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

    2d ago

    #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 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/

    51 min
  2. #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!

    4d ago

    #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!

    ▶︎ #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/

    22 min
  3. #168 | From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management, Strategic Simplicity, and the Networking Muscle You Never Built w/ Iryna Lambrianides @Clar

    Jun 11

    #168 | From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management, Strategic Simplicity, and the Networking Muscle You Never Built w/ Iryna Lambrianides @Clar

    ▶︎ #168 | From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management, Strategic Simplicity, and the Networking Muscle You Never Built w/ Iryna Lambrianides @ClarityPoint Consulting In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Iryna Lambrianides: fractional strategic advisor, COO, and Chief of Staff, and Founder of ClarityPoint Consulting. Iryna's career story is one of radical reinvention: arriving in the US from Ukraine with no network, taking a $7/hour restaurant job, and systematically building expertise across project management, change management, Lean Six Sigma, and organizational strategy until she was restructuring international organizations spanning 60 countries. She's been laid off twice, narrowly escaped two more, and watched her salary nearly triple in five years. Her conclusion: institutions are unstable. Skills are not. What makes this conversation stand out is Iryna's operational precision about the things most tech leaders wave at rather than actually do: translating vision into concrete roadmaps, embedding change management into every initiative before it goes off the rails, and building the networking muscle that most engineers were never told they'd need. She is direct about why change fails: not because people resist change, but because leaders don't plan for it, communicate about it, or measure it. And she has frameworks for all three. If you're a tech leader drowning in simultaneous changes, struggling to make your vision land with your team, or quietly aware that your network is thinner than it should be, this episode will give you both the understanding and the tools to change that. ✔︎ Mentioned in the episode: Create an MBA by Justin Welsh: https://www.justinwelsh.me/ Reinvention Academy — change management certification frameworkMcKinsey & IBM research on organizational change and disruption speed ✉︎ FOLLOW IRYNA ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @irynalambrianides ClarityPoint Consulting: https://claritypointconsultants.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/

    59 min
  4. #167 | Your Best Engineer Is Your Biggest Leadership Problem - Now What?

    Jun 9

    #167 | Your Best Engineer Is Your Biggest Leadership Problem - Now What?

    ▶︎ #167 | Your Best Engineer Is Your Biggest Leadership Problem - Now What? In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska addresses one of the most uncomfortable dilemmas tech leaders face over and over again: what to do when your technically brilliant engineer is also destroying the team around them. The problem is painfully familiar. Their output looks great on paper. Confronting or removing them feels risky - what if they quit? And yet every other person on the team is paying a daily cost for this person's behavior. Most leaders know it's a problem. Almost none of them know what to actually do about it. Alex identifies three layers that make this harder than it looks. The first is structural, the second is the leader's own ambivalence, and the third is the absence of contracting. In most teams, the technical bar was clear from day one. The relational bar was implied, and implied contracts are what allow destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged. From the CQ Leadership Method perspective, Alex walks through how to diagnose what is actually driving the behavior - and why the intervention looks completely different depending on the root cause. This is not a personality problem. It is a systems and leadership problem that a personality is simply exposing. If you've been avoiding this conversation, this episode gives you the diagnosis and the tools to stop. ✉︎ 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/

    18 min
  5. #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w: Jordan Cutler @Pinterest

    Jun 4

    #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w: Jordan Cutler @Pinterest

    ▶︎ #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI: How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w/ Jordan Cutler @Pinterest In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Jordan Cutler: Staff Engineer at Pinterest, where he leads web platform initiatives supporting over 200 engineers. Jordan's career moved from junior to senior in just two years at Gusto, then through Qualified (recently acquired by Salesforce), and into the kind of cross-functional, multi-team leadership that defines the Staff Engineer role today: a role many leaders still don't fully understand. What makes this conversation stand out is Jordan's unflinching clarity about how AI is not just changing what engineers do, but raising the bar at every level of the career ladder. The mid-level engineer is now expected to do what seniors did three years ago. Juniors entering the market face a job board that has shrunk to under 10% of all engineering listings. And the engineers who will thrive are not the ones who write the most code by hand: they're the ones who can recognize high-ROI opportunities, delegate implementation to AI-powered systems, and build things that compound impact over time. Jordan also shares what the Staff Engineer role actually means: not just leading within a team, but expanding scope across teams, connecting strategic company goals to concrete technical initiatives, and selling ideas in ways that bring people along. If you're leading engineering teams, thinking about what to expect from your engineers in 2026, or navigating your own transition from code-first to strategy-first thinking, this episode will give you a new lens on what the role actually demands now. ✔︎ Mentioned in the episode: "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott” ✉︎ FOLLOW JORDAN ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @jordancutler1 ✉︎ 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/

    1 hr
  6. #165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For

    Jun 2

    #165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For

    #165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska takes on a transition that happens constantly in tech - and almost always without the support it actually requires: promoting your best engineer to team lead, tech lead, or principal engineer. The pattern is familiar. Six months after the promotion, the engineer is frustrated, the team is frustrated, and the person who was your most reliable individual contributor has become your most complicated leadership problem. They're still heads-down executing, ignoring everything else the new role requires - or if you're that engineer, you're working harder than ever, uncertain whether you're doing it right, unsure who to even ask. Alex starts with the question nobody asks out loud: what did nobody tell them about this new job? The job description lies. A principal engineer or tech lead sounds like a more senior version of the previous role. It isn't. It is a categorically different role, and the skills that made someone exceptional before - speed, precision, independent depth of work - can actively work against them now. If you've recently promoted someone or are thinking about doing it, this episode is the conversation that should happen before the announcement. ✉︎ 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/

    13 min
  7. #164 | From Five Failed Products to the 100-Person Company w/ Prashanth Tondapu (ex-@McAfee, @Innostax Tech LLC)

    May 28

    #164 | From Five Failed Products to the 100-Person Company w/ Prashanth Tondapu (ex-@McAfee, @Innostax Tech LLC)

    ▶︎ #164 | From Five Failed Products to 100-Person Company: Delegation, Detachment, and the Real Root of Burnout in Tech w/ Prashanth Tondapu  (ex-@McAfee, @Innostax Tech LLC) In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Prashanth Tondapu: CEO of InnoStacks Tech LLC, a 100-person software services company with active R&D in LLM products. Prashanth's story is one many tech leaders will recognise all too painfully: a gifted developer who believed that passion for the craft was enough to build a business, went through five failed products before finding one that worked, and had to systematically shift his own identity to become the leader his company needed him to be. What makes this conversation stand out is Prashanth's unflinching honesty about the mistakes that shaped him: including building in isolation without validating demand, believing he was the smartest person in the room long after that was useful, and learning delegation only after burning himself out by being on every client call, terrified something would go wrong without him. The moment he finally stayed off a call, and nothing went wrong, he says, was the moment he was never the same leader again. If you're scaling a team, struggling to let go of control, or quietly burning out while trying to keep everything running, this episode will meet you exactly where you are. ✔︎ Mentioned in the episode: “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment” “The Advaita Philosophy: Recognizing the Oneness of the Universe” “Be Here Now” ✉︎ FOLLOW PRASHNATH ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @prashanth-tondapu Innostax: https://innostax.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/

    51 min
  8. #163 | “I Know I Should Say No. So Why Can't I?”

    May 26

    #163 | “I Know I Should Say No. So Why Can't I?”

    #163 | “I Know I Should Say No. So Why Can't I?” In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on one of the most persistent gaps between what tech leaders know and what they actually do: saying no. Almost every leader Alex works with already knows, intellectually, that they should say no more often. They've read about it. They've advised their own team to do it. And then a stakeholder drops something on their desk, a peer asks for support just outside their remit, or their manager adds one more thing to the quarter, and they say yes. Again. The frustration afterward is real. And it's almost never about weakness or conflict avoidance. Alex identifies the three real roots of the problem. The first is identity: for most tech leaders, saying yes was the behavior that built their reputation and career as individual contributors, and the psychological cost of saying no now feels like a betrayal of who they are. The second is the absence of a clear enough set of priorities to say no to: a Contracting failure that leaves every incoming request feeling equally valid. The third is simply not having the language: knowing what you want to decline but having no way to do it that doesn't feel like a fight or a relationship risk. If you've ever walked out of a meeting having said yes to something you knew you shouldn't have, this episode gives you the understanding and the tools to change that pattern. ✉︎ 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/

    16 min
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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
    171
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Aleksandra Lemańska
  • Show Website
    Leman Tech Leadership Podcast