Leadership

by Anna Ortynska The sooner we accept that everyone in an organization is seeking power, the more consciously we'll be able to use it for ourselves and for others. Wanting power is supposed to be something you don't admit. You can want impact, influence, legacy, meaningful work — all of that is fine, respectable even. But power? That's for the ambitious ones. The ones who play games while the rest of us just try to get good work done. I believed this for a long time. Then I

by Anna Ortynska Most founders believe they are maintaining control when, in reality, they are compensating for the absence of structure. Over time, the company becomes so dependent on the founder’s constant involvement that their presence starts to feel synonymous with leadership itself. They sit in every important meeting, approve every meaningful decision, stay involved in every escalation, and remain the person everyone turns to when something becomes uncertain. From the

Why task tracking fails and what actually makes progress visible by Anna Ortynska Most companies do not have an effort problem, because people are working hard, teams are consistently busy, and calendars are fully packed with meetings, deadlines, and deliverables. The real issue becomes visible when you ask a much simpler but far more important question: are we actually moving forward as a business? And surprisingly often, there is no clear or confident answer to that questio

by Anna Ortynska Last week I wrote about five biases that quietly distort leadership decisions. There's a logical question that follows any conversation like this, and it's usually the same one: "Okay. So what do we actually do about it?" The answer most people expect is: read more, train more, reflect more. But you can't read your way out of bias. You can't train your way out either. Two weeks after a "cognitive biases in leadership" workshop, confirmation bias is back at th

Understanding Cognitive Biases in Leadership I once watched a CEO spend an entire quarterly review praising a product line that was bleeding money. Everyone in the room had the data. The dashboards were on the screen. But the CEO had championed this product from the start, and so the numbers somehow didn't register. They just... slid off. Like rain off a windshield. After the meeting, three directors stood in a hallway and agreed the product should be sunsetted. None of them