Why every forward-thinking leader should join this conversation
Team managers are facing their challenges alone. A community of peers and mentors will help emerging leaders grow into confident and effective executives.
I created this newsletter to help emerging leaders grow into great managers: effective, empathetic, empowering, and exciting. This way, we will make teams a better place to work.
Inside are practical strategies, management tools, and mental models for you to ace “the soft-side” of teamwork: attitudes, motivations, emotions, humans; the why, the who, and the how. The insights are reflections of real-life experiences and synthesis of cutting-edge research in management science.
I believe that the organization is the most important invention of humankind. Together with you, we are in a messy, chaotic, emotional, but fascinating business of leading humans.
I am a practitioner, just like you are. I served more than thirty teams as a team leader and as a team player. Since 2011 I have worked at ING Wholesale Banking, became a manager at McKinsey, got an MBA degree from Columbia, been an early employee in a b2b IoT company, and co-founded a startup (which then was acquired by a tech giant). I worked in executive teams, project teams, product teams, teams of founders, consulting teams. I’ve seen plenty of leaders, managers, and executives: excellent, mediocre, and awful. Between me, my colleagues, clients, and friends are thousands of situations to reflect on and dig out very practical learnings.
A massive waste of talent is happening every day across zoom rooms and office spaces. Very few organizations coach their team leaders, empowering them with trust. With poorly trained managers reaching the limits of their competences, teams quickly disengage with their work. People stop seeing “the why“, their contributions decrease to a bare minimum, they trade time for a paycheck … or simply leave. For them and their organizations, the status quo is very ineffective.
Life is too short for meaningless work and toxic teams! After all, we spend a third of our life on it. It is time to change it — one team leader at a time.
Not only I’d love to share my stories but also hear yours. So let’s reflect together on our experience and find ways to lead better lives as managers.
Leave a comment, or send me an email.
Also, email me questions that bother you, and I will do my best to find answers.
Most recent and upcoming issues:
1. “Why becoming a manager suck?”
Why formal training (that you skipped) and informal coaching (that you never got) are critical for your success?
2. “How to fire friends?”
How to accept that it so painful, and how to make it less so?
3. “What is the one most important metric of a manager?” [Release by: 05/25/21]
Why team engagement is the best way to measure your influence over the team’s outcomes?
4. “How not to screw up your first 30 days as a team leader?” [Release by: 05/26/21]
A step-by-step guide to setup your team and yourself for success.
If you have colleagues and friends who may benefit from insights on leading people, please press the button below. They will thank you later!