Scott A. Snook, Ph.D. | How to develop authentic leaders
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
Release Date: 08/22/2023
Greg Larkin | Tackling Innovation Roadblocks
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
To survive over the long term, businesses must constantly innovate and transform. All too often, however, forces inside companies stifle this change. Greg Larkin has built a career as an internal disruptor. In his view, anyone who seeks to innovate from within, to transform a legacy company, naturally comes into contact with obstructionists — with people who, for different reasons, act as barriers to change. Larkin has identified five key obstructionist archetypes, and he has a playbook of strategies for overcoming each one of them. He talks with Maril about his career journey;...
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General Jay Silveria | Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
From the U.S. Air Force to higher education, General Jay Silveria’s leadership career has been as wide-ranging as they come. After leading pilots into combat and going viral for the anti-racist speech he made while Superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy, Silveria now serves as the Executive Director of Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service. The thread beneath all his experiences is that he’s a true servant leader — one who invests time in getting to know his people as a mission imperative. He and Maril discuss why innovation starts...
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Umayma Abubakar | Harmonizing Cultures: The Art of Post-Merger Integration
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
In a world where so many M&A activities fail to deliver their promised results, Umayma Abubakar has firsthand knowledge of how to buck the trend, and truly create something new and better through all the change. Starting in 2017, Abubakar helped lead one of the largest mergers in history, when Mubadala Development Company combined with International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) to form what is today known as Mubadala Investment Company. Maril talks with Abubakar, now Mubadala’s deputy chief communications officer, about the principles and practices that drove them...
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Bonnie St. John | Paralympian Medalist on Harnessing the Power of Positivity
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
Resilience is something Bonnie St. John knows in her core. The Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar became a Paralympic medalist by getting up after she’d fallen down in a very literal way, and since then, she has helped leaders and businesses understand the power in that truth. Over a wide-ranging conversation, she and Maril discuss how there is no one right way to be a leader; why purpose is so important to resilience; and why positivity is such a potent reinforcement mechanism — for locking in learning, for persevering within challenges and ultimately, for accomplishing our goals. ABOUT LET...
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Julia Hobsbawm | Building Genuine Connection and Trust in a Hybrid World
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
Work has been in a chaotic flux since COVID-19 began, but as Julia Hobsbawm reminds us, it wasn’t going that well before the pandemic, either. The author, Bloomberg columnist and futurist of work has been researching connectivity, social health and humans’ relationship with technology since before the age of hybrid work. She talks with Maril about the ways work is changing — from new office models to technology developments to the norms of new generations — and what the best leaders can do to build productive, fulfilled, connected cultures through it all. --- ABOUT LET GO & LEAD...
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Mark Miller | What Chick-fil-A Has Figured Out About Leadership
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
At the heart of Chick-fil-A’s iconic culture is a simple but consistent focus on studying and developing good leaders. Mark Miller, the former Vice President of High Performance Leadership at Chick-fil-A, was there decades ago as the company first asked what it takes to be an effective leader. He was also there leading the charge as they worked to scale the learnings they found. He and Maril discuss the traits that set transformative leaders apart; the power of asking questions; why unclear aspiration is the root of so much organizational culture struggle; and why it’s so important for...
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Kate O’Neill | How leaders can create bankable foresights and scale optimism
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
In a world increasingly driven by technology and data, is it possible to preserve the health of the human experience and the broader planet? One of the first 100 employees of Netflix, Kate O’Neill has long innovated at the intersection of technology and humanity. In the view of O’Neill and her signature “strategic optimism,” the future is still ours to shape, and businesses have a bigger role to play than they’ve ever had in the past. She and Maril discuss the human specialty of meaning-making, and the ways it manifests into organizational purpose work; why there’s no such...
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Sally Jenkins | The seven factors of high performing leaders
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
In Pulitzer-nominated sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ experience, great leaders are less in the business of winning than the business of teaching. Over a wide-ranging conversation, Maril and Sally explore the leadership lessons Sally has learned from a career interviewing and writing about the world’s great athletes and coaches. They discuss why discipline is something that leaders can’t impose, but have to call up from within people; why it’s less important to take a popular position than a good position; and why leadership is less like holding the steering wheel and more...
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Vada Manager | Leadership lessons from a career of service
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
For Vada Manager, everything comes back to relationships. Throughout a career serving on countless Boards of Directors and advising everyone from Nelson Mandela to Nike founder Phil Knight to the New York Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, Manager has accumulated more than 14,000 contacts in his rolodex, and he’s quick to tout this number with students and mentees. Relationships, he says, come full circle — and his career has been driven by them. Nurturing those relationships through thoughtful gestures and regular contact means that you’re always top of mind for opportunities and...
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Zach Mercurio | How to become a more purposeful leader
Let Go & Lead with Maril MacDonald
For researcher, professor and author Zach Mercurio, “mattering” is not a new buzz word: it’s a primal human survival instinct embedded in our brains from 6 million years of programming, and something businesses need to take very seriously. Zach is an expert in what makes work meaningful, and to him, the facts are clear: Meaningfulness is not developed through a program or initiative — it’s developed and maintained through human interactions. He and Maril discuss why it’s so important for people to know that they’re significant to others; why often, we blame humans for problems...
info_outlineLeadership expert, Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer and bestselling author of Friendly Fire Scott A. Snook discusses what he’s learned over his time in the military and academia about what it takes to lead. Snook, a decorated veteran and victim of friendly fire himself, studies these incidents of tragedy as a way to make sense of — and ultimately prevent — organizational dysfunction. Among other things, they discuss why every leadership program should cover “followership” and the art of managing up; how leaders fundamentally cannot control outcomes, and can only shift the odds; the importance of finding the right balance between high challenge and high support; and why ultimately, what leaders need most is self-awareness and self-acceptance — or, in other words, to be both socially intelligent and secure.
Learn about:
11:42 How Scott describes leadership
14:13 The deep connection between leadership and “followership”
19:00 The organizational lessons from a “friendly fire” incident
23:45 Why your core values are so critical for leaders
28:58 The worst attribute in a leader
29:52 The intersection of high performance, high support and high challenge
38:22 Scott’s summary lessons for leaders
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Scott A. Snook graduated with honors from West Point, earning the Royal Society of Arts Award for the most outstanding overall cadet in his class. Following graduation, he was commissioned in the US Army Corps of Engineers, where he served in various command and staff positions for over 22 years, earning the rank of Colonel before retiring in 2002. He has led soldiers in combat. Among his military decorations are the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Master Parachutist badge. He has an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where he graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar. Dr. Snook earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Organizational Behavior, winning the Sage-Louis Pondy Best Dissertation Award from the Academy of Management for his study of the Friendly Fire Shootdown in Northern Iraq. Until July of 2002, Colonel Snook served as an Academy Professor in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department at the United States Military Academy. He also directed West Point's Center for Leadership and Organizations Research as well as its joint Master's Program in Leader Development.
Scott's passion is to help others live more "meaning-full" lives. More specifically, he is interested in unpacking and understanding transformational leader (human) development experiences --how to make the most out of life's curriculum, as well as how to create high-leverage/high-impact interventions to accelerate the growth of leaders.
Professor Snook's book Friendly Fire was selected by the Academy of Management to receive the 2002 Terry Award as the most influential book on managerial thinking published during the past two years. He has also co-authored a book that explores the role of "common sense" in leadership titled, Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life (2000) and co-edited The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being (2011). Most recently, he co-authored The Discover Your True North Fieldbook (2015), which is the primary text for “Authentic Leader Development,” the popular MBA elective he has taught for over 10 years. Professor Snook has shared his leadership insights in formal executive education programs at Harvard and with numerous corporate audiences around the world.
ABOUT LET GO & LEAD
Let Go & Lead is a leadership community created by Maril MacDonald, founder and CEO of Gagen MacDonald. Maril brings together provocateurs, pioneers, thought leaders and those leading the conversation around culture, transformation and change.
Over the course of the past 12 years, Let Go & Lead has existed in many forms, from video interviews to resource guides to its current iteration as a podcast. At its core, it remains a place where people can access a diversity of perspectives on interdisciplinary approaches to leadership. Maril is also working on a book incorporating these insights gathered over the past several years from global leaders and change makers.
Maril has interviewed over 120 leaders — from business to academia and nonprofits to the arts — through the years. In each conversation, from personal anecdotes to ground-breaking scientific analysis, she has probed the lessons learned in leadership. From these conversations, the Let Go & Lead framework has emerged. It is both a personal and organizational resource that aims to serve the individual leader or leadership at scale.
ABOUT GAGEN MACDONALD
At Gagen MacDonald, we are dedicated to helping organizations navigate the human struggle of change. We are a people-focused consulting firm and our passion is improving the employee experience — for everyone. For almost 25 years, we have been working with companies to create clarity from chaos by uniting employees across all levels around a single vision so they can achieve results and realize their future.
We have been a pioneer in bringing humanity to strategy execution, leading in areas such as organizational communication, culture, leadership, and employee engagement. Our Vision is to lift all humanity by transforming the companies that transform the world.
Full episodes also available on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/let-go-lead-with-maril-macdonald/id1454869525
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Gaf7JXOckZMtkpsMtnjAj?si=WZjZkvfLTX2T4eaeB1PO2A
Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9sZXRnb2xlYWQubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M
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Gagen MacDonald is a strategy execution consulting firm that specializes in employee engagement, culture change and leadership development. Learn more at http://www.gagenmacdonald.com.