Kwame Mensah

My career in engineering went like most ambitious careers go in this industry: I was hired into a junior role, I did strong work, I moved companies once or twice for compensation jumps, I was promoted through the senior engineer band, I made staff, I was asked to go into management, I went into management, I made it to senior manager and then director. Fourteen years from start to director. On paper, that is a clean trajectory. The actual experience was a series of small decisions, most of them made in isolation, almost none of which I had been prepared for.

What I wish I had known: the technical work was almost never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was always the same — managing the politics of being read as either too ambitious or not ambitious enough, depending on the day and the room. The visibility work — making sure leadership could see what I was doing and could attribute it to me rather than to my team — was a discipline I had to build from scratch in my late twenties. The promotion narratives I wrote for myself were the single highest-leverage piece of writing I did each year. None of this was taught at the university where I studied.

I now coach brothers in the engineering ladder. My typical client is a Black engineer at L5 or L6 — senior or staff track — who has been told for three years that they are 'almost there' for the next promotion and is starting to wonder whether the promotion is going to come. I have seen this pattern dozens of times. The pattern is not always solvable. Sometimes the company is not going to promote the brother, regardless of how good he is, and the right move is to leave. Sometimes the company will promote, but the brother is missing a specific piece of the visibility work and we can build it together over six to nine months.

The work I do is structured. The first call is a free intro call — we use it to figure out whether I am the right coach for the brother and the situation. If we decide to work together, we set up biweekly hour-long sessions with structured homework between them. The homework is real — writing exercises, conversation scripts to practice with peers, the rebuilding of the brother's self-assessment document, the drafting of a strategic plan for the next twelve to twenty-four months. I am not the coach for brothers who want validation. I am the coach for brothers who want to do the actual work.

I also coach brothers leaving the corporate world. The decision to go independent — to start a consulting practice, to take a sabbatical, to build a company — is one I have made myself and one I have helped many brothers think through. The decision is rarely as clean as the brothers in the early phase of it believe. The numbers have to work. The relationship pieces have to work. The brother's identity outside of his title has to be settled enough to survive the first year or two when the title is gone and the work is harder than it was on salary.

I work primarily with brothers in the U.S. and Canada, though I have clients in the U.K. and continental Europe. All sessions are remote. My rates reflect senior coaching in this industry. I keep a small sliding-scale list for brothers who would otherwise not be able to afford the work — write me directly and we will figure it out. I am slow to respond — I am running this practice alongside a small set of other commitments — but I do respond. If you are considering reaching out, do.