Courage to Advance with Kim Bohr

The job market is brutal right now, and the advice most candidates carry into an interview is quietly working against them. Roles that once drew a hundred applications now draw a thousand, and a single conversation may be all you get. The old playbook, memorize the perfect answer and perform it, is the fastest way to lose the room. Laura Browne says the whole frame is backward. After years in seni...

Most senior leaders can feel it but rarely say it out loud: the math has stopped working. More hours, more output, more visibility, and a quiet question about whether any of it is adding up to better leadership. Most organizations treat constant motion as proof of commitment, rewarding output while the capacity to actually lead erodes. Dawn Christian gives that erosion a name, Capacity Debt, the c...

Most leaders are still waiting for work to settle down. The research says the wait is the problem. In year two of SparkEffect's study of organizational trust, 85% of people reported a significant disruption in the past two years, up from 71%. Disruption is not the storm that passes. It is the climate. The common response is to treat it as a stability problem and reach for another training. The dat...

Most of us are taught to wait for proof before we move. Find the data, find the comparable, make sure someone has done it first. But the ideas that matter most rarely come with evidence attached. In the fall of 2021, one of the best women's soccer teams in the country was one win from a championship, and not a single bar in Seattle would show the game. The response Jen Barnes got when she called a...

Most leaders are told to close the deal first and earn the relationship later. Witney Schneidman spent fifty years proving the reverse, and in this episode he shows host Kim Bohr how trust is really built. In a market that rewards speed, most of us rush the one thing that cannot be rushed. SparkEffect's research found that 71% of employees have lived through a major disruption in the past two year...

Most organizations have already spent the money on AI training. Far fewer have anything that looks like real adoption. A DataCamp study found that 82% of organizations train employees on AI while 59% still report a skills gap. So what is actually going wrong? On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and Elayne Fluker put the answer somewhere most rollouts overlook: trust. People will n...

Only 2% of leaders believe their performance management process adds any real value. That is a problem, because the number one driver of profit growth in any company is people growth. When the system built to grow people is broken, growth stalls. On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr talks with leadership team coach Mike Goldman about what actually holds teams back. It is rarely str...

Most leaders are taught that apologizing is a legal risk and a sign of weakness. So they avoid the conversations that would repair a broken relationship at work, and the damage compounds. Jon Bui, J.D., makes the opposite case: apology is a skill leaders can learn, and avoidance is the costly choice. Where most conflict resolution runs on the force of law and a monetary settlement, Jon saw a set o...

If you stepped away from your business tomorrow, not for a week or a quarter but for good, would it still run? Most owners cannot say yes, and on this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and Ted Wolf dig into why that answer is also the reason so many businesses never sell. A company that depends on one person is not an asset yet. It is a job that ends when they walk away. Most owners nev...

Senior leaders tend to hold two stories about Gen Z at once. One says they are lazy and entitled. The other says they are digital natives who will figure the rest out on their own. On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and guest Ashlynne Valdez , PHR, make the case that both are wrong, and that the cost of believing either one shows up in the same place: retention, the hiring pipeli...

The confidence gap that holds women back in leadership doesn't start in the workplace. It starts around age 14, and most organizations spend years trying to coach the symptom without ever naming where it began. That's the throughline Kim Bohr , CEO of SparkEffect, and guest Jilyne Jarvis follow in this episode. The hesitation leaders see in capable women, the reluctance to take the role, raise the...

Trust is the one thing every leader says they want more of, and the one most are quietly getting wrong. The instinct is to build it through competence or charisma: prove yourself, earn people's confidence, move on. Then the team goes quiet, the executive room gets political, and the organization stops believing what leadership says. Executive coach Andrea Butcher has spent years inside executive a...

Most organizations say they care about employee wellbeing. But when your therapist's office hours don't fit the windows your employer leaves open, when you're the only person trained to run a Friday report so you can never actually take a Friday off, when the word "accommodation" makes you feel like a problem before the conversation even starts, the message your people receive is different from th...

Most culture problems don't surprise anyone. That's the uncomfortable truth at the center of Scott McInnes's research - a study of Chief People Officers across Ireland that set out to identify what's actually blocking progress from the culture organizations have to the one they need. When Scott debriefed a group of respondents on his findings, the room didn't react with shock. They responded with...

Most leadership advice assumes everyone on your team is okay. What happens when they aren’t?  That gap between caring deeply and not knowing how to help is where most leaders live right now. Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer names what’s underneath it. Leaders aren’t undertrained on strategy. They’re undertrained on what to do when the people they lead are struggling. Many try to skip straight to healing wit...

Kim Bohr , CEO of SparkEffect and host of Courage to Advance, sees it all the time: leaders who don’t think about professional visibility until they’re forced to. A layoff, a reorg, a pivot they didn’t plan for. And suddenly they’re trying to build a presence from scratch on a platform they’ve been ignoring. That’s not just inconvenient. That’s starting from zero when the stakes are at their highe...

Most companies treat employee motivation like a personality trait. When engagement drops, the default assumption is that the employee isn't driven enough or doesn't care enough. But what if the problem isn't who you hired? What if it's what you never asked them? Host Kim Bohr sits down with Daniela Tancau to unpack where the disconnect starts. That's the pattern Daniela has spent 18 years diagnosi...

Most leadership development programs don’t fail because the content is wrong. They fail because of what organizations do, and don’t do, the moment the program ends.  Richard Mirabile, PhD , is a leadership development researcher and practitioner with more than 30 years of applied work across organizational psychology, corporate environments, startups, and consulting. He is the creator of SparkEffe...

What does it actually look like when a CEO spends years intentionally handing over the reins, and both leaders are willing to tell the whole story?  This episode of Courage to Advance is different from any we’ve done before. There’s no outside guest. Instead, Kim Bohr sits down with Mike Humphries , her colleague, predecessor, and the leader who shaped Waldron for decades before the 2023 merger th...

What if the most important skill for leading a technology transformation has nothing to do with technology? It's a question Kim Bohr has been asking for years. And when she met Bob Wallis , she found someone who had spent his entire career proving the answer. Bob Wallis, fractional CIO and founder of 61 Keys LLC, has spent his career proving that the difference between a system rollout that succee...

We’ve spent years implementing HR technology to fix workplace problems that technology was never going to fix. Calli Bakken built a career inside that system, watched it fail, and came out the other side with a different answer: if you want employees to show up fully, start by solving the problems they carry through the door. After 15 years in HR, HR tech, and an employee engagement startup, Calli...

What if 70% of change initiatives are failing for the exact same reason and your AI rollout is next?  Ted Wolf , founder of Guidewise AI, has spent decades building businesses and overseeing technology implementations, including 300+ ERP rollouts, watching the same failure pattern repeat. The technology worked. The business case was solid. People just didn't change. After scaling a staffing compan...

What if your organization’s biggest people problems aren’t a skills issue — they’re an access issue?  Only 2% of global CEOs have ever been CHROs. Dr. Suzi Potts spent 25 years watching family-owned businesses hit critical moments, generational transitions, restructurings, down markets, without anyone in the room who understood the human side of the decision. So she left a prestigious SVP role and...

Your policies are not failing because of the 5% who might abuse them, but because they quietly erode trust with the 95% who are doing their best work. When disruption hits, control-heavy policies put managers in an impossible spot and make your top performers feel punished instead of trusted.​ Mitchell Jeffery , founder of Ember Collective, helps organizations redesign HR policies from control-bas...

Your leadership skills vanish when fight-or-flight kicks in. Learn how to build trust when your brain screams "run." For executives facing high-stakes pressure.  Key Takeaways:  Why technical competence is useless if you can't access it under pressure  The exact moment manager trust collapses—and how to prevent it  Strategic NeuroRegulation: training your nervous system like a musician trains thei...