Women too often get stuck in middle management. It’s a broken rung in the corporate ladder. For every 100 men who are promoted from entry level positions to management, only 87 women make that transition. In this episode we explore this topic and, more importantly, what can be done to address it with Kim Havens and Noa Ries, Co-founders of Kahilla.

Kahilla is a digital leadership and development platform for underrepresented communities in the corporate world. They’ve started with focusing on helping women build community and the skills needed to succeed professionally. Kahilla is building a support system through a cross-industry community for individuals to be open, vulnerable, and candid with peers.

Noa and Kim are an absolute delight to speak with. They bring a joyous energy to every conversation I’ve had with them, as you’ll hear in this recording.

In this episode, we talk about building intentional, cohesive, and cozy—yes, *cozy*—companies with Brie Wolfson, founder of Constellate. We geek out on:

Brie is the founder of Constellate and creator of The Kool-Aid Factory, a series of web zines about building great organizations. She has worked at organizations like Stripe, Figma, and Google, and consulted with dozens of startups on how to scale culture.

Claude Silver is the Chief Heart Officer at Vayner Media. As soon as we heard Claude's title, we knew we had to have her on the podcast. In this conversation, we dig into what it means to be a Chief Heart Officer, how to lead with heart through tough and messy situations, and techniques for scaling heart-centered leadership throughout an organization.

Andrew Blain, founder of of remote:af, talks with us about how the Remote Agile Framework can help leaders foster greater connection, motivation, and autonomy on the teams they lead. We also get into complexity theory, practical techniques to empower teams to make decisions, the potential that remote has to transform work and life, and so much more. 

Andrew is a founder of remote:af (aka remote agile framework) and Elabor8, Australia's leading lean/agile consultancy. He is an experienced technology leader with expertise in strategy, organizational design, complex facilitation and adaptive leadership.

How does a 1200-person office-based company transform into a leading remote-first company? Jason Morwick is Head of Remote-First at Cactus. In this episode, he takes us deep into how Cactus went all-in on remote-first and became one of Quartz's 20 Best Companies for Remote Workers. 

This episode is packed with useful info for supporting a remote-first, globally distributed team. We talk about crafting policies, working with budgets, experimenting with tools, organizing retreats, and so much more. Jason also shares wisdom on leading change and how to help team members feel like they're driving the transformation. 

Jason Morwick is Head of Remote-First at Cactus and the author of Remote Leadership (2021), among other books. He started working remotely in 2006 and, prior to Cactus, consulted with companies to help them make the transition to remote work back when "remote work" was called "teleworking."

This episode is all about leading with curiosity, integrity, and love. We're joined by Sarah Young, author of Expansive Impact. We talk with Sarah about the leadership framework she lays out in the book and then she shows us how to put it into action. Sarah and Niko have a coaching conversation about one of Niko’s recent leadership challenges: rolling out Redox’s response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.

This conversation takes us deep into themes at the heart of this podcast: building a culture of belonging, the role of leaders in fostering culture, both setting direction and making space for other voices, and how to navigate this all when the real world makes things complicated.

Sarah Young is the founder and CEO of Zing Collaborative, a leadership development company that helps high-impact, high-integrity organizations, teams, and individuals elevate their leadership capacity. She is also the author of Expansive Impact: An Invitation to Lead in Everyday Moments, which came out earlier this year. In Expansive Impact, Sarah offers a framework to elevate your impact as a leader while remaining grounded in the truest version of yourself.

How can you lead from a place of awareness, intention, and ease? How can you use your emotions to be a more impactful leader? What gets unlocked when you replace stress and anxiety with play and creativity?

In this episode, we explore the Conscious Leadership framework and toolkit with Gentzy Franz, Ph.D. Gentzy shares techniques for leading with greater intention and clarity, his own journey to Conscious Leadership, and how his work as an academic and teacher informs his work as an executive coach. This episode is a terrific primer on Conscious Leadership, as well as a fun, invigorating listen if you're in need of a reset.

About Gentzy:

Gentzy Franz is an executive coach and a teacher. He founded Lightly to help leaders bring the principles of conscious leadership into their organizations. He teaches Employee Motivation and Performance at the University of Illinois, where he earned his Ph.D. Organizational Behavior from the School of Labor and Employement Relations.

Books Mentioned:

Think about the best team you've ever been a part of. I would bet that you felt a strong sense of belonging within this team. You had a shared destiny and sense of identity, felt safe and trusted, and had fun while crushing the mission. Dang belonging feels good. And, it turns out, having a culture of belonging creates high-performing teams.

Adriana is my Belonging Guru. When we started this podcast, she was one of the first people I knew we needed to get. You'll see why. Adriana helped me realize the vital importance of belonging and has been working with me to develop the skills required to build belonging at Redox and all of the communities I organize.

It's is a bit of a buzz word these days, often included in diversity, equity, and inclusion work. In this show, we dive into what belonging actually means, it’s key characteristics, why it’s fundamentally important (a basic human need, as Adriana described it), and we get into a really tactical discussion about behaviors and methods you can use to build more belonging for yourself and the teams you’re a part of.

When should you start to think about building a People (or HR) function? How do you find a great People leader? How does the People function change as the company grows and becomes more complex? How can leaders help the company navigate this change?

We sat down to talk about all of this and more with Amy Robinson. Amy has decades of experience leading HR in startups at every stage of growth, from very early through IPO. Today, she helps leaders scale as an executive coach and founder of Pivotal Moments.

Amy has tremendous insight into not just how People organizations get built, but how companies evolve, how leaders and teams level up, and how to stay grounded through it all.

Kona recently published their 2022 Remote Manager Report featuring insights from 350 managers across some of the top remote companies in tech.

In this episode, we speak with one of the masterminds behind this report, Kona co-founder Yen Tan. Yen co-founded Kona just before the pandemic. Kona has since grown to be a staple wellbeing platform for remote teams. Kona plugs into Slack and allows team members to report out a quick green/yellow/red 🚦 check-in that gets teams connecting at a deeper level, building trust, and psychological safety.

Yen shares how discovery interviews with remote managers helped shape their product and discussed the insights gleaned over literally thousands of conversations. We dug in particularly deep on the topic of psychological safety, how to measure it, and how to build it within your culture.

(Note: Yen changed their name after we first published this episode. We've updated the show notes and transcript, but you'll hear us use Yen's former name in the audio.)