Libsyn Directory

Zach Mercurio | How to become a more purposeful leader

Release Date: 09/19/2023

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;...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

More Episodes

Learn about:

6:39 Why people problems are often system problems

9:26 Creating environments where people matter

15:16 The difference between having purpose and being purposeful

25:07 How to create a meaningful purpose

28:06 Why mattering is as important as belonging

35:40 How leaders impact employee mattering

41:10 How invisible leaders transform organizations

45:20 Becoming a better leader by changing how you see people

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Zach Mercurio, Ph.D. works with individuals and organizations around the world to forge purposeful leaders who cultivate more meaning, motivation, well-being, and performance. He is a positive leadership and organizations researcher and Honorary Fellow of Psychology in the Center for Meaning and Purpose at Colorado State University. He is also the author of “The Invisible Leader: Transform Your Life, Work, and Organization with the Power of Authentic Purpose.” His research has been awarded by the Association for Talent Development and The Academy of Management and he contributes regularly to international media outlets.

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.

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