Lead the Team (Top 2% of Podcasts)

Most leaders think they know why people resist change—but they are usually wrong. In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Andrea Sorrenti, Deputy CEO of MSX International, to expose the hidden truth about corporate transformation: it’s not resistance holding your team back, it’s fear. After nearly three decades leading global teams through major automotive industry shifts, An...

AI is changing leadership faster than most executives can lead their team. In this episode of Lead the Team , Ben Fanning sits down with Olivia Nottebohm, COO of Box , to discuss why the companies that win technology shifts aren't the ones with the perfect strategy—they're the ones willing to move before they have all the answers. After helping scale Google Cloud, Dropbox, Notion, and now Box, Oli...

When growth pressure hits an organization, it triggers a hidden survival instinct: teams become political, siloed, and reactive. Most executives try to solve this by pushing harder—but driving pace without dignity is exactly how you destroy organizational trust. In this episode of Lead The Team, Ben Fanning sits down with Mark Banfield, Chief Revenue Officer at TeamViewer (and former CEO of 1e), t...

What if the organizations doing some of the most critical work in the world are being held back the most by traditional technology? In this episode of Lead The Team, Ben Fanning sits down with Scott Brighton, CEO of Bonterra, to break down a massive paradigm shift: how resource-starved, underfunded teams are leveraging agentic AI to completely transform operations and defeat massive budgets. Scott...

Most business leaders approach networking completely wrong—and it is costing them real revenue. They show up to events, hand out business cards, and try to sell directly to the room, wondering why nothing ever converts into sustainable growth. In this episode of Lead The Team , host Ben Fanning sits down with Dave Collins, the Chief Operating Officer of BNI. Dave oversees a staggering global netwo...

ENERGY GOT STRATEGIC Andy Cormie, CEO and Board Chaiir of SmartestEnergy US, shares how one hurricane, one geopolitical conflict, or one AI-driven demand spike can send a company’s energy costs from $2M a month… to $12M almost overnight. That’s not a utility problem anymore. That’s a REAL leadership problem. Most companies still think about energy as a line item on a bill. But according to Andy, e...

The bigger your company gets, the more polished reports can distort vital truth. In this episode of Lead the Team, Ben Fanning sits down with John Case, CEO of Acumatica and former Microsoft executive who helped scale Office 365 into one of the most successful cloud businesses in the world. John shares why one of the most important responsibilities of leadership is creating direct access to truth...

AI is changing leadership faster than most executives realize, pushing teams to move at a speed that introduces multi-million dollar operational blindspots. In this episode of Lead The Team, Ben Fanning sits down with Radha Basu, Founder & CEO of iMerit, to break down why "right beats fast" when scaling technology. Discover how to navigate high-stakes AI disruption, structure true organization...

AI IS REBUILDING LEADERS KK, CEO of Ascendion, believes most companies are still thinking about AI too small-scale. The leaders pulling ahead are rebuilding how they operate. And that’s a very different conversation! KK walked away from one of the world’s largest IT services companies because he could already see the old model starting to crack: More headcount. More layers. More complexity. Meanwh...

Comfort Stops Growth. Magen Buterbaugh, President & CEO of Greene Tweed, walked away from leading a billion-dollar business at DuPont because she realized something… Success can become a trap. Her role was secure. The path was clear. The reputation opened doors. But she knew she had stopped growing. So she left the corporate safety net to help build a startup with one employee, real payroll pr...

Most leaders are preparing for the wrong enemy. Matt Thompson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Socure, is helping lead the fight—where machine identities already outnumber humans 80 to 1. And fraud isn’t just growing… it’s evolving faster than most businesses can keep up. Most leaders are still treating this like a tech problem. It’s not. It’s truly a strategy problem. The adversary is d...

Pressure reveals leaders. Keval Hutheesing, CEO of Cygnet. One, was 25 when he suddenly became responsible for 900 people—in the middle of a crisis. No playbook. No certainty. And hundreds of people counting on his decisions. Most people think leadership in moments like that is about having the "right" answers. That’s the mistake. As Keval told me: “I didn’t have all the information… but I had our...

Getting AI Wrong Arun Varadarajan, Chief Commercial Officer at Ascendion, reframed how I think about why so many AI initiatives are failing. “90% of projects fail because people don’t spend enough time defining the problem.” Not because the technology failed or the team wasn’t smart enough. It's because leaders started building BEFORE they got clear on what actually needed to change. So what looke...

The Scaling Mistake Hightouch CRO, Josh Kanagy, showed me how companies scaling fastest right now are creating their biggest future leadership problem. Companies are obsessed with scaling: • systems • process • AI • automation Yes, those things matter. BUT there’s a real danger when leaders start believing scaling the system automatically scales the company. Josh learned that the hard way in a hum...

Do you know BRUCE? Andy Freed, Chairman of Virtual, Inc. has seen Bruce Springsteen nearly 100 times, and was so inspired by what he saw that he wrote a book about it.... ...Lead Like The Boss: The Bruce Springsteen Framework to Elevating Your Leadership What Andy took from those shows completely changed how he leads. For instance at the end of every show, Bruce walks to the back of the stage… …an...

Why Leave Success? monday.com CRO Case George once got career advice he never expected. After decades at IBM a close mentor looked at him and said: “I’ll deny it if you tell anybody… but I think you should leave.” It was unexpected but that advice changed everything for Case. He went on to help scale billion-dollar revenue organizations and now leads global revenue at monday.com, a platform used b...

They Said Don’t. Andrew Brandman, COO of DailyPay and a former leader at the New York Stock Exchange, knows risk taking When he decided to join the NYSE back in the day, everyone told him he was making a mistake. “Everyone was saying to me, don’t do it!.” He did it anyway. That decision didn’t just work out — it actually put him at the center of transforming a 200+ year old institution and reshape...

Fastest Tech Adoption in History. Zoom COO Aparna Bawa was right in the middle of it... helping lead the company as the entire world moved onto one platform in a matter of weeks. For work. For school. Even for final goodbyes. I sat down with Aparna to understand what leadership actually looked like in that moment. One decision changed it all... They turned Zoom on for K–12 schools across the U.S.—...

Inside the Room. Hayden E. Stafford, President & CRO at Seismic, had a front-row seat to Satya Nadella rebuilding Microsoft from the inside out. The world saw the outcome. Hayden saw the decisions. The ones that got challenged. The ones that got changed. And the ones leaders refused to change. He saw that alignment didn’t break all at once. It broke when signals said something isn’t working… a...

AI isn’t accountable. Leaders are. Eileen Sweeney, PROS CRO, operates in a world where algorithms influence billions in airline revenue. The scale and speed are staggering. What a conversation on a big idea that leaders and teams are challenged by right now... When algorithms shape decisions… who owns the outcome when it goes wrong? Not the system. The leader. You see it in high-stakes deals—every...

Looks Like Progress. It’s Not. So I asked Adrian Stoch, CEO Americas at Hai Robotics: What’s the mistake that looks right… but costs millions? Why do “working” systems still fail? What breaks first when you scale? He’s led automation at massive scale. Inside Target. Inside GXO. Now leading robotics. He told me about one warehouse…Robots installed. Systems live. Dashboards green. It looked like pro...

After 10,000 Interviews... Rod McDermott, CEO of McDermott + Bull and founder of Activate 180, has noticed that the executives who win interviews… ...aren’t always the ones who build results. And that’s the trap. It's so easy to fall for the wrong signals. The leader who owns the room. The polished answers. The one who leaves everyone thinking, “That was impressive.” But impressive DOESN'T SCALE....

Noise vs Focus. Bob McCuin, Chief Revenue Officer and EVP at Clear Channel Outdoor, has spent decades inside the attention economy...radio, sports media, and literally the most valuable billboards on the planet. When you live in that world long enough, you start to notice something about leadership. What's shaping how organizations behave. Bob told me that attention determines priority. Most leade...

Leadership Blindspot Adam Block, Chief Revenue Officer at Motive, who helped scale the company to serve 100,000+ customers and more than a million drivers, shared a real wake up call with me. Early in his career, he spent a lot of energy trying to help struggling employees succeed. Then he realized something uncomfortable. “The people that suffer the most in that situation are actually the best pl...

My AI just joined the meeting... I expected Abhijit Mitra, CEO of Outreach, a multi billion-dollar AI company, to tell me about their legendary tools and automation. Instead, he it took a different direction. When he’s in a meeting… his AI agents actually join the meeting and coach him in real time. Not summarize it later. Not send notes afterward. They’re in the meeting, helping him think, respon...