Why Starting with Why Matters for Every Leader

She shares her personal struggles with a never-ending desire for self-improvement - always trying to accomplish the next thing and never taking time to acknowledge and celebrate achievements along the way.  We hear about how she overcame insecurities surrounding the practice of self-acceptance and how it is the antidote to so many of life’s challenges.

Tune in to find out how to spot signs that you are struggling with accepting yourself exactly as you are, right now, and ways to practice self-acceptance to truly harness the power of it.

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What if you never did another performance review in your life? Would that make you happy? It pleases most people, research has shown that just about everybody hates the performance review process – employees and leaders alike! 

In this episode I speak with Barbara Stankowski, former President and CEO of AMTIS, Inc, about how she refused to implement a performance review process, yet focused and invested heavily in helping employees improve performance.  Listen now to learn not just about her approach, but tangible examples of how she made this work while AMTIS nearly doubled revenue in two years and received so many awards, I don’t have the space to list them here.

In part two of this special 2-part series, I speak with Roy Johnson, former VP of Strategic Accounts at UniKey Technologies. Roy was a self-described “troublemaker,” using Slack to do “the devil’s work,” but eventually became an invaluable asset to UniKey.  Join me to hear Roy – and former COO at UniKey, Lee Oddess – describe his journey and transformation.

In this episode, I talk with Lee Odess, former VP at UniKey Technologies, about their bold decision to invest heavily in their leadership development, culture, and team cohesion. Lee describes what drove their decision to overcome the fear associated with self-improvement and self-awareness, their commitment to defend the investment to their board, and the impact it has had on him personally, as well as the team.

In part 2 of this series, we explore our Missing Link Culture Model through the lens of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, so that you can take valuable lessons from NASA and apply them to your own organization. This episode features former NASA Deputy Chief Engineer, Chris Singer, former Director of Engineering at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Dr. Patrick Simpkins, and the former Kennedy Space Center Change Manager, and co-author of our new book, The Missing Links: Launching a High Performing Company Culture, Dr. Phillip Meade.

Join me for a special two-part series, to take a behind-the-scenes look at the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident and how it shaped our ideas about culture.  I speak with three people with key leadership roles within NASA, both leading up to and following the tragedy: Chris Singer, former NASA Deputy Chief Engineer, Dr. Patrick Simpkins, Director of Engineering at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and Dr. Phillip Meade, who was asked to lead the culture change initiative at Kennedy following the accident. If improving your company culture and developing your team’s communication and collaboration is important to you, then this series is for you!

In this episode, Jim Tamm joins me to discuss how his career as a senior administrative law judge for the state of California inspired him to co-create Radical Collaboration – a powerful program with incredible results, centered around building successful relationships, both professionally and personally.

He shares his success with reducing the amount of measurable conflict in nearly 100 various organizations by 67% (in merely 3.5 years!) and how it resulted in the state of California creating a non-profit foundation to continue his work.  It's an episode you won't want to miss if you're looking to level up your leadership and create stronger, more collaborative relationships with the humans on your team!

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Serial entrepreneur, Jonathan Taylor, has started seven companies, acquired 18 and sold three, for an undisclosed amount surpassing a quarter of a billion dollars. And yet he still was open to learning more effective ways to run businesses when he did the work of The Human Element.

In this episode, he joins me to discuss his surprise at how often he was misunderstood, how openness was the grand simplifier, and how quickly it accelerates trust between people. We also debate whether or not one “needs” to be an asshole in business to succeed.

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Tom Cannon is the CEO of National Carts, a company that has been around for over 30 years. He talks about the process of creating a common vision when stepping into somebody else’s company, as well as the process of realizing that nothing about the culture was aligned with that future vision. He describes his investment in changing the culture, including taking everybody through Radical Collaboration®, which focuses on building collaborative skills like self-awareness and self-accountability, and elaborates on growing his own self-awareness.

On today’s episode, I talk to Suneera Madhani, the founder and CEO of Stax by Fattmerchant. I met Suneera when she was going through Starter Studio, a tech accelerator in Orlando, FL, and when her team was preparing for incredible growth, she asked for my help to align her team. My purpose in life is to help teams increase their cohesion and effectiveness, ultimately driving organizational performance, and a lot of that involves growing individual self-awareness to create more self-accountable team members who then communicate and collaborate more effectively. AND, there is also the critical element of aligning your team on the core elements of your organization. Why do you exist, what do you do (and what do you NOT do), what is your vision of the future, how do we align decisions to maximize the likelihood we get there (AKA strategy), and how do we treat each other along the way (AKA culture). I use the framework from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything to create a playbook for executive teams. In my interview with Suneera, we discuss everything from self-awareness to recover from defensiveness to finding your true purpose as an organization to how a viral article in Fast Company broke Fattmerchant, but ultimately prepared them to align strategically in preparation for scalability and 10x growth. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to grow a company, or a leader who wants to create a kick ass culture, you don’t want to miss this conversation.