The Leaders Lab presents The Playbook with Ken Eslick
The Leaders Lab Presents The Playbook with Ken Eslick is your weekly guide to building exceptional leaders, strengthening your organization, and creating high-performing teams that drive lasting results. Hosted by Ken Eslick—former Tony Robbins Trainer, Fortune 500 executive, and Founder of The Leaders Lab—Ken brings more than 30 years of leadership experience spanning military service, entrepreneurship, corporate leadership, executive search, and executive coaching. Over the course of his career, Ken has been directly involved in more than 1,000 executive placements and has advised leadership teams across a wide range of industries. He's served as COO of the M1 Mastermind Group, Head of Coaching for James Blackwell's Agency Blueprint, and Board Member for Nick Bradley's High Value Exit, while working alongside some of the world's leading entrepreneurs and business thinkers. Together with co-host Onika Kwatsha and a lineup of accomplished founders, executives, and leadership experts, Ken explores the three disciplines that define high-performing organizations: Hire. Scale. Execute. Each episode delivers practical leadership frameworks, talent strategies, operational insights, and real-world lessons designed to help leaders build stronger teams and achieve sustainable growth. Previously, Ken hosted The Leaders Lab Podcast—ranked among the top 5% of podcasts globally—featuring conversations with influential business leaders including Mike Michalowicz (Profit First) and John Warrillow (Built to Sell). His career has also earned recognition as Rotarian of the Year, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and recipient of multiple Fortune 500 awards for sales and operational excellence. Whether you're a founder, CEO, executive, or aspiring leader, The Playbook with Ken Eslick provides the insights, strategies, and practical tools to help you hire exceptional people, scale with confidence, and execute at the highest level.
Episodes
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha welcome back executive coach and performance expert Rich Waterman to explore one of the most fundamental forces in human behavior: Identity.
Many leaders and high achievers struggle to achieve their goals not because of a lack of skill or strategy, but because their internal narrative directly contradicts what they are trying to build. Drawing from their extensi...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha are rejoined by executive coach and performance expert Rich Waterman to unpack State, Story, and Strategy - the foundational framework for peak execution.
Many leaders believe they have a strategy problem when, in reality, they have a state problem. Even the most flawless business plan will fail if executed from a poor emotional state or supported by self-sabotag...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha dive into the critical differences between leadership and management, exploring why exceptional managers don't always become great leaders and how spending time on the wrong activities holds businesses back.
Management focuses on operations, execution, administration, and dotting the i's and crossing the t's, while leadership focuses on vision, motivation, and fo...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha are joined by performance expert and executive coach Rich Waterman to explore the critical concept of Emotional Fitness.
The trio discusses how top-tier leadership isn't just about technical expertise or strategies - it's about the quality of decisions made under extreme pressure. Drawing from his background as a former investment banker and Senior Trainer for To...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha break down one of the simplest yet most impactful leadership tools for evaluating talent and measuring organizational health: The Team GPA.
Adapted from Jack Welch’s classic A, B, and C player framework at General Electric, Ken shares how turning talent assessment into an actionable scorecard creates an instant read on team performance. Rather than using th...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Andy Storch unpack a critical reality in today's corporate landscape: AI isn't replacing you, but someone using AI might.
At its core, this episode challenges the fear and overwhelm that many founders, executives, and team leaders face when looking at rapid technology adoption. True AI fluency isn't about becoming...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha unpack a powerful leadership mindset shift: the 90-Day Challenge - a principle inspired by a lesson Ken learned from Tony Robbins.
At its core, this episode challenges one of the most common breakdown points in leadership, business, and relationships: scorekeeping. Most relationships don’t fail suddenly. They degrade slowly. Not through one big moment - but...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha explore how the stories we repeatedly tell ourselves about people, experiences, and the world quietly shape nearly every area of our lives.
Most people believe they see reality objectively. But in truth, our minds constantly filter experiences through beliefs formed by past interactions, emotional experiences, and personal assumptions. One difficult boss, bad rel...
In this episode of The Playbook, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha dive into one of the most overlooked drivers of human behavior and performance: identity.
Most people believe their success is determined by goals, discipline, motivation, or talent. But Ken argues that over time, people almost always act in alignment with who they believe they are.
Whether it’s leadership, business, finances, health, confidence, or relationships, ...
Tired of the "guessing game" that comes with traditional hiring?. We’ve all been there - you meet a candidate who looks perfect on paper, nails the interview with a sharp suit and a great smile (hello, Halo Effect!), but then struggles to perform two months in.
In this episode, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha dive deep into how to move past surface-level impressions by using advanced behavioral assessments - like DISC, Motivator...
Is your leadership style built to scale, or is it a bottleneck?
In this powerhouse episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick sits down with Don Weber, a global communication strategist and former international intelligence operative who spent years working in high-stakes environments across Europe, Africa, and South America. Don doesn't just coach leaders; he teaches them how to build trust, command a room, and read people using ...
In this episode, we go "under the hood" of the most complex machine in the known universe—the human brain. Ken Eslick is joined by guest Dominika Staniewicz (known globally as Coach D). Dominika is a world-renowned elite neuro-encoding specialist who has advised the President of Poland and trained under the legendary Dr. Daniel Amen.
If you’ve ever felt like you're fighting yourself—knowing exactly what to do but ...
In this episode of The Playbook Podcast, host Ken Eslick sits down with Dr. Ginny Baro, a Fortune 500 executive coach, bestselling author, and CEO of ExecutiveBound. Ginny shares her powerful immigrant journey, arriving in the U.S. from the Dominican Republic at age 14 without knowing English, fueled by a dream to break the cycle of poverty.
She discusses h...
In this episode, Ken Eslick sits down with "the scale-up guy," Nick Bradley, to pull back the curtain on the world of private equity (PE) and business exits. With a career spanning from starting a personal training business at 18 to serving as a CEO four times under investor backing, Nick shares the "investor-grade" playbooks that help founders stop leaving tens of m...
What happens when your external success - the titles, the money, and the accolades—leaves you feeling "dead inside"? In this episode of The Playbook, host Ken Eslick sits down with life and leadership coach Katie Shannon to explore the profound identity shifts required to move from high-achieving exhaustion to core-aligned impact.
Katie shares her journey from a "...
"Culture is not what’s written on the wall; it’s what happens in meetings, in hard conversations, and when no one is watching." In this masterclass of intentional leadership, Ken Eslick breaks down his signature framework - a practical tool for building a healthy, high-performance culture intentionally rather than accidentally.
Ken and Onika explore why culture starts with the founder’s values, why turnover is ult...
In this profoundly vulnerable and essential conversation, host Ken Eslick sits down with legendary venture capitalist, author, and CEO coach Jerry Colonna (co-founder of Flatiron Partners, author of Reboot and Reunion) to unpack the personal crucible moment that led him to redefine what success truly means. Jerry shares his journey from outward triumph to deep dep...
On this episode of The Playbook Podcast, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha cut through the noise and get to the core engine of human drive: the Six Human Needs. Your ability to lead others is a direct reflection of your ability to lead yourself. This discussion is about understanding your subconscious strategy for fulfillment and uncovering the 'why' behind your hardest decisions.
We dive deep into the six needs, which include four need...
On this episode of The Playbook Podcast, host Ken Eslick is joined by former NFL Linebacker, speaker, and coach, Anthony Trucks.
Anthony Trucks shares the raw, emotional journey from a child in foster care to a professional athlete, detailing the exact internal pivot that changed his trajectory. This conversation is a blueprint for radical ownership, directly addressing the Founders and Enterprise Leaders who feel caught in the "cy...
Most founders can track their customer acquisition cost down to the penny, yet when it comes to their most expensive asset—their people—they rely on "bad luck" or "personality conflicts" to explain performance issues.
In this episode, Ken Eslick and Onika Kwatsha pull back the curtain on TeamCompass, a proprietary diagnostic tool designed to replace hiring guesswork with actionable data. Ken discusses why relying solely...
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