Lead the Team (Top 2% of Podcasts)

One decision by Apple threatened everything he'd spent 15 years building.

Vivek Sharma, Founder and Executive Chair of Movable Ink, built a marketing technology company valued at more than $1 billion, serving major brands including American Express, JetBlue, and Citi.

Then a seemingly minor announcement from Apple threatened to send his company's annual infrastructure costs soaring past $100 million.

“Apple just put the nail in our coffin.”

What happened next would test everything Vivek believed about leadership, risk, and resilience.

In this episode of Lead the Team, Vivek takes us inside that extraordinary moment—and shares the surprising experiences that shaped him, from arriving in America with his family and $1,200 to a failed startup and an unexpected leap from engineering into sales.

You'll also discover why he believes AI is creating dangerous new risks for businesses, what leaders misunderstand about uncertainty, and why the most important leadership skills may have nothing to do with technology.

What do you do when something completely outside your control threatens everything you've built?

Vivek's story offers a powerful perspective.

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REAL STORIES. REAL CEOs. REAL LEADERSHIP.

Lead the Team is a Top 2% global podcast featuring candid conversations with CEOs and C-suite leaders. Host Ben Fanning has had 700+ conversations with leaders from Honeywell, IBM, HP, Zoom, ESPN, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Savannah Bananas and more.

What if the very thing that made you successful is now holding you back?

Melodie Nakhle, Global Chief Marketing Officer of Amway, has built an extraordinary career leading businesses, teams, and transformation across countries and cultures. Today, she helps shape strategy for a $7.3 billion global enterprise with more than 1 million independent business owners.

But when Melodie stepped into a senior leadership role in Japan, something unexpected happened.

The experience, confidence, and leadership approach that had helped her succeed were suddenly challenged.

What happened next fundamentally changed how she leads.

In this episode of Lead the Team, Melodie joins host Ben Fanning to share the leadership lessons behind her global career, including why successful executives can develop dangerous blind spots, how to navigate transformation, and what it really takes to bring out the best in people.

You'll discover why curiosity, courage, and humility are essential to leadership, how to make difficult decisions without having every answer, and why the people closest to an opportunity often see what senior executives miss.

Melodie also shares how she approaches influencing more than one million independent business owners, developing future leaders, and helping a global business evolve across generations.

The biggest leadership risk may not be what you don't know. It may be what your past success has convinced you that you already know.

🎧 Listen now to discover the experience that changed Melodie's perspective on leadership.

What's one leadership belief you've had to rethink as you've become more successful?

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow Lead the Team on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and leave a rating or review to help more leaders discover the show.

Disclaimer: This recording contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about the opportunities Veradigm sees in the healthcare technology industries in which it operates and solutions and services that may be developed to serve its clients. These statements reflect current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information on these risks appears in Veradigm's filings with the SEC, available at investor.veradigm.com. Veradigm undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

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What happens when a leader bets the company on an idea that could transform an entire industry?

Don Trigg, CEO of Veradigm, saw it firsthand at Cerner, where founder Neal Patterson made a massive bet on what would become the electronic medical record. Cerner ultimately grew into a $5B+ healthcare technology company—and that early digitization helped create the foundation for today’s AI revolution.

Don shares what that experience taught him about conviction, risk, failure, and making high-velocity decisions when the outcome is far from certain.

He also reveals why he practices reverse mentorship, why he believes “the people who ask the best questions win,” the daily habit that has shaped decades of his career, and what leaders may be getting wrong about AI right now.

Help us spread the movement of building better leaders! Takes just 5 seconds to rate and follow the show on Spotify, and share this episode with an executive, founder, or colleague who needs to hear it.

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What would you do if you had just six weeks to sell the business you spent years building?

That’s what happened to Robert Clarkson when he was one of the youngest presidents at GE Capital. A message from GE leadership suddenly changed everything... and gave him roughly six weeks to help sell the business.

What could have been a paralyzing moment became a defining leadership experience.

Today, Robert is Chief Revenue Officer for SMB and Clover at Fiserv, following senior leadership roles at Stripe, Payoneer, PayPal, American Express and GE.

In this episode of Lead the Team, Robert reveals why great leaders look for the problems instead of avoiding them, why the toughest assignments can create the most growth, and how he builds teams that challenge his thinking rather than simply agree with him.

You'll also hear:

• Why Robert ties sales compensation directly to customer success
• The meeting strategy he uses to surface problems before they reach the executive level
• Why his career philosophy is to make other people successful
• What leaders should understand about AI and agentic commerce
• How he leads and trusts teams operating across the globe

Robert’s career is a powerful reminder: when the unexpected happens, the problem itself may be the opportunity.

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What happens when the leadership playbook that made you successful suddenly stops working?

Dave Lehman, President and COO of Birdeye, has spent more than two decades building and scaling teams at Salesforce, Yext, Campaign Monitor, and Birdeye. But one of his most important leadership lessons came from a painful moment: after aggressively scaling a business, Dave had to cut half his team.

“All I could do was blame myself.”

In this episode of Lead the Team, Dave shares how that experience changed the way he leads—and why a leader’s job isn’t simply to keep the machine growing, but to see where it could break before it does.

Dave also reveals why Birdeye is now testing job candidates for “AI aptitude,” the human skills becoming more valuable as AI improves, and how leaders can move their teams from repetitive “negative-one work” toward higher-value strategic work.

You’ll discover:

• Why successful playbooks eventually stop working

• The hiring mindset Dave used while scaling Salesforce’s Chicago office

• The painful leadership mistake that changed how he approaches growth

• Why leaders need to know their numbers before problems surface

• How Birdeye is testing leaders and salespeople for AI aptitude

• Why “AI can make that mistake—you can’t”

• How AI could allow managers to lead larger, more effective teams

• Why every leader should get hands-on with AI now

Dave also shares lessons from hosting The Agentic CMO and his perspective on how AI coworkers will reshape the way leaders build and manage teams.

This is a conversation about growth, accountability, judgment, and what great leadership looks like when the world...and the technology around us...is changing fast.

Follow Lead the Team for more candid conversations with executives about the moments that shaped how they lead.

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Enjoyed the episode?

Follow Lead the Team so you never miss a conversation, and leave a 5-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more leaders discover the show.

REAL STORIES. REAL CEOs. REAL LEADERSHIP.

Lead the Team is a Top 2% global podcast featuring candid conversations with CEOs and C-suite leaders. Host Ben Fanning has had 700+ conversations with leaders from Honeywell, IBM, HP, Zoom, ESPN, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Savannah Bananas and more.

Sometimes you don’t know what kind of leader you are until a crisis hits.

Bijal Shah was two and a half months postpartum and out on parental leave when Guild’s founder and CEO suffered a stroke. Suddenly, she was called to step in, steady the company, earn the confidence of the board and executive team, and make decisions she never expected to face.

Months later, a board member told her something she’ll never forget:

“We never knew you had this gear.”

In this episode of Lead the Team, Bijal shares what she discovered about herself in that moment — and the leadership traits that helped her rise to it: listening, low ego, decisive action, resilience, and the willingness to go all in.

She also tells a career story she says she’s never told before, revealing why walking away from a difficult situation earlier in her career may have cost her an important opportunity to grow.

Plus, we dig into AI and the future of work, the skills employees will need to thrive, what Guild is learning from serving millions of workers, and why Bijal believes great CEOs need to think beyond short-term wins to build enduring businesses.

You’ll hear:

• How Bijal unexpectedly stepped into the CEO role

• Why a board member told her, “We never knew you had this gear”

• The power of listening, low ego and decisive action

• Why discomfort can be where your greatest growth happens

• Her candid story about a career decision she sees differently today

• How AI is reshaping skills and the future of work

• Why enduring businesses require long-term leadership

• What Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail taught her about moral courage

This is a conversation about what happens when the moment demands another gear ... and you discover you have it.

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Enjoyed the episode?

Follow Lead the Team so you never miss a conversation, and leave a 5-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more leaders discover the show.

REAL STORIES. REAL CEOs. REAL LEADERSHIP.

Lead the Team is a Top 2% global podcast featuring candid conversations with CEOs and C-suite leaders. Host Ben Fanning has had hundreds conversations with leaders from Honeywell, IBM, HP, Zoom, ESPN, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Savannah Bananas and more.

David Sudolsky was building a company with his best friend when everything changed in an instant.

His business partner died suddenly at 38—and what David heard at the funeral forced him to question everything he believed about success.

Today, David is Founder and CEO of Boldr. He shares how that loss changed the company he built, why he believes traditional outsourcing gets people wrong, what worries him about AI, and how fatherhood has transformed the way he leads.

It’s a conversation about ambition, loss, and the question every leader eventually faces:

What will actually matter when it’s over?

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Enjoyed the episode?

Follow Lead the Team so you never miss a conversation, and leave a 5-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more leaders discover the show.

REAL STORIES. REAL CEOs. REAL LEADERSHIP.

Lead the Team is a Top 2% global podcast featuring candid conversations with CEOs and C-suite leaders. Host Ben Fanning has had 700+ conversations with leaders from Honeywell, IBM, HP, Zoom, ESPN, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Savannah Bananas and more.

What you say as a leader may take them seconds to forget...OR stay with someone on your team for decades.

Aimee George Leary is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she leads the people strategy for more than 35,000 employees. In this episode of Lead The Team, she shares the painful early-career moment that permanently changed how she leads.

After honestly telling executives that a critical project was behind schedule, Aimee received a devastatin voicemail from a senior leader. She spent the entire weekend anxious about it. When she returned to work Monday, the leader didn’t remember leaving the message.

That experience taught Aimee a lesson she still carries more than 25 years later: Your words as a leader carry. Choose them wisely.

Ben and Aimee also explore:

• The three things that kept her at Booz Allen for 30+ years

• Why doing great work gets noticed—even years later

• How to create career opportunities without chasing promotions

• What listening and vulnerability look like at the executive level

• How Booz Allen is preparing 35,000+ people for AI

• The mistake leaders make when using AI to improve existing processes

• Why intentionality, optimism, and energy matter in leadership

If you lead a team, this conversation is a powerful reminder: You may forget the moment. Your people may never forget how you made them feel.

Follow Lead The Team with Ben Fanning for conversations with top executives, CEOs, founders, and business leaders about leadership, high-performance teams, AI transformation, communication, and building organizations that thrive through change.

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What do you do when everything goes wrong...and everyone is looking to you for answers?

Chaim Mazal knows that feeling.

As Chief Information Security Officer at GitLab, he operates in a world where one alert can suddenly mean it’s “all hands on deck.”

In this episode of Lead The Team, Chaim shares the story of a major cybersecurity incident at a previous company where sensitive customer data was exposed. At one point, the potential impact appeared to include more than 3,000 customers.

Teams worked nights and weekends, the clock was ticking, and, as Chaim describes it, everyone was “collectively freaking out.”

His job as a leader was to remain the voice of reason.

His lesson: “It’s not what happens, it’s how you deal with it.”

Chaim and Ben also explore:

• Why resilience matters more than perfection

• How to stay calm when your team is under intense pressure

• Chaim’s daily practice of “positive projection”

• Why great leaders hire talented people and then trust them

• The three leadership traits he believes matter most in the AI era

• How Brazilian jiu-jitsu, running, and physical challenges build mental resilience

• The COVID realization that changed how he manages stress

• Why becoming a better leader starts with investing in yourself as a human being

Chaim’s career requires him to prepare for things to go wrong. Yet his leadership philosophy is rooted in optimism, trust, curiosity, and the belief that his team can find a way forward.

Whether you’re leading through a crisis, managing an ambitious team, or simply dealing with the everyday uncertainty of leadership, this conversation offers a practical reminder: you can’t control everything that happens, but you can control how you show up when it does.

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When Puneet Raj became CEO of Fieldwire after its acquisition by Hilti, he inherited a successful 250-person startup facing a pivotal transition: the founders were leaving, employees were worried about losing the startup culture, and a new leader was walking in.

Instead of arriving as the new boss with all the answers, Puneet introduced himself as an intern.

For six months, he rotated through Fieldwire’s teams, learned the business from the ground up, listened to the people who had made it successful, and even failed the company’s demo certification twice. The approach helped him earn trust, opened a direct channel with employees, and gave him a deeper understanding of the company before trying to change it.

Puneet shares what that experience taught him about humility, listening, organizational trust, leading experts, and creating alignment at scale.

He also explains why he now treats his leadership team as his most important “product”, and why leaders in the AI era need to know when NOT to use AI.

His warning: when leaders outsource their thinking to AI, they can lose the ability to debate, question, and think deeply about the decisions that matter most.

In this episode:

• Why a new CEO deliberately became an “intern”
• How listening before leading can earn trust
• Why great leaders don't need to know everything
• How to align hundreds of people around one direction
• Why your leadership team may be your most important “product”
• The danger of outsourcing critical thinking to AI

Leadership starts with learning and sometimes the best way to lead is to become a student first.

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Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben Fanning

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