Deb Caulet: Essential Leadership Skills for the Age of AI

About this episode

Deborah Caulet discusses essential leadership skills in the context of AI and personal development.

What happens in the gap between updating your LinkedIn title and actually knowing how to do the job? Caitlin sits down with Deborah Caulet—leadership coach, former VP of People at Blinkist, and someone who's spent 15 years helping leaders figure out what they're doing (and why they feel like they aren't doing it right!). Deb works with first-time managers and founders at growing startups, coaching them through the messy, humbling transition from high-performing individual contributor to someone whose job is to make other people shine. It's an identity shift, she says—and your sense of self has to catch up. They get into the classic traps: the leader who becomes their own bottleneck because delegating feels slower than just doing it, the difficult conversation that gets avoided for weeks because the anticipation is worse than the thing itself, and the imposter syndrome that 85% of professionals have felt at some point. Deb shares her CLEAR framework for navigating hard feedback conversations, and there's a thread about what it actually means to be kind versus nice at work — and why the difference matters more than you'd think. There's also a moment about AI's role in leadership…

People in this episode

Host: Caitlin

Guest: Deborah Caulet

Topics covered

• leadership
• AI
• coaching
• imposter syndrome
• feedback
• personal development

Keywords

• leadership skills
• AI in leadership
• coaching
• imposter syndrome
• feedback conversations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Blinkist

Books & works: Work Rules!

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