Leaders Rising Podcast

Most leaders know their team at the surface level. They know the roles, the deliverables, the performance trends. What they don't know is what's going on below the waterline in the lives and motivations of their people. And according to Tim [LAST NAME], not knowing is how organizations quietly run aground. Tim is a USCG-licensed merchant mariner and leadership coach who uses sailing as both a meta...

You keep telling your team that development is the priority. You mean it. Then Monday hits. The meetings run long. The email pile grows. The project list shows up with the same work and fewer weeks. By Friday, development is still on the board. It just never got touched. In this episode, Aaron sits down with Becky Rivest to work through Training Magazine's take on what 2026 looks like for people f...

Year one was slow. There were empty seats at the leadership table, a culture that needed rebuilding, and no clear map for how to get from where things were to where they needed to go. What came out of those years was not a perfect plan. It was a system, built gradually, through clarity about people, through honest assessment of gaps, and through a commitment to developing leaders on purpose rather...

When something isn't working inside an organization, the instinct is to find a better tool. A new platform, a new system, a new application that promises better collaboration and faster execution. It's a reasonable instinct. And it almost always backfires. Technology is an amplifier. It makes healthy organizations more efficient and struggling organizations more broken. The problem is never really...

Most leaders don't think their culture is broken. They're too close to it. What they notice instead is that meetings feel heavier, decisions take longer, and the same energy they keep pouring in isn't producing the same results. That's not a culture collapse. That's a culture drift. And it almost always starts in the gap between what leaders intend and what their teams actually experience. In this...

What makes leadership development actually stick? In this episode, we unpack the full lifecycle of Bespoke—a structured leadership program that moves leaders from unconscious habits to empowered, scalable leadership. Joined by Astrid Benedetto and Jim Lee, we explore how combining 5 Voices, data partnerships, and a rhythm of training, coaching, and apprenticeship transforms individuals and drives...

"Culture is revealed when behavior collides with values." — Jeff Lovell (07:53) In this summer-session episode of the Leaders Rising Podcast, Jeff Lovell and Aaron Lee pull back the curtain on a timely truth for growth-stage organizations: Culture isn’t the enemy of performance—it’s the pathway. With candid reflections from their own compressed schedules and real client stories, Jeff and Aaron dig...

Becky Rivest didn’t set out to become a leadership coach. But her journey from public school classrooms to corporate training floors—and now to LRN—shows what happens when learning and humility drive everything. In this personal and thoughtful episode, Aaron Lee sits down with Becky to explore the twists and turns of her leadership development story. From standing in front of her first class of st...

Only 11% of executives are happy with their leadership development. That stat caught us off guard—and energized us. Why? Because it validates what we’re hearing inside real companies every week. In this episode, Becky Rivest, Jeff Lovell, Mike Pumphrey, and Aaron Lee unpack a recent Training Magazine article on leadership development in the age of AI. What begins as a data dive quickly becomes a d...

Welcome to the Leadership Manifesto , a practical, people-first framework for leadership development inside growing organizations. In this episode, we unpack six truths that help companies move from accidental growth to intentional culture, from individual burnout to scalable systems. From the myth of hustle culture to real stories of transformation, this episode will resonate with founders, execu...

What if the boldest leadership move you could make wasn’t about vision or execution, but self-awareness? In this powerful episode of the Leaders Rising Podcast, listeners are invited into a candid conversation about leadership transformation that begins not with image, but with truth. Dr. Tom Nebel, founding partner and executive chairman of Leaders Rising Network, shares the raw and redemptive st...

Culture change in a regulated industry isn't just hard — it’s rare. But at National Exchange Bank & Trust, it’s happening from the inside out. In this episode, Tami Christian and Tammy Pitts share how a conservative, compliance-first environment evolved into a people-first culture built on trust, voice, and vulnerability. With the help of Dr. Tom Nebel from Leaders Rising Network, they began e...

Most leaders still see HR as compliance. But what if it's actually the engine for people alignment, trust, and culture? In this episode, Natalie Goulding joins Aaron Lee for a conversation that exposes the hidden gaps between leadership, HR, and company culture and how to close them. Drawing on real client stories and lived experience, Natalie challenges the idea that a policy, a ping pong table,...

Leadership retreats can inspire. Conferences can inform. But if your culture doesn’t transform, what are you really building? In this episode, Aaron Lee and Jeff unpack a common leadership trap — relying on once-a-year inspirational events to carry a culture forward — and show why real transformation requires more than binders and buzzwords . From decades of firsthand experience with leadership co...