What does it cost to keep climbing when you're not sure the ladder is leaning against the right wall? Cynthia Lai spent two decades in multinational banking before a health warning sign forced her to ask that question, and to walk away from a role that looked successful from the outside. In this conversation, Cynthia, a governance advisor, leadership educator, and ICF certified executive coach, joins Lori to talk about: Why high achievers so often ignore the warning signs their bodies are send...
What if the systems built to help people are quietly deciding who gets to heal and who feels safe enough to even ask? Janelle Miller Moravek has spent 26 years inside that system, and she's not just naming the problem. She's rebuilding it from the ground up. Topic bullets: Why the U.S. behavioral health workforce doesn't reflect the communities it serves, and how decades of low reimbursement rates created the gap The difference between being fluent and being bilingual in therapy, and why cult...
The AI race is real. So is the hidden cost. Lori introduces the Speed Tax, the Culture Architecture Framework, and a free 5-question diagnostic for HR leaders. 6th anniversary solo episode.
Picture two fish swimming in a bowl. One asks the other, how's the water? The second fish replies, what's water? That's culture, says Maria Angela Calmet, and it's exactly why so many leaders never notice the assumptions shaping how their teams communicate, decide, and trust one another. In this episode Why cultural competence is now ranked among the World Economic Forum's top future-of-work skills The tree analogy: why cultural conflict happens at the roots, not the visible leaves and flower...
What if the traits that get someone labeled difficult in one workplace are exactly what makes them extraordinary in another? Tara May, CEO of Aspiritech, a technology company where more than 90 percent of the team is autistic, joins us to talk about what she calls the ROI of kindness, and why building for neurodivergent talent makes every workplace better. In this episode Why Tara calls it “the ROI of kindness,” and what that means for the bottom line The “spiky cognitive profile” reframe: wh...
Karen Tay built a peer-support program for women navigating workplace bullying and burnout, ran it through Princeton research, and found something a lot of managers don't expect: the problem usually isn't a lack of effort. It's a lack of support. In this Leading Through Change encore, Karen and Lori unpack what Karen's Princeton-backed research found about workplace adversity, why women in the senior-manager to senior-director range are most likely to drop out of the workforce, and what actually helps.
AI is changing every part of how leaders communicate, and Allison Shapira has a warning worth hearing: don't outsource your voice to it. In this conversation, we get into her framework for using AI to amplify authentic leadership instead of replacing it, and why she insists the human isn't just in the loop, the human is the loop. In this episode Why “the human is the loop, not just in it” reframes how leaders should think about AI The AI Authenticity Loop, Allison's framework for using AI wit...
