Listen to Noomii's interview with Alexander Lesnevskiy

About Me

Curiosity has always been a driving force for me—persistent, sometimes inconvenient, but ultimately generative. I’ve often wondered whether it’s something to contain or to follow. So far, it has led me to meaningful work and solid achievements, and I’m inclined to keep trusting it.
Here’s the journey, in brief:
Software engineer
Business analyst
Church choir singer
Project manager
CTO
University professor with a PhD in Educational Technology
Agile coach
Psychodynamic Leadership Coach
And, last but certainly not least, the father of three children.
At some point in time I became interested in psychoanalysis in organisational context. I've enrolled in the programme with seductive name "Psychoanalysis and business consultancy”. One of our professors was Manfred Kets de Vries from INSEAD, who was also one of the inventors of psychoanalytic coaching. I was impressed by his definition of a leader: the leader in a gorilla's horde is the one who goes to look for bananas…
My master's thesis - “Interpretation in psychoanalytic coaching” reflects my aspiration to dive deeper into the inner world of a client in order to ignite favourable changes in their psyche. The behaviour will follow, of course.
As an Agile coach, I’ve worked in organizations of vastly different sizes and cultures—from large institutions like Sberbank to startups such as Minimovie and Pipedrive. In larger, more bureaucratic environments, the culture often shapes leadership behavior in subtle but powerful ways. Leaders can find themselves absorbed in what Kegan and Lahey describe as a “second job” in Deliberately Developmental Organizations—put plainly, managing risk and protecting themselves.
I dare say that answers like “I want to help…”, “I want to inspire…”, are not the honest ones. I believe that honest answers originate from one's true self and are conceived in the depths of narcissistic satisfaction, when you do what you love both from the process and from the outcome.