More and more of the people who book a first call with me arrive with a similar document open on their laptop. Sometimes it is a termination agreement. Sometimes it is a voluntary redundancy offer, or an invitation from HR to a "consultation meeting" whose outcome they already know. Quite often there is a signing deadline a few days away, and they are trying to make sense of it on their own. When clients come to me now, they have usually searched online first. What they find

Some of the most capable founders I coach have the hardest time doing something that sounds deceptively simple: stopping long enough to think. One founder I coach runs a 40-person B2B software company in Berlin. In our last session, she walked me through her previous week: Slack replies during her daughter's swim lesson, an investor update rewritten twice on the train, a hiring call taken while walking between two other meetings, and a pricing decision she'd been putting off

Performance reviews are supposed to make work fairer. They should help people understand how they are doing, recognize their contributions, identify areas for development, and make better decisions about promotions and pay. So why do so many people approach them with a mixture of dread, cynicism, and resignation? A client of mine, whom I'll call Quinn, works at a large global tech company. A few weeks ago, just as performance review season was getting underway, she told me ho

A couple of weeks ago, a client brought a set of notes to our session. She had not written them, she had not been consulted on what was in them, and she was expected to deliver them to her teams right away. She is a director at a tech company, based in the UK and responsible for EMEA operations. The notes set out a reorg that leadership at the US headquarters had decided on without involving her or any of her peers, and the change was taking effect immediately. She was upset.

Last week I wrote about bullying. I shared my own experiences of being bullied at school and later at work, and talked about Amy Cuddy's recent work on bullying and social bravery. I wasn't expecting the response I got. I received a lot of private messages. Some were from people telling me what had happened to them. Some were from people who had witnessed bullying and never stepped in, and were still thinking about it years later. Some were genuinely disturbing. A few turned

When I was twelve years old, I was the most academically successful student in my classroom for a long while. Getting into our school was kind of a big deal. In Turkey’s high-stakes education system, we had all spent two grueling years — from nine to eleven years old — studying for a nationwide standardized test. We spent our weekdays, weekends, and endless hours at school, in cram schools and at home with private tutors to earn our seats. Everyone in that building was ambit

I remember things. I remember what someone said in a meeting four years ago, the exact phrasing, and the pause before it. I remember who promised to introduce me to whom and never did. I remember the tone of an email from 2019. I remember which song was playing in the taxi on the way to an interview in 2014. I remember the name of the person who was kind to me on my first day somewhere, and the act of kindness itself. For a long time I thought of this as an asset, and in

I start looking for my keys three streets before I reach the door. I've only ever been locked out once or twice in my life because I forgot my keys. And I've never had an emergency that required me to have the keys already in my hand, ready to be inserted into the lock the second I reached the front door. Yet there I am. Three streets away, rummaging through my bag. The bag is deep, the walk from the gate to the door is about eleven seconds, and I would rather not spend those

Someone called me out recently for how I talk to my AI agents. Apparently, I was being rude. My response was something along the lines of: It's software. It'll be fine. But then I did what I usually do when someone tells me something I don't particularly want to hear. I looked into it. And I ended up somewhere much more interesting than the question of whether I should say please and thank you to Claude. The genuinely useful question, in my opinion, is what happens to our jud

A client of mine, a director at a global tech company, told me recently about the moment she understood why her VP promotion kept not happening. Her team had prepared a partnership proposal, and she rewrote it herself the night before the executive review because it was faster than explaining what she wanted. The proposal landed well. Her leadership praised the output. And her name still didn't come up when the VP seat opened three months later, because everyone in that room

What a summer of sport this has been. The World Cup wrapped up last night, the Tour de France is grinding through the mountains as I write this, Wimbledon crowned its champions just a week ago, and I've been loving watching the Turkish Men's Basketball team in the world cup qualifiers. I love watching sport for its own sake, but I will admit that the coach in me never fully switches off. Sport compresses everything I see in careers and leadership, the effort, the setbacks, th

A coachee of mine, a director at a large tech company, keeps a spreadsheet of reasons to leave her job. She started it in early 2025. It has grown to 23 rows: a manager she has outgrown, a product she stopped believing in, a promotion cycle that passed her over twice. She showed it to me in a session last month, and then she said the sentence that prompted this article: "I know all of this, and I still haven't applied to a single role in fourteen months." She has options and

A founder I coach, running a Series A fintech out of London, sat down for our session and pulled up her board update, still open in a draft tab from three nights running. The numbers were fine. She'd rewritten the same three paragraphs each night, trying to find a tone that sounded like she had a handle on things she genuinely did have a handle on. She finally sent it at midnight, unfinished, with a line at the bottom: "will follow up tomorrow with the rest." The board said n

When I was in high school, a teacher I deeply respected sat me down and told me I was like a duck. Not sure where he was going with it at first, I twitched uncomfortably but kept listening. A duck, he explained, can walk, swim, and fly. It doesn't out-swim a shark, out-run a cheetah, or out-fly an eagle, but it does all three competently. It survives, adapts, and gets wherever it needs to go because it isn't trapped in a single element. It was a complement. For a long time,

A while ago I started working with a newly promoted leader - let's call her Hannah. Thirty-two, sharp, and suddenly running a team where several people had a decade more tenure than she did. She came to me because meetings were going sideways. She would make a recommendation and watch it sit there, unanswered, until someone older repeated a version of it twenty minutes later and the room nodded. So she did what a lot of capable young leaders do. She worked harder at being cre

Last week, Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees that they were being laid off — about 10% of its entire workforce. The stated reason: funding its AI push. At the same time, around 7,000 more employees were being redirected into newly created AI-focused teams. And quietly buried in the internal memo from Meta's Chief People Officer was a line that should have gotten far more attention than it did: the company is restructuring around "AI-native design principles," flattening m

A few years ago, I was coaching a senior leader at a multinational company — let's call her Diane. She had read all the right books, attended the right offsites, and genuinely believed she had built a psychologically safe team. Her direct reports liked her. The energy in team meetings felt warm and collegial. Nobody ever argued. Nobody ever pushed back. She came to me because her team kept missing the signals. Problems that should have surfaced in week one were showing up in

I've never met a leader who looked forward to a reorg. Not the ones who initiated it. Not the ones who had to implement it. And certainly not the ones who found out about it on a Tuesday afternoon via a calendar invite titled "Important Organizational Update." Over the last eighteen months, reorgs have become a near-constant backdrop for the leaders I work with. The reasons vary — AI-driven restructuring, cost pressure, post-merger integration, strategic pivots, new leadershi

A few months ago I was sitting in a coaching session with a Director at a mid-size tech company — let's call her Layla. Layla is sharp, experienced, and genuinely good at her job. She'd been managing people for nearly a decade. Her team trusted her. Her stakeholders respected her. Her performance reviews were consistently excellent. And then her company rolled out an AI-integrated workflow across the entire organization. Within six weeks, Layla came to a session and said some

Every founder I have ever coached on fundraising has, at some point, looked at me and said some version of the same thing: "I had no idea it would be this hard." Not the first time. Not the fifth time. Not even for founders who have done it before and know exactly what is coming. Fundraising is one of those things that looks clean and logical from the outside and feels chaotic and deeply personal from the inside. The TechCrunch announcement is the last paragraph of a very lo