By: Maria Williams
Maja (Maya) Caplette, founder of Glu Consultants, is a business development specialist who coaches technology company executives to reach their full potential by leveraging the power of collaboration. But, she did not always want to be an entrepreneur. Her position as a reluctant visionary, the coach behind the success of business leaders and their teams, arrives after decades of reckless decisions and hard work.
Maya comes from an underprivileged yet entrepreneurial family in Poland. She was brought up to be a free thinker and always knew what she wanted to do – which was not to follow in anyone else’s footsteps. However, at the age of thirteen a series of tragedies befell her that would change the trajectory of her life from then on. When she lost her father to cancer, her mother had to pick up the pieces, juggling taking care of three young children while maintaining the family business. She lived life for everyone but herself, in complete survival mode, and it left her exhausted. Maya’s mother passed away soon after.
At that point, Maya was sure she would never stray anywhere near entrepreneurship. Maya’s path to her eventual and enormous success was long and winding, “I feel like I’ve lived three lives,” she says. She had wanted to travel the world since the age of 9 and was always an extremely curious person. During her time at university studying telecommunications, Maya saw an opportunity to study abroad and she grabbed it with all her might.
Over the course of fifteen years, she went from London to France where she achieved her MBA at INSEAD, funding her education herself and learning languages from scratch. Then, Maya told her family she was moving to Australia to embark on an adventure that would change the trajectory of her future. “It was like I told them I was going to the moon,” she recalls.
As she moved from company to company working in sales and product management, she experienced and observed many issues with how teams are organized. Maya reflects, “I realized I was on the highway to burnout unless I changed my life right away. And that this wasn’t a unique experience.”
She was frustrated by the sheer lack of collaboration that occurred within teams, making it difficult to come up with solutions that were truly novel and useful. This led to unfulfillment and feelings that her labor went to waste in the organizations she worked in. On the other side, Maya saw firsthand the power that an intentionally designed team could have – not only on the individual members but the company’s overall success. For Maya and other successful leaders, collaboration and a sense of belonging are what make employees ‘really stick together.’
When a friend introduced her to the world of performance coaching through a TV show character, Maya knew she had finally found her calling and began defining her direction right at that moment. She began a decade of self-education about the neuroscience of business and leadership. “I went from IT architecture to the architecture of the brain,” she says.
Although she found success in directly coaching individuals, Maya discovered that change is truly a top-down process. When organizations attempt to implement change without the full support of their leadership, any improvements eventually fall to the wayside because it is not institutionalized. When leaders outsource their leadership without thought, change becomes merely momentary, and all the work Maya and her clients put in goes to waste.
This was the final piece of her puzzle. Maya founded Glu to emphasize the importance of collaboration directly with the people who could affect the most change: managers, founders, and executives. Recognized as one of the top 15 executive coaches in Paris, Maya focuses on leaders who provide their teams with everything but the glue to succeed.
Glu aims to aid leaders who are undergoing life changes and feel stuck in ‘hard-working, small impact’ loops that lead to stagnant growth. Maya provides services that analyze current structures to enhance leaders’ natural zones of genius and amplify the organization, productivity, and efficiency of teams. Glu seeks to progress leadership within companies, using neuropsychologically-backed methods to transform burnout, self-doubt, and ruts into leaders who have conviction, humility, foresight, and a complete set of tools to assist their teams whenever needed.
Glu Consultants empowers leaders to find their best selves by diving into the potential of their teams, because ‘No one is successful alone,’ as their slogan declares. Maya is committed to cultivating her clients’ companies by embedding this message across the industry, “In that moment of shattered confidence, you can turn your weaknesses into your strengths by choosing the next step with conviction. When you know where you want to go, your team follows suit.”
Published By: Aize Perez
