The Leadership Project Podcast

One of the biggest things standing between you and the leader you could become is not a skill gap, it’s a story gap. The story you repeat about yourself shapes what you attempt, how you show up, and what you decide is “just not you.” And at work, a second story is always running in parallel: the story other people believe about your value, your ceiling, and what they can trust you with.

I’m joined by ...

You’ve probably had this moment: something small happens, and your reaction feels bigger than the situation. That gap between “what happened” and “what I told myself it meant” is where so much leadership, stress, and conflict is born. We sit down with Coach Monique DeMonaco, founder of EQ Wize and an emotional intelligence and change expert, to unpack why awareness is the first step to any sustainable ...

Most leaders think they’re fixing a performance problem when they’re actually managing a clarity problem. Dusty Holcomb, CEO and founder of The Arcqus Group, joins me to break down a deceptively simple idea: remove ambiguity and performance follows. We get specific about what “clarity” really means in leadership and why it has nothing to do with barking orders or tightening control.

We talk through on...

Most leadership advice assumes people are fixed and organizations are machines. We don’t buy that. People change, teams adapt, and every interaction leaves a trace, which is why we’re using a garden metaphor to tie together the biggest lessons from Antoniette Roze, Ron Friedman, and Frans Campher. When leadership is a living ecosystem, your job is not to “control the machine,” it’s to tend the conditio...

If you’ve ever felt pressure to “look like a leader” instead of actually leading, this conversation will land. I sit down with executive coach and author Frans Campher (Dynamic Leadership in a Disruptive World) to talk about the masks we inherit, the behaviors we copy, and the quiet cost of bending ourselves out of shape to fit an old leadership template.

We get practical fast. Frans shares his head, heart,...

A team full of smart, capable people can still feel slow, stressed, and stuck and the reason usually isn’t effort. It’s the system. Dr. Ron Friedman, award-winning psychologist and author of Super Teams, joins me to challenge the way we think about high performance and to explain why “busy” often hides broken coordination, unclear roles, and incentives that pull people in different directions.

We get ...

The clearest idea usually wins, even when it isn’t the smartest one and that reality quietly shapes careers, meetings, and entire strategies. I’m joined by Antoniette Roze, founder and CEO of WPC Speakers Global and host of the Speak Pact Podcast, to get practical about how leaders communicate complex ideas so people actually understand them, remember them, and act on them.

We dig into why executive communication...

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...