Klaudyna Smit Consulting

Strona główna
Polska
Kraków
Klaudyna Smit Consulting

Strategia zarządzania i przywództwa | Coaching&mentoring | Szkolenia
💼CEO - Klaudyna Smit Consulting

27/07/2026

I used to think change resistance was a people problem. A management challenge to be overcome with better communication, more town halls, clearer messaging about the vision.

Then I started tracing where the resistance actually originated. What I found, consistently, was this: the people resisting the change had almost always been excluded from shaping it. They were handed a decision and asked to feel ownership over something they had zero authorship in.

The SCARF model - developed by neuroscientist David Rock - tells us that the human brain responds to threats against status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness with the same neurological intensity as a physical threat. Imposed change triggers all five simultaneously. Authored change triggers almost none of them.

This is the distinction most change programmes miss entirely. The rollout is the final five percent of the problem. The first ninety-five percent is the design of the process that preceded it - specifically, whether the people who will live inside the change were ever genuinely invited to shape it.

Resistance is data. Before you push harder, ask what it is telling you.

Is the change you are currently leading being delivered to your team, or with them?

Comment NEWSLETTER and I will send you the link to my weekly writing on leadership.

22/07/2026

Most women do not get to design their return to work. I did, and it changed everything about how I lead.

I came back this month after maternity leave. The research is consistent: the moment that decides whether a woman stays and grows is rarely the leave. It is the return, and how thoughtfully it is led.

The difference was never talent. It was who held the pen.

Leaders, someone on your team is coming back soon. Do you have a plan, or an assumption?

Whats your story of returning to work after a leave? Share it in the comments and let’s all have a chat.

Also - if you found yourself nodding through the reel, follow me . We’re having a different conversation here.

—
Executive coaching. Women in leadership. Return to work. Leadership development. Working mothers. Talent retention. Senior leadership. Leadership Becoming.

20/07/2026

Most leaders I work with don’t have a time problem. They have an exposure problem.

At senior level, the shift is subtle, yet critical:
✔️ You’re no longer measured by how much you can handle.
✔️ You’re measured by how well you filter.

➡️ Who gets access to you.
➡️ What gets your attention.
➡️ Which decisions are actually yours to carry.

This is where leadership becomes less about capacity and more about discernment.

And most people never make that shift.

They stay available.
Responsive.
Involved in everything.

And slowly lose the space required to think.

The leaders who operate differently are not doing more.
They are refusing more, with precision.

If this resonates, you’ll find more of this inside Leadership: Becoming. Comment Newsletter, and I’ll send you the link.

15/07/2026

The first time someone told me I was too demanding, I believed them.

I was early in my career, sitting across from someone with significantly more authority than me, and I did what a lot of brilliant leaders do in that moment. I adjusted. I softened. I made myself easier to be around. I stopped asking the questions I had already formed in my head before the meeting began.

And then I spent the next six months watching every single one of those unasked questions become expensive, avoidable problems.

I have worked with senior leaders across Europe, Asia, and the US for thirteen years. The pattern I see most consistently - across industries, across cultures, across levels of the organisation - is this: the leaders who have genuinely built something exceptional are almost never described as easy by everyone in the room. They are described as rigorous. As uncompromising. As someone who raises the bar and holds it there, even when the room would prefer they quietly lower it.

McKinsey and Harvard Business Review research consistently shows that leaders who hold high performance standards face more interpersonal criticism than peers who accommodate lower ones. The word “difficult” is not a character assessment. It is a cultural reaction. It is the sound of a standard that the people around you have decided to experience as inconvenient rather than adopt as their own.

The discomfort you create by holding your standards is not a signal to lower them. It is a signal worth paying attention to - about the culture you are sitting inside, and whether it is worthy of what you are capable of building.

Save this if it landed. Share it with a leader in your world who has been told they are too much.

And if you want my weekly writing on leadership - comment NEWSLETTER and I will send you the link directly.

executivepresence, leadershipidentity, seniorleadership, csuite, executivecoaching, highperformanceleadership, leadershipdevelopment

09/07/2026

Books arrived.

And I may have recorded my reaction.

Six minutes of me unpacking a delivery from , giving you my honest first thoughts on each title, and announcing something that’s coming very soon for those of you who watch to the end.

I read a lot. I always have. But since becoming a mother and spending this maternity leave building rather than slowing down, books have felt more intentional than ever. Every one I pick up, I’m asking: what does this do for the people I work with? What conversation does this open?

These ones have answers.

Watch, follow along, and stay close. The contest drops soon.

08/07/2026

Somewhere between the strategy offsite where you set the vision and Tuesday morning, the priorities shifted. Almost not noticeably. Without a formal decision. Through the accumulation of small choices made under pressure, one after another, until the calendar you are looking at looks nothing like the leader you said you were becoming.

I now ask every new client to send me their unedited calendar from the previous two weeks before our first session. Not their goals. Not their values statement. Their calendar. Because what a leader tells me matters and what their choices show me matters are - almost without exception - two different answers.

A 2018 Harvard Business Review study tracked 27 CEOs across thousands of working hours and found that leaders consistently overestimate the time they invest in their stated priorities and dramatically underestimate time lost to reactive, low-leverage activity. The gap is not a character flaw. It is a systems failure. And it is one of the most expensive blind spots at the senior level - because no one around you is going to name it for you.

Every choice you make is a priority statement. Every deferred conversation, every cancelled 1:1, every hour spent in a meeting you could not name a clear outcome for - all of it is data. All of it is telling you something about the operating system running beneath the leadership identity you are trying to build.

The question is not whether the gap exists. The question is whether you are willing to look at it honestly.

Look at your calendar from last week. Then ask yourself - does this belong to the leader I am becoming, or to the leader I am trying to leave behind?

Save this if it gave you something uncomfortable to think about. Share it with a leader in your world who is ready for the same question.

And if you want my weekly writing on leadership - comment NEWSLETTER and I will send you the link directly.

_

executivepresence, leadershipidentity, seniorleadership, csuite, executivecoaching, highperformanceleadership, leadershipdevelopment

07/07/2026

I have a confession.

When I’m sitting across from you in a session - I’m not just listening to your words.

I’m reading your energy. The temperature of the room. The colour of what you’re not saying.

I’ve always experienced the world this way. I’m a synesthete - I see numbers, words, and people in color. Literally.

For a long time I kept this quiet. It felt too personal, too unusual, too difficult to explain.

But I’ve come to understand that it’s not separate from my work. It is my work.

→ Swipe. This one is different.

06/07/2026

The higher you rise…

Leadership is one of the loneliest roles in existence - and the most under-discussed ones too. Every room you walk into shifts when you enter it. Conversations arrive pre-filtered. Questions carry subtext. People perform their best version of themselves around you, and you learn to read what lives underneath.

You carry decisions in silence. You hold the weight of others’ livelihoods, their confidence, their direction - often long after the meeting ends and the door closes.

And over time, you become very good at carrying it. So good, in fact, that you stop looking for a place to put it down.

The leaders I work with - senior, capable, accomplished - arrive at coaching having mastered the art of self-sufficiency. What shifts for them is discovering that being truly witnessed, in all the complexity of what they hold, is itself a leadership advantage.

Clarity sharpens. Decisions land with more conviction. The weight becomes something you can move through, rather than something you move around.

If any of this is resonating - you are already asking the right questions. Follow and stay here for a while.

24/06/2026

I used to think that high performers left organisations for better offers. The data says otherwise. And so does every exit conversation I have ever been part of.

When I trace the departure of a genuinely excellent person, the trigger is rarely compensation or title. It is almost always this: they were asked, implicitly and repeatedly, to carry the weight of someone who had already chosen to stop caring. And the leader allowed it to continue.

High performers thrive in complexity. They absorb pressure, navigate ambiguity, and produce in conditions that would exhaust most people. What they have a very limited tolerance for is inequity - the sustained experience of subsidising someone else’s disengagement with their own output, while the leader treats both contributions as equivalent.

Every day a people decision is delayed, the best person in the room receives a message. It arrives without a memo. It lands with precision.

The best talent in your organisation is watching. They are simply deciding how long to stay.

Which high performer are you one delayed decision away from losing?

🔖 Save this if it names something you’ve lived.
💭Comment if it challenged you.

executivecoaching | seniorleadership | leadershipaccountability | peopledecisions | leadershipdevelopment | highperformanceleadership | csuite | executivepresence | leadershipbecoming | womeninleadership

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Kraków
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