On Connection

Law #6: Inclusion - "Differences + Trust = Brilliance"Inclusion isn't a side initiative - it's a leadership skill that drives performance Collaboration requires not only navigating differences across a team but leveraging them in ways that drive valuable results and fuel future successes. Leaders often express fatigue around inclusion efforts that feel bureaucratic or disconnected from business outcomes, and those that occur as performative (e.g. asking for input without real power-sharing) rather than generative (e.g. co-creating strategy, surfacing dissent, integrating frontline insight into decision-making). Teams that can engage multiple lenses, lived experiences, and cognitive styles make better decisions, faster. This inclusion of various perspectives is especially important when navigating ambiguity or complexity. Harnessing the value of difference requires stewarding an environment of trust, unlocking the full intelligence of a system. Insights from the episode:

• Over-inclusion and under-inclusion both erode clarity, speed, and trust
• Valuable inclusion requires clarity of purpose and a high-quality of listening and conversation
• Leaders who include wisely unlock creativity, commitment, and shared ownership

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Presence - All improvement begins with what is present

Leadership Under Pressure Starts With Presence

Leaders who can attune to their own cognitive, emotional, and physical experience in real-time - without judgement - are better equipped to handle complexity, defuse conflict, and show up with emotional intelligence when it counts most. In this episode, we explore why cultivating presence is foundational to collaboration, resilience, and trust in fast-moving environments.

Insights from the episode:

• Practicing presence unlocks emotional intelligence
• Nonjudgmental awareness of the current moment fuels clearer decisions, and alignment
• Today's challenges - urgency, hybrid and virtual collaboration, dynamic circumstances - call for an unprecedented quality of leadership presence and emotional agility

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Law #4: Authenticity - "Pivot to purpose in the face of fear, threat & disappointment"Life, and life at work, bring plenty of opportunities for disruption, especially in the context of our relationships with others. A collaborative effort is bound to surface misalignments, differences of opinion, and competing priorities. Circumstances themselves may knock our plans off course, sending a team into a space of anxiety, fear, and protection. Having a skillset for recovering a sense of purpose and generating focus and alignment where it's missing, even in challenging times, is a critically important leadership skill. In this episode we discuss the 4th Law of Authenticity. Authenticity - an art of listening for shared purpose and cultivating connection - is foundational to high-performance collaboration.Insights from the episode:

• Emotional agility is a core skill for successful leaders, collaborators, and high-performers

Law #3: The Law of Connection - "The conversations are the work."In today’s complex, fast-moving organizations, leaders are under constant pressure to drive results, manage competing priorities, and keep teams aligned—often across functions, locations, and time zones.This episode of The 10 Laws of High-Performance Collaboration introduces The Law of Connection, and core principles of leadership that are often overlooked: The quality of your team’s conversations determines the quality of your collaboration—and the results you’re able to achieve.We discuss:

• Why connection and conversation have a direct impact on efficiency, effectiveness, and supervision costs
• How to care for the quality of our conversations (hint: this has more to do with how well you listen than what you say)
• How to care for the timing of your conversations - "What conversation is it time for now?"
• The importance of developing the ability to notice when things are off track, and the skills that help you restore alignment and trust

Law #2: The Law of Listening - "The test for listening is learning."

In today’s fast-paced, high-stakes environments, leaders are expected to drive results while fostering alignment, trust, and engagement. But one of the most underleveraged tools in that effort is also one of the most human: listening.

This episode introduces the second Law of High-Performance Collaboration: Listening. When leaders listen to learn, they create space for contribution and build the credibility and trust that enables teams to perform at their best. In the episode we discuss:

• The difference between listening to learn and listening to respond or defend
• Why leaders who listen well cultivate trust and psychological safety
• Why learning from others is a powerful act of leadership

For any leader navigating complexity, change, or growth, this conversation offers practical insight into how a commitment to listening transforms not just communication, but culture.

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Episode 1: The Law of Teamwork — "The Source of Teamwork is a Common Future"What makes a group of people into a team?Not just shared tasks—but a shared future.In this opening episode of The 10 Laws of High-Performance Collaboration, we explore what it takes to cultivate a team that's grounded in shared purpose, common values, and commitments to measurable goals. We also discuss three factors contributing to the strength of your team and their ability to collaborate effectively and efficiently - community, contribution, and choice. Caring for these elements set the foundation for addressing challenges relating to:

• Generating shared understanding of goals
• Building trust and psychological safety
• Clear roles, communication, and conflict norms
• Accountability and commitment

The most powerful tool a leader has? The next conversation.

Welcome to the first episode of our new series, The 10 Laws of High-Performance Collaboration—a series designed for leaders at all levels who want to unlock better communication, alignment, and performance in their teams.

In this opening episode, we explore what makes collaboration valuable (and what makes it wasteful), the hidden power dynamics in team interactions, and why rethinking how we coordinate might be the key to getting better results—with less friction.

Whether you lead a team of five or five hundred, this series is your guide to the human side of leadership, and the universal principles that lead to breakthroughs in collaboration.

Resources mentioned in the episode:

In this episode of On Connection, we sit down with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Fire Network Director at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Lenya shares her insights on the critical role of love and connection in leadership, especially in the context of fire management and community resilience. Her work on beneficial fire practices, community engagement, and her leadership in the Women in Fire Training Exchange program offer valuable lessons on how purpose-driven leadership can address complex challenges.

You can learn more about Lenya and her work below:

Balancing work and well-being is a constant challenge for many, particularly for leaders who are managing both people and organizational commitments. Well-being easily slips down the priority list when pressing accountabilities come up, and it can feel like a “nice-to-have” rather than a necessity. However, well-being is a critical foundation for productivity, engagement, collaboration, and leadership, and research increasingly shows that when this foundation is lacking, it affects the overall health of the business.

In today’s episode, Emma Rose is joined by Conversant consultant and partner Kell Delaney and guest Eleanor Allen. Eleanor is CEO of Catapult for Change, focusing on empowering other leaders and organizations to overcome challenges and ignite innovative ideas that enable success. Having worked across the corporate and nonprofit sectors she brings a practical but whole-hearted perspective to the question of what it takes for businesses and people to thrive. She has recently been working to bring science-based tools to organizations that support workplace experience and peak performance.

You can connect with Eleanor and learn more about her work below.

Eleanor Allen is a visionary catalyst for positive change, dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for both people and the planet. As a humanist, environmentalist, and versatile force in corporate and nonprofit sectors, she brings a wealth of experience as a CEO, business leader, board member, technical expert, consultant, and professional engineer. Eleanor's impressive career includes leadership roles in various organizations such as CEO of B Lab Global and Water For People, Global Water Leader at Arcadis, and Latin America Water Leader at CH2M (now Jacobs). Her contributions to the engineering profession led to her induction into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

In this episode of On Connection, host Robin Anselmi interviews Pedro Zannoni, CEO of Lacoste Latin America. With a rich background in the sporting and fashion goods industries, Pedro has successfully grown global brands in new regions and tackled various leadership challenges. As an ambassador for Diversity and Inclusion at Lacoste, Pedro shares valuable insights on elevating women's leadership and why it matters to have a truly authentic approach to the work of inclusion.

Learn more about Pedro through his bio and the links included below:

An executive with over 23 years of experience in multinational companies in the sports and fashion industries, Pedro has expertise in sales and brand building. He takes pride in forming and leading high-performance teams and has held leadership positions at companies such as Wilson, PUMA, adidas, Reebok, ASICS, and is currently the CEO of Lacoste Latin America. In this role, he is responsible for leading the strategic direction and operations of one of the most iconic and prestigious brands in the world.

Before starting his corporate career, Pedro was a professional tennis player and coach. During this time, he won several national and international titles in various categories, including South American and World Champion titles in 1993, and competed in Grand Slam tournaments at Roland Garros and Wimbledon.

He holds a degree in Law, a postgraduate degree in Business Administration, a specialization in General Management from Wharton - University of Pennsylvania, and certification as a Corporate Governance Board Member from IBGC.

Organizations rely on leaders to effectively direct action and inspire collaborative work even when they don't have direct authority over everyone they need to influence. Often, these are leaders a few rungs below senior leadership that are responsible for driving strategic priorities forward, influencing across a matrix, and doing so without relying on title or reporting structure.

There are effective strategies for inspiring authentic commitment and engagement even when you can't demand compliance, and it's worthwhile for any leader to learn how to leverage this skillset.

In this episode, Robin and Emma Rose are joined by Conversant consultant Roger Henderson to offer practical areas of focus to become an effective and purposeful leader, with or without authority.

Strategic planning and budget setting are core responsibilities for organizational leaders, yet they often come with unique challenges. These processes rely on a series of crucial conversations that directly impact not only how challenging that process feels, but also the quality of the resulting plans and commitments, ultimately guiding successful execution.

In this episode, Robin and Mickey share insights from their experience supporting leadership teams across various industries, as well as from their own leadership journeys. They explore how to design conversations that help answer the essential question: What are we focusing on, and why? Tune in to learn how to make your strategic planning discussions more focused, valuable, and productive.

Additional Resources:

A critical first chapter in a leader's growth comes when they are no longer just accountable for their own performance, but for that of others. Whether managing a team for the first time or taking on more leadership in collaborative work, this leap requires new mindsets and skills to guide collective rather than individual success.

Challenges for this population include:

- Setting expectations & generating alignment (both with those they lead and their managers)

- Generating trust in working relationships

- Clarifying accountabilities & getting commitment from others

- Giving and receiving feedback for continuous improvement

In this episode, Mickey, Robin and Emma Rose share what they see are key developmental focus areas for Emerging Leaders and what they can do to set a foundation for valuable leadership that lasts through their career.

Bringing a team together - whether that be for meetings, offsites, retreats, kickoffs, happy hours, or other forms of gathering - is an important part of cultivating team culture, generating alignment, and building connection. Many will report that their teams don't meet often enough, or meet too much. At the heart of both critiques is a question - when we do meet, how do we ensure it's a valuable and worthwhile investment of time and resources?

Many are currently considering plans for team gatherings at the end of this year or the start of 2025, and we wanted to offer our insight and expertise around how to ensure that when you gather, you do it well.

Are you clear on why you need to come together? What outcomes would make that use of time and resources worth it? To design your gathering well, all decisions about virtual or in-person, agenda, team building activities, and more should be intentional, clearly serving what you're out to do together and why it matters.

In this episode, Mickey, Emma Rose, and their colleague Patrick Kennedy share what they've learned from advising clients on this very challenge, and how you can design your upcoming gatherings to serve the needs of your team and your business.

Resources:

Of the challenges unique to senior roles, "Enterprise Leadership" is a common point of focus in our work with clients today. Enterprise Leadership is a distinction that refers to both a role and a mindset: taking responsibility for the health of the whole enterprise, and for the promises it makes to its stakeholders and citizens.

Leaders can have great capability and expertise in leading their function or a specific set of accountabilities, but at the most senior levels, organizations need people that extend their care not just vertically but across the organization. Leaders that generate the connection and alignment that allows the system to achieve strategic and cultural goals while navigating dynamic challenges.

In this episode, Robin and Mickey offer how an enterprise leader thinks and acts, how that might shift their picture of success, and the key challenges those taking on this charge often have to navigate.

Resources:

Imagine if all use of your time, energy and attention at work led to real value. How much would you get done? How would you feel? Now imagine if all use of time and resources across your organization caused value - no meeting, task or project was a waste.

Every organization has waste in its system, but the real problem is that we either don't notice it, or we don't feel empowered to do anything about it. Every individual in an organization has power to make the shift from waste to value, improving the vitality of that individual and the system as a whole.

In this episode, Robin, Mickey and Emma Rose share their advice for catching signs of waste in your work, and practical steps you can take to improve the value-to-waste ratio, improving your experience at work and the results you're able to produce.

Resources:

Mike Tetreault, Chief People Officer of The Nature Conservancy, joins Robin Anselmi to talk about the value of Radical Partnership, and why it's a necessary focus for leaders navigating dynamic and complex challenges.

Mike leads the team focused on enabling a healthy, strategic and agile organizational culture that is dedicated to creating a world where people and nature can thrive. He believes in a human-focused approach to leadership, one that prioritizes empathy, integrity and collaboration in its pursuit of strategic goals.

When we find ourselves in disagreement with another person, it's easy to put our energy into winning the argument. How do I get my point across? How do I get them to see it my way? How do I prove that I'm right?

If we treat conversations and conflict like a win-or-lose game, we all lose. If we practice conversational accuracy, we create an opportunity for both sides to learn from the other.

In this episode, Mickey, Robin, and Emma Rose share the essential shift to focus on if you want to turn those differences into an opportunity to build something together. It starts with how you listen, and what you're listening for.

Resources:

Conflict resolution and the valuable management of differences are leadership skills that continue to be identified as critical areas of development across organizations and industries. While conflict is something we all tend to avoid or leave unresolved, the way we choose to engage with it can either hurt our goals and working relationships or increase our access to trust and new insights.

In this episode, Emma Rose, Mickey, and Robin share practical ways you can engage with conflict to reveal new opportunities for connection and collaboration.

Resources:

We know that influence is not limited to those with tenure, title, or hierarchy. Every member of an organization has the capacity to influence those around them, the quality of work, the collective understanding of challenges, and much more.

Choosing to develop influence as a skill is a worthwhile investment not only for senior leaders but also for leaders and contributors of all levels. We recently released an episode devoted to that topic, and this one expands on that conversation with a focus on non-executive audiences.

Conversant consultants Katie Mingo and Patrick Kennedy join Emma Rose to share what they've learned from their personal experiences and those with other leaders about developing influence and growing your impact without tenure or role-related authority.

A leader’s ability to influence others, the quality and trajectory of work, performance, and results is integral to organizational success, and an indicator of the value that leader provides. What things are made better by their contribution? What do they uniquely contribute that people can count on them for?

We are all influencing all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not. Becoming conscious of that influence is the first step in becoming more reliable for influencing purposefully and valuably.

Performance reviews and feedback can be some of the most valuable tools in growth and career development, though they can also be some of the most dreaded employee experiences. As of 2022, 95% of managers are dissatisfied with their organization’s review system – a statistic that shows not only is there room for improvement, but managers would likely welcome a change.

What makes a feedback conversation valuable and supportive? What makes it so painful? Robin and Mickey join Emma Rose to share their ideas for improving the performance review process that any manager could start practicing today.

Show Notes:

There are times we all feel stuck, held back, or inhibited and often we aren’t clear or confident about what we can do to change it. Not only is this a source of frustration, but over time it can devolve from decreasing engagement and motivation to hopelessness, resentment, or despair.

How people engage with this experience and what they’re looking for is what leads to stuckness becoming a dead end or an opportunity for new insight and action.

Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to talk about what they've seen are common characteristics and causes of “stuckness” and to share some best practices for turning those experiences into an opportunity to generate value.

Show notes:

Our ability to influence people and the course of events starts with the level of credibility we have. It is a foundational leadership skill, one that we've found is generated, not granted.

It’s especially common for us to see credibility as a point of development focus for those looking to elevate their presence and influence within an organization. Over years of working with senior executives from around the world, we've learned what helps and hinders our capacity to gain credibility, and we've found it has more to do with how you listen than what you have to say.

Growth and development are key parts of our lives at work, and for leaders, this is both a personal undertaking and something to sponsor in others. What best supports successful development? How can we design for growth towards our goals, our vision for ourselves and for our work, and fulfillment that enriches our working experience and contribution? 

Carolyn French and Krista Spence join Emma Rose to share what they've learned from coaching leaders and teams, and designing for development. 

Show Notes

For the second in our series on Power, we do a deeper dive into what we mean when we talk about power. Michelle and Robin share the different "types" of power (as defined by the American Psychological Association) and how they can help us further investigate our own relationship to power - as leaders, employees, teammates, and as people.

Our current working definition of Power is "the capacity or ability to direct or influence others or the course of events." Power impacts the way organizations are behaving, making decisions, and the conversations they're having. It's also something we aren't often talking about explicitly, and beginning to engage with it consciously can reveal a new understanding of how we cultivate or diminish value, inclusion, and belonging.

How is power used or abused in organizational life? How do we each, as leaders and employees, understand our relationship to power? Are we being curious about how our use of power impacts the lived experience of others?

Show Notes:

According to Gallup, there has been a steady decline in employee engagement over the last few years, with only 32% of employees in the U.S. falling in the "engaged" category and 18% "actively disengaged." Of the factors contributing to those statistics, most are not new concepts or surprising ideas. So, why is it that organizations still don't know how to address the engagement challenge? 

In this episode, Robin, Mickey and Emma Rose talk about what there is to learn from the story this new data tells, and what opportunities there are for inspiring greater employee engagement for the future.

Show notes: 

On this event preview, we consider what place love has at work and why we think it matters. Love isn’t a passive cultural feature; some would argue it’s a powerful business strategy. Join us as we start a conversation on love and leadership.

Most simply, choice means “an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities.” In an organizational context, however, there’s a lot more to it than that. The opportunity and capacity to make a decision for oneself is an act of agency and autonomy, one that sustains a commitment to contribute to a shared purpose. We believe this opportunity to choose to commit to something is powerful, and an important ingredient in organizational vitality and employee engagement.

Robin Anselmi and Kell Delaney join Emma Rose Connolly to talk about why “choice” is an important characteristic of cultures that sustain organizational performance and employee well-being.

Show notes:

Time is something we all struggle with, and many battling stress and overwhelm feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. We tend to hunt for productivity hacks, time management techniques, and methods of working that will solve the problem, but there is no one-size-fits all solution.

For any method to be effective, it must be designed to clearly serve a purpose and set of targeted results. Designing our time works the same way. What purpose would a different use of time serve? What would a successful method cause in your work and life?

Kell Delaney and Patrick Kennedy join Emma Rose for a conversation about designing our relationship with time, the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness, and how to manage improvement at an individual and team level.

Show notes:

Dr. Debra Clary began passionately researching curiosity a few years ago after being asked if she thought it was something that can be learned. Since then, she has become a thought leader on the connection between leadership and curiosity and has shared her expertise with over 10,000 people. She has discovered that curiosity is not only able to be learned but is a contagious state and a predictor of achievement.

Curiosity is key to evolution, innovation, and growth. It’s an innate human tendency and one that, when encouraged and tapped into, can generate new ideas, authentic connection, and engagement.

In this conversation we ask:

• What are the behaviors of a curious leader?
• What kills a culture of curiosity?
• How do we become and develop curious leaders when it feels like we have no time?
• What does curiosity have to do with building cultures of inclusion and belonging?

Learn more about Dr. Debra and her research:

Talking about love in the context of leadership, organizational development, and strategy execution is not common, but we’ve decided it’s a worthy area of research. We have found that it is a uniquely human superpower, in a time when the human side of work is increasingly an area of strategic focus for business success.

How would your approach to leadership change if you led with love? What experiences have you had at work, with leaders and peers throughout your career, that were acts of care for your development and you as a human being? How did those experiences impact your growth and your relationship with work? Robin Anselmi and Michelle Wonsley join Emma Rose for this conversation – the first of a renewed exploration we’ll be sharing with you over the year to come.

Show Notes:

Our Anniversary episode!! The first year of this podcast has been a great experiment and success, and we are so grateful to the community of people that makes it possible. Thank you to all that have listened, joined as a guest, shared an episode with a friend, or sent us a note about how the show impacted you. It wouldn't be a success without you!

Even when things are going well, occasions and mile markers such as anniversaries are a great opportunity to pause, reflect, and see what there is to learn from the experiment to-date. For any project, taking that pause is really hard to do, especially when we’re all running a mile a minute managing so many other things. But taking a moment to REVIEW what has happened and RENEW your commitments, intentions, and strategies means you move forward in a much smarter, more agile way.

Emma Rose is joined by Robin and Mickey once again to talk about why adjustment matters, when it’s the right time to adjust, and how to leverage those moments to cause even greater impact for your investments of time, money, and energy.

Michelle Wonsley joins us for our second episode on Inclusive Leadership Design. This time we ask, what do we mean when we say the words "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice & Belonging"? They are so often used now, but are we on the same page about how we define them? And if we don't have a common definition, how can we know we're making meaningful progress in any of those domains? 

These are complex areas of study, discipline, and reflection, and simplifying them to an acronym does not reduce their complexity, or the need to clarify what meaning we step into with others when we commit to their cause. In this episode, we don't come to specific definitions but offer some wisdom on how to approach your own community with a respect for everyone's diverse views. 

For many reasons, sponsoring an “ownership mindset” is a popular topic for organizational leaders. Increasingly, leaders want (and need) teams that can be self-supervising and take independent action in service of strategic goals. Given that distributed and hybrid work are here to stay, and belt-tightening across industries means fewer hands for the same amount of work, increased efficiency and trust in people’s ability to make decisions without hand holding is imperative to business success.

There are leadership behaviors that can help or hurt autonomy and ownership, which is what Mickey, Robin, and Emma Rose spend the majority of this conversation focused on. A common theme: leaders that drive connection and high-quality communication while making expectations explicit will be most successful at sponsoring responsible autonomy.

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