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PODCAST

Lead the People

Matt Poepsel, PhD

Lead The People is your guide to unlocking your true potential as an authentic leader. Hosted by Dr. Matt Poepsel—The Godfather of Talent Optimization—this podcast dives deep into the art and science of what it takes to lead at the next level. With insightful conversations and practical strategies, each episode equips executives, strategic HR pros, and aspiring leaders with the tools it takes to boost performance, inspire teams, and drive meaningful impact. Whether exploring the latest workplace

business management

All Episodes

33:17

#192 The New Role of Managers in the Age of AI (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/10/08

Start with our free behavioral assessment. Go to trypi.com/ltp .AI transformation isn’t just a technology problem; it’s a management problem. Executives want faster adoption, employees are wondering what AI means for their jobs, and managers are stuck in the middle trying to turn all that uncertainty into something their teams can actually work with.Matt Poepsel sits down with Joel Pipher, who leads AI transformation at The Predictive Index, to unpack what it takes to grow with AI without

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30:56

#191 How Uber's Culture Broke Its Brand Promise...

Lead the People ·

2026/10/01

Start with our free behavioral assessment. Go to trypi.com/ltp .Travis Kalanick built Uber on a promise of democratic freedom, everyone gets to feel like a rockstar, not just people who can afford a limo. Denise Lee Yohn tells Matt Poepsel what came next: a tech-bro internal culture so far removed from that promise that customers eventually deleted the app in protest. "We're not going to believe what you say about yourself," she says. "We're actually going to act on what we know and

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33:52

#190 Why 70% of Transformations Still Fail (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/09/24

Most leadership models still treat change like a project: a start, an end, and a return to normal in between. Jackie Insinger, CEO and Founder of Spark Brilliance, argues that premise is exactly what's breaking down. There's no dry land left to land on, which means the old idea of "managing" change through to completion isn't just outdated; it's the thing quietly wearing leaders and teams down.Matt Poepsel sits down with Jackie Insinger, CEO and Founder of Spark Brilliance, to unpack her

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26:45

#189 Stop Calling Your Workers a Line Item (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/09/17

Most leaders can point to their P&L and show you exactly where the money moves. Ask them to point to their people on that same page, and the room goes quiet. For Tracie Sponenberg, who spent nine years as Chief People Officer at The Granite Group, a wholesale distributor with 700+ employees across six states, that silence is the whole problem. Her new book, The Frontline People Strategy, makes the case that distribution and manufacturing leaders have been treating their workforce as a

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26:49

#188 What 250-Year-Old Companies Know About Surviving...

Lead the People ·

2026/09/10

Most leaders treat uncertainty like a storm to wait out. Meridith Elliott Powell has spent two decades proving that's the wrong instinct. As CEO of MotionFirst, author of a benchmark study spanning more than 800 CEOs, and Hall of Fame speaker with the National Speakers Association, she argues the businesses that come out ahead aren't the ones with the most information. They're the ones who move while everyone else is still waiting for the shoe to drop.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down

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26:45

Why Your Executive Team Is The Company's Bottleneck...

Lead the People ·

2026/09/03

Most executive teams don't fail because someone drops the ball. They fail quietly, over months, while every function runs fine on its own and nobody can name what's actually wrong. For Adam Weber, executive coach at Adam Weber Coaching and co-founder of Helm, that quiet failure has a name and a shape, and it's measurable.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Adam Weber, co-founder of Helm, to unpack why the real conversation on most executive teams happens in the hallway instead of

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28:03

#186 Why Credibility Beats Charisma in Leadership...

Lead the People ·

2026/08/27

Steve Farber has been arguing that love is a legitimate business discipline for over two decades, and people still flinch at the word. Companies print "we love our customers" on buttons and banners without breaking a sweat. Backing it up with policy, budget, and follow-through is where most of them quietly give up. His new book, The Radical Promise, co-written with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, makes the case that the real gap in leadership isn't between people who talk about love and values

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29:00

#185 Why Executives Resist the Change They Approved...

Lead the People ·

2026/08/20

Most change management still assumes there's a gap between disruptions—a chance to catch your breath before the next transformation lands. Lata Hamilton's clients don't get that gap anymore. Change has stopped being an event and started being the weather.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Lata Hamilton, founder and CEO of Passion Pioneers, accredited change manager, NLP practitioner, and bestselling author of Pioneer Your Career Change. They dig into why change triggers a survival

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28:54

#184 The Real Reason 85% of Culture Change Fails...

Lead the People ·

2026/08/13

Culture isn't a slogan on a values slide; it's the daily discipline of listening to the people the org chart forgets. Most companies assume culture change means demolition, blow it up, start over, transform into something new. But Kevin Oakes, founder and chief strategy officer of i4cp and author of the Amazon bestseller Culture Renovation, has spent decades studying hundreds of companies and found the opposite: the ones who actually pull it off don't tear the house down. They renovate

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33:47

#183 How to Hear the People Who Never Speak Up (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/08/06

Culture shows up in the small moments, and few moments are smaller, or more revealing, than a meeting. Most managers treat meetings as a scheduling problem to survive rather than a leadership opportunity to design. But for Jess Britt, leadership coach and meeting design expert, the real cost of a badly run meeting isn't wasted time; it's the leadership behavior you're modeling every time you fail to use the room well.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Jess Britt, leadership coach

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36:00

#182 Why Pushing Through is Not Real Resilience...

Lead the People ·

2026/07/30

Most leadership advice treats the person and the professional as two separate jobs. Dr. Marline C. Duroseau's career says otherwise. She started in payroll at twenty-one, worked her way up to CFO of a 1,500-person healthcare organization, then walked away from finance to lead HR and leadership development at Brandon Hall Group, all while carrying a fifteen-year infertility journey she didn't talk about at work until she wrote a book, then took the story to a TEDx stage.In this episode, Matt

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33:56

#181 The 90% Forgetting Problem No One Talks About...

Lead the People ·

2026/07/23

Most leadership development follows the same logic: bring people together, fill them with good content, and trust that something will stick. It doesn't. Within two weeks, research shows we've forgotten 90% of what we learned, not because the content was wrong, but because the format was never built for the way adults actually work.Mamie Kanfer Stewart figured this out the hard way. As the founder of Meeteor and host of the Modern Manager podcast, she spent years running workshops that left

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34:07

#180 The Culture That Punishes the Questions It...

Lead the People ·

2026/07/16

Your biggest leadership challenge may not be your workload, your team, or the pace of change. It may be that somewhere along the way, you stopped asking questions. Charles Lee, Founder and CEO of Ideation and author of Design Your Good Life: The Framework for Discovering Your Purpose, Actualizing Your Vision, and Amplifying Your Impact, has spent nearly two decades helping leaders turn ideas into action. Through that work, he's uncovered a surprising truth: the greatest obstacle to

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33:39

#179 What Leaders Get Wrong About AI (feat. Lance...

Lead the People ·

2026/07/09

AI is changing what it means to be valuable at work. The tasks that once defined expertise are increasingly being automated, forcing leaders and employees alike to confront a harder question: What happens when the machine becomes better than we ever were? Lance Neuhauser, CEO of The Predictive Index and a longtime leader of companies navigating disruption and transformation, sheds light on one of the most consequential workplace shifts in modern history. In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits

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32:37

#178 Burnout Is Not a Personal Failure (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/07/02

What if burnout isn’t a warning sign that something is wrong with your job, but a signal that something is misaligned in how you’re living?Most leaders are conditioned to see exhaustion as a time management problem. But burnout often has less to do with productivity and more to do with the gap between how we live and what our bodies can sustainably handle. Elizabeth Rosenberg, founder of The Good Advice Company, challenges that assumption from personal experience. After years as a global

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31:36

#177 The Real Cost of Broken Trust (feat. Yolanda K....

Lead the People ·

2026/06/25

Trust doesn't break all at once. It erodes quietly, through gaps in communication, unanswered questions, and decisions that arrive without context. By the time leaders notice it's gone, the damage is already running through the numbers.In this episode, Yolanda K. Davis, an HR executive, Gallup-certified strengths coach, and author of The Trust Advantage, makes the case that organizations treat trust like a mood when they should treat it like payroll. When the system stops running,

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30:54

#176 Storytelling Skills That Set Managers Apart...

Lead the People ·

2026/06/18

Storytelling isn't a performance trick or a "nice-to-have" for leaders who like to talk. It's the fastest way to move a team, align a room, and make people care about work that might otherwise feel abstract. Most managers reach for dashboards, memos, and productivity systems when alignment breaks down. But for Johanna Walker, public speaking and storytelling coach and founder of Women Who Speak, the real gap isn't strategy; it's the absence of a story that makes the strategy matter.In this

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41:00

#175 What Executives Decide Behind Closed Doors...

Lead the People ·

2026/06/11

Your title tells people where you sit. Your mastery tells them why you matter. Most managers spend years chasing the next promotion, only to wake up realizing the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. Julian Lighton, Business Coach at Moo Pie Coaching Inc., former McKinsey partner, four-time Chief Strategy Officer, and one of Silicon Valley's most sought-after executive coaches, has spent 30 years studying why some people break through and others stall. The answer has nothing to do

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34:37

#174 Escaping the Fear-based Leadership Trap (feat....

Lead the People ·

2026/06/04

Culture isn’t a poster on the wall; it’s the daily, unglamorous discipline of showing up with intention. Most businesses assume demanding results mean sacrificing relationships. But for Justin Ricklefs, founder and CEO of Guild Collective and author of the new book Give a Damn: The Catalyst for Caring Companies, the real threat to any great company isn't leniency. It's the slow, systemic drift toward apathy that makes 81% of employees dread Mondays.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down

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34:01

#173 Misguided vs. Mission-Driven: Why Good Companies...

Lead the People ·

2026/05/28

Most businesses assume staying profitable means staying on mission. But for Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup and author of the new book Incorruptible, the real threat to any great company isn't a bad quarter, it's the slow, systemic loss of the thing that made it worth building in the first place.In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Eric to dig into why good companies go bad, why trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and how our conventional definition of

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195 results

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