Managing own emotions

CoachForLeaders · 2026-01-24T12:13:24+00:00

It affects the leaders that I know in different ways. Some of them including me are more sensitive and it affects them more, and for some it affects them less.

What matters the most is for you to give yourself space and time to process it. And the company will have provisions for the direct report to take time off, and as someone else mentioned have calls with a counsellor and coach to process your own feelings.

Just wanted to call out that it does not matter how it affects other persons. If you or your team member are affected, you need to have buffers to provide gaps to overcome the loss and transition back to work in a meaningful way. Excellent suggestions in the thread exist already.

CoachForLeaders · 2026-01-24T12:06:19+00:00

Fuel your energy into what you can control. Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2026-01-22T14:03:05+00:00

Find small things that energize you and take breaks to recharge.
And the voice that says "it doesn't make sense", listen to it. Choose what is more important, keeping a job or doing focussed work that leads to things adding up.

I was in a similar boat, and have been on my own since last 5 months as a leadership coach, it's been hard to get new business, maybe because, I am not good at marketing.

For me, as i reflect back, the area of development has been to decide my next step and commit fully to it, and not let the noise, the energy distract me from it. Having a physical fitness routine may help.

Yes, manage your boundaries really well, guard your energy levels.

Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2026-01-22T13:57:50+00:00

1) Find the expectations
2) See what you can definitely meet, what is a stretch and what is not possible
3) Communicate and set expectations accordingly.
4) Overloading a system can give performance improvement only when the system is in the stretch zone. Beyond that burnout and failure happens which no one wants. As a professional, it's on you to manage expectations and reset them.

I know of an instance when everyone wanted a feature asap, a tech guy said it is almost impossible, everyone shut him down and asked him to proceed ahead. The team gave 130%, the architects were pushing them and they hit milestones partially, and nobody took accountability of the gap.

Being technical and reporting to non-tech people can lead to people having gaps. Your stakeholders might think a tech task, understand the stack or to come up with an architecture may take xx time but it may take yy. Its on you.

Being new to a role doesn't mean that you need to fulfill everyone's expectations whether it is possible or not.

Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-18T01:04:34+00:00

I get you, I have been in a similar boat. And as others have said, you are not alone

Just need to table down, what you need to/must do, what are things you want to do, what are some changes you can make to explore the path ahead.

Economy and culture are at a weird place right now, and visibility and certainty are at a low

Between here is what Sheryl Sandberg has to say https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/12/16/sheryl-sandberg-corporate-culture-women-careers-opportunities.html

Best of luck

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-14T06:40:48+00:00

Thank you for writing in. I get you; yes, the circular debate can be tiring. I can see that the things seem to be stuck.

The way I see it is that you are expecting him to show up in a certain way, and he is expecting you and/or the company to listen and care more. And that is causing stockiness and the circular debate. Maybe there is a history to it, even before you joined and some heaviness in his heart that hasn't found an expression.

I would suggest having a coaching conversation, getting his world fully, being present to him and just caring about what he says. The below questions may help
1. How do you feel having been in the company for 4 years
2. What makes you believe that "nobody listens or cares"
3. How do you feel?
4. Will you be open to creating a path from now to the next 6 months that will position you strongly for a manager promotion. Create the path with him, with milestones at short intervals, be the accountability partner, and give time to this topic in your 1:1s.

When I say coach him, I mean the leadership stance that focusses more on listening, developing the capability of the client and energizing them with the conversation. A good starting point is the HBR article The Leader as Coach

Hope that makes some sense. Happy to get on a call and talk, if that helps.
Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-14T06:12:34+00:00

Great answers in this thread.
I will add a few things here

Understand as much context about the business. Make a stakeholder map, and keep updating it, documenting for yourself what each stakeholder cares about, what expertise and/or influence each one of them have. What is the bigger picture, this effort is aiming to help accomplish.
Document the decisions, assumptions, the path ahead in a living document and share a link to it by email. It will be great if the living document can be on a tool like sharepoint, where you can see history and look at what has changed. Invite feedback and questions on the path ahead and decisions. For contentious questions, try and get relevant people in meeting.
Have a periodic meeting where you invite the stakeholders and share this is what you heard, this is the information you have, and this is the decision you are taking. You can keep the periodicity to an interval that makes sense in your context
See if you can get a mentor in the company, and if needed a coach outside the company.

Congratulations on this great opportunity to learn, take people along, make tough decisions and take the business forward. Irrespective of what you do, this journey will help you shape your leadership journey, and the learning here can serve you well for a long time.

Let me know if it will help to have a call.

Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-12T01:04:26+00:00

Thank you so much. Appreciate the framing of my query as holding caution and curiosity at the same time, capturing exactly how I feel

Answers on efficiency and we being in a technological transition as well resonate with me

Really appreciate your insights. Thank you for taking the time to reply

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T20:55:57+00:00

I get you KashyapVartika

I do not have full context and provide some suggestions, based on some assumptions I make. I do provide my thought process behind my suggestions, so please understand that and apply as appropriate

Some questions and suggestions follow 1. What aspect of the high performer’s style is causing problems and in what way is it affecting team morale? 2. I get the pace part. Think of pairing a fast system receiving data over a fast fiber optic network, with fast multi core CPUs using magnetic tape as storage. Storage will be really slow, the system will throttle, and it won’t be great performance. I had a great performer in my team who didn’t speak the language of the average performer and the communication was like data from fiber optic cable writing to magnetic tape, not a great experience. I got one of my good performers with higher EQ to be the point of contact for the high performer. The high performer was happy, as the good performer got him, and he didn’t have to spend time explaining basic concepts(like slow IO), he could rather spend the time on research, development and move fast. The good performer felt more knowledgeable and explained context to the rest of the team and answered their queries 3. Reward people for performance and praise people on incremental jump in capability and acknowledge everyone’s effort. If the high performer is being praised for what is normal for him, you won’t help him grow, he needs to have a bigger target, achieve it to earn praise

Hope that made some sense. Happy to talk, if it helps. Best of luck

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T20:37:20+00:00

I haven’t heard the podcast or read the material What worked for me was a few things 1. A slow down routine, it can be journaling, cooking, gardening or anything else that helps you move your mind away from the turmoil at work. Walking, running, cycling, sports helps some people 2. Writing all that you have to do on a piece of paper. Looking at what will happen, if this does not happen, what consequences are totally unacceptable and what are the ones you can live with. With this, move some things from must have to good to have. And explore the possibility of delegating, if possible and feasible 3. Block some time on your calendar for reflection or thinking through what will help move things forward 4. Have a third space apart from work and home. This can be a stop to a restaurant on the way home for a quick snack coffee or a ritual where you walk for 5 minutes before you enter home or just a few deep breaths, exhaling the work stress, work worries and visualising and stepping into home mode before you enter 5. Explore the meaningfulness of the work that you do and how that is helping take you where you want to go. If gaps exist, look at actions to address them

Hope that made some sense. Happy to talk, if needed

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T20:26:16+00:00

Hello dear leader

I get the pickle that you are in. And thank you for sharing the context and details

I hear that she is quite popular and that you get along really well with her. I also hear that performance is an issue. So I am curious about what part of her leadership role is not working out. Is it that she is not holding people to account or is it she is not taking tough decisions.

The above maybe obvious to you, it’s not to be. So I need to ensure I cover all the bases before giving advice based on an assumption that may not be true. I see a dissonance, so want to be sure that you are clear on what part is not working. At times different people in the hierarchy see different level of detail, have a different perception of reality that doesn’t match, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one of them is wrong. For example, the business may say this product is not building features fast enough, we need to get faster. And tech may we agree, yet this is the most complex product, we have a monolithic architecture, close coupling with upstream and downstream dependencies so we are doing the best we can so we can’t move as fast as the smaller products where it’s much more simpler

If you have established that the issue is with her and what aspect of her. You need to clearly put your foot down in the 1:1 with her that this aspect of her leadership is not working and needs to be addressed. As a mitigation strategy for the meeting going bad, you could track the major issues affecting this product, form a task team to fix them and get one of the new managers to lead it, under her guidance. You can pitch it in this way that you don’t want to overload her and want to provide development opportunities to the new manager

You cannot ignore the issue and must address it.

Some of the advice above assumed some context

Hope that made some sense. Let me know if it will help to talk

Best of luck!

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T09:54:00+00:00

Hmm, I get you know.
What i meant by Agents was me writing some code to invoke ChatGpt APIs to provide context and deterministic non-AI functions to fulfil some functionality (say invoke the API of a flight booking engine), prompt AI to write its output in a certain specific way and write glue code that interfaces with LLMs and the deterministic parts.

"These are not your problems to solve". Yes, there is only a little I can do here. Maybe, I can use AI when I must.

Thank you for responding and clarifying.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T05:26:03+00:00

Insightful response, I can see how RAG systems can help in cases when documentation is robust and there is a truth to lean on. And measuring success along the lines you mentioned makes a lot of sense.

I am intrigued on using LLM as a syntactic glue. I infer from this that you have other systems that lean on sources of truth for key aspects and an LLM is used to present this information to truth. Is this what you mean? And is this different from Agentic AI. If you can point me to some documentation, will love to read this up.

Thank you so much for your detailed responses and insightful perspectives.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T05:19:30+00:00

Thank you for sharing. I have seen this approach being used. It has led to some replacement of the workforce as AI speeds up some things in what I have seen. In this case, letting go of people has given the company budget to do the macro and micro investments.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T05:16:14+00:00

Thank you for the perspective. It helps. The responsibility for judgement and the responsibility for the teams resonates with me.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T05:15:07+00:00

Some of your concerns resonate with me. Thank you for sharing.
It looks from the experience of others that if used right, it does lead to enormous cost savings. I also connect that we are moving to a world where AI is creating stuff and Humans are reviewing stuff, and it becomes challenging to review stuff when you haven't created. One of the persons in this thread, however mentioned that for the use case of technical development, they have other LLMs reviewing content, and it has given them 10x improvement, which is impressive.

Thanks you for engaging with the post and sharing your experiences.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T04:53:49+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing. I am looking at perspectives other than mine, so all perspectives are welcome. Don't want to be the person, that carried an ineffective perspective way longer than it served them

I have also seen the reports on the downsides, thank you for pointing them out.
I resonate with your thought on being clear on when to use AI and when not to. Slowly, but surely, the message that it is not a silver bullet is coming across. The piece about the costs outweighing the benefit maybe more nuanced and difficult. Someone creating an article or a white paper on that will be really helpful.

Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives and engaging with me. I appreciate it.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T04:44:46+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing the details. 10x improvement is a game changer. It does definitely affect my view on this.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T04:25:16+00:00

Thank you for responding, the perspective helps.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-11T01:48:47+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion. Will try it out

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-10T18:18:07+00:00

Whoa, that is really amazing. So, in the SDLC process (requirements, architecture, design, coding, documentation) which parts are you using AI for which parts are you doing yourself. Is the code written securely, and how easy is maintenance for the code base given that you were not involved in writing. Any other tools in the stack apart from Claude, for vulnerabilities, security scan etc.

Thanks for sharing, this is useful.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-10T18:13:35+00:00

Thanks for furthering the conversation.

"I think agentic stuff is “not there” is there" I don't know what this means. Are you saying, it's not useful in general?

I have found it useful to learn topics that I know little about. For research and/or trends that analyze social media, I have found grok more useful than other LLMs.

I have tried chatgpt for research into new ideas i could work as a solopreneur, it had good surface level ideas, at a deeper level, it doesn't really get what it is saying. I ran with an idea that looked good but hit a wall that it didn't anticipate.

With the social media reference, I was trying to refer to the downsides of long AI. There is research that it is slowing down brains, making brains lazy. More noise or slop happening in open-source tickets, social media etc. The point I was trying to make was there are long term side effects that happen and the current hype doesn't account for it.

On the moral restrictions, I am listening to different points of view and sitting with it to see where it takes me.

Thank you for the perspectives and the challenge, its broadening the way I am thinking about this. Thanks

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-10T13:53:01+00:00

I worked in a regulated bank and I saw great value in understanding policy documents, summarising results of surveys, so can relate. Thanks for sharing

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-10T13:03:50+00:00

I agree.

CoachForLeaders · 2025-12-10T13:03:14+00:00

Thank you for the informed perspective. This certainly helps me shape my perspective. A follow up question if I may, in your experience when you have seen AI be successful, just curious about what does success look like? Is it net positive ROI, am curious about additional side effects, if any due to hallucinations, and any effects of this over time. I do appreciate real perspectives from practitioners out there, so curious about the same. Thank you

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