Leadership Recalibrated™

Content note: This episode contains strong language and discusses grief and the loss of loved ones and colleagues, workplace bullying, burnout, and personal safety concerns at work. You exceeded your number. You closed one of the biggest deals of your career. And the response was: you should be grateful. Once it was stated, Christine couldn’t unhear it. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated,...

Margaret Leibovic had offers from GitHub and several established companies. Every one of them was in a management role. She turned them all down for the smallest company on the table, in an individual contributor seat. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sat down with Margaret, who studied computer science at MIT, built Firefox at Mozilla, and then spent nearly a decade at League, arriv...

Content note: This episode includes discussion of calorie counting, restrictive eating, weight & body image, and weight loss medication. Please listen with care. Healthy was supposed to make you feel better. For a lot of women, it became one more thing to get right. One more list, one more metric, one more way to fall short. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Jessica...

Ask a product team how their AI feature could be attacked, and the pause that follows tells you a lot. Petra Mifka's workshops start there. She gives the team a budget of 500 euros and a new job: you're the attacker now, so how do you break your own product? In her experience, once people see how little it takes, the conversation changes. They stop asking whether it could happen and start asking w...

The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with co...

Someone on your team is excellent at their job. So you promote them. That is how it works, and almost nobody questions it. Then things start to fracture. Deadlines get tighter. Processes multiply. People stop feeling included in decisions they used to be part of. Six months later you have a retention problem and a leader who is exhausted by a job they were never wired for. Cari Kenzie can show you...

We have been measuring leadership wrong for decades. Headcount managed. Teams grown. Revenue expanded. These are the numbers that build careers, pad resumes, and get leaders promoted. And almost none of them tell you whether the people underneath those leaders are actually thriving. Shirah Huff is back on Leadership Recalibrated and this time she is taking on the entire incentive structure that sh...

Dinah Davis spent eight years at BlackBerry, first as a software developer, then leading the team that built cryptographic protocols nobody had built before. She has a master's degree in cryptography and the patents to prove it. None of that stopped her from being told, at different points in her career, that she wasn't technical enough. Or, from different people, that she wasn't strategic enough....

Most women navigate menopause the same way they were taught to navigate everything else — quietly, alone, and without complaining. Our mothers did not talk about it. Our grandmothers did not talk about it. And so when the symptoms arrived, we pushed through, wore the mask, and told ourselves it was just part of getting older. Lisa R. Triggs did that too. For years. In this episode of Leadership Re...

Most of the technology shaping our world right now was not built with women in mind. The algorithms deciding who gets hired, who gets promoted, and whose ideas get amplified were built largely without us, trained largely without us, and are now being deployed at a scale that is moving faster than most of us can keep up with. The numbers are sobering. 86% of jobs most exposed to AI automation are h...

Every leadership team is talking about AI right now. The slide decks are full of it. The board presentations reference it. The press releases announce it. And on the ground, the people actually responsible for building and delivering are quietly panicking because nobody gave them the time, the tools, or the training to actually do it. That gap has a name. And it has a cost. In this episode of Lead...

Sustainability is not just about the environment. It never was. At the heart of every climate policy, every economic model, every sustainability report is a deeper question — whose voice is centered, whose leadership is legitimized, and whose values are prioritized. And right now, in 2026, the answers to those questions are moving in the wrong direction. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™...

Most business transformations fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the budget ran out. Because nobody wrote anything down and nobody was talking to each other. That is not a dramatic oversimplification. That is what Jessica Caresse White walks into every single time. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Jessica, CEO & Managing Director of her own transf...

The hiring process is sending signals to women long before the first interview. In the job posting. In whether the salary is listed or conspicuously absent. In how flexibility is framed or not mentioned at all. Women are reading every one of those signals and making decisions based on what they find. Or more often, what they don't. And the data backs it up. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrat...

You have been in the room. You have done the work. You have delivered the results. And somehow you still walk out of meetings feeling like you left something on the table. That is not a you problem. That is what happens when high-achieving women are handed a leadership playbook that was never written for them. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Lynsey Mulder — keynote spe...

Everyone's telling women to use AI. Learn it, embrace it, or get left behind. So women do. And then they get penalized for it. In this episode, I dig into the research and I came with receipts. Most importantly, I share some positive stats we don't hear about. If you are a first-time manager trying to figure out how to lead with AI, or a senior leader who's done waiting for the system to catch up,...

We've all been handed the same playbook — eat less, move more, push through. And most of us have followed it faithfully while still feeling exhausted, disconnected from our bodies, and no closer to actually feeling well. Joana Castro has a different theory about why that is. And the answer isn't another supplement, another diet, or another wellness trend. Joana is a food therapy expert and founder...

Most of us were taught to solve problems alone. To carry the weight of our careers on our own shoulders. To wait until we had the perfect answer before raising our hand or reaching out. But what if that instinct is exactly what's keeping you stuck? In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Saeideh Fard, CFO at Introhive and one of the most intentional network builders I have had...

You built the business from the ground up — and for a long time, being at the center of everything worked. But somewhere between steady revenue and real scale, that same drive starts working against you. Decisions stack up, the team stalls, and the operation gets messy. Sound familiar? In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Nana Obeng, Strategic Operations Partner and Fraction...

Most companies build Employee Engagement teams when what they need first is an Empowerment team. Yvonne helps growth-stage companies tackle scaling challenges—and one of the biggest gaps she sees is companies trying to fix engagement without first creating empowerment. In this episode, we explore the difference between engagement and empowerment, why companies default to measuring engagement (and...

What if the reason you're overwhelmed isn't a lack of effort, but a broken system? In this episode, Shirah Huff, creator of The Kinetic Method™, shares how what started as a personal survival tool — protecting her time with her family while still chasing career ambitions — evolved into a repeatable system she's now teaching others. We also dig into why the traditional tools we rely on are actively...

What happens when a high-achieving, award-winning corporate professional hits a wall she never saw coming? In this episode, I sit down with Julie Lafleur — former corporate full-timer turned wellness practitioner — to unpack the hidden cost of people-pleasing, chronic overperformance, and the culture of silence around burnout. Julie shares how her own burnout became the unexpected catalyst for a c...

I asked my LinkedIn community: " What is one concrete thing you wish leaders would do right now to better support their people? " The responses were honest and powerful. Then, at a networking event, I heard a C-suite executive say that to sponsor a woman, she needs to see a commitment to 80-100 hour weeks. This episode shares responses from my community and what they revealed: people are exhausted...

Slow down to speed up. It sounds like a paradox but it's how better decisions get made. Cass Cooper, known as the "Chaos Whisperer", helps leaders interpret chaos instead of reacting to it. And it starts with slowing down enough to ask the right questions. In this episode, we explore how curiosity uncovers what urgency hides, why asking "why" multiple times reveals systemic issues, and how corpora...

Your team is watching everything you do. When you message them on vacation. When you skip lunch for another meeting. When you don't take time off. Rekha Narang, Senior Director at Microsoft, learned this the hard way after burnout forced her to take a six-month leave. In this episode, we talk about her journey from burnout to balance and what changed when she stopped proving and started modeling....