The Art and Science of Leadership Communication

Friday, 21st November 2025

About The Event

In today’s complex, interconnected world, leadership is not just about having the right answers—it’s about communicating with clarity, confidence, and authenticity. Across sectors and seniority levels, as environments become more complex and fast-moving, effective communication becomes more challenging. How do we communicate in a way that people pay attention, understand, remember, and care? Messages get lost. Intent gets misinterpreted. And the ability to connect meaningfully across teams, cultures, and global contexts becomes a defining leadership differentiator.

To shed light on how to strengthen this essential capability, we held our very first joint SGLN x INSEAD event, centred on the Art & Science of Leadership Communication.

Professor Andy Yap opened the evening with a powerful masterclass that not only shed the latest insights, but demonstrated it. His perspectives served as a timely reminder that communication is never just about delivering information. It is about enabling understanding, building alignment, and strengthening trust.

We then moved into a lively dialogue moderated by Dr. Nadir Zafar, featuring three SGLN Fellowship Mentors who offered authentic and real-world examples of what leadership communication looks like in the realities of global leadership today:

Cindy Tan, Managing Director, Meta APAC Clients & author of Own Your Magic
Malgosia Green, CEO, Match Asia (operator of Tinder)
Vinod Mahboobani, Global Chief Legal Officer, KFC & Pizza Hut

A consistent theme emerged throughout the evening:
Leadership communication is not a static skill. It is an ongoing practice, and one that is contextual.

As roles evolve and environments change, leaders must continually refine how they listen, how they speak, and how they connect with those around them.

Speaker

Professor Andy Yap

Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

Andy Yap is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. Professor Yap holds a PhD and MPhil in Management from Columbia Business School, and a BSSc with Honours in Psychology from the National University of Singapore. Before joining INSEAD, Professor Yap was a faculty at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At INSEAD, Professor Yap teaches in a variety of programs including Executive Education, MBA, EMBA, and PhD. His teaching and consulting expertise includes Leadership, Leadership Communication, Executive Presence, Leading High-Impact Teams, Strategy Execution & Organizational Change, Power And Politics, and Managerial Negotiation. At MIT, Professor Yap taught the graduate/undergraduate course on Managerial Psychology and the core leadership MBA course on Organizational Processes. Andy Yap is directing the Executive Presence and Influence (EPI) programme and the Impactful Communication for Leaders (ICL) programme.

Professor Yap is a social and organizational psychologist. His research program focuses on three overarching areas: (1) Signals of social status and its consequences, (2) The impact of hierarchy on person perception, and (3) How dimensions of social hierarchy affect important organisational outcomes (e.g. prosocial behaviour, subjective well-being, stress, organisational commitment and career decisions). Professor Yap’s work has important implications for how organisations can be structured to promote a workforce that is productive, motivated, and socially responsible.

Professor Yap’s research has been published in leading academic journals including Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, as well as leading practitioner journals such as Harvard Business Review. His work has also been featured across a range of international media outlets including TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, The Atlantic, Financial Times, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.), The Business Times (Singapore), The Straits Times (Singapore) and the US National Public Radio.

Professor Yap has been recognized with academic and teaching honours such as the American Psychological Association Early Graduate Student Researcher Award, the Donald C. Hambrick Award from Columbia Business School, nomination for the Best Teacher Award in the MBA program at INSEAD, and several other conference awards in Psychology, Marketing, and Management.

Panellists

Malgosia Green

CEO, Match Asia (operator of Tinder)

Malgosia Green is the CEO of Match Group Asia.

Prior to this role, Green was the CEO of Plenty of Fish from 2018-2022. Before joining the company, she served as the Chief Product Officer at educational technology company Top Hat, where she headed up product and engineering. She helped scale the company to over 300 people in just 5 years.

Previously, Malgosia was the founder & CEO of Savvica, an online marketing company focused on international education. Savvica launched LearnHub in 2008, a higher ed, test prep, and career network for students, which grew to be the largest education site in India.

An entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience, Malgosia has worked in Toronto, San Francisco, and Austin. She holds a BaSc. in System Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.
Cindy Tan

Managing Director, Global Clients APAC, Meta

Cindy Tan is an entrepreneurial commercial leader with a career spanning diverse industries.

As Meta’s Managing Director of Global Clients, Cindy leads a team advising Fortune 500 brands to scale their business with Meta’s solutions. Cindy is also the global lead for Meta’s community club ‘English as a Second Language’, empowering 800+ members across the globe to find their confidence and voice as a non-native English speaker.

Prior to Meta, Cindy was on INTO executive board as Chief Commercial Officer for INTO University Partnerships. She led the international recruitment, operations, and digital marketing team. Amidst the challenges of the Covid pandemic, Cindy worked with her team to deliver accessibility and tutorial solutions to enable students to continue their studies.

In her previous role with TripAdvisor, where she served as Global Vice President for Retail and APAC Display, she expanded the company’s presence across APAC and launched new business verticals, forging some of the largest and most critical global partnerships for the business. At British Broadcasting Corporation, Cindy led the expansion of BBC Worldwide into China, signing the first media partnership with Boao Forum and managed high stakes Government relations. She was also a member of BBC strategy team and led the go to market post-acquisition of Lonely planet and Viki.com.

Cindy is an independent Board Director of MM2 Asia, a Singapore Exchange mainboard listed company. She was also previously a Board Member for IAB Southeast Asia and India.

Committed to leadership development, Cindy founded Newton Leaders, a career and personal equity development business to empower high potential leaders. Cindy has also developed a proprietary leadership framework titled ‘MAGIC’ as part of the Newton Leaders programming and is now working on her new book. Cindy advises digital startups entering APAC markets and previously lectured at the Singapore Institute of Technology, on project management.

Cindy holds double EMBA each with UCLA and NUS, an Executive Certificate in Finance from INSEAD and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Monash University.
Vinod Mahboobani

Global Chief Legal Officer, KFC & Pizza Hut

Vinod Mahboobani is the Global Chief Legal Officer for KFC and Pizza Hut at Yum Brands, Inc.

He has over 33 years of experience and his current responsibilities span across over 150 countries. Vinod is a member of both the KFC and Pizza Hut leadership teams, and his responsibilities include advising senior management on business strategy and risks, franchising and policy formulation, corporate governance and compliance, global expansion, large scale M&A, managing private equities and IPOs, and driving ESG and technology initiatives. Vinod is known for his high level of personal accountability and integrity, exceptional strong relationships with franchisees and other stakeholders, and identifies himself as a people-grower and a business-enabler.

Vinod joined PepsiCo Restaurants Hong Kong in 1996 as legal counsel for Asia Pacific, and he moved over to Yum! Brands upon the spinoff in 1997. During his 28+ years with Yum!, he has worked in multiple cities, including Singapore, New Delhi and presently Dallas.

Vinod graduated with his law degree and his postgraduate certificates in law from the University of Hong Kong and has a master’s in applied finance from Macquarie University in Australia. In addition, he has attended various leadership and development programs at several institutions including Insead and Indian School of Business, and sustainability strategies at Stanford.

Vinod is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, a member of the Singapore Institute of Directors (SID), the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Singapore Academy of Law and the Hong Kong and UK Law Societies. In addition, he has his senior directorship accreditation from SID. Vinod is also fluent in five languages.

Moderator

Dr. Nadir Zafar

Managing Director, SGLN

Dr. Nadir Ali Zafar is Managing Director, Singapore Leaders Network (SGLN), at the Human Capital Leadership Institute (HCLI).

SGLN is a national movement managed by HCLI and supported by EDB. He joins HCLI from UAE-based education technology company Alef Education where he was Chief Operating Officer. During his time, the company grew from a start-up to an award-winning organisation that serves several hundred thousand students.

Nadir was one of the founding leaders of Alef Education and set up and oversaw the marketing, finance, human resources, legal, audit, procurement, and business support departments. He also spearheaded the company’s expansion into Asia, set up a healthcare program, and launched a new schools management business that was spun off into an independent entity.

Nadir’s experience spans over 20 years. Prior to Alef Education, he was at GEMS Education, where he reported directly to the Group CEO and served on the senior leadership team. He was then posted to Singapore as Director of Corporate Development, leading admissions and marketing for their Singapore school. In previous roles, Nadir has worked closely with the CEO of one of the largest shipping companies in the world and the CEO of one of the Middle East region’s largest media companies. Nadir has worked in UAE, India, Thailand, and Singapore.

Nadir graduated with a Bachelor of Business Management (Marketing) from the pioneer batch of the Singapore Management University and holds an MBA from INSEAD. He has also completed a Doctor of Education in Leadership and Innovation at New York University. His past and current leadership experience extends to serving on the Board of a London-listed global education company, President of the Singapore Business Council in UAE, alumni leader for both his alma maters, and founder of an EdTech venture. Nadir is Singaporean.