Connector of Talent and Success 💼 | Empowering Businesses to Thrive through People | Culture Growth Strategist | Coach | Writer | HR leader | #1 LinkedIn Belgium | Top #150 LinkedIn 🌍

Who I help: Ambitious introverts and people-first companies

Problems: Visibility without burnout, quiet leadership, culture that enables deep work

Outcomes: Promotions, role transitions, retention, high-trust cultures

STRATEGIC HR LEADER AND COACH WITH HANDS-ON APPROACH AIMING FOR THE BEST EMPLOYEE/BUSINESS EXPERIENCE - INTROVERT ADVOCATE

International HR Executive passionate about the link between employee experience and business dynamics. Combining a strong focus on strategic thinking and planning with a structured and factual hands-on approach. A positive well connected team coach with a natural sense of empowering team members in a spirit of challenge, learning and mutual recognition. Sound decision making capabilities based on critical reflections within companies focusing on innovation, change, digital transformation and learning.

A. Group HR Director Alter Pharma (200 FTE - BE/IRL/US) – private equity backed firm defining & implementing HR strategy (from strategy to operations) including definition of mission/vision/strategy & values.
B. Global HR Business Partner BU Kerley international/Tessenderlo Group (+/-300 employees - 11 countries) developing/transforming key HR processes (talent resource planning, talent acquisition, performance management, competency management, learning, reward,..) - HR project lead new factory Rouen, France. 
C. Global HR Executive SWIFT (+/- 3.000 employees in +25 countries) transforming/coaching business and HR into new ways of (digital) working/thinking to improve the employee and business experience 
D. Global Head of Reward Tessenderlo Group (+/- 5.000 employees in +25 countries) - strategic development/transformation reward strategy
E. Development new holistic performance management framework for Tessenderlo Group, including full implementation recognition stream.
F. HR Project Manager : move of the Chiquita EME Headquarters from Belgium to Switzerland (social plan negotiations, c&b setup, recruitment, mobility, new policy/process design,...)

Professional coaching certification Better Minds at Work               2018 - 2019
Centre for Creative Leadership - senior leadership program           Q1-2 2018
Management Development Programme Vlerick (17 days)		  2010 - 2011
Strategic Compensation & Benefits Management, Vlerick 		  2007      
Master degree in Law&Taxation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven    1997 - 1998

Steven Claes

This visual stopped me mid-scroll.

Not because it was poetic.
Because it was accurate.

For 20 years as CHRO, I sat across from introverts who apologized for being exactly this.

For needing silence after back-to-back meetings.
For choosing one real conversation over five surface-level ones.
For slipping out before the small talk started.

Last year, a senior director asked me permission to skip the team dinner.

He thought I'd mark him as "not a team player."

I told him I'd been doing the same thing for two decades.

What most people get wrong about us:

They confuse selectivity with coldness.
Solitude with sadness.
Quiet with empty.

All three are dead wrong.

What work actually taught me:

→ Selectivity is a self-management skill
Choosing fewer interactions protects your best thinking. Not coldness.

→ Solitude is a recharge, not a retreat
The best boardroom decisions? Made by someone who sat alone with the problem first.

→ Quiet is not empty. It is focused.
That depth is a career advantage most never develop because they're too busy performing.

The quiet life is not a consolation prize.
It is a chosen one.

And if you are in an introvert's inner circle, know this.
You were not a convenience.
You were a deliberate choice.

That is quiet confidence in action.

Which line on the visual hit you the hardest?

♻️ Repost to help a fellow introvert feel seen

Introversion isn't a bug. It's an operating system. I spent years apologizing for who I am.

Too quiet. Too reserved. Too much "in my head."

I tried to fix myself.
Fake energy. Forced small talk. Endless networking events that drained me by Tuesday.

Then something shifted.

I stopped treating introversion as a bug to fix.
And started seeing it as my operating system.

My quiet? It's deep listening.
My reserved? It's strategic thinking.
My "in my head"? It's where the best ideas live.

20+ years as a CHRO taught me this:
The leaders who know how they're wired outperform those who fight it.

Every time.

So I wrote this on my whiteboard.
As a reminder.
As a declaration.

I'm done apologizing.

And if you've ever felt like you needed to become someone else to succeed, I see you.

♻️ Repost for the introvert in your network who needs to hear this.

📩 These are the daily techniques that helped me stop fighting my wiring:
https://lnkd.in/eSdKpkMs

I bring engineers, innovation teams, and leaders from disengaged to thriving - DM me if this is you 🐲 Techie, Liberator, Complexity Buster, Motivator, Engineering Director @ Novoda

I’m a Head of Engineering who combines hands-on leadership with systems-level leadership development. Alongside my full-time roles, I run a small leadership coaching practice focused on engineering leaders, which strengthens my ability to scale trust, clarity, and impact across organizations.

Sarah G.

I didn’t bring my laptop to Den Bosch.

And it changed everything. 🐉🔥

Today was a workspace day. Not a conference. Not a performance. Just brilliant women building, thinking, talking.

I misunderstood the context of the day.
I thought it was a conference.
It was actually a themed workspace day, with a panel at the end that I’d be part of.

Because I didn’t bring my laptop, I couldn’t hide behind productivity theatre.
So I wrote.
I listened.
I had deep conversations.

And that mistake turned into a gift.

During the Q&A, I felt myself transported back.
Back to when I was a young engineer.
Technically strong. Strategically aware.
But with zero real mandate.

My relational skills were seen as a strength.
I was “good with people.”
I could align teams.
I could read dynamics.

But that became the box.

What many didn’t see was that I led that way because I understood tech strategy.
Architecture trade-offs.
Delivery constraints.
System design.

I wasn’t being relational instead of strategic.
I was being relational because I was strategic.

But here’s the hard part:

I was often responsible for outcomes I didn’t have the authority to shape.
Accountable without real control.

And I observed something.

Whenever conversations moved toward alignment, reflection, or team dynamics, they were gently redirected back to goals and achievements.

Not aggressively.
Just… recalibrated.

I watched how certain men did it.
Calmly moving everything back to results.
Back to measurable success.

And I realized something uncomfortable.

They often felt more worthy in the room.
That internal worth created gravity.

So I learned to redirect too.

If my ideas were reduced to “the soft layer,” I would anchor them directly to results.
Tie culture to delivery.
Link psychological safety to velocity.
Connect alignment to performance.

Not defensively.
Deliberately.

Because influence without mandate requires precision.

You have to know your core.
Your dragons.
Your patterns.
And be deeply okay with your so-called weaknesses.

Only then can you stand in the room and move the conversation back to what matters 
without losing yourself.

Today reminded me how far I’ve come.

No slides.
No armor.
Just presence.

And presence, grounded in self-worth, is influence. 💚🔥🐉

Thank you Team Rockstars IT ! 
Ramona Domen 🔥🔥🔥🔥🐉

Sarah Gruneisen 🐉

Engineering Leadership | Scaling Leaders, Teams & Sustainable Impact | #9 LinkedIn IT & Tech influencer in the NL | #6 LinkedIn Computer Engineering Female Worldwide

No alternative text description for this image

🚲 I’m helping a founder rethink their senior engineering hire. 

Over the last 24 hours I’ve been advising a small but established SaaS company (UK-based, real revenue, real customers) in the cycling space.

Good product.
Strong customer base.
Massive upside.

But like many scale-ups, engineering maturity and delivery confidence need strengthening.

They originally advertised for a “Technical Team Lead.”

After observing stand-up and planning, my instinct is different.

They don’t need hierarchy.
They need ownership.

So I’m looking, through my network, for a genuinely senior engineer who:

• Has 7+ years of experience
• Is hands-on and still enjoys writing code
• Communicates clearly in small teams and with stakeholders 
• Understands architecture and business impact
• Is AI-literate but responsible
• Can raise delivery standards without ego

Stack: Java 21, Spring Boot 3.x, Angular, PostgreSQL, GCP

🌍 Remote (Europe time zone preferred)
✈️ Must be reasonably cost-efficient to travel to the UK periodically
💰 Rate/salary aligned with senior impact (details via DM)

This is not a “title” role.
It’s a stabilise-and-accelerate role.

Small companies cannot afford:
– Poor communicators
– Seniors who want to rewrite everything
– Or AI usage without governance

If someone comes to mind, message me privately.

I’ll introduce strong profiles directly to the founder.

🔥🔥🔥🐉
I haven’t taken a permanent role.
I’m supporting in a fractional CTO capacity, and I remain open to the right long-term opportunity.

AI is helping eccelerate the removal of carbon from the atmosphere???  Tonight I went to an AI Innovators meetup in Weights & Biases in Amsterdam.  Thank you Alessandro Stefouli-Vozza for suggesting it! 

And something unexpected happened.

They started talking about chemists using AI to accelerate carbon removal discovery.

Carbon removal.

Atmospheric chemistry.
Experimental iteration.
Massive combinatorial search.
Scientific method… on steroids.

And I felt 17 again.

Most people here probably don’t know this about me:

In high school I was a chemistry nerd.
County-wide awards.
Lab competitions.
The whole thing.

I originally chose Chemical Engineering as my major @ University of California, Davis  
With a minor in Music and Computer Science.
Yes. I was that person. 🎻🧪💾

And then in my fourth year…
I switched to a major in Computer Science and Engineering and I started on the path of who you know today!

At the time, it felt like a pivot.

Tonight, it felt like a circle closing.

Because what they showed was fascinating:

Instead of running experiments one by one in a physical lab,
AI models simulate thousands, sometimes millions, of molecular combinations.

They predict which compounds might bind carbon efficiently.  Bigger gaps in their structures.
They eliminate dead ends before humans ever touch a pipette.
They massively compress the experimentation cycle.

What used to take years… !!! And SOOOO MUCH PATIENCE which I didn’t always have
can now be narrowed down in weeks.

It’s not replacing scientists.
It’s amplifying the scientific method.

And that’s when I smiled.

Because in my Leadership Leap book I talk about bringing scientific thinking into product and engineering teams.

Hypothesis.
Experiment.
Measure.
Learn.
Adapt.

Not opinion-driven delivery.
Not ego-driven roadmaps.
Not “we’ve always done it this way.”

But structured experimentation aimed to fail! To learn! And magnify impact!!!

AI is doing for chemistry what great product leadership should do for teams:
Increase the speed of validated learning.

The funny thing?

I never really left chemistry.
I just changed laboratories.

From molecules…
to systems.
From compounds…
to teams.
From carbon capture…
to value creation.

PS. I say the same about ART and ENGINEERING btw ;-) all artists!  Different mediums!

And tonight reminded me:

The future belongs to people who understand experimentation.  Dare to be creative!  And have courage to fail toward learning!

Whether you’re removing carbon from the atmosphere
or removing friction from a product.

Or turning a ink blob into a spider’s head ;-) …

Scientific method scales.
Curiosity scales.
Learning velocity scales.

And AI?

It’s just the newest lab assistant.

💚🔥

When I code, I disappear.

Yesterday I started at 11:00.

It was suddenly 23:00.

I forgot lunch.
Forgot to stretch.
Didn’t study Dutch.
Didn’t study Greek.
Skipped yoga.
Didn’t check emails.
Didn’t edit a powerful recording I made with Adrian Stanek last week.
After one hour of client work, I didn’t talk to anyone.

I fell through a portal.

Inside my head is a labyrinth.

Not chaos. Structure.
Systems folding into systems.
Patterns revealing deeper patterns.

Gifted depth is not distraction.
It’s sustained immersion.

And it’s powerful.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Hyperfocus is immersive.
Leadership is interruptive.

You cannot operate both at maximum intensity daily.

Coding requires:
🔥 Long uninterrupted blocks
🔥 Internal simulation of systems
🔥 Cognitive depth

Leadership requires:
🔥 Emotional availability
🔥 Context switching
🔥 Strategic zooming
🔥 Being interruptible

If I code deeply every day, I resent interruptions.
If I lead deeply every day, my technical intuition dulls.

That tension is real.

Now here’s the controversial part:

Engineering leaders should still code.

But they should not own production code.

If you fully detach from craft:
🖤 You forget friction.
🖤 You forget cognitive load.
🖤 You design unrealistic expectations.

If you immerse daily:
🖤 You narrow strategic visibility.
🖤 You reduce space for your team.
🖤 You disappear relationally.

The balance is proximity without ownership.

And none of this works without architecture.

Hyperfocus magnifies direction.
It does not choose direction.

Without a clear North Star, you just build beautiful nonsense faster.

AI amplifies this even more.

AI is incredible.
It accelerates ideation.
It compresses iteration cycles.

But without strong engineering foundations and architectural clarity, AI simply scales confusion.

Acceleration is not architecture.

In the full reflection (linked in the comments), I go deeper into:

🐉 The Dragon of Hyperfocus
🐉 The labyrinth inside the gifted mind
🐉 Why architecture takes longer than wiring
🐉 The leadership cost of disappearing
🐉 The FinOps parallel (local optimization vs global value)
🐉 Why containment, not suppression, is the real discipline

And this is exactly what I explore much more deeply in my book, The Leadership Leap:

💎 North Star clarity
💎 Architecture as leadership
💎 Crafting ways of working that magnify strengths!
💎 Leverage selection
💎 Containing intensity instead of being consumed by it
💎 Building systems that expand expression and impact, not measure worth

📖 Tonight at 18:30 CET, I’ll be reading live from The Leadership Leap, followed by a free Zoom leadership huddle.

If you want to join, comment LIVE and I’ll send you the details.

Let’s talk about depth, leadership, and the discipline of leaving the labyrinth.

🐉🔥

Last night my LinkedIn Live failed and it led to an evolution!

Not a minor glitch.
Duplicate. Delete. Recreate. Refresh.
Clock ticking.

And instead of forcing it, I pivoted.

I merged Spark (my live reading from The Leadership Leap: Now Without Crash Landings) into the Fire huddle.

No broadcast.
Just four humans on Zoom.

Robin calling in from New Zealand.
Sanne.
Phylicia.
And me.

And what unfolded was deeper than any polished livestream would have been.

We didn’t talk about tech.

We talked about elephants.

How do you bring an elephant into the light productively?
How do you address something everyone dances around, especially when you don’t hold authority?
How do you name tension before it becomes behavior?

We went into:

🔥Influence without authority
🔥Group vs one-on-one timing
🔥The ripple effect of micro-interventions
🔥The toxic triangle (destructive behavior, enabling environment, susceptible followers)
🔥Dragons that get loud when unheard
🔥Dragons that hide to stay safe
🔥Dragons that withdraw when misunderstood

We spoke about adoption.
About autonomy.
About misinterpretation.
About creating space instead of force.

The biggest insight?

Leadership isn’t grand gestures.

It’s ripple effects.

One sentence.
One pause.
One courageous question.

And the irony?

The “failure” created a better architecture.  Evolution!!! 

Spark + Fire together.
One arc.
One container.
One hour of real leadership.

In the full blog (linked in the comments), I go deeper into:

💚 The exact Conversation Café flow we used
💚 Practical ways to address elephants without creating war
💚 How to assess safety before speaking
💚 When to speak publicly vs privately
💚 Why small questions change meeting outcomes
💚 And what we concluded about evolving the format

If you want to join next Tuesday’s Spark + Fire, the RSVP link is also in the comments.  I may also create a LinkedIn event but one that leads you to the same RSVP link below ;-)

No scripts.
No cherry-picking pages.
No performance.

Just real leadership work.

Sometimes imperfect.
Always alive.

🔥🐉

Many confuse pattern recognition with understanding. You’re not empathic.
You’re traumatized.

And it might be running your leadership.

Let’s talk about something uncomfortable.

We praise empathy in leaders.
We list it in job descriptions.
We celebrate it in performance reviews.

But what if what we call “empathy” is sometimes just hypervigilance in disguise?

If you grew up walking on eggshells…
If you learned to read moods before words were spoken…
If you can sense tension in a room within seconds…

That’s not automatically emotional intelligence.

That’s survival.

There is a difference between:

🔥 feeling someone’s pain
🔥 understanding someone’s context
🖤 assuming you know their story
🖤 projecting your own wounds onto them

Many leaders confuse pattern recognition with understanding.

You see someone withdraw and think:
“They feel rejected.”

You see someone get sharp and think:
“They feel unsafe.”

You see someone quiet and think:
“They’re ashamed.”

But often?

You are reading your own history into their behavior.

That’s not empathy.
That’s projection with good intentions.

Real empathy is slower.
Quieter.
More disciplined.

It asks:
“What am I assuming?”
“What might I be wrong about?”
“What is actually theirs, and what is mine?”

And here’s the controversial part:

Some of the most “empathic” leaders are actually exhausted because they are over-identifying with everyone around them.

🖤 They absorb.
🖤 They anticipate.
 🖤 They carry.
🖤 They over-function.

And they call it compassion.

But compassion without boundaries becomes control.
Empathy without differentiation becomes entanglement.

Great leadership requires empathy, yes.
But not the kind that erases yourself.

It requires:

💪🏿 Cognitive empathy (I can understand your perspective)
💪🏿 Background empathy (I see your history may shape your reaction)
💪🏿 Regulated empathy (I stay grounded in myself while listening)
💪🏿 Curious empathy (I ask instead of assume)
…

Not emotional fusion.

AND YOU HAVE NOOO IDEA HOW OFTEN LEADERS PROJECTED AND HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS REALLY FEELING OR EXPERIENCING.  Toooo often!

Assuming feelings
Assuming intentions
Assuming abilities …

In my latest blog, I unpack this deeply, including the different types of empathy leaders confuse, how trauma masks itself as “high emotional intelligence,” and why curiosity is the real leadership muscle.

And in my book, I go even further, with deep explanations of 13 types of empathy and how you can stretch these muscles healthily, and I go into the layers beneath behavior:
values, convictions, nervous system patterns, and the dragons we carry from childhood that shape how we lead today.

Because leadership doesn’t start with others.
It starts with understanding what is actually driving you.

If this resonates, even a little,
the full article is in the comments.
And the book goes much deeper into this exact tension.

Curious to hear your perspective:

Have you ever mistaken hyper-awareness for empathy?

Most people are not bad leaders.

They are mismanaged dragons.

Let me say something uncomfortable.

The “impatience” you try to suppress?
The intensity you tone down?
The urgency you apologize for?

That might be your genius.

We live in cultures, especially in tech, where calm equals competent.
Where speed is tolerated, but only if it looks polished.
Where emotional fire must be hidden behind Jira tickets and OKRs.

So we learn to mute ourselves.

I see it all the time.

Senior engineers who think their drive is aggression.
Future leaders who believe their intensity is a liability.
High performers who are praised for output but subtly corrected for energy.

And then they burn out.
Or shrink.
Or stay “senior” forever.

Guilherme almost did.

Brilliant frontend engineer.
Already operating beyond his role.
Already carrying team gaps no one asked him to carry.

But he didn’t see himself as a leader.

He saw managers as a block.
A role.
A title.

Not as humans with styles, fears, values, and dragons.

The shift didn’t come from learning more frameworks.
It came from understanding this:

You cannot influence others if you are afraid of your own fire.

Impatience is not the problem.
Unintegrated impatience is.

When you don’t understand your dragons, you either:

🖤 Suppress them
🖤 Weaponize them
🖤 Or project them

But when you sit with them,
when you breathe instead of react,
they become power.

His impatience became clarity.
His intensity became direction.
His sensitivity became empathy.
His overthinking became strategic depth.

He didn’t become softer.

He became grounded.

And that grounding made him recognizable.

Not louder.
Recognizable.

That’s the difference between a senior engineer
and a team captain.

Not authority.

Presence.

Not control.

Self-awareness.

This is why I don’t teach leadership as a skill set.
I teach it as integration.

Because the world doesn’t need more leaders who can “manage.”
It needs leaders who know their dragons well enough
not to burn the room down.

If this resonates, read the full reflection in the comments.
I also linked the full YouTube interview and the detailed use case page.

And if you’re quietly carrying fire you’ve been told to suppress

Maybe it’s time to stop calling it a flaw.

🐉

💚🔥🐉 This weekend blessing is personal. 

Because I am in a dip.

Professionally.
Romantically.
Financially.

The kind of dip where the ground feels less stable than you would like to admit.

Where you desire not just affection, but alignment, a shared life built on values, depth, and mutual choosing.

Where you smile in meetings but lie awake at night calculating numbers.

Where your competence is intact, but your certainty is not.

And I want to say this out loud:

Even as a leadership trainer.
Even as someone who teaches resilience.
Even as someone who writes about courage.


I am not immune to valleys.

There are moments I feel the old dragons whispering 

“Maybe you miscalculated.” 🐉  
“Maybe you’re too much.” 🐉
“Maybe you should have chosen differently.” 🐉

And yet.

Life-long adversity has taught me something powerful.

I bend.
But I do not quit.

I have rebuilt before.

I have started over before.
I have stood in rooms where I felt underestimated and still carved my place.
I have loved deeply and survived heartbreak.
I have faced financial fear and found my way through.

Resilience is not loud.
It is not a motivational quote.

It is a quiet decision made again and again:
I will not abandon myself.

And here’s something I’ve learned about “manifesting opportunities.”
Some people seem to attract them constantly.

But I don’t believe it’s magic.

I believe it’s the eyes.

When you have walked through enough darkness and kept your integrity, your eyes change.

You start seeing what others miss.
You recognize openings disguised as disruptions.
You sense alignment where others see chaos.

I am reminding myself of this right now.

The dip is uncomfortable.
It is humbling.
It is stretching me.

But it may also be positioning me.
I may not see the full path yet.

But I trust the version of me who has survived every previous storm.

🐉 A dragon in the valley does not forget it can fly.
It simply waits for the right current of air.

If you are in a dip too,
professionally, romantically, financially, emotionally ..

You are not weak.
You are in a chapter.

May this weekend bring steadiness.
May your eyes stay open to what is quietly forming.
May you remember that resilience is not the absence of fear,
it is hope that refuses to die.

I am still here.
Still standing.
Still believing.

And so are you. 💚🔥🐉

Adrian Stanek talks about how discipline can be born from awakening… but what I also saw between the lines, was how it also can quietly be fueled by fear.

Adrian Stanek tells a story many leaders quietly recognize:

🔥 The obedient apprentice
🔥 The ego-driven “bad boss”
🔥 The emotionally reactive manager
🔥 The disciplined stoic

On the surface, it’s a transformation story about control.

But underneath?

It’s a story about identity.

About what happens when you try to control others because you haven’t yet learned to control yourself.

About how discipline can be born from awakening…
but also quietly fueled by fear.

He unpacks:

🔥 Why high performers often start as people-pleasers
🔥 How control masquerades as leadership
🔥 Why losing employees can be the wake-up call
🔥 The difference between authority and influence
🔥 What “turning pro” really means
🔥 Why discipline is not the same as integration
🔥 How leadership shifts when you stop obeying external agendas

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Many leaders believe growth ends at discipline.

It doesn’t.

Discipline stabilizes you.

It does not integrate you.

In the full conversation, something else happens.

A deeper layer surfaces.

A word.

A hesitation.

An identity wound.

That’s where real leadership work begins.

But you won’t see it unless you’re watching for it.

Watch for:

Where energy shifts.
Where philosophy becomes protection.
Where control tightens.
Where something softer is trying to surface.

That’s leadership.

Not the frameworks.

Not the productivity hacks.

The moment someone sees themselves 
and doesn’t look away.

And if this conversation resonates, you’ll find the full framework inside:

📖 The Leadership Leap: Now Without Crash Landings
Where I break down:
❤️‍🔥 Inner resistance
❤️‍🔥 Discipline vs. integration
❤️‍🔥 Identity-driven leadership
❤️‍🔥 How unconscious fear shapes team culture
❤️‍🔥 Why stoicism without self-compassion becomes armor

And if you want to do this work live, not just read about it …

🔥 The Leadership Landing
12 sessions.
Identity before execution.
Integration before strategy.
Because you cannot lead beyond the dragons you refuse to face.

Please join us for an unforgettable event. We're planning something you won't want to miss, and we hope to see you there.
 
RS TONIGHT: Spark & Fire
Every Tuesday from 6:30-7:00 PM CET

I open a completely random page (1-763) of The Leadership Leap: Now Without Crash Landings and read it live.
No script.
No cherry-picking.
No performance.
Just whatever page finds us.
 
We reflect together on what it means for real leadership.
Real systems.
Real courage.
 
This is the Spark.
And it is intentional.
 
Because reflection without integration fades.
 
If you want to go deeper after the reading, join The Fire from 7:00-8:00 PM CET: a facilitated leadership campfire huddle where we unpack what surfaced and translate insight into action.
 
Spark → Awareness.
Fire → Integration.
Come for the Spark.
Stay if you’re ready for the Fire.
 
Your leadership grows when insight meets courage.
See you tonight.

RSVP:

Open article: The Fire: Leadership Campfire Huddle by avagasso.com

Who will I see in Den Bosch on Thursday? ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥🐉

Founder & owner Team Rockstars IT / Executive boardmember / Head of AI

If you’re a woman working in IT in the Netherlands, you’ll know there’s a good chance that in your team, at the office, or at a conference, you’ll mostly find yourself surrounded by male colleagues. Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with working with men ☺️ , but a change of scenery can do wonders from time to time.

That’s why next week Thursday, February 26, we’re hosting another She’s an IT Rockstar office take‑over!

This time we’re working in Den Bosch with a women‑only group. Everyone just does their own work, but with a great group of women around you to brainstorm with, laugh with, and learn from. And of course, we want to be treated like Rockstars, so you can sign up for a massage, a boxing clinic, or get your nails done.

To wrap up the day, we’ll have an informal panel discussion with Mirjam van Olst, Sarah Gruneisen 🐉, and myself about leadership. Special shout-out to the wonderful Ramona Domen & Maarten Boer for organizing this day! 

We still have a few spots available, so if you identify as female and would like to join, feel free to stop by and send me a DM!

🔥 Gather by the Virtual Fire, Let’s Spark & Ignite Together! 🔥

This evening, Tuesday, March 3rd at 19:00 CET, we’re gathering for a moment that’s equal parts ritual, reflection, and real leadership practice: The Spark & Fire: Leadership Campfire Huddle on Zoom.

This isn’t just another call. It’s a leadership ritual with meaning, momentum, and mystery.

📖 Here’s how it unfolds:
The Spark begins at with a live, random page reading from The Leadership Leap: Now Without Crash Landings, page 1 through 763, no cherry-picking, no editing, just whatever page finds us.

Just like real leadership, we don’t script every moment, we meet what’s here and make sense of it together.

🔥 From there, we step into The Fire: a facilitated campfire huddle where what surfaced in the Spark moves from idea to insight to courage. Reflection becomes action. Awareness becomes integration.

This structure mirrors the journey inside The Leadership Leap, where leaders learn to take courageous leaps through awareness, trust, empathy, and systems thinking.

✨ What awaits in the pages we might touch tomorrow:

The inner ascent: from self-awareness to self-leadership (Vol. I, Chapters 1-11)

Leading with fire: trust, boundaries, motivation, and courageous impact (Vol. II, Chapters 12-20)

There’s no roadmap for leadership that doesn’t respect uncertainty, and that’s exactly why this ritual works. When we let the book speak, and then talk about what it awakens in us, leaders show up fully: real, raw, and ready to grow.


📅 When: 03 March 2026, 19:00-20:00 CET
📍 Where: Zoom (details on the RSVP page - link in the comments section)

Whether you’re early in your leadership journey or you’ve been stewarding teams and systems for years, this space is for anyone who isn’t satisfied with surface-level leadership talk, it’s for leaders who want courage over comfort.

Come for the Spark. Stay for the Fire.

Let’s see what the book (and each other) reveals tomorrow night.

🐉💛 See you by the fire. 💛🐉

taplio

The Battle

Steven Claes

Sarah G.

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taplio

The Battle

Steven Claes

Sarah G.

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Steven Claes's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSarah G.'s LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSteven Claes's LinkedIn Performance