This week, the Leading With Respect podcast turns one year old — Episode 52. I've got separate posts running on that milestone, so I'll keep this part short: thank you dear guests for your wisdom and heart, on this critical topic. I want to lead with the actual argument of this week's episode, because it's worth stating plainly before I get into the story.

My guest, Adam Nemer, was a CFO and operations executive at Kaiser Permanente, and is now the author of the new book Simple Mental Health. His core claim, backed by two decades sitting on the finance side of a 200,000-person organization, is this: Listening is the highest-leverage, lowest-cost leadership skill in your business, and almost nobody is managing it as a metric.

That's not a soft observation. That's a gap in your operating model.

Read the article on LinkedIn.

Respect Shows Up Differently by Culture

Michelle Zou, PCC, MBA, PhD Candidate in Happiness Studies on happiness research, cross-cultural blind spots, and why what feels respectful to you may feel like the opposite to someone else.

We tend to think of respect as something we either have or don't. A character trait. A cultural value. Something leadership declares and HR measures once a year in an engagement survey.

Michelle Zhou — executive coach, wellbeing researcher, and PhD candidate in happiness studies — sees it differently. To her, respect is a lived experience, and my hand goes up big time to that!

The gap between what a leader intends and the impact on employees is where most organizations are quietly losing people. This ties to low engagement scores.

This week's conversation on Leading With Respect is one worth sitting with slowly.

Read the article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/respect-shows-up-differently-culture-bobby-bakshi-bfb7c

Treating people as objects creates the absence of respect.

Phillip Cave on pattern recognition, personal responsibility, and why honoring someone is a verb — not a value on a wall.

Most leaders I talk to genuinely believe they respect their people. They also have teams where trust is low, feedback is guarded, and conflict gets buried. So what's the gap?

This week on Leading With Respect, I sat down with Phillip Cave, a former software engineer and principal program manager who backed into the people side of business and never left.

Consider his wisdom and share it with your people, your network.n, personal responsibility, and why honoring someone is a verb — not a value on a wall.