Explore every episode of the podcast The Kestryl Edge

Kathi Dalguntas spent a year as a fractional chief of staff, got offered too little for work nobody could measure, and quit in a way that was not at all planned. Now she runs Not Rising, a decentralized journalism magazine built to avoid the single biggest trap in media: capture.

We go deep on the negative space of leadership, the work that keeps an organization alive without ever showing up as a line item. She explains why companies become living systems, not org charts, and why the C-suite's biggest job is getting over itself. Along the way: the principal who warned her parents journalism was dangerous, her Walter Mitty moment, the case for role modeling your own mistakes, and exactly where to find a Garrett.

You can find Kathi on Substack as Chief Absurdist Officer, and the magazine at Not Rising.

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Jennifer Houle Crosswinds Interview

Jen's Substack Uncompliant

Read and listen to more at www.dankorus.com

Most emotional intelligence training hands out a framework and calls it done.

Jennifer Houle, HR leader and Substack writer, argues the opposite: there's no script, no personality quiz, no four-box model that works until you actually know who's in front of you.

In this episode, Dan Korus and Jennifer dig into what real emotional intelligence looks like inside a company: how middle managers get systemically set up to fail, why terminations need aftercare the same way any hard conversation does, and why the DISC/Enneagram-style personality frameworks so many workplaces lean on often do more harm than good. Jennifer draws on her path from Wendy's at 14, to running her own yoga studio, to two decades in HR, to make the case that leadership effectiveness isn't a template you apply, it's a practice of paying attention.

Along the way: imposter syndrome and whether leaders actually want to know if people like them, the cult-like patterns inside toxic startups, how to give feedback without hollowing it out into nothing, and why "just be data-driven" doesn't fix a broken culture.

If you lead people, manage people, or fire people for a living, this one's for you.

#EmotionalIntelligence #EQ #Leadership #HR #WorkplaceCulture #MiddleManagement #ImposterSyndrome #LeadershipDevelopment #PeopleManagement #HRLeadership #AuthenticLeadership #LeadershipPodcast #KestrylSessions #EmployeeExperience #ToxicWorkplace

References and resources available upon request :)

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Masks at work and the Case for CPOs in the Corner Office (with Mark Putrus)

Mark Putrus has spent his career moving through the full HR arc, from pharma sales rep to sales trainer to Chief People Officer, and he's not shy about calling out what he calls "1980s HR" along the way. In this conversation, Mark opens up about something rarely discussed on leadership podcasts: the exhausting work of wearing a mask at work, drawn from his own experience navigating the workplace as part of the LGBTQ+ community and as one half of a two-dad family. From there, the conversation moves into what it actually takes to build a workplace where people can show up without armor.

We also dig into why HR should be treated like any other revenue-driving function instead of a cost center, Mark's build-buy-borrow framework for talent strategy, his case for why Chief People Officers are increasingly strong candidates for the CEO seat, and his sharp, contrarian take on the "AI is going to collapse the workforce" narrative dominating headlines right now. Mark closes with his philosophy on leading with clarity, the platinum rule versus the golden rule, and concrete advice for new hires, middle managers, and the C-suite alike.

In this episode:

• What it costs to wear a mask at work, and how to build a workplace that needs less of it
• Why HR should be run like marketing or sales, not treated as a cost center
• Build, buy, or borrow: a practical framework for closing talent gaps
• The case for Chief People Officers as future CEOs
• Why Mark is skeptical of "doom and gloom" predictions about AI and the workforce
• Leading with clarity, and why uncertainty is one of the worst ways to run a team
• Advice for first-day employees, middle managers, and senior executives

Connect with Mark: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markputrus/ Substack (The Unspoken): https://substack.com/@markputrus

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Matt Heyn spent over two decades as a hospital chaplain and in ministry before he ever touched a marketing campaign. On this episode of Kestryl Sessions, he explains why the two jobs are more alike than anyone expects.

Host Dan Korus talks with Matt Heyn (Strategy Signal, VyB Marketing) about what a century of chaplaincy training can teach leaders and marketers about emotional intelligence. Matt breaks down the "verbatim," a clinical pastoral education tool chaplains use to reflect on high-stakes conversations, and the layered model of presence (geographical, psychological, affective) that separates leaders people follow from leaders people merely obey. The conversation covers the real difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion in a management context, why "living human documents" is a better mental model for reading people than trying to extract information from them, and concrete advice for building trust in a new role, team, or leadership seat.

In this episode:

• What a hospital chaplaincy verbatim is and how to run one on yourself
• The three (or five) layers of presence, and why most leadership advice only covers the first one
• Sympathy vs. empathy vs. compassion: picking the right tool for the moment
• Why the jump from individual contributor to manager is a relational shift, not a skills shift
• Practical advice for people starting, mid-career, and at the top of their leadership path

Find Matt Heyn on Substack at Strategy Signal.

Lead with the best at www.kestryledge.com.

Tanu Tiwari: Why Your Team's Disengagement Is a Leadership Design Problem

Global employee engagement just hit its lowest point since 2020, the first two consecutive years of decline ever recorded. Manager engagement collapsed from 31% to 22% since 2022. Ten trillion dollars in lost productivity. No region on earth saw an increase.

Tanu Tiwari spent 18 years inside global tech and Fortune 500 companies in marketing, data analytics, and leadership. She's now an ICF certified leadership coach, founder of The Conscious Leader Company, and author of the forthcoming book Disengaged: Turning Passive Teams into Proactive Microcultures.

In this conversation, Tanu breaks down:

• Why every leader is building a "microculture" whether they realize it or not, and the nine conditions in her PROACTIVE framework that determine whether it's healthy
• The difference between a "shit umbrella" leader and a "shit funnel" leader, with real examples of what each looks like in a Tuesday afternoon meeting
• Why she thinks most "AI layoffs" are companies using AI as cover for business models that were already failing
• The three things people need from a leader to stay engaged: to feel seen, significant, and safe
• Her own story of working through labor and flying to a trade show five months postpartum, and what it taught her about identity and burnout

Tanu also built a free AI tool that scores your team's culture stack against her nine conditions.

Connect with Tanu:
Substack, Invisible Lessons: https://invisiblelessons.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bytanutiwari/
Instagram/TikTok: @theconsciousleaderco
Website: theconsciousleaderco.com

Referenced in this episode: Simon Sinek's conversation with Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, on A Bit of Optimism — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6766oydXpw

Rich Reynolds is a licensed marriage and family therapist turned leadership coach, and he opens with a claim that reframes the whole episode: the reason a leader struggles in a boardroom is the same reason a husband struggles in a marriage or an addict struggles to quit. Same emotional wiring, different room.

We get into his "stage one, stage two" model of development (the adaptive strategies that get you through childhood eventually become the ceiling on your leadership), what real versus performative empathy actually feels like in the body, and why most boundary-setting advice fails because it's all script and no nervous system.

Then I bring him a live case: less than 24 hours after teaching a workshop module on performative empathy, my own 360 review came back with a comment saying I do exactly that. Rich coaches me through it in real time, including a moment where I get visibly heated talking about a peer manager who lied to my face. We use it to walk through what healthy anger actually looks like at work, as opposed to the two failure modes most of us default to: blowing up or going silent.

Also covered: managing up, advice for first-day employees vs. middle managers vs. C-suite, and why Kaladin from The Stormlight Archive is a near-perfect case study in leadership burnout.

Find Rich at his newsletter, The Self Reflective Leader, on Substack.

Ashley Gibson spent over a decade running marketing for touring Broadway shows (Hamilton included, back before anyone knew what they had) while quietly burning out the whole time. Then she went back to school, became a trauma therapist, and realized she was diagnosing the exact same thing in her clients that she'd already lived through at the VP level. Now she's building a framework for treating burnout as a relational systems problem instead of a personal one.

We get into a lot: co-regulation and why your nervous system reads a room before your brain catches up, why "authenticity" has become a hall pass for people to just be assholes at work, what a 94-year-old existential psychiatrist has to do with leadership training, and where AI is actually useful for pattern recognition versus where it just feeds the loop you're already stuck in.

Also covered: why you should skip every meeting without an agenda, what to actually do on your first day at a new job, and the time a bathroom flooded directly onto Ashley's desk mid-career. It's a real story. It comes up.

Find Ashley's free Intent-Impact Diagnostic and her upcoming white paper at meaninginpractice.com, and follow her on Substack.

https://ashleycgibson.substack.com/

#Burnout #EmotionalIntelligence #Leadership #WorkplaceCulture #MentalHealthAtWork #EQ #TraumaInformed #OrganizationalPsychology #LeadershipDevelopment #Coregulation

Annabelle's Substack - https://annabellebotea.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

She was advising Parliament and working UN global health policy. Then burnout made her stop and rebuild from scratch.

Annabelle Botea studied political science and law at Sciences Po, advised in the Romanian Parliament, and worked global health policy for an NGO at the UN level. On paper, it looked perfect. Underneath it, she was running on four coffees a day and popping medicine like candy just to keep going. Then burnout forced the stop she couldn’t give herself.

In this conversation, Dan and Annabelle get into:

• The exact moment burnout stopped being abstract and became physical
• Why she treats intuition and emotional intelligence as a competitive advantage, not a soft skill
• “Brenda”: the name she gave her inner critic, and how she sends her for a walk
• Why she doesn’t allow “party poopers” in her Substack comments, and the boundary behind that rule
• Building Pitaya and rejecting the “10k a month in three months” myth of online business
• What she wants to give future employees that she never had: emotional safety

Annabelle now writes Outside the System on Substack and is building Pitaya, helping first-time founders simplify selling digital products and services online.

Outside the System - https://annabellebotea.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

If you’ve ever mistaken burnout for a personality trait, this one’s for you.

Is AI actually intelligent, or just a very good mirror of us?

Jennifer Hong, fractional CMO and writer behind the Substack Natural Intelligence, joins Dan Korus for a conversation that moves fast: why image generators keep failing to render real human faces (she calls it "the centroid problem"), why she switched from OpenAI to Anthropic and compares the two to Tesla and Volvo, and why she picked a public fight with Substack's leadership over its handling of death threats and deepfakes on the platform.

They also get into:

• Why "AI fluent" describes less than 1% of users, and what that number actually means
• The 95/10 to 15 self-awareness gap and what it means for leaders specifically
• The difference between a jerk and an asshole at work, and why only one is a dealbreaker
• How two life crises rebuilt Jennifer's relationship with control, trust, and delegation
• Why personal branding is a prenup you're already signing whether you write it down or not
• The plan to buy back Letterboxd for its community instead of selling to private equity

A conversation about self-awareness, trust, and what's left for humans once machines get good at mimicking the average.

Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:38 Does "intelligence is no longer ours alone" still hold a year later
2:53 If not intelligence, what would you call it: the "centroid" problem
9:47 Why she switched from OpenAI to Anthropic: Tesla vs. Volvo
13:57 Growing up in Los Altos, getting kicked out of Berkeley
20:37 The rules she breaks: buying back Letterboxd from private equity
25:12 Substack's Nazi problem, the open letter, and getting threatened for it
29:38 "Low-key Buddhism" and letting go of control
35:05 Trust and delegation as a leader
36:09 The health crisis that became her line of demarcation
48:31 Personal branding is a prenup you're already signing
58:12 The 95/10-15 self-awareness gap and EQ diagnostics
1:03:39 Lightning round: good leadership, first-day advice, advice for execs
1:15:09 Where to find Jennifer Hong

Follow Jennifer Hong
Substack (Natural Intelligence): https://hongjennifer.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-hong-100/

More from Kestryl Edge
Website: www.kestryledge.com
The Updraft (Substack): https://dankorus.substack.com/

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Hashtags
#EmotionalIntelligence #Leadership #ArtificialIntelligence #SelfAwareness #Substack #PsychologicalSafety #PersonalBranding #AIEthics #Podcast #KestrylEdge

Andrew's Book - https://www.amazon.com/dp/191930942X?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Andrew's Website - https://awallbridge.com/

Andrew's Courses - https://maven.com/leader-s-labyrinth/the-labyrinth-experience

On LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wallbridge-64b94/

On Substack - https://substack.com/@andrewwallbridge?utm_source=global-search

What separates a good manager from a truly felt leader? In this episode of the Kestryl Edge Podcast, Dan Korus sits down with Andrew Walbridge — leadership consultant, executive coach, and author of Leader's Labyrinth — for a candid conversation spanning 32 years in leadership development, from running a UK pub and leading cultural change at Warner Bros. to becoming a globally recognized voice on emotional intelligence and self-awareness at work.

Andrew shares the story of his mentor Terry Pierce (author of Leading Out Loud), the toxic leadership culture that taught him what not to do, and why he calls himself "the world's worst manager but a pretty good leader."

Together, Dan and Andrew unpack the real difference between management and leadership, why the goal of great leadership is to make yourself unnecessary, how to build psychological safety and trust on a team, and why "finding your voice" is one of the hardest — and most important — shifts a leader can make.

Topics covered: leadership vs. management, emotional intelligence (EQ), self-awareness, servant leadership, building high-trust teams, coaching through questions instead of answers, cultural change management, and the mentorship that shaped a career.

Whether you're a first-time manager or a seasoned executive, this episode offers practical, story-driven wisdom on leading people, not just managing tasks.

Learn more about Andrew Walbridge's books, Leader's Labyrinth and The Anatomy of Felt Leadership, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Subscribe to the Kestryl Edge Podcast for more conversations on emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and human-centered leadership.

Guest - Giulia Scalaberni - https://www.linkedin.com/in/giulia-scalaberni-665175124/

Her Substack - https://giuliascalaberni.substack.com/

Humanship: Leading Across Cultures with Giulia Scalaberni

Giulia Scalaberni started as a coder and became the product manager and team leader of the software she used to build. Today she leads a team of nearly 20 people across Europe and India, building medtech software that puts tools in doctors' hands. She landed in leadership the way most technical people do, with no path and no toolkit, and she learned the rest by watching.

In this episode she breaks down "humanship," her term for the mix of leadership and humanity. It rejects the idea that empathy and high standards cancel each other out. She explains why trust with Eastern-country teammates is built on relationships before tasks, how she used Erin Meyer's Culture Map to fix a team that went silent after every meeting, and why she runs a monthly "fun time" ritual that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with output.

We also get into giving yourself time before you react, treating failure as an enabler instead of a verdict, and finding your Ikigai without forcing your whole life through a diagram. She closes with first-day, mid-career, and senior-leader advice, including the line that culture starts in the basement.

#Leadership #EmotionalIntelligence #Humanship #RemoteLeadership #TeamManagement #CrossCulturalLeadership #WorkplaceCulture #PeopleFirst #TechLeadership #Empathy #PsychologicalSafety #Ikigai #FutureOfWork #LeadershipDevelopment

Brandi Substack --> https://substack.com/@employeeexperienceedit

Brandi Copeland calls herself an accidental HR professional. She built her career end to end at Disney and NBCUniversal before founding The Employee Experience Edit, and she's spent the last decade proving that employee experience isn't the welcome gift or the splashy onboarding event. It's whether someone knows who to ask when they're stuck.

In this episode we get into:

• Why direct report loads are up roughly 50% over the last decade while L&D investment keeps shrinking
• Disney's four-part framework (safety, efficiency, courtesy, show) and what it teaches about prioritizing fundamentals over flash
• The four generations now sharing the workforce, why "generation" is about formative experience and not age, and why Gen Z might be the mouthpiece for everything millennials never felt safe saying out loud
• A simple language fix for feedback conversations: replace "I feel like" with "I observed," and watch what opens up
• Why engagement surveys often ask leading questions, and what to do instead
• Career advice for three different career stages: day one, the messy middle, and the C-suite

Brandi's read on where this is heading: companies that keep treating talking to their people as expensive or optional are going to lose. The ones that figure out empathy is free are going to win.

Claire LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-walsh-msc-680591121/

Being a workplace chameleon isn't fake — it's one of the clearest signs of high emotional intelligence.

HR tech leader Claire joins Dan Korus to unpack what actually separates people with real EQ from everyone else: not "reading the room," but knowing yourself well enough to change how you show up without losing who you are. Claire's spent five years across recruiting, employee relations, and onboarding before landing in HR automation — and she brings the rare perspective of someone who's automated the busywork and still had to sit across the table from burned-out teams.

In this episode:

• Why adapting your communication style for sales vs. engineering isn't disingenuous — "it's still you, just a chameleon"
• The real definition of burnout: not caring too much, but losing control over your ability to recover
• Claire's framework for finding your "So What" — the personal philosophy that turns a job into meaningful work
• Why AI is raising the bar for mediocre output instead of replacing human judgment
• Career advice for first-day hires, messy-middle managers, and CEOs at 10,000 feet: "the folks closest to the issue have the best potential solutions"

If you've ever been told you're "too intense," or wondered whether adapting to different people makes you a fraud, this one's for you.

#EmotionalIntelligence #HRTech #Leadership #Burnout #WorkplaceCulture #FutureOfWork #PeopleFirst #CareerAdvice #SelfAwareness #AIatWork #KestrylEdge #HRLeadership #WorkplaceWellbeing

HR tech leader Claire Walsh joins Dan to talk emotional intelligence, the line between authenticity and adaptability, and why AI is raising the bar on what counts as good work. Plus: practical career advice for every stage, from first-day hires to CEOs.

Learn more about Kestryl Edge: kestryledge.com