The Leadership Project Podcast

You can have the right strategy and still walk into a room and lose it with one comment. You can mean well and still “fill the space” so completely that your team stops thinking out loud. That gap between intention and impact is where most leadership pain lives and it’s usually not a skill issue, it’s an autopilot issue.

We pull together four big ideas from recent conversations with Susan Drumm, Brad ...

You can have the right strategy, the right numbers, and the cleanest slide deck in the world and still fail to move anyone. That gap is not about intelligence or effort. It is about meaning. I sit down with Robert Kennedy III (RK3), keynote speaker and communication strategist, to talk about storytelling as a leadership skill that cuts through noise and turns information into understanding.

We unpack one of the biggest myths...

Day one is exciting. Day two still feels fresh. Day three is when the “new car smell” is gone and the work gets real, and that’s where most goals quietly die. We talk with Dre Baldwin (Dre All Day), former pro basketball player and founder of Work On Your Game, about how to push through that moment without waiting for motivation to magically return.

We get practical about the difference between motivation a...

The fastest way to derail a team is to lead on autopilot. Walk into a meeting, speak first, “set direction,” and watch everyone quietly align to your opinion, even when they see a better answer. Step back too far, though, and the same team can feel abandoned, unclear, or unsupported. That tension is exactly where Brad Semmens lives. Brad is the founder of Objective Consulting and Employee Yield, and he brings a rare mix...

That thought you can’t stop replaying isn’t just annoying. It quietly shapes how you walk into meetings, how you speak under pressure, and how safe other people feel around you. Susan Drumm, bestselling author of The Leader’s Playlist and founder of Meritage Leadership, joins me to unpack a powerful idea: every leader has a playlist. Some of it is literal music that shifts your energy fast. Some of it is the inter...

Two people can face the same change and walk away with totally different stories: one feels opportunity, the other feels threat. That gap is where leadership lives. We step back and synthesize three conversations into a simple but demanding framework for modern leadership: Adapt, Care, Connect and the deeper idea underneath it all that leadership is helping people make sense of their world. 

We talk about adaptive leade...

Most change initiatives don’t fail because the plan is flawed. They fail because leaders confuse communication with conversation and then wonder why people feel anxious, resistant, or checked out. We sit down with returning guest Huw Thomas, author of Change Anything, to move beyond individual psychology and get practical about organizational change management that actually sticks.

We dig into why “overcommunicat...

What if the leadership skill your team needs most is not sharper strategy or faster execution, but a leader who genuinely cares and knows what to do when things get hard? I sit down with Graeme Cowan, a leading voice on workplace mental health, resilience, and leadership, and a founding director of R U OK Day. Graeme also shares his own lived experience of depression and the long road back, plus the purpose that came from turning s...

The leadership style that got you promoted can quietly become the thing that holds you back. When you move from building great work to leading people, the rules change fast, especially for technical founders and high-performing individual contributors who suddenly wake up running a business instead of writing code.

We sit down with Mike Krupit, a serial entrepreneur and executive coach who has lived the journey from software...

What if the real job of a leader isn’t to get people to do what you want, but to create the conditions where people can do their best work? I’m reflecting on the biggest leadership lessons from this month’s conversations and pulling the common thread that ties them together: stop chasing control and start designing an environment where clarity, trust, and ownership can actually grow.

We start with communica...

If your leadership strategy still depends on being the smartest person in the room, AI is about to make that a painful game to play. We sit down with Chris Deaver, culture shaper, leadership coach, former HR leader with experience at Apple, Disney, and Pixar, and co-founder of Brave Core, to talk about what actually scales now: bravery, co-creation, and the skill of leading with questions. 

We unpack why fear is normal ...

What if the person you’re frustrated with at work isn’t lazy, careless, or “not leadership material,” but simply stuck in an environment that works against how their brain operates? That question sits at the center of my conversation with Wainwright Yu, a senior technology executive and leadership coach who specializes in neurodiversity and cognitive diversity. We get personal quickly, starting with the mome...

If you have ever walked out of a town hall thinking “we were crystal clear” only to hear your team say “we still don’t get it,” you’re not dealing with a motivation problem. You’re dealing with a communication and trust problem. Mick Spiers sits down with Alejandra Ramirez, internal communication strategist and founder of Ready Cultures, to show why leadership communication shapes organizat...

The hardest leadership problems rarely announce themselves as “leadership problems.” They show up as weight you carry in silence, conversations you keep postponing, success that still feels empty, and a loud inner voice that says you’re not ready.

I step back and connect the biggest lessons from this month of The Leadership Project into one practical thread: leadership is human before it is tactical. We tal...

That quiet voice saying “I’m not good enough” shows up for almost every leader, even the ones who look the most confident from the outside. Mick Spiers sits down with world-renowned leadership coach Marc A. Pitman, author of The Surprising Gift of Doubt, to unpack why self-doubt and imposter syndrome are so persistent and how they can actually point you toward growth, alignment, and better leadership decisions.

What if the promotion, the praise, and the “big win” you’re chasing isn’t actually the thing you’re looking for? We sit down with Anthony (a professor and leadership researcher focused on relationships, loneliness, and sustainable leadership) to challenge a stubborn assumption in modern work culture: that success and outcomes are the path to happiness.

We dig into why leaders get trapped by resu...

Your culture isn’t what you say in calm moments. It’s what your team experiences when tension rises, deadlines slip, and someone has to tell the truth.

We sit down with returning guest Bill Benjamin, co-author of The Last 8%, to move from individual stress behaviors to the bigger question leaders wrestle with: what happens to your culture when things get hard? Bill shares a simple, powerful way to diagnose any te...

Leadership has a hidden cost we do not talk about enough: the quiet pressure of being the person everyone leans on while you wonder who you can lean on. Hank Minor joins me for a deeper conversation about the inner world of leadership, the emotional load leaders carry, and the moment the role starts consuming the person. Hank brings a rare mix of experience as a former counseling psychologist, a longtime CEO in a multigenerational ...

Have you ever looked at a team that’s working hard and still thought, “Why are we not moving?” That gap rarely comes down to talent. I’m reflecting on the biggest leadership lessons I heard across three very different conversations this March and the pattern is blunt: what holds people back is usually interference. Fear. Hesitation. Labels that shrink what someone thinks they’re allowed to try. Assumpt...