Lead In 30

Co-founder of Lead In 30 - the future of leadership development. Organizations use Lead In 30 as the new way to train and develop leaders.

Co-Founder

Lone Rock Consulting

We help senior executives teams get aligned and accelerate achieving Key Results. Honored to work with leaders of some of the biggest companies in the world.

Senior Partner, Co-Founder

CULTURE PARTNERS 

Was senior partner and worked with senior executives of Amazon, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Cigna, HCA, Hormel, and other companies in 14 countries.

Senior Partner

Spectrum Association Management

Was on the senior leadership team of a market disruptor called Spectrum Association Management based in Texas. Helped transition the company from being a Hill family-owned startup to a corporation managing more than 900 communities. 

This experience was basic training in building process to drive scale and customer experience design to drive growth. Was quite the ride!

Vice President of Growth

Bonneville International

I worked as an executive for a national broadcast company during the final glory days of traditional media. We purchased underperforming media brands in top 50 markets and my role ultimately became to help turn them around. 

This is where I began learning the importance of culture management. How do you turn underperformers into revenue and ratings leaders in less than three years? I discovered you have to change the culture.

Vice President of Operations

KSL Media

Worked as a reporter and anchor, and then led news and sports teams at KSL Media. Covered news events ranging from a tsunami in Indonesia that killed 250,000 people to Olympic Games to Elizabeth Smart's disappearance and remarkable return.

Director of News, Programming, and Reporter/Anchor

KTSA Radio

Was general assignment reporter for KTSA Radio.  Covered everything from the LA riots following the Rodney King verdict to the lunch time massacre in Killeen to the daily news events in San Antonio. Ok, those were the BIG stories. Let's be honest - I was usually reporting on house fires and car chases.

News Reporter

Cofounder of Lead In 30 • Upgrade your leaders • Human resources and leadership development

It was one of the most memorable moments of my career. I was standing in the front of the room finishing a meeting with the top 200 leaders of a large hospital system in the DC area. I handed the microphone to the CEO to close us out. What he said shocked me and has stuck with me for years. After hours of discussion about the culture of his organization of 18,000 people that day he ended the meeting looking into the eyes of his top 200 and saying into the microphone, "I have come to an inconvenient and disgusting conclusion that I am the problem."

That's a direct quote.

He was gone less than two months later. 

He left.

For almost a decade I've traveled the world meeting with leaders of some of the world's biggest companies. Amazon, Walmart, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, Hormel, BD, Darden Restaurants, Fox, and HCA to name a few. I've averaged 165 flights a year. New York, London, Singapore, Sydney, New Zealand, and a lot of less notable locales have been stops along the way.

Here's what I've learned...

Leaders make or break an organization.

They are the competitive advantage.

Or the anchor sinking the ship.

One leader can change everything. Positively or negatively.

After years of consulting senior executives on their company-wide culture transformation projects I'm now spending all of my time with a smaller group of leaders. Call them executive coaching clients or whatever you want. They are leaders of teams, divisions, business areas, or enterprises that aren't yet who they want to become.

We help successful executives grow their careers through strengthening their leadership effectiveness.

That's the phrase we wrote as we founded our firm.

Perhaps you're that leader who could benefit from our questions, perspective, and proprietary models. Or maybe you know that leader.  

DM me. 

I'd love to chat. 🎯

Russ Hill

Jim Farley didn’t panic. He built urgency without chaos. That’s why Ford beat the clock on EVs. In 2020, Farley took over a Ford that was years behind Tesla...

Deadlines loomed. Pressure was mounting. 
But instead of demanding all-nighters and pushing heroics, Farley made a counterintuitive move:

He gave teams six-week decision windows.
If an experiment failed in week 3, they pivoted in week 4, not in the next quarter.

He publicly celebrated a team that killed its own initiative after the data didn’t hold up.

The message?
“We’re not chasing perfection. We’re chasing fast learning.”

During critical sprints, Farley held daily standups; not to pressure, but to unblock.

Because urgency doesn’t mean chaos. 
It means removing drag.

It means more communication, not silence.
It means more clarity, not more fear.

And it worked:
- The Mustang Mach-E shipped in under 3 years
- Smart risks replaced politics
- Teams stayed engaged without burning out

Urgency sharpens focus. Panic narrows it.

If your team is spiraling under pressure, ask yourself:
- Are we building urgency or just spreading fear?
- Are we removing blockers or just piling on noise?
- Are we pushing clarity or defaulting to chaos?

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Cofounder of Lone Rock Leadership • Upgrade your managers • Human resources and leadership development

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Michelle Gass joined Levi's as incoming CEO in 2020 and walked into a culture of paralysis. The teams weren't lazy. They weren't incompetent. They were terrified. Here's what happened:

Years of cost-cutting and operational tightening had created an invisible rule: don't risk anything. Don't try anything new. Don't be the person who fails.

So they didn't.

Product launches slowed. Innovation stalled. Meanwhile, competitors were moving fast, and Levi's - a 170-year-old icon - was at risk of becoming irrelevant.

Most CEOs would double down. Push harder. Set aggressive targets. Demand more output.

Gass did the opposite.
She launched what she called "permission to play" sessions.

Here's how they worked: Cross-functional teams got 90 days to test ideas that normally would have required 6 months of approvals. No business case required upfront. No punishment for failure. Just experiment, learn, iterate.

The only rule? Share what you learned, whether it worked or not.

Within 6 months, the results were undeniable. A digital-first denim line launched in half the normal time. Sustainable fabric experiments that would have been "too risky" became real products. Store teams tested customer experience changes that increased conversion by 12%.

The breakthrough wasn't the specific ideas. It was then that people started moving again.

Here's what most leaders miss: Movement isn't motion.

Motion is activity. Meetings, emails, busy work. Movement is progress toward what matters.

And movement happens when you remove the friction, not add more pressure.

I see this constantly when coaching executives. A director will tell me their team is "being thorough" or "doing their due diligence."

But when I dig deeper, the pattern is clear: people are stalling because they're afraid of being wrong.

Watch for these signals that fear is blocking your team:

They ask for "one more analysis" when they already have the answer. They schedule meetings to prepare for meetings. They wait for perfect information that will never come.

Contrast that with teams where fear has been removed: They make decisions with 70% of the information. They test small, fail fast, and adjust. They self-correct instead of waiting for permission.

They move.

The difference isn't capability. It's psychological safety.

This is exactly what we address in Lead In 30. We give leaders a systematic process to identify what's blocking movement, remove the friction, and create the clarity teams need to act without fear.

If your team has the talent but lacks the movement, let's talk.

P.S. If you found this valuable, repost for your network ♻️

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Lead with impact.

When Josh Silverman took over Etsy in 2017, teams were working 60-hour weeks, going nowhere. He made ONE radical decision that changed everything. Here's how he transformed chaos into clarity:

Most leaders think more direction means better results. They add initiatives, create new priorities, and launch fresh campaigns. 

But here's what actually happens: teams freeze. 
When everything's important, nothing's important.

Silverman inherited exactly this problem.

The company was drowning. Not in debt or bad products, but in priorities. Over 50 competing initiatives, each with its own champion, its own meetings, its own urgency.

Nobody could tell you what Etsy's actual strategy was. Ask five different employees and you'd get five different answers.

Silverman's approach was surgical.

He didn't ask teams to prioritize their own work. That's how you get 50 initiatives in the first place. Instead, he identified the 3-4 metrics that would actually move Etsy's business: seller growth, buyer engagement, revenue per customer, and platform stability.

Then he did something radical: he killed everything else. Not paused. Killed.

Product features that teams had spent months building? Scrapped if they didn't tie to one of those four goals. Marketing campaigns? Cut if they couldn't demonstrate impact on the core metrics.

The reaction was predictable. Outrage, resistance, and fear that critical work would fall through the cracks.

But here's what happened: within 90 days, teams stopped asking "What should I work on?" and started asking "Which of our four goals does this impact most?"

The energy didn't change. The direction did.

Etsy's stock price increased significantly within a year. But the real shift happened internally. Teams moved faster, made better decisions, and actually knew if they were winning or losing.

This is the Clarity Paradox: the more you add, the less people understand. When clarity is absent, the void fills with assumption. Teams make up their own priorities, pursue their own definitions of success, and wonder why leadership seems disappointed.

The 3rd Leader framework starts exactly where Silverman did: with clarity. 

Not the kind of clarity that lives in strategy decks, but the kind that changes how teams make decisions every single day. 

Then it creates the alignment that prevents people from working at cross-purposes. Finally, it generates the movement that actually changes outcomes.

If you're leading a team that feels busy but not effective, working hard but not making progress, the issue probably isn't effort. It's clarity.

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Jim Sinegal built Costco into a $400B giant. But the secret wasn’t strategy; it was something deeper. One principle, repeated for 40 years, made all the difference...

Before launching Costco in 1983, Jim Sinegal spent 30 years learning retail under Sol Price at FedMart.

What he learned wasn’t a tactic. 
It was a philosophy:

Charge members, not markup.
Offer deep discounts.
Pay employees better than anyone else.

Most leaders publish values on a slide deck once a year.
Sinegal lived his - every day, for decades.

When he and Jeff Brotman founded Costco, those principles weren’t negotiable. They were the operating system.

Fair wages. Low margins. Member value first.

Even after stepping down in 2011, Sinegal still showed up every Tuesday at HQ.
Same desk. Same routine. Same values.

He’s 89. And still there.
Not for nostalgia, for consistency.

That consistency built culture.
That culture built trust.

And trust built a $400B company with an $86B private label brand (Kirkland).

No gimmicks. No pivots. No quarterly reinventions.
Just one message, lived relentlessly for 40+ years.

That’s what The 3rd Leader framework is all about:
Clarity → Alignment → Movement.

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When Carol Tomé became CEO of UPS in 2020, the company was drowning in complexity. Thousands of processes. Endless meetings. Here's how she turned it around with one simple mantra:

She inherited a company running on autopilot toward mediocrity.

Package delivery drivers followed 23 different standard operating procedures. Middle managers spent 60% of their time in meetings about meetings. A simple pricing decision required 14 approval layers.

The company wasn't failing. It was suffocating under its own weight.
Tomé didn't start with a big announcement or a flashy restructuring plan. She started with questions.

Which of these 23 procedures actually prevent errors? Which meetings drive decisions versus consume time? Which approval layers add insight versus just delay?

The answers were uncomfortable.

Most processes existed because they'd always existed. Most meetings happened because they were on the calendar. Most approval layers were vestiges of leaders who'd long since moved on.

So Tomé introduced one mantra: "Better, not bigger."

Then she cut. Not randomly. Systematically.

She eliminated initiatives that created confusion without driving results. She simplified processes that buried frontline teams in unnecessary detail. She gave teams clearer guidance, not more guidance.

The distinction matters more than most leaders realize.

Your brain craves simplicity. Too much detail doesn't create clarity, it collapses it. When you pile on processes and initiatives, you're not helping your team execute. You're paralyzing them.

Within 18 months, UPS reported its strongest operating margins in over a decade. Customer satisfaction scores rose 12%. Employee engagement jumped 15%.

But the most telling metric? Decision velocity increased 3x. 
The company could move.

Complexity kills execution. Simplicity scales it.

If you want to apply this in your organization, start by asking three questions:

Which processes confuse your team more than help them? Which initiatives exist without clear ownership or measurable impact? Where are you adding when you should be subtracting?

This is the foundation of effective leadership. Clarity doesn't come from adding more strategy. It comes from ruthlessly eliminating what doesn't serve the mission.

In my work with leaders at Amazon, Walmart, and hundreds of other organizations, the ones who transform performance master this skill. They use frameworks that force simplification, not complexity.

You'll find this and more frameworks in my latest book: Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results, and Most Don't. Available now at https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw.

You can dive more into creating clarity by cutting the noise so teams can focus on what actually moves the business forward.

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Lead with impact.

You announce a major change. The team resists. It looks like defiance, but it’s something else entirely...

Most leaders think resistance means disagreement.
It doesn’t. It means threat detection.

You’ve spent weeks crafting airtight logic - slides, data, strategy - to explain why your change makes sense.

You present it.

And instead of buy-in, you get silence... skepticism... subtle foot-dragging.
So you double down: more presentations, more rationale, more logic.

But here’s what your team is actually thinking:
- “Do I still matter?”
- “Do I have the skills for this future?”
- “What if I fail?”

You’re speaking strategy.
They’re experiencing survival.

That’s exactly what Arvind Krishna faced when he pivoted IBM into hybrid cloud in 2020.

His senior engineers - lifers in the mainframe era - pushed back.
Not because they disagreed.
Because their careers suddenly felt fragile.

Krishna didn’t counter with more logic.
He did something smarter: he made it safe to feel uncertain.

He held open office hours.
Engineers were blunt:
“I’m not sure I have the skills for this world.”

He didn’t sugarcoat. He validated:
“You’re right to feel that way. This is a shift. Let’s bridge it together.”

And resistance began to dissolve.
That’s what real leadership looks like.

Here’s the shift to make:

- Stop assuming silence is agreement.
- Stop seeing resistance as defiance.
- Start seeing it as an emotional signal.

Before explaining what’s changing, acknowledge what that change might threaten.

Try this:
“Some of you might be wondering if your skills still matter. That’s a legitimate concern. Let’s talk about it.”

Then pause. Really pause. Let people speak.
And when they do - don’t correct their fear. Name it. Normalize it.

Why this matters:

✔️ Most change efforts fail because emotional resistance goes unacknowledged.
✔️ Teams don’t fear strategy. They fear irrelevance.
✔️ Safe teams adapt. Unsafe teams stall.

If you’re announcing change and facing resistance, you don’t need a new strategy. You need a new leadership lens.

That sequence is at the heart of my new book Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results and Most Don’t.

It explains why the fastest teams are not the most talented, they are the most trusted. We’re letting a limited group preview it before the November 10 release.

Read the PDF, leave an honest Amazon review, and we’ll send you two signed copies as a thank you.

Apply here:
https://lnkd.in/e74z3WTy

In 2016, a power outage grounded 2,000+ Delta flights overnight. Ed Bastian had one choice: hide or own it. Here's what he did that turned the crisis into Delta's defining cultural moment:

Most Fortune 500 CEOs follow the same crisis playbook.

Let PR craft the perfect statement. Blame the technology vendor. Promise to "investigate thoroughly." Then disappear until the news cycle moves on.

Bastian did the opposite.

Within hours of the outage, he recorded a video from his phone. No script. No teleprompter. Just him, looking directly into the camera, taking full responsibility for the failure.

Then he announced immediate compensation for every affected traveler before the crisis was even resolved.

Wall Street analysts predicted massive reputational damage. Instead, the response became a masterclass in crisis leadership.

What made Bastian's approach culturally transformative wasn't just what he did. It's what he refused to do.

He refused to let lawyers and PR teams sanitize his message. That directness signaled to every Delta employee: when we fail, we own it immediately. No committees. No blame-shifting. No waiting for perfect information.

He refused to use passive corporate language. "We're investigating" is what legal teams write. Taking direct responsibility is what real leaders do. That choice told employees their leaders would model the same accountability expected from frontline staff.

He refused to wait until the full cost was calculated before offering compensation. The decision came fast, even though they didn't know the financial impact. That bias toward action over analysis became a cultural permission slip: when customers are hurting, we move first and worry about spreadsheets later.

This is how singular moments become cultural inflection points.

Most managers won't face a crisis this public. But you'll face your moment where your team watches to see if your values are real or just wall art.

That moment is coming faster than you think.

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Doug McMillon saw it before anyone else. Walmart's supply chain was a sleeping liability. No crisis yet, but fragility everywhere. So he did what most CEOs don’t:

He built the fix before the fire.
Years before COVID disruptions, he invested heavily in automation, real-time inventory systems, and predictive logistics.

No media coverage. No quarterly boost. Just quiet prevention.
Then the storm hit.

In 2021–2022, Target struggled with stockouts. Amazon missed delivery windows.

Walmart? They kept shelves full and trucks moving.
That’s the power of preventative leadership.

But here’s the problem:
Most companies don’t reward prevention.

They reward the hero who pulls the all-nighter, not the planner who avoided the crisis.

They promote the manager who “handles escalations well,” not the one who has none.

They praise the engineer who patches the outage, not the one who built the alert that caught it two weeks earlier.

This is how firefighting cultures form.

The real work of prevention is invisible:
Planning buffers before they’re needed
Investing in root cause fixes, not surface wins
Creating systems that scale sanity

The best leaders don’t just ask:
“What happened?”
They ask:
“What system let this happen?”

You’ll know you’re rewarding the wrong behaviors when:
- Planning meetings keep getting canceled for “urgent issues”
- Employees stay late to fix recurring bugs, and get applauded
- The phrase “We got lucky” shows up in every postmortem.

Prevention isn’t flashy.
It doesn’t make headlines.
But it makes history.

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Emma Walmsley didn’t bluff her way through a crisis. She told her team and investors exactly what GSK had failed at and what she didn’t know yet. The result? 

Trust surged, top talent returned, and innovation restarted.
Most leaders think saying “I don’t know” will cost them respect.

The opposite is true. 
Admitting uncertainty builds more credibility than faking confidence ever will.

When Emma Walmsley became CEO of GlaxoSmithKline in 2017, the company was struggling.

Its R&D pipeline had stalled. Top scientists were leaving.
Analysts questioned whether GSK could compete in modern pharmaceuticals.

Walmsley did something most executives avoid: she told the truth.

In her first earnings call, she told analysts that GSK had "failed to invest appropriately in innovation.”
No predecessor would’ve used that language. No spin. No deflection.

Then she went further.
She told her top 20 leaders she didn’t have the answers and asked them to redesign R&D from scratch.

That honesty unlocked what years of PR couldn’t:
• Research partnerships with 3 top universities that had previously refused to engage
• A 34-point jump in internal trust within 18 months
• Re-engagement from scientists who had stopped taking GSK’s calls

Why did this work?
Because your team already knows when you're bluffing.

The VP who spends 45 minutes defending shaky market projections doesn’t protect his credibility.

He destroys it. 
His team walks away executing on targets no one believes in.

Most leaders default to false certainty because we’re trained to believe authority means having the answers.

But what your team needs isn’t omniscience.
It’s clarity on what you know, what you don’t, and how you’ll solve it, together.

Here’s a simple 3-part framework:
- Say what you know, with specifics.
- Name what you don’t, without hedging.
- Propose how you’ll figure it out, using the team’s intelligence.

The skill is knowing when to lean into transparency and when to project steadiness.

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Tony Hsieh eliminated all managers at Zappos to fix bureaucracy. 260 employees immediately quit. Here's why consensus-driven leadership destroys companies just as fast as founder mode:

Tony built Zappos into a billion-dollar company by trusting employees completely. Customer service reps could spend $2,000 solving problems without asking permission. The culture was legendary.

Then bureaucracy crept in. One resignation letter changed everything.

In 2013, Tony got a resignation letter that shattered his vision. This wasn't just any employee complaining - this was someone who embodied everything Zappos stood for. 

Someone who had lived the culture and was now walking away because the very thing Tony thought he'd eliminated had returned: soul-crushing corporate bureaucracy.

He introduced holacracy - self-organizing teams, no bosses, distributed decision-making. Pure democracy. The business press celebrated it. Employee engagement scores initially hit all-time highs. People felt energized by the radical experiment.

Then reality hit.

Simple decisions that took minutes now required multiple team consultations. A website change that should have taken days needed 6 months and 3 circle consultations. By the time teams reached consensus, competitors had shipped similar features months earlier.

Projects stalled as teams struggled to figure out who had the authority to decide anything. Customer service scores dropped because representatives became unclear about their power to solve problems.  

Employees spent more time talking about work than actually working.

By 2015, Tony issued an ultimatum: commit to holacracy or leave with generous severance. Around 260 people - roughly 18% of the workforce - walked out the door.

While Tony was drowning in democratic discussion, Reed Hastings at Netflix was proving the opposite approach worked.

Reed didn't eliminate hierarchy - he weaponized it. "We're not a family. We're a team," he told employees.

Just clarity and accountability. When someone wasn't performing, they got generous severance. When decisions needed making, leaders made them.

The result? Netflix became one of the fastest-growing companies in history while Zappos fell off Fortune's Best Companies to Work For list for the first time in 8 years.

Steve Jobs put it even simpler: "Real artists ship."

Tony solved for Alignment but sacrificed Clarity and Movement. Perfect alignment around going nowhere is still going nowhere.

Leaders are trapped between two broken extremes: founder mode autocracy that burns out teams, or consensus mode paralysis that stalls everything. Both destroy companies. Both drive away top talent.

The answer isn't balancing these approaches. It's replacing them with a systematic framework that delivers Clarity, Alignment, and Movement simultaneously.

I explore this framework and the full Zappos story in my new book, Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results, and Most Don't. Available now at https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw.

When Nintendo's profits fell, CEO Satoru Iwata cut his salary by 50%. Most executives protect themselves first. He absorbed the pain. Here's the leadership lesson that changes everything:

Most CEOs in crisis mode blame the market or lay off staff. Iwata did the opposite.

The result? Teams didn't scatter. They rallied.

Here's what most leaders miss about trust:
Your team isn't listening to your words about sacrifice. They're watching whether you're willing to feel it first.

When Iwata cut his salary, he did something most executives avoid: he made his pain visible before asking anyone else to absorb impact.

That shift in sequence, me first, then us, completely changes team psychology.

Instead of resentment ("easy for you to say"), you get commitment ("we're in this together").

Leaders often underestimate the power of example. People follow what you do long before they follow what you say.

The rally at Nintendo didn't happen because Iwata gave better speeches afterward. It happened because he demonstrated that leadership meant absorbing impact, not delegating it.

Your team is watching how you handle pressure. And they notice the gaps.

When you ask them to work weekends, but protect your own calendar. When you freeze their hiring budget but approve your conference travel. When you demand transparency about their mistakes but hide your own.

These moments teach them that sacrifice flows in one direction.

Flip the sequence: Before you ask your team to take on extra load, what are you willing to absorb first? Before you implement budget cuts, where are you cutting from your own resources?

The visibility matters. They need to see you feeling the impact before they're asked to.

Accountability doesn't rise through motivational talks. It rises when people watch you demonstrate that being a leader means going first into discomfort, not last.

The fastest way to build trust is to take responsibility before assigning it.

If this resonates, I recently explored this idea in one of my podcast episodes: “Stop Breaking Glass – How Effective Leaders Stay Calm.” You’ll hear the exact framework: Breathe → Elevate → Lead, a system for staying steady under pressure so your team feels protected, not exposed.

Listen to it here:
https://lnkd.in/e2kHfmQX

If every decision goes through you, it's not leadership. It's a traffic jam. Here's how Daniel Ek turned Spotify into a decision-making machine:

Your calendar is back-to-back approvals. Product decisions. Pricing decisions. Hiring decisions. Your team waits hours (or days) for answers you could give in minutes - if you weren't drowning in other people's decisions.

Most managers believe this is control, that approving every decision keeps quality high and mistakes low.

The opposite is true. When decisions stack at the top, 3 things happen.

Speed dies. Your competitor ships in 2 weeks, while your team waits 3 months for approvals.

Innovation stops. Your people stop proposing bold ideas because they know you'll water them down through 4 rounds of review.

Your best people disengage. They came to build and create. You've turned them into order-takers who execute your vision instead of owners who contribute their own.

Daniel Ek figured this out at Spotify. He built the company around small teams with real decision-making authority.

Product squads could ship features without executive approval. Engineering teams could choose their own tech stack. Marketing teams could launch campaigns.

But not chaos. Guardrails everywhere.

Teams owned decisions within their domain. They couldn't change company strategy or blow the budget. They had clear boundaries, transparent metrics, and quarterly check-ins.

The result? Product cycles that used to take months took weeks. Innovation came from dozens of teams experimenting simultaneously instead of 5 executives guessing what might work.

Here's what most leaders miss: Your job isn't to make every decision. It's to build a system that makes good decisions without you.

Start by sorting decisions into 3 buckets:

1. Strategic (company direction, major investments, key hires) - you own these.

2. Operational (how to execute strategy, resource allocation within budget, team structure) - push to your direct reports.

3. Tactical (daily execution, minor resource shifts, individual choices) - these should never reach you.

For everything you push down: Define clear boundaries. Set outcome metrics. Create transparency so you can monitor without micromanaging.

The test: If a decision can be reversed easily and the worst case is a learning moment, it shouldn't require your approval.

The best organizations don't have hero leaders making all the calls. They have systems that create good decisions at every level.

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When Anne Fudge took over Young & Rubicam in 2003, the legendary ad agency was in crisis. Clients were leaving. Revenue was dropping. The board brought her in to fix it fast...

Everyone expected her to show up on day one with a turnaround plan.
She did something that looked like the opposite.

For 100 days, she didn't announce a single initiative. She walked the halls instead. Sat in cubicles. Had hundreds of conversations with people at every level of the company.

And she asked the same question every time: "If you were CEO, what would you change first?"

The people who actually served clients told her what executives had been too afraid to say out loud. Those insights didn't just inform her strategy—they became her strategy.

Most leaders think they need to talk more. The best leaders listen more and speak last.

Here's what Fudge understood that most leaders miss: Questions unlock truth. Listening unlocks commitment.

When you ask people what they'd change, you're not just gathering data. You're signaling that their perspective matters, that it's safe to tell the truth, and that you're building solutions together rather than imposing them from above.

That's the shift from Answer-First to Question-First leadership.

Most leaders resist this approach because asking questions feels like admitting weakness. But here's the paradox: When you ask instead of tell, you actually build more credibility, not less.

People commit to solutions they help create. 
They resist solutions imposed from above.

Start Monday with one question: "What's one thing we should stop doing?"

Then do the hardest part - stay quiet and actually listen. Don't defend, don't explain, don't problem-solve yet. Just let your team tell you what they see.

The most transformative thing a leader can do is ask a better question.

I've worked with leaders at Amazon, Walmart, and Lockheed Martin to build this approach into their daily leadership. The transformation happens when leaders stop imposing and start uncovering.

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Most CEOs sent memos when COVID hit. Tony Fernandes went live. And saved AirAsia with one move most leaders avoid...

When COVID grounded AirAsia in 2020, most executives issued top-down updates about layoffs and cost-cutting.

Tony did something radically different.

He hosted weekly livestreams - unfiltered Q&As with pilots, crew, and baggage handlers. He didn’t spin a PR message. He listened. He acknowledged fear. He celebrated small wins.

No strategy deck. Just empathy, live.

The result? What should have caused mass resignations turned into loyalty.

AirAsia rebounded faster than competitors, kept more staff, and reengaged its workforce around a shared future.

Because strategy without empathy is just noise.

Execution isn’t logical. It’s emotional.
People don’t follow plans, they follow voices that make them feel safe.

Fernandes understood this. That’s why his people followed him through crisis.

Here’s the leadership test:
If your team isn’t moving, it’s probably not because the plan isn’t clear.
It’s because they don’t trust they’ll be okay inside it.

A great vision needs an empathetic voice.

You can find this and more insights in my new book, "Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results and Most Don’t"

If you want an early copy, join the Advance Reader Group.

You’ll get the full PDF now, and two signed print copies after you leave an honest review.

Join here: https://lnkd.in/e74z3WTy

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When teams break down under pressure, it is almost never a systems problem. It is a standards problem. Here's why:

Two teams can have the same training, the same procedures, and the same workload, yet deliver completely different outcomes. 

The difference is the leadership expectation at the top. 

Weak leaders tolerate chaos and explain it away as “being in the trenches.” Strong leaders set a non-negotiable bar for excellence and build environments where people are set up to win.

Your team will always mirror the standards you hold.

Capacity inside a team is rarely fixed. 
Leaders who assume their people are “maxed out” end up creating the ceiling themselves. 

When you stop assigning challenging work, hesitate to delegate, or protect people from stretch opportunities, the team interprets that as doubt. They pull back, play safe, and contract to match the expectations you set.

The ceiling becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But when a leader signals belief and backs it with support, people consistently outperform their own assumptions about what they can do. 

High-capacity teams are almost always built by leaders who expect more and equip people to rise to it.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

1. Remove tolerances that drain performance.
Identify the lowest standard you’re currently accepting. Chronic lateness, “good enough” work, technical performers who spread negativity - whatever it is, that tolerance sets the floor for the entire team. Raise it, and the rest of the team will rise with it.

2. Use stretch goals properly.
Stretch goals only work when they’re paired with support. Set targets that push the team 20–30 percent beyond their comfort zone, then remove obstacles, provide resources, and explain why you believe they can deliver. The combination of challenge and support drives expansion.

3. Lead with visible belief.
Teams rarely outperform the level of belief their leader communicates. When you model growth, people step into growth. When you signal doubt, people shrink.

Leadership is not about loading people with pressure. 
It is about raising the standard, backing your expectations with action, and creating an environment where excellence is normal, not extraordinary.

Catch this episode on our podcast, Lead in 30: https://lnkd.in/egJnM3eA

Every organization has values. What separates good leaders is how they act when those values collide with real-world pressure. Alan Jope faced one of those moments, and his decision left a lasting mark:

In 2021, a private equity firm approached Unilever about acquiring a profitable personal care brand. The financials looked perfect. $200M revenue, 18% margins, immediate accretion to earnings.

The board saw an easy win.

But Jope's team discovered the brand's supply chain relied on palm oil from suppliers with documented deforestation practices. It violated Unilever's sustainability commitments.

Not technically. Explicitly.

Investors pushed back. One board member asked the question Jope knew was coming: "Isn't this exactly why we have audits? To fix these issues after acquisition?"

The path of least resistance was obvious. Buy the brand. Fix the supply chain later. Everyone wins.

Jope rejected the deal entirely.

Not because it was easy. Because Unilever's values meant something only if they guided decisions when the stakes were real.

The result wasn't chaos. Employee engagement scores rose 12% in the following quarter. Brand equity strengthened as customers and talent saw that the company meant what it said.

Teams watched their CEO choose principle over profit and thought, "Maybe we actually mean what we say."

Clarity without consistency fails. 
People trust what leaders prove, not what they say.

Values aren't beliefs you discuss in offsites. They're behaviors you demonstrate under pressure.

And the moment you compromise them for convenience, your credibility collapses.

I watched this play out with a director at a Fortune 500 tech company. She'd promised her VP they'd ship a new feature by end of quarter, tied to her bonus and promotion review.

Two weeks before deadline, her lead engineer showed her the code. It worked. Technically.

But the error handling was incomplete. Ship it now, and 5% of users would hit crashes they couldn't recover from.

She called the VP: "We're pushing the launch 3 weeks. The feature isn't ready."
He wasn't happy. She didn't get promoted that cycle.

But her team watched her choose quality over her own advancement. Six months later, when she asked them to pull weekends for a critical launch, they showed up.

Because they'd seen what she was willing to sacrifice.

Your team is watching. Not what you post about integrity. What you do when living your values costs you something.

That's when they start believing.

This principle sits at the core of The 3rd Leader framework. When I work with leaders, we focus on building trust through decisions, not declarations.

Because your team doesn't believe what you say in town halls. They believe what you prove when it costs you something.

P.S. If you found this valuable, repost for your network ♻️

Join the 11,000+ leaders who get our weekly email newsletter: https://lnkd.in/en9vxeNk

Lead with impact.

When Feike Sijbesma took over Royal DSM in 2007, he inherited a 20,000-person petrochemicals giant that was slowly dying. Most CEOs would have started with layoffs and restructuring...

Sijbesma did something different.

The company's identity was embedded in 100+ years of chemical manufacturing. Employees saw themselves as producing materials, optimizing yields, managing costs. That's what they'd always done.

Sijbesma recognized something crucial: you can't change 20,000 people's behavior by changing the org chart. You have to change what they believe they're building.

He reframed DSM's entire purpose around a single question: How do we improve global health and nutrition?

Not through efficiency metrics or cost reduction. Through meaning.

This wasn't just messaging. He restructured investments, shifted R&D priorities, and aligned every business decision to this new north star. When people understood they were solving global malnutrition rather than optimizing chemical yields, something shifted.

Alignment moved from resistance to momentum.

DSM transformed into a global leader in life sciences and nutrition innovation. The same 20,000 people, radically different results.

Here's what made it work: Sijbesma understood that alignment accelerates when people grasp the case for why they're being asked to do something. Not what. Not how. Why.

Most leaders try to convince people to do something different. They build presentations, create incentives, and restructure teams.

But alignment isn't persuasion. When people understand the purpose, alignment becomes passion.

This is the foundation of the 3rd Leader framework: Clarity drives alignment, and alignment creates movement.

Purpose-driven leaders build teams that move faster and deliver better results because they've solved the hardest problem first. They've answered why it matters. 

If you're ready to transform how your leaders create alignment and drive results, let's talk about bringing Lead In 30 to your organization.

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Lead with impact.

I build GTM Systems that generate leads on autopilot using Sales Tech + AI | B2B creator

👋 Hi, I'm Natasha! 

I'm a tech lover turned GTM Engineer.

I got into tech while was working as a freelancer/business owner from 2022 up until mid 2024. 

I started by testing tools to make daily tasks easier, and that hobby grew into a full-on passion.

Now, I work as a GTME that helps businesses build intelligent outbound workflows with AI and Sales Tech tools to not only grow faster but multiply their sales efforts in a scalable and efficient manner. 

When I’m not building systems that 10x sales pipelines, I’m building my personal brand as a B2B sales content creator and creating content about what I’m learning about GTM Engineering, both here on LinkedIn and in my newsletter.

Outside of work, I enjoy:

🎧Listening to music
📖 Reading fiction
🍿 Watching movies

If you're curious about GTM Engineering or how to use Sales Tech Tools like Clay, Instantly, Smartlead, etc., then let’s connect! 

I’ve also shared some amazing free resources in the link in my bio.

Ciao! ☁️

Natasha Odeyemi

People overcomplicate going into GTM Engineering.
Listen, if you’re a beginner:


Avoid:

– Trying to master every tool at once
– Copying other people’s workflows without understanding the logic
– Thinking you need to build long and complex n8n workflows or Clay tables immediately

Instead:

– Learn how to use Clay
– Learn how to get data outside of typical data sourcing tools, for example, using web scraping tools.
– Learn prompt engineering
– Learn how to use APIs/webhooks
– Build and experiment on workflows that solve actual problems (ensuring they follow this process: find, enrich, transform, and export), using the modern GTM tools you have access to.
– Document everything in a portfolio, showing your thought process and results.

STOP trying to master every tool in the market.
GTM Engineering starts with a problem, figuring out the inputs (aka skills) needed to solve that problem in a flow, only THEN do you use tools to execute.

If you focus on learning the right skills

You can use them to leverage any tool


If you have any GTM Engineering questions, my DMs are always open


What will you add to this list to guide a beginner GTM Engineer?

A while ago, I stopped trying to “hack” LinkedIn to find niche companies.
It just wasn’t cutting it, so I started doing this instead


It wasn’t the platform that was broken,

It was the labels.

Most niche companies don’t describe themselves consistently.

Some barely appear on LinkedIn at all.

And traditional filters only return the ones who know how to categorize themselves.

So I switched to semantic search inside CompanyEnrich.

I describe the actual company, like:

“Companies that manage cloud infrastructure for SMBs.”

Suddenly, the “hidden” companies appear.

Ones that never use predictable keywords.

Ones that no enrichment tool would surface.

Ones that LinkedIn doesn’t even index.

Then I refine by:
location, size, capabilities, model, specialization.

✅ Result: Found 54,000 verified MSPs across the U.S.

And this is just one scenario,

This method works for every company with messy labels or in hard-to-find niches

If your ICP is hard to find…

It’s because you’re searching by titles, not meaning.

Semantic search fixes that.


How are you currently finding companies that aren’t on LinkedIn?

How to find your niche on LinkedIn
(If you’re a beginner, read this twice)


Here’s the truth:

You don’t “find” your niche. It finds you

And if you’re multi-faceted like me, the worst thing you can do at the beginning is force yourself into one box.

People will say you’re “all over the place.”

I call it collecting skills, perspective, and opportunities that eventually connect.

I’ve had multiple career transitions.

My longest streak? My current role as a GTM Engineer.

And even now, I’m exploring last week, I was learning how to build AI Agents.

Curiosity is my superpower.

It’s what helps me thrive in this field that evolves fast.

Everyone told me:

“Niching down is everything.”

If I listened, I would’ve never landed in GTM Engineering.

In 2022, I was building Zapier automations when it wasn’t mainstream.

It “didn’t make sense” then

But that obsession with efficiency is exactly what led me here.

And how I was able to learn Clay all on my own

Now automation isn’t optional.

It’s essential for every scalable company.

And I’ve landed in a skill faucet that has endless opportunities

That’s the point.

Yes, you can become a master of one thing.

But being curious, adaptable, and multi-dimensional?

That’s how you build a career that evolves with you.

So if you’re worried about niching down:

Don’t start with what you can do.

Start with what problem you want to solve,

And explore every possible way to solve it.

Your niche won’t come from choosing one interest.

It’ll come from following the ones that refuse to leave you alone.

How did you find your niche?

Last week, I automated campaign performance analysis. 
Here's how:

I used a Smartlead MCP through Claude.

Here's what happened:

✅ Fetched live data from Smartlead across all active campaigns
✅ Identified high-performing vs low-performing campaigns.
✅ Generated specific fixes for each campaign:
✅ Drafted optimization actions and queued them for review
✅ Created a summary report breaking down what's working, what's broken, and exactly what to fix next

All of this in under 3 minutes.

No manual CSV exports. 
No campaign analytics hopping. 
No guessing what's wrong.

Just: ask → analyze → act.

That’s what happens when your GTM stack doesn’t just talk to AI, it lets AI act.

If you do outbound, here’s what an MCP could do for you:

✅ Diagnose campaign issues
✅ Identify deliverability or domain problems
✅ Catch bad leads before they tank reputation
✅ Build + enrich prospect lists
✅ Automate campaign launches
✅ Run email account health checks
✅ Generate and test copy variants
✅ Summarize performance data and suggest actions
✅ Push updates directly to HubSpot, Notion, Slack, or wherever your team works
Stacking tools isn’t innovation.
✅ .... and more

Connecting them so they can act intelligently, that’s the future of GTM.

MCP isn’t another integration layer.

It’s the universal translator between AI and your GTM systems.

→ If you want to see how I set up the Smartlead MCP to analyse my campaigns, check here: https://lnkd.in/eSe9kzr6

If your AI assistant could act, what’s the first task you’d want it to handle for you?

(I’m collecting the most creative use cases 👇)

Modern Sales Tech Tools With An MCP Server

Cold email gets harder at the end of the year.
But last week, I generated 40 replies. Here's how:


If you’re doing cold email right now, you’re probably feeling the drop.

- Replies slow down.
- Teams are winding down for the holidays.
- And everyone assumes companies “aren’t open to new partnerships.”

So instead of focusing on sales triggers, shift to seasonal triggers.

This season has its own business cycle:

- Budgets reset.
- Teams plan.
- Systems get audited.
- Processes get rebuilt.
- Q1 pipelines get shaped.

And that creates opportunities most people ignore.

While everyone else is waiting for things to “pick back up,” or still using building campaigns based on "newly hired" triggers.

You can be focusing on campaigns that help companies during this period

For example:
→ Positioning your offer for Q1 planning
→ Making offers to help teams as they refresh their process
→ Guiding strategy shifts
→ Helping leaders prepare for new-year KPIs
→ Supporting companies during year-end cleanup

Seasonal triggers unlock leads when traditional triggers stop working.


What seasonal triggers are you exploring right now?

8 seasonal triggers you are ignoring

How I Actually Learned Clay in less than 2 months
(without any course)


I didn’t get good at Clay just because I’m technical.

I got good because I’m curious.

When I opened Clay for the first time, I was overwhelmed.

- Too many columns.
- Too many enrichments.
- Too many moving pieces that didn’t make sense yet.

It was like a glorified Excel (and I do not love Excel!)

But I was curious about so I dived into trying to figure it out

I learned by reverse-engineering other people’s builds.

Instead of trying to memorize or copy the table

I would ask, “What was this person thinking when they built this?”

And that one question always guided my learning process.

My process was simple:

1. Skim the entire table first.
Not to understand it, just to get a sense the structure, the flow, the purpose.

2. Then go column by column.
I’d open each piece, study what it does, map its dependencies, and understand how it feeds the next step.

3. Then rebuild the whole thing from scratch.
Sometimes using the same process
Other times, I try my own method

That’s what made Clay stop feeling “complicated.”
And made it less overwhelming.

Reverse-engineering didn’t just make me good at Clay,

It made me a better GTM engineer.

So if you’re learning Clay right now, don’t drown yourself in tutorials.

- Open a table.
- Take it apart.
- Learn what it does.

And if you want help?
Send me a screenshot of the table, and I’ll walk through it with you.


What is/was your Clay learning process

Let me tell you a mistake almost everyone makes in outbound
Including me (learnt this the hard way)


We obsess over the leads who book meetings…

And forget the ones who almost did.

The ones who:
– Opened every email
– Asked questions
– Requested more info
– Said, “try me again later”

Then life happened.

They got busy.

Or distracted.

Or timing wasn’t right.

And because most teams track everything manually…

Those leads fall through the cracks.

Not because they weren’t interested

But because there was no system to catch them.

And then the next time you need to generate leads,

You have to build the entire system all over

Or have to manually scroll through old conversations to find them

That’s not a strategy.

That’s a leak.

Modern outbound doesn’t rely on memory.

It relies on infrastructure that ensures:
→ Activity monitoring
→ CRM updates
→ Timed reminders
→ Automated re-engagement

This is the difference between missing potential deals

And consistently creating second chances in your pipeline.

That’s how you stop losing deals you should be winning.

I built a Clay template that automatically updates your CRM with the activity of interested leads, so you have full visibility into them and easily re-engage them if they fall through the cracks. 

Comment "RE-ENGAGE" if you want it (have to be connected)

What's your current process to re-engage leads old leads

"How do you write cold emails that actually work?"
Here’s my unfiltered answer, after getting 1 positive reply for every 162 emails 

(vs. the industry benchmark of 1 for 350).

Cold email isn’t about fancy templates.

It’s about precision.

The tighter your targeting, the easier it is to make your copy feel personal, without sounding robotic or fluffy.

These are the 20 rules I follow when writing cold emails that actually get replies 

1)  Keep your list tight. (The more ICP-focused, the better.)
2)  Segment properly; don’t mix contrasting industries just because you target the same persona.
3)  Use triggers to spot timing.
4)  Keep subject lines between 5-8 words max.
5)  Grab attention with your first line (reference the intent trigger that qualified them).
6)  Introduce the solution early.
7)  Keep it short: 3 short paragraphs, <110 words, and short sentences.
8)  Email flow →
 • Paragraph 1: intent + problem
 • Paragraph 2: your offer
 • Paragraph 3: social proof + CTA
9)  Be valuable.
10) Instead of “book a call,” suggest more value and ask, “Would you like to see how this could help?”
11) 2nd email (aka follow-up email) follows the same offer as email one, but introduces a new value and/or case study different from email 1
12) Use lots of white space.
13) Use as many simple words and clear phrases as possible.
14) Speak to their KPIs.
15) Never say “Just following up.”
16) Make it 99.9% about them.
17) Always test variations. (Learn faster, reply faster.)
18) Don’t test multiple verticals in one campaign.
19) Avoid spam words.
20) Send during the receiver’s work hours.


I live by these 20 rules. They’ve made a measurable difference in reply rates, meeting quality, and deal velocity.

Which one did I miss?

I just broke down exactly how to find the best-fit leads within your ICP 
(If you’re new to Clay or running outbound)


I hosted a free live session last week for beginners 

On how to segment and score leads in Clay,

So you can focus on the right people with the right message.

🎥 Watch the full recording here → https://lnkd.in/e97Z6dyJ

This is the same framework I use to build outbound systems that generate leads on autopilot.

And it’s beginner-friendly, no complex workflows, just Clay + a strategy.

If you’re new to GTM Engineering or outbound and tired of guessing who to contact (or what to say)…

This is for you.

Here’s what I covered inside:

→ How to identify your ICP and enrich your leads
→ How to score and segment contacts using Clay
→ How to personalize “generic” campaigns without intent signals
→ How to use tiers (T1, T2, T3) to prioritize outreach
→ How to do all of this using only the free version of Clay

I built everything live, step-by-step, including the formulas, prompts, and scoring logic.

Now it’s your turn to try it.

🎥 Watch the full session here → https://lnkd.in/e97Z6dyJ

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