leaving faster next time. It was about what to ask before joining anywhere: what kind of boss she needed, what kind of environment she wanted to be around, and whether the people making decisions were people she respected. Those questions hadn't occurred to her as a young professional. After that job, they became non-negotiable.
Moving From Individual Contributor to Leader Is a Career Change, Not a Promotion
When Mehta was made Director of Canada at NPD Group after three strong years as an account manager and salesperson, she assumed leadership would follow the same pattern as everything else: do the job well, get promoted, keep going. "The thought that moving from IC to leader is a career change had not occurred to me," she says. "I thought that's just what you do."
Her first one-to-one with someone on her own team undid that assumption completely. "I have no idea what I'm doing here," she remembers thinking. Who was supposed to set the agenda? What was she meant to ask? She had been sitting on the other side of one-to-ones her whole career and had simply assumed the skill would transfer.
The harder lesson came later, through mistakes with her own team. "I was becoming demanding versus empathetic," she says. When someone wasn't performing, she wasn't taking the time to understand whether it was a lack of clarity, a lack of support, or something else entirely. She'd absorbed the idea that a leader needed to have all the answers, for her bosses and for her team, and that pressure was working against her rather than for her.
She also assumed her relationships needed to change because her title had. They didn't. "I think somehow I needed to create this line between leader and team," she says. "It's like, no, I don't actually need to do that."
The Cost of Not Being Allowed to Show Up as Yourself
Alongside learning to lead, Mehta was navigating something the standard leadership playbook never covered: how to show up authentically as a woman of colour in a corporate world that was, in her words, predominantly older and white. The advice available to her had mostly been built for people who didn't look like her.
The conflict showed up in small, constant decisions. "Am I wearing enough makeup, am I wearing too much makeup, should I wear high heels, should I wear a skirt, should I wear pants, should I smile, am I smiling too much," she says, describing feedback that she smiled too much, which read as "ditzy or flirty rather than confident and powerful." Long hair or short hair. Every choice was being read against a standard she hadn't set and didn't fully understand.
Looking back, she says she didn't recognise at the time how much conflict she was carrying. Layering "leader" on top of an identity she was already negotiating in every room was, in her word, overwhelming. It's a cost that doesn't show up on a performance review, but it shapes how much energy is left over for the actual work of leading.
Choosing Growth Over Comfort
After three stable, well-led years at NPD, Mehta found herself bored. The food industry grows roughly two percent a year. Annual planning meant stretching for six percent growth when the business wanted nine, and she'd started to notice that colleagues who'd been there a decade or more were doing exactly what they'd done ten years earlier. For some people, that stability is the win. For her, it wasn't.
When a Berlin-based startup called Market Logic Software reached out about a sales role building an AI-driven market research platform, she nearly talked herself out of it. Leaving a company that valued her, for something unproven, in another country, felt like giving up security for a gamble. Her father settled it with one line: "Nothing in this world is irreversible except having a baby, so you might as well go do it."
Taking the leap meant stepping back into an individual contributor role after having been a director, a trade she made deliberately. What she learned about herself in the process was specific: she needed disruption, she didn't like predictability, and she wanted to be close to fast growth and decision-making, not managing the status quo.
When Values Are on the Wall but Not in the Room
At Market Logic, Mehta effectively ran three jobs at once: global salesperson, architect of the company's first onboarding and enablement programme, and informal coach to new hires, travelling 25 of 30 days most months. It worked because the environment was good. Then the company hired a Chief Revenue Officer, and everything changed.
She describes him as a gaslighter who yelled, reversed decisions overnight, and expected the team to keep up with commitments he'd already abandoned. Within months, an environment she'd loved running around in became one that gave her daily anxiety. She raised it directly with the CEO, laying out the damage as clearly as she could. The response wasn't a plan to address the leader. It was an offer to promote her and relocate her to Chicago, closer to him, so she could act as a buffer between him and the rest of the organisation.
She agreed to the move, still believing in the company and the CEO's vision. Then, while she was apartment-hunting in Chicago, the leader crossed a line serious enough that it caused what she calls "a whole Ruckus" globally. Even then, the CEO and board chose not to remove him. It would cost too much money.
That was the moment the lesson became permanent. "You can't say that you have values and that you care about your people, but when the fork in the road is in front of you, you choose the easier path," she says. "Values can just be something that's on a wall. It has to be the thing that you live."
Choosing Leaders by What They Actually Value
The timing of what happened next still strikes Mehta as remarkable. A recruiter from Shopify had reached out two days before the incident. Until then, she'd been turning down every approach out of loyalty to Market Logic. She hadn't yet replied to decline. After the incident, she did the opposite and opened the conversation.
Shopify's interview process was unlike anything she'd experienced. Instead of standard behavioural questions, people wanted to know her life story, her ideas, who she was, not just what she'd accomplished. The interview that sealed it was with Mark Bergen \[CHECK\], the leader who would become her boss. Half of it was spent whiteboarding ideas together. Near the end, she asked him what success would look like for him by the end of the year.
His answer was immediate: "Shimona, when people walk out of our doors in the next two, three, four, five years, if we've set them up for success in their careers, that will be success. Full stop." Not a revenue number. Not a headcount target. She knew, in that moment, she'd found someone whose values would still hold when a decision actually cost him something.
