Leadership Recalibrated™

Content note: This episode contains strong language and discusses grief and the loss of loved ones and colleagues, workplace bullying, burnout, and personal safety concerns at work.

You exceeded your number. You closed one of the biggest deals of your career. And the response was: you should be grateful.

Once it was stated, Christine couldn’t unhear it.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Christine Joseph, Founder of Corporate Inmate, to talk about what happens when you stop accepting corporate’s explanations for why you’re tired, underpaid, and always on call.

Christine has spent most of her career in big corporate, much of it in finance-industry sales, and she’s still there. That’s what makes her worth listening to. She isn’t looking back from a safe distance. She’s describing Monday.

We get into the stories corporate tells to keep people in line, why so many capable women spend years chasing approval from people who were never going to give it, and the moment Christine decided what she would and wouldn’t trade for a job.

This is a conversation for anyone who has been told to be grateful for something she earned.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by guests are their own and do not represent the views of any current or former employer. Companies and individuals discussed are intentionally not named. This episode is for general discussion and is not legal, financial, or medical advice. If you’re struggling with your mental health, please reach out to a professional or a local support line.

About Our Guest

Christine Joseph is the founder of Corporate Inmate, and she knows the system she writes about from the inside. She has spent more than two decades in Corporate America, most of it in sales, and she is still working in it today.

Somewhere in the middle of that career, she got out. Christine spent several years in the yoga world, first teaching, then training other teachers, and eventually serving as a director responsible for roughly 100 teachers across 10 studios. What she found there was a different uniform on the same hierarchy.

She returned to Corporate America in 2021 and saw it with fresh eyes. The commission games, the gratitude scripts, and the expectation that you’ll always be reachable no longer looked normal to her. So she started saying so, on TikTok and Instagram, and built Corporate Inmate: a vocabulary for corporate life that gives exhausted professionals words for what they’ve been living. She also writes on Substack and co-hosts the podcast Doing Time Differently with her husband, Andrew.

You can find everything she does at corporateinmate.com. In this conversation, she brings that same blunt honesty to the question so many accomplished women are quietly asking: how much of myself is this job actually worth?

Links

• Website: https://corporateinmate.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/corporateinmate
• TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@corporateinmate

Margaret Leibovic had offers from GitHub and several established companies. Every one of them was in a management role. She turned them all down for the smallest company on the table, in an individual contributor seat.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sat down with Margaret, who studied computer science at MIT, built Firefox at Mozilla, and then spent nearly a decade at League, arriving as an engineer and leaving as Senior Vice President. She built the engineering organization from almost nothing, scaled it through multiple pivots of the business, and took two maternity leaves along the way.

What connects every move in her career is a pattern she names herself. When things got stable, she went looking for whatever was breaking. The uncomfortable team, the rewrite nobody wanted, the company with no product yet. That is where she found growth, and it is the opposite of what most of us were taught to look for.

She is also honest about what it cost her to learn the management side, including the mistake she made repeatedly while scaling a team, and the thing she got wrong about people who told her they could handle something.

And she did all of it without building a second version of herself for work.

This is a conversation for anyone weighing a next move, anyone new to leading people, and anyone who has wondered whether playing it safe is actually the safe choice.

About Our Guest

Margaret Leibovic is CTO at SiftMed, a Canadian startup building AI-enabled software to make sense of massive and messy medical records. Before SiftMed, Margaret spent nearly 10 years at League, joining after its Series A as the first Android developer and first engineering manager, and later leading the engineering org as SVP as it grew from about 10 to more than 150 people. Earlier, she was an engineering manager on Firefox for Android at Mozilla. She holds a BS in Computer Science from MIT and is based in Ottawa.

Connect with Margaret on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leibovic/

Content note: This episode includes discussion of calorie counting, restrictive eating, weight & body image, and weight loss medication. Please listen with care.

Healthy was supposed to make you feel better.

For a lot of women, it became one more thing to get right. One more list, one more metric, one more way to fall short.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Jessica Khourie, Founder and CEO of JOVA, to talk about what wellness has gotten wrong and what it would take to get it right. Before founding JOVA, Jessica spent a decade in consumer goods and that corporate foundation shapes how she builds, how she leads, and what she refuses to compromise on.

The conversation goes well beyond the smoothie. Jessica shares what building a product from nothing has taught her about being a founder: the lines she won't cross, what to hold onto, when to let go, and what it takes to stop carrying everything yourself. We also talk about what the corporate world taught her, what she hopes it changes, and the one rule she would retire for good.

This is a conversation for anyone who has turned her own wellbeing into one more item on a list that never ends, and for anyone building something of her own.

About Our Guest

Jessica Khourie is the Founder and CEO of JOVA, a dietitian-developed whole-food smoothie brand for women. She spent 10 years in consumer goods first, starting as a finance manager at Procter & Gamble managing the global P&L forecast, then moving into brand leadership on Pampers. There she pitched Pampers Pure three times before winning approval, launched it in 11 months, and took it to more than $100M in sales and the #1 natural brand position within a year. She went on to become the first CMO of Tushy Bidet, fractional head of marketing for Lysol and Huggies, and a member of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital's Brand & Marketing Committee. She built JOVA on the finding that women are not failing at eating well; the industry has made it too complicated to sustain.

Connect with Jessica: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakhourie

Learn more about JOVA

• Web: https://livejova.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinkjova
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drinkjova

Ask a product team how their AI feature could be attacked, and the pause that follows tells you a lot.

Petra Mifka's workshops start there. She gives the team a budget of 500 euros and a new job: you're the attacker now, so how do you break your own product? In her experience, once people see how little it takes, the conversation changes. They stop asking whether it could happen and start asking who gets the call at 3 a.m. when it does.

The attackers aren't smarter than they used to be. They have tools that do the work faster.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Petra, who runs the Berlin consultancy noosphr, to talk about what it takes to find the weak points in an AI product before someone else does.

Petra built her career in trust and safety, leading large global teams at Meta and TikTok, where the work is deciding what stays up and what comes down. It shows in how she runs a room.

We talk about the question most companies skip, why the hardest calls are rarely made by the person with the title, and how a role-swap exercise can turn a vague worry into a number a CFO will fund.

This is a conversation for anyone being told to ship AI faster instead of asking what could go wrong.

About Our Guest

Petra Mifka spent over 10 years in trust and safety at TikTok and Meta. At TikTok she was Global Head of Implementation and Head of Operations for EMEA, leading 600+ people. At Meta she oversaw a 1,500+ person operation across APAC.

For most of that time, she'll tell you, she felt like an impostor and let the company logo do the talking. Leaving big tech meant figuring out who she was without it.

Today she runs noosphr, a Berlin-based consultancy she co-founded with her husband, and mentors women through Extraordinary Women in Tech. She's Croatian, lives in Berlin, and writes about leadership, AI, and saying the quiet part out loud.

You can connect with Petra on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-mifka/.

You can book a free 30-minute call through her Calendly: https://calendly.com/mifkapetra/30min

The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with content or messaging and everything to do with finding what is missing. Including, for years, in how she told her own career story.

Twenty years across state agencies, B2B SaaS, supply chain, and health tech, and when she walked into private sector rooms she talked about the parts she thought people wanted to hear. It took a mentor pointing out what she was doing for her to see what she had been cutting out. Not just a chapter of her resume. The reason companies kept hiring her in the first place.

She shares one example of a product that would not sell, and where the answer turned out to be hiding. It was not in the data. It was not in the research. It was sitting with someone who had been in the room with customers the whole time and had no idea what he was holding.

We also get into why hiring for the mold is costing companies the ideas they say they want, what actually happens in the room when teams discover they have been arguing over the same position in different vocabulary, how to get found now that buyers are searching through LLMs instead of Google, and the marketing rule Niki wants retired for good.

This is a conversation for marketers, founders, and anyone who has been told their background does not quite fit.

About Our Guest

Niki McKinnell is the VP of Growth at Curbside where she leads marketing, sales processes, customer success infrastructure, and the GTM systems connecting it all. She is also the Founder of MCKINNELL Marketing Consulting. She has built and led global and regional teams across B2B and B2G SaaS, DaaS, supply chain, HealthTech, GovTech, and data providers, in both the public and private sectors.

Her career started in press offices for state agencies and associations, running crisis communications and press conferences in an environment where nearly everything happened after the fact. That is where the pattern began. She kept finding what an organization was not saying and building the program around it, first with no funding and a camera she found in a supply closet, and later leading marketing departments through growth, rebrands, and product launches on the private sector side.

Her specialty is scaling marketing departments and building unified strategies that blend AI, brand, demand generation, product marketing, and communications. Her expertise spans GTM strategy and execution, ABM, product and lifecycle marketing, brand positioning, buyer journey mapping, demand generation, pipeline growth, and SEO, SEM, GEO, and LLM optimization.

What makes her perspective worth an hour is that she has built in rooms with no budget and rooms with real budget, and she can tell you exactly what carries over between them.

You can connect with Niki on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikimckinnell/

Someone on your team is excellent at their job. So you promote them. That is how it works, and almost nobody questions it.

Then things start to fracture. Deadlines get tighter. Processes multiply. People stop feeling included in decisions they used to be part of. Six months later you have a retention problem and a leader who is exhausted by a job they were never wired for.

Cari Kenzie can show you exactly where that broke. And she can do it without anyone in the room having to make it personal.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Cari Kenzie, founder of Kinza Collective™, a strategic advisory firm that works with founders on leadership alignment, operations, and finances so their businesses hold real enterprise value. Cari built a trade show and event marketing firm into a multi-million dollar company and then sold it in 45 days, off a text message she was not expecting, a year to the day before COVID hit. What she did not have going into that sale is most of the reason she does this work now.

Her work starts with a question most organizations never think to ask. Not whether someone is capable, but whether the seat they are sitting in is one they can hold without breaking.

Using Predictive Index, she can answer it. And what the data says about a struggling team is rarely what the leadership above them believes is happening.

This is a conversation for founders and executives who have a team that is not working and have been treating it as a people problem.

About Our Guest

Cari Kenzie is a keynote speaker, leadership advisor, and former CEO who built and sold a multi-million-dollar agency in an unplanned exit.

That experience revealed the gaps most founders don’t see — when the business isn’t fully ready, and neither is the leader.

Today, as the founder of KINZA Collective™, Cari helps high-capacity women design businesses that thrive beyond them, leadership teams that execute with conscious awareness, and exits that protect both wealth and legacy.

Known for blending strategic clarity with soul-led leadership, she is committed to ensuring no founder has to walk the exit road alone.

To connect with Cari, you can email her at [email protected]

To learn more about Kinza Collective™, visit: www.kinzacollective.com

We have been measuring leadership wrong for decades. Headcount managed. Teams grown. Revenue expanded. These are the numbers that build careers, pad resumes, and get leaders promoted. And almost none of them tell you whether the people underneath those leaders are actually thriving.

Shirah Huff is back on Leadership Recalibrated and this time she is taking on the entire incentive structure that shapes how organizations hire, reward, and develop their leaders.

In this episode, Shirah draws a distinction that most leadership development programs never touch — the difference between leadership and stewardship. Leadership, as most organizations practice it, is about direction, control, and growth metrics. Stewardship is something entirely different. It is about creating the conditions for people to reach their highest potential. And according to Shirah, until organizations start rewarding the second thing instead of the first, the dysfunction most leaders are managing is not going to change.

Shirah does not just diagnose this from the outside. She walks into organizations, audits how information flows through every layer, and finds exactly where the environment is either supporting or sabotaging the people inside it. What she finds almost every time is that the problem is not the people. It is the structure.

We get into why resistance inside organizations is almost always structural rather than individual failure, why the questions on leadership resumes are measuring the wrong things entirely, what a stewardship audit actually looks like and what it reveals that traditional leadership reviews never surface, and the one book that changed everything about how Shirah thinks about what it means to lead.

This is a conversation for anyone who has ever suspected that the leadership playbook they inherited was built for the wrong outcomes. And for anyone who is ready to build something better.

About Our Guest

Shirah Huff is the creator of the Kinetic Method, a 90-day intensive program she developed after years of studying productivity frameworks, leadership tools, and organizational systems, and then building a structure that allowed her to achieve stronger results while maintaining balance and clarity.

Since her first appearance on Leadership Recalibrated in Season 1, Shirah has continued to evolve the Kinetic Method and expanded her work into organizational consulting — helping businesses turn their vision and strategy into execution plans that people can actually carry out. She audits how information flows through every layer of an organization to find where the environment is either supporting or sabotaging the people inside it.

Her work is grounded in a simple but powerful belief: it is not as hard as we think it is. The gap between where organizations are and where they want to be is almost always structural, not personal. And closing that gap starts with asking better questions.

The Kinetic Method is currently available through Kickstarter with a September 3rd deadline. Shirah is also hosting a webinar on September 10th, focused on helping businesses find the profit leaks that happen while defining vision and the steps to get there. Register at: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_plZETm1MT_KuG14vhjBhBg#/registration

Support her Kickstarter - kickstarter.com/projects/kineticplanner/the-kinetic-planner/description

Contact Shirah through her website: huffblueprint.com

Dinah Davis spent eight years at BlackBerry, first as a software developer, then leading the team that built cryptographic protocols nobody had built before. She has a master's degree in cryptography and the patents to prove it. None of that stopped her from being told, at different points in her career, that she wasn't technical enough. Or, from different people, that she wasn't strategic enough. Same person, two opposite verdicts, and a pattern more women in tech will recognize than most companies would like to admit.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, Dinah traces her path from the bleeding edge of mobile security to founding Code Like a Girl, and talks candidly about the parts of corporate leadership she never got good at, and why she's not sorry about it.

This is a conversation about the standards that get invented after the fact, the cost of caring too much in a system that doesn't reward it, and what happens when you stop trying to win a game you never agreed to play.

About Our Guest:

Dinah Davis spent 20 years in tech, from writing cryptographic protocols at BlackBerry to leading engineering teams as a VP, most recently at Arctic Wolf. She holds a master's in cryptography and multiple patents. In 2016, she founded Code Like a Girl, a publication amplifying women's voices in tech, which she now runs full-time. She writes about careers, leadership, and the parts of the industry nobody puts in the recruiting brochure.

Connect with Dinah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinahdavis/

Subscribe to Code Like A Girl: https://substack.com/@codelikeagirl

Subscribe to She Writes AI: https://substack.com/@shewritesai

Most women navigate menopause the same way they were taught to navigate everything else — quietly, alone, and without complaining. Our mothers did not talk about it. Our grandmothers did not talk about it. And so when the symptoms arrived, we pushed through, wore the mask, and told ourselves it was just part of getting older.

Lisa R. Triggs did that too. For years.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Lisa, known as The Menopause Queen, to talk about what happens when you stop letting menopause control you and start making choices that change everything. Lisa managed her own journey without medication — using visualization, meditation, journaling, and a mindset shift that she now teaches through her coaching practice, bestselling book, and speaking work.

What she has to say is going to reframe the way you think about this chapter of life entirely.

We get into why the story we have been told about menopause is the thing making it harder, how the hormonal changes of midlife bring buried things back to the surface and what to do when that happens, why the strength that women in leadership wear as armor is often a mask for the vulnerability underneath, what it looks like to grieve who you used to be while building someone even better, and the one rule Lisa wants retired from the old playbook about what women are capable of at this stage of life.

This one is for every woman who has ever felt like she was disappearing inside her own body and needed someone to tell her that the other side of this is worth fighting for.

About Our Guest

The Menopause Queen, Lisa R. Triggs is a certified menopause coach, motivational speaker, best selling author and podcast host.  With a deep love for personal growth, Lisa has spent nearly 20 years navigating the rollercoaster of menopause; an experience that ultimately transformed her life.

In her bestselling book, The Menopause Mindshift: How I Unleashed My Inner Queen, And You Can Too!, Lisa shares her story to inspire other women to take back control, prioritize their well-being, and step into their power.

Today, she stands as a voice of hope, showing women that menopause doesn’t have to be a struggle—it can be a powerful awakening. Her mission is to help others awaken their inner Queen, embrace self-love, and redefine what it means to thrive in this life phase.

Connect with Lisa

Website: https://themenopausemindshift.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisartriggs

Buy her book: https://www.amazon.ca/Menopause-Mindshift-Unleashed-Inner-Queen-ebook/dp/B0DJG47FS8

Most of the technology shaping our world right now was not built with women in mind. The algorithms deciding who gets hired, who gets promoted, and whose ideas get amplified were built largely without us, trained largely without us, and are now being deployed at a scale that is moving faster than most of us can keep up with.

The numbers are sobering. 86% of jobs most exposed to AI automation are held by women. Women make up less than 25% of the workforce actually building AI. And the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years to close the gender parity gap worldwide. In 2026, women are still making 83 to 86 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work.

But today's guest is not here to talk about the problem. She is here to talk about what we do about it.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Miri Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, the groundbreaking AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening. After 13 years at Microsoft, where she became one of the company's most recognized storytellers and published the award-winning bestseller Brand Storytelling, Miri left one of the most powerful platforms in the world to build something the industry had never seen before.

We get into why AI is either the most powerful tool women have ever had access to or the fastest way to permanently hard-code today's gaps into tomorrow's opportunities at scale, what it actually means for an AI to be built on women's lived experiences and why that changes everything about how it responds, the Empressa Imperial Council and the model that pays women royalties for the knowledge they contribute, how to start closing the gap today, and the rule Miri wants every woman to rewrite before she walks into her next room.

This one will fire you up. And it is supposed to.

About Our Guest

Miri Rodriguez is the Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, a groundbreaking AI company reshaping the future of work for women. With 13 years at Microsoft, where she evolved from communications and marketing into one of the company's most recognized storytellers, Miri built and led work that changes how organizations connect with people. That body of work became her bestselling book, Brand Storytelling, published by Kogan Page, translated into four languages, and recognized with multiple awards worldwide.

Now she is channeling everything she built at Microsoft into something the market has never seen before. Empressa is an AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening.

She is also the author of the book The Women of Microsoft, an advisor to Ragan's Center for AI Strategy, and one of the clearest, most urgent voices on what it is going to take for women to stop adapting to systems that were never built for them and start building the ones that are.

Connect with Miri

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/mirirod

Website: https://empressa.ai