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 compliance. Influence produces commitment. This article gives you a practical new toolbox, and more importantly, a new mindset.
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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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18 Mar

The Leader Who Stopped Learning

Most senior leaders don't derail because they lack intelligence or drive. They derail because they stopped learning — and didn't notice until the damage was done. In this article, executive coach Jan Salomons explores the neuroscience behind why behavioral change is so hard, the five warning signs that a leader's learning agility is eroding, and what the research really says about what separates leaders who keep growing from those who quietly plateau. Drawing on decades of evidence from Korn Ferry, the Center for Creative Leadership, and the neuroscience of neuroplasticity, this is a practical, behavior-focused guide to one of the most critical — and most overlooked — leadership competencies of our time. If you have ever caught yourself relying on what worked before in a situation that is clearly different, this article is for you.
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15 Mar

“Not Strategic Enough”: The Label That Hides the Real Problem

The phrase “not strategic enough” is one of the most common labels used when leaders hit an invisible career ceiling. But in executive teams it often hides a deeper problem — unclear expectations, power dynamics, or low psychological safety. Before developing the individual, leaders must first examine the system that produced the label.
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