The Hard Skills

An open door does not guarantee an honest conversation. Deanna Singh shares how leadership communication and small daily habits support building trust at work. On The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira talks with Deanna Singh, coauthor of The Bridging Leader with Justin Ponder, about the gap between a leader's good intentions and a team's lived experience. Deanna explains why unity does not require uni...

How to network without feeling fake? Professional networking and LinkedIn networking start with relationships you build before you need help. On The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira talks with Becky Brown about building a network that supports your career through change. Becky shares how her experiences with layoffs changed her approach to relationships, why she began connecting beyond her immediate team, an...

What can a pop culture convention teach you about workplace culture and leadership? More than you think. Brandon Peters shares the leadership lessons behind building a stage people line up for. Brandon runs the live podcast stage at Indy PopCon, a locally owned pop culture convention in Indianapolis that runs on volunteers. It took him years of trial and error to turn a lonely table in a loud food...

Is your team difficult, or are you misreading the signals? Build leadership skills by looking beneath workplace burnout and micromanagement. In this Season 12 compilation of The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira revisits 13 common leadership misinterpretations through guest conversations and solo episode highlights. Discover why incivility can signal exhaustion or organizational grief, why burnout requires mo...

Dealing with a micromanaging boss, or worried you're the one who can't stop micromanaging? The fix depends on why it's happening, and there's more than one reason. Micromanaging isn't the same as a healthy progress check-in. It's when the review gets so detailed that people stop owning their work and start wondering why they should even try.  In this solo episode of The Har...

Your team is grieving, even when nobody says it out loud. Dr. Mira Brancu talks with HR leader and coach Emily Ambrose about the organizational grief behind burnout and quiet quitting. Most leaders learn to push past the hard stuff. A retirement gets a quick mention, a reorg gets a memo, and everyone moves on before anyone actually feels what changed. Emily Ambrose has spent 20 years inside organi...

Managing up is broken advice. Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down the leadership skill that actually builds trust with your boss, and it isn't managing anyone at all. Most advice about "managing up" treats your boss like a problem to handle. Dr. Mira Brancu, a clinical psychologist turned executive advisor, thinks that framing is backwards, and she has the story to prove it.  In this episode s...

Most managers are so afraid of micromanaging that they default to one leadership style. Then change hits, the team stalls, and nobody can name what went wrong. Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Suzie Bishop and Dr. Sam Shriver from the Center for Leadership Studies, the home of the situational leadership model, to talk about why the approach that works beautifully with one person fails completely wit...

Most leaders treat grief and burnout like a personal weakness. James Dismond thinks differently. James became a CEO for the first time in 2023. Ninety days in, his mother entered hospice care, and he found himself running a hospice organization while sitting on the other side of the bed as a grieving son. That experience changed how he leads, and this conversation is about what it changed.  He and...

Everyone says you have to manage each generation differently. The data says otherwise. Your generation explains about 4 percent of your personality. You explain almost 80 percent. Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Dr. Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments, to take apart one of the most repeated ideas in leadership: that Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers are fundamentally different pe...

Managing high performers takes a completely different skill set than managing low performers, and giving feedback to a high achiever the usual way can backfire badly. There is probably someone on your team who used to be your strongest player and lately something is off. They are missing deadlines, questioning everything, or moving so fast they are rubbing the team the wrong way.  And you keep put...

You were right in that meeting and nobody listened. Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down what technical experts miss when they ignore workplace politics in favor of being right.  Most technical experts get promoted because they were brilliant at the work. They spotted the flaw nobody else saw, they said it out loud, and people respected them for it. Then they step into leadership and that same directness s...

Most leaders are told to stay logical and remove anything that feels like friction. But real emotional intelligence in leadership starts with reading that friction, not erasing it. Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with organizational psychologists Dr. Ross Blankenship and Dr. Maggie Sass, authors of the upcoming book Friction, to talk about the emotional data most of us are trained to ignore. They make a...

You did not set out to become a micromanager. But if you got promoted for being the best expert in the room, perfectionism is probably running your leadership now, and it might be quietly burning you out or causing you to become ineffective as a leader. Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down a pattern she sees constantly in expert-driven industries like research, law, medicine, and engineering. In those fiel...

Even Einstein doubted himself. Meryl Streep still waits for the other shoe to drop. Dr. Mira sits down with executive advisors Dr. Suzy Burke and Jamie Ramsden to explore what they call the inner game and outer game of leadership.  Suzy explains why self-doubt is actually an evolutionary response, not a personal flaw, and walks through a simple three-step process for catching negative self-talk be...

Most leaders were taught that self-love is soft, or even selfish. It is actually the skill that keeps you from burning out. Self-love is the real foundation of sustainable leadership. In this episode of The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with psychologist and life coach Dr. Dana Gionta, author of "52 Weeks to Self-Love." They get into what self-love actually means for someone in a...

Most leaders spot rudeness or a toxic workplace and rush to shut the behavior down. But incivility is often a symptom of stress, burnout, and something deeper nobody names. Dr. Mira Brancu sat down as a guest on Dr. John O'Brien's show, Civility Matters, and this is the full conversation. They get into why punishing rude behavior usually backfires, and how to tell the difference between th...

The modern workplace got great at performance and quietly stopped meeting basic human needs at work. This is a full season on those needs, and the leadership that brings them back. Dr. Mira Brancu closes out Season 11 of The Hard Skills by walking through 13 human needs organizations have learned to ignore. Across eleven guests and two solo episodes, each need comes with a short, powerful clip and...

Most leaders think succession is just naming the next person for the chair. It is not. Real leadership succession is about protecting everything you spent years building. Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Dr. Mark L. Vincent, author of The Maestro Effect, to close out the season on rediscovering human needs at work. They get into why handing off a company is so much harder than picking a name, and wh...

"Imposter syndrome" gets thrown around constantly in leadership spaces. But what if the label itself is doing more harm than good? Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down why the original researchers never called it a "syndrome" and what that distinction actually means for high achievers. If you've ever been promoted into a leadership role and suddenly felt like you had no idea what you we...

Imagination as a leadership skill? Most people wouldn't even put it in their top 10. But what if it's the one thing separating leaders who repeat old systems from those who build new futures? In this conversation, Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Dr. David W. Robinson-Morris, founder of Reimaginelution, to talk about why imagination might be the most underrated leadership competency of our t...

You've been working so hard to be an effective leader, and somehow your team still doesn't see it. This episode shows you exactly why, and how to close the gap before it stalls your career. Margaret Andrews ran the MBA program at MIT Sloan for seven years and is now an Associate Dean at Harvard. She's spent two decades teaching leadership and emotional intelligence to high achievers, a...

Emotional intelligence is supposed to make workplaces better. But what if it might also teach people to tolerate what should be intolerable? Candice Schutter spent two decades inside the wellness industry, leading programs, training instructors, building cultures of care, until her body started screaming that something was wrong through panic attacks and a nervous system in overdrive. She started...

Most women in leadership got there by working twice as hard as the men around them. And it's quietly destroying their health. In this conversation, Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with executive coach Duygu Alpteka Gursu, who spent nearly three decades climbing the corporate ladder at companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever before her body finally forced her to stop. Duygu shares the moment she realiz...

What if everything you were taught about success and leadership was causing you to abandon your own needs?  This conversation will completely change how you see work, identity, and what it means to truly win in life. In this episode of The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Dr. CarolLaine M. Garcia, a Dominican-American I/O psychologist, decolonial researcher, and creator of Queen Mindset...