Lead From the Heart

Esther Wojcicki knows what it takes to raise successful children.

Her daughter, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube. Janet is professor of Pediatrics at the UC San Francisco Medical School (and A Fulbright scholar). And Anne is co-founder & CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe.

If any of us were to guess how Esther influenced all three of her daughters to become so high-achieving, the logical leap would be to assume she had to have been the ultimate “tiger mom:” perfectionistic, unrelenting and intensely focused on having her kids win at all costs.

But, of course, Esther wouldn’t be a guest on this podcast were any of those assumptions to be true.

What is true is that Esther trusted her own uncommon instincts on what lessons would produce successful adults; and she intentionally imbued her children with a deep appreciation for five key values:

 Trust,” “Respect,” “Independence,” “Collaboration” and “Kindness.”

Based upon “soft” values like these, Esther might rightfully be regarded as more of a “panda mom” in her approach to child-rearing. Virtues like aren’t widely believed to be the ones that lead to success moreover super-stardom. But it wasn’t just her three daughters who soared under Esther’s curriculum.  For 36 years, she influenced countless students to excel in their lives as a journalism teacher at Palo Alto high school – where she recently was named California’s “Teacher of the Year.”

The big question we have for Esther on this podcast is “Could these very same values have a similar impact when it comes to managing people in the workplace?”  “Is it possible that these same five values hold their charge into adult-life too – and that leaders who adopt them will experience great performance from their employees in return?”

Tapping into everything she wrote in her new best-selling book,“How To Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons For Radical Results,” Esther brilliantly shares a philosophy that transcends teaching.  It’s a mindset that has profound implications for management, and one that intentionally emphasizes heart.

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When researchers tell us employee engagement is especially low, they’re almost always referring to American businesses. But as distressing as engagement is in the United States, the truth is it’s far worse in Europe and the UK – a fact this podcast is dedicated to exploring.

Just a few days before this interview with Dan Cable, professor of Organizational Behavior at the London Business School, the London Times reported statistics that might be laughable were they not true:

Research shows 1-in-2 Britains dread getting out of bed on work-day mornings, and 1-in-4 say they never have a single happy moment while on the job. Making matters worse, the study asserts that workers are starving for appreciation and recognition – an indication that workplace managers aren’t even getting the basics right.

A consistent theme of the Lead From The Heart podcast is that findings like these shouldn’t come as a surprise. We continue to manage human beings in ways that effectively undermine their optimal performance – and it’s because we’re still employing outdated leadership practices passed on to us from generations long-ago.

A while back, I asked Wharton Professor and best-selling author Adam Grant to recommend people he believed would be great guests on this podcast; and Dan Cable was first on his list. Dan (as the author of the new book, “Alive At Work”) very much believes there’s a biological reason so many of us are discontented at work. And much of this podcast is devoted to exploring the many ways managers can re-activate their employee’s “seeking system,” the part of the mind that holds such great sway over human behavior.

Dan holds an undergraduate degree from Penn State University along with a masters and Ph.D from Cornell University. With optics into the US and the UK – not to mention having done considerable work with many global companies, he’s in a great position to help us understand why so many people everywhere are miserable in their jobs – and how managers must help them return to being “alive at work.” 

This is one of the most dynamic and informative podcast conversations yet!

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Pick up any business magazine today, and it won’t take you long to find an article that features the phrase, “according to Gallup research.”

And whether that article is about workplace management, the future of work or how to most effectively lead a team of millennials, the studies to which the author will be referring are almost always the work Dr. Jim Harter.

For over 30 years, he’s led Gallup’s management research which includes over 1,000 workplace effectiveness studies – not to mention their world famous and ongoing global Well Being and Employee Engagement studies.

Gallup research, of course, represents the gold-standard of business insight – and so it’s perhaps no surprise that Jim Harter is the first person we’ve ever invited back on the podcast for a second time.  And we’ve timed his encore appearance to coincide with the launch of his new book, “It’s The Manager,” co-written with Gallup CEO, Jim Clifton – which became an immediate Amazon #1 bestseller when it was released last week.  

“It’s The Manager” is packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study ever on the future of work – the most important of which is that a whopping “70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”

And because we already know that employee engagement is absurdly low across the world, the idea that managers have the greatest impact on it inherently tells us we’re either choosing the wrong people for leadership roles – or that most managers don’t consistently employ the practices now known to drive great performance.  As you might have guessed, in “It’s The Manager,” Harter tells us that both are actually true.

Harter does few interviews, and in our discussion he energetically explains the key findings from his compelling new research – knowledge that will surely propel you and your organization to great new heights.

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Over a span of only a couple of decades, we’ve witnessed entire industries get wiped out by digital disruption – advances in technology that have decimated traditional business models while ushering in new & previously unimaginable ways of delivering the same service. Very often, the innovators had never been previously seen as being either a threat or a competitor – until it was far too late.

Harmed in the process have been book stores, music stores, video rental businesses, taxi cab owners – even hotels. Gone are companies like Kodak, Borders, Blockbuster – & major newspapers across the world.

In light of this, is it likely that digital disruption will affect your industry and career?  Research shows that nearly 9-in-10 of us believe it’s a certainty. 

But the same detailed study made a truly staggering discovery: only 4-in-10 of us believe our companies are doing enough to prepare.

That leads us to asking: “How do we prepare?” and, “What must our leadership mindset be in this era of rapid change to not just endure, but also thrive?”

Working with colleagues from Deloitte & MIT’s Sloan Management Review, Boston College technology professor Gerald Kane spent the past four years surveying 16,000 people about their experience with digital disruption & how well they believe their organizations are responding. And to learn how cutting-edge firms like Google, SalesForce, WalMart and Facebook are working to disrupt themselves, he interviewed many of their top though leaders and innovators.

What he and his team learned through this research is the focus of this podcast – insight every one of us will need in order to successfully maneuver in our careers and in leading our organizations.

One huge take-away from Jerry’s deep-dive is that leaders don’t need to understand the inner workings of artificial intelligence, blockchain & virtual reality to succeed in this new business environment. Instead, what they need to adopt are the qualities of being change oriented, adaptable, open-minded, & willing to experiment & continually learn.

As Jerry writes in his new book, The Technology Fallacy, the response to digital disruption doesn’t call for leaders to focus exclusively on technology. Instead, it requires us to devote ourselves to preparing our people, our cultures & even our organizational structures to respond to the exciting and challenging future ahead.

The good news is Jerry has the roadmap, & brilliantly shares it with you here!

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In their new best-selling book, “Nine Lies About Work,” co-authors Marcus Buckingham (“First Break All The Rules”) & Cisco’s Director of Leadership, Ashley Goodall prove that many of the basic truths we’ve long believed about work are actually lies.

As examples of our faulty assumptions, we believe the best people are well-rounded & that employees crave feedback. We think strategic planning is essential & that an organization’s culture is key to its success.

But as we discuss in this enlightening podcast, Goodall says the strength of individual teams actually matters far more to employees than their organization’s culture. He believes managers must lessen their focus on top down planning & give people more real time intelligence with which to take action instead.

And despite the very human inclination to call out people’s weaknesses, workers don’t want or even need constant feedback – what they really need in order to thrive is their manager’s “attention.”

In a widely read Harvard Business Review article, “The Feedback Fallacy,” Buckingham & Goodall recently revealed another of their nine lies of work: the belief that managers can reliably rate the performance & potential of other people.

We dig into all of this & more – & I hope you’ll listen in. Goodall proves to be a true sage when it comes to the future of managing people in the workplace.

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Gallup research shows 75% of people quit their jobs in response to a bad manager.

65% of Americans say they’d rather change their boss than get a pay raise.

Global surveys report a staggering 70% of employees aren’t engaged at work – and only 4% of these employees had anything nice to say about their bosses.

The obvious conclusion from these facts is that most people across the world experience incompetent leadership – and suffer from it – every single day. And while we presume there’s been an intense focus on leadership success recently, all the relevant scorecards prove most leaders today remain ineffective.

According to Tomas Chamorrow-Premusik, what explains this mess is that we have an inaccurate understanding of what qualities & skills truly drive high engagement and performance – and consequently, keep on hiring people with the very same ineffective traits.

We think confident people are inherently meant to become managers when science proves confidence is actually a weak indicator of leadership potential.  We’re also very impressed with charisma despite the fact that highly charismatic managers tend to be highly self-focused, not to mention poor at developing other people & fostering the collaboration needed to make teams excel.

In his new best-selling book, “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders (and how to fix it), Chamorrow taps a motherlode of research data which proves many male leaders are ill-suited to management roles because they lack emotional intelligence, and think they are far more effective than they actually are.  In the worst cases, they have a significant deficit in empathy and don’t really care about other people – they’re lacking a heart.

Based on studies which proves the best leaders have strong intellectual intelligence and strong emotional intelligence, Chamorrow asserts that women actually tend to be better leaders than men.  One impressive study found that women outshine men in virtually all leadership competencies.

In this riveting podcast, we dig into the science that reveals a new kind of leader not only must emerge, but that we must begin hiring managers according to the new model now. And whether you’re looking to learn how you can be an even more effective leader – or want to know what traits to look for when you’re hiring new managers – both new answers emerge.

Tomas Chamorrow-Premusic is the Chief Talent Scientist at Fortune-500 staffing firm, the Manpower Group. He’s also a professor of business psychology at Columbia University & The University College London.

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When we consider the future of our careers, most of us fully realize that the only way we can ensure our continued relevance & viability is by learning & growing.

We know we have a need to get increasingly better at our existing jobs while, at the same time, preparing ourselves to do entirely new things.  And given the many challenges we already have on our plates, most of us feel oppressed & overwhelmed by these demands.

It would therefore be especially helpful if we had informed guidance on how to acquire new knowledge & skills during our normal work days – & that’s the theme of this podcast.

After 15 years of research – including as an MBA & Ph.D student at the Harvard Business School – University of North Carolina professor, Brad Staats, became an expert on learning.  And what he discovered is that most of us aren’t good learners in any environment. In his words, we’re actually “supremely” bad at learning – news that would be rather discouraging were there no remedies.

It turns out we routinely get in the way of our own growth. For starters, we hate to experience failure, & therefore intentionally avoid taking on challenges that often deliver profound new wisdom. We also have a strong inclination for answering questions rather than asking them (another blow to learning) – and our need to feel busy in every given moment takes us away from the reflection & relaxation known to cement new knowledge into our brains.

In his new book, “Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself & Thrive,” Staats shows us that there are several ways we  limit our own growth & development – and understanding how to correct all of these blind spots is the key to becoming a dynamic learner.

In this podcast, Staats shares some powerful research – not to mention many wonderfully illustrative anecdotes – that will bring your understanding of learning to an entirely new level.  Stanford Business School business school professor, Bob Sutton calls “Never Stop Learning,” “the best book ever written on learning,” and you’ll understand why after you hear the rapid-fire insights Brad Staats shares.

Get ready to be a dynamic learner – you’re going to need it!

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Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, is one of the world’s top experts on building highly cohesive, cooperative and productive teams.

And much of her expertise comes from her decades of research into “Psychological Safety,” recently confirmed by Google to be the single most important quality found in all super-achieving groups.

Simply put, psychological safety means that people work in environments where they feel comfortable expressing & being themselves. They know they can speak up without fear of being humiliated, ignored or blamed – & it’s because their leaders fully accept that fostering this kind of workplace promotes exceptional performance.

Today’s Harvard MBA students are not only learning the profound importance of psychological safety in leadership, but also the most effective ways of building it into their overall management philosophy.

The good news for those of us who don’t attend Harvard is that Dr. Edmondson shares many of her same remarkable insights on this podcast – a discussion that’s focused on her best-selling new book, “The Fearless Organization – Creating Psychological Safety In The Workplace For Learning, Innovation & Growth.”

If your goal is to manage teams that routinely & repeatedly excel, Amy Edmondson has the formula you’ll want to follow.

As of August 2026, this is the #1 most downloaded episode of the podcast series.

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We all know the primary reason companies go into business is to make money.

But is it possible for organizations to thrive financially while also doing good in the world?

USC Marshall School of Business Professor Emeritus, Jim O’Toole spent ten years researching companies that were founded with the uncommon ambition of driving profits – while also caring about the well-being of employees, customers & communities. This podcast is devoted to exploring all of the leadership lessons O’Toole acquired from his research.

In his new book, “The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried To Do Well By Being Good,” O’Toole tells the remarkable stories of well-known companies like Hersheys, Lever Brothers, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss, Herman Miller, & Southwest Airlines. All had founders who took the road less traveled by seeking to enrich not just shareholders – but also their workers (& society overall) – tied to the belief that their businesses would perform better by doing so.

What O’Toole discovered is that all of these company’s founders had the “moral courage” to operate a business by an entirely different set of rules. And almost from the beginning, virtually all of them were met with intense criticism and resistance from shareholders, competitors – even from some of their very own managers.

That all these organizations survive decades or even a century later is testimony to the profound visions of their original leaders.  But as O’Toole found, after each founder passed away, the successor CEO almost always gutted the original culture, and dismissed the very values that had helped make their companies so successful.

In this podcast, we discuss the reasons why so many leaders – then and to this day – so willingly dismiss the example of leaders like Milton Hershey, James Cash Penney and Herb Kelleher who irrefutably proved that leaders can create organizations that are good for both people and profits.

At the end of the podcast, I asked Professor O’Toole if, tied to everything he’d learned from researching the Enlightened Capitalists, whether putting people first is the leadership model of the future.  His answer provides invaluable insight for any entrepreneur, manager or leader who seeks to excel in the 21stCentury.

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