Leman Tech Leadership Podcast

▶︎ #207 | Going Back to IC Isn’t Failure. It Might Be Your Best Leadership Decision.

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a shift she used to see rarely and now sees a lot more: experienced, sometimes very senior leaders quietly telling her they want to go back to being an individual contributor, and feeling like admitting it out loud is some kind of confession. She points listeners back to episode 166 with Jordan Cutler for more on how the developer career landscape itself is changing underneath this trend.

She treats this as the impostor syndrome episode’s Contracting move run in reverse: the implicit belief that "my worth is proven by climbing" has to be renegotiated on purpose, or the old scorecard keeps measuring a role it was never designed for. Through PCM, she shows how the fear of "failure" attaches differently by base, status, and respect for a Persister, visibility and recognition for a Promoter, logical defensibility for a Thinker, and why naming your specific version makes it much easier to address.

If this thought has crossed your mind and you’ve immediately felt guilty about it, this episode gives you a practical loss-and-gain exercise, language for the conversation with your own leadership, and a new, explicit contract to replace the old one.


Mentioned in the episode:
"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical
Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":
https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #206 | Why the Best Leaders Stop Doing the Work: On Clarity, Curiosity, Ownership, and Hiking With Executives in Patagonia w/ Mark Rickmeier @TXI

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Mark Rickmeier, CEO of TXI {Technology Experience Innovation}, a company that builds AI workflows for industrial clients across fleet management, logistics, and related sectors. Mark is also the founder of Walkshop, a leadership development program that takes groups of senior executives on long-distance hikes through remote terrain - no screens, no Slack, no meetings - just movement, conversation, and space to think. This year the group heads to Patagonia. Next year: northern Sweden for the northern lights.

The episode starts with the origin of Walkshop, which was not designed as a program at all. Mark was transitioning from COO to CEO at TXI and needed space to think through a decision that felt bigger than his usual day-to-day. He gathered nine other senior executives and walked the Scottish Highlands for several days, carrying nothing, with bags delivered town to town. When he wrote about the experience afterward, people immediately asked when the next one was. He said there was no next one. Then he kept getting asked. That is how it started: an accidental institution built on a genuine need that most leaders quietly share but rarely name - the need to stop, step away from the machine, and actually think.

The core of the episode is a framework Mark has been running inside TXI and recommending to other organizations: three things leaders must prioritize in a period of rapid change. Clarity - not just transparency, but precise, actionable direction that removes ambiguity about where the company is going. Ownership - a genuine sense of autonomy for people at every level, including the structural decision TXI made to become 100% employee-owned so that the word ownership would mean something real. And curiosity - the one Mark spends the most time on, because he believes it is the lever most leaders underinvest in and the one that most directly determines whether an organization can adapt.

For any leader who has confused motion with progress, or who has been meaning to create space to think but has not yet made it non-negotiable, this episode names the pattern precisely and offers something more useful than advice: a set of structures that actually work.


Mentioned in the episode:
TXI (Technology Experience Innovation): https://txidigital.com
Walkshop: https://www.walkshop.io
Book: The Octopus Organization


✉︎ FOLLOW MARK ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @markrickmeier
TXI: txidigital.com
Walkshop: walkshop.io

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Get the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #205 | Do We Overvalue AI and Undervalue Our People?

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska names something she says a lot of leaders are quietly feeling and not many are saying out loud: organizations right now are overvaluing AI and undervaluing their people. Not the tools themselves: she’s clear she’s not anti-AI, but the imbalance in where the budget, attention, and genuine curiosity actually go.

She uses the Wheel of Conflict to reframe this as a values question rather than a budget question: the real issue isn’t the ROI of training versus tooling; it’s whether an organization genuinely believes people development is a priority or just says so while its spending says otherwise. She brings in Contracting at the organizational level to show the gap between the stated contract with employees ("we invest in your growth") and the lived one, visible in where the money quietly goes instead.

If you’ve sensed this imbalance in your own organization, this episode gives you a simple audit to run on your last two quarters, and a concrete way to protect at least one real people investment before the next round of "more urgent" pressure eats it.

Mentioned in the episode:
"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical
Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":
https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #204 | A-Players, AI Agents, and the End of the Old Junior: How Cutting the Team in Half Made It Stronger w/ Kuba Nowosielski (COO @Web Solutions NYC, CEO @Systevio)

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Kuba Nowosielski: COO of Web Solutions NYC and founder of his brand-new venture Systevio, helping manufacturers with decades of history and large B2B distributors through real digital transformation. Kuba started working with AI over 15 years ago (long before it was fashionable), then proved himself in almost every role in IT, from business analyst and solutions architect to project manager and QA, before stepping into the C-level.

What makes this conversation stand out is how bluntly Kuba talks about talent. He shares how his company redefined "senior" as someone who takes initiative and tries to be self-sufficient, scaled down by 50%, and became more successful than ever. He explains why he would choose one A player plus AI agents over three juniors, why his best hires had a portfolio instead of a job history, and why the worst advice he ever got was that fear earns respect. He also opens up about 15 years of remote work, the loneliness that came with it, and why community and mentoring give back far more than they take.

If you're hiring on a tight budget, wondering where juniors fit in an AI-first market, or leading from behind a screen and quietly feeling alone, this episode will give you a sharper lens and a few uncomfortable but useful truths.


Mentioned in the episode:
"Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet"
"From Code to People" by Aleksandra Lemańska


✉︎ FOLLOW KUBA ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakub-nowosielski/
Web Solutions NYC: https://www.websolutionsnyc.com/
Systevio: systevio.com

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Get the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #203 | Why an All-Star Team Might Be Your Biggest Risk

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska answers a question she’s been asked, years apart, by two different leaders: should I build a team of only A-players? She takes the appeal seriously, then walks through why a team stacked entirely with stars is often more fragile than it looks, not less, especially once real pressure hits.

Using PCM, she shows how a team built from one dominant personality base - all push, all speed, all confidence - predictably struggles with the things that base isn’t built for: finishing, pausing, maintaining. Then she names the Wheel of Conflict hiding underneath "only hire stars": it’s rarely about competence; it’s a conflict of values between believing individual brilliance wins versus believing complementary contribution wins, one that most organizations have never actually debated out loud.

If your team looks incredible on paper but keeps stalling in practice, this episode gives you a concrete way to map what’s actually missing, and to hire for the gap instead of for another version of what you already have.

Mentioned in the episode:
"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical
Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":
https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #202 | From Typing by Hand to Automating It: What 11 Years of Building a Startup Teaches About Trust, Control, and Leading w/ Jagoda Pieścicka @NuDelta

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Jagoda Pieścicka, CEO and Founder of NuDelta, a Polish fintech company specializing in intelligent document recognition and process automation for the financial sector. NuDelta works with major banking institutions including PKO BP, BNP Paribas, and Pekao SA, supporting over 120 document types and automating workflows that previously required manual data entry.

The episode opens with three chapters from Jagoda's career: an early pattern of being promoted to team manager within months of joining any organization, a first startup that taught her exactly how not to run a company {scattered focus, money spent on the wrong things, a founder who couldn't commit}, and the chance encounter at a stable that led to the investor conversation that made NuDelta possible. What runs through all three is the same instinct: spot a real problem, take responsibility for solving it, and give people the space to do their best work.

Jagoda identifies two things that have made her a leader people actually want to work with: responsibility and freedom. On responsibility, she is precise about what it means in practice. When something goes wrong, her first move is never to find someone to blame. She tries to understand what happened, why it happened, and what can be fixed, and she does not leave an employee alone with a problem. On freedom, she describes a model built on agreed outcomes and deadlines, with full autonomy over how the work gets done, combined with the expectation that if something changes, she hears about it early rather than the day before a deadline.

For any founder leading a technical team without a technical background, or any leader trying to rebuild trust after years of over-controlling, this is a conversation full of earned, specific answers.

Mentioned in the episode:
NuDelta: https://nudelta.pl


✉︎ FOLLOW JAGODA ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @jagoda-piescicka
Email: [email protected]
Website: nudelta.pl

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Get the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #201 | It’s Not About One Big Boundary. It’s About a Few Small Habits.

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska follows up on the always-on leader episode with the question a lot of listeners asked afterward: okay, but what do I actually do every day so I don’t end up there in the first place? This is the prevention episode, not the crisis response, and she’s upfront that it isn’t one big boundary that fixes exhaustion, it’s a handful of small, repeatable habits.

She frames self-management as Contracting, but contracting with yourself, the same tool most leaders only ever use with other people, and shows why a vague wish like "I should disconnect more" doesn’t work the way a specific, checkable agreement does. She brings in PCM to explain why recovery isn’t universal either, what actually restores a Thinker base, a Harmonizer base, and a Rebel base are genuinely different things.

If you’ve tried the big dramatic resets and watched the same patterns creep back within two weeks, this episode gives you a smaller, more durable alternative: three specific habits, attached to your existing routine, checked weekly.

Mentioned in the episode:
"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical
Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":
https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #200 | From Pro Basketball to a 4,000-Venue Startup: Resilience, Shameless Pivots, and Betting on A-Players w/ Fryderyk Szydłowski (@ Embargo)

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Fryderyk Szydlowski, Co-founder of Embargo, the loyalty and CRM platform now used by close to 4,000 cafes, restaurants, and bakeries across the UK, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and the US. Freddie’s path runs from a professional basketball career in Poland’s top division, through London hospitality {becoming the youngest Head of Marketing in the city’s nightlife scene at 21}, a first attempt at a fashion brand, and finally Embargo: a business he nearly had to sell for survival money in the earliest days of COVID.

What makes this conversation stand out is how directly Freddie ties his years as an athlete to what it takes to build a company: resilience defined not as toughness but as showing up and delivering through constant setbacks; long-term thinking held in tension with daily impatience; and what he calls a "shameless" willingness to change direction, fail, and try again, fast, because speed is a startup’s real edge over big competitors.

Freddie is candid about who entrepreneurship is not for: people who need to fully switch off, who cannot tolerate rejection, or whose sense of worth depends on saying yes to every good idea. His practical rule, borrowed from a resonant read {see below}: every yes to something new is a no to something else, and learning to say no on purpose is what makes scaling possible.

If you are building something from scratch, wondering whether the entrepreneurial path is for you, or trying to figure out what to say no to next, this episode is for you.



Mentioned in the episode:
Buy Back Your Time: by Dan Martell


✉︎ FOLLOW FREDDIE ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: Fryderyk (Frederick) Szydlowski
Embargo: embargoapp.com
Embargo on YouTube: youtube.com/embargoapp

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Get the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #199 | The Leadership Skills That Actually Matter in Q4 2026

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska skips the generic "top 10 leadership skills" list {the kind that could have been written in 2015} and names what’s actually changed heading into the rest of 2026: teams getting smaller relative to output because of AI tooling, decisions moving faster, and a widening gap between leaders who can personally verify the work and leaders who can’t.

She walks through the four skills she sees separating leaders who are doing well right now from leaders who are quietly struggling: judgment under ambiguity (including her simple 40/70 rule for knowing when you have enough information to decide), renegotiating agreements out loud, asking real questions across an expertise gap, and naming what you’re actually for, and runs each one through PCM to show why the hardest one for you depends on your personality base.

If you’re tired of skills lists that don’t reflect what your job actually looks like right now, this episode gives you four specific, practiced skills to choose from, and a way to pick the one worth focusing on this quarter.


Mentioned in the episode:
"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical
Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":
https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #198 | From Actor to AI Strategist: Red Flags, Real Feedback, and Leading Like Your Favorite Teacher w/ Sean Dagony-Clark (@Your Tech Ally)

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Sean Dagony-Clark: a self-described "high-tech problem solver with a high human focus" whose path runs through acting, design, and 14 years in education {including running academic technology at Riverdale Country School} before landing at coding bootcamps Flatiron School and Iron Circle {formerly Thrive DX}, and now his own consultancy, Your Tech Ally, helping small and solo businesses build AI and tech strategy.

What makes this conversation stand out is how directly Sean connects his years in education to leadership: clear communication, constant feedback, and treating people like a favorite teacher would {not a taskmaster}. He is candid that most leaders learn on the job, not from studying leadership, and shares an early mistake that still guides him: lack of clarity in communication can quietly alienate the people you lead.

Sean also shares why he joined the STEMinist Summit {October 15–16, 2026} as an ally: a shared thread with co-host AJ Lauer’s work on imposter syndrome, and his belief that the biggest leadership skill in the AI era is still the human one {understanding what a tool can and cannot do, and using it without over-trusting it}.

If you are rethinking how you hire, give feedback, or lead through the noise of AI, this episode has practical, hard-won lessons for you.


Mentioned in the episode:
Turn the Ship Around!: by L. David Marquet

STEMINIST SUMMIT (October 15–16, 2026): https://steministsummit.com/

✉︎ FOLLOW SEAN ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: dagonyclark
Your Tech Ally: yourtechally.net

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Get the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/