Avoidance. Sometimes, what looks like helplessness is actually avoidance. A coachee once told me: “I really want to speak to my manager about my promotion. But I don’t think it will make any difference.” I asked, “Have you tried?”. “No.” “Why do you think it won’t work out?” “I know how my
A good vision can be intoxicating. Management literature gives a lot of importance to creating and communicating vision – sometimes in the form of stories. It helps to motivate people and gives a general sense of direction. I have often seen founders and operating leaders get excited about vision. They make great
A senior executive brought up a coaching topic – ‘I want to improve my health. Then I set a goal to finish a half marathon but not progressing at all”. I asked him, “Then what happened?’ “I used AI to create an elaborate training plan for 16 weeks. But I keep procrastinating”.
A coachee recently told me: “I think I should leave my job. My boss doesn’t motivate me.” I got curious and asked a few questions. Was the manager unfair? No. Was he biased against the coachee? No. Was he toxic or making it difficult for the person to do the job? Not
A founder came up with a not-so-strange topic for a coaching session. He wanted to become unaffected by what was happening around him, his startup, and life in general. His current state: He felt very stressed with the ups and downs in his startup. Some days were great, some days were not
One of my favourite areas to explore during PM interviews is how customer-focused the candidate has been in their previous role. Sometimes I end up asking directly: “How customer-focused do you think you are?” The answers can get interesting. PMs who are self-aware, and/or who have worked in mature product organizations, often
A friend messaged me after reading my last post ( https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7477941614376599552/ ) on the founder who got sucked into the ‘feature trap’ (i.e the founder kept building more and more features in response to the product not finding traction). The friend asked – “He was an inexperienced founder, right?” – No, not
A founder who shut down his product shared his journey. He wanted to modernize how spas were run. He had a compelling vision. He wanted every appointment, payment, customer record and business report connected in one place. This solves the problem of scattered notebooks, manual reconciliation etc. All data flowing through a
The need to be understood. Have you noticed some people explain everything in great detail? At first, it usually feels like a good thing. They seem thoughtful, thorough etc. Strangers see them as good communicators. But sometimes, even after you’ve known them for years, they still start every story from the very
Feeling trapped vs seeing choices. One of the most challenging but rewarding parts of coaching is to make the coachee see that they always have choices. Typical narratives that coachees come up with – a) Founder is anxious – “My startup is neither scaling nor can I shut it down. I feel
