Level 10 Leaders

Ryan Castle sits down with Sam Yankelevitch, LinkedIn Learning instructor and author of five books, whose courses have reached more than a million learners globally. Sam trained as an industrial engineer, and his conclusion after decades in manufacturing is blunt: the standard you pass by is the standard you set.

Sam also walks through the five step commitment framework, who, what, by when, plus what if and what's next, and explains why the what if clause predicts reliability better than anything else. Plus what accountability without intimidation looks like day to day.

Useful links:
Connect with Sam Yankelevitch on LinkedIn
samyankelevitch.com

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

This Level 10 Leaders Power Tip is from Scott Anderson, former US Army Major and former UN humanitarian leader, now COO at Real Property Management Express, on why the way you receive bad news determines whether anyone brings it to you. Scott's point is that consistency shows in the hard moments, not the easy ones. Anyone can take good news well. Staying calm when the news is bad is what makes people feel safe enough to come to you early. He carries a line from his grandfather: in an argument, the first person to start yelling loses.

Useful links:

Connect with Scott Anderson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottanderson1967/

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

Ryan Castle sits down with Liane Davey, team effectiveness adviser and author of Thoughtload. Liane's argument is that leaders keep solving the wrong problem. They strip back the workload and nothing moves, because what is flattening people is thought load, the invisible overload nobody else can see.

Liane also explains conflict debt, why avoided conflict compounds until it erupts, and why conflict should feel like flossing rather than root canal. Plus the wicked, wounded and witness behaviours that let anyone change a team from any seat at the table.

Useful links:
Connect with Liane Davey on LinkedIn
lianedavey.com

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

This Level 10 Leaders Power Tip is from Jen Hamilton of Hamilton COOs, on how to win back someone's trust after you have got it wrong. Jen's sequence has five parts: let them vent without cutting in, validate what they felt without necessarily agreeing, own the specific thing you did, apologise in a way that shows you understand the harm, then make a promise for something new. The step most people skip is the last one, deliberately checking back in so the other person can see the promise being kept.

Useful links:

Connect with Jen Hamilton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferdawnhamilton/
www.HamiltonCOOs.com 

Sign up for free monthly roundtables with peers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hamilton-coos/events

👉 FREE Resource: level10.us/execution - Execution Strength Diagnostic

Discover if your managers are driving results or letting commitments drift.

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

Ryan Castle sits down with Kyle McDowell, author of the bestselling "Begin With WE" and a thirty year veteran of corporate America. Kyle led teams of 15,000 people and hated what he had become. His inner circle eventually told him the truth: they feared him more than they respected him.

Kyle also explains the ten WEs, the observable behavioural standards he wrote the night before addressing 50 of his leaders, and why they succeed where corporate values fail. Plus the three part discipline that makes them stick: set the standard, model the standard, hold the standard.

Useful links:
Connect with Kyle McDowell on LinkedIn
kylemcdowellinc.com

👉 FREE Resource: level10.us/execution - Execution Strength Diagnostic

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👉 Got a Level 10 Leaders podcast tip? - Submit your tip at lvl10.us/submit-tip

Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

This Level 10 Leaders Power Tip is from Gretchen Heinen, Founder and CEO of Authsnap Inc, drawn from her full episode, on getting the structure of a business right from day one. Gretchen's advice is to spend a couple of hours with a lawyer or a CPA before you build anything. A good attorney set up her cap table for the structure she would need five years out, so she could build from there. Founders go wrong, she says, by skipping that piece of the house.

Useful links:
Connect with Gretchen Heinen on LinkedIn
https://authsnap.ai/
Full epsiode:

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

Ryan Castle sits down with Mike Ashby, founder of The Breakthrough Co and Level 10 Leaders, on his latest Forbes piece about why AI coaching fails without human intelligence. Mike's argument is simple: AI coaches are a supplement, not a replacement. Content is only 10% of what changes behaviour.

Mike also walks through the 10/20/70 model and why generic AI gets stuck in the 10, what the great training robbery costs organisations, and how they built Dr Mike AI to sit inside a human system rather than replace one. Plus what happens when a leader coach disengages.

Useful links:
Connect with Dr Mike Ashby on LinkedIn
AI Coaching Fails Without Human Intelligence, Forbes

👉 FREE Resource: level10.us/execution - Execution Strength Diagnostic

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👉 Got a Level 10 Leaders podcast tip? - Submit your tip at lvl10.us/submit-tip

Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

This Level 10 Leaders Power Tip is from Alex Franklin of First Principles Consulting, sharing why the smallest piece of a large consulting project turned out to be the one that multiplied everything else. Alex's point is that we hire for technical competency, which is eligibility for the role, and forget behavioural competency, which is suitability for it: passion, interests, work preferences, interpersonal style.

Working with a large mining client on process improvement, the change that made the biggest difference was a team dynamics exercise with the leadership team, using a third party behavioural tool to give people an outside perspective on themselves and each other. The result was a team rowing in the same direction rather than against each other, and a client who kept asking them back for refreshers year after year. The smallest thing they did, with the most outsized impact.

Connect with Alex Franklin:
LinkedIn
"Mining for Value" by Alex Franklin
firstprinciplesconsulting.com

👉 FREE Resource: level10.us/execution - Execution Strength Diagnostic

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👉 Got a Level 10 Leaders podcast tip? - Submit your tip at lvl10.us/submit-tip

Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

Ryan Castle sits down with Rajiv Mehta, aerospace engineer turned product leader turned researcher, founder of the nonprofit Atlas of Care and author of the new book "Camaraderie." Rajiv spent the first half of his career at NASA, Apple, Adobe and Motorola before walking away to spend 20 years on a single question: how do people actually take care of each other? His answer for leaders is blunt. Relationships before results. Without a foundation of real human connection, teams cannot sustain performance through the crises that inevitably arrive.

Rajiv also unpacks a three part idea about expertise: you are the expert on your own life, your expertise is far shallower than you think, and you already have the observation skills to close that gap. He introduces the Atlas Care Map, a deceptively simple paper and pencil tool he has run with everyone from Navy Seals to eight year olds, and explains why starting with friends and family is a safer entry point than starting with touchy work topics. Plus why distributed teams have to build deliberately what the office used to give away for free.

Useful links:
Connect with Rajiv Mehta on LinkedIn
Camaraderie: A Modern Leader’s Guide to Building Joyful, High-Performing Teams
Atlas CareMap
atlasofcaregiving.com
mappingourselves.com

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Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/

This Level 10 Leaders Power Tip is from Kenny Cao of Cultivator Co, sharing why the decisions you refuse to let go of are the ones capping your ability to scale.

Kenny calls it the Sovereignty Trap. As a company grows, complexity increases but the decision architecture doesn't, so ambiguity in the organisation resolves the only way it can: authority concentrates upwards until the leader becomes the cognitive bottleneck. His fix isn't delegation, which he describes as temporary and task based, but sovereignty transfer, giving someone a domain instead of a job. He offers a practical diagnostic called the escalation ratio: track every decision that reaches you for one week, separate the sacred 10% that genuinely must stay with you from the default decisions that only land on your desk because no other pathway was ever designed, then do the maths. Anything over 10% is a design problem, not a capability problem. The shift he's asking leaders to make is from heroic manager to organisational architect, building a system strong enough to survive your own brilliance.

Connect with Kenny Cao:
LinkedIn
"The Cultivator" by Cao, 曹宗轩 Zōng Xuān (Kenny)
cultivatorco.net

👉 FREE Resource: level10.us/execution - Execution Strength Diagnostic

Discover if your managers are driving results or letting commitments drift.

👉 Got a Level 10 Leaders podcast tip? - Submit your tip at lvl10.us/submit-tip

Where else you can find us

Website: https://www.level10leaders.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/level10leaders/