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

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

An Honest Guide for Senior Professionals In the last few weeks I have had quite a few conversations with people who have left or are planning on leaving their corporate careers. Former colleagues. Old Google network connections. People who found me through LinkedIn. Prospective clients referred by people I used to work with. They are reaching out because they are standing at a crossroads and they are not sure about which way to go. Some of the profiles are: A Senior Di

Some time ago, my client — let's call him Steve — came to me disappointed, angry, and confused all at once, which is a particular kind of exhausting. Steve is a founder. Sharp, self-aware, genuinely good at what he does. Some of the people he had invested most in — developed, advocated for, stayed late with, comforted when they confided in him about personal issues — had left the company the minute a competitor came calling. Not just left. They brought some of his client book

A few years into a senior role at Google, a more senior colleague pulled me aside after a meeting. "You're the smartest person in that room," she said. "But you're not landing the way you think you are." That sentence stayed with me for a long time. Not only because it stung (it really really did) but because I knew she was right, and I had no idea what to do about it. I had the skills, the track record, the ambition. What I didn't have was anyone who could help me see myself

It's one of the most common questions I hear from senior leaders, HR professionals, and founders navigating their next stage of growth: "Should I invest in coaching — or just send people to a training program?" It sounds like a simple either/or but of course in reality it's more complicated than that. And getting this decision wrong is expensive - not just financially, but in time, momentum, and trust. After 11 years at Google leading teams across sales, partnerships, Cloud,

I am currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell . You probably know the premise by now: it is the story of Shakespeare's son, who died at eleven, told entirely through the eyes of his mother Agnes. What strikes me every time I pick it up is the structural audacity of the thing. The most famous writer who ever lived appears in these pages as a peripheral figure. He is never once named. The novel insists, quietly and firmly, that the woman history forgot is the one worth kn

After 13.5 years in Ireland — and counting — I still smile every time I see a Dublin Bus display its gentle regret: "Sorry, Not in Service." Even the buses apologize here. It's such a quintessentially Irish moment that perfectly captures something deeper about this island nation's culture, one that every leader working in Ireland needs to understand. The Weight of History: How Emigration Shaped a Culture To understand Ireland's communication culture, we need to understand its

Most leaders think growth problems are strategy problems. They're not. They're communication problems that only become visible once the organization starts to scale. When teams are small, things "just work." People fill gaps. Context lives in conversations. Decisions happen quickly because everyone knows what everyone else knows. Then the company grows. More people. More layers. More complexity. And suddenly the same leadership style that worked before starts to fail. Not bec

Don't get me wrong. As a leader, you should be strict about your time. Ruthless, even. Your calendar is one of your most strategic assets, and protecting it matters. Boundaries matter. Saying no matters. And yet. Some of the worst leadership decisions I see are made by people who are constantly telling people they "don't have time." Not because they're lazy. Not because they're careless. But because they're operating from a place of deep psychological scarcity. The Time-Rich,

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. — T.S. Eliot I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately. Exploration is rarely the glamorous, expansive thing we imagine it to be. Most of the time, it’s disorienting. It strips away labels. It removes the scaffolding that once made life feel coherent. It asks uncomfortable questions long before it offers any clarity in

Three months after my Google career came to an end, someone asked me at a dinner event: "So, what do you do?" I hesitated before I started answering. It wasn't that I didn't have enough going on for me to be able to give a coherent answer. I was building my executive coaching business and working with a few exciting businesses as an advisor / consultant. I hesitated because none of them felt fully-baked yet. It all seemed too hand-wavy. For 11 years, the answer had been e