Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future

Featured Guest: Aline Kamakian Thriving during a crisis is a challenging feat for any leader. Aline Kamakian shares with listeners not only how she encountered the difficult decisions that many faced in the hospitality industry due to the pandemic but she was also forced to deal with the destruction of one of her restaurants during the massive blast that occurred in Beirut, Lebanon, in August of 2...

Featured Guest: Mark Shapiro, Toronto Bluejays President & CEO We think of "leadership" as a topic for the military, governments, and the corporate boardroom.  However, innovative leadership benefits us in every sector, including professional sports.  The president and CEO of the Toronto Bluejays, Mark Shapiro, joins host Maureen Metcalf to share his approach to effective leadership -- and app...

Featured Guests: Tom Grote and Christoph Hinske Many -- perhaps too many -- corporations think they're transforming their business models...but in reality continue to do the same old stuff; they just put fancy new words around it.  Innovative leaders focus more on real systemic change than on the vocabulary.  Many of those change leaders take lessons learned from organizations such as the Innovati...

Featured Guest: Greg Moran The pandemic accelerated discussions and forecasts about the future of work.  But there's a relative dearth of study about the future of leadership.  This is a critical gap:  as work changes, leadership must also change to ensure organizations can meet their objectives. After all, effective change always starts at the top.  It is essential for leaders to "innovate how th...

Featured Guest: Eric Redmond Deep tech describes capabilities that were impossible yesterday, barely feasible today, but tomorrow will be so pervasive it will be hard to imagine we ever lived without it. In this early stage of the digital age, understanding how deep tech is disrupting the world is no longer a competitive advantage—it's a matter of survival.  Eric Redmond joins us to discuss his ne...

Featured Guest: Sean Castrina Disruption to the norm, unexpected events, uncertain times: these are part of life, not just limited to pandemic times.  These disruptions force companies to rethink how they have done business, and how they can continue to stay in business. Leaders are daily faced with tough decisions on how to lead in this new and different environment. Sean Castrina launched over t...

Featured Guest: Jeff Wald The world has witnessed three-step functions in technological change: mechanization, electrification, and computerization. These industrial revolutions led to massive increases in productivity and thus we need far fewer workers. With each of these technological breakthroughs, the power balance between companies and workers shifted heavily to companies. The abuses of that...

Featured Guest: Eric Douglas Keene  Diversity recruiting and retention is a hot topic in HR departments and the board room.  Their DEI initiatives often fall short, though; many organizations don’t understand the nuances of recruiting, nor how to navigate the complexities of retention. Ensuring candidates and organizations create the best experiences and a path for mutual success isn't difficult....

Featured Guest: Jeff DeGraff Everyone can be creative in their own way. Creativity skills can be learned and developed. The creative process is iterative: we typically fail many times before we succeed. We learn from those failures and approach the next experiment with new information and an improved understanding.  Yet it can be different in the workplace; particularly in large organizations, the...

Featured Guest: Jonathan Reitz  Coaching skills are not just for the life coach or the executive coach, they are every leader’s secret weapon.  Managers can become the leaders that are needed when they understand how to use coaching skills that put the development of their team as the top priority and multiply their impact.  Want to move from managing your team to leading your team? Coaching skill...

Featured Guest: Liane Davey Business today is more competitive than ever; staying ahead requires you to make tough calls, face hard choices, and work through conflict. But productive conflict is so rare. Why? Because productive conflict requires a different mindset, new skills, and repeatable processes -- none of which come naturally.  Liane Davey joins Maureen to discuss building a productive con...

Featured Guests: Rich Fernandez and Peter Weng Even before Covid-19, employees reported record rates of burnout and stress; Gallup studies show only 15% of employees are fully engaged at work. Organizations need well-being development for their employees. It is essential for today’s workplaces to provide well-being support, every bit as much as traditional professional development. Supporting the...

Featured Guests: Amanda Ellis & Augusto Lopez-Claros Gender inequality around the world has many facets: archaic laws that codify sexism, male control of joint income and household assets, exclusion from governance, trafficking and violence against women, denial of education and adequate health care, and gender segregation in the work force, to name a few. The Gender Equality and Governance In...

Featured Guest: Dr. Mary Jo Burchard As a society, we're facing a growing lack of trust.  We're losing trust in each other, and in our institutions.  The impacts ripple through our personal lives and through the nation -- reflected in how difficult it is for both parties to come together in Congress for the greater good.  It's also led to an increase in mental illness and suicide. Dr. Mary Jo Burc...

Featured Guest: Neil Grunberg Universities and medical schools do a wonderful job preparing their students for medical procedures, but the often-missed crucial element for great health care is leadership training.  Neil Grunberg joins host Maureen Metcalf to share his experiences, and how the leadership framework he developed with Maureen can build the leadership skills needed by medical staff to...

Featured Guest: Valerie Biden Owens, First Female Presidential Campaign Manager It’s said that leaders are made, not born. That’s certainly true of the Biden family. Although Joe Biden is in the spotlight as the 46th President of the United States, his three siblings are all leaders in their own right, too. And Joe’s sister Valerie Biden Owens says that forging of strong leadership began in childh...

Featured Guest: Pat Dambe De Beers Vice President Pat Dambe takes a case study approach to the private and public sector partnership between De Beers and the government of Botswana on sustainability and corporate citizenship. She discusses her personal and corporate story and the courage required to contribute responsibly to the communities in which she works and resides. Pat’s story offers a mode...

Featured Guest: Christoph Hinske Can you survive in the new economy? As the supply chain disruptions have shown, our current economic model is very linear. One kink in the chain can cascade through our whole system, nationally and globally. And our linear economy assumes unlimited resources to keep production going to start the chain. But unless we start mining asteroids soon, Earth has finite res...

Featured Guests: Ren Washington and Laura Gibson Though we rarely think of it, there are strong connections between art and leadership. Art sets the environment and tone of the workplace; in your business or home office, it sets the tone of any conversation -- and sends a strong message of who you are, as a person and as a leader. The type of art around your team also shapes the kind of creativity...

Featured Guest: Diane Rosenfeld People like to think humanity is at the top of cultural achievement, the pinnacle of evolution’s craftwork. But one glance at the daily headlines proves we have problems. Lots of problems. Across all nations, there’s one glaring problem that hits hard over half our population: sexism. From subtle misogyny to outright violent abuse, women continue to be left on the o...

Featured Guest: John Reid Adulthood is kryptonite. We’re all born with superpowers.  Curiosity is the most easily recognizable.  As children, we’re flooded with it.  But as adults, instead of being rewarded for having a million questions, we’re expected to have the answers.  Leaders, in particular, believe they should have all the answers. Your superpowers are still there, and truly great leaders...

Featured Guest: Dr. Ciela Hartanov When you face uncertainty, how do you react? We’re biologically wired to meet uncertainty with concern, even panic or anxiety: it triggers our fight-or-flight response. But behind that veil of the unknown lies tremendous opportunity, and we can rewire our brains to look forward to it…to welcome uncertainty as fun and exciting. As Dr. Ciela Hartanov explains to ho...

Featured Guest: George Limbert The pace of change in the world is rapidly increasing, and there’s no slowing it down. VUCA – a program developed by the U.S. military – is a way of identifying the disruptions of change…and, more importantly, of being ready for them.   We’ve talked about the theory of VUCA before (see our interview with Chris Nolan posted September 6, 2022). In this episode, George...

Featured Guest: Amer Kaissi A major myth in politics and business is that arrogant, over-confident people are better leaders.  But reality reveals the opposite: humility combined with ambition drives the best leadership performance – and that, in turn, improves the entire organization. Author and Trinity University professor Amer Kaissi discusses the details with host Maureen Metcalf.  His new boo...

Featured Guest: Bob DeKoch and Phil Clampitt Only 15% of workers in the U.S. feel engaged with their jobs. That's just one job ill poor leadership spawns; bad leaders also cause turnover, absenteeism, and more. What is going wrong?  Some leaders have the right beliefs and sentiments. Others may possess the right skills. Yet world-class leaders need BOTH the right beliefs and practices to address t...