117: Charles Feltman — A Simple Framework for Building (and Rebuilding) Trust Every Leader Needs

January 29, 2025 by Cal Walters in Intentional Living, Courageous Leadership, Leadership, Servant Leadership

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Cal and Charles Feltman delve into the intricate nature of trust, exploring its biological underpinnings and the personal experiences that shape our propensity to trust or distrust others. They discuss the importance of sincerity, reliability, competence, and care as key assessments of trustworthiness, and how leaders can foster a trusting environment by extending trust to their teams.

Charles Feltman has over 25 years of professional experience coaching, facilitating, consulting to, and training people who lead others. An overarching goal in all of his work is that his clients experience both success and wellbeing at work and in all areas of their lives. Prior to starting his coaching and consulting business he spent a decade in leadership roles in technology industry companies.

Charles is the author of The Thin Book® of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work, based on three decades of experience working with individuals and teams to build, maintain, and when necessary restore trust.

After completing his coach training in 2000 with Newfield Network, one of the premier coach training schools worldwide, Charles served as a mentor coach for Newfield’s programs. In this capacity he taught, mentored and coached others who were learning to become skilled coaches.

Charles holds a BA in psychology from U.C. Santa Cruz and a master's in organization development and communication from the University of Southern California. He has an International Coach Federation credential of Professional Certified Coach (PCC). He is certified in The Leadership Circle Profile, MBTI, DiSC Work of Leaders, and the Triscendance Trust Assessment for Leadership Teams. He is also a certified husband, father and grandfather.

The Thin Book of Trust, Third Edition: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work

By Feltman, Charles

If you’re interested in discovering your core values and becoming a more self-aware and emotionally intelligent leader, I’ve built the perfect course to help you get there. Check out my Discover Your Core Values Mini Course, where I coach you through 3 exercises of guided reflection and help you uncover your core values in a way that you can apply them right away.

104: Dr. Amy Edmondson — The Science of Failing Well

February 22, 2024 by Cal Walters in Leadership, Courageous Leadership, Intentional Living

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We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.

After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure—basic, complex, and intelligent—Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. She illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. This is the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.

With vivid, real-life stories from business, pop culture, history, and more, Edmondson gives us specifically tailored practices, skills, and mindsets to help us replace shame and blame with curiosity, vulnerability, and personal growth. You’ll never look at failure the same way again.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson’s Ted Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Fearless Organization, and Teaming.

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

By Edmondson, Amy C.

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

By Edmondson, Amy C.

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88: Gino Wickman — How to Find Out if You’re an Entrepreneur, Create a Personal Vision, and Get Over Rejection

May 12, 2022 by Cal Walters in Courageous Leadership, Leadership, Intentional Living

I'm really excited to have Gino Wickman on the show today!

An entrepreneur since the age of 21, Gino has had an obsession for learning what makes businesses and entrepreneurs thrive.

At 25 he took over the family business, which was deeply in debt and in need of help. After turning the company around and running it for seven years, he and his partners successfully sold the company.

Gino then set out to help entrepreneurs and leaders get what they want from their businesses. Based on his years of real-world experience, he created the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a practical method for helping companies achieve greatness. He has personally delivered more than 1,900 full-day sessions for more than 135 companies, helping them implement EOS. He is also the author of the award-winning, best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, which has sold over 1 million copies, as well as five other books in the Traction Library that have sold almost 2 million copies. Gino is the founder of EOS Worldwide, an organization that helps tens of thousands of businesses implement EOS with the aid of an international team of over 450 professional and certified EOS Implementers and online support. There are over 130,000 companies using the EOS tools worldwide.

Gino is now devoting time and energy toward helping entrepreneurs-in-the-making get a huge jump-start on taking their entrepreneurial leap, which is why he created Entrepreneurial Leap. The mission of Entrepreneurial Leap is to find all of the entrepreneurs-in-the-making, at any age, wherever they are—to help them realize their purpose and live the life they were born to live.

Entrepreneurial Leap: Do You Have What it Takes to Become an Entrepreneur?

By Wickman, Gino

Entrepreneurial Leap: Do You Have What It Takes to Become an Entrepreneur? is available for purchase through all major retailers.

Visit e-leap.com to Take the Free Entrepreneur-in-the-Making Assessment

Subscribe to the Entrepreneurial Leap YouTube Channel

Other items discussed during the interview:

10 Lessons Gino Learned from His Dad

10 Disciplines to Maximize Your Energy

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87: Whitney Johnson — The Benefits of Disrupting Yourself and Smart Growth

April 30, 2022 by Cal Walters in Intentional Living, Leadership

I want to publicly thank Ryan Gottfredson, a previous guest on this show, for introducing me to Whitney Johnson. I really think you will enjoy this interview. If you’re someone who feels a bit stagnant or like you’re coasting in this season of life, this conversation may inspire you to deliberately grow and find greater fulfillment.

Whitney Johnson is CEO of the tech-enabled talent development company Disruption Advisors, an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private company in America (2020). One of the top ten business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50, Whitney is an expert at smart growth leadership. Whitney has worked at FORTUNE 100 companies, and as an award-winning equity analyst on Wall Street. She co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s late Clayton Christensen. She has coached alongside the renowned Marshall Goldsmith, selected by Goldsmith in 2017 as a Top 15 Coach out of a pool of more than 17,000 candidates. Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach.

An award-winning author, Johnson teaches the S Curve of Learning to managers and companies as both a keynote speaker and a frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School’s Corporate Learning. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice (2020) with 1.8 million followers. Her course Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times.

An innovation and disruption theorist, Whitney is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. Author of the bestselling Build an A Team (a Financial Times Book of the Month), Disrupt Yourself (fittingly described by Publisher’s Weekly as “Savvy . . . often counterintuitive . . . superb”), and Smart Growth. She hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast with guests including Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Susan Cain, and General Stanley McChrystal.

Whitney was co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen. Her role included fund formation, strategy, and capital raising. They invested and led the $8 million seed round for South Korea’s Coupang ecommerce platform, currently valued at $50 billion.

Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve

By Whitney Johnson

Disrupt Yourself, With a New Introduction: Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve

By Johnson, Whitney

Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

By Johnson, Whitney

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#73: Taylor Justice — On Building and Scaling a High Impact Business

September 27, 2021 by Cal Walters in Intentional Living, Leadership

This episode is brought to you by HigherEchelon, Inc. HigherEchelon is a leadership development & organizational performance consulting firm providing human capital and technology services to optimize performance. HigherEchelon can help prepare your organization to meet the rapidly changing, complex and often ambiguous requirements of today’s world by developing Resilient and Adaptive leaders, modernizing and enhancing processes, and implementing transformational technology solutions. Visit HigherEchelon.com to connect with the amazing team at Higher Echelon and learn more about how they can help you and your team. Check out this great interview of HigherEchelon’s President, Dr. Joe Ross, on the Beyond the Uniform podcast.

Taylor Justice is the Co-Founder and President of Unite Us, Unite Us standardizes how health and social care providers communicate and track outcomes together. They align all stakeholders from healthcare, government, and the community around a shared goal to improve health. Their proven infrastructure provides both a person-centered care coordination platform and a hands-on community engagement process; they work hand-in-hand with communities to ensure services are seamlessly delivered to the people who need them most. In March 2021, Unite Us raised its largest funding to date, a $150 million Series C round, to value the technology company at more than $1.6 billion.

Taylor began his entrepreneurial journey shortly after he left the military in 2007. He is often evangelizing the need for collaboration technology within most industries. Taylor holds academic allegiance to West Point and Columbia (MBA). He enjoys the company of innovative thinkers and witty minds, has an abnormal obsession with documentaries, and loves reading the histories of successful leaders. Taylor lives in New York City with his wife Meghan.

On this episode, we cover a lot of ground, including:

How he decided to start United Us
The importance of finding the right personality in a Co-Founder
What makes a successful entrepreneur
How entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of time and work it takes to build a successful business
How to find the right team members
The top principles of Unite Us and how they use these principles for hiring
Some of the biggest mistakes he has made in his entrepreneurial journey
How he has been able to raise money for Unite Us (including the early days)
What Unite Us is doing to standardizes how health and social care providers communicate
The keys to a successful investor pitch

Join us for our first LIVE event on Tuesday, September 28 at 7:30 pm ET with Major General (Ret.) Dana Pittard.