By Deep Work Club · Last updated: October 2026 · 8 minute read
Many leaders in startups have nobody to talk to about the leadership questions that actually keep them up. The founders are busy, the other leads are busy, and admitting that you have been putting off a conversation feels risky. This article explains what peer learning for leaders is, why a group carries more than a single coach, why nobody hands out advice, and how a session runs. It draws on episode 7 of the Deep Talk podcast, in which Lea Mersch, psychologist and psychotherapist, and Till Westermann introduce the Leadership Circle.
Key takeaways
Peer learning means leaders in comparable roles learn from each other on real, current cases, not textbook examples.
The strongest effect is often the first one: realising others go through the same thing. Group therapy research calls it universality.
The format has no advice, only shared experience. Unsolicited advice triggers self-justification instead of reflection.
Classic training has a transfer problem: a year later, only about a third of what was learned is still applied (Saks and Belcourt, 2006). Working on your own case removes the transfer step.
What holds the group together: confidentiality (NDA), a fixed group, facilitation, and the follow-up question at the next session.
What is peer learning for leaders?
Peer learning for leaders is a facilitated format in which people in comparable leadership roles bring their current challenges and help each other with their own experience. Unlike training, there is no curriculum: the material is whatever the participants are dealing with right now. Unlike a networking evening, the group is fixed, confidential and works together over months.
Related formats go by many names: peer groups, action learning sets, peer coaching circles, or in German-speaking countries, kollegiale Beratung. The Deep Work Leadership Circle is one such group: leaders from growing startups meet twice a month for 60 minutes, facilitated by Lea Mersch, under NDA.
Why leaders stay alone with their questions
Lea names three reasons in the episode, and all three are amplified in startups.
First, there is no peer. Someone who runs a team rarely has anyone at eye level to think through leadership questions with. Your own manager evaluates you, your team is who you lead, and the other leads are running at the same pace.
Second, there is shame. Lea puts it this way:
"Maybe I'm ashamed to share difficulties, problems, challenges with others, because self-worth is often tied to performance or to the quality of my leadership."
— Lea Mersch, Deep Talk episode 7
When your worth hangs on your performance, every open question is a small admission. So you don't ask. More on that in the article on self-worth at work.
Third, the uncomfortable conversations get postponed. You know the conversation is due, but it needs preparing, and operational work always feels more urgent. Why that happens is the subject of the article on difficult conversations at work.
What the group does: four therapeutic factors
Lea uses terms in the episode that come from group psychotherapy. Irvin Yalom described a set of therapeutic factors that explain why groups work. Four of them also carry a leadership peer group.
Factor | What it means | How it shows up in the Circle |
|---|---|---|
Universality | Realising you are not alone with a problem | "It's not my incompetence, it's a challenge that comes with the position." |
Interpersonal learning | Learning from people who have lived the situation | Experience from practice instead of theory from a training |
Cohesion | Connection and belonging in the group | A fixed group that knows your case |
Altruism | The sense of worth that comes from helping others | Even if you take nothing away yourself, you leave having been useful |
Lea describes the first factor as the biggest relief:
"It's not my incompetence, it's simply a challenge in a position. Others have felt exactly the same."
— Lea Mersch, Deep Talk episode 7
On interpersonal learning, Lea talks about the mastery model: you learn from someone who has already worked through the situation. Research on modelling, going back to Albert Bandura, adds an interesting twist. Models who visibly struggled themselves often have more impact than flawless experts, because you recognise yourself in them. That is exactly what a peer is: someone who also put off the same dismissal for far too long.
Till adds the perspective advantage from his own experience with group formats:
"You don't just have the expertise of your coach, you have the expertise of the seven, eight, nine people in the room. A single therapist or coach simply can't offer that many perspectives."
— Till Westermann, Deep Talk episode 7
Why there is no advice in the Circle
The format's most important rule is also the hardest to keep: people share experience, they do not give advice. Lea has a German saying for it, "Ratschläge sind auch Schläge", roughly "advice is also a blow":
"Then you go into resistance, you start justifying yourself, and that's exactly what we don't want."
— Lea Mersch, Deep Talk episode 7
Research on social support backs the rule. Niall Bolger and David Amarel showed experimentally in 2007 that visible, direct support under stress helps less than expected and can undermine people's sense of competence. When you receive advice, you often also hear: you can't manage this on your own. A shared experience ("What helped me in a similar situation was ...") leaves the decision with the person who brought the case.
In practice the switch takes getting used to. Lea describes stepping in as a referee: "Hold on, that's not an I-statement, that's straight advice." The team saw the same pattern in circles it ran inside companies. The shift in perspective has to be learned.
How a session runs
A session lasts 60 minutes and follows a fixed structure modelled on structured peer consultation.
Preparation (optional). A template goes out beforehand for writing down your challenge. Not required, but it helps to sort your thoughts.
Arriving. A moment to step out of the day before getting into content.
Presenting challenges. Everyone describes their current challenge in a few sentences. Important: an open question, not a story that is already solved.
Choosing. The group agrees on one challenge, sometimes there is time for a second.
Clarifying questions. People ask until everyone really understands the problem.
Sharing experience. Each person shares what they experienced in similar situations and what helped, as an I-statement.
Framing. Lea adds perspectives from one-on-one and group coaching as a leadership coach and, where useful, research findings. For some topics she prepares a follow-up document, for example on cultural fit or onboarding.
A case played through
In the episode, Lea and Till play through a typical case. Till is head of marketing, his team is growing from five to 15 people, and he should let someone go after several conversations about performance have changed nothing. He presents the case, and Lea's first correction is about the question, not the answer: what do you want to learn from the others? The real challenge is not "I have to fire someone." It is "I keep avoiding it."
Then come clarifying questions and the others' experiences. What does not come is: "Stop making a fuss, you're the manager, just do it." That is exactly where Lea would step in.
Why learning transfer works differently here
The classic problem with leadership training is not the content, it is getting it into daily work. Alan Saks and Monica Belcourt surveyed training professionals in Canada in 2006. By their estimate, only about a third of what was learned is still applied a year after a training.
Lea explains the difference: in a training you learn on generic examples and have to transfer the lesson yourself afterwards. In the Circle you bring your own current case. There is no transfer step, because you work on the real situation from the start. And because the group meets again two weeks later, there is the follow-up that daily life lacks:
"Because we meet again the week after or the week after that, people can ask: How did it go? Did you have the conversation? So you stay committed."
— Lea Mersch, Deep Talk episode 7
That accountability is at the core of what the action learning tradition, going back to Reg Revans, describes: learning happens when real problems are worked on in a fixed group and the results are checked next time.
What comes up on the table
From the first circles, Lea names these topics in particular:
Feedback: How do I give feedback without being harsh, but also without being too soft? And what if the person used to be my peer?
Hiring and cultural fit: Do I hire for competence or for fit with the company?
Performance culture: What do I do with people who are lovely but don't deliver?
Allyship: How do I respond when sexist or racist remarks are made at work?
Your own balance: How do I stay effective without burning out when I work a lot because I want to grow?
Several of these questions have their own podcast episodes, such as radical candor and culture fit versus culture add.
Group or one-on-one coaching?
Both have their place. One-on-one coaching goes deeper, because all the attention is on one person. A group offers something else: many perspectives from practice, the relief of not being alone, and the accountability of people who ask how it went. For leaders who mostly want sparring on concrete situations, a group is often the better fit. If you want to work on deeper personal patterns, one-on-one coaching is the better place.
Frequently asked questions
What is peer learning for leaders?
A facilitated format in which leaders in comparable roles bring their current challenges and help each other with their own experience. Learning happens on real cases, not a curriculum.
What is the difference between peer learning and leadership training?
Training delivers content that you then have to transfer to daily work yourself. Peer learning works directly on the participants' current situations, which removes the transfer step. On top of that comes the follow-up at the next session.
Why is there no advice in the Leadership Circle?
Unsolicited advice often triggers self-justification rather than reflection. Research on social support (Bolger and Amarel, 2007) also shows that direct help can weaken people's sense of competence. Shared experience leaves the decision with the person who brought the case.
How does a peer learning session run?
Arriving, presenting challenges briefly, choosing one, clarifying questions, sharing experience, framing by the facilitator. In the Leadership Circle this takes 60 minutes, twice a month.
Is what is discussed in the group confidential?
Yes. In the Leadership Circle every participant signs an NDA and commits to confidentiality. Without that, nobody would talk openly about an upcoming dismissal or a conflict with their own manager.
Who is a leadership circle for?
Leaders in growing startups and chiefs of staff. Groups are put together by position, so that people with comparable challenges sit together.
Conclusion
Leaders rarely stay alone with their questions because nobody could help them. They stay alone because there is no room where an open question costs nothing. Peer learning creates that room: confidential, with people in the same position, and with one rule that feels strange at first and then freeing. No advice, only experience.
A question for this week: which leadership question are you carrying around right now that you haven't asked anyone yet?
If you want to work through it in a fixed group: how the Leadership Circle works. For an overview of other formats, see the comparison of peer groups for founders and CEOs in Germany.
Full episode: Deep Talk episode 7, Leadership Circle: how leaders learn from each other (in German), with Lea Mersch and Till Westermann.
Sources
Yalom, I. D., & Leszcz, M. (2020). The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (6th ed.). Basic Books.
Bolger, N., & Amarel, D. (2007). Effects of social support visibility on adjustment to stress: Experimental evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 458–475.
Saks, A. M., & Belcourt, M. (2006). An investigation of training activities and transfer of training in organizations. Human Resource Management, 45(4), 629–648.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Prentice Hall.
Schunk, D. H., Hanson, A. R., & Cox, P. D. (1987). Peer-model attributes and children's achievement behaviors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(1), 54–61.
Revans, R. W. (2011). ABC of Action Learning. Gower.
Deep Talk Podcast, episode 7: Leadership Circle (21 September 2026), Deep Work Club.