The Hard Skills

What can a pop culture convention teach you about workplace culture and leadership? More than you think. Brandon Peters shares the leadership lessons behind building a stage people line up for.

Brandon runs the live podcast stage at Indy PopCon, a locally owned pop culture convention in Indianapolis that runs on volunteers. It took him years of trial and error to turn a lonely table in a loud food court into a stage with a waitlist. In this conversation with Dr. Mira Brancu, he talks about what actually made the difference.

You'll hear how the PopCon team keeps volunteers happy without micromanaging them, why "if my people are happy, everyone is happy" is more than a nice saying, and how they bring in new audiences without pushing out the regulars. Brandon also shares what happened when a two-night stadium concert crowd clashed with convention guests, and Mira explains why leaders who go quiet during a crisis only make it worse. If you lead a team, a community, or anything built on passion, this one is for you.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace culture, and building healthier organizations.

Find our guest here:

Connect with Brandon Peters:

https://popcon.us/popcon-indy/  

https://thebrandonpetersshow.com/ 

https://popcon.us/creator-summit/

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Watch this Episode on Youtube : https://youtu.be/SeIiDKi4Aok

Is your team difficult, or are you misreading the signals?

Build leadership skills by looking beneath workplace burnout and micromanagement.

In this Season 12 compilation of The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira revisits 13 common leadership misinterpretations through guest conversations and solo episode highlights. Discover why incivility can signal exhaustion or organizational grief, why burnout requires more than resilience, and how a leader's self-talk shapes the emotional climate of a team. 

For technical experts moving into leadership, the conversation explores why expertise, accuracy, and high standards need new skills in relationships, prioritization, and influence. You'll also hear why productive friction matters, how to coach high performers through a new learning curve, and why generational labels can obscure individual differences. 

Other highlights connect compassion with accountability, explain when empowerment can feel like abandonment, and reframe managing up as joining up. The central invitation is to pause before judging behavior, examine the pressures beneath it, and choose a response that addresses the individual, team, organization, or wider system.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace wellbeing, and the human realities of work.

Watch this Episode on Youtube : https://youtu.be/H5I4kVpxeI8

Find our guests here:

Dr. John O'Brien :https://youtu.be/t9-osoC_qgg 

Dr. Dana Gionta : https://stream.redcircle.com/episodes/4edaec00-83ac-4cb8-a043-7791d50ae282/stream.mp3 

Jamie Ramsden and Dr. Suzie Burke: https://youtu.be/bDSp1vmwQS8 

Ross Blankenship and Maggie Sass : https://youtu.be/MNGdGGJ8dHo 

Dr. Ryne Sherman : https://youtu.be/P-IoU4aIe_U 

James Dismond : https://youtu.be/2PiCI1KRX0U 

Dr. Sam Shriver and Suzie Bishop : https://youtu.be/5sJAe6E-fA0 

Emily Ambrose : https://youtu.be/dYW5otMRrDA 

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

• Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 
• Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment
• Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

#thehardskills #mirabrancu #selfawareness #leadershipdevelopment #emotionalintelligence #executivecoaching

Dealing with a micromanaging boss, or worried you're the one who can't stop micromanaging? The fix depends on why it's happening, and there's more than one reason.

Micromanaging isn't the same as a healthy progress check-in. It's when the review gets so detailed that people stop owning their work and start wondering why they should even try. 

In this solo episode of The Hard Skills, Dr. Mira Brancu, a clinical psychologist turned executive advisor, walks through six reasons people micromanage: anxiety, skill gaps, trust problems, organizational pressure, personality, and misreading what engaged leadership looks like. She also gets honest about being on both sides of the trust problem, and how pushing harder can make someone share even less. 

Once you can name the real reason behind it, you'll know how to respond. That might mean offering to take more off your boss's plate, setting up steady check-ins, or getting support for your own anxiety, trust, or skill gaps as a leader.

Watch this Episode on Youtube - https://youtu.be/Zdw24T4XRvA

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace politics, and the human side of leading.

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Episodes and other resources referenced: 

https://youtu.be/QUeBQe8QLp8 

Your team is grieving, even when nobody says it out loud. Dr. Mira Brancu talks with HR leader and coach Emily Ambrose about the organizational grief behind burnout and quiet quitting.

Most leaders learn to push past the hard stuff. A retirement gets a quick mention, a reorg gets a memo, and everyone moves on before anyone actually feels what changed. Emily Ambrose has spent 20 years inside organizations watching what happens when that grief never gets named, and it usually shows up later as burnout, disengagement, or good people quietly leaving. 

In this conversation, Emily and Mira walk through what it actually looks like to acknowledge loss at work, from a two-second check-in that changed how one employee showed up for months, to the SCARF model that explains why even small changes can feel like a threat. You will also hear how stay interviews work, why ambiguous grief shows up in things like remote work and pregnancy, and what to say when you do not have all the answers but still need to lead.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, burnout, and mental health at work.

Find our guest here:

https://emilyambrose.com/

https://shape.colostate.edu/

Watch this video on youtube - https://youtu.be/dYW5otMRrDA

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Managing up is broken advice. Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down the leadership skill that actually builds trust with your boss, and it isn't managing anyone at all.

Most advice about "managing up" treats your boss like a problem to handle. Dr. Mira Brancu, a clinical psychologist turned executive advisor, thinks that framing is backwards, and she has the story to prove it. 

In this episode she breaks down what one exceptional research coordinator did differently that made her impossible to replace, then walks through the two part shift from managing up to joining up: empathizing with what your leader is actually carrying, then bringing value only you can offer. 

You will learn how to spot blind spots before they blindside your team, how to read whether a leader is defensive, overwhelmed, or just wired differently, and why the same message can land completely differently depending on how you deliver it. 

If your relationship with your leader has felt more transactional than collaborative, this reframe will change how you show up.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, burnout, and the human side of work.

Watch this video on youtube - https://youtu.be/1lND5f_Bd3Q

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this Podcast

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Most managers are so afraid of micromanaging that they default to one leadership style. Then change hits, the team stalls, and nobody can name what went wrong.

Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Suzie Bishop and Dr. Sam Shriver from the Center for Leadership Studies, the home of the situational leadership model, to talk about why the approach that works beautifully with one person fails completely with the next. 

They break down the four steps, why performance readiness shifts the moment anything changes, and why the styles that feel most uncomfortable are often the ones that build the most trust.

You will hear why being great at your job can actively work against you when you step into management, what to do when a high performer suddenly loses confidence, and the exact sentence to use when you can tell your approach is not landing. 

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace dynamics, and mental health at work.

View this episode on youtube - https://youtu.be/5sJAe6E-fA0

Find our guest here:

Connect with Suzie Bishop: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzie-bishop/ and https://situational.com/

Connect with Dr. Sam Shriver: https://situational.com/

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Newsletter: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Book a consultation: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Website: www.gotowerscope.com

Books: gotowerscope.com/books

Join the next leadership training cohort: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Free Resources:

Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Most leaders treat grief and burnout like a personal weakness. James Dismond thinks differently.

James became a CEO for the first time in 2023. Ninety days in, his mother entered hospice care, and he found himself running a hospice organization while sitting on the other side of the bed as a grieving son. That experience changed how he leads, and this conversation is about what it changed. 

He and Dr. Mira Brancu get into why saying "that person is burning out" quietly moves the blame onto the wrong shoulders, what he actually did to carry an entire organization through a rebrand and expansion without gutting their trust, and the practice he built to replace the useless feedback sandwich. He also talks about when to let a good person fail on purpose, and why he refuses to fake it until he makes it.

If you have ever had to hold someone accountable while they were falling apart, this one is for you.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, burnout, and workplace mental health.

Find our guest here:

Connect with James Dismond: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-dismond/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/mirasolhealth

https://mirasolhealth.org/ 

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Subscribe to my free newsletter at: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Work with me one-on-one: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Learn more about my services: www.gotowerscope.com

Get practical workplace politics tips from my books: gotowerscope.com/books

Get my free Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Get my Free Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Get my Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Find other free resources to support your leadership growth: https://gotowerscope.com/other-free-stuff 

Join the next Towerscope leadership workshop or fellowship: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Episodes and other resources referenced:

Watch this next: https://youtu.be/Yh04IHzEMqU?si=V7HzqPP4qg7_qT23

Everyone says you have to manage each generation differently. The data says otherwise. Your generation explains about 4 percent of your personality. You explain almost 80 percent.

Dr. Mira Brancu sits down with Dr. Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessments, to take apart one of the most repeated ideas in leadership: that Gen Z, Millennials, and Boomers are fundamentally different people who need to be managed in fundamentally different ways.

Ryne brought the data: Once you statistically separate age, time period, and birth cohort, generation accounts for roughly 4 percent of the variability on a personality assessment. Age accounts for 12 to 15 percent. The individual person accounts for nearly 80 percent.

They get into why our brains build these shortcuts in the first place, what genuinely does change as people get older, why agreeableness drops off after retirement, and what it really costs you when you make hiring and promotion calls based on someone's birth year or generation.

Ryne also shares the five human skills he thinks will matter most as AI takes over more of the work.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace psychology, and what actually makes teams work.

Find our guest here:

Connect with Dr. Ryne Sherman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rynesherman/ 

Hogan Assessments: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hogan-assessments

Subscribe to my free newsletter at: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Work with me one-on-one: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Learn more about my services: www.gotowerscope.com

Get practical workplace politics tips from my books: gotowerscope.com/books

Get my free Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Get my Free Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Get my Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Find other free resources to support your leadership growth: https://gotowerscope.com/other-free-stuff 

Join the next Towerscope leadership workshop or fellowship: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

Managing high performers takes a completely different skill set than managing low performers, and giving feedback to a high achiever the usual way can backfire badly.

There is probably someone on your team who used to be your strongest player and lately something is off. They are missing deadlines, questioning everything, or moving so fast they are rubbing the team the wrong way. 

And you keep putting the conversation off, because how do you tell someone they are amazing and they are not meeting your expectations at the same time? Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down why most supervisors freeze here, why "just be direct" is incomplete advice when you are dealing with talented people, and what to say instead. 

You will learn the “wise” feedback method, a research-backed way to frame the conversation so it lands as investment rather than punishment. You will also learn how to reframe leadership itself as a second specialty your high performer has to master, and why that single shift makes frequent check-ins feel like support instead of micromanaging.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, burnout, and the human side of high pressure work.

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Subscribe to my free newsletter at: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Work with me one-on-one: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Learn more about my services: www.gotowerscope.com

Get practical workplace politics tips from my books: gotowerscope.com/books

Get my free Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Get my Free Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Get my Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Find other free resources to support your leadership growth: https://gotowerscope.com/other-free-stuff 

Join the next Towerscope leadership workshop or fellowship: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship 

You were right in that meeting and nobody listened. Dr. Mira Brancu breaks down what technical experts miss when they ignore workplace politics in favor of being right. 

Most technical experts get promoted because they were brilliant at the work. They spotted the flaw nobody else saw, they said it out loud, and people respected them for it. Then they step into leadership and that same directness starts landing as criticism and nitpicking.

The usual fix is to gain political savvy, build executive presence, get better at diplomacy. To a lot of functional experts-turned-leaders that sounds like being told to be fake, so they shut down and ignore it completely.

Mira takes a different route. She walks through why the political side of the job is not noise getting in the way of real work, it is the majority of the work now. Then she gives you a 30 minute environmental scan you can run before any high stakes meeting, so you stop leading with your conclusion and start leading with what you actually understand about the other person's concern.

This is part two of her series on what happens when strong individual contributors move into leadership roles.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on leadership, workplace politics, and the human side of high pressure organizations.

To find more of my work:

Subscribe to this channel

Subscribe to my free newsletter at: mailchi.mp/2079c04f4d44/subscribe

Work with me one-on-one: calendly.com/mira-brancu/30-minute-initial-consultation

Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu

Learn more about my services: www.gotowerscope.com

Get practical workplace politics tips from my books: gotowerscope.com/books

Get my free Strategic Clarity and Leadership Resilience assessment: https://mailchi.mp/e1ebf8505764/slr-assessment 

Get my Free Burnout Root Cause Assessment: https://mailchi.mp/29d7d18fae4a/burnout-root-cause-assessment

Get my Workplace Grief Guide: https://mailchi.mp/46873b910380/workplace-grief-field-guide 

Find other free resources to support your leadership growth: https://gotowerscope.com/other-free-stuff 

Join the next Towerscope leadership workshop or fellowship: https://gotowerscope.com/fellowship