The H2 Leadership Podcast

What actually makes a team healthy, aligned, and effective?

In this episode of the H2 Leadership Podcast, Alan Briggs sits down with the H2 Leadership team for an honest conversation about the practices that help their team work well together.

H2 happens to be decentralized, with team members spread across different states and time zones. That creates some unique challenges. But the things that make the team work are not remote-work principles. They are team principles.

Trust. Clarity. Shared language. Knowing the people behind the roles. Creating space to think together. Understanding how each person is wired. Making expectations clear. Building enough relational connection that challenge and accountability can actually work.

Those things matter whether your team works across the country or in the same office every day.

Alan, Jonathan Collier, Mikelle Mosier, and Justin Ochocki talk candidly about the realities of working as a decentralized team and what makes healthy team culture possible. They also reflect on how nearly nine years of building, changing, and refining the organization between Alan and Jonathan has created history, trust, lessons, and shared language that now shape the way the current team works together.

They unpack lessons from a recent team immersion, including why getting outside the normal rhythm of work can create clarity that weekly meetings cannot, why team development should be treated as an investment rather than an expense, and why productive time together needs room for relationship, reflection, and play, not just an overloaded agenda.

The conversation also gets practical about culture: how curiosity and humility help teams navigate disagreement, why shared language matters, how leaders can care deeply about their people without treating the team like family, and why psychological safety still needs healthy challenge and clear expectations.

And in an increasingly digital and AI-driven workplace, the team wrestles with another important question: what should become more efficient, and what needs to remain deeply human?

Alan challenges leaders to think intentionally about where AI can help and where trust, judgment, relationship, presence, and human connection still matter most.

The episode closes with each member of the team speaking directly to leaders who may feel tired, discouraged, stretched thin, or tempted to believe they need more people, more resources, or more capacity before they can make meaningful progress.

If you lead a team, manage people, or are trying to build a healthier culture without sacrificing performance, this conversation will give you practical ideas you can apply whether your team is remote, hybrid, or sitting together every day.

We're back from an amazing summer and we have news! The H2 Leadership Podcast is entering a new season.

We’re moving from weekly episodes to one intentional, HIGHLY curated, HIGHLY PRACTICAL, episode each month, featuring conversations with HEALTHY, HIGH-CAPACITY leaders worth learning from and practical ideas you can put to work in your own leadership.

In this first episode of the new format, Alan Briggs sits down with Kadi Cole and Justin Roethlingshoefer for two conversations about the health, capacity, and intentionality required to lead well for the long haul.

Kadi Cole joins Alan after returning from a three-month sabbatical. She shares what it took to come out of years of operating in crisis mode, why her body needed time to catch up with the changes already happening in her life, and what she learned by deliberately putting herself in situations where she wasn’t already competent.

Their conversation then turns toward the church and the leadership challenges Kadi is seeing right now: churches still confronting post-COVID realities, gaps in leadership pipelines and succession, unsustainable staff rhythms, changing systems, and the challenge of leading through an in-between season when the old model may no longer work but the next one hasn’t fully emerged yet.

Kadi also shares about her work developing female church leaders and why many women enter significant leadership roles without having received the same developmental opportunities and repetitions earlier in their careers.

Then Alan sits down with Justin Roethlingshoefer, founder of OWN IT Coaching and author of Holy Health, for a conversation about an area high-capacity leaders can easily neglect: physical health.

Justin shares his own experience with chronic striving and burnout and explores why successful leaders often keep investing in the areas where they already know how to win while allowing their health to move further down the priority list.

Alan and Justin talk about physical health as stewardship, the connection between habits and capacity, performance-based identity, and one practical warning sign leaders should pay attention to: when things that once felt manageable suddenly begin to feel unusually hard.

Kadi Cole is a leadership consultant, coach, speaker, and author of Developing Female Leaders. Her work helps churches and organizations strengthen leadership cultures and develop the people entrusted to them. She also hosts The Female Church Leaders Podcast.

Justin Roethlingshoefer is a performance and health expert, founder of OWN IT Coaching, and author of Holy Health. His work helps leaders better understand the connection between their health, habits, energy, and capacity to sustainably carry what they have been called to lead.

The H2 Leadership Podcast is now monthly.

Each month, Alan will bring you conversations with leaders worth learning from, along with practical coaching insight designed to help you become both healthy and high impact.

You can also subscribe to The H2 Leader, Alan’s monthly email featuring practical coaching insights, tools, and ideas coming directly from the coaching table at H2 Leadership.

Do we practice what we preach or produce?

That's the question behind this conversation.

As Jonathan prepares for sabbatical and the H2 Leadership team enters a different rhythm for the summer, Alan and Jonathan reflect on a challenge facing leaders everywhere. We live in a culture that rewards constant production, celebrates busyness, and always asks for more.

More content. More output. More growth. More momentum.

But what happens when the things we say we value collide with the way we're actually living and leading?

The reality is that not every season is a harvest season. Not every season is for building, launching, or pushing harder. Healthy leaders learn to recognize the difference and have the courage to lead accordingly.

As H2 Leadership takes a short pause for the summer, we're inviting you to ask some honest questions about your own leadership, your own pace, and the things competing for your attention right now.

• Why the way many leaders work is no longer sustainable

• The hidden cost of always producing

• Why healthy leadership requires alignment between values and actions

• How Jonathan is preparing for sabbatical after a season of significant growth and production

• The role trust plays in healthy leadership

• Why recognizing your season matters

• How leaders can create margin without disappearing for months at a time

• The difference between stewardship and endless productivity

• Why the algorithm will always ask for more

• What it looks like to lead from conviction instead of expectation

Not every season is for producing.

Some seasons are for preparing.

Some are for recovering.

Some are for planting seeds that will not bear fruit until much later.

Healthy leaders know the difference.

What season are you actually in right now?

Not the season you wish you were in.

Not the season someone else expects from you.

The season you're actually in.

• Anti-Burnout by Alan Briggs

• The Sabbatical Journey Field Guide

• The Sabbatical Journey Podcast

• Sabbatical Coaching Group

Take fifteen minutes this week and ask yourself one question:

Where is the gap between what I say I value and what my calendar says I value?

Start there.

The answer may reveal more than you expect.

We'll be taking a short break from releasing new episodes this summer.

We're grateful for you.

We're cheering you on.

And we'll see you in August.

Time is the most precious resource a leader has, and summer might be the most underused stretch of it. The school calendar opens up. Work expectations soften. The world feels a little more breathable. And then somehow, before you've caught your breath, it's gone.

Alan Briggs walks through four keys that turn summer from a season that happens to you into one you actually shape: space, replenishment, relational time, and growth. If you've ever hit the end of summer and thought "where did that go," this episode is the planning conversation you didn't know you needed.

If you're a parent looking at the next stretch ahead and feeling both the gift and the overwhelm of it. If you're a leader who tends to let summer happen instead of leading through it. If you've been running hard and you know you need rest, but you also know "rest" without a plan turns into doom scrolling and chores. If you want this summer to actually mean something when you look back on it. This one is for you.

"Time is precious. We only have so much of it."

"If you don't plan it, it will plan you."

"Accept the great irony of planning unplanned time."

"Most replenishing activities in our lives can happen at home."

"Leaders, we're always growing."

When will you plan empty space in your life, the kind with nothing scheduled in it on purpose?

What activities actually recharge you, and when will you block them in?

Who do you need to reconnect with before another season passes?

What do you need to learn this summer, and who will you learn it from?

Download the free Summer Planning Guide, with journal prompts and planning blocks built in: https://summer.stayforthcoaching.com/plan-for-the-summer

For coaching, frameworks, and tools to help you lead well, head to h2leadership.com.

If you've been running hard and you know your next step involves real partnership, coaching might be the right call. Start a conversation at h2leadership.com.

There is a moment in every baseball game where everything stops. Not because something went wrong. Because the game was designed that way.

The 7th inning stretch is not a timeout. It is not a sign of weakness. It is built into the structure of the game because whoever designed baseball understood something most leaders forget: you cannot finish strong if you never pause to reset.

Jonathan and Alan bring back one of the most talked-about episodes from the H2 Leadership archives because heading into summer 2026, most leaders need this conversation more than ever. If you are six months in and running on fumes, this is your inning.

They get into what it actually looks like to use summer with intention, not just survive it. Reflection, realignment, solitude, celebrating small wins. This is not a productivity conversation. It is a rhythm conversation.

In This Episode:

Reflect On This:

Resource: Download the free 7th Inning Stretch for Leaders Checklist and catch the full summer series: Becoming an H2 Leader.

Tara Owens has spent over twenty years as a spiritual director, and she also trains other spiritual directors. She's the author of Embracing the Body, the executive director of a nonprofit, a boxer, and a coaching client of Alan's. That last detail matters, because this conversation is about something most leaders quietly wrestle with: which kind of helper do I actually need right now?

Alan and Tara unpack the three lanes (therapy, spiritual direction, and coaching), where each one shines, where leaders most often apply the wrong tool to the wrong problem, and what it cost Tara to finally say yes to a coach after years of resisting it.

If you've been in therapy for a while and have a gut sense the season is shifting but you don't know where to go next. If you've been pursuing growth through one modality and quietly suspect you've been trying to use a hammer on a screw. If you're a leader who's allergic to coaching (or to spiritual direction, or to therapy) and you want to understand what you might actually be allergic to. If you sense you're stuck and you can't tell whether you're stuck in the past, in the present, or in the future. This one is for you.

"There are no spiritual direction emergencies."

"You're not Jesus. I'm not Jesus. That's not our job."

"I didn't have anybody in my life who was for my future."

"Hope is the ground of everything I do, and it's probably my weakest muscle."

"So much about coaching is naming and permission."

"Ask 'who' instead of 'what.' Some of God's greatest 'what' questions or opportunities are answered by 'who do I need.'"

Where are you actually stuck right now: in something from your past, in something happening in your present, or in something you can't see clearly about your future?

What's the right partnership for that specific kind of stuck, and have you been trying to solve it with the wrong tool?

Who, not what, might be the answer to the next thing God is doing in you?

Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone by Tara Owens.

Learn more about Tara's work at anamcara.com.

For coaching, frameworks, and tools to help you lead well, head to h2leadership.com.

If you're a leader sensing you need partnership but can't quite name where the gap is, that's exactly the kind of clarity our coaching work is built for. Schedule a breakthrough coaching session.

Jillian Johnsrud has taken thirteen mini retirements (sabbaticals) over the last twenty years. She's raised five kids (three adopted), built and renovated rental properties that changed her family's financial trajectory, and coached hundreds of leaders through their own sabbaticals. Her new book Retire Often might be the most practical and philosophically rich thing written on the subject.

She joins Alan Briggs for a conversation about something most leaders get wrong: the assumption that caring about your work means never stepping away from it.

If you're a leader who runs hard and assumes the operation falls apart without you. If you've watched peers burn out and quietly wondered when it's coming for you. If you're caught between a 60-year-old generation that grinds and a 25-year-old generation that won't, and you're trying to figure out a third way. If your identity is so wrapped up in what you do that you're not sure what's underneath it. This one is for you.

"The only options are you figure it out or you die at your desk."

"Machines are getting better at being machines. Humans need to get a lot better at being human."

"No one looks at the basketball players running sprints during halftime and goes, oh, they're the ones who really care. No, they don't. They're being stupid."

"You're always more tired than you think."

"You don't include yourself in the people first."

If your identity is entirely defined by your work, what would it take to start building meaning and purpose outside of it before life forces the issue?

What season are you actually leading from right now (spring, summer, fall, winter), and is your current pace honest about that?

What would have to be true for you to take a real break with purpose? And what's actually stopping you from making that true?

Retire Often by Jillian Johnsrud, available wherever you buy books.

The Sabbatical Journey field guide by Alan Briggs, available from Amazon & Barnes & Noble

This episode is also featured on The Sabbatical Journey Podcast from our sister organization, Sabbatical Coaching Group, which helps leaders prepare for, experience, and return well from a life-changing sabbatical. Learn more at sabbaticalcoachinggroup.com.

For coaching, frameworks, and tools to help you lead healthy and with higher impact, head to h2leadership.com.

Rebecca Hinds, researcher, organizational designer, and author of Your Best Meeting Ever joins the Alan Briggs for a conversation that is long overdue in most, if not all organizations. Alan has threatened to write a book about meetings for years. He no longer has to. Why? Rebecca wrote it.

After 15 years studying how humans communicate and coordinate at work, Rebecca brings both the research and the practical frameworks to help leaders stop letting meetings kill their culture — and start designing them as the powerful, expensive tool they actually are.

If you've ever sat in a meeting wondering why you're there, or felt the creeping guilt of a calendar so packed with meetings that the real work gets squeezed into the margins, this one is for you.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Reflection Questions:

Resources Mentioned:

Want more? Visit h2leadership.com for coaching, resources, and tools to help you lead well.

In this episode, Alan Briggs sits down with Holly Tate, founder of The Ready Network and a consultant who has spent 15 years serving churches, ministries, and organizations at the intersection of leadership development and strategic clarity. Holly brings a rare vantage point: nearly a decade at Vanderbloemen doing executive search for churches, four years as Chief Marketing and Services Officer at a leadership software company serving over 600 ministries, and now running her own coaching and consulting practice helping leaders and teams scale.

The conversation covers a lot of ground and moves fast. From the moment organizations outgrow their basketball team culture and have to become a football team, to the trends Holly is watching unfold in real time around shared leadership models, AI adoption, spiritual formation, and what it means to actually be ready for what's coming next.

If you lead a church, serve on an elder board, work as an executive pastor, or simply want to understand the challenges facing ministry leaders right now, this one is for you. And if you lead a business or nonprofit, Holly estimates about 70% of this conversation will translate directly.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Reflection Questions:

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Holly:

Want more? Visit h2leadership.com for coaching, resources, and tools to help you lead well.

In this episode, Alan Briggs sits down with Laura Kriska — cross-cultural consultant, speaker, and author of The Business of We — for a conversation about one of the most underestimated challenges in leadership today: the invisible gaps that keep teams from reaching their full potential.

Laura was born in Japan, raised in Ohio, and spent her early career as the first American woman working inside Honda's Tokyo headquarters. What started as a fascinating cross-cultural immersion became a three-decade career helping leaders and organizations bridge the us versus them gaps that quietly undermine collaboration — whether those gaps are cultural, generational, geographic, or simply the difference between how two departments approach a problem.

If you lead a team of any kind, the frameworks Laura shares in this episode are immediately actionable and long overdue.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Reflection Questions:

Resources Mentioned:

Want more? Visit h2leadership.com for coaching, resources, and tools to help you lead well.