Lead the Team (Top 2% of Podcasts)

What would you do if you had just six weeks to sell the business you spent years building? That’s what happened to Robert Clarkson when he was one of the youngest presidents at GE Capital. A message from GE leadership suddenly changed everything... and gave him roughly six weeks to help sell the business. What could have been a paralyzing moment became a defining leadership experience. Today, Robe...

What happens when the leadership playbook that made you successful suddenly stops working? Dave Lehman, President and COO of Birdeye, has spent more than two decades building and scaling teams at Salesforce, Yext, Campaign Monitor, and Birdeye. But one of his most important leadership lessons came from a painful moment: after aggressively scaling a business, Dave had to cut half his team. “All I c...

Sometimes you don’t know what kind of leader you are until a crisis hits. Bijal Shah was two and a half months postpartum and out on parental leave when Guild’s founder and CEO suffered a stroke. Suddenly, she was called to step in, steady the company, earn the confidence of the board and executive team, and make decisions she never expected to face. Months later, a board member told her something...

David Sudolsky was building a company with his best friend when everything changed in an instant. His business partner died suddenly at 38—and what David heard at the funeral forced him to question everything he believed about success. Today, David is Founder and CEO of Boldr. He shares how that loss changed the company he built, why he believes traditional outsourcing gets people wrong, what worr...

What you say as a leader may take them seconds to forget...OR stay with someone on your team for decades. Aimee George Leary is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Booz Allen Hamilton , where she leads the people strategy for more than 35,000 employees . In this episode of Lead The Team , she shares the painful early-career moment that permanently changed how she leads. After hone...

What do you do when everything goes wrong...and everyone is looking to you for answers? Chaim Mazal knows that feeling. As Chief Information Security Officer at GitLab , he operates in a world where one alert can suddenly mean it’s “all hands on deck.” In this episode of Lead The Team, Chaim shares the story of a major cybersecurity incident at a previous company where sensitive customer data was...

When Puneet Raj became CEO of Fieldwire after its acquisition by Hilti, he inherited a successful 250-person startup facing a pivotal transition: the founders were leaving, employees were worried about losing the startup culture, and a new leader was walking in. Instead of arriving as the new boss with all the answers, Puneet introduced himself as an intern. For six months, he rotated through Fiel...

How do you lead through uncertainty when the path forward isn’t clear? Manoj Leelanivas has done it at extraordinary scale. Today he’s President of HP Solutions . Before HP, he helped lead a major transformation at Juniper Networks, moving into new markets, building belief across thousands of employees, and helping build a new enterprise business approaching $3B in revenue in 5 years ! In this epi...

What happens when leaders face intense pressure to compromise short-term gains for long-term survival? In this episode of Lead The Team , host Ben Fanning sits down with Mark Niemiec , Global Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Customer Experience. Mark shares the story of a massive enterprise deal where his team walked away from a short-term commission boost to do the right thing for the business long-...

What does it really mean to take ownership as a leader? In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Tony Ball, CEO of Entrust , to explore the leadership lessons that shaped his career—from working alongside Intel during one of the most demanding periods in technology history to leading a global cybersecurity company with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Tony shares how on...

What do you do when you inherit a problem everyone else has given up on? Before helping build Grafana Labs into one of the world's leading infrastructure software companies, Anthony Woods inherited enterprise software that had already cost millions of dollars—and concluded it was never going to work. Instead of accepting it, he spent one weekend building a better solution. That single decision bec...

When Phong Nguyen stepped into the CEO role at Modus—a technology platform processing over $2 Billion annually in driver reimbursements—he skipped the victory lap and did something his team was terrified to arrange: he got on a call with one of their biggest, angriest ex-customers. The client "ripped them a new one," exposing a hard reality: Modus had lost its innovation edge and treated them tran...

Every leader eventually faces a moment when the numbers stop making sense. For Amit Bendov , Co-Founder and CEO of Gong, that moment came during what he calls "the quarter from hell." Sales were collapsing, investors were asking tough questions, and every report looked normal. The CRM had data—but none of the answers. That painful experience sparked an idea that would become Gong , one of the worl...

AI isn't just transforming business—it's transforming cyberattacks. In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Dennis Kozak, CEO of Ivanti , to discuss why artificial intelligence is changing cybersecurity faster than most organizations can adapt. After leading companies through cloud computing, mobile, remote work, cybersecurity, and now AI, Dennis explains the leadership princ...

Chris Hillabrant was only days into a new role in New York when the September 11 attacks changed everything. As communications infrastructure across Manhattan began to fail, his team discovered they had one cell site still standing. What happened over the next 72 hours became one of the defining leadership moments of his career. Technicians drove into the city, manually hauled thousand-pound equip...

What does it take to make the kind of decision that changes how you lead forever? In this episode of Lead The Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Doug Braun , CEO of eProductivity Software (EPS), to discuss the leadership experiences that shaped his philosophy long before he became CEO. Doug shares the unforgettable story of a company making the difficult decision to walk away from a customer repres...

He Beat a Monopoly. Then Had to Reinvent Everything. What do you do when the business model that made you billions faces sudden, total obsolescence? Most executive leaders miscalculate technological shifts—they either panic and move too early, or ignore the noise and move too late. In this episode of Lead the Team , host Ben Fanning sits down with Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO of Thryv , to break do...

How do you beat the industry leader when everyone says you don't belong? In this episode of Lead The Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Alessio Artuffo , CEO of Docebo, who helped transform a small Italian startup into a global SaaS leader, scaling the business from roughly $1 million to more than $200 million in ARR . Alessio shares the pivotal moments that shaped both the company and his leadersh...

What separates great CEOs from everyone else? According to Shane O'Kelly , President and CEO of Advance Auto Parts, it starts by getting out of the boardroom and onto the front line. After taking over an $11 billion company with nearly 5,000 locations and more than 60,000 team members, Shane's first move wasn't another strategy meeting—it was visiting stores, listening to employees, and uncovering...

Most leaders think they know why people resist change—but they are usually wrong. In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Andrea Sorrenti, Deputy CEO of MSX International, to expose the hidden truth about corporate transformation: it’s not resistance holding your team back, it’s fear. After nearly three decades leading global teams through major automotive industry shifts, An...

AI is changing leadership faster than most executives can lead their team. In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Olivia Nottebohm, COO of Box , to discuss why the companies that win technology shifts aren't the ones with the perfect strategy—they're the ones willing to move before they have all the answers. After helping scale Google Cloud, Dropbox, Notion, and now Box, Oli...

When growth pressure hits an organization, it triggers a hidden survival instinct: teams become political, siloed, and reactive. Most executives try to solve this by pushing harder—but driving pace without dignity is exactly how you destroy organizational trust. In this episode of Lead The Team, Ben Fanning sits down with Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer at TeamViewer (and former CEO of 1e), t...

What if the organizations doing some of the most critical work in the world are being held back the most by traditional technology? In this episode of Lead The Team, Ben Fanning sits down with Scott Brighton, CEO of Bonterra, to break down a massive paradigm shift: how resource-starved, underfunded teams are leveraging agentic AI to completely transform operations and defeat massive budgets. Scott...

Most business leaders approach networking completely wrong—and it is costing them real revenue. They show up to events, hand out business cards, and try to sell directly to the room, wondering why nothing ever converts into sustainable growth. In this episode of Lead The Team , host Ben Fanning sits down with Dave Collins, the Chief Operating Officer of BNI. Dave oversees a staggering global netwo...

ENERGY GOT STRATEGIC Andy Cormie, CEO and Board Chaiir of SmartestEnergy US, shares how one hurricane, one geopolitical conflict, or one AI-driven demand spike can send a company’s energy costs from $2M a month… to $12M almost overnight. That’s not a utility problem anymore. That’s a REAL leadership problem. Most companies still think about energy as a line item on a bill. But according to Andy, e...