Meet Ope Bukola. She’s founder and CEO of Kibo School, an online university in Africa.

Ope is both relatable and remarkable. Relatable because, like so many founders, at one point she looked around her company and felt a pang of disappointment - everyone was falling short of her expectations. Remarkable because, instead of blaming her team, she did the uncomfortable thing and asked how she was contributing to that dynamic.

She realized she was giving her people lots of autonomy - the thing she most craved. But she was failing to give them what they needed. This included clarifying her expectations, driving alignment around a problem statement, and giving regular feedback.

In this episode, you also get to hear from Ope’s coach Mandisa Khanna! Mandisa helped untangle Ope’s frustration and helped her acknowledge a blindspot: because Ope thrived in ambiguity, she was blind to the structure that others on her team might need.

With Mandisa’s support, Ope experimented with new and sometimes unnatural behaviors. Eventually, Ope learned that managing her team more closely (the thing she silently dreaded) actually unlocked a way more entrepreneurial culture (the thing she wanted most). When people understood what she wanted, they were more creative, risk-taking, and agile.

If you’ve ever thought, “Do I have to fire everybody?” Ope shares an inspiring alternative.

Favorite moments of the episode:

• 5:04 Ope “hits a management wall”. She cancels 1:1s with direct reports when she sees the agendas (they were supposed to populate) are empty!

• 11:04 Ope realizes that by not making her expectations explicit and known, she is making it virtually impossible for her direct reports to meet those expectations

• 16:27 Ope accepts that sharing her expectations and offering up frameworks and guiding principles are critical elements to managing well at Kibo

• 19:48 Mandisa shares how Ope's talent for structured thinking and strong goal orientation feeds into a "talent blindspot" (Ope underestimates how distinct and rare that talent / distinction truly is)

• 27:16 Mandisa and Ope describe what it feels like to design & run experiments squarely inside your blindspot and how Ope applied her structured, methodical approach to this challenge. Angie references Mandisa’s article “Escaping the Feedback Loop” (4 min read)

• 34:39 “What she was actually afraid of didn't come true.” Mandisa and Ope reflect that investing more into management, allowed for more autonomy and creativity from the team and cultivated a culture of learning that Ope deeply craved for Kibo.

To learn more about how Talentism works with leaders like Ope, visit www.talentism.com

Meet Joshua Walsky. He was co-founder and CTO of Broadway Technology and came up during the dot com boom. Now he’s a Talentism coach, guiding the next generation of founders.

If you’ve worked in tech, you’ve probably met someone like Joshua. Exceedingly smart, exceedingly talented, and digging an exceedingly big hole for himself...

Like many technical leaders, his views on management have evolved dramatically since his early days as a software engineer. He used to believe that he was the one who should solve the problems so others could focus on execution. Through coaching, he came to understand the unseen cost of failing to create space for emerging engineers to get reps solving problems themselves. By unwittingly under-investing in developing his reports, he “borrowed against the future”.

Joshua devoted nearly 20 years to building Broadway’s offering and a team of 230+ people spanning five continents. He also helped raise $42M in strategic minority funding to accelerate growth and eventually negotiated the sale of Broadway.

In this episode, Joshua describes a painfully common pitfall in management - unknowingly limiting the development of your people - in a way we’d never heard before. Whether you are managing or the one being managed, we hope Joshua’s story unlocks learning for you too.

Note about this episode:

We love the ideas Joshua shares here. There are parts of this episode, however, where we don’t love the sound quality. In the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of good, we wanted to share this episode because Joshua’s words are so powerful.

Learn more about clarity coaching at www.talentism.com

Meet Kathie Chao. She’s a Managing Director and Head of Digital Retail at Charles Schwab. Never one to back down from a challenge, her role has changed almost every year for the past decade.

In 2021, her scope shifted dramatically. She realized her anxiety about work was tipping into an unhealthy point. She started working with a coach and learned how to use those signals of anxiety to focus her attention on critical areas rather than overwhelm her, ensuring the anxiety and confusion she encountered was ultimately productive vs. limiting.

Kathie, a Harvard and Wharton Business School alum, is never going to stop attacking increasingly complex problems at work. She can’t stop, won’t stop. But if she wanted to get better at facing bigger, messier challenges, she realized she had to accept that along the way, she might not get an A+ at every turn.

In order to achieve her ambitious goals and thrive in senior roles, Kathie learned the most important relationship she could manage, is the one with herself.

Tune in to hear Kathie's journey, peppered with a ton of humor, pop culture references, and really practical ways she upped her game as a senior leader.

4:34 “It's hit an unhealthy point” Sifting through anxiety to understand herself and her context

6:07 “Are you driven by excitement or fear?” What the root of your momentum might tell you about how things will likely unfold.

9:55 Kathie uncovers a "status trigger" and how it shows up for her and others at work

18:29 Spoiler: Senior leaders are fallible, operating with their own fears and anxieties! Self-management is critical to scaling well.

27:09 Confusion as a learning tool: Kathie opens up a candid convo with a partner about a confusing remark he had made. Result? Deeper trust and a richer understanding of the risks and opportunities they were facing together

33:47 How Kathie prioritizes what confusion to dig into: “Does it get in the way of me accomplishing the goal?” If YES, must address.