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  • #176 | From PhD to Director: What Academia Never Teaches You About Leading People w/ Quentin Reul (Director of AI Strategy @Expeto AI)

    #176 | From PhD to Director: What Academia Never Teaches You About Leading People w/ Quentin Reul (Director of AI Strategy @Expeto AI)
    Jul 9 2026
    ▶︎ #176 | From PhD to Director: What Academia Never Teaches You About Leading People w/ Quentin Reul (Director of AI Strategy @Expeto AI)

    In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Quentin Reul: Director of AI Strategy and Solutions at Expeto AI, a Belgian-born computer scientist whose one-year English adventure in the UK quietly turned into a decade - a PhD in symbolic AI, a front-row seat to the academic-to-enterprise transition, and eventually a leadership path built through teams of data scientists, software engineers, knowledge engineers, and QA specialists spread across continents.

    The conversation opens with one of the most underexplored tensions in tech: what actually breaks when you move from academic research culture into enterprise delivery. Quentin is precise about it - it is not about intelligence or even drive. It is the completion mindset. Academia rewards the idea, the paper, the demonstrable prototype. Enterprise rewards the shipped thing, the SOC-compliant thing, the thing a customer can buy tomorrow. The gap between those two modes is where a lot of technically brilliant people quietly stall - and where Quentin has spent years learning to bridge it.

    If you came up through a technical or research background and are now leading - or thinking about leading - people for the first time, this one will land.


    ✉︎ FOLLOW QUENTIN ON: ⤵︎
    LinkedIn: @quentinreul
    YouTube: Quentin Reul on YouTube

    ✉︎ 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/
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    48 Min.
  • #175 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Why Does the Same Feedback Land for One Person and Wreck Another?

    #175 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Why Does the Same Feedback Land for One Person and Wreck Another?
    Jul 7 2026
    ▶︎ #175 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Why Does the Same Feedback Land for One Person and Wreck Another?

    In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series by tackling two questions that go hand in hand: "Why does the same piece of feedback land fine with one person and wreck another?" and "Is it normal to dread one-on-ones with certain people?"

    Alex's answer centers on communication intelligence, or CQ - the core of her CQ Leadership Method, built tightly to the Process Communication Model. Feedback that doesn't land usually isn't tailored to the person receiving it; it's tailored to how the leader prefers to give and receive feedback. Since there are six personality bases, defaulting to your own style means you are statistically only speaking the language that one out of six people actually needs.

    She lays out a practical starting point: map your team. List everyone you lead, make a hypothesis about each person's personality base, and note the keywords and communication channels they respond to. Then pick one person and one small adjustment - a different question, a different channel - and test it for a week. This is what builds the CQ muscle: awareness, hypothesis, reps.


    ✉︎ 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/
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    16 Min.
  • #174 | A-Players, Task Monkeys, and the AI Reckoning w: Francis Brero (VP AI Strategy @HG Insights)

    #174 | A-Players, Task Monkeys, and the AI Reckoning w: Francis Brero (VP AI Strategy @HG Insights)
    Jul 2 2026
    ▶︎ #174 | A-Players, Task Monkeys, and the AI Reckoning w/ Francis Brero (VP AI Strategy @HG Insights)

    In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Francis Brero: VP of AI Strategy at HG Insights and Co-Founder of MadKudu, a French-born engineer who swapped the grandes ecoles of Paris for Silicon Valley and has spent 15 years building AI-powered systems for some of the world’s leading B2B revenue organizations. Francis brings a mathematician’s rigour and a founder’s scar tissue to every conversation about teams - and this one is no exception.


    What drives this episode is Francis’s deceptively simple framework for mapping any team: the task monkey who executes, the problem-solver who adapts, the system thinker who diagnoses root causes, and the rock star who spots the problem before anyone else named it. The conversation moves fast from there - to the hidden cost of keeping “okay” players on the roster, why brilliant jerks are rarely as indispensable as they think, and why the bar for what counts as a rock star has shifted dramatically with AI.

    If you are managing a team right now and quietly wondering whether you have the right people in the right seats - or whether you yourself are operating above or below the system-thinker line - this episode will give you a sharper lens.


    ✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

    Radical Candor - Kim Scott
    vast.ai (GPU rental platform): https://vast.ai

    ✉︎ FOLLOW FRANCIS ON: ⤵︎
    LinkedIn: @francisbrero
    HG Insights: https://hginsights.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/
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    1 Std. und 9 Min.
  • #173 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Get My Team to Just Do Their Job Without Checking on Them Constantly?

    #173 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Get My Team to Just Do Their Job Without Checking on Them Constantly?
    Jun 30 2026
    ▶︎ #173 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Get My Team to Just Do Their Job Without Checking on Them Constantly?

    In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series with one of the most common struggles tech leaders bring to her: "How do I get this person to do their job without checking on them constantly - and how do I trust that it will be done as well as I would do it myself?"

    Alex traces this straight back to contracting, specifically the contracting gap at the professional level. When scope, success criteria, decision-making authority, and ways of working were never explicitly discussed and agreed on, leaders are left guessing whether "good work" in their head matches "good work" in their team member's head. That gap, not a lack of trust, is usually the real root cause behind the urge to micromanage.

    Alex’s concrete challenge for listeners is to check their own needs first, then schedule a recontracting conversation with at least one team member this week. If this question is one you - or someone you know - keeps asking, share the episode with them.


    ✉︎ 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/
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    16 Min.
  • #172 | What Silicon Valley Taught a Tech Analyst About Marketing, Authority, and Never Burning Bridges w/ Mark Vena

    #172 | What Silicon Valley Taught a Tech Analyst About Marketing, Authority, and Never Burning Bridges w/ Mark Vena
    Jun 25 2026
    ▶︎ #172 | What Silicon Valley Taught a Tech Analyst About Marketing, Authority, and Never Burning Bridges w/ Mark Vena, @ex-Dell Technologies, @SmartTech Research

    In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Mark Vena, CEO and Principal Analyst at SmartTech Research, a boutique technology research firm he founded after 25 years of senior marketing and leadership roles at companies including IBM, Dell, Compaq, Alienware, and Sling Media. For 18 of those years, Mark operated at the epicenter of innovation - seven minutes from the Apple campus in Silicon Valley - where he developed a rare ability to see through both the brilliance and the blind spots of founder culture.

    The conversation opens with a question leaders rarely ask themselves out loud: do you actually need to be an expert in a field to lead it well? Mark's answer is clear and backed by a career that started with a history degree - and led to managing engineering and marketing teams at some of the biggest names in tech.

    Mark shares a Steve Jobs story you probably haven't heard - a blind audio test during the original iMac development that revealed how much the post-NeXT Jobs had changed as a leader. It's a precise illustration of something Mark returns to throughout the conversation: the ability to evolve. To separate what's worth going to war for from what simply isn't.

    The episode also covers the AI revolution from a marketing analyst's perspective - and it's more concrete than most takes. Mark describes how AI is shifting the entire content creation model, why the old agency-driven marketing playbook is collapsing, and what he believes will be the signal moment that AI has fully arrived (hint: it involves a Best Picture winner).

    If you lead a team, are building something, or sit at the intersection of technology and go-to-market, this is a conversation worth your full attention.


    ✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

    SmartTech Research podcast
    TV series "John Adams" (HBO)

    ✉︎ FOLLOW MARK ON: ⤵︎
    LinkedIn: @markvena
    X: @MarkVenaTechGuy

    ✉︎ 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/
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    1 Std. und 2 Min.
  • #171 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Am I Actually Good at This… or Did I Just Get Lucky?

    #171 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Am I Actually Good at This… or Did I Just Get Lucky?
    Jun 23 2026
    ▶︎ #171 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Am I Actually Good at This… or Did I Just Get Lucky?

    In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska kicks off a new Q&A series, where she answers the questions tech leaders keep asking her in workshops, keynotes, and one-on-one conversations - the questions that often go unspoken. Today she tackles two that show up constantly with newer leaders: "Am I actually good at this leadership thing, or did I just get lucky?" and "Why do I miss writing code so much?"

    On the first question, Alex is direct: feeling unprepared as a new leader is not a sign that you don't belong, it is a sign that you are doing a completely different job than the one you were promoted for. She shares a bold claim from her years of working with tech leaders: roughly 90% of leaders were never properly prepared for leadership, and that is a systemic failure, not a personal one. Most people get promoted into leadership as a reward for being great individual contributors, with no real training in the new skill set, mindset, and tool set that the role actually demands.

    The second question - why leaders miss writing code, building, or doing the hands-on work they used to be great at - gets reframed too. According to Alex, this isn't nostalgia. It's a contracting problem, both with yourself and with your organization, because nobody has defined what "winning" looks like in your new role.

    Alex closes with a concrete exercise: write down everything you were great at and got promoted for, and next to it, write down what your role actually requires of you today. Compare the two lists - they will look very different, and that difference is the real shift you are navigating. If either question hit home, share the episode with a tech leader who needs to hear it too.



    ✉︎ 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/
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    16 Min.
  • #170 | From Startup Garage to Microsoft MVP: How Continuous Learning Builds Unbreakable Tech Leaders w/ Amit Chandak, @ex-Oracle, @Kinerika

    #170 | From Startup Garage to Microsoft MVP: How Continuous Learning Builds Unbreakable Tech Leaders w/ Amit Chandak, @ex-Oracle, @Kinerika
    Jun 18 2026
    ▶︎ #170 | From Startup Garage to Microsoft MVP: How Continuous Learning Builds Unbreakable Tech Leaders w/ Amit Chandak, @ex-Oracle, @Kinerika

    In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Amit Chandak, CTO and Data & AI Lead at Kinerika, a Microsoft Fabric Featured Partner operating at the forefront of cloud data engineering. Amit's career spans three distinct environments: a 10-year co-founder journey building a BI tool from a two-person apartment startup to a 50-person product company, senior engineering leadership at Oracle, and now heading data and AI strategy at a fast-scaling services organization. In 2022, he became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his exceptional contributions to the Power BI community - a recognition earned through over 17,000 community solutions and years of relentless self-directed learning.

    The episode opens with a question that shapes the entire conversation: what actually separates the leaders who compound their impact over time from those who plateau?

    Amit and Aleksandra dig deep into the IC-to-leader transition - one of the most structurally underestimated challenges in tech organizations. Amit is precise about what gets lost in that shift: the identity of being the best individual performer becomes a liability when your actual job is to build an environment where the team outperforms what you ever could alone.

    For anyone navigating the tension between lifelong learning and burnout, building a tech team from scratch, or making the mental shift from individual contributor to people leader - this episode delivers the kind of practical clarity that only comes from someone who has lived every stage of that journey.


    ✉︎ FOLLOW AMIT ON: ⤵︎
    LinkedIn: @amitchandak
    YouTube: Amit Chandak

    ✉︎ 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/
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    51 Min.
  • #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!

    #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!
    Jun 16 2026
    ▶︎ #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!

    In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska makes an official announcement she has been building toward for over a decade: her first book, "From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For", is done. The premiere is July 30th, 2026 - and this episode is her way of celebrating it with the people who have been part of the journey.

    Alex is candid about what drove her to write it. After 10-plus years of working with tech leaders, engineering teams, data science, cybersecurity, and AI organizations, she kept seeing the same patterns repeat. The same breakdowns. The same blind spots. The same moment where a brilliant individual contributor gets promoted to team lead and loses themselves within months. She wanted to give leaders a single, practical resource they could reach for - not another abstract leadership theory, but a blueprint grounded in real case studies and the frameworks she uses every single day.

    If you have ever had the thought "I know what I should be doing, I just don't have a clear way to do it all at once," this is the episode - and the book - for you. The book will be available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. An audiobook is planned for later in 2026. A book launch Masterclass, book tour events, and fireside chats are all in the works. Alex's Leadership Pulse newsletter will be the first to know everything.


    ✉︎ 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/
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    22 Min.