Parks and Restoration

In this episode, Chris sits down with Brett Hoogeveen, co-founder of Better Culture and Mindset LLC, keynote speaker, TEDx speaker, and host of the Better Culture podcast. Brett’s work is built on a simple but powerful premise: culture is undervalued, underappreciated, and when done right, the most powerful lever any leader has.

The conversation draws rich parallels between organizational culture and ecological systems. Just like a ...

Chris sits down with Dr. Nick Askew, founder and director of Conservation Careers, for a wide-ranging conversation that spans barn owl behavior, international wildlife management, and the future of the conservation workforce.

Nick shares how a career arc that began with childhood fishing trips and a breathtaking first barn owl sighting led him through Birdlife International, fieldwork in the Pacific, and eventually back to the UK to...

What if the way we’ve been thinking about leadership is fundamentally wrong?

This episode is the meetup Chris hosted with Dr. Kathleen Allen, author of Leading from the Roots, and it explores a completely different way of thinking about leadership—one grounded not in control, hierarchy, or efficiency… but in nature.

Kathleen’s work focuses on regenerative leadership—designing organizations that function more like ecosystems than mach...

What makes people want to stay on your team for the long haul?

In this episode, Chris is joined by Des Moines County Conservation’s Environmental Education Manager, Marcus Nack, for a conversation about workplace culture, leadership, and the kind of organizational ecosystem that makes people want to stay, grow, and do their best work. The discussion starts with a real example: an intern who came to the team looking for clarity and l...

What do prescribed burns have to do with leading a team?

More than you’d think.

In this episode, Chris and Jeremy break down leadership lessons pulled straight from burn season — burn plans, clear objectives, contingency planning, and the kind of flexibility you need when conditions change. They talk through real examples from recent burns (including an 800-acre day at Hitchcock) and connect the dots to the workplace: performance iss...

What’s the ROI of a prairie? A bat you’ll never see? A fence line removed to stitch habitat back together?

In this episode, Chris and Jeremy dig into a pressure most parks and conservation leaders feel right now: the growing expectation to put a dollar value on everything—habitat work, land protection, restoration, even species existence. There’s usefulness in ecosystem services and economic arguments… but there are also real limita...

What if the key to better leadership isn’t “managing harder”…but managing like an ecologist?

From a difficult conversation where Chris was told he could be "intimidating" to his questioning whether he was cut out for a leadership role, this episode unpacks Chris' leadership journey and the origins of his Organizational Ecology framework — a leadership approach rooted in the idea that you don’t force results, you create the condition...

What if “performance evaluations” weren’t a dreaded, once-a-year formality… but one of the best tools you have to build culture?

In this episode, Chris and Jeremy talk about a different way to look at performance evaluations—less as a grading system, and more as a structured, intentional check-in that helps you understand your people, clarify expectations, and keep the workplace ecosystem healthy.

They dig into why annual evals can c...

Back in November, we invited the Parks and Restoration Next Level Leader Community to an exclusive meetup with Jessica DeAngelo, author of the new book The Wild Advantage: Why Your Brain on Nature is Your Boldest Business Move. With help from the community, the book hit bestseller status in multiple categories on Amazon.

Jessica doesn't have a parks or conservation background. She comes from the corporate world. Yet she discovered t...

Are you trying to sell a plan… when what people really need is a vision?

In this episode, Chris and Jeremy dig into why vision—not strategy documents, timelines, or step-by-step plans—is what actually gets people to care, to say yes, and to get involved. Using examples from JFK’s moonshot and Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, they connect big, historic visions to very real, very local parks and conservation projects.

They share ...

Why do we cut cedars out of prairies? Why do we thin trees in forests and oak savannas? Why do we burn?

For many of us, the answers to those questions are fairly straightforward. But some people think about land management on a deeper level. They see thinning operations as managing the flow of energy in a system. Or they seek to understand the microclimate impacts from prescribed fire.

Some people focus on the "why" before the "what...

Change isn’t just hard—it’s biologically, psychologically, and culturally designed to be hard. In this episode, Chris and Jeremy break down why teams resist change, especially in legacy organizations like parks, conservation agencies, and natural resource departments.

Whether you’re rolling out digital campground registration or shifting from a mow-everything mentality to a pollinator-friendly rewilding approach, resistance is guar...

Are you still leading with the habits that got you promoted—or the ones that will actually move your team forward?

This week Chris and Jeremy unpack “What got you here won’t get you there” through an ecological lens. Just like trees drop their leaves to grow stronger roots, next-level leaders let go of mindsets that once worked but now hold their teams back. They share 10 practical mindset shifts to help you move from output to impa...

In this episode, Chris and Jeremy take a lesson from nature — and from beavers, specifically — to explore what happens when we try to do work we weren’t built for. Using Patrick Lencioni’s Six Types of Working Genius framework, they show how leaders and teams can align their work with their natural sources of energy to avoid burnout, boost motivation, and build more resilient teams.

Chris shares how this understanding reshaped how h...

Sometimes, productivity doesn’t come from adding more—it comes from taking things away. In this episode, Chris and Jeremy explore the law of subtraction through lessons from oak trees, prairies, and leadership. A fascinating Tennessee study showed that fertilizing oak trees had no effect on acorn production, but thinning the stand by 50% boosted production by 65%. The takeaway? Productivity often increases when we remove competitio...

What’s stronger than strategy? Culture.

In this episode of the Parks and Restoration Podcast, Chris and Jeremy dig into why culture has to be every leader’s top priority—and why even the best plans fall apart without it. Through stories ranging from a construction crew with 20-year employee tenures to lessons from Glacier National Park, they unpack how culture shapes retention, performance, and resilience in the parks and natural re...

What happens when the people protecting our natural resources are running on empty?

In this episode of Parks and Restoration, Chris Lee and Jeremy Yost tackle an uncomfortable truth: the very passion that drives us to protect parks and natural resources might be slowly destroying us. They introduce the CARE Framework—a practical approach to wellbeing that every conservation professional needs to hear.

Through research-backed insights...

How do you eat an elephant?
Most people say, “one bite at a time.” But what if you invited 45 of your friends and turned it into a barbecue?

That’s exactly what happened in Iowa’s Loess Hills when multiple agencies came together for a cooperative cedar-cutting workday—and it’s the perfect picture of how partnerships expand capacity and tackle projects no one organization could handle alone.

In this episode of Parks and Restoration, Ch...

What if the way you recognize your team could make or break their motivation to stay? Or screen them from burnout?

In this episode, Chris Lee and Jeremy Yost share the SPF² Framework—Specific, Personalized, Fast, and Frequent recognition—and show how it can protect your team from burnout while building a culture people can’t wait to be part of.

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This is the Parks and Restoration Podcast, the show for parks and natural resource prof...