What We Don't Say

Stop Fixing Yourself. Find the Right Room. | Liza Adams, Part 1 Liza Adams spent her whole career being the person who shares. Ideas, connections, credit. In the right rooms, that made her invaluable. In the wrong ones, people assumed she had an angle. "What does she want? What is she positioning for?" As if generosity at work always has to be a move. She didn't figure this out from...

A CEO rattled off three company goals without hesitation. Then Jeff Miller interviewed nine executives on the same team and collected 74 different answers. That gap between what leaders assume and what teams actually understand is the throughline of this conversation. Jeff Miller is a leadership coach and organizational advisor who works inside executive teams to surface misalignment before it bec...

Most people have had a boss they didn't fully appreciate while they were there. The one who said the thing everyone else was too careful to say. Jeff Miller has spent a career trying to understand why that kind of feedback is so rare, and what it costs people when they never get it. Jeff is a partner at Door2 and a longtime coach to leaders navigating the gap between how work looks and how it...

Jeff Miller built his career in the wrong order, at least by conventional standards. He was teaching in one of the most dangerous schools in Los Angeles before he ever managed a corporate team. He violated a university contract to take a director role he didn't fully understand yet. And he didn't get his first real corporate job until his late 30s. Jeff is a partner at Door Two, but the pa...

Someone told Amy Bray something she had never heard in her career: it's okay to tell your boss you're unhappy. That sounds simple. It wasn't. She was in a big job on an interim basis, working through something she describes as toxic, pulled away from her kids, grinding through it because nobody had ever told her she could stop and say it wasn't working. When she finally did, her ca...

Amy Bray was crushing it. She had the right people, the momentum, the wins. Then her manager left, and the VP asked her to step in on an interim basis. She said yes. And some of it worked. But some of it didn't. This is Part 2 of my conversation with Amy, who leads teams at Google. We talk about what happens when you take a stretch role before you're ready, how to experiment with your care...

A stranger walked up to Amy Bray at a little league game and asked, "Are you Owen's mom? I've never seen you before." That sentence stopped her. Amy is the Global Head of Partner Demand Center at Google Cloud. Before that, she moved from the art world into tech through sheer will, an MBA, and some difficult conversations she still remembers clearly. In episode 1 of 3, she talks a...

What happens when a 10-year-old uses ChatGPT to plan an entire family vacation—and stays within budget? Andrea Margolin, SVP and Partner at Fleishman-Hillard, is living the AI question from both sides: deploying it at a global communications firm while catching her son using it for Harlem Renaissance homework. This isn't AI panic or AI hype. This is someone with 20+ years managing teams and client...

If relationships are the currency of a career, but the systems for building them are broken, what do you actually do? Andrea Margolin, SVP and Partner at Fleishman-Hillard with over 20 years leading teams and managing multimillion-dollar accounts, gets honest about something most people at her level won't say out loud: she still battles imposter syndrome. This isn't theory from a leadership coach....

What if the career moves you're taught to make are costing you the wrong things? Andrea Margolin, SVP and Partner at Fleishman-Hillard, moved across the country multiple times to build her career—but she carried the weight of leaving her sick mother 3,000 miles behind. In this raw conversation, Andrea opens up about the guilt that followed her from DC to San Francisco, the moment she stopped a...

Should you stay or quit your job? A Chief Revenue Officer who's navigated this decision multiple times shares the exact framework that could save you years of pain and regret. CRO Carl Oliveri opens up with host Ken Roden about the "perfect job" that nearly broke him—and the hard-won lessons that changed how he thinks about career moves. This isn't generic advice from someone who...

Not all bosses who feel "bad" are actually terrible people—sometimes they're just the wrong fit. But how do you know the difference? And more importantly, when does it stop mattering? In this episode, Carl Oliveri gets brutally honest about navigating 4 company exits (including an IBM acquisition that went from startup culture to 15 bosses overnight), why vulnerability is the most un...

In this conversation, Ken Roden and Carl Oliveri explore the journey of self-discovery, the importance of vulnerability in leadership, and the impact of personal experiences on professional growth. Carl shares his insights on how introverts can excel in sales, the significance of helping others succeed, and the lessons learned from both personal and professional challenges. The discussion emphasiz...

What happens when you ask a successful leader how they  really  got where they are?  Shana Glenzer , VP of Marketing at Oleria and DC tech fixture for over two decades, shares the unfiltered truth about her career journey—including the moments that don't make it onto LinkedIn. In this premiere episode of "What We Don't Say," host Ken Roden (doctoral researcher in workplace evolut...