The Leader's Mindset

The team leadership skills that decide who replaces you get built years before you leave.Most succession planning happens far too late to be planning at all — and by then the market has usually made the decision for you.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc talks with John Scott — a CPA and tax partner at a nearly 500-person firm, where he also leads the virtual CFO practice for law firms — about why the average age of your leadership group predicts your company's future better than your revenue does.What you'll learn:- Why a partner group averaging in its 40s is healthy, and one drifting past 50 means you are about to be acquired- The leadership development mistake that cost one firm its independence: nobody trained the next generation- Why emerging leaders leave when they cannot see a path up, even when they like the work- The promotion exercise that ends the argument — "write the case for how you are already doing the next job"- Why the hardest part of a merger is two good cultures that simply are not the same- The leadership skills young professionals lose when AI does all the entry-level repsHow to reach John Scott:Firm website: anderscpa.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-c-scott-cpa/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johncscottcpa/Connect with Jason LeDuc at leducleadership.comStay 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

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Team leadership gets tested less when people are angry and more when they go quiet — and a checked-out team almost never complains.

Nobody quits. Nobody pushes back. People are polite, on time, and doing exactly what's asked — and not one inch more. The spark is gone, and because no alarm is going off, most leaders miss it until output slips. Gallup found only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged at work in 2025, and attributes roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager.

What you'll learn:

- Why a coasting team is more dangerous than an angry one

- The leadership skills move that reconnects the work to a why people can actually see

- Why asking your team for input and then ignoring it is worse than never asking at all

- How recognition and real decision ownership re-engage people faster than perks

- The team development habit of killing one soul-sucking meeting, report, or rule

- The bonus check most leaders skip: whether your own energy is setting the room's temperature

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

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The leadership conversation your team is avoiding is the one deciding your results.Your last meeting was pleasant. Everyone nodded. Nobody argued. And the thing that actually matters never got said.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Croft Edwards — a Master Certified Coach and U.S. Army veteran (five years active duty, another twenty in the National Guard and Reserve), now president of Croft & Company and author of The Liquid Accordion. Croft's teacher Bob Dunham put it this way: the root cause of all outcomes, positive and negative, are the conversations we have effectively, ineffectively, or fail to have. This conversation is about the third kind.What you'll learn:- What "cordial hypocrisy" is — a term popularized by Fernando Flores — and why being polite with someone you don't trust is the default state of most teams- The two kinds of missing conversation: the one you're dodging, and the one you don't even know exists- Why an organization is really a network of conversations, and what that changes about the leadership skills you need to run one- Why the most candid conversations happen at the front line, not in the boardroom — and what a platinum mine a mile underground taught Croft about trust- The "studs and duds" approach to change: spend your energy on the top and the bottom of the curve, not the middle- Why leadership is a practice, not a concept: you can't think your way into a hard conversation, you have to have it badly firstHow to reach Croft Edwards:https://croftandcompany.com/

https://liquidaccordion.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/croftedwards/More from Jason LeDuc, including the Be The Boss program and the Leadership Academy for Tech Managers: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 is what turns two warring teams into one. When Sales blames Ops and Ops blames Sales, you don't have a people problem — you have a scoreboard problem.Two teams playing two different games will call each other the enemy, and the harder each one works, the deeper the trench gets. Meanwhile the customer is the one paying for it. Harvard Business Review found that 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional — missing on budget, schedule, spec, or what the customer expected. So if your teams can't get along, you're not broken. But normal here is expensive.In this episode, Jason LeDuc gives you five tactics — plus a bonus — to get two departments pulling in the same direction, drawn from rooms where engineers, maintainers, and aircrew all saw the same mission differently and turf could get somebody hurt.What you'll learn:- Leadership skills for naming a shared enemy so both teams stop aiming at each other- How one shared metric ends the fight that two separate scoreboards started- The one After-Action Review rule that makes a joint debrief safe: attack the process, never the person- Why trading seats for a single day ends a turf war faster than any meeting- How to turn a fuzzy handoff into a written contract both teams can holdThe leadership move most managers miss: publicly catching one team helping the other. What gets recognized gets repeated.Ready to turn two warring teams into one? Find Jason's leadership 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

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The loudest default in startup leadership is that you need a co-founder. Rei Vardi never had one.

Eight years in, Eon is bootstrapped, profitable, and running in roughly 40 states — and the closest Rei came to a co-founder was a partner who waited until a term sheet was on the table, then demanded half the company.

In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Rei Vardi — an EV mobility platform founder who started Eon with one car in a Boston University dorm room — to unpack the equity decision that nearly cost him the business, and the team he built instead.

What you'll learn:

- Why a late co-founder is "like bringing in a father to raise your kid when the kid is 17 years old"

- What giving away too much equity signals to the investors you're courting

- The leadership skills that outrank titles: matching people to challenges at the edge of their capacity

- Why cultural fit outweighs raw skill 60/40 on Rei's team

- How bootstrapping protected margins and retention while funded competitors chased growth

- Why leadership is downstream of competence — "great leaders aren't born, they get made"

How to reach Rei Vardi:

https://eonrides.com

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

More leadership conversations, programs and coaching with Jason LeDuc:

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 stops scaling the moment everything has to run through you. That's a bottleneck, not a bench.

Nothing moves in your business unless it moves through you — every decision, every approval, every "hey, quick question." The better you are at doing everything, the worse it gets, because your team learns to bring you all of it. Gallup studied Inc. 500 CEOs and found the high delegators generated 33% more revenue than the ones who held on. Not because they worked harder. Because they let go. In this episode, Jason LeDuc gives you five tactics plus a bonus to get out of your own way.

What you'll learn:

- The only-me list: why roughly 70% of last week's tasks are already someone else's

- Leadership skills for delegating the outcome and the deadline instead of the checklist

- The one-page playbook that stops the same question from reaching you fifty times

- Decision rules — the dollar line your team can act under without you

- Why you schedule the handoff and then physically leave the room

- The bonus: hand it over at 80% as well as you'd do it, and stop paying for the last 20%

More leadership tactics, plus the Be The Boss program and the Corporate Leadership Academy, at leducleadership.com — or email [email protected].

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 runs on a body you keep overriding. Your skin is data, not vanity — and it reports first.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Mireille "Dr. Mimi" Vega — a biotechnology PhD and skin-microbiome scientist who now runs her own skincare company — to argue that the skin is not a surface to treat but a daily feed on stress, sleep, and inflammation load. Mimi explains why cortisol shows up on your face before you consciously feel depleted, and why the discipline that fixes a skin problem is the same one that fixes a business problem: stop treating the symptom, go find the root function. It is a conversation about root-cause thinking as one of the least-taught leadership skills.What you'll learn:- What a breakout, an itchy patch, or dull skin is actually reporting about your stress load- Gut microbiome vs. skin microbiome — and why over-cleansing works against you- How cortisol and sleep debt compound into inflammation, and what that does to your decisions- The five-whys-plus-mind-map method Mimi uses to get from symptom to root cause- What she had to unlearn from big pharma when she started leading a tiny team of her own- Her advice to women aiming at the CEO seat: "You're right where you need to be."How to reach Mireille "Dr. Mimi" Vega:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mireillevega/Work with Jason LeDuc on your own leadership development: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.

Leadership is not the tactics you execute all day — it's the direction you protect time to set.Your team can be busy, hitting deadlines and clearing the inbox, while the business goes nowhere. From the inside that motion looks like momentum, right up until the quarter ends and nothing actually moved. Gallup found only 22% of employees strongly agree their organization's leadership has a clear direction — which means almost eight out of ten people are working hard with no idea where it's headed. In this Leadership TTP episode, Jason LeDuc gives you five tactics, plus a bonus, for leading with a real strategy instead of reacting all day.What you'll learn:- How to name the ONE outcome for the quarter and write it as a single measurable sentence- Why strategy is subtraction — and the rule of killing two things for every priority you add- How to protect a weekly strategy block you can move but never delete- Why one public metric beats a dashboard nobody reads- How briefing commander's intent stops you from being the bottleneckReady to build a strategy your whole team can follow? Start at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram or email [email protected].🗞️ 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.

The leadership skills that decide your success are the ones you never consciously choose. Up to 95% of your daily actions run on autopilot — and those actions, not your intentions, determine how your career, your health, and your relationships turn out.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with John Mitchell, who teaches Advanced Leadership of Self at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and is the mental coach to UT's 18 head coaches. John is the founder of Think It, Be It and the author of The Missing Secret of the legendary book Think and Grow Rich. He read the top success book in the world twenty times before he found what he says the author left out, built a 12-minute-a-day routine around it, and used it to change what his days actually looked like.What you'll learn:- Why up to 95% of your daily actions are unconscious, and why that quietly caps your results- The false belief almost every high performer holds about controlling their own behavior- Why the same book did nothing for him at 41 and changed everything at 50- "You don't rise to the level of your goals. You sink to the level of your systems."- Why more success is merely a preference for most people, and a necessity for a few- The bubble-up effect: how a morning template changes what you do at six o'clock that evening- How John uses AI as a thinking partner to get past the four corners of his own mindJohn's free nine-minute video explaining the full secret, plus the book:https://themissingsecret.orgReach John directly:[email protected]Work with Jason LeDuc on leadership development for you or your team: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.

Leadership at the top is lonely by design — the higher you go, the fewer people tell you the truth.

When you're the most senior leader in the room, there's no boss above you to catch your mistakes and no safety net under you. Your job flips: you are no longer paid to have the answers, you are paid to build the people and systems that produce them without you. In DDI's Global Leadership Forecast, 77% of organizations said they don't have a strong bench of leaders ready to step up — so the biggest risk in most companies isn't the market, it's that the person at the top never built the layer beneath them.

In this episode, Jason LeDuc gives you five tactics for leading well from the top, plus a bonus.

What you'll learn:

- Build the Bench — hand your top three people a real decision to own this quarter, not just a task

- Hire Truth-Tellers — say out loud that bad news brought early will never be punished

- Decide at 70% — waiting for perfect information is its own decision, and usually the wrong one

- Set the Weather — your calm and your panic are both contagious, so walk in steady on the hard days

- Zoom Out Weekly — block one hour to lift your head above the noise and ask where this whole thing is going

- Bonus: Build Your Outside Circle — one honest conversation a month with people who owe you nothing but the truth

Ready to lead well from the top? Find the programs and book a discovery call at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram, or email [email protected].

Onward and Upward!

🗞️ 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.