Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
As a leader, letting go doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Letting go to lead means encouraging your people toward mastery, infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose, allowing room for self-direction and giving others more autonomy in their jobs. In the Let Go & Lead podcast, Maril MacDonald, Founder and CEO of award winning strategy firm Gagen MacDonald, unpacks these topics and more in conversations with today’s business leaders, academics and creative thinkers.
Episodes
Margery Kraus, founder and executive chairman of APCO, reflects on 40 years of leadership. She shares how APCO grew from a small team into a global advisory firm rooted in trust, values and innovation.
Margery discusses building a culture that thrives across borders, letting go of control to develop future leaders and applying lessons from motherhood to business. She also looks ahead to what’s next, including bold thi...
To survive over the long term, businesses must constantly innovate and transform. All too often, however, forces inside companies stifle this change.
From the U.S. Air Force to higher education, General Jay Silveria’s leadership career has been as wide-ranging as they come. After leading pilots into combat and going viral for the anti-racist speech he made while Superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy, Silveria now serves as the Executive Director of Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service. The thread beneath all his experiences is that he...
In a world where so many M&A activities fail to deliver their promised results, Umayma Abubakar has firsthand knowledge of ho...
Resilience is something Bonnie St. John knows in her core. The Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar became a Paralympic medalist by getting up after she’d fallen down in a very literal way, and since then, she has helped leaders and businesses understand the power in that truth. Over a wide-ranging conversation, she and Maril discuss how there is no one right way to be a leader; why purpose is so important to resilience; and why positiv...
Work has been in a chaotic flux since COVID-19 began, but as Julia Hobsbawm reminds us, it wasn’t going that well before the pandemic, either.
At the heart of Chick-fil-A’s iconic culture is a simple but consistent focus on studying and developing good leaders.
Mark Miller, the former Vice President of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A, was there decades ago as the company first asked what it takes to be an effective leader. He was also there leading the charge as they worked to scale the learnings they found. He and Maril discuss the traits that set transformati...
In a world increasingly driven by technology and data, is it possible to preserve the health of the human experience and the broader planet?
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In Pulitzer-nominated sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ experience, great leaders are less in the business of winning than the business of teaching.
Over a wide-ranging conversation, Maril and Sally explore the leadership lessons Sally has learned from a career interviewing and writing about the world’s great athletes and coaches. They discuss why discipline is something t...
For Vada Manager, everything comes back to relationships. Throughout a career serving on countless Boards of Directors and advising everyone from Nelson Mandela to Nike founder Phil Knight to the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, Manager has accumulated more tha...
For researcher, professor and author Zach Mercurio, “mattering” is not a new buzz word: it’s a primal human survival instinct embedded in our brains from 6 million years of programming, and something businesses need to take very seriously. Zach is an expert in what m...
Ann Powell, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, talks with Maril about her leadership journey. The culture of “radical inclusivity” Powell has shepherded at BMS has allowed the company to continuously...
Leadership expert, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer and bestselling author of Friendly Fire Scott A. Snook discusses what he’s learned over his time in the military and academia about what it takes to lead. Snook, a decorated veter...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with bestselling author, world-class coach and CEO and Co-Founder of Disruption Advisors Whitney Johnson. After a successful career on Wall Street, Whitney had an epiphany: she wanted to apply...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with bestselling author and lauded employee engagement expert Mark Crowley. Over 25 years, Crowley drove unprecedented success as a leader in the financial services industry by focusing on a s...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with lauded author, scholar and Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose pioneering research into psychological safety has massively impacted the world of work. Amy breaks down w...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with Sylvia Burwell, the 15th president of American University. She shares the leadership principles that have guided her through an impressive and wide-ranging leadership career — from serving as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration to Chief Operating Officer at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to her current...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with Wendy Short Bartie, Senior Vice President & Chief of Staff to the CEO at Bristol Myers Squibb. The gift for leadership that has made Wendy such a fast riser in the pharmaceutical industry, since leaving her original legal career, shines throughout this vibrant conversation.
They discuss Wendy’s journey as a leader, and how h...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril and renowned author and leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith continue their discussion about Marshall’s book, The Earned Life. In this episode, their focus turns to leadership.
They discuss the five key factors about leading today, how leaders can productively disagree; why when you’re leading knowledge workers, you can’t lead by tellin...
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, renowned author and leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith talks with Maril about the hard work of becoming a better leader — work that is, in his words, “incredibly easy to understand and difficult to do.”
Across this wide-ranging conversation, Marshall and Maril touch on cognitive dissonance theory, and the “superstition trap” that leaders of...
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