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The Real Return
by Riyaad Howard
I first heard about the Care and Growth model through Maryam Schuitema. When she invited us to join the online course, learning that it would bring together leaders from around the world wrestling with the exact same questions made it feel like the precise room we needed to be in at this stage of building eSwitch AI. eSwitch is a startup, and the culture we establish today becomes the foundation everything else rests upon. As a founding leadership team, we wanted to map out a trajectory that didn’t just chase growth for its own sake, but built something genuinely sound beneath it. We wanted our baseline – how we treat each other and how we lead – to be benign and intentional from the start, before bad habits or misaligned incentives had a chance to take root.
Carving out two days for training wasn’t easy. Between investor conversations, client meetings, and preparing for product demos, our schedule was full. Yet this course felt far too critical to pass up. Naeem, Ahmed, Mohammed, and I engaged in the full two-day training together. Not because it was convenient, but because each of us will lead teams as eSwitch scales. I wanted us to move forward with a single, shared compass rather than four individual interpretations of what good leadership looks like. What we took away has fundamentally reframed how I approach building this company. The core insight that stayed with me is shifting away from top-down authority toward distributed power among peers – viewing leadership as something earned through contribution rather than held and dispensed from above. Etsko’s framing of an organisation built on asking “what can I give” rather than “what can I get” is deceptively simple to articulate but challenging to execute and precisely the standard I want for eSwitch.
This learning landed at a pivotal moment for us. As a lean team, balancing technical development, strategic partnerships, investor relations, and an ambitious national rollout, defaulting to a conventional top-down structure would be tempting just for short-term speed. But Care and Growth offered a better lens: a workforce grounded in genuine contribution and autonomy rather than command and extraction, that is what actually allows a small team to move fast without breaking under the weight.
If Naeem, Ahmed, Mohammed, and I lead our future teams using this framework, we aren’t just writing software, managing clean energy and electric fleets; we are building an organisation where people genuinely want to grow.
That is the real return: not a framework to file away, but an enduring operational anchor we can return to as we scale.
Want to learn more about how to lead your team with greater purpose, strengthen organisational culture, and unlock potential? See: www.schuitemagroup.com
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