If you’re stepping into a leadership role, remember that your primary responsibility is to provide direction. If you’re stepping out of a leadership role, make sure your community knows there’s someone in charge whom you believe in.

Shannon talks with Alec Broadfoot and Kate Norton of VisionSpark, who’ve discovered how to identify and hire those elusive “innovation managers” who can turn an entrepreneur’s wildest ideas into practical results.

We can all benefit from having regular conversations with professional friends who energize us, challenge us, and expand our thinking. Reach out and build your own “thinking partner network”!

What are you called to do? What contribution do you want to make to this world? Whatever your answer, delegation is the key to accelerating and multiplying your efforts—the ultimate freedom, growth, and retention strategy. In this episode, Shannon talks with Emily Morgan about her deep, fun, and practical new book on the subject of delegation: Let It Go. (We promise that this episode contains no singing or references to ice princesses.)

In order to shift your behavior, shift your mindset first. If you’re not seeing the results you want, stop for a moment to think about your thinking. This is the way to make a higher level of personal and professional growth your new normal. It isn’t easy, and it takes courage, but it can spark a permanent transformation in an instant.

In this episode, Shannon talks with Jerry Lujan in depth about The WHY Institute’s new “WHY.os” profile, which helps you understand what motivates you at your core so you can better filter opportunities and consistently show up as your best self.

Learn more about The WHY Institute.

You hire someone who’s smart, interesting, presents beautifully … then doesn’t produce the results you expected. What’s going on? In this episode, Shannon shows how entrepreneurs and their team members can go beyond a mere intellectual understanding of a role to engage the team member’s emotions and mindset, so they can connect personally with the impact of their work and really care about becoming a hero to you.

In some ways, Mark Fujiwara and Justin Breen couldn’t be less alike, and this makes for a perfect collaborative partnership. (Together, they’ve built a network that helps other entrepreneurs establish connections like theirs.) Listen in as Shannon walks them through a range of profiles that explain why their differing talents and shared values line up so well—demonstrating how you can use these systems as incredibly powerful teamwork tools.

When someone leaves your company, that’s it, right? Once they’re out the door, the relationship’s over. Or is it? In this episode, Shannon talks about the advantage of keeping an abundance mindset and remembering that, as Dan Sullivan says, “People do things for their reasons, not for your reasons.” She explains how handling endings graciously can turn your ex-clients and former team members into enthusiastic ambassadors for you out in the world.

Serial entrepreneur Dan Rogers knows his place: the future. Whether he’s a week, a month, or a year ahead in creating the vision of an organization, he knows he needs collaborative partners to send insights back to—people with the talents and perspectives to make his ideas real in the present. In this episode, Shannon and Dan talk about how to mesh vision and teamwork, and Dan shares how he uses a few of his favorite Strategic Coach tools.