Lead From the Heart

Most leaders say they want a high-performing team. Far know how to build one. Ron Friedman, author of Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, joins us to explain what separates the two, and why the answer has less to do with talent than with the conditions people work in.

Friedman opens his book with a question: Why do so many leaders ignore what research tells us about how people do their best work? His own research on superteams points to a truly profound conclusion. The teams that perform at the highest level are also the ones where people have very high well-being.

In our conversation, we look at how superteams collaborate, and why the best of them guard individual focus as carefully as they build connection. We take on meetings, which a recent MIT study found get in the way of important work for 70% of employees and strike 92% as unproductive. Friedman explains what superteam leaders do differently. We also discuss how a leader’s own habits after hours shape the people who work for them.

Then there’s time. Harvard Business School psychologist Ashley Whillans has shown that feeling we have enough time shapes nearly every part of our lives. In a workplace that expects people to be always on, that may be one of the most overlooked drivers of both well-being and performance.

Along the way, Friedman makes the case for having chili cook-offs, talent shows, and paper airplane competitions, the kind of activities some leaders dismiss as a distraction from real work. He also describes who belongs on a superteam, and the culture of generosity, trust, and psychological safety that lets people compete and succeed together without rivalry.

Taken together, this conversation is a powerful confirmation of why leaders and companies must make employee well-being a key performance indicator. If organizations want high-performing teams, this is the way to get there. Whether you lead five people or five thousand, you will come away with research-backed ideas you can put to use right away.

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As leaders, we often believe our greatest limitations come from a gap in our skills, knowledge or experience. Pam Manfredo Curtis argues that something we may never have considered likely has even greater influence than any of these.

In her work as an executive coach and author of The Origin of a Leader: Transforming Family Patterns Into Leadership Power, she holds that roughly 80 percent of how we act, think and present ourselves in the world was shaped in our childhood – by our parents, siblings, people closest to us, and the significant events we experienced. The point is most of us carry those influences into our work without knowing it – and without ever having reflected on whether the beliefs, behavior and strategies we cultivated during our childhood continue to serve us well today.

Coincidentally, these ideas are the foundation for “Know Thyself” and “Know Thy Values,” the first two chapters of Mark’s book, The Power of Employee Well-Being. When leaders actively explore all of the influences that shaped them and come to deeply understand how their values and behaviors were formed, they gain the freedom to act in ways they intentionally choose instead of in ways they were influenced to act long ago.

In this conversation, Pam explains what it means to dive into a leader’s backstory and how to identify the “supporting cast” of childhood figures who may still be driving management decisions and interpersonal habits today.

She describes three kinds of upbringing she sees in her clients (they grew up in homes of stability, complexity and/or trauma) and what happens to a team’s psychological safety and well-being when someone unknowingly leads from the emotional age of an unresolved trauma. We also discuss why “inner child” work became a mocked pop-psychology meme, and how she reaches skeptical executives who instinctively resist it.

The conversation goes back to the beginning: what convinced Pam, both personally and professionally, that childhood shapes leadership so profoundly that she built a career and a book around it. It moves through real examples of the behaviors she’s seen show up in the executives she’s coached — patterns that trace directly back to how they were raised — and what it actually takes to notice and change them. The lens turns inward on both sides of the mic, with real pieces of upbringing on the table, not just theory.

This is really a deep-dive into self-work that is at the core of becoming a self-aware and highly effective leader, and intentionally gets into the practical questions that matter most: how long does this kind of self-examination realistically take, what percentage of leaders have actually done it, and what happens to the people around a leader — their teams, their families — when they finally do. It doesn’t shy away from the harder edges either, including what this work looks like for someone whose childhood was genuinely painful, and whether it’s something you can do alone or whether it requires another person to see what you can’t see in yourself.

It’s a powerful conversation in support of your own self-exploration.

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For decades, companies have searched for CEOs capable of transforming organizations through their vision, confidence, and force of will. But what if we’ve been looking for the wrong kind of leader?

Constantine Alexandrakis is the CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates and the author of The Catalyst CEO. Throughout his career, he has worked closely with many of the world’s largest organizations, giving him a front-row seat to how CEOs are selected, how executive teams function, and why some organizations successfully transform while others struggle.

In this conversation, we explore why the era of the “hero CEO” may be coming to an end and what leaders at every level can learn from organizations that create shared ownership, encourage healthy debate, and value the contributions of people throughout the organization.

Drawing on research with more than 1,000 senior leaders around the world, Alexandrakis argues that lasting transformation doesn’t happen because one exceptional leader has all the answers. It happens when leaders create an environment where people at every level contribute their ideas, challenge assumptions, and share responsibility for success.

Our conversation also examines some of today’s biggest leadership challenges: creating cultures where employees genuinely feel safe speaking up, building executive teams capable of leading transformation, ensuring organizational values become lived behaviors rather than words on a wall, and listening to employees in ways that lead to meaningful action.

One of the most compelling themes to emerge from our discussion is that organizational transformation is, at its core, a human endeavor. Strategy matters, but strategy succeeds only when leaders earn trust, create shared purpose, and empower people throughout the organization to contribute. When leaders value every voice, encourage constructive disagreement, and build environments where people feel heard and respected, organizations become more resilient, more innovative, and better places to work.

While The Catalyst CEO is written for CEOs, the lessons extend far beyond the executive suite. Every leader has the opportunity to become a catalyst by creating the conditions for others to succeed. If you’re interested in building healthier cultures, improving employee well-being, and leading teams that are better equipped to navigate change, this conversation offers practical insights into why the future of leadership depends less on having all the answers and more on helping others discover theirs.

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Paula Goldman has been thinking about the role AI should play in our workplaces long before the current boom. As Salesforce’s first Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, she has spent years helping one of the world’s largest technology companies determine how powerful technologies can be developed and deployed in ways that earn trust and serve people.

Her work has included building ethical frameworks, establishing safeguards, engaging employees and stakeholders, and helping make ethical decision-making part of how technology gets built—not something added after the fact. Goldman argues that ethics is not a checklist; it is a mindset and a culture in which people throughout an organization take responsibility for the consequences of what they create.

Now, as AI moves rapidly toward autonomous agents capable of taking action, Goldman is focused on a bigger question: How do we make AI work for people rather than simply make people work differently for AI?

Her new book, Manage the Machine: How to Harness Human-AI Collaboration at Work, explores that question. Rather than viewing the future as a contest between humans and machines, Goldman envisions a workplace that is “human elevated”—one in which AI takes on more of what machines do well while people contribute more of what makes human judgment valuable.

That requires leaders to rethink jobs rather than simply automate existing tasks. It means deciding where AI belongs, where human judgment must remain central, and how employees can develop the skills to work effectively with increasingly capable machines. Goldman has argued that the old idea of keeping a “human in the loop” is no longer sufficient as AI becomes more autonomous. The better model is “human at the helm”: people remain accountable for determining how AI is used, interpreting its output and making consequential decisions.

The conversation also explores what happens when technology begins to resemble a colleague, why humans so readily attribute intelligence and agency to machines, and what leaders need to understand about creativity, discernment and common sense that cannot simply be automated.

Most importantly, Goldman challenges leaders to look beyond the immediate promise of productivity. If AI is going to transform work, the critical investment is not only in the technology. It is in people—their skills, AI fluency, judgment and ability to know when a machine should be trusted and when it should not.

For leaders trying to navigate AI without losing sight of the people who make their organizations work, Goldman offers a compelling argument: the future of work should not be about replacing human beings with machines, but about using AI to elevate what people are uniquely capable of doing.

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Sherry Turkle is one of the most influential voices in the study of how humans relate to technology, and this conversation with her covers new ground on that subject. Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist. For nearly five decades, beginning with the earliest days of personal computing, she has studied the psychological and social consequences of the machines people build and the relationships people form with them.

Her earlier books, including The Second Self, Alone Together, and Reclaiming Conversation, have shaped how a generation of researchers, technologists, and leaders think about digital life — and Alone Together, published over fifteen years ago, anticipated with striking accuracy a future in which people would come to see robots and machines as companions worthy of real emotional investment.

That future has arrived. Turkle’s newest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, examines what happens when AI chatbots move beyond productivity tools and begin positioning themselves as friends, romantic partners, and therapists — always available, endlessly patient, and asking nothing in return. Her concern is not that these systems are unconvincing, but that they are convincing enough: that people are beginning to accept the performance of empathy as a substitute for empathy itself, with consequences for solitude, intimacy, and the capacity for genuine human connection.

The conversation traces Turkle’s intellectual journey from her early predictions to the present moment, explores what is fundamentally different about AI compared to the technologies she has studied before, and presses into the distinction between authentic care and its convincing imitation. It moves into the workplace, examining what happens to human agency, purpose, and mastery when AI absorbs more of the thinking and communicating people once did themselves — and what is at stake when the relationship between a manager and the people who report to them, long understood as one of the most powerful drivers of well-being, becomes a task AI is asked to perform rather than a bond a human being chooses to show up for.

The discussion also turns a critical eye toward the technology industry itself, questioning predictions from prominent tech leaders about AI companionship and probing the well-documented pattern of executives who limit their own children’s exposure to the very technologies they build. It closes with a forward-looking question: what must be protected, deliberately and urgently, to ensure AI serves humanity rather than the reverse.

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