Lessons From The Remarkable Leadership Podcast this Year

I welcomed 62 wise and experienced guests for 56 conversations on The Remarkable Leadership Podcast this year. And now, I am attempting the impossible by sharing just a few of my biggest lessons and learnings from these conversations.

I hope these leadership lessons stand alone as actionable insights, and I hope those insights encourage you to dive deeper into one or more of these selected conversations or subscribe to learn more in the future.

I’m sharing just two insights in each of five categories and referencing the episodes if you want to learn more about those conversations or my guests. It’s just a tasty appetizer, but like any good appetizer, I hope it leaves you hungry for more.

Culture

• I have long defined culture as “the way we do things around here,” and I’ve learned that there is additional power in culture to create meaning in work for people. Laura Hamill shared that culture = values + norms + meaning, and this context for considering culture is important – and belongs to all leaders, not just the C-suite. – From Bringing Values to Life at Work with Laura Hamill
• While we can (and I believe should) have a culture we aspire to, culture isn’t about lofty futuristic visions as much as it is how we show up every day. Once we see what we all want from work and our workplace, we can start to act in small new ways that will move the cultural needle. – From Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants with Jennifer Moss 

Personal Development for Leaders

• Leaders can learn from the ongoing learning in sports and positive psychology – whether we are sports fans or athletes ourselves. We underestimate the power of our belief in positive outcomes and sharing those beliefs with others. Specifically, there is a difference between wins and meaningful success. Thinking about this difference outside of the sports realm is helpful. We may have a meaningful success even if we don’t reach our goal or target and we can’t lose that distinction. – From The Psychology of Leadership with Sébastien Page
• Self-awareness is an important skill for us to develop as leaders, and we often struggle to see our blind spots. While there is the need to build self-awareness, past success creates an identity we carry, which makes it even harder to see our blind spots. – From How to See Your Leadership Blindspots with Martin Dubin 

Communication

• Trust comes from clarity – which we can’t achieve without effective communication! One of the most important things we need to communicate is our expectations of others – which is something that too many leaders under-appreciate. Why? Because they assume they are obvious. – From Undoing Urgency with Ryan Matt Reynolds
• As leaders, we often must deliver hard messages – and delaying in delivering them doesn’t help. We need to understand the role of respect for others, clarity of the message, and confidence in ourselves to get better at this important skill. - From How to Deliver Bad News – and Get Away With it! with Mahesh Guruswamy

Complexity and Uncertainty

• AI is an example, but only one of many disruptions we face as leaders today. These disruptions can be an opportunity for us as leaders if we shift our mindset. Disruption also challenges us to consider the paradox of risk. Too often we underestimate the risk of standing still but overestimate the risk of trying something. – From The Upside of Disruption with Terence Mauri
• Change within the organization creates additional uncertainty, and since there are emotions attached to that, a strictly scientific, procedurally based approach to change won’t succeed. In fact, we must embrace ambiguity in order to move past the purely analytical approaches to change we have typically employed. – From The Art of Change with Jeff Degraff 

Meaningful Work

• Meaning is created in moments where people feel seen, valued, and needed. This means we as leaders don’t need programs or cooler work, we need to be present with our team members. – From The Power of Mattering with Zach Mercurio
• According to Adams and Myles there are three pillars to meaningful work – community, contribution and challenge. All three of these are things we as leaders can help identify and communicate so people see and experience these things – in fact doing that is a big part of our job. From Creating Meaningful Work with Wes Adams and Tamara Myles 

Two Overriding Ideas

These ideas come not from one episode or guests but are ideas that came up repeatedly. As a host, if I missed these, I wasn’t paying attention!

• We can’t become the leaders we want and need to be without consistently and intentionally considering and working on our mindset. Until our mindsets align with the skills and habits we want to create, we will not succeed.
• Communication is the foundation on which nearly everything else sits. Our ability to communicate the right things in the right ways at the right times is fundamental to all we do as a leader. And becoming a better communicator isn’t just about technique, but about intention, mindset and internal clarity.

I’m releasing a year-end wrap up episode on New Year’s Eve. If you are subscribed on your favorite podcast platform it will drop for you then. If not, you can find it on our YouTube Podcast Playlist. It will be a great companion to this short list of leadership lessons.