I Tried GROW Coaching in My 1:1s. It Cut Them in Half.

by
Susiloharjo

— title: “I Tried GROW Coaching in My 1:1s. It Cut Them in Half.” date: 2026-06-15 blog: SH status: draft needs_review: true approved: 2026-06-15 series: leadership-2 category: leadership tags: [leadership, coaching, engineering-management, 1-on-1, grow-model] wp_slug: grow-coaching-cycle-1on1-leadership meta_description: “I added the GROW coaching model to my 1:1s. The meetings got shorter, the team unblocked themselves, and I finally stopped solving their problems for them.” internal_links: – teaching-ai-like-junior-dev-leadership-4-communication – delegation-failures-5-things-i-stopped-doing-as-a-lead – design-thinking-is-80-percent-theater —

I Tried GROW Coaching in My 1:1s. It Cut Them in Half.

Last week I ran a 1:1 that lasted 12 minutes. The engineer walked out unblocked, with a clear next step, and didn’t ping me for the rest of the day. A month ago, the same engineer would have walked out of a 45-minute 1:1 with a vague “I’ll think about it” and pinged me twice before lunch.

The only thing I changed was the questions I asked. I stopped solving problems in the meeting. I started running them through a 30-year-old coaching framework called GROW — Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward.

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Teaching AI Like a Junior Dev: 4 Leadership 4.0 Moves

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Team collaboration and leadership communication concept

A few weeks back I sat through a corporate leadership training on “the four dimensions of digital leadership.” I went in expecting corporate fluff. I came out realizing something that has been nagging me ever since: the same moves the trainer taught for managing junior engineers are the same moves I keep needing to get an AI to actually understand me. Same pattern, same cost of getting it wrong, same fix.

I was thinking about it over my morning coffee this week: giving instructions to an AI feels exactly like onboarding a junior dev who joined yesterday. Sometimes one sentence lands. Sometimes I explain the same thing three times, slightly differently each time, and the output still comes back wrong. It’s not that the AI is stupid. It’s not that the junior dev is slow. It’s that I might not be a great communicator — and that gap is mine to close, not theirs.

The framework I learned is called Leadership 4.0. It has four dimensions: Freshmen Leader, Technology Leader, Social Leader, and Digital Leader. Used together, they help you diagnose whether the communication gap is on the sender’s side, the receiver’s side, or somewhere in the handoff. Here is how I now use them — at work with junior devs, and at home with my AI assistants.

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How to Fix Linux Menu Icons for Portable Electron Apps

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Linux desktop menu showing an Electron application shortcut with its icon properly rendered beside the system tray

How to Fix Linux Menu Icons for Portable Electron Apps

You downloaded a Linux app as a portable folder or a raw binary — Antigravity IDE, a portable VS Code, a side-loaded Electron tool. You wrote a .desktop file, dropped it in ~/.local/share/applications/, and the app is gone from the menu. The launcher grid shows nothing. The search box finds nothing. You open the .desktop file and the Icon= line points at a perfectly valid PNG discover how 3 bash aliases saved me 10 hours last week, yet the system acts like the icon does not exist learn how to resize your Ubuntu VM disk step by step.

The problem is almost never the icon file. The problem is whitespace in the path.

GNOME, KDE, and most freedesktop-compliant desktop environments parse .desktop files with a config parser that is unusually strict about spaces. A path like /home/ubuntu/Downloads/Antigravity IDE/resources/app/resources/linux/code.png will silently fail to load for two reasons: the unquoted space inside Icon= breaks the parser, and even when the parser survives, the desktop file validator (which runs when update-desktop-database regenerates the cache) treats the entry as malformed and drops it.

I burned an hour on this the first time. The second time I wrote the fix down. This is the four-step version that survives every Electron portable app I have thrown at it.

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I Set 2 Playwright Goals at 4 AM and Both Beat Fajr

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Browser window with Python Playwright code on a desk in the dim light of pre-dawn, a closed Quran beside the keyboard

I Set 2 Playwright Goals at 4 AM and Both Beat Fajr

This Saturday morning I woke up at 4 AM with the kind of half-baked idea that only survives a brain that hasn’t fully booted. I wanted to see if I could give an LLM a real browser three AI code review tools I run before every PR, a goal written in two sentences, and walk away. Not a toy. Not a sandbox. LinkedIn. Tokopedia. The real web, with logins and JavaScript and the kind of DOM that makes scrapers cry learn how rogue AI processes can eat your server.

By the time I finished praying Fajr and closed my Quran, both jobs were done. One returned 23 LinkedIn profiles as structured JSON. The other returned 14 G-Shock listings under Rp 1.000.000 from Jakarta sellers offering instant payment. I had not touched the keyboard.

This is the prompt pattern that made it work — and the three things I almost got wrong.

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5 Things I Stopped Doing as a Lead

by
Susiloharjo

I led a small engineering team for two years. We shipped on time, the code was clean, and the standups were short. By every metric I cared about, the team looked fine. Then three of my best engineers quit within a month. None of them had a single conversation with me before they handed in their notice.

The exit interviews told me what I should have seen earlier. They were not burned out by the work. They were burned out by the way I gave it to them.

I spent the next six months rebuilding how I delegated. I read four books on engineering management. I ran a one-on-one feedback survey every Friday for twelve weeks. I shipped a working team again, and the difference was not subtle.

Here are the five delegation habits I had to kill. If you are a tech lead and any of these feel familiar, the exit interview pattern will too.

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