Leman Tech Leadership Podcast

Aleksandra Lemańska
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Leman Tech Leadership Podcast Welcome to the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, your ultimate guide to developing exceptional tech leadership skills. Whether you're a seasoned tech leader or just stepping into a managerial role, this podcast is designed to provide you with actionable insights and best practices to create a thriving work environment that people won't want to leave. Learn how to do it with host Aleksandra Lemańska, CQ Technology Leadership Mentor & Speaker. Founder @LemanSkills, Co-Founder & Board President @Startup Community Poznan Foundation, Host @Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. She is the creator of the CQ Leadership Method: a battle-tested framework that helps tech leaders communicate with precision and lead without burnout. Join Alex as she delves deep into the secrets of effective leadership, from mastering essential tools to implementing cutting-edge techniques. Each episode brings you invaluable knowledge, practical advice, or unique perspectives through engaging interviews with leaders who have experiences and lessons to share. Discover the dos and don’ts of tech leadership, learn about the habits that drive success, and gather strategies to foster a motivated and engaged team. Follow Alex @aleksandralemanska on LinkedIn for more inspiration and actions that you can take as a transformational leader. Check out more as well on https://lemanskills.com!  

  1. 15h ago

    #194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka

    ▶︎ #194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka @Open Mercato In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Piotr Karwatka, Co-Founder of Open Mercato, a 100% AI-engineered open-source framework for building enterprise CRM and ERP applications. Piotr has spent 26 years in technology, starting with freeware desktop software he built with his brother Tomasz as teenagers. Together they grew Divante from a two-person company to over 300 people before a successful exit, co-created Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront), which raised the largest VC round in Poland at the time, and built Callstack, the well-known React Native contributor, which also ended in an exit. They are also business angels with over 40 portfolio companies, including ElevenLabs. The conversation opens on one of the questions founders ask most often and answer least honestly: can you really do business with family? Piotr's answer is grounded in 26 years of data. The single most important factor was not love or loyalty but culture: specifically, the decision to always treat the company as a product separate from themselves. Piotr and Aleksandra then dig into delegation, control, and the specific fear that drives most early-stage founders to micromanage: not personality, but margin. When you have no financial runway, and every client matters completely, over-controlling is not a character flaw; it is a survival response. The episode also covers the question of whether tech leaders should stay in the code, and Piotr is unambiguous: yes, and anyone who told him otherwise gave him some of the worst advice he ever received. For Piotr, staying technical is not a comfort blanket; it is the thing that keeps your judgment honest. Whether you are a tech founder, a leader trying to delegate without losing your mind, or someone figuring out how to keep both the tech and the human dimensions of leadership alive as your company grows, this conversation offers hard-won perspective from someone who has lived every stage of it. Mentioned in the episode: "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott" "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg" Open Mercato: https://www.openmercato.com AI Tech Leaders training {aihtechleaders.pl}: https://aitechleaders.pl ✉︎ FOLLOW PIOTR ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @piotrkarwatka X: @piotrkarwatka Website: openmercato.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/

    #194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka

  2. 2d ago

    #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.

    ▶︎ #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It. In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a phrase most tech leaders have grown allergic to: psychological safety. She names the pattern first, because it’s the one that starts almost every mentoring conversation on this subject: a leader declares: "Come to me with mistakes, come to me with bad news," everyone nods, and six months later that same leader is blindsided by a problem the team saw coming for weeks and never mentioned. Alex is direct about why this keeps happening even with leaders who genuinely mean it: psychological safety doesn’t get built by the statement; it gets built by what happens the first time someone actually tests it, and most leaders never run that test on themselves first. If you’ve ever declared an open door and privately wondered why nobody’s walking through it, this episode gives you the specific, sixty-second-level tools to actually build the trust instead of just announcing 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/

    #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.

  3. Sep 3

    #192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @Lejdi

    ▶︎ #192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @LejdiSapiens / @Incepti In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Paulina Kotowska, a transformation specialist, accredited EMCC coach and mentor, and Co-Founder of Incepti, a business agility consultancy she runs alongside her own personal brand LejdiSapiens. With nearly 30 years of professional experience spanning pharma, telecom, fintech, and tech, Paulina has led teams from operations to technology, most recently managing over 100 people, before stepping out of corporate life to work with startups and organizations as a consultant, mentor, and founder. She is also a postgraduate researcher writing a thesis on AI and leadership. The episode opens on lifelong learning, not as a concept but as a daily practice under pressure. Paulina and Aleksandra dig into the shift from I-shaped and T-shaped skill profiles to what Paulina calls the comp-shape: a leader who holds multiple deep expertise areas and connects them across business strategy, technology, and people. From there, Paulina outlines three things leaders most need to do differently right now. First: stop trying to have all the answers and become a critical thinking enabler instead. Second: when a team looks broken, look at the system of work before looking at the people, because 98% of the time the problem is process and alignment, not character. Third: protect focus as if it were a resource, because it is.  If you lead a team, are rebuilding yourself after years in corporate, or are trying to create a culture where people actually trust each other enough to fail and learn, this is a conversation that will stay with you. Mentioned in the episode: "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by Yuval Noah Harari" Diary of a CEO podcast: https://stevenbartlett.com/the-diary-of-a-ceo-podcast/ LejdiSapiens: https://lejdisapiens.com/ Incepti: https://incepti.eu ✉︎ FOLLOW PAULINA ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @paulina-kotowska Incepti: incepti.eu ✉︎ 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/

    #192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @Lejdi

  4. Sep 1

    #191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving Up

    ▶︎ #191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving Up In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska opens the final quarter of the year with a subject she's lived through personally and professionally, and hears from leaders and founders on a near-daily basis: giving up. Alex names the pattern she keeps running into in conversation after conversation: people who feel like failures, like imposters, like they simply can't stick to a habit or deliver what they promised themselves. She's honest that she's lived both sides of it: rock-solid consistency with her workouts and with writing her book, and quiet quitting on other goals she genuinely cared about. Rather than blaming generational laziness (a myth she pushes back on directly), Alex walks through the real reasons people quit: no accountability, no proximity to people already doing the thing, or an environment that quietly discourages the goal altogether. She closes with a simple, practical exercise: write down who you're trying to become, name the smallest possible next step, and reverse-engineer the discipline you already have in one area of your life into the one you keep abandoning. 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/

    #191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving Up

  5. Aug 27

    #190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w Ashutosh Garg

    ▶︎ #190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI: Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w/ Ashutosh Garg (Co-Founder & CEO, @Eightfold AI & @Viven, ex-@Google, ex-@IBM) In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Ashutosh Garg: Co-Founder and CEO of Eightfold AI and Viven, a third-time founder (after Bloomreach and Eightfold) who spent his early career as a research scientist at IBM and Google before building a career predicting where technology is headed next. Recording the conversation in the middle of 2026, Ashutosh reflects on three decades inside machine learning and AI, from hand-built models in the 1990s to a field that now reshapes itself within weeks, not years. What makes this conversation stand out is how Ashutosh reframes the pressure so many tech leaders feel to know everything, all the time. He argues that too much information can be as damaging as too little, that curiosity means seeking answers from the least obvious places rather than only from people who already agree with you. The second half of the conversation turns practical: Ashutosh unpacks Viven, the digital twin platform he co-founded to solve a problem every scaling leader recognizes {being one person with the knowledge of ten}. From reducing bottlenecks with subject-matter experts to making founders and managers accessible to their teams around the clock, he makes the case that digital twins are not about replacing people, but about closing the coordination gap between them. If you are a leader trying to stay curious without burning out, or wondering how AI-native tools might change what "being available" to your team even means, this episode will give you a lot to sit with. ✉︎ FOLLOW ASHUTOSH ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: ashutoshgarg893 Eightfold AI: eightfold.ai https://viven.ai/ ✉︎ 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/

    #190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w Ashutosh Garg

  6. Aug 25

    #189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path?

    ▶︎ #189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path? In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a question more leaders are quietly wrestling with: how do you lead engineers who don't want your career path? The episode opens with a story from one of Alex's mentees, a director who built a strong promotion case for one of her best engineers, only to have him turn it down. Not for money, not for timing, but because he didn't want more people depending on him. Alex names this as a growing pattern across tech teams: leaders offering the only kind of growth they know (more scope, more people, more title) to engineers who are optimizing for something else entirely. Using Contracting from her CQ Leadership Method, Alex breaks down why this disconnect happens: leaders assume a shared, universal definition of “growth” that was never actually agreed on. She applies PCM to show how the growth conversation needs to shift depending on personality base, from mastery and technical depth, to values-driven work, to variety and stimulation, rather than a single generic script. Alex closes with a direct challenge: pick one person whose ambitions you've been assuming rather than asking about, and have the real conversation this week. 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/

    #189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path?

  7. Aug 20

    #188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś

    ▶︎ #188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś (Founder @Relayn) In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Aleksandra Łoś. Her path runs from management consulting in Paris and London, through a string of ventures (a sports-matching app, a startup renting luxury assets for cryptocurrency, rebuilding the original Bitcoin whitepaper for the Bitcoin Association, and TrueMe, an attempt to merge AI with personal development) to her current company, Relayn, where she and her Co-founder are building AI agents on a deterministic, non-LLM-first architecture designed to cut compute costs dramatically. What makes this conversation stand out is Aleksandra’s honesty about the belief that quietly drove her for years: that landing the "right" job at the right company would finally prove she was good enough. Alex and Aleksandra also dig into the mindset shift from corporate to startup life, why intuition and self-trust matter more than gathering endless data when decisions move fast, and what actually predicts whether a Co-founder relationship will work. Ola’s answer: try the person before you try the idea. If you are weighing a leap from IC to Founder, from corporate to startup, or you are searching for the right person to build with, this is part one of a conversation you will want to finish. ✉︎ FOLLOW ALEKSANDRA ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @aleksandra-los-1423615b Relayn: https://www.relayn.sh/ ✉︎ 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/

    #188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś

  8. Aug 18

    #187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't Practice

    ▶︎ #187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't Practice In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a conversation she's had for years, in corporate hallways, mentoring sessions, and now with leaders across the globe: being always on. The episode opens with a moment from one of Alex's own mentoring sessions: a VP of Engineering spent forty minutes describing the ground rules he'd built to protect his team's focus time, then answered a Slack message at nine at night mid-session. Alex names the gap directly: it's not what you tell your team about boundaries, it's what you do when everybody's watching, because you're the one they learn from. She unpacks three reasons leaders keep overriding their own rules: identity fusion with being reachable, the fear that something breaks if they're not there, and the quiet belief that disconnecting means losing relevance. The episode ends with a practical, one-week challenge: write down your real contract with yourself, name the need underneath it, renegotiate one specific term, and say it out loud to someone who'll hold you to 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/

    #187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't Practice
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About

Leman Tech Leadership Podcast Welcome to the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, your ultimate guide to developing exceptional tech leadership skills. Whether you're a seasoned tech leader or just stepping into a managerial role, this podcast is designed to provide you with actionable insights and best practices to create a thriving work environment that people won't want to leave. Learn how to do it with host Aleksandra Lemańska, CQ Technology Leadership Mentor & Speaker. Founder @LemanSkills, Co-Founder & Board President @Startup Community Poznan Foundation, Host @Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. She is the creator of the CQ Leadership Method: a battle-tested framework that helps tech leaders communicate with precision and lead without burnout. Join Alex as she delves deep into the secrets of effective leadership, from mastering essential tools to implementing cutting-edge techniques. Each episode brings you invaluable knowledge, practical advice, or unique perspectives through engaging interviews with leaders who have experiences and lessons to share. Discover the dos and don’ts of tech leadership, learn about the habits that drive success, and gather strategies to foster a motivated and engaged team. Follow Alex @aleksandralemanska on LinkedIn for more inspiration and actions that you can take as a transformational leader. Check out more as well on https://lemanskills.com!  

Information

  • Creator
    Aleksandra Lemańska
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    195
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Aleksandra Lemańska
  • Show Website
    Leman Tech Leadership Podcast