Your Preshift

A seasoned restaurant leader shares a story from early in his career, when the pressure to hit numbers led him to game the system, not out of defiance, but because he didn’t actually understand what he was being asked to do.

This episode unpacks how easily leaders can fall into the same trap, asking for results without creating understanding. When numbers become the focus, behavior starts bending to protect the metric instead of improving the work. Teams work harder, but not always better. Short-term fixes start to chip away at long-term performance.

Drawing on ideas like “line of sight,” systems thinking, and the reality of pressure on the frontline, this episode challenges leaders to slow down and really understand what’s driving their numbers before reacting.

The shift is simple, but not easy: stop leading the number, and start leading the work behind it.

Because when you help people understand the work, the numbers usually follow.

In this episode of Your Preshift, Ryan challenges a common leadership habit, chasing numbers as if they’re the problem. Using the metaphor of trying to hold an inner tube underwater, he shows why pushing metrics only creates new issues somewhere else.

The real shift is learning to see numbers as signals and symptoms, not causes. Every metric is the result of human behavior shaped by the environment leaders create.

Through simple root cause thinking and the “5 Whys,” this episode helps leaders move from reacting to numbers to understanding what’s actually driving them, so they can lead behavior instead of chasing outcomes.

In this Preshift, we talk about a simple question for every leader and organization: are people actually better off for having worked with you?

This one is also a small tribute to Bob Chapman, whose work in Everybody Matters shaped how many of us think about leadership and human dignity at work. Bob believed the way we lead impacts the way people live, and that shows up most clearly in the day-to-day moments between a frontline leader and their team.

We get into what that looks like in real life. Not in big ideas, but in everyday leadership choices: how you train someone on their first shift, whether you take time to listen, whether people feel like they belong or like they’re just filling a spot.

The episode closes with a simple reflection, imagine your 85th birthday and all the people you’ve led over the years showing up. What would you hope they say about working with you?

That answer is being shaped right now, one shift at a time.

When you step into a struggling team or organization, it’s easy to focus on fixing the numbers. But most of the time, the numbers are just a reflection of something deeper, the beliefs, behaviors, and patterns that have taken root over time.

In this episode, Ryan explores what it really means to lead a turnaround. Drawing on ideas from Spiral Dynamics and real-world examples like Barry-Wehmiller and Ford, we look at how leaders shift not just performance, but the way a team thinks, communicates, and operates under pressure.

We also go into the harder side of leadership, what to do when some people don’t move with the new environment. At that point, the question shifts from capability to alignment, and leaders are faced with a decision that impacts the entire team.

If you ever inherit(ed) a mess, this episode will help you see it more clearly and lead it more intentionally.

Leaders don’t just lead differently, they see the world differently. And the way we see people shapes the kind of workplace we build around them.

In this episode of Your Preshift, we explore a powerful question: What kind of organization are you growing?

Drawing on the work of Frederic Laloux and the Spiral Dynamics framework, we walk through five common ways organizations operate: Red, Amber, Orange, Green, and Teal, and the leadership beliefs behind each one. From fear-driven environments to rule-based systems, performance cultures, relationship-focused teams, and organizations that function more like living systems, each stage reflects a different assumption about people and how work gets done.

You’ll hear how these dynamics show up in everyday in your leadership through how decisions get made, how mistakes are handled, what gets rewarded, and how people experience your presence as a leader.

One important reminder: most organizations aren’t just one stage. Different teams, departments, and leaders often operate from different mindsets at the same time. The real opportunity for leaders is not labeling their organization, but noticing the environment their leadership is creating.

This episode invites you to reflect on three simple questions:

1. What currently motivates the people on your team?
2. What behaviors does your leadership reinforce?
3. And how might you help your environment move one healthier step forward?

Every leader is cultivating something, and the environment we create shapes how people grow.

If you lead a shift, a classroom, a department, or a team, this conversation will help you better understand the culture you’re building and the role your leadership plays in shaping it.

How does your team feel when they see you coming? Do they breathe easier, or brace for impact?

This episode takes a look at one of the truths of leadership: your presence, your reputation, arrives before your words do, and your team already has a reputation for you, whether you’ve named it or not.

We explore how your internal view of leadership shapes the way you show up either from the “mechanic” mindset of correcting and tightening to the “gardener” mindset of teaching and growing. Then we break down some patterns that often determine whether leaders get experienced as help or trouble: the Fix-It Reflex, emotional whiplash, and chronic urgency. And yes, we name the infamous “Swoop and Poop”—the habit of flying in, dropping criticism and direction, and disappearing before any help or support can take root.

This episode is about awareness of patterns that aren’t character flaws; simply learned habits. And because they’re learned, they can be unlearned.

Why do smart, well-intentioned leaders look at the same struggling team and come to completely different conclusions?

In this opening episode, Ryan explores how leaders don’t just disagree on solutions, they disagree on what the actual problem is. One sees accountability. Another sees burnout. Another sees broken systems. Same facts. Different stories.

Drawing on Spiral Dynamics and Karl Weick’s research on sensemaking, the episode unpacks how we don’t react to reality itself, we react to the story we build about it. And under pressure, we double down on the lens that has worked for us before.

The invitation is simple and practical: before arguing about solutions, ask, “What problem do we believe we’re trying to solve?”

That question alone can create connection and change how you lead.

Leading people over time requires more than good intentions. It requires self-location.

Before you recalibrate trust, adjust structure, or change your level of involvement, you have to know where you’re actually standing. Not on your best day. Not in theory. In pressure.

This episode explores three mirrors that help you locate yourself as a leader over time: pressure, which reveals your reflex, repetition, which exposes the edge of your strengths, and your wake, which shows what your leadership consistently produces.

Because when you lead people over time, your defaults compound. And you cannot intentionally develop others if you don’t know where you are starting from.

In this episode, we look at a tension most frontline leaders deal with: stability versus effectiveness.

Stability keeps stuff from falling apart and unfortunately become the goal. Leaders start protecting what’s steady instead of improving what’s possible. Standards get softened. Feedback gets delayed. Rescue replaces development. The team functions, but it doesn’t get better.

This episode challenges you with two questions:

1. What are you compromising to keep things stable?
2. What are you willing to risk to make things more effective?

The goal isn’t to blow anything up. It’s to protect what’s working while making small, intentional moves that improve performance over time.

Familiarity sets in faster than most of us realize, and when it does, leadership effort drops. Expectations go unstated, involvement fades, and leaders start leading from old assumptions instead of present reality.

Nothing is wrong. Performance often looks fine. But development stalls.

In this episode, Ryan helps leaders spot when they’re on autopilot with people they know well, understand why trust without attention creates distance, and learn how to reopen familiar relationships with clarity, presence, and intention.