LeadershipSOPs

Are today's leaders so focused on results that they're overlooking the very thing that drives success: their people?

In Episode 16 of Leadership SOPs, host Ed Tyson welcomes Dr. Scott Paine, industrial-organizational psychologist and leadership development expert at Kaiser Permanente, for a powerful conversation about the challenges facing modern leaders.

With increasing workplace demands, shifting expectations, and mounting pressure to deliver results, leaders are struggling to balance operational performance with the human side of leadership.

Ed and Scott explore why traditionally labeled "soft skills" such as trust, emotional intelligence, accountability, vulnerability, and psychological safety are essential to building high-performing teams.

Discover how leaders can turn these concepts into practical, repeatable behaviors that strengthen workplace culture, improve collaboration, and create meaningful results.

Scott also shares his personal leadership SOPs, including the importance of owning mistakes, honoring commitments, asking for feedback, and consistently demonstrating the values you expect from others.

Together, they explore how mindset, personal responsibility, and focusing on what you can control can help leaders navigate uncertainty and inspire their teams.

Because great leadership isn't just about achieving results. It's about building the trust, relationships, and culture that make those results possible.

Whether you're an executive, manager, or emerging leader, this episode offers practical insights to help you lead with greater authenticity, accountability, and impact.

Listen now and discover how small, intentional leadership behaviors can create lasting organizational change.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

What happens when your career takes you away from the work that made you successful?

In Episode 15 of Leadership SOPs, host Ed Tyson welcomes Dr. Mayssa Attar, Senior Vice President of Pharmaceutical and Consumer R&D at Bausch + Lomb, to explore the challenging transition from technical expert to executive leader.

Drawing from her journey from scientist to senior executive, Mayssa shares why great leadership requires courage, adaptability, and the ability to empower others rather than always having the answers.

Discover how to navigate difficult colleagues, embrace career transitions, build collaborative teams, and create an environment where people feel comfortable raising challenges before they become bigger problems.

Because becoming a great leader isn't about leaving your expertise behind. It's about learning how to make an even greater impact through others.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Flattening an organization sounds appealing: fewer management layers, lower costs, faster decisions, greater autonomy, and less bureaucracy. But what happens when the leaders who remain suddenly inherit a much heavier leadership load?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson examines “The Great Flattening,” the growing organizational trend of eliminating management layers and expanding spans of control. While flattening can create real value, Ed challenges leaders to look beyond headcount and organizational charts before deciding which management roles are truly unnecessary.

Ed breaks down six critical leadership accountabilities: governance, coordination, integration, quality, performance, and stewardship. He explains why two managers with the same number of direct reports can carry dramatically different leadership workloads depending on the complexity, risk, interdependence, expertise, and demands of their teams.

He also challenges the idea that there is a universal “right” number of direct reports. Instead, organizations should determine how much leadership work actually needs to be done, how much capacity a manager has, and whether the next leader up can realistically absorb those responsibilities if a management layer disappears.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

How do you effectively lead people when you can’t see what they’re doing, how they’re performing, or when they need your help?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson explores multi-site leadership and why leading beyond your physical line of sight is not a challenge created by remote work. Enterprise leaders have been managing people across locations, regions, and even countries for generations.

Ed breaks down what leaders lose when physical proximity disappears, including the ability to passively observe attendance, behavior, and condition, and explains why relying too heavily on what you can see can expose weaknesses in your leadership systems. Observation may reveal an event, but data reveals the pattern. 

The solution centers on three critical leadership capabilities: Alignment, Coordination, and Transparency, or ACT. When leaders intentionally build these into their systems, teams can make better decisions, coordinate work, maintain accountability, and operate effectively even when the leader is somewhere else.

Tune in to learn how to build the processes, communication, accountability, and leadership systems required to lead beyond your sight without losing alignment, trust, or performance.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

What if the biggest reason organizational change fails isn’t the solution, but how leaders introduce it?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson shares the unforgettable “diaper debacle,” a multimillion-dollar opportunity that collapsed because the people needed to make the change successful weren’t involved early enough. He then connects that lesson to enterprise transformation, stakeholder engagement, cross-functional leadership, and why even brilliant strategies can fail when leaders focus on the solution before the people. 

Ed reveals a better approach: involve the full community of effort from the beginning, surface resistance and hidden complications early, and lead people through transformation instead of trying to manage change after the decisions have already been made. 

If you lead teams, enterprise initiatives, or major organizational change, this episode offers a practical framework for turning resistance into participation and strategy into successful execution.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

What if the team you think needs fixing is actually becoming the team you’ve been trying to build?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson explores how teams develop from dependence on their leader to greater trust, ownership, healthy conflict, and ultimately high performance.

Ed explains why disagreement, resistance, and even periods of declining performance can be natural parts of team development, and why leaders who rush in to eliminate conflict or take back control may unintentionally push their teams backward.

Drawing on established team development models and the LeadershipSOPs methodology, Ed examines the journey from team infancy through adolescence and into high-performing adulthood. He shares how leaders can recognize where their team is developmentally, create safe ways to address friction, and gradually transfer greater ownership and authority to team members.

Because the goal of leadership isn’t to create a team that always needs its leader. It’s to develop a team capable of leading, challenging, improving, and performing together.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Great coaching doesn’t start with what you know. It starts with understanding where the other person is.

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson breaks down how executives can develop stronger leaders through curiosity, cognitive empathy, and intentional coaching. Discover the four stages of development, Explore, Clarify, Transform, and Master, and how to combine coaching, training, observation, and real-world experience to help people grow.

Learn how to stop simply directing your leaders and start developing their ability to think, decide, and lead for themselves.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

What do you do when the feedback you receive is painful, personal, and the last thing you want to hear?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson begins with a brutally honest piece of anonymous feedback he received from a colleague, an experience that stayed with him for decades and ultimately became a powerful lesson in leadership and personal development. 

Ed explores why leaders often focus on giving feedback and developing others while overlooking the difficult work of developing themselves. He explains why our natural response to uncomfortable feedback can include denial, anger, resistance, and even emotional shutdown, and why recognizing those reactions is essential to meaningful growth. 

He introduces a practical path for turning uncomfortable feedback into improvement: Explore, Clarify, Transform, and Master. Rather than allowing criticism to define you or immediately dismissing it, Ed shows how leaders can search for the useful truth inside the feedback, decide what needs to change, create specific actions, and build new behaviors through repetition. 

Ed also shares five practical steps for creating your own personal development SOP, including keeping a development journal, actively seeking feedback, setting clear development objectives, finding trusted accountability partners, and repeating and adjusting your efforts until new behaviors become part of how you lead. 

The takeaway: Great leadership development starts with the person in the mirror. The feedback that makes you most uncomfortable may contain exactly what you need to become a better leader.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

What if avoiding organizational politics is actually preventing you from leading effectively?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson challenges the idea that great leaders can simply ignore office politics and focus on their own teams. Leadership requires influencing the broader community of people whose support, effort, information, or approval is necessary for success. 

Ed introduces stakeholder engagement as a critical leadership discipline and breaks it into three practical steps: stakeholder assessment, engagement planning, and managing the engagement itself. 

He also explains how leaders can intentionally build trust through four essential layers: credibility, consistency, confidence, and caring. Rather than asking stakeholders for trust before earning it, leaders must create relationships that demonstrate competence, reliability, confidence, and character over time. 

The takeaway is clear: Your team is not enough. Great leadership requires building trust and influence across the entire community of people needed to accomplish the mission.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

When someone on your team fails to perform, who is really accountable?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson challenges leaders to stop treating accountability as something that begins after performance goes wrong. Instead, he introduces performance leadership, the upstream work required to successfully transfer responsibility from a leader to the person performing the work. 

Using the discipline of military marching as a powerful analogy, Ed explains how clear expectations, communication, coordination, practice, and visibility create the conditions for accountability. 

He breaks performance leadership into six critical areas: work description, assignment, planning, completion, evaluation, and remediation. Before blaming an employee for poor results, leaders must ask whether the work was clearly defined, assigned to the right person, properly planned, monitored, evaluated, and supported. 

The key lesson is simple: before pointing out the window at your team, look in the mirror at your leadership systems. True accountability begins long before the work gets done.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.