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Tarun Galagali
Tarun Galagali is the founder of Mandala, an AI-native coaching platform that brings neuroscience-backed leadership development into the flow of work through Slack. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he studied how compelling leaders manage themselves, their teams, and their changing organizations, and writes a Forbes column on leadership, neuroscience, and the future of work.
Building Resilient Leaders With AI and Neuroscience
Before founding Mandala in 2024, Tarun held leadership roles at Google and Verily, Alphabet's life sciences division, helped lead Talkspace's B2B strategy through its IPO, and worked in finance and political organizing, including on Congressional campaigns. He built Mandala around the idea he calls "resilient leadership": that managers avoid difficult conversations not because they lack a framework, but because their nervous system fires fight-or-flight before the conversation even starts. His programming trains managers to regulate that response first (through breathing, emotional noting, and kinder inner dialogue) before layering on the tools and role-play most leadership training starts with. An independent study conducted through Boston College found managers in Mandala's program saw a 54 percent improvement in team effectiveness and an estimated 19 percent reduction in turnover. He is also co-authoring a book with Dr. Michael Platt, head of neuroscience at Wharton, on nervous system regulation as an overlooked leadership skill.
Topics Tarun speaks on
- Why managers avoid difficult conversations, and what actually fixes it
- Resilient leadership: regulating your nervous system before you coach others
- AI-native coaching for managers
- Building psychologically safe teams through storytelling and vulnerability
- Where AI adoption in HR and performance management is headed
Sessions with Achieve
Tarun is featured in "The Transform Dialogues Featuring Tarun Galagali" (February 25, 2026), an Achieve Engagement resource recorded live at the Transform conference in partnership with Engagedly. In it, he unpacks Mandala's resilient leadership framework in detail, including the Boston College research findings, and predicts that AI fluency, a renewed business case for DEIB as a performance lever, and the Gen Z transition into the workforce will be the three biggest things companies need to get right.
Connect
Want more on what it actually takes to build leaders who can regulate under pressure? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.