11 Jun

You Don’t Have a People Problem. You Have a System.

Systems-thinking infographic: scattered people icons, curved arrows around a glowing central circle on a dark blue gradient with the phrase 'You don't have a people problem. You have a system.'
Your team won't take ownership. The same crisis keeps returning. You replaced the problem person and nothing changed. These aren't character flaws — they're the shape of the system you're standing inside. Drawing on three decades in the leadership chair, Jan Salomons on why so much competence produces so little change, and where the shift actually begins.
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10 Jun

AI Can Coach Your Career. It Can’t Coach You.

Silhouetted heads in a line with one highlighted gold figure and a glowing vertical bar, against a dark gradient background; text mentions AI and coaching relationships.
Generative AI is a superb career thought partner — for CVs, interviews, search strategy, and rehearsal. But coaching isn't information. Drawing on systemic and provocative coaching and three decades in the leadership chair, Jan Salomons argues that the deeper work, seeing your system, facing your blind spot, growing past your own comfort, is precisely what an AI built to agree with you can never do.
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17 Apr

Getting Influential: Getting More Things Done

icons of people connected in various way and circles representing various levels; by salomons.coach
Most managers have two default tools when they need something to happen: tell people what to do, or escalate to someone who can. Direct communication and the chain of command. Both have their place. But if they are your primary or only tools for getting things done across an organization, you have a problem. Not because they don't work, but because they work less and less the higher you climb and the more complex your environment becomes. The managers and project managers who consistently get things done are not the ones with the biggest title or the loudest voice. They are the ones who understand that in most modern organisations, influence is the currency that actually moves things. Directives produce...
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12 Apr

Your Cross-Culture Leadership Compass

Most cross-cultural leadership problems don’t look like cultural problems, until they cost you performance. Misaligned expectations around trust, feedback, hierarchy, and decision-making silently undermine teams, delay results, and create friction that leaders misread as personality or competence issues. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass translates decades of academic research, including Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, GLOBE Study, World Values Survey, and Schwartz Theory of Basic Values, into precise, actionable leadership insights. Instead of generic awareness, it gives you a data-backed map of where cultural gaps actually impact your role, your team, and your results.
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12 Apr

The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass: A Practical Guide to Its 11 Leadership Dimensions

Every leader who crosses a cultural boundary carries two operating systems at once. One was installed in childhood. The other was acquired through years of professional adaptation. The real skill — the one that separates effective cross-cultural leaders from merely well-travelled ones — is knowing which system is running at any given moment, and whether it is serving the situation. The Cross-Cultural Leadership Compass is built around exactly this challenge. It integrates four validated academic frameworks — Hofstede, GLOBE, the World Values Survey, and Schwartz — and translates the data into eleven specific leadership dimensions where cultural gaps play out in practice. This post unpacks each one.
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