GUEST BIO

Stephanie Houser is a former Fortune 500 executive turned consultant, entrepreneur, and speaker. After 12 years in corporate leadership, she now runs a consulting practice focused on process, risk, product, and technology development for growing businesses. She also operates a self-publishing company that helps writers publish their books, and she is building an asynchronous ed tech tutoring platform. Stephanie speaks and serves on boards, bringing a cross-industry, problem-solving lens shaped by careers in writing, education, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship.

Stephanie and Michael return repeatedly to staying the course. 

She uses the image of turning a cruise liner, which takes three nautical miles of advance planning, to describe how leaders must commit to a long-term direction and resist shiny object syndrome, the short-term distractions that feel exciting but pull an organization off its planned path. Michael shares a cautionary example of a well-funded organization that lost its way chasing shiny opportunities instead of holding to its plan.

They also discuss shrinking attention spans. Stephanie notes that undivided attention today lasts about 47 seconds, down from just over two minutes in 2004, so a message needs to be repeated rather than delivered once. 

She points to the marketing rule of seven as a reminder that repetition, not length, makes information land.

The episode closes on personal development as an ongoing discipline. Stephanie encourages leaders to listen more than they speak, admit when they are wrong, spotlight the people doing good work, and learn to say no with confidence, backed by reasoning rather than a title.

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Dr. Santarvis Brown, educator, pastor, author, and Chief Education Officer at ProQ, joins Michael D. Levitt on the Breakfast Leadership Show for a powerful conversation about leading with purpose. With over 20 years in education and 15 years in pastoral ministry, Dr. Brown brings academic rigor, spiritual grounding, and practical business insight to every leadership conversation.

The Leader You Have to Lead First: Yourself

In his book "Leading While Limping," Dr. Brown challenges leaders to confront their own "bang-ups and hang-ups" without filters or masks. When you avoid that internal reckoning, you risk inflicting your unresolved issues onto the people you lead. Authentic leadership begins with radical self-honesty. As Michael puts it, you will spend more time with yourself than with any other person on earth. Working through whatever you find within is not optional for any leader who wants to create lasting impact.

Impact Over Title

During his tenure as the top education official for the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Department of Education, a young student wandered to the executive floor looking for homework help. Dr. Brown pulled up a chair and helped him with his reading. When the boy's mother arrived, the student looked at her and said simply, "He's a teacher." That moment crystallized the principle Dr. Brown carries everywhere: your title comes and goes, but your impact remains.

The Story That Became a Chapter

Dr. Brown shares a defining story from "Leading While Limping." A university student he mentored went silent one evening, breaking from his usual enthusiastic greeting. Dr. Brown turned around in the parking lot, took the student to a nearby Denny's, and had a conversation about everything and nothing. At 1:30 a.m., the student sent an email with the subject line: "You saved my life." He had been on the verge of ending it rather than returning home without finishing his degree. Dr. Brown was on campus at 5:00 a.m. the next morning, and together they secured the funding needed to get him to graduation. Nearly 20 years later, that student still introduces Dr. Brown to everyone with the same words. The lesson: sometimes you are the aspirin to someone else's headache while carrying a migraine of your own.

Human Connection Is Not Optional

Leaders who isolate themselves behind titles miss the very thing that makes people want to follow them. Genuine presence, curiosity, and interest in another person are not soft skills. They are the foundation of any leadership worth building.

Growth as a Problem: The Chaos Tax

ProQ, founded on the book "Don't Walk Off a Cliff in Business" by Thomas McDonald, operates on a simple principle: predictable, scalable, reliable progress. Dr. Brown explains that not all growth is good growth. When growth outpaces process, businesses pay a chaos tax in inefficiency, burnout, and lost leadership bandwidth. ProQ helps organizations grow incrementally and intentionally so that progress becomes sustainable. As Dr. Brown puts it, businesses fail today not because they lack opportunity or know-how, but because they lack process.

Connect with Dr. Santarvis Brown

Learn more about ProQ at ProQSystems.com https://www.proqsystems.com

Connect directly with Dr. Brown at [email protected] and subscribe to his YouTube channel, The Leadership Doctor SB (https://www.youtube.com/@TheLeadershipDoctorSB), where he diagnoses leadership challenges every week.

Schedule Your Leadership Diagnostic

Visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule a leadership diagnostic for your company today.

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Most books about life after a career transition are written after the author has figured it all out. Geoff Curtis wrote his while still inside the uncertainty. That intentional choice is at the heart of "Embracing Your Own Purgatory," and it is what makes his perspective so rare and so honest.

After 30 years in biotech and pharmaceutical communications, Geoff exited his company and found himself in the disorienting in-between that so many high-achievers are completely unprepared for. He had the freedom. He had the resources. What he did not have was a roadmap for who he was without the title, the team, and the daily structure that had defined him for three decades.

In this episode, Geoff and Michael explore why leaders who spend their careers focused outward on results, teams, and growth are often the least equipped for the inward work that a major transition demands. Geoff makes the case that rushing to the next thing, whether a board seat, a consulting engagement, or a new venture, is often a way of avoiding the more important question of who you actually are beneath the role you played.

The conversation covers the uncomfortable reality that early career success can become a liability later in life, why men in particular are reaching out to Geoff after reading his book to share stories they have never told anyone, and how getting comfortable with uncertainty is not a sign of weakness but a prerequisite for genuine self-discovery.

Geoff also discusses what he learned from observing young physicians who took time away from their careers to travel and returned as better clinicians, and why he believes the leaders who do this kind of reflective work in their 40s and 50s are better positioned for whatever comes next than those who never slow down long enough to look inward.

If you have recently exited a company, are approaching a major career transition, or simply feel like your identity has become too entangled with your professional title, this episode will give you permission to sit with that discomfort a little longer and do the work that actually matters.

Book:  "Embracing Your Own Purgatory"

Topics covered: Career transitions, business exits, identity after leadership, retirement planning, self-reflection, biotech and pharma industry, vulnerability in leadership, personal growth, purpose after work, life after business ownership

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What You Will Learn

In this episode, you will discover how the most powerful experiences are engineered around a single shared emotional trigger that lives in both the audience and the brand simultaneously. You will learn why most corporate and museum experiences entertain without transforming, and what business leaders must do differently.

Guest Bio Bob Rogers is the founder of BRC Imagination Arts, a globally recognized experience design firm with 44 years of work spanning presidential libraries, cultural institutions, and major brand homes. His projects include the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Jameson Distillery experience in Dublin, and the nine-story Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience in Edinburgh. Rogers began his career in the magic shop at Disneyland, an experience that permanently shaped his philosophy on identity transformation. His forthcoming book, Deep Story, distills decades of award-winning methodology into a practical framework any leader can apply. Website: BobRogers.com | Company: BRCweb.com

Episode Summary Bob Rogers joins Michael Levitt on the Breakfast Leadership Show to discuss his forthcoming book, Deep Story, releasing September 8th. Rogers traces the origins of his approach to his days in the Disneyland magic shop, where he discovered that the most meaningful part of a demonstration was not impressing the audience but shifting their perception of what they themselves were capable of.

For 44 years, BRC Imagination Arts has been designing permanent experiences for iconic institutions and brands. The defining question his firm asks is not whether visitors were entertained, but whether the experience changed what they do next.

The conversation explores the core mechanism of Deep Story: finding the same pre-existing emotional trigger in both the audience and the subject, then building the entire experience around that common thread. Rogers argues this is what separates experiences that permanently alter behavior from those that simply produce a pleasant afternoon. The most resonant experiences cause people to feel that their own inner life is being articulated more clearly than they could manage themselves.

Rogers also reflects on why he wrote the book, citing mentors such as Marty Sklar and Buzz Price, Disney Imagineering giants who invested in him early. He describes the book as paying that generosity forward to the next generation of leaders.

Key Insights Transformation requires a target. Most organizations spend enormous resources creating experiences without defining the specific behavioral change they want to produce. Deep Story begins with that definition and works backward.

The shared emotional trigger is the architecture. It is about locating the same emotional truth that already exists in both the audience and the brand, then making that overlap the structural foundation of everything.

Identity shift is the highest outcome. The most powerful thing an experience can do is cause someone to see a new possibility in themselves.

Entertaining is not transforming. Memorability and enjoyment are not the metric. The metric is whether the visitor leaves prepared to act differently.

Resources and Links BobRogers.com | BRCweb.com | Deep Story releases September 8th

Call to Action If this conversation shifted the way you think about how your organization shows up for its customers, share it with a colleague responsible for customer experience, brand, or culture. Subscribe to the Breakfast Leadership Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, and visit BreakfastLeadership.com for more leadership resources.

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Kathy Solberg Book Discussion

Michael welcomed Kathy Solberg to discuss her background and book. Kathy shared her career journey from academia to running a leadership program and starting her own consulting company, Common Unity Consulting. She mentioned her upcoming book "Practical Tools for Workplace Transformation" releasing September 10th. The conversation touched on how Kathy's diverse experiences across academia, consulting, and running peer groups for various professionals have allowed her to accumulate valuable tools and skills that she uses to help others.

Kathy explained that many change management efforts fail because complex solutions are applied to complex problems without properly addressing existing systems and infrastructure. She described her "unweaving" process, which starts with noticing and clarifying current systems before acting, emphasizing the importance of understanding what works before implementing changes. Kathy noted that leaders often try too many different approaches without giving previous efforts enough time to succeed, leading to broken trust and employee exhaustion.

Michael shared his experience from government healthcare panels where doctors were often excluded from planning discussions, leading to failed implementations when doctors ultimately rejected the proposed solutions. He drew a parallel to current AI deployments, warning that many AI initiatives will likely fail by 2027 due to lack of proper oversight and understanding of standard operating procedures. Kathy agreed and added that many organizations struggle with creating meaningful strategic plans without proper human interaction in the process.

Kathy explained that her book, which took over three years to write, was inspired by her frustration with people wanting to return to pre-pandemic normalcy and her desire to share insights about creating a better future. She described the book as a gift of simplified systems and tools, including 302 worksheet pages that will be available for free on her website when the book launches in September.

Kathy discussed creating a book focused on workplace boundaries and control, which started as a personal project but evolved into a workplace-focused publication. Michael shared his experience with conference notes and learning resources, emphasizing the challenge of implementing new knowledge due to limited staffing. They both discussed the importance of applying learning to both personal and professional settings, with Kathy noting how her book addresses the connection between personal and workplace behavior.

Michael and Kathy discussed the promotion and release timeline for Kathy's book. They agreed to release promotional content gradually over a few days to build anticipation, with Michael's team handling the editing and distribution process. Kathy provided her website kathysolberg.com as the place for people to learn more about her work and the book.

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Barry Rosen has spent decades at Interaction Associates, a firm he joined in 1984 after being drawn to their focus on making meetings more effective. He began his career training teams at Ford, Dow, and DuPont during the early era of quality initiatives, teaching engineers and project managers how to facilitate meetings and navigate interpersonal dynamics. He went on to lead the training division at Interaction Associates for a decade, building out programs in facilitative leadership.

Over the years he has trained consultants at firms including McKinsey, Bain, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, helping highly analytical professionals strengthen the human side of their work. His current focus is Essential Facilitation for Project Managers, a program built around the growing number of project managers seeking these skills.

What You Will Learn

Listeners will hear why facilitation is a teachable skill rather than an innate trait, and how it applies directly to running better meetings and better projects. Barry explains the three dimensions every skilled facilitator manages: results, process, and relationship. He and Michael discuss how artificial intelligence is changing the analytical side of project work while making the human and emotional side more important than ever. The conversation covers why so many AI initiatives stall, often because teams never clarified their outcomes or ownership before deploying the technology. Barry also walks through how project managers are evolving into process consultants who understand stakeholder needs, build agreements, and guide teams through structured problem solving rather than jumping straight to solutions.

Episode Highlights

Barry traces his path from joining Interaction Associates in 1984 to training engineering teams at Ford, Dow, and DuPont during the early push for quality and consensus based collaboration in American manufacturing. He describes the moment facilitation and collaborative leadership merged into a single discipline, and how that shift fueled a decade of growth in his training programs. Michael shares a personal story about a healthcare clinic project that had to be rebuilt in six weeks after a change in scope, illustrating how communication gaps derail even well managed projects. Barry connects this to his concept of collaborative intelligence, the ability to build agreements and reach outcomes that work for a group rather than any single person. The discussion turns to AI agents joining meetings as active participants, with Barry predicting this will become a normal part of how project teams operate. He closes by describing the upcoming Essential Facilitation for Project Managers program, set to launch in September.

Guest Contact Information

Barry Rosen, Interaction Associates

Call to Action

If this conversation on facilitation and collaborative leadership resonated with you, visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/leadershipos to schedule your Leadership Diagnostic and find out where your organization's coordination gaps really are.

More from Barry Rosen: https://www.interactionassociates.com/resources/blog/author/barry-rosen

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Episode Summary Employee engagement and mental health are often treated as separate line items on an HR dashboard, but they are actually two sides of the same coin. With global engagement falling to just one in five employees and stress levels rising, CEOs must recognize that disengagement is frequently a symptom of unaddressed psychological strain. In this episode, we dive into why traditional "wellness perks" aren't enough and how structural changes—from manager workload to AI deployment—are the real keys to a high-performing, healthy workforce.

https://BreakfastLeadership.com/

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Episode Summary

In this episode of the Breakfast Leadership Show, host Michael D. Levitt sits down with Brent Stewart, owner of Stewart Law Offices, a personal injury firm serving North and South Carolina that has been in practice for thirty one years. Brent shares what drew him to personal injury law, how his firm handles tractor trailer and trucking accident cases, and why the emotional weight of closing a case can rival the weight of the accident itself. The conversation covers driver negligence, the imbalance of resources between families and trucking companies, and the counseling role attorneys play long after the legal work is finished.

Guest Bio

Brent Stewart is the owner of Stewart Law Offices, a personal injury firm based in North and South Carolina with more than three decades of experience representing families affected by tractor trailer and trucking accidents. His practice focuses on holding negligent drivers and trucking companies accountable while guiding clients through the legal and emotional realities of a serious injury or wrongful death claim.

What You Will Learn

Why Brent chose personal injury law and the mentor who shaped his approach to the work

Episode Highlights

The Path Into Personal Injury Law

The Realities of Trucking Litigation

Resources and the David and Goliath Dynamic

Closure and the Emotional Weight of Settlement

Words of Wisdom

Connect With Brent Stewart:  https://www.stewartlawoffices.net/

or call 866-STEWART

Firm: Stewart Law Offices, serving North and South Carolina

Next Step for Listeners

If you are a business leader ready to strengthen how your organization operates, visit https://www.breakfastleadership.com/

to schedule your Leadership Diagnostic and see how the Leadership OS can support your team.

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Steve McKinney spent the first thirteen years of his career in the athletic footwear industry, where he oversaw a five thousand person Reebok factory producing 1.2 million pairs of shoes a month and later led global product development for Adidas. In 2001 he founded McKinney Consulting in Seoul, South Korea, an executive search and leadership consulting firm. Steve is a master coach and an early graduate of proactive agility as a leadership philosophy, shaped by decades of building teams across cultures.

Bryan McKinney grew up between the United States and South Korea, attending international schools in Busan and Seoul before working in California with one of the first live streaming technology companies in the world. He returned to join his father at McKinney Consulting, where he has spent the past nine years building out the firm's technology, coaching, and executive search practice. Bryan is a master coach and is positioned to lead the firm's next generation of growth. McKinney Consulting is a partner firm within Kestria, a global executive search organization.

What You Will Learn

Episode Highlights

Steve and Bryan McKinney share their career paths, from athletic footwear manufacturing and global product development to founding and growing McKinney Consulting.

A discussion of the generational talent gap facing industries such as farming and manufacturing as experienced workers retire.

Steve reflects on witnessing South Korea's transition from dictatorship to democracy and how McKinney Consulting operates as both a local and global executive search partner through the Kestria network.

Steve explains proactive agility, a leadership philosophy shaped by his path from a career in music to athletic footwear leadership to executive search, and why anticipating change matters more than reacting to it.

The story behind their book project on cross-cultural leadership, which grew out of research the two originally intended for a coaching program called Success Factors.

Steve tells the story of consulting a factory line worker in a multi-million dollar production decision, illustrating how expertise and respect should outweigh title and hierarchy.

Bryan and Michael discuss how bringing frontline experts into high-stakes decisions applies well beyond manufacturing, including in healthcare policy design.

Bryan's advice for leading across cultures: seek out local experts, stay humble, and keep asking questions.

Closing thoughts on why understanding cultural differences builds stronger organizations and a richer world.

Guest Contact Information

Next Steps

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Michael D. Levitt speaks with Melissa Robinson-Winemiller about the role of empathy in modern leadership and why it is no longer optional.

Drawing from Melissa’s research and Michael’s real-world leadership experience, this conversation reframes empathy from a soft skill into a measurable leadership strategy that directly impacts retention, performance, and organizational outcomes.

The Empathy Gap in Leadership

A consistent issue across organizations:

Leaders feel pressure from above and disconnect below

Middle managers report feeling unheard and unsupported

Communication breakdowns create disengagement

Melissa’s research highlights this gap as a root cause of:

Leadership burnout

Workplace dissatisfaction

Breakdown in team cohesion

The pandemic accelerated this shift, forcing employees to reassess what they will tolerate in leadership and culture.

Empathy Is a Strategic Tool, Not a Soft Skill

Empathy is often misunderstood.

It is not about emotional reaction.

Melissa defines this as a structured leadership capability, not a personality trait.

Research shows the impact clearly:

Productivity increases by 87%

Innovation increases by 86%

Profitability increases by 84%

Empathy, when applied intentionally, becomes a competitive advantage.

Case Study: Listening as a High-ROI Leadership Move

Michael shares a practical example of transforming a toxic workplace.

Conducted one-on-one conversations with team members

Asked for their perspective

Asked what they would change if they were leading

Turnover reduced from 90% to 6% annually

No financial incentives were introduced.

The shift came from:

Being heard

Being included

Being respected

Listening is not passive. It is a leadership system.

Why Listening Works

Listening creates:

Trust

Psychological safety

Better decision-making

It also reduces:

Misalignment

Rework

Internal friction

The investment is time.

The Real Cost of Attrition

Turnover is not just an HR issue. It is a financial and operational risk.

Key reality:

Replacing an employee costs 90% to 200% of their annual salary

Additional hidden costs:

Loss of institutional knowledge

Disruption to team performance

Increased workload for remaining staff

Retention is not a cultural initiative.

The Failure of Command-and-Control Leadership

Traditional leadership models are breaking down.

Old approach:

Authority-driven

Compliance-based

Top-down decision making

Modern workforce response:

Disengagement

Exit

Loss of trust

As Melissa highlights, today’s workforce no longer tolerates environments where their voice is ignored.

Leadership Evolution: From Control to Connection

Effective leaders today:

Seek input before making decisions

Create space for dialogue

Build systems that incorporate team feedback

This is not about consensus.

Key Takeaways

Empathy drives measurable business outcomes

Listening is one of the highest ROI leadership actions

Turnover is more expensive than most leaders realize

Command-and-control leadership is no longer viable

Perspective-taking improves decision quality and team performance

Action Steps

Schedule one-on-one conversations

Ask: “What would you change if you were in my role?”

Audit your leadership communication

Are you informing or engaging?

Identify friction points

Where are employees not being heard?

Track turnover costs

Quantify the financial impact

Implement feedback loops

Make listening part of your operating system

Closing

If your team does not feel heard, your leadership system is broken.

Empathy is not optional.

https://eqviaempathy.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-melissa-a-robinson-winemiller-author-speaker-trainer

Book your Leadership Operating System review:

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