Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership

Ashley Freeman is the founder of Flourishing Work, where she supports leaders through facilitation and coaching. Her background started in medical research, then leadership education, and a first experience as a people leader that changed everything: she discovered how leadership theory, applied with care, can help teams flourish and improve outcomes at the same time. In this episode, we explore p...

Jurgen Appelo is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He’s known for Management 3.0 , for building practitioner communities, and for pushing ideas about agility, leadership, and change into formats people actually use. In this episode, we talk about what led Jurgen to leave corporate leadership, how his books each came to life, and why experimentation and fast feedback loops remain central leader...

Reputation is not what you say about your company. It is what people believe about you, based on what they see, feel, and experience. And in a world of hyper-transparency, that perception moves fast. Laurence Duarte describes herself as a business fixer and protector. She helps leaders understand reputation, identify reputational risks, and build “reputation shields” that make companies more resil...

Remote and hybrid work proved that many things can be done online. But should everything stay online? And if not, when does meeting in person still matter? Jared Kleinert, CEO and Co-Founder of Offsite, joins Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore why intentional in-person gatherings remain essential for distributed teams. Jared has been a remote worker his entire career, and Offsite helps c...

Portia Tung joins Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore play as a serious gift in leadership and transformation. Portia is an Executive and Personal Coach, an Executive Agile Coach, a play researcher, and a keynote speaker. We talk about how play creates safety, connection, creativity, and better work. Portia shares a simple and powerful “ping pong” one-to-one exercise that helps people tru...

Avi Liran joins Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to explore what it means to “deliver delight” as a leader. Avi is the Chief Delighting Officer at Delivering Delight and has lived multiple lives: CMO, entrepreneur, investor, trade commissioner. He also shares openly that he made and lost all his money three times. We talk about authenticity, values, and the daily choices that shape your leadershi...

Gojko Adzic joins Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership to talk about building products that deliver value, not just output. Gojko is an AWS Serverless Hero, a long-time product builder, and the author of Impact Mapping and Specification by Example . We discuss the painful lesson behind Impact Mapping : shipping high-quality software at high speed while delivering no value, and how that experience pus...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I’m joined by Lucinda Duncalfe , serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of AboveBoard , an inclusive hiring platform focused on executive and board roles. We unpack why diversity is rarely a pipeline problem and how hiring systems quietly filter out great candidates long before an offer is made. Lucinda shares concrete practices to improve hi...

In this episode of Le Podcast , I’m joined by Jeremy Brown , Chief Product and Technology Officer at Traveldoo (Expedia Group) . It’s an emotional conversation about leadership and teamwork during a year that hit the travel industry hard. Jeremy shares what it means to lead when you can’t control the context, how the pandemic forced deep changes in ways of working, and why leadership is both about...

In this episode of Le Podcast , I’m joined by Scott Amenta , community builder, co-founder of Propel , and founder of the Chief of Staff Network . We explore what communities make possible for personal development and leadership, and why the Chief of Staff role is increasingly valuable in early and growth stage companies. We talk about what it means to build a community, how communities have evolv...

In this episode of Le Podcast , I’m joined by Ally Kouao , Developer Advocate and Solution Architect at Red Hat , to explore Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion through a practical lens. We talk about what allyship really means beyond labels, how unconscious bias shows up in everyday interactions, and why small “innocent” questions can land as exclusion. We also dig into hiring and representation, wh...

What makes a team a great team? In this episode, I’m joined by Chris Foley , Principal Systems Design Engineer at Red Hat and sports coach. We explore a question that sounds simple but opens a lot of doors: can software teams learn from sporting teams? We talk about what sporting environments make very visible: clarity of roles, momentum, training versus performance, and how teams build confidence...

How do you help a team move from “just doing agile” to actually improving how they work together, and why they work? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I’m joined by Mary Provinciatto , author of Sprint a Sprint and Engagement Lead at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs . Mary shares her journey from software developer to coach and explains what pushed her to focus on a bridge that ma...

OKRs are everywhere. But most teams still fall into the same trap: they set goals and forget them. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Christina Wodtke (author of Radical Focus and The Team That Manages Itself , lecturer at Stanford) to explore what makes OKRs actually work. Christina explains OKRs in a way that connects strategy, learning, and teamwork: the objec...

Agile started with a clear value: people and interactions over processes and tools. And yet, as a community, we often haven’t lived up to it. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Geof Ellingham , business agility champion and leadership coach, to explore his work on Human-Centric Agility Coaching . I was skeptical at first. Why another model? And why “human-centric...

Open leadership is often described through values and principles. But what does it actually look like in practice? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Preethi Thomas , Software Engineering Manager at Red Hat, to explore the job of an open leader. Drawing from her journey from individual contributor to manager, Preethi shares grounded insights on: why mentoring is...

Growing a career in software engineering is often framed as a purely technical journey. In practice, learning and sharing play a much bigger role. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Emilien Macchi , Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. Emilien is a long-time contributor to OpenStack , originally from France and now based in Canada. In our conversation,...

Great teams don’t happen by accident. They are shaped by clear principles and everyday leadership choices. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Jason McKerr , Engineering Leader for Management and Automation at Red Hat, to explore his Thirteen Rules of a Team . I first discovered these rules during a mentoring conversation with a member of Jason’s team. They immedi...

OKRs are often introduced as a goal-setting framework. Used well, they are much more than that: they are a learning and alignment practice. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Bart den Haak to explore how OKRs work in practice. Bart is a software engineer who discovered OKRs more than 10 years ago in a startup environment and has continued to use them ever since....

The idea of the “10x engineer” is often used to explain exceptional performance in software teams. But what does it really mean, and is it even the right goal? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Julien Danjou , open source software hacker with more than 20 years of experience and author of multiple books on Python. We explore the myth of 10x engineers and discuss...

Many leadership and collaboration issues persist even when people “do the right things”. The missing piece is often not behavior, but inner stance. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , John Poelstra and I explore the book The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute. John originally recommended the book in our previous conversation on feedback. After reading it twice, I was str...

Psychological safety is often mentioned as a prerequisite for high-performing teams. But what does it actually mean in practice? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I explore the concept of psychological safety , originally coined by Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization . Building on research such as Google’s Project Aristotle , I explain why psychological safety i...

Distributed teams are no longer an exception. They are a reality for many organizations, and they challenge how we collaborate, communicate, and lead. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , John Poelstra , Michael Doyle , and I explore what it takes to make distributed teams work. Our conversation takes place while we are spread across 15 time zones : John in Portland (USA), Michae...

Changing a team is often associated with authority, plans, or formal transformation programs. In practice, real change usually starts much closer to the work. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I share a conversation with John Poelstra , originally recorded on his show, about the ideas behind my book Changing Your Team From The Inside . We discuss: what really makes a team grea...

Many collaboration problems don’t come from disagreement, but from using the same words with different meanings. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I am joined by Michael DeLanzo to explore why clarifying terms is a foundational leadership practice. The conversation was sparked by a feedback exchange following the episode How to Create Great Goals? , where we discovered that ap...