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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07 Jun

Your Stress Profile: A Mirror to Start Mastering Stress

Infographic header 'Your stress profile' with a radar chart showing stress factors and scores (Mindset 88, Active coping 75, Reframing 62, etc.). Value labels visible on each axis.
"I'm stressed" is true, useless, and where most people stop. This is how I turn that vague sense of pressure into a map you can actually act on, the nine dimensions behind my stress profile, the research they rest on, and how the picture becomes a coping strategy rather than a label.
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23 Apr

Leading in the Waiting Room: How to Hold Your Team Together When the Organization Hasn’t Decided Yet on Organizational Changes

Abstract illustration of golden human figures forming a crowd under a spotlight inside a stylized arena.
When four of your twelve team members may be made redundant — but nothing is official yet — leadership becomes something different. It becomes the art of holding people together in uncertainty. This post offers six practical principles for leading through the wait: with honesty, focus, differentiation, and the kind of steadiness that people will remember long after the decision is made.
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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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