The Lift: Executive Leadership for Organizational Change

For CEOs and senior executives, and the leaders they're counting on to make change happen. Host Ben Brooks is himself a CEO, working with other CEOs and their executive teams after a career as an SVP of HR, a management consultant, and an executive coach. Each week, he brings his own experience and a network of accomplished leaders. You challenge your team, your peers, your board. But who challenges you? Very few people feel safe bringing bad news to a senior executive, or telling one they're wrong. So the best ones go find that challenge somewhere else. That's what this is. The Lift is a weekly show about leadership and organizational change, and what jams up executives trying to drive the performance expected of them: why the obviously right thing is so maddeningly hard to get an organization to actually do, and how to get it moving. Knowing what to do is rarely the problem. What gets in the way is the how, and the why it isn't happening: the politics, the emotions, the past, the misalignment, the fear, the sheer complexity of changing something this big. The Lift is a conversation, and the issues we take on come from the executives we work with every day. Real things real leaders have not figured out yet. How to drive real accountability without damaging the relationship. How to get more conflict into the room, not less. How to get your leaders upgrading talent before they're forced to. How to stay committed to a vision that will take years. Why your managers are worse than your engagement scores say. You probably don't have time for another conference or three-day program, and you know how those go: you come back fired up, and three weeks later, nothing has changed. This is thirty minutes a week, on a commute or between meetings. A habit, not an event. The focus of change is the organization. The agent of change is you. Listen for yourself first, then share it with your team.