The Leader's Mindset

Leadership development rarely covers the risk that can erase twelve years of work overnight: you do not own your marketing channels.You rent them. Josh Sprague found out the morning Google locked him out of his own ads account, on vacation, before breakfast.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Josh Sprague — fractional CMO, founder of trail running brand Orange Mud and custom apparel company Seven Clay — to talk about what a leader actually controls and what they only rent.What you'll learn:- Why a channel you optimised for a decade can vanish in a morning, and what rebuilding it cost- Why the email list everyone calls the one thing you own is rented too- What to have in place before you spend a dollar on ads, starting with tracking you trust- Where he draws the line between what AI handles and what stays human- The birthday gift that told him he was his own company's bottleneck, and the delegation techniques that got him out of the middle- Why people fight the system you built to help them, and the strategic thinking that wins adoptionJosh names two books: Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares's Traction for marketing, and Gino Wickman's Traction, the book behind EOS.More founder interviews on The Leader's Mindset every week.Josh Spraguehttps://orangemud.com/https://sevenclay.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsprague/Jason LeDuc runs leadership development programs for emerging leaders: https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jldDisclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Leadership development lives or dies on the conversation you keep rehearsing in the car and never actually having.

The person you have to correct sat next to you for three years. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, published in Harvard Business Review from a survey of 7,631 respondents, found 21% of managers admit they avoid giving negative feedback — while 72% of employees said their performance would improve if their manager gave it. The thing you are dreading is the thing they are waiting for.

What you'll learn:

- The three-sentence structure that replaces the speech: behavior, impact, ask, with a worked example

- Why feedback has a forty-eight hour shelf life, and what you end up arguing about after that

- The first time manager habit of using a compliment sandwich, and why it poisons every compliment after it

- Leadership skills for opening with the hard sentence instead of the weather

- Team leadership that ends with a date, so a complaint becomes a standard

Jason LeDuc's leadership development programs are at

https://www.leducleadership.com/

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Leadership development stalls for a reason most leaders will not say out loud: the problem is the anchor, not the engine.

So they add engines. More hours, more headcount, more effort — and the boat barely moves.

In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Kevin Voisin — a former Louisiana elected official, eighth-generation oysterman, and founder of We Live Legend — to break down why high performers keep upgrading the area of life they already win at while the one they avoid quietly drags everything else.

What you'll learn:

- Why raising one anchor moves you further than bolting on another engine

- The five areas Kevin coaches to — fitness, faith, family, finance, fun — and how to find which one is yours

- The strategic thinking that separates hard work from work actually worth doing

- What happens to a company when the founder's personal life breaks

- How metrics stop helping the moment the number itself becomes the point

- Why the best partnerships agree how they will end before they begin

- His closing instruction to emerging leaders: tell the truth about your real numbers

More founder interviews on The Leader's Mindset every week.

How to reach Kevin Voisin:

Website: https://itscoachkevin.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itscoachkevin/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itscoachkevin/

Jason LeDuc runs leadership development programs for emerging leaders: https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

No amount of leadership development buys respect — it gets built, not by being liked, and not by trying harder to be liked.You say something in a meeting and it lands flat; someone else says it ten minutes later and the room nods. Gallup reports only about 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership, so your team did not start neutral on you. This episode is five tactics for earning respect you have not been given yet, plus a bonus.What you'll learn:- The difference between liked (how people feel in the room) and respected (whether they would bet on your judgment when you are not in it)- Why teams respect accountability rather than certainty, and how to make one visible decision this week- The first time manager move of taking the unglamorous job quietly, and what it buys- Why keeping small promises is the leadership skills habit almost nobody actually plays- Team leadership under fire: defending your people publicly, and saying "I was wrong" before you have toJason LeDuc's leadership development programs are athttps://www.leducleadership.com/

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Strategic thinking is the first thing a new manager runs out of — your team has about 20% of their time left for your projects.

You set two goals for the quarter. Everyone works hard. The goals still slip, and it was never effort.

In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Lisa Woodruff — who just finished a PhD on the invisible load and leadership in the home, and is the founder of Organize 365 and the author of Escaping Quicksand — to put numbers on the work nobody sees and nobody counts.

What you'll learn:

- Where a workweek actually goes: 20-40% in email and meetings, 20-40% in the job description, and only 15-20% left for the projects you measure everyone against

- Why contingency planning beats time-management planning, and why doing both is what gets work finished

- The question to ask instead of "why isn't this done?" — and why the answer usually surprises the manager

- Delegation techniques that hand over whole outcomes instead of single tasks, plus the new manager tips that come with them

- The move from tactical to strategic thinking, and where most leaders get stuck on it

- Why every executive, founder and single person with no kids ends up running a household system sooner than they think

How to reach Lisa Woodruff:Book: Escaping Quicksand: https://a.co/d/03jDP4fp Website: https://organize365.com/Podcast: https://organize365.com/category/365-podcast/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisawoodruff/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/organize365/How to reach Jason LeDuc:Email: [email protected]Website: https://www.leducleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-leduc-3469823/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leducleadership

Want this kind of leadership development for yourself? Take charge of your own: https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Leadership development skips the hardest part of the promotion: the first time you have to tell a friend their work isn't good enough.

Friday you were venting about the boss together. Monday you are the boss. The Center for Creative Leadership surveyed 295 first-time managers and found the most-cited challenge, at 59.3%, was adjusting to people management and displaying authority — and 58% got no training for that transition at all. This episode is the script for it: what to say so the standard holds and the friendship survives the promotion.

What you'll learn:

- Why naming the change out loud in a one-on-one beats letting the team read tea leaves

- The first time manager trap of overcorrecting on a friend, and why it punishes loyalty

- How to close the side door so decisions stop getting made at lunch

- Leadership skills for taking the first hard conversation the same day instead of next month

- Team leadership habits that keep the friendship by moving the venue, not ending it

Jason LeDuc's new manager tips and leadership programs are at

https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

The leadership skills that scale a company are not the ones that keep a founder sane.

Rajesh Nagjee calls himself a business physicist. In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with the CEO mentor who has spent three decades — 80,000 hours, by his own count, across 14 disciplines — working out why ambitious founders stall, and what he calls the gilded cage: an impressive business that has quietly become a place its owner cannot be honest in.

What you'll learn:

- The inner-game equation Rajesh builds everything on — performance = potential minus interference, from Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis — and why he only ever works on the interference

- The "velocity crisis": what happens when outer-game ambition outruns inner-game capacity

- Why every growth target you set is really a promotion into incompetence, and the team leadership habit that closes the gap

- Delegation techniques that actually produce ownership — hand over outcomes and let people design the process

- Why giving advice usually fails, and the advice-free conversation that gets there faster

- The leadership skills it takes to stop pretending in front of your own team, and what Rajesh says happens when leaders do

One of the more honest founder interviews we have recorded.

How to reach Rajesh Nagjee:

https://rajeshnagjee.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajeshnagjee/

Book a discovery call with Jason LeDuc:

https://link.marketingmoneymachine.co/widget/bookings/training-discovery

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Leadership development almost never covers the seat nobody trains you for — the one where your peer just became your boss.

Carnegie Mellon researcher Robert Kelley, author of Harvard Business Review's "In Praise of Followers," attributes roughly 80% of an organization's success to followers. Every leadership book is about the other 20%. This episode is about the 80%: how to follow well when the chair moves out from under you, without resenting the new boss or losing your own standing. The topic and all five tactics came from Jason's friend W. Christian Ward, callsign "Mental," and are credited to him.

What you'll learn:

- The one conversation that replaces three weeks of assumption about what your new boss actually needs

- Why being reliable before you're recognized is the leadership skills move that protects your standing

- How to shut down the back-channel question without making an enemy

- Team leadership habits that keep the camaraderie and still respect the rank

- Why disagreeing early and committing completely is the leadership advice that outlasts a change of command

Jason LeDuc's leadership development programs are at

https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

The team leadership skills nobody trains you for: how to ask a man on your crew if he's okay.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Bill McCamley — former New Mexico Secretary of Labor, state representative and county commissioner, and author of "Right, My Dudes. Now What?" Bill ran a state's unemployment system through the pandemic, survived his own suicide attempt in the middle of it, and today teaches suicide prevention to union construction workers across New Mexico and Texas.What you'll learn:- Why authority always has to come with responsibility, and what happens when it doesn't- The reframe at the centre of the episode: tough guys do tough, hard things, and dealing with what is in your head is one of them- The leadership skills behind the direct question Bill makes every class practice out loud, because "you good, bro?" never gets an answer- The "bands" men wrap around themselves — any emotion means weak — and what they cost a team- Why he wants more men teaching and in therapy chairs, and his work with Richard Reeves' American Institute for Boys and Men- What mentoring looks like with an hour a month: leadership development that starts with one apprentice and one real conversationIf you or someone you lead is struggling: in the US and Canada you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, 24/7.Bill McCamley:https://billmccamley.net/https://www.instagram.com/mccamleybillWork with Jason on team development and leadership skills:https://www.leducleadership.com/

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jldDisclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

Team leadership is usually the real reason your best people keep quitting — not money, and not a better offer somewhere else.

By the time a great employee is interviewing elsewhere, you already lost them; the notice is just the paperwork. SHRM found that toxic workplace culture drove an estimated $223 billion in turnover costs over five years, and that 58% of employees who quit over culture said their manager was the main reason.

What you'll learn:

- Why the stay interview beats the exit interview, and the two questions to ask

- The leadership skills habit of guarding the standard — your best people leave when you let your worst behavior stay

- Why people leave because they stopped growing far more often than for money

- How recognition works as the cheapest retention tool you own

- Why organizational culture problems are usually manager problems, not perk problems

- The bonus move: make leaving loud, and actually change something after an exit

Jason LeDuc is a leadership consultant and former U.S. Air Force leader teaching practical team leadership skills. Find his leadership development programs and book a discovery call at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram

🗞️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld

Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.