About Jan Paul Grollé

Who I work with now

I coach venture leadership teams directly. I also train non-executive directors and aspiring board members of scale-ups, using a case I built for it: four parts, each one mapping the challenges a company hits at a specific growth stage. I've now run it with 22 cohorts and over 300 people. The case sets up the typical events at each stage, but the real work is the posture a leader brings to the table.

How I work

Facilitator or operator? Both. I use systemic team coaching to change how you meet each other, and growth-stage experience to make the right process and role moves at the right time.

What you can expect:

Roles are clear, handoffs are clean.
Conflict becomes productive polarity: speed ↔ sustainability, vision ↔ operations.
Decisions get made at the right level, at the right pace.
Curiosity over ego, visible in how you meet each other.
A concrete path over your next growth edge, people and process.

My stance, and why it works: I assume good intentions until shown otherwise. I challenge directly and support strongly. We design explicit team agreements and build visible habits. I won't collude with ego, including yours.

If you want a cheerleader, I'm not it. If you want a partner who helps your team meet each other better and move faster, let's talk.

Rebuilding while it ran

I spent over twenty years at Reed Elsevier, known today as RELX, then and now the most valuable publisher in the world. That whole career was one long transformation, the kind of ground-up reinvention driving most of the ventures I coach today. I was known for ideas, and for getting them funded, not for commercial or managerial polish.

I sat on the global board of its scientific publishing division, alongside former top strategy consultants and PhDs who'd left academia, the level of scrutiny I got used to working under, and still the bar I hold myself, and my clients, to. Publishing was among the first industries the internet disrupted, and from the nineties on we had to rebuild nearly everything: how content was made, sold, and delivered. Getting attention for a new idea in that environment meant building a track record of pitching big bets and winning real budget behind them, sometimes several million at a time, from executives who believed in the idea as much as I did.

Ideas were never the hard part

I lived this inside a large, established company, with real stakes on the table, not watching from outside as a consultant or investor, and not building from a blank slate as a founder. Nothing I ran ended up looking like the plan we'd funded, and I learned to stop expecting it to.

Consultants and investors mostly watch innovation happen from the outside. Founders usually build from a blank slate, with no existing organisation's weight to push against. I had real revenue to protect and real internal politics to survive, much closer to what a leadership team faces once their own company starts carrying that same weight. In practice, that meant a technical problem nobody foresaw, customers who said yes in the room and no with their budget, an impossible trade-off between protecting the core business and building something new. I also learned to respect the people I used to be impatient with, the ones running operations and finance, holding the line on what already worked. Good leadership needs both, chasing new things and protecting what works, and most of the friction I coach around now is the two sides not realising they need each other.

From mentoring to coaching

I left twelve years ago, once I'd seen a public company's ceiling on real innovation, and started mentoring startup founders. Founders would come to me and say, "Mentor A told me X, Mentor B told me the opposite. What do I do?"

Mentoring startup founders led to running a couple of accelerator programmes, including managing their mentor pools. The mentors most in demand with founders were the serial entrepreneurs: people who'd actually built something before. But I kept watching them do the same thing: project their own path onto someone else's business. My answer to founders was always some version of: that's your call to make, not theirs. That's where I actually found coaching, not mentoring. Mentoring hands over somebody else's playbook. Coaching means bringing structure, pattern recognition, and a direct outside view to a decision that's still yours to make, and pushing back when I see something you don't.

What breaks the growth barrier

Most of what stalls a growing team comes down to two things: how people actually meet each other, and whether priorities are clear enough to move fast on. Both trace back to training and experience I built deliberately.

I trained in two disciplines that heavily influenced how I work. Individual coaching (Co-Active) taught me that the real decision-making often isn't happening in someone's head. It's in the body, the gut, before it ever gets to logic. I've seen a single session shift something years of thinking hadn't moved.

Systemic team coaching (ORSC, Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching) treats the team itself, not any one person in it, as the client. A team has an identity of its own, and that identity often decides more than the strategy or the plan does. I'm naturally left-brained myself, and it took real, repeated evidence to convince me, but I've never coached a team that didn't, eventually, see it too. From that moment, change can happen quickly. I'm currently certifying for the International Coaching Federation's Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC) to go deeper into this speciality.

In practice, that means I don't just work with the people, I work with the pattern between them. A team that keeps circling back to the same unresolved argument, no matter who's actually in the room, is telling you something about the system, not about any one person's stubbornness. A team whose whole energy shifts the moment one particular person steps out is the same thing: the system reacting to a role, not a personality. Coach only the individuals and you can fix this person's tone or that person's confidence, and watch the pattern turn up again with someone else in the same seat. Coach the system, and the pattern becomes something the team can name, see coming, and choose differently, which is usually the actual unlock, not any one person's growth. There's more on how ORSC itself works on its own page, if you want the fuller picture.

Growth-stage pattern recognition is the other half of how I work. A scale-up's crises, the leadership crisis of the early days, the loss of alignment as it professionalises, the second wave of friction once it scales again, are far more predictable than founders expect. That's what lets me get to the real issue fast: I'm rarely surprised by what a leadership team is stuck on.

Recognising the pattern is only the diagnosis. A team that looks stuck on delegation, for instance, is often actually in the autonomy crisis: people were given titles but never an actual system for managing, so authority quietly reverts to the founder by default. Naming which crisis a team is actually in changes what's worth trying first, but what actually shifts it still has to be built with that specific team, around their history, their people, and how they already work together, not a template applied the same way twice. The full map, all four crises and what each one calls for, is on its own page.

What I recognise in a lot of the leaders I coach is the trap of their own early success: the instinct that got them here was to have the answer and take the lead, and now everyone still expects that of them, in every decision, at a scale where no one person can actually hold it all. I see the same instinct at the board table, non-executive directors who still need to be heard and be right before the group gets to a shared understanding of what's actually happening.