The Shepherd Way: Leeds solicitor Daxa Patel on leadership learned from German Shepherd

The solicitor from Leeds is petite and German Shepherds, famously, are not.

“I've taught him to stand and dance with me,” she says. “When he comes up to me and he stands up, he's taller than me.”

Oscar is a “big lad,” she says, but “he's such a gentle, gentle soul, and I never felt fearful of his presence.”

As anyone who lives with a furry companion will understand, he has also become a figuratively outsized part of life for Daxa, as the two established a deep bond when he came to her puppy more than five years ago.

What she didn't expect is that he would also teach her all sorts of lessons on leadership, an area about which she already knew plenty.

It proved to be a major inspiration and Daxa, a regular Yorkshire Post columnist, has now released her second book, The Shepherd Way: Quiet Leadership in a Loud World.

“Leadership,” she writes at the start, “is a quiet language of steadiness. It does not require dominance; it requires directive calm. This book is for anyone who carries responsibility inwardly and outwardly, for those who lead quietly, feel deeply, and understand that strength does not need to announce itself.”

Through sixteen lessons inspired by life with Oscar, the author explores leadership informed by “presence, loyalty, courage, awareness, stewardship, boundaries and calm”. Daxa introduces various principles followed by a story to demonstrate it, and followed up with a tool section where she explains how people can develop these concepts in life and work.

She says: “The Unseen Bond is the second principle, where I've talked about (how) the deepest bonds are never created through control, performance, or constant communication, but they're built through trust, intention, and quiet understanding that grows between the two beings. They learn to move through life side by side.

"The strong bond is not born in one defining moment, it's shaped through thousans of almost invisible moments in which another being learns ‘I am safe here’. So it's recognising that connection is not something we can demand. It’s something we build patiently, consistently, and with a kind of presence that can't be faked.”

Daxa didn’t always think like this. She studied law at the University of Leeds and went on to become a solicitor for more than 30 years and has been through the “aspirational route” of department head and partner, she says.

"I was the first female brown-skinned partner to make it in a 150-year-old firm as a partner. So the glass ceiling and everything else, I went through all of that,” she says.

She was a litigation partner when her career came to halt in 2011 as she became a carer to her father, Manhar Patel, who had a stroke at the age of 92.

He died in December 2013 and Daxa poured her experiences into her first book, My Dad and Me.

She then became a team engagement and development partner, and clinical negligence solicitor, at a Manchester law firm until August 2023 and is now a leadership coach as well as author.

Oscar feels like another connection to her father, who had a similar dog named Asha when Daxa was a child.

Grief, she says, “broke me open, but Oscar brought the balm in. But also, even the relationship with Oscar required me to dig deep to learn more about me.

"It's almost like having another being that makes you check yourself and think, I need to work on me and how I actually behave and how my behaviour makes others feel.”

That can be applied to the business world, she believes. There has been a "big shift” in her understanding of leadership between those aspirational days and now.

Leadership is about listening, she says. “As a lawyer, I gave advice, opinions. Active listening was not something I did until I actually moved into the role as a leadership coach” – she now mentors young solicitors – “and I learned active listening requires you to be curious. It requires you to be respectful and it requires you to give the other person that space, that safety, that they can be who they are and thrive, and the same thing I found with my relationship with Oscar is, I had to change a huge deal,” she says.

There is a workplace bonding exercise, sometimes seen in films and television, that involves a person falling back into the arms of their colleagues. Daxa and Oscar have organically learned to do something similar at home.

“Oscar generally goes to the front room because he's got a big double bed and he can watch the world go by there like a king. I approach him from behind. They say with dogs that you shouldn't be approaching them from behind because it makes them feel threatened, but he knows that I'm coming.

“Because he’s so big, that's the only time we're on a par, if you like, when I’m behind him on the side, and he suddenly drops back. It's like trust fall because he knows and he almost says to me: ‘Scratch my tummy now’. And he leans back on me. I just think, wow, for him to have dropped his guard, and for us just to be there doing nothing, saying nothing, just standing next to each other, and you realise that it's those moments that actually build a relationship.”

The Shepherd Way: Quiet Leadership in a Loud World is out now.