CLIENT CASE | Leadership Development

Coaching Founders and functional Leaders in a distributed startup

Background

A startup studio working with many startup partners operates with a team distributed across several countries. The studio combines vertical expertise with a cross-functional setup to support a portfolio of early-stage ventures.

The two founders were deeply involved in many operational decisions. Five team leads were managing different verticals, but struggled to fully step into leadership. The founders wanted a shift: less bottlenecking, more ownership, and a stronger leadership across the organization.

Challenge

Several leadership challenges were present:

• Team leads lacked clarity in roles and were hesitant to take independent decisions.
• Alignment with the founders was inconsistent, creating friction and slow execution.
• Remote collaboration suffered from communication gaps and low morale.
• Founders themselves were spread thin, pulled into details instead of strategic focus.

The team leads were capable but hesitant. The founders wanted them to take more initiative, but the shift wasn’t happening organically.

Processes

Over six months, I worked one-on-one with both founders and all five team leads, blending coaching and mentoring depending on each leader’s needs — from reflective conversations to practical tools they could apply immediately.

Key themes in the coaching included:

• Clarifying expectations and leadership scope
• Building ownership and confidence in decision-making
• Structuring conversations for clarity and alignment
• Developing new team rituals to increase connection and morale
• Helping founders focus their time strategically, moving from reactive to intentional leadership

Outcomes

Within six months, the leadership dynamic shifted in concrete ways:

• Team leads stopped waiting for founder sign-off and began making independent decisions in their verticals. They introduced new team rituals like weekly check-ins, structured feedback loops, that increased morale, openness, and speed of collaboration.
• Founders pulled back from the day-to-day. They reallocated their time toward strategic priorities such as fundraising and portfolio support, while becoming clearer and more structured in setting expectations with team leads.
• Execution improved. Decisions that previously waited for days at the founder level began happening faster at the team-lead level. Remote collaboration became smoother, with fewer communication breakdowns.

Conclusion

This coaching engagement helped the startup build leadership capacity: founders freed up their time for strategy, team leads grew into stronger decision-makers, and the organization moved faster without sacrificing cohesion.

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