In The Lead

In this episode, we 're listening in on Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, on why gatherings don't begin when people walk in the room — they begin the moment someone receives an invitation. Parker spoke with Big Think as she unpacked what she calls "generous authority": the practice of using your position as a leader to connect people to a shared purpose, protect them from each other, and make sure everyone in the room feels seen. 

Whether you're leading a staff meeting, a board, a small group, or a family around a dinner table, this episode will change how you think about the first five minutes you get with people — and why that's often the most important leadership move you'll make all week.

The pressure is on. You are the clear leader. Everyone is looking to you. What do you do?

Most leaders aren't stealing from people. But many are.

Not money — something harder to replace. This episode names three things leaders take without knowing it: agency, voice, and life.

And it asks a harder question than "are you stealing?" 

Are you giving?

You can manage your time perfectly and still arrive at Friday completely emptied. Time management doesn't fix depletion. That's a different problem — and that's what this episode is about.

In five minutes, Nathan Metz walks through three kinds of rest that most leaders aren't getting: the decision to actually stop (cessation), knowing the place that fills you back up (location), and the deepest rest of all — the one that comes from knowing your work is held by something larger than your outcomes. Drawing from Hebrews 4 and Paul's letter from prison, this is a short episode with a long shelf life.

July is vacation month. And if you're like most leaders, you're already negotiating with yourself about how available you need to stay. This episode is for you.

Time is the one resource every person has in exactly equal measure — twenty-four hours — and yet something happens to it when nobody's paying attention. In this episode, Nathan Metz draws from Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World to name four things that happen to unmanaged time: it flows toward your weaknesses, it comes under the influence of dominant people, it surrenders to every emergency, and it quietly drifts toward whatever earns the most applause. Odds are, you'll recognize yourself in at least one.

But the episode doesn't stop at the problem. Nathan closes with three practical moves for reclaiming your time — knowing your rhythms, building real criteria for your yes, and learning to plan your time before you're under its pressure. Plus a simple framework for thinking about fixed time versus flex time that you can put to work immediately.

This is Part 1 of a two-part summer series on time and rest. Part 2 is next.

Great listeners aren't born — they're built. In this episode, Nathan steps back and hands the floor to one of the most-watched communication talks of the last decade. Celeste Headlee spent decades as a public radio host before she asked herself a hard question: What actually makes a conversation good? Her answer, delivered in a 2015 TEDx talk, is one of the most practical things a leader can hear.

Congrats coach! You've put in the time. You've invested. And then they get up from their chair, leave your office and...nothing changes. Why? How? The most common coaching mistake is the loss of the last two minutes. After spending the scheduled time in valuable coaching conversation, the close it where the rubber hits the road. In this episode, we focus on exactly that...the last two minutes.

Most leaders think coaching is something they schedule. A one-on-one. A development conversation. A blocked-off hour on the calendar. In this episode, we make the case that coaching is actually a language — and it happens in real time, in the flow of the work, in the moments nobody planned for.

Drawing on the experiences of David Marquet, retired U.S. Navy Captain and author of Turn the Ship Around, Nathan tells the story of the USS Santa Fe — the worst-performing submarine in the U.S. Navy — and the single moment that revealed why smart, experienced leaders keep getting mediocre results from the people around them. The problem wasn't the crew. It was the language.

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on coaching. Today is practical: three questions that replace the instinct to give answers, why fear is the reason your team isn't telling you what they know, and the daily choice every leader faces between task accomplishment and actually developing people.

Frequently, we promote people into leadership based on a criteria that doesn't translate and often works to undercut their own success. To begin addressing the issue, we're starting with one many angles: the pressure to have the answers. In this episode, Nathan Metz introduces a concept from author Michael Bungay Stanier that every leader needs to hear: the advice monster. It's the part of you that starts solving before the other person finishes talking. It's the habit that's keeping your team from growing — and wearing you out in the process. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series on coaching. Today is personal: the internal shift from task-focused to person-focused, and what actually gets in the way.

The average employee spends two hours and twenty-six minutes every workday in what researcher Cy Wakeman calls drama — not conflict, not hard conversations, but the mental energy spent rehearsing grievances, replaying meetings, and building the case for why things are unfair. Multiply that across your building. That number adds up fast.

What if the lost time and energy is all a response to nothing that actually happened but to the story we added? This is part two of our "Soft Heart, Thick Skin" series...an honest look at the emotionally healthy leader.

In The Lead is a leadership development podcast of TLC Management. New episodes on the 16th of each month.