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Poker Face: Why Founders Learn to Look Certain and Forget How to Fold

Founder Isolation and Decision Quality: why solo certainty degrades founder judgement, and the peer structures that restore it.

Tayyaba Jordan has coached senior leaders for ten years, and the founders who arrive at her door are rarely short of answers; they are short of anyone to test them on. The role trains a founder to appear certain in front of a team, an investor and a board, and she argues that the performance eventually runs the person, until changing a decision feels like an admission rather than a choice. Her Lead Like a Human™ work with founders of seven-figure businesses separates the two: what a leader owes a room in confidence, and what has to be said somewhere else before the next call goes out. She runs the Founder's Performance and Leadership Programme with teams of twenty or fewer in London, Dubai, New York and Singapore, where the founder is usually the only person in the company with no peer above them. Listeners leave with the specific structures that give a founder somewhere honest to think, and the signs that certainty has quietly become a habit rather than a judgement.

About Tayyaba Jordan

Tayyaba Jordan, podcast guest

Leadership and Performance Coach Helping Senior Teams Build Candour, Cohesion, and Human Sustainability

10+ years Coaching and training senior leaders2024 winner Global Woman Innovator of the YearFRSA Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts5 frameworks Named leadership and performance methods

Tayyaba Jordan is a leadership and performance coach who fixes senior-team cohesion, candour, and hidden burnout for CEOs, senior leadership teams and boards.

She got into this work after repeatedly encountering the same corporate patterns that quietly erode performance - slow decisions, mixed leadership signals, fractured communication, and isolated leaders. Raised in a household where her father brought philosophy, psychology and sociology into everyday conversation, she learned early to interrogate dynamics and language; that upbringing shaped her appetite for addressing what is not being said in organisations.

Her practice has developed over a decade of work with senior leaders; she lists ten years coaching senior leaders and holds roles including Executive Performance Coach at Wellness With Me and Leadership & Team Performance Specialist at her own practice. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has worked with organisations such as BBC, Spotify, Deloitte and the Wall Street Journal, and with clients across London, Dubai, New York, Singapore, Norway, Amsterdam, Japan, Iran and Beirut.

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