Rookie Leaders Podcast

What does it mean to you to positively impact the lives of those you lead?

You’ve heard me mention before my mission to help you positively impact business results and the lives of those you lead. What does that last part of my mission mean? Do you have a strong desire to make a real difference with your leadership?

Do you have concerns about the future of your team? Does your company utilize succession planning that seems ineffective? Or maybe you’re feeling to need for additional leaders in your team, but uncertain how to develop new leaders.

Succession planning is often neglected, maybe even ignored. In cases where succession planning exists, it seems to be inef...

Do you struggle with negativity in your team? Do you often hear comments like “that won’t work because…” from team members? Or maybe you feel a real struggle to energize or excite your team about the goal you're working to achieve.

Negativity can be a cancer that robs your team of productivity, efficiency, and success. You can minimize, even eliminate, ...

Have you ever tried to take a family vacation, but your vacation turned into a frustrating repeat of you responding to office emails, answering urgent phone calls, or trying to pull away from your laptop to spend time with your family?

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve had family vacations that I worried would end in divorce because I just couldn’t ...

Every leader wants to be an excellent leader. But the loneliness and isolation of being at the “top” can make excellence feel like mission impossible.

Aaron Walker has been in small business and community leadership for over 42 years. Aaron joins me on the podcast to share the secret to defeating isolation and loneliness as a leader.

Do you have a team member that is underperforming, but you are afraid to give them a bad performance review?

Giving performance reviews, especially for poor performance, are typically the first scary act for a new leader.

But you can deliver a performance review that addresses poor performance and yet remain a leader that your teammate loves and wants to follow.

Forget the compliment sandwich and other similar gimmicks. De...

Do you have a workplace bully on your team? Have you dealt with that bully yet? Are you worried about the impact this bully is having on the rest of your team?

Dealing with a workplace bully is difficult and scary - especially for a leader that doesn’t like conflict.

But it doesn’t have to be difficult or scar...

Are you in a temporary or interim leadership position? This is often the pathway to a permanent leadership position. There are certainly nuisances to interim positions that can be difficult to navigate.

In this podcast episode, we will be learning from Deborah Coviello. Deb Coviello is an advisor, author, podcast host, and Founder of Illumination Partners, a consulting firm for CEOs navigating c...

I’m often asked leadership questions that follow the form, “how would you lead in a situation where ________?” And they fill in that blank with whatever difficult situation they are facing at the time - where you need to fire a team member, you have a team member destroying the morale of the team, you have to reprimand a team member for bad behavior, and the list of difficult situations could go on forever.

In a recent parenting failure, I learned a really important leadership lesson. This lesson is related to the question if your team knows that you believe in them.

Do you believe in your team’s ability to succeed? Do they know you believe in them?

Our youngest son just graduated from high school. On the night before his graduation ceremony, he and I were sitting on the front porch g...

I often hear leaders complaining about the burden of problems. They are referencing the fact their team members are consistently bringing problems to them.

I’m always quick to point out this is exactly what leaders are supposed to be. As a leader, you must welcome team members bringing problems to your attention.

That said, I acknowledge the fact this can be a tremendous burden. De...

It's a celebration! The Rookie Leaders Podcast hits 100 episodes! To celebrate the milestone, I revisit the story behind the podcast.

Me

•  Leadership credentials - listen to episode 1
•  Fear of rejection
•  Dyslexic
•  

 “Free your inner critic to inner confidence so that you have more impact as a leader” - Olivia Carter

Imposter syndrome impacts us all differently. While I’ve understood imposter syndrome for some time, I’ve never recognized how our individual personalities are impacted differently.

In this podcast episode, Olivia Carter will literally read your mind. At least she read my min...

Firing a team member is a difficult situation, especially for a new leader that has never done it before. There is no advice I can give you that will make it easy, but there are ways to ensure you do it correctly.

In this podcast episode, we will talk about why it’s important you fire a team member correctly, why you would need to fire a team member, and then how to actually fire them.

I’m often asked to identify the best leaders I’ve worked for. I’ve been very fortunate to work for some really good leaders. Additionally fortunate, I’ve also worked for some really bad leaders. So I can easily tell the difference.

Good leadership isn’t identified by a title, position, attitude, or even actions. I can’t make a list of actions to take that make a good leader. Ultimately, good lea...

Students of our Leadership Accelerator course recently brought up a question about politicians.

The question was essentially, “should we view politicians as examples of good leadership?”

“Well, no.”

While my response to the question is definitive, it needs a little explanation. While a politician may be a great leader behind closed doors (that is within their team), t...

“I’ve just been promoted to a leadership position. What is the most important thing I should do first?”

I get this type of question all the time. Now that I’m a leader, what do I do first? I’m always glad to see new leaders asking themselves such questions.

Almost without exception, however, those leaders seem disappointed in my answer. They seem to think I’m going to tell them how...

I am obviously unqualified to tell you about the unique challenges that women face in leadership. But that is certainly not the case with my guest, Nichole Harrop.

Nichole is a leadership and career coach. She is a wife, mother of two daughters, and most important to this episode, a female leader. Nichole believes the world needs more female leaders, and through her efforts at n...

Very early in my corporate career, I went to my boss to request some leadership training. I was the new leader of a small group of software developers and I wanted to be the best leader I could be.

My boss seemed excited that I was asking for training and was eager to send me to what he considered to be top-notch leadership training that was developed in-house by the company's training departmen...