When does a founding team need a coach?
There is rarely a dramatic moment. No single meeting that falls apart, no obvious crisis. Most founding teams I work with come to coaching after a longer, quieter accumulation of something being slightly off.
The conversations that used to happen naturally have become harder to initiate. Feedback circulates less freely. Decisions take longer, not because the team lacks judgment, but because alignment has quietly eroded. Everyone is still moving, but not quite together.
So when, exactly, is the right time?
The signals worth paying attention to
When growth changes the team faster than the team can adapt to it.
This is the most common pattern. A team that worked brilliantly at five people starts to strain at fifteen. The informal ways of deciding, communicating, and trusting each other no longer scale. It is not a people problem. It is a transition problem, and it needs space to be named.
When the same conversations keep happening without resolution.
Not conflict, necessarily. Sometimes it is more subtle: a topic that gets raised, discussed, and never quite landed. A decision that gets revisited. A tension that everyone can sense but nobody is addressing directly. When a loop like this becomes established, it rarely dissolves on its own.
When individual performance is strong but collective performance is not.
This is one of the more frustrating situations for founders. The people are good. The skills are there. And yet something is missing at the team level. Trust, maybe. A shared way of giving feedback. A clearer sense of how decisions actually get made. Strong individuals do not automatically form a strong team. That takes intentional work.
When the founder is growing and the team needs to grow with them.
Leadership evolves under pressure. A founder who has been through eighteen months of rapid growth is not the same leader they were at the start. The team around them needs to evolve too. Sometimes coaching is the space where that process becomes conscious rather than chaotic.
What coaching is, and what it is not
It is worth being direct about this, because the word "coaching" still carries some baggage.
Team coaching is not therapy. It is not conflict resolution as a one-off intervention. It is not a workshop where everyone leaves feeling good and then returns to the same dynamics on Monday.
At its core, it is structured space. Space to have the conversations that get postponed because the week is always too full. Space to surface assumptions that have never been made explicit. Space to rebuild something that has started to fray, before it becomes a real problem.
But in practice, especially with founding teams of growing companies, there is almost always more to it than that.
What is really happening in the room
When I work with a founding team, I am rarely just facilitating a conversation.
I am paying attention to what is not being said. To the dynamic between two co-founders who have worked together for four years and have developed habits of communication that serve some things and block others. To the person who always defers. To the one who always decides. To the gap between what the team says its values are and how it actually behaves under pressure.
My background is in executive search and talent consulting. I have spent twenty years reading organizations and the people who lead them. That lens does not disappear when I sit down with a team. I bring it with me, and it changes what I notice.
Coaching, in this sense, is not just a methodology. It is a perspective. And a good coach working with a founding team is not just asking clean open questions. They are bringing experience, pattern recognition, and sometimes the willingness to say something that no one else in the room will.
What sits behind a coaching engagement can include helping a leadership team build a shared language around how they lead. Thinking through how roles need to evolve as the company grows. Making explicit the decision-making principles that currently exist only in the founders' heads. Creating the conditions where honest feedback actually happens, not just in the coaching session but as a permanent feature of how the team operates.
This is work that matters long after the sessions end.
The timing question, answered honestly
There is no perfect moment. Teams that wait for the crisis are usually doing harder work than they needed to. Teams that engage early, when things are functional but not quite right, tend to find it easier and more generative.
The founding team is the company's first culture. How the people at the top communicate, decide, disagree, and repair things becomes the template for everything that follows. That is worth investing in, not as a remediation, but as a foundation.
If you recognize something in what you have read here, it is probably worth a conversation.
Anne Ferretjans is an executive and leadership coach based in Zurich, working with founders and leadership teams of growing companies across Switzerland and Europe.
No Passion, No Pressure: Why I Created the Career Lab
I have been working in the talent and leadership space for years. I have seen people grow, change roles, build teams, and sometimes completely rethink their professional direction. One pattern appears again and again: many capable people feel stuck when it comes to their career.
They are not lacking ability. They are lacking clarity.
And very often, the confusion begins much earlier than their first job.
The school system teaches us to focus on what we are not good at. If you excel in four subjects and struggle in one, the conversation quickly turns to the weakness. Over time, many people internalize the idea that they must fix themselves before they can move forward.
This mindset often follows us into professional life.
The Career Lab starts from a different place.
It begins with strengths.
The first foundation of the process comes from CliftonStrengths. Instead of asking “What should I improve?”, it asks a different question: “How do I naturally create value?”
Exploring strengths helps people recognize patterns in how they think, solve problems, and contribute. It gives language to what already works and where energy naturally appears. Rather than fixing weaknesses, the focus shifts to developing the ways someone already performs at their best.
Yet understanding strengths alone does not solve the second challenge of modern careers: the belief that there must be one correct path.
Many people feel pressure to find their passion. The idea is attractive: discover the one thing you love and build your career around it.
In reality, careers rarely unfold this way.
This is where the second pillar of the Career Lab comes in: Design Thinking.
Design thinking introduces experimentation into career decisions. Instead of trying to identify the perfect path from the start, you explore possibilities and test ideas.
This approach was popularized for careers by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans through the concept of the Odyssey Plan in their book Designing Your Life, which I already talked about in a previous article.
Their idea is simple and powerful: instead of searching for the one correct future, you design several possible lives.
You explore different scenarios.
You prototype ideas.
You test small steps before making big commitments.
A conversation with someone in a different role can be a prototype.
A side project can be a prototype.
A short assignment in a new environment can be a prototype.
Over time, these experiments generate insight. People begin to see what fits their strengths, their values, and the kind of impact they want to have.
The process becomes less about choosing the “right” career and more about designing a path that evolves with them.
And this is also where the idea of passion deserves to be reconsidered.
Passion does not always need to come from work itself, or maybe not right away. For some people, passion lives in creative projects, sports, family life, or community engagement. Work can be a place where strengths are expressed, value is created, and stability is built, while passion flourishes elsewhere.
For others, passion grows gradually through mastery, learning, and meaningful contribution.
There is no single recipe for the right career.
That is why the Career Lab follows a simple philosophy:
No passion, no pressure.
You do not need to identify a single lifelong passion before moving forward.
You need curiosity.
You need awareness of your strengths.
And you need the freedom to explore.
Careers are not linear. They evolve through experience, learning, and the environments we choose.
The Career Lab is simply a space to explore that process with intention and take action.
Imagining Three Possible Futures: The Power of the Odyssey Plan
When I first discovered the Odyssey Plan, I was struck by its simplicity and its power.
It’s a tool, developed by Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Stanford University’s design program), that invites you to imagine not one, but three different futures for yourself.
As adults, we often narrow our view of what’s possible. We follow a path that makes sense, the one we’ve built, invested in, and that others expect from us. Yet there’s rarely just one version of our future waiting ahead.
The Odyssey Plan helps open that perspective again.
It asks you to design three possible lives for the next five years:
The logical one: the path you’re already on, continuing to grow in the same direction.
The alternative: something you’ve thought about but haven’t dared to explore yet.
The wild one: a complete reimagining, if there were no limits, what would you do?
When I work on an Odyssey Plan with my clients, the first reaction is often practical: “Three versions of my life? I barely have time to think about one.”
Yet once people start sketching ideas, something shifts. The exercise doesn’t ask for big decisions, only for curiosity.
I use it as one of several tools, alongside the CliftonStrengths assessment and values exploration, to help people take a step back, look at their trajectory with perspective, and reconnect with what gives direction and meaning to their choices.
It’s less about inventing new paths than about surfacing what’s already there: things you’ve considered, dismissed, or quietly postponed. Seeing them side by side often makes patterns visible, what keeps coming back, what feels energizing, and what no longer fits.
What emerges from the exercise
“The secret to happiness in life design isn’t making the right choice; it’s learning to choose well.” (Burnett & Evans)
What really emerges from it is:
Gathering & Creating Options
Prototyping them
Choosing
Fully embracing the decision
A plan that isn’t about planning
The Odyssey Plan is a reminder that life doesn’t have to be linear. We evolve, circumstances change, and so do our priorities. Imagining several futures is not a sign of indecision; it’s a sign of awareness.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
Why CliftonStrengths Is Not Just Another Personality Test
When I introduce CliftonStrengths, I often hear: “Isn’t this just another personality test?” And it’s a fair question. Many tools leave people feeling labeled or reduced to a type, or even a color.
Instead of telling you who you are (which is really something only you can do), it shows you where your energy comes from and how to use it more intentionally.
Energy, not labels
Strengths are not rigid categories. Two people with “Analytical” can look completely different: one loves exploring data, another uses analysis to challenge assumptions. Same theme, different expression. CliftonStrengths doesn’t confine you, it gives you language to describe how you naturally operate.
Permission to stretch
One client of mine discovered “Activator” in their top themes. Until then, they felt guilty about always pushing for quick wins. With new awareness, they stopped apologizing and started using this drive to spark momentum in the team. Strengths don’t restrict; they expand what’s possible when you lean into them.
A shared language in teams
Most conflicts come from misinterpretation. “Why does she always question everything?” can feel irritating, until you see that her “Context” strength is helping the team make better decisions. CliftonStrengths helps people shift from judgment to appreciation, making trust and collaboration easier.
My top 5
My top five are Individualization, Adaptability, Arranger, Empathy, and Relator. They shape the way I coach: I quickly see what makes each person unique, adapt to different contexts, bring order to complexity, tune into emotions, and build trust through close relationships. I see my strengths as tools for connecting and bringing out the best in teams, not rules I have to follow.
Human Design got me curious
To Be and Not to Be: What Human Design Taught Me
I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Human Design, I was skeptical. That was back in March 2025. Since then, I must have come across it a dozen times, and eventually curiosity caught me. I decided to give it a try.
For those unfamiliar, Human Design is a system that blends elements of astrology, the I Ching, Kabbalah, and the chakra system. The idea is to create a kind of “map” of how you’re wired, your strengths, tendencies, and decision-making style. It’s not science, but rather a framework for reflection.
I turned out to be a Generator, which probably doesn’t mean much if you haven’t looked into it. As I read more (with ChatGPT helping me decode it first), I realized how interesting it was. Not just to understand what being a Generator involves, using energy sustainably, trusting my intuition, responding to life, but also to see clearly what I’m not. That part was surprisingly freeing.
It gave me another lens to look at myself, and sometimes that’s exactly what we need: a shift in perspective to shake up our thinking. I bought a book, did more research about it and have decided to bring it into my individual coaching sessions as an additional tool for reflection.
You can test it yourself for free. All you need is your birth information (the exact time matters). You can pull up a free chart on a site like mybodygraph.com and see what it says.
My recommendation: Read it as a hypothesis. Test the strategy for a week. Notice if it brings a little more ease, a little less resistance.
Confidence: Borrowed, Built, Shared
Many people believe confidence is something you either have or don’t. If you feel like you don’t have enough, you’re not alone, and it doesn’t mean you can’t build it.
In La Confiance, Charles Pépin, a French philosopher, explains that confidence often begins outside of us. As children, we dare to take our first steps because someone holds our hand. Later, we find courage because someone believes in us. We start by borrowing confidence until it becomes our own.
This ties closely to the “Care & Dare” principle I explored during my program at IMD. When we feel cared for, we trust that someone has our back. When we are dared, we’re encouraged to step outside our comfort zone. Together, Care & Dare create the conditions where confidence can grow, in individuals and in teams.
If you’re struggling with confidence this week, try to notice where you can lean on care (support, encouragement) and where you might stretch with a little dare (taking one small risk). One doesn’t need to erase doubt to feel confident; one just needs to take one step despite it.
