“Leading a team. Personal life.
I’m broken.”
That’s a word-for-word sentence from a form on this website. The whole message was six words long. And similar ones keep coming: “Most of the tasks have been on me for a long time and I’m no longer able to carry on.” “Employees aren’t happy with the leadership and they’re leaving.” They’re written by people who know their trade better than anyone around them. That’s exactly why it catches them out that leading people is a completely different trade.
The company plays loud what you keep quiet
You can practise a guitar quietly at home. Only you hear the wrong note and it’s your business. The moment you plug it into an amp and turn up the volume, the whole hall hears it. A company is exactly that amp. It doesn’t make you better or worse, it just amplifies you. What you have decided in your head, the team does fast and without asking. What you have half decided, three people do in three different ways and then you wonder where the mess came from.
That’s why a lot of company problems can be described in a sentence about the owner. You can’t say no, so the team does the work of two and the lights are still on on Friday evening. You’re afraid to ask for your price, so the whole price list is low and then there’s nothing left for people. You avoid one unpleasant conversation, so a year later twenty people are avoiding it. It isn’t an accusation, it’s good news: an amplifier works both ways. A small change at the source is heard everywhere. And it holds even when the company isn’t yours. A team is its leader’s amplifier, ownership has nothing to do with it.
Three things owners and managers come to me with most often
1. They promoted you from best craftsman to foreman
You were the best in the workshop, so they gave you the workshop. Except a foreman isn’t supposed to do the work. He’s supposed to let others do it, watch over their hands, teach them and put up with them doing it a bit worse than he would. That’s a different trade and nobody taught it to you, because the role came as recognition, not as a job description. In the first year most people then do both: manage during the day and finish the old work in the evening, because they’re fast at it and it’s the only thing that gives them the feeling they got something done.
2. You’re carrying it alone and running out of breath
“By the time I explain it, I’ll have done it myself.” That sentence makes sense once. The tenth time it’s a system. It looks like a question of time, but it’s almost never about time. Underneath there’s usually mistrust: nobody will do it like I do. It’s also a piece of identity: if I didn’t do this, what am I here for. And there’s usually chaos, because you can only hand over something that has a shape. What drifts around in your head like fog you won’t hand over, even if you wanted to. Hence that familiar evening feeling: head full, nothing done.
3. You don’t say the uncomfortable sentence
The feedback you keep putting off until the end of the quarter. The person you’ve known for a year shouldn’t be in the company. The client who pays the least and takes the most. And the price you write into the offer lower than the one you had in your head, and then you add that there’s still room to talk. It’s always one and the same skill: to say an uncomfortable thing out loud and sit through those few seconds of silence afterwards. Whoever doesn’t have it pays for it in money and in people. In people who lead, nothing more expensive is missing more often.
What you can do about it now
Sort last week into three piles
Write down what you actually did last week, and next to each item write one of three things: only I can do this, someone else could handle this, nobody needs to do this. It takes twenty minutes. Most people get a fright at how small the first pile is.
Hand over one thing by Friday
Not five. One, from the middle pile. Before you hand it over, write on paper what “good enough” done looks like. Without that you’ll take it back in three days with the feeling that nobody can do it. Count on the first result being worse than yours. That’s not a fault of delegating, that’s its price.
Write the sentence you haven’t said for six months
Open your notes and write it the way you want to say it. Then read it out loud. If it sounds like an accusation, rewrite it into this shape: this happened, this is what it does to me, this is what I need. Cut it to three sentences. Say it tomorrow.
Price one offer your own way
Take the offer you have half-written right now and put in the number you actually have in your head, not the careful one. Don’t add “there’s room to talk”. Send it. One contract isn’t the fate of the company, and in a single evening you’ll learn more than from ten articles about self-confidence.
Ask three people and stay quiet
The question is: what do you need more of from me, and what less? Then don’t speak until the person has finished, and don’t explain yourself. Just write it down. Three answers will tell you more precisely where you are in your leading than a whole year of thinking about yourself.
Does this sound familiar?
Tick what fits you:
The more you ticked, the less it’s about the company and the more it’s about how you lead it. Take that as good news. Processes and people change slowly, your own decisions change from tomorrow.
For companies: are you looking for a coach for a person or a team?
From here on I’m speaking to someone else, because this part isn’t for the owner but for the person who’s looking for a coach for somebody else. HR or a direct manager writes to me and it sounds like this: “We’re looking for a coach for a senior manager at our company.” “We promoted a colleague to manager and we’d like to pay for a few hours so he handles the move from the team into a leading role.” I’m glad to take work like that.
Most often it’s one of four things. Someone who’s new in the role and learning it on the move. A manager who’s been in it for years and needs one place where they can speak plainly without it having consequences. A team going through a change, a merger or new leadership. And coaching as a benefit, where the person picks the topic themselves. It isn’t training. You won’t get a syllabus or a presentation, you’ll get a person who finally talks to someone about their work.
Your terms are the same as anyone else’s. The same form, the same intro session, 20–30 minutes online, free and with no obligation, the same two-hour sessions instead of the usual fifty minutes, once every three to five weeks. Prague, Brno, online. I don’t have a corporate price list or a corporate package. The only extra is a short call with you beforehand, so I understand why you’re commissioning the coaching and how you’ll know it made sense.
I say two things plainly up front. What’s said in a session stays between me and that person. What you get back is that the work is running, not the content of the conversations. Without that, the person wouldn’t tell me anything worth saying. And the second thing: whoever you send against their will, I don’t coach. If the coaching is meant as a punishment or as the last step before dismissal, I’ll say so out loud and I won’t start.
When you recognise this in yourself (or in someone at your company)
In the session we’ll go through what in the company rests only on you, what of that can be handed over and which uncomfortable sentence has been waiting longest. Feel free to come with nothing but the sentence “I’m dragging it all myself and I can’t any more”. Plenty of people before you wrote exactly that. The intro session is 20–30 minutes online, free and it commits you to nothing. Companies write through the same form.
Free intro session →