Episodes

Brian Souza is the Founder and CEO of Productivity Drivers, a sales leadership training and consulting firm specializing in building world-class, high-performance teams and organizations. He is also a New York Times bestselling author and a highly sought after keynote speaker. His book The Weekly Coaching Conversation is an informative and accessible coaching framework backed with years of thorough research. He has influenced and instructed over ten thousand sales leaders and managers worldwide ...

David Kline is a leadership coach, adviser, and writer. He is the founder and creator of the MGMT Accelerator, a cohort-based program that helps leaders level up by building out their codified management playbooks and systems. David also owns SkillScouter, a trusted source of online courses, learning hacks, and career advice. He formerly served as the COO of multiple divisions in Bridgewater Associates for over ten years before becoming the owner of SkillScouter in 2021. Prior to Bridgewater Ass...

Once upon a time, I was sick, depressed, suicidal—and wanted to make a million dollars. How did I make the transition from being incapable of selling, depressed, and in bad shape to making a million dollars? Leadership. While hard work has been a huge piece of turning my life around, I wouldn’t have made it without a leader that supported, trusted, and believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. In this episode, I discuss how leadership can make a difference in other people’s lives. I des...

Mark Barden is a Partner at eatbigfish, a highly-renowned consultation company that takes on the challenges of moving an established brand higher up the ranks through market research and effective business strategies. He is the co-author of A Beautiful Constraint, a book that teaches readers to highlight the constraints in their lives and view them in a positive manner that leads to solutions. Mark has plenty of experience with improving the business positions of high-profile brands such as Audi...

Kim Scott is an author, speaker, and the Co-founder of Radical Candor, an enterprise dedicated to creating productive organizations where respect and collaboration combine. Before co-founding Radical Candor, Kim served as a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies, as well as a faculty member at Apple University. She also led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. She is the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Just W...

I’ve been doing this Rising Leader program, podcast, and book, and I’ve been talking, eating, drinking, and sleeping leadership—which is why I think I recently had the weirdest dream. In it, after having gone through a bloody battle, I was crawling. After so much crawling, I came to the feet of God—who, in this dream, appears as a woman—and she gave me a pearl of great wisdom about leadership. In this episode, I discuss what I realized about leadership after journaling about my dream. I also de...

Michael D. Robinson is the Vice President of Healthcare for North America at VMware, a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps—enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. A tech industry veteran, Michael has driven hundreds of thousands in revenue, created billion-dollar business divisions, and supported scores of sales careers. He formerly served as the Vice President for US Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, where he worked for over 14 years before joining Year Up as...

Mark C. Crowley is an author, leadership speaker, consultant, and change agent for workplace engagement and culture. He is a regular columnist for Fast Company Magazine and has been published in USA Today, Reuters, Forbes, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, among other publications. The second edition of his book, Lead from the Heart: Transformational Leadership for the 21st Century, debuted in August 2022 as a #1 Amazon Release. Lead from the Heart has been taught in 10 American univers...

Michael Bungay Stanier is at the forefront of making coaching an everyday leadership behavior. He is the author of The Coaching Habit ... the best-selling coaching book of this century with over 700,000 copies sold and 1,000+ five-star reviews on Amazon. His new book, The Advice Trap, focus on what it takes to stay curious a little bit longer and tame your Advice Monster. In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching, and was shortlisted for the coaching prize by Thinkers50, the “Osca...

Beth Perlman is the Managing Director and Chief Information Officer Advisor at Think, a national technology and operations management consulting practice. As an experienced executive, Beth has an in-depth background in management combined with operational and administrative expertise. She is the former VP and Program Director at Gartner, where she worked with Fortune 100 C-level executives. She graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems and Fina...

William Branum is a Navy SEAL veteran and the founder of Naked Warrior Recovery. During his 26 years of service in the United States military, William has honed his leadership skills, cultivated his mindset, and gained invaluable experience in high-pressure situations. He served as a sniping instructor during his tenure. He led teams on several operations, from protecting interim Iraqi elected officials to undersea missions that required approval from the US President. After his service, William...

Anton Gunn is an international speaker, expert on leadership and workplace culture, and the world’s foremost authority on socially conscious leadership. A former advisor to President Barack Obama, Anton currently serves as the CEO of 937 Strategy Group LLC, a management consulting and professional services firm that helps executives and teams build world-class cultures in their organizations. Anton is also a former SEC football player and the first African American in history to be elected to th...

I do everything I can to be the best person I can be. I meditate, journal, and go to workshops, all to cultivate love and kindness in my heart and to be honest, fair, and supportive toward others. But, despite everything I do, I remain human—and being human means, I still screw up. I still let people down, hurt them, or even gossip. And at work—with all the ambition, pressure, and anxiety—it’s especially easy to screw up and neglect our emotional intelligence. Does this sound like you, too? Luck...

John Sapone is the Senior Vice President of Sales at Snowflake, a technology company dedicated to mobilizing data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Before joining Snowflake in 2019, John served in various roles at ServiceNow, including Vice President Americas of Commercial Sales, Vice President of North America Commercial Sales, and Vice President of US Commercial Sales. He formerly served as the Vice President of Sales at Nimble Storage and Xsigo Systems, as well as the D...

Trying to convince your kids to eat more vegetables? Sales. Showing your significant other how much you love and value them? Sales. Convincing your team to get on board with a new idea? You’ve guessed it—sales. No matter where, how, or with whom, everything that we do in the world is sales. And many people—myself included—sometimes get upset at the idea that they must always sell, despite its usefulness as a skill. In this episode, I share why we may want to consider overcoming our resentment o...

Garry Ridge is the Chairman and CEO of the WD-40 Company. Garry has been working with the WD-40 Company for nearly 40 years and, as its CEO, is responsible for driving the company’s culture and values. In addition to his role at the WD-40 Company, Garry shares his experience and insights as an executive coach, consultant, and speaker through his platform, the Living Moment. He has been instrumental in re-igniting excitement and cultivating cultures that foster breakthrough innovations in organiz...

Kevin Haverty is the Senior Advisor to the CEO of ServiceNow, a software development organization dedicated to making the world work better for everyone. Kevin has over 25 years of experience in sales leadership roles in the tech industry. He has been working with ServiceNow for over 11 years in different capacities, including Chief Revenue Officer and EVP of Worldwide Sales. Before joining ServiceNow, Kevin worked in senior leadership roles for several companies including EMC, Data Domain, and ...

Jefferson K. Rogers is a keynote speaker and the founder and CEO of JKR Windows. Through innovative leadership and the creation of highly motivated sales teams, Jefferson has led JKR Windows to grow exponentially in record time, generating $40 million in revenue within the first five years of operation. In addition to his work at JKR Windows, Jefferson helps other entrepreneurs and business owners scale their companies by mastering leadership. His book, All In: Get Unstuck and Accelerate Further...

Personality tests are beneficial to my work as a coach. I use personality assessments to get a picture of the client’s situation and evaluate where we need to begin. In organizations, personality tests could be used to assess a new hire’s fitness for a role. For example, if a hire is high in feeling and low on attention to detail, you may not want to put them into accounting. But if they lean toward facts, figures, and numbers, they could excel as a sales executive. Personality tests, however, c...

Roderick Jefferson is a keynote speaker, Senior Enablement Executive, and the author of the Amazon bestselling book Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence. With more than 20 years of sales enablement leadership experience, Roderick is an Executive-in-Residence with VentureScale. He is one of the founding members of the Sales Enablement Society. He also serves as a member of several advisory boards, including Capella University, Autobound.ai, and Sales for the Culture....

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If you have a spouse, if you have children, if you have elderly parents, you’re going to deal with stress outside of work. If you have a body, you’re going to deal with stress outside of work. It’s inevitable—stress is simply part of the human experience. But if it’s a constant in our personal lives, how can we manage it so we can do our best at work? What do we do if that stress starts spilling into our jobs? In this episode, I discuss dealing with stress from outside of work. I reveal why com...

Helen Appleby is an executive coach who helps senior leaders and high-performing women deliver powerful results, grow their leadership styles, build high-performing teams, and take their careers to the next level. She was VP and Global Business Leader for Respiratory Health at GlaxoSmithKline until she founded the Powerful Growth Group in 2015. In her book, The Unwritten Rules of Women’s Leadership, Helen shares the lessons she wishes she had learned while rising through the ranks. Helen joins ...

It can be terrifying to speak your truth. When you find yourself in an environment where opposition is less than welcome, or you’re the breadwinner of your family, it can be difficult to point out flaws in your organization. Yet, sharing your knowledge can be beneficial for your company and yourself—and just like anything, it takes practice to move through fear and risk and speak your mind. In this episode, I discuss what it takes to speak truth to power. I describe the roles of self-worth and ...