Grown to Lead

The best service, leadership, and networking all start in the same place: paying attention to the person in front of you.

Rachael Freedland, founder and CEO of Best Always Consulting, shares lessons from more than 20 years across luxury hospitality, private clubs, events, marketing, and business development. Her experience has taught her how small details can shape a relationship and make someone feel seen, heard, and remembered.

The conversation explores “social exhaustion,” the demands of being “on” all day, and how to protect your energy while building meaningful connections. Rachael shares practical ways to make networking feel more natural, why asking one more question matters, and what she learned when she realized that having a good idea and getting people to listen require different skills.

These lessons also apply to leading a team, from understanding how each person wants to be recognized to adapting how you communicate and offer support. A practical conversation about consideration, curiosity, and the everyday choices that strengthen relationships.

Becoming a stronger manager does not always mean adding more to your plate. Sometimes it starts with understanding who you are, what matters to you, and how you want to show up for the people around you.

Suken Jain spent 20 years in corporate leadership, including managing an $800 million product portfolio, before moving into coaching and leadership development. After experiencing burnout and realizing how much of his leadership had been shaped by other people’s expectations, he began asking a different question: What would it look like to lead as himself?

Suken shares how leaders can reconnect with their values, recognize the strengths they may be overusing, and build the discipline to align their everyday choices with the leader they want to become. He and Lindsay also explore why busyness can get in the way of presence, how different seasons of life require different priorities, and why the skills that made you a successful individual contributor may need to evolve when you begin managing others.

At the heart of the conversation is a reminder that showing up as your best self is not about doing everything perfectly. It is about knowing yourself well enough to choose where your attention belongs, trusting what you bring to the table, and continuing to grow from there.

The strongest leaders are not always the ones who move the fastest. Sometimes the most powerful thing a leader can do is pause.

Paul McCormick is the General Manager and Superintendent at Fox Meadow Golf and Country Club on Prince Edward Island and the founder of Mindful Island Consulting. After nearly burning himself out earlier in his career, losing his job, and walking away from the golf industry altogether, Paul found mindfulness. When an opportunity brought him back to the industry, he made a decision: he could return to the work, but he could not return to the way he had been working.

More than 15 years later, mindfulness has become part of how Paul leads. He shares why being present has very little to do with sitting quietly on a meditation cushion and everything to do with how you listen, respond to conflict, recognize your own limits, and create an environment where people feel seen and supported. He also challenges the grind mentality that can turn long hours into a badge of honor and explains why your job should never become your entire identity.

The conversation gets especially practical around leadership under pressure. Paul talks about handling difficult members and customers without taking their behavior personally, protecting employees while maintaining high service standards, creating space for vulnerability without lowering expectations, and learning the difference between reacting and responding.

His advice to younger leaders is deceptively simple: get to know yourself. Understand what happens to you under stress. Learn when to pause. Remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. A present moment, as Paul puts it, is only a breath away.

The higher you rise in leadership, the less the job is about having the answers.

Amber Read is the Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Piedmont Driving Club in Atlanta, one of the country’s most historic private clubs. She leads in an environment with exceptionally high expectations, deep traditions, and relationships that carry real weight.

Amber shares what it takes to lead at that level: listening before acting, building a team that will challenge her, receiving feedback without becoming defensive, and holding people to high standards without losing empathy. She also reflects on being the first female General Manager at two clubs and what changed when she stopped trying to lead like the people around her.

At the heart of the conversation is a bigger question: what does leadership require when your success depends less on what you can do yourself and more on the culture and people you develop around you? Amber’s answer is demanding and human. Care deeply. Expect a lot. Keep learning. And when the decisions get hard, leave people with their dignity.

Saying yes can open doors. It can also leave you overextended, burned out, and moving toward a version of success you may not even want anymore. The challenge is not simply learning to say no. It is becoming more thoughtful about which opportunities deserve your time and energy, and recognizing that every yes comes with a tradeoff.

Carrie Eyler is the Director of Private Clubs at Boelter, where she works with club leaders across the country on hospitality, food and beverage, and customer experience. She brings more than 15 years of leadership experience, including serving as Assistant General Manager at Interlachen Country Club. Before entering hospitality, Carrie built a career in the performing arts, an unconventional path that continues to shape how she thinks about leadership, relationships, and creating experiences.

Carrie shares her perspective on taking chances before you feel ready, building confidence through action, navigating ambition without losing yourself, and choosing where to invest your time. She also shares why she has shifted from chasing the next opportunity to planting seeds for the future, and how Fierce and Fearless grew from her own desire for a stronger community of women. The message for leaders is simple: keep taking chances, know what your yes is costing you, and say yes on purpose.

A bad manager can cost an organization far more than a difficult employee. In the worst cases, the price can reach millions. But most employment problems do not begin with one dramatic mistake. They build through missed conversations, inconsistent expectations, weak documentation, and managers who were never taught how to manage people.

Jared Speier is a Partner in Stradling’s Employment Law practice group, where he advises employers and represents them in wrongful termination, discrimination, class action, and PAGA litigation. In this episode, he brings a litigator’s perspective to the everyday management decisions that either protect an organization or create risk.

Jared shares practical advice on documentation, difficult conversations, performance management, and when to involve HR or employment counsel. The message for leaders is simple: invest in manager training early, give managers the right support, and address small issues before they become expensive ones.

Jackie Carpenter, CCM has spent more than twenty years inside the private club industry, turning around struggling clubs by challenging the one assumption most leaders never question: that the members come first. Her answer is employees first, every time. As co-author of People First and founder of Notable, she makes a simple case. Your people are the biggest line item on the budget and the only reason a great member experience is possible at all.

The conversation gets concrete about what that looks like on a normal Tuesday, not at a strategy offsite. Jackie walks through her five-part framework for a people-first culture: credibility, candor, cultivation, commitment, and care. She unpacks what it means to hire from the heart instead of hiring to check a box, why she defines love at work as loyalty, ownership, value, and excellence, and the false credibility that quietly wrecks trust the moment you promise a new hire something you won't deliver.

The most useful moment might be the advice Jackie gives every leader: put down the inbox and get on the floor with your people. You connect more and, over time, fight fewer fires. If retention keeps you up at night, "Why Good People Stay" hands you a roadmap you can start using tomorrow.

Communication is the one leadership skill almost everyone assumes they've mastered. Most haven't.

Shannon GaNun has spent more than 30 years helping people communicate clearly, concisely, and confidently. She has worked with corporations, associations, government agencies, nonprofits, and Congress, and she teaches public speaking and leadership at Georgia Southern University. Today she runs her own firm delivering keynotes and workshops to leaders who want to be heard.

Shannon breaks down why confidence comes from practice rather than perfection, the three-word phrase that defuses almost any tense conversation, and how to read whether someone wants an emotional, social, or practical response before you open your mouth. She makes the case for executive presence as something you build on purpose, and explains why the leaders people actually trust pair confidence with warmth.

You'll walk away with a phrase you can use in your next hard conversation, a method for getting real team buy-in instead of reluctant compliance, and three specific techniques to project confidence the moment you stand up to speak.

Most leaders assume executive presence is about how they show up on the outside. The tailored suit. The commanding voice. The big energy in the room.

Elle Zimmerman has spent over 20 years helping leaders unlearn that assumption.

A former Broadway leading lady turned Fortune 100 leadership coach, Elle brings a rare combination of performance expertise and emotional intelligence training to executives at McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, Bacardi USA, Crocs, Vera Bradley, and hundreds of small to mid-sized organizations. Her work sits at the intersection of self-awareness, communication, and presence, and she is very clear on what actually moves the needle.

Research from the Center for Talent Innovation found that executive presence breaks down into three components: gravitas, communication, and appearance. Gravitas accounts for 67%. Appearance? Five percent. Elle builds her entire methodology around that gap, helping leaders develop the quiet, grounded strength that makes people lean in, listen, and follow, without performing a version of themselves that doesn't fit.

This conversation covers how self-awareness becomes the foundation of presence, why women and men tend to show up differently when they're trying to project confidence, and the practical techniques Elle uses with executives to slow down, say less, and command more.

Four generations. One team. And most leaders are winging it.

Kelly Lannan has spent nearly 13 years at Fidelity Investments, most of it focused on what younger generations actually need from their employers and their money. Now leading Fidelity's flagship Boston branch, she manages a team that spans every generation in the workforce and a client base to match.

She breaks down how each generation communicates, what they actually want from a leader, and why the smartest move any manager can make has nothing to do with generation at all. She also challenges the tired stereotypes around Gen Z and Boomers, and makes the case that the real friction on multi-generational teams isn't age — it's assumptions.

You'll walk away with a clearer picture of how to start conversations with your team that cut through generational noise, practical adjustments to how you give feedback across the spectrum, and one reframe that changes how you approach every person you lead.