Aspire Leaders Program: what a leadership program taught a data engineer
I was selected for the Aspire Leaders Program, a global leadership initiative by the Aspire Institute. It is the only item on my list that is not about technology, and one of the ones that changed my work the most.
by Gabriel Henrique · · 2 min read · Ler em português
I'm Gabriel Henrique, a data engineer, and in December 2025 I completed the Aspire Leaders Program from the Aspire Institute, founded by Harvard Business School faculty. I received a certificate of completion and an institutional recommendation letter.
The program brings together young professionals from many countries. Its focus is leadership rather than technique.
The program's topics
- Leadership and how it works without a formal title.
- Self-awareness: understanding your own strengths and blind spots.
- Ethical decision-making, with cases that have no obvious answer.
- Multicultural collaboration, with peers from other countries and backgrounds.
Why a data engineer takes a leadership program
The more senior data work gets, the less the bottleneck is code. What stalls a project is usually a misunderstood requirement, priorities contested between teams or someone who doesn't trust the number.
In my daily work, I present data initiatives to product, marketing and sales teams and translate commercial goals into engineering execution. Those conversations need exactly the skills the program trains.
What I brought back to work
Ethical decisions with data
I work with clients' financial data. The program's ethics cases gave me the vocabulary to raise questions early: is this use of the data what the client would expect, who can see this field and what happens if this rule is wrong.
Leading without a title
As Data Owner of the data catalog, I needed other teams to follow documentation standards without having formal authority over them. What worked was showing the benefit to the people documenting, instead of chasing them.
Working across cultures
Discussing cases with people from many countries trained something useful on any team: explaining a technical idea to someone with a different background, without jargon.
Who I recommend it to
People early or mid-way through a technical career who have started to notice that the hardest problems at work involve people. It pairs well with the agile basics I described in the article on Scrum Foundation.
Read about my path as a data engineer on the portfolio of Gabriel Henrique, Data Engineer. I'm Gabriel Henrique, and I write about data, career and technical leadership.