Career growth is rarely about one big leap. More often, it’s a series of small decisions, made consistently, inside an environment that rewards curiosity over ego. That’s the thread running through the latest episode of the Culture and Career Corner podcast, where host Anamika sat down with two members of IT By Design’s service delivery team: Lhea Dayrit from the Philippines office and Axton (Ashish) Agrawal from the Delhi office.
Both have spent roughly five years at ITBD. Both started in narrower roles and grew into broader ones. And both, in different ways, pointed to the same root cause: a culture that treats not knowing something as a starting point, not a liability.
Two paths in, same signal
Before joining ITBD, Lhea worked as a local IT support employee for a large BPO company in the Philippines. She had mastered the role, but she wanted to keep growing, so she stepped outside her comfort zone to look for something new.
She found ITBD on LinkedIn. Her first impression wasn’t a job description or a benefits list. It was a photo of the founders with their dogs, and the fact that ITBD offers insurance benefits for pets, not just people.
Anamika added her own vantage point on this. In talent acquisition, she’s seen firsthand how much that detail lands with candidates, particularly in the Philippines, where pets are treated as family, not property. Her point: taking care of employees is table stakes. Taking care of what employees care about is a different signal entirely.
Axton’s entry point was different. He joined ITBD as a senior system administrator on the backup team, with knowledge of a single backup tool. Five years later, he’s working across multiple backup platforms and leading the backup team for one of the company’s high-value clients. He called it one of the best decisions of his career.
Two different starting points. One shared outcome: an environment that gave them room to expand what they knew.
Culture as the multiplier
When Anamika asked each of them to describe ITBD’s culture, the answers converged from two different angles.
Lhea framed it around inclusion and mentorship. She joined without deep knowledge of how the business worked, and that gap was never treated as a disadvantage. People invested time teaching and guiding her. Her core observation: no two days at ITBD are the same.
Every day brings something new to learn, whether that’s a technology, a better way to solve a problem, or a better way to communicate with a colleague. Listening back, Anamika named the value underneath all of it: humility. Not the culture performing humility, but people genuinely investing in each other’s success.
Axton framed his answer around transparency. For him, ITBD’s culture means employees can approach senior leaders directly and speak freely. Anamika built on that point: without open communication, gaps get filled with assumption, and assumption is where misunderstanding starts.
From there, she brought in her own experience with ITBD’s TCW (The Collaborative Way) training, a four-day workshop that she said changed how she thinks, reacts, and communicates. That workshop, in her telling, is where she learned that speaking straight is a prerequisite for open communication, not a nice-to-have.
Put the two answers together, and a pattern emerges. Inclusion gives people permission to not know something yet. Transparency gives people permission to say so out loud. Neither works well without the other.
The lessons that stuck
The heart of the episode is the segment Anamika calls “aha moments,” three life lessons from each guest.
Lhea’s three: Never assume you’ve reached your limit, because there’s always more room to grow. Don’t compare yourself to people further along in their journey; use that gap as motivation instead of discouragement. And don’t be afraid to ask questions. She admitted this last one was personal. She used to hesitate to ask questions, worried it would make her look like she didn’t know enough. Over time, she realized the opposite was true. Asking questions reduces mistakes, speeds up learning, and shows a willingness to grow rather than a lack of capability.
Axton’s three: Stay positive, because it keeps people motivated and focused through challenges. Practice humility, because humble people accept feedback more readily and correct course faster. And give full effort in whatever you do, personal or professional, because the result tends to follow the effort.
The room you’re afraid to speak in
Lhea’s point about asking questions pulled something out of Anamika worth sitting with on its own. She traced it back to ITBD’s leadership training, where the recurring reminder is simple: raise your hand when you have a question, and don’t shy away from it. The reasoning is direct. When you don’t ask, you assume. And assumption is where things go sideways, building perceptions that are often wrong and creating confusion that didn’t need to exist.
She also brought up a line worth repeating: if you feel like the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
What made this section land was Anamika’s own admission. She described sitting in meetings, at a level where people have certain expectations of her, and running an internal debate before asking a question that felt too basic: should I ask this, how will it make me look, will it undercut how people see me.
More often than not, she’d leave the meeting having stayed quiet, then reflect afterward that she should have just asked. Her conclusion: the question was never a referendum on her credibility. It was just a request for clarity.
She pointed to something else too, something anyone who has asked an “obvious” question in a meeting has probably experienced. Ask it, and a message shows up afterward from a peer, thanking you for asking, because they were thinking the same thing and didn’t say it either. That’s the real cost of staying quiet. It’s not just your own clarity you’re protecting by not asking. It’s everyone else’s in the room who is quietly hoping someone else will go first.
Lhea’s message to newcomers
Lhea closed her segment with a direct message for anyone starting their career. Entering the professional world can be scary, and feeling uncertain or overwhelmed at the start is normal. But surround yourself with the right people, in an environment that encourages learning and growth, and the distance covered will surprise you. Look back later at who you were when you started, and the growth becomes the reward in itself.
Why it matters
Neither Lhea nor Axton described a dramatic turning point. What they described was consistency: staying curious, asking questions, showing up with effort, and doing it inside a culture built to support that. Anamika’s own reflections added the harder, less comfortable half of that story, that even people well into their careers still talk themselves out of asking the question that would help them and everyone around them.
That’s a less cinematic story than most career narratives, but it’s a more repeatable one. It’s also the clearest evidence of what ITBD’s culture is designed to produce.
