Authority Optional: Leadership Beyond the Rulebook

In part 2 Rob answers our story-based questions starting with the hat trick and tells some interesting stories about ideas, leadership, and values. They move on to bad bosses, misconnected teams, and who should (and shouldn’t) work remote.

Max and Josh sit down with a man who's been mentioned in several other episodes, Rob Cole helped Max define his leadership style very early on. In the first of this 3-part interview they discuss the value of seeking out side-hustles, war stories of Max in his earlier leadership days, and the value of making way for good ideas.

Max and Josh continue the conversation with Courtney. With the basics of Enneagram covered as well as some of its awesomeness, they move on to asking their more story-based questions so we all get some peaks into Courtney’s origins as an expert in the field of connected leadership.

Courtney returns! She talks to Max and Josh about the core basics of Enneagram, the core types, sub types, wings and more. The fellas have completed the basic free version and express how just the high-level overview of those seem dead-on accurate and how they’ve played into their lives. This will be a 2-parter and in round 2 Courtney fields our updated questions for leaders.

Max and Josh share some stories around their Core Principles. Ranging from origin stories to tales on how they’ve implemented them in life, they cover why these can be so important to know, how pivotal instances in life can shape them, even how they can translate to skills not commonly acknowledged in the zeitgeist.

Max and Josh finally get to talk to an old teammate from their days in corporate. Aidan was the first leader Max promoted towards the dream team and joins the fellas in some reminiscing about what made the team work and how it's impacting job environments since then.

Max and Josh discuss an amorphous concept on what’s holding you back, the psychological obstacle that stops you or slows you down from achieving your goals. Or, in other words, what’s the thing that constantly stands in your way that you may have built yourself. They talk about the need to be able to understand and analyze it to be able to get over it in order to be successful. They both get vulnerable about their own walls and attempt to give advice to each other based on their collective experiences.

Max and Josh start a new series in the ongoing effort to help you streamline your life as a leader. The series takes words and phrases that turn into buzzwords and explains them with the hope that it makes sense out of it and, as always, tries to provide something useful to you in the process. This one is Communication Models, what they are, some examples, and what might be handy to try in your own experience.

Max and Josh talk about an area on the continuum of knowledge that Max has coined, "The Sinister Window." We know what we know, and often we're also pretty sure of what we don't know. What's in between those two areas? Tune in and hear about it. Trigger warning: we use a pretty dark example to showcase how bad it can be, but we do bring things back around to work and leadership.

Max and Josh interview Nicholas Whitaker, an Executive well-being and performance coach, Conscious Leadership Activist, and the co-founder of Changing Work. We hypothesize on the current cause of destructive work environments being largely due to laziness and inherited broken systems, our collective efforts to create and maintain conscious leadership, and how as our generations progress we, as a species, seem to have a better handle on what we’re about and, therefore, what we should or shouldn’t be willing to tolerate. Nicholas provides an overview about his process of self-awareness, leadership training, the courage to stand out as a different kind of leader, and the importance of creating environments where people actually feel comfortable being authentic. You can join the effort at Changingwork.org or find Nicholas on Linked In where he posts prolifically.