Episodes

What happens when the qualities that helped make you successful begin working against you as a leader? Sébastien Page has spent more than 25 years in investment management and serves as Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. But his growing interest in leadership took him beyond finance and into psychology, where he spent years exploring research from sports, positive, and performance psychology. That journey became the foundation for his book, The Psychology of Leadership: Timeless Principl...

What if one of the most overlooked influences on how people think, perform, and connect is the environment around them? In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli welcomes back Leidy Klotz, professor at the University of Virginia and author of In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive. Building on their earlier conversation about his acclaimed book Subtract, Klotz explores a different but related question: not simply how we shape the world aro...

Senior executives can spend years thinking rigorously about strategy, talent, capital allocation, and organizational performance while giving surprisingly little strategic thought to their own careers. That gap sits at the center of this Partnering Leadership conversation with Kelly O. Kay, Managing Partner of the Global Software Practice at Heidrick & Struggles and co-author, with Jeffrey Sanders, of Show Up to Win: How to Land the Leadership Role You Want. Drawing on decades of executive searc...

AI is rapidly improving what people can produce. But is it also weakening the capabilities that make people valuable in the first place? In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Eric So, Stanford-trained behavioral researcher, longtime MIT professor, and author of The Collision: What AI Does to Us. Eric explores a question that sits underneath much of today’s excitement about artificial intelligence: not simply what AI can do for us, but what sustained reliance on AI...

What separates leadership as an idea from leading as a daily practice? For Dr. Thom Mayer, the distinction matters. Leadership can become a collection of concepts, titles, and aspirations. Leading is what people actually do, especially when circumstances are uncertain, the stakes are high, and there is no playbook to follow. Dr. Mayer has spent much of his career in precisely those environments. He served as the command physician at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and is the longtime Medica...

When AI can generate plausible ideas and polished content in seconds, producing more of it is not a competitive advantage. For CEOs and senior executives, the more consequential question is whether they have an idea worth advancing, an audience for whom it genuinely matters, and the credibility to influence how others think and act. In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Bill Sherman, a leading authority on thought leadership and coauthor of The Thought Leadership ...

Most leaders understand that strategy requires choices. Fewer are prepared for what follows: disappointing people, committing resources under uncertainty, and accepting responsibility when the consequences are significant. Those pressures are not unique to the battlefield. They show up whenever CEOs and senior executives must choose a direction while facing incomplete information, competing stakeholders, and no risk-free option. In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks wi...

What happens to the way we design organizations when intelligence is no longer scarce? That is the provocative question at the heart of this conversation with Brian Solis and Dave Wright, co-authors of Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Business Into AI-Forward Companies. Drawing on decades of experience at the intersection of technology, strategy, innovation, and enterprise transformation, Brian and Dave challenge executives to think beyond AI adoption and productivity gains towa...

As uncertainty rises, people often look to leaders for greater certainty. Yet the more complex the environment becomes, the less credible it is for any one person to claim they have the answers. The leadership challenge is no longer simply making better decisions. It is creating the conditions for better questions, broader participation, and stronger collective judgment. In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Larry Robertson, leadership advisor, Fulbright Scholar, ...

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with John Kotter, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, co-founder of a management consulting firm Kotter International and a pioneer in organizational change. John Kotter is the author of 22 books on change, including his most recent book, Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile times. John Kotter talks about the struggles leaders and teams face when it comes to change and how to...

AI adoption is often treated as a technology challenge: choose the right tools, train people to use them, and drive implementation. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky argues that this framing misses the harder problem. Unlike previous technology shifts, AI can trigger fear about job security, challenge professional identity, and create social stigma around how work gets done. For organizations trying to move from experimentation to meaningful business impact, understanding those human dynamics may matter as muc...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Welcome to the Summer Leadership Reset on Partnering Leadership. We have more access to ideas than ever before. More books. More podcasts. More articles. More insights. The challenge isn’t finding more information. It’s spending enough time with the ideas that can change how we think, decide, and lead. I have seen this in my own life. The books and conversations that have influenced me most aren’t the ones I rushed through and moved on from. They are the ones I returned to, wrestled with, and...

Many organizations have an AI strategy. Far fewer have built the organizational foundations needed for AI to create lasting business value. Generative AI has made it easier than ever to experiment with AI. Yet many leaders are discovering that deploying AI tools and creating meaningful business value are two very different things. In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Fern Halper, internationally recognized AI and data strategist, founder of the AI Foundations Gr...

Why do so many teams work harder than ever but still struggle to make meaningful progress? In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with organizational psychologist and bestselling author Liane Davey, author of Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work, about why leaders need to rethink how they approach priorities, productivity, and performance. Liane explains why the biggest challenge facing many organizations is not simply the amount of work...

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Gustavo Razzetti, workplace culture strategist, founder of Fearless Culture, and author of Forward Talk: The Bold New Method for Getting Teams Unstuck. Gustavo shares why many leadership teams struggle not because they lack talent or commitment, but because they accumulate “conversational debt,” the cost of the conversations they avoid. Gustavo explains why silence in organizations doesn’t always mean agreement. While leaders ...

What does it take to see opportunity where everyone else sees a commodity? In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Monica Nassif, founder of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day and author of I Bottled My Mother: Grit, Grime, and Growing a Business, The Mrs. Meyer’s Story, about building a category-defining brand by challenging the assumptions everyone else accepted. Monica shares the leadership lessons behind transforming household cleaning from a purely functional category into...