In this episode of Leading Together, Shaun Lee and Joe Olwig sit down with Alistair Deakin, founder of SigBee, to explore what truly makes teams thrive. From the power of simple daily check-ins to the importance of clarity and honesty in leadership, Alistair shares lessons from decades of leading organizations and building high-performing teams. The conversation explores why so many teams struggle with focus, how leaders can cut through organizational noise, and the small rituals that help people feel seen, connected, and motivated at work.

What does it really mean for people to feel like they matter at work - and why does it have such a powerful impact on performance?

In this episode, Shaun and Joe sit down with researcher and author Zach Mercurio to explore the science and practice of mattering in leadership. Drawing from his research and his book The Power of Mattering, Zach explains how feeling seen, valued, and needed shapes engagement, resilience, and team performance.

Together, they unpack the everyday leadership behaviors that help people feel recognized and significant at work. This conversation offers practical insights for leaders who want to build healthier cultures where people feel motivated to contribute their best.

In this first episode of the Leading Together Interview Series, Shaun and Joe welcome former NFL running back and ESPN analyst Fozzy Whittaker for a powerful conversation on leadership, energy, and influence. Drawing from his experiences in college football, the NFL, and life beyond the field, Fozzy shares how contagious joy, encouragement, and conditioning shaped his approach to leadership. Together, they explore how leaders set the emotional tone for a team and why positive energy isn’t accidental - it’s cultivated. This episode is a compelling look at what it means to lead with resilience, intentionality, and team-first mindset.

Most teams put their energy into planning synchronous time such as meetings, offsites, and Zoom calls, but real collaboration actually happens asynchronously in Slack threads, shared docs, and decision logs. Without clear design, async work often devolves into scattered updates, missed handoffs, and interruptions. In this episode, Shaun and Joe share four practical asynchronous hacks that help teams reclaim focus, speed up decision making, and make meetings more meaningful: replacing endless update meetings with shared updates and Looms, moving data reviews into async walkthroughs, preparing for deep work through pre recorded context, and logging decisions outside of meetings. The result is that teams gain back time for real dialogue, make faster progress, and collaborate with greater clarity.

What makes a team brave? In this episode, we explore James Clear’s quote, “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems,” and ask what it really means for leadership today.

With help from a powerful clip featuring Brené Brown and Adam Grant, we dig into the idea that courage is not just personal. It is structural. Well-designed, collaboratively built systems increase the odds that people can show up with presence, take meaningful risks, and hold each other to high standards.

We also look at how the right systems create space for accountability to live across the team, not just with the leader, and how they help us rise above our own worst tendencies when it matters most. Because the best systems do more than support performance. They support people.

In this special episode, we pull back the curtain to share our own journey, sharing how two different paths led us to the same vision. Shaun reflects on his early experiences in AmeriCorps and nonprofit and entrepreneurial leadership, while Joe shares how his time in Teach for America and later as a principal shaped his calling. Together, we talk about how we met, why we built the 6 Levers Framework, and how that work grew into the Leading Together program. If you’ve ever wondered where our passion for leadership teams comes from, this is the story behind it all.

In this episode, we unpack the leadership lessons from The Bear, Season 2, Episode “Forks.” It’s the story of Cousin Richie, a guy stuck in old patterns, bitter and defensive until one week at a world-class restaurant changes everything. By the end, he’s energized and full of purpose.

We explore how this transformation shows the power of team culture:

Why excellence only lasts when anchored in purpose.

How clear norms make direct communication easier.

How purpose at work can spill over into purpose in life.

The right team environment doesn’t just make work better, it has the power to shape who people become.

One-on-ones are a staple of leadership, but when they become the primary place for real conversations, teams pay the price. In this episode, we unpack why leaders over-rely on one-on-ones, the risks of pushing too much problem-solving into private meetings, and how to redesign them for genuine connection and development. If you want your team meetings to be more than status updates and your one-on-ones to be more meaningful, this conversation will spark some ideas for you.

Too many leaders are overwhelmed not because they care too much, but because they’re carrying too much. In this episode, we explore the mindset of shared ownership and why it’s one of the most powerful traits of high-performing leadership teams. Through the story of Didi from The Man on the Inside (brought to life by Stephanie Beatriz), we unpack what happens when leadership is isolated, and how to shift toward a culture where strategy, decisions, and accountability are shared.

If we want a culture of trust and belonging, accountability can’t be the thing we avoid. In this episode, we explore why even the most well-meaning leaders struggle to address underperformance, and what’s really going on under the surface. Using insights from Self-Determination Theory, we unpack the psychological barriers to accountability, what’s at stake when we delay, and how to step into these conversations with clarity, care, and courage. If you’ve ever hesitated to say the hard thing, this one’s for you.