Worthy to Lead

We’re bringing back one of Kristiana’s favorite episodes, and it feels just as relevant today as we all adjust to the shift in daylight saving time. In this episode of the Worthy to Lead podcast, host Kristiana Corona speaks with author and science journalist Lynne Peeples about her book on circadian rhythms. They explore the importance of understanding and optimizing our internal clocks for bette...

Where do big ideas actually come from? For Lexie Spiro, Director of Amazon Delivery Experience, they come from a process you can learn and repeat. Lexie has spent more than 20 years leading design and research for Fortune 500 companies, including almost 15 years at Motorola. Today he leads design and research across Amazon’s delivery network, from the customer experience to the tools DSP drivers a...

Leaders often walk into a pitch ready to defend their idea. The big market. The happy customers. The risks that are all "manageable." Kristiana sat down with Rayna Lesser Hannaway, founder of Pure Path Ventures, who spent nearly three decades as an institutional investor at firms like Fidelity Investments, Jennison Associates, and Lord Abbett. After evaluating thousands of management teams, Rayna...

Every company has a process nobody can explain. A meeting that runs long. A form that takes 20 minutes. An approval chain with 15 names on it. Kristiana sat down with Gianmichael “GM” Di Lallo, Chief Design Officer and Partner at Multiplayer, to figure out what they do about it. GM spends his days inside other companies as he leads embedded designers, which means he sees the exact moment a process...

Kristiana recently sat down with a small business banker to talk through funding for her business, and something unexpected happened. Instead of feeling like she was walking into a test, the whole conversation felt like a relaxed collaboration - building a plan for the future. She used the exact storytelling principles she teaches inside Fortune 500 companies to prepare, and it turned a nerve-wrac...

Kristiana has spent the past twenty years leading innovation for design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and there is one pattern that keeps showing up no matter the company or the team. Brilliant leaders bring ideas that could genuinely change the business, and they have no idea how to pitch those ideas in a way that earns buy-in. So the ideas die in the conference room before anyon...

Dr. Maggie Sass and Dr. Ross Blankenship are consulting psychologists and executive coaches who have spent decades working with executives and senior leaders, and they came to a conclusion that changed how I think about emotions at work entirely. We’re often taught to push past tension or ignore the defensiveness that spikes during tough meetings. But Maggie and Ross argue that friction isn't a pr...

Dr. Kevin Sakamoto and I go way back. We worked together at Target, we've spent years comparing notes from our different corners of the world (he's a professor and product leader, I'm a design leader), and we enjoy diving deep and nerding out over leadership and innovation. We recently sat down to challenge how leaders are thinking about leading through AI. We get into the fear that some leaders a...

Rusty Atkinson spent twenty-five years climbing into the highest levels of corporate technology, including time as a CIO, and he vowed not to stop caring about his people in order to get there. In this Worthy to Lead podcast conversation, we get into the real cost of leading with integrity: the rooms Rusty wasn't invited to and why he'd make the same trade every time. He walks us through the six s...

For once, I'm not the host – I'm the guest. My friend and fellow coach Laurie Hall flips the script and interviews me about my own path: small-town Minnesota roots, unglamorous first jobs, and getting thrown into leadership with zero training. My early stumbles led me to coaching – the moment that changed how I lead for good – and into 23 years of building teams and inventing new roles for myself...

Andy Vitale has been building with AI since 2015, across healthcare, banking, mortgage, marketing, and now tax software, long before it became a leadership talking point. He was auto-suggesting medical codes at 3M before most people knew what machine learning was. He helped increase loan volume at Rocket Companies by billions of dollars through conversational AI. And now, as VP and Head of Product...

Erin Coupe spent over 17 years inside high-performance corporate environments: Goldman Sachs, CBRE, Fortune 140 companies. She was commuting 10 to 12 hours a week, working 60-plus hours, and building a career that looked impressive from the outside. Then her body started breaking down. Fainting in elevators. Stress rashes treated with steroids. A quiet but persistent sense that something was deepl...

Laurie Hall spent years working on space exploration and the International Space Station. She was a chemical engineer at NASA and Lockheed Martin, doing exactly what she had dreamed about since she was a kid growing up in Kansas. And then, around year ten, a nagging question started to emerge: Is this still what I’m meant to be doing? What followed wasn't a clean pivot. It was a five-year transiti...

Powerful leadership skills go beyond your strategy and experience. One of the most untapped sources of potential is your team’s creativity and curiosity. Here’s why that matters: Van Lai-DuMone has spent over a decade proving that creativity isn't just an art class activity. It's a thinking tool, a problem-solving tool, and one of the most underused levers in leadership today. She's brought it int...

What do you do when the identity you built your entire career around disappears overnight? For Greg Bro, losing his job after 20+ years as a UX design leader wasn't just a professional setback. It was a complete identity crisis. The question "what do you do?" suddenly had no answer, and that forced a much deeper one: who do I actually want to be? Instead of looking for a similar role, Greg wrote a...

Anya Cheng didn’t build her career by waiting to feel ready. She built it by acting in moments when nothing felt certain. After immigrating from Taiwan and graduating into the 2008 financial crisis, she couldn’t get a single interview. So she created her own access, waiting outside buildings in Chicago winters, knocking on doors, and cold-calling publishers until someone said yes. What looks like...

How do you stay grounded as a leader when everything around you is falling apart? Craig Nishizaki has answered that question more than once. Early in his career, a manager told him he'd only keep him on to avoid a discrimination lawsuit. Later, he went seven months without a paycheck while his wife was pregnant. He was passed over for promotions. And at every single turning point, he made the same...

What if you started looking at chaos as a transition to a new operating system?  Governments are shifting, layoffs are spreading, AI is rewriting entire industries, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, leaders are expected to show up steady while privately managing fear, uncertainty, and the quiet question of whether everything they've built is going to hold. In this episode, I'm sharing...

You think things are fine. Your team seems okay. But your best people are quietly checking out, and the reason might be something you can't see about yourself. In this episode, I break down what a leadership ceiling actually is, why the most dangerous blind spots are the ones you're most confident you don't have, and how to build a simple feedback system that tells you the truth before your team s...

You know you need to sell. Your business depends on it. But every time you think about reaching out to someone, you feel like you're about to do something sleazy. In this conversation with Catherine Brown, we talk about why so many of us are carrying around baggage about sales, and what it actually takes to sell in a way that feels honest, useful, and like yourself. In this episode, we get into: W...

You're smart. You're experienced. You're ambitious. So why does it feel like you can't find time to think strategically? Most senior leaders aren't lacking intelligence or drive. They're lacking what I call “white space.” Their calendars are crammed, their days are fully stacked, and their strategic thinking is forced between the cracks of back-to-back meetings. In this episode, I'm getting person...

You've done the work. You know what the answer should be. But when you walk into that meeting with senior leaders, everything falls apart. The conversation goes sideways, people argue about things that don't matter, and you leave without the decision you came for. In this conversation with strategy consultant Marja Fox, we talk about what it actually takes to influence upward, facilitate difficult...

As the year comes to a close, Kristiana Corona is joined by Operations Manager and Coach Catalina Velez-Watson for an honest reflection on what it really took to build Worthy to Lead from the ground up. In this end-of-year recap, they go behind the scenes of the past year—leaving corporate careers, navigating burnout and uncertainty, learning how to work together in real time, and the seamless col...

Leaders are doing everything they can to support their teams, but many don’t realize they might also be training their people to rely on them for every decision. That pattern has a name: learned helplessness . And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. In this conversation with executive coach and host of The STaR Coach Show , Meg Rentschler , we talk about why so many well-intentioned leaders end u...

Leaders are being asked to “figure out AI” while juggling shrinking teams, constant change, and heavier expectations. Many are overwhelmed not because AI is too technical, but because they’re trying to navigate this shift without support. In this episode, I sit down with Blessing Richardson , small business AI & tech strategist and founder of Sayla. Blessing has 15 years of experience building...