Coachful Coaching Leadership Podcast

Executive presence for introverts comes down to 3 C’s. Former Microsoft and AmEx VP Jennifer Marcou explains how quiet leaders get promoted.

Jennifer was doing the GM job as interim, had the expertise and the results, and still lost the role to someone with a stronger network and more visibility. That moment reshaped how she led and became the foundation of her book, Lead with Quiet Confidence (out October 6).

We cover why confidence beats competence, the 3 C’s of executive presence (competence, confidence, communication), small behavior changes that shift how people see you without changing who you are, why introverted brains produce their best ideas after the meeting, networking for people who hate it, and why saying “I” instead of “we” changes how a leader lands.

Find Jennifer at jennifermarcou.com.

I’m David Fung, executive coach and founder of Coachful Coaching. I help technical leaders become influential executives through coaching for individuals, coaching for teams, and speaking engagements. Learn more at coachfulcoaching.com

Promoted fast, then the habits that got you there stopped working? Here are the 3 tests every new leader faces.

Bill Gunn went from entry level to Managing Director at FedEx in under five years, then to a VP role at Gap. Looking back, he says he valued the speed of the journey more than what he was learning along the way.

Bill spent 30+ years at FedEx, Gap, Coach, Estée Lauder, and Johnson & Johnson, most recently as Chief Procurement Officer for J&J Consumer Health. Today he's a Hudson Institute certified executive coach.

We cover:

- The 3 tests every new leader faces in the first 6 to 9 months: alignment with your boss, knowing your team, and communicating at scale

- How long to stay in a role before you go for the next one

- Why moving from FedEx to Gap taught him to "slow down to speed up"

- Cycles of Success, and why the stumble and the recovery matter

- What to do first when your old playbook stops working

Connect with Bill: https://www.williamgunncoaching.com

Full episode notes: https://coachfulcoaching.com/coachful-coaching-leadership-podcast/promoted-too-fast

I help technical leaders and executives grow into bigger roles through coaching for individuals, coaching for teams, and speaking engagements. Learn more at https://coachfulcoaching.com

How do you build a team that runs without you? Jon Rennie spent ten years letting go, then stepped down as CEO.

Jon served as a US Navy nuclear submarine officer through seven Cold War deployments, then ran eight manufacturing businesses for three global companies before co-founding AccuGrid Technologies and leading it for a decade. In January he stepped down. The company did not miss a beat.

Three years earlier he spent a month in a cabin in Maine, deliberately hard to reach, to find out whether the business actually needed him. It performed better while he was gone.

We get into why most leaders never reach that point: the instinct to grab the ball back the second something goes wrong, and the boss who wants to be the genius surrounded by helpers instead of building a team of geniuses. Jon's fix is simple and uncomfortable. Stop being the answer guy, let your team make real mistakes, and ask questions instead of making statements.

We also cover the seven years it took him to find his purpose after the Navy. At 25 he was crawling inside a nuclear missile to inspect the warhead. Six months later he was in a cubicle with no computer and no authorization to buy a stapler.

Jon Rennie, PhD, is Professor of Business at Thales College and the former CEO of AccuGrid Technologies. He is the author of I Have the Watch, You Have the Watch, and All in the Same Boat, and hosts the Deep Leadership podcast. More at jonsrennie.com

I'm David Fung, an executive coach working with technical leaders stepping into executive roles. Coaching for individuals, coaching for teams, and speaking engagements at coachfulcoaching.com

Most AI projects fail in big companies for one reason: nobody tied them to a business result. Anmol Madan on how to fix it.

I sat down with Anmol Madan, founder and CEO of RadiantGraph, former Chief Data Scientist at Livongo and Teladoc, and author of The Machines Will See You Now. We cover why startups adopt AI faster than enterprises, how to tie AI to a metric your CFO will sign off on, what to do when you have built the right thing too early, and why AI is raising healthcare costs right now instead of lowering them.

Show notes: https://coachfulcoaching.com/coachful-coaching-leadership-podcast/why-ai-projects-fail-big-companies

Work with me: https://coachfulcoaching.com

Executives used AI to write their emails for one month. Then they couldn't write one themselves. Steven Kotler, NYT bestselling author of seventeen books and founder of the Flow Research Collective, joins me to explain why the bottleneck of this century isn't technology, it's the human brain.

We cover the flow research behind 500% productivity gains and 230% faster learning, the twelve categories of cognition AI quietly erodes, the Universe 25 mouse utopia that collapsed despite total abundance, and the framework at the heart of his new book with Peter Diamandis, We Are as Gods: separating frames, mindset, and bias so you can actually train each one. Steven also shares the Zen practice he starts with, why mindfulness is the mechanism that teaches leaders to spot opportunity, and his blunt answer when I asked who owns the abundance.

His closing message for every leader: the soft skills of the last century, creativity, focus, purpose, mindset, are the hard skills of this one. Train them, or the technology erodes them.

Full show notes: https://coachfulcoaching.com/coachful-coaching-leadership-podcast/ai-is-quietly-eroding-the-skills-leaders-need-most-with-steven-kotler

Work with me at coachfulcoaching.com

Steven's book: We are as Gods

I joined Jim Beach on School for Startups Radio, an SBA award winning show airing on 100 AM and FM stations, to talk about what AI is really doing to careers in tech.

The line from this conversation that keeps coming back to me: careers don't end anymore, they expire. People aren't choosing when to leave their industry. They're being told. And by then it's too late to do anything about it.

Jim and I got into why every company suddenly claims to be an AI company, how to tell the real ones from the LLM wrappers, what's actually driving the layoffs at Microsoft and Meta, and the energy audit I ran with a chief executive who had turned around a struggling nonprofit and couldn't figure out why the job stopped feeling right. The answer was in his calendar. His competence was highest exactly where his energy was lowest.

We also talked about how I got my first coaching client. He found me through ChatGPT. I share exactly what I did to make that happen, because if your business can't be found by AI search today, you're on page 10 of Google all over again.

I'm David Fung, founder of Coachful Coaching in Toronto. I spent 23 years in tech, including 15 at Salesforce, before becoming an executive coach. I work with founders, CTOs, and senior leaders on staying relevant, leading through change, and communicating with clarity.

Find me at coachfulcoaching.com or on LinkedIn.

In Episode 177 of Unpacked with Ron Harvey, host Ron Harvey of Global Core Strategies and Consulting sits down with David Fung — executive coach, founder of Coachful Coaching, and 23-year veteran of the tech industry, including a leadership tenure at Salesforce.

Based in Toronto, Canada, David now works with executives and teams navigating major transitions and chaos, helping them find clarity when the stakes are highest.Ron and David dig into the real, often uncomfortable work that separates titled managers from trusted leaders.

From the metaphor of playing soccer at the edge of a cliff to the belief systems that quietly steer behavior, this conversation gives leaders practical language and frameworks they can put to work immediately.

What you will hear in this episode:

* Why learning to lead yourself is the non-negotiable starting point for leading anyone else*

* The "soccer at the edge of a cliff" metaphor for creating safety that fuels innovation

* How to lead with weakness instead of performing strength, and why it draws people to you

* A practical framework for diagnosing where and when trust was broken on a team

* Why the "how will we work together" conversation is the one most teams skip

* Lessons from Salesforce on running a metrics-driven culture without losing your humanity

* How clarity, cadence, and accountability prevent conflict-averse leadership

* Why beliefs — not skills — are what most often hold leaders back

* The four pillars of sustainable leadership: faith, family, friends, and meaningful work

* What the 1937 Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals about community and well-being

* A candid story about how David's biggest strength became the behavior burning out his team

This is a conversation for current and emerging leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process.

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome to Unpack Podcast - Ron introduces the show, its focus on leadership, and welcomes guest David Fung.

01:24 – David Fung’s Background - David shares his 23-year tech career, leadership experience, and move into executive coaching.

02:14 – What Leadership Looks Like Across Organizations-Discussion on common leadership themes and the “guardrails at the edge of the cliff” metaphor.

04:12 – Leading Yourself First - David explains self-leadership, self-work, and why leaders should lead with weakness.

07:20 – Trust in Leadership and Society - Ron and David explore who people trust and how trust applies in leadership and life.

11:13 – Rebuilding Trust After It’s Broken - David shares how to identify where trust broke down and how to work backward from there.

14:04 – Managing Expectations Up FrontThe conversation shifts to setting norms, agreements, and communication standards early.

16:44 – Balancing Metrics and Human Connection - David discusses leading in a metrics-driven environment while still seeing people as people.

20:39 – Handling Conflict-Averse Leaders - How coaches help leaders confront conflict and build accountability.

23:14 – Personal Leadership Lessons and Burnout - David shares a real example of how too many ideas created confusion and burnout.

29:11 – The Four Pillars of Self-Care - Faith, family, friends, and meaningful work as anchors for well-being.

32:47 – Final Leadership Advice - David’s closing wisdom on humility, discipline, and self-leadership.

33:22 – How to Find David Fung - David shares his podcast, coaching work, and where to connect with him.

35:07 – Ron’s Closing Remarks - Ron wraps up the episode and encourages listeners to share and stay connected.

Up to 20% of your team is neurodivergent. Most leaders have no idea, and it's costing them their best people.

Executive coach Cara Wilson spent years coaching software engineers before realizing why she connected with them so easily. Many of them are neurodivergent. So is she. Cara only discovered she's autistic two years ago, and it reframed her whole career.

We get into why analytical minds try to break every framework before trusting it, the single habit that makes teams more inclusive (make the implicit explicit), what to do when an employee asks for a protocol instead of intuition, and the real cost of masking at work.

Find Cara at tractionleadershipllc.com.

Work with David at coachfulcoaching.com.

Your title gets compliance. It won't get commitment. Executive coach David Fung breaks down how to influence people who don't report to you.

(GUEST APPEARANCE on the LEADERSHIP IN QUARTERS podcast with Josh Seldin)

David spent 23 years in tech, most recently as a Senior Director at Salesforce, where half his week went to influencing leaders outside his reporting line. Decades of psychology on influence distill down to three pillars: credibility, connection, and relevance.

In this episode:

• Why the stick works temporarily but kills initiative
• The three pillars of influence and how to build each one
• How to influence across organizations when there's "nothing in it for them"
• The exact script for holding a peer accountable when they drop a commitment
• Why respect costs nothing but assuming the worst costs relationships

David is an ICF-certified executive coach, founder of Coachful Coaching, and host of the Coachful Coaching Leadership Podcast. Learn more at coachfulcoaching.com.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction to Influence Without Authority

1:20 Carrot vs. Stick

5:11 The Three Pillars of Influence

6:49 Building Real Relationships

10:10 The Limits of Authority

14:57 Influencing Across Organizations

19:01 Accountability Without Authority

23:18 Closing Thoughts

How do you lead when you don't have direct control?

Daniel Atlin interviewed 25 university presidents across the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to answer that question. What he found applies to any leader in a complex, multi-stakeholder organization: the ones who thrive don't have better plans. They ask more questions, move slower, and bring people with them. The ones who revert to command-and-control get stuck.

In this episode:

• ​What sense-making means and why it beats strategic planning in uncertain environments
• ​Inner vs. outer sense-making, and why you can't do one without the other
• ​The three habits that separated presidents who navigated disruption from those who got stuck
• ​Why your job is not your identity, and Daniel's own admission about figuring that out too late
• ​The power of the pause, the balcony view, and two skills leaders risk losing in the age of AI

Daniel Atlin is a strategic advisor and executive coach with 30 years in senior roles across Canada's post-secondary, cooperative, and government sectors. He hosts the Messy Podcast and teaches at the University of Guelph.

Full show notes and transcript: https://coachfulcoaching.com/coachful-coaching-leadership-podcast/how-to-lead-without-control

Work with David: coachfulcoaching.com