How MINDS Coaching & Consulting Guides Executives Through Uncertainty – Interview with Iryna Vilgash

Iryna Vilgash is the founder and CEO of a leadership company, MINDS Coaching & Consulting, and a study abroad agency, Wake Up, based in Kyiv, Ukraine, and well-positioned for global collaboration. Her world-recognized coaching qualification is ILM Level 7 (Master's equivalent) in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, Ofqual regulated (the UK).

Before starting her first business in 2014, Iryna Vilgash was a key player in corporate sales, insurance, and commercial property sectors for nearly a decade. She is quite assertive to stand out as an authentic voice providing leadership solutions, transformational learning, and career enhancement both in Ukraine and worldwide.

Iryna Vilgash, Founder & CEO / Qualified Executive Coach

You founded MINDS Coaching & Consulting in Kyiv during wartime, what did leadership look like for you in that moment?

Before February 2022, I was running two education businesses in Kyiv, including a global education company with two offices, international clients, and partners worldwide. After leading my business through COVID-19, I believed I understood resilience and uncertainty. I was even preparing to scale internationally, exploring opportunities in Dubai inspired by Expo 2020.

Then the full-scale war began. I had to leave my countryside home near Kyiv, only five kilometres from occupied territory. All plans stopped overnight. For almost three months, I felt personally and professionally suspended, unable to move forward.

What changed everything was my team. They were educated, internationally minded professionals, and almost 90% chose to stay in Ukraine. As soon as I returned home in May 2022, many of them asked me to keep the business going because it gave them a sense of purpose and helped them feel needed during those terrifying times. They were even willing to reconsider the terms of cooperation and accept significantly reduced compensation temporarily. What mattered most to them was a sense of belonging and the opportunity to continue doing what they were best at.

That was my breakthrough moment. I understood that leadership is not only about strategy, growth, or performance. In crisis, leadership becomes ownership, taking responsibility for the direction you hold, the atmosphere you create, and the dignity you help people preserve.

MINDS Coaching & Consulting was born from that experience in July 2022. For me, leadership is revealed when uncertainty is high and people still need courage, purpose, and a way forward.

What do senior leaders typically misunderstand about their own effectiveness when they first come into coaching with you?

Many senior leaders come into coaching believing that their effectiveness is based on networking, knowledge, experience, expertise, and past achievements. These qualities matter, but they do not automatically translate into leadership impact.

Very often, the real issue is how a leader thinks, decides, communicates, and moves people into action. Some leaders are highly capable, but they overanalyse. Some avoid risk. Others remain too close to execution and do not fully step into the leadership space where vision, ownership, and strategic contribution are required.

They may underestimate how strongly their decisions affect the whole system. If a leader hesitates, the organisation slows down. If the direction is unclear, the team loses focus.

I see a similar pattern with entrepreneurs and start-up founders. Many have strong ideas, energy, and ambition, but they are still developing the entrepreneurial mindset required for scale. They may focus heavily on the product, opportunity, or growth stage, while paying less attention to decision discipline, resilience, and responsibility for risk.

In my view, many senior leaders need to strengthen the quality of their leadership decisions and their ability to take bold, responsible initiative. In a world shaped by uncertainty and pressure since COVID-19, completing tasks or following a plan is no longer enough. Leadership today requires judgement, courage, and the capacity to move people forward when the path is not fully clear.

How does your background in high-stakes insurance shape the way you approach risk and decision-making with executives today?

Working in corporate insurance, especially with aviation risks, bancassurance, and medical insurance, taught me to approach decision-making through a very practical lens. Every decision had to consider several layers at once, security data, legal requirements across local and international markets, underwriters’ instructions, reinsurance policies, company risk exposure, commercial interests, and client needs.

It was a highly competitive, demanding, and often male-dominated market, and it became one of the most formative periods of my professional life. It trained me to think strategically, assess risk deeply, maintain a helicopter view, and still take concrete action.

That experience strongly shapes the way I work with executives today. I do not see risk as something to avoid. I see it as something to understand, structure, communicate, and manage. Strong leaders need the ability to make high-stakes decisions without becoming paralysed by uncertainty.

For me, every decision, action, and even the avoidance of action has a cost. It affects money, reputation, trust, performance, and long-term business value. That is why I help leaders strengthen their judgement and connect decisions with measurable impact.

Confidentiality is also essential. My insurance background made me deeply respectful of discretion, responsibility, and trust.

From your experience in the Ukraine Rebuilding Task Force, where do you see the biggest gap between funding and actual leadership capability?

The biggest gap is the ability to translate strong capability into internationally trusted execution. Ukraine has talent, courage, and technical excellence. The challenge is not capability itself. The challenge is converting that capability into clear leadership structures, transparent governance, risk ownership, and measurable delivery.

Donors, investors, and global partners do not fund potential alone. They need confidence that a project can be governed, communicated, and executed according to international expectations. Funding becomes effective only when leadership systems are strong enough to turn resources into outcomes.

This is where many strong Ukrainian initiatives can lose momentum. The idea may be powerful and the team may be highly capable, but if the leadership narrative is unclear, responsibilities are not structured, or risks are not communicated with confidence, international partners may hesitate.

For Ukraine, this challenge is especially demanding because we are building global trust and execution capacity while operating under the pressure of war. In my view, the real leadership task is to make Ukrainian capability visible, structured, and trusted enough to attract funding and turn it into measurable rebuilding outcomes.

How is leadership evolving in organisations that are operating under constant uncertainty or crisis conditions?

Leadership is moving away from control-based management towards more adaptive, self-aware, and ownership-driven leadership. Rigid leadership exhausts both the leader and the organisation. When leadership is built on control, fear, or fixed thinking, a company may continue operating for a while, but it gradually loses speed, creativity, and trust. People become dependent on approval, talent becomes drained, and culture can shift into blame, defensiveness, and avoidance of responsibility.

Adaptive leadership starts with the leader’s own awareness. The strongest leaders I see today are becoming more context-aware. They understand that what worked before may no longer work in a changed environment. They develop mental agility, emotional discipline, and the ability to adjust without losing direction.

They also become more human-centred in a strategic sense. They understand that credibility, accountability, psychological safety, and clear communication directly affect decision speed, execution quality, and organisational resilience.

In crisis conditions, this shift is critical. Leadership becomes less reactive and more deliberate. Performance becomes less dependent on control and more connected to clarity, ownership, trust, and the ability to make decisions when conditions are uncertain.

What is one shift a leader can make immediately to build a more resilient and high-performing team?

One immediate shift is to move from blame to responsibility for the next action. Blame weakens resilience because people start protecting themselves instead of solving the problem. They hide risks, delay difficult conversations, and wait for someone else to decide.

In strong teams, leaders do not excuse mistakes, and they do not turn them into personal attacks. They examine what happened with discipline and ask, "Where did the process fail? What decision was missing? What needs to change now? Who will take the next step?"

This changes the team’s behaviour. People become more willing to raise problems early, speak honestly, make decisions, and correct mistakes before they grow into larger issues. Commitment becomes clearer because the focus moves from defending the past to improving what happens next.

A resilient, high-performing team is not a team that avoids mistakes. It is a team that can face reality quickly, learn without defensiveness, agree on clear next steps, and connect responsibility to measurable performance indicators and reward systems. When people know what they are accountable for, how performance is measured, and what behaviours are recognised, accountability becomes visible in execution, not just discussed as a value.

How do you help leaders balance performance expectations with personal wellbeing without compromising either?

I help leaders balance performance expectations with personal wellbeing by reframing balance as a leadership capability, not a compromise. In my work, the issue is often not lack of ambition, discipline, or resilience. It is how leaders operate under pressure. Some confuse performance with constant activity, overcontrol, and external validation. Others delay execution because of overanalysis, hidden assumptions, fear of loss, or resistance to feedback.

We start by defining what balance means for them personally, what gives them energy, what drains it, and how their current way of performing affects decisions, relationships, quality of life, and business outcomes.

Two client cases illustrate patterns I see often. A senior marketing executive was caught in busy work, guilt, overthinking, and dependence on external validation. Coaching helped her separate motion from real impact and shift towards clearer priorities, stronger boundaries, and more intentional decisions.

A senior banking professional was trapped in analysis-led hesitation. Once we identified the real drivers behind delayed execution, we built a practical execution system. Within the first week, he gained much clearer control over how his working time was being used and began moving from hesitation into structured delivery.

Across these and other cases, performance became more sustainable because it was no longer driven by pressure alone. It came from clarity, self-regulation, and conscious effectiveness.

You often speak about self-actualisation, what does that look like in practice for an executive leading an organisation?

For me, self-actualisation means bringing inner potential into action by recognising and working through the patterns that limit performance.

For an executive, it begins with self-awareness, understanding what drives their decisions, where resistance appears, and how pressure, control, fear of judgement, or the need for validation influence the way they lead.

In practice, self-actualisation looks like mature, authentic leadership. It means making responsible choices instead of reactive ones, separating ego from decision-making, and aligning personal values with behaviour, organisational priorities, and measurable impact.

A self-actualised executive does not simply perform well as an individual. They create conditions where others can think clearly, take responsibility, contribute their strengths, and execute with purpose. That is where personal growth becomes organisational performance.

If leadership is the foundation of rebuilding, what kind of leaders does the future demand most?

The future demands leaders who can rebuild more than organisations. They must rebuild trust, dignity, capability, and belief in what is possible. But belief alone is not enough. Rebuilding requires leaders who can make bold decisions under uncertainty, take responsibility before conditions are perfect, and create systems where people can contribute, execute, and grow.

The leaders most needed now are those who combine humanity with discipline. They can hold vision and reality at the same time, align people around meaningful priorities, and turn recovery into measurable progress.

This is especially important in international leadership. The future needs leaders with a strong narrative, people who can connect local realities with global expectations, build trust across cultures, and unite teams, partners, and institutions around a shared direction.

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