Leaders Leading Leaders

John Espinosa
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Self-Improvement

John Espinosa is an educator, dynamic speaker, frontline leader, and podcast host dedicated to serving others. With a passion for helping individuals reach their goals, John is known for his down-to-earth approach and commitment to making a difference. Follow him on social media for inspiring content and insights that reflect his mission of empowerment and service.

  1. 2d ago

    They Used To Be Your Friends. Now You're The Boss.

    You got promoted, and the people you are leading now are the same people you used to grab lunch with, complain about the boss with, and text on the weekends. The group text got quiet. Somebody looked at you a little different halfway through a joke. And you are wondering whether you are still one of them, or the boss now. You are both. That is the hard part. When you get promoted over your friends, the title changes overnight and the relationships do not. Most new managers handle it one of two ways. They pretend nothing changed, or they go cold overnight. Both fail for the same reason: they let the title do the work. Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill has studied what happens to people in their first year as a manager. One of the biggest myths she found is that new managers believe their authority comes from the position. It does not. It comes from credibility: character, competence, and whether people trust you to do the right thing. Your friends already know who you are. What they do not know yet is what kind of boss you are going to be. In this episode John Espinosa walks through The New Seat, three moves for leading the people who used to be your friends. ONE. NAME THE WEIRD. Sit down one on one with every former peer this week. Here is what is not changing. Here is what is. And I am going to make the calls the same way for everybody, including you. Then ask what they need from you. Start with the person who wanted the job. TWO. CLOSE THE BACK CHANNEL. From the new seat, venting up turns into undermining, sharing what you know turns friends into insiders, and extra access looks like favorites. Keep the friendship. Quit the back channel. THREE. PASS THE FIRST TEST. Somebody will test the new line, usually in the first month. Do not go easy and do not overcorrect. Ask whether you would handle it the same way with anybody else on the team, handle it privately, and then go back to normal. This is first time manager leadership at the point where it shapes your whole team: not whether you stay friends, but whether everybody knows where they stand. ------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  2. 5d ago

    How To Deal With A Toxic Employee Who's Your Best Performer

    Every manager eventually has one. The best performer on the team, the one whose numbers you would never want to lose, and the one nobody else can stand working with. Every week you tell yourself the numbers are worth it. This episode is about finding out whether they actually are. When you keep a toxic top performer, you think you are trading their attitude for their output. But you are only looking at half the math. The numbers show up on the report. The person who stopped speaking up, the two people who rebuilt their workflow to avoid a handoff, and the good employee quietly updating their resume do not. The research backs this up. In a Harvard Business School study of almost 60,000 frontline workers across eleven companies, Michael Housman and Dylan Minor found that toxic workers were on average more productive than their peers, that avoiding one was worth nearly twice as much as hiring a top superstar, and that the people around them became more likely to behave the same way. In this episode John Espinosa walks through The Exception, three moves for dealing with a toxic employee who is also your best performer. ONE. RUN THE WHOLE NUMBER. Two columns: what they bring and what it costs. Fill the second with four questions. Who works around them, who stopped talking, who left, and what do you fix. Then ask whether the team would be upset or relieved if they resigned tomorrow. TWO. MAKE THE HOW PART OF THE JOB. Most toxic top performers were told for years that the numbers were the job. Say it out loud: your numbers are the best on this team, and starting today how you get them counts just as much. Name two or three behaviors you can actually see, and put a date on it. THREE. STOP MAKING THE EXCEPTION. The pass, the reroute, the cleanup and the excuse all tell your team the rules are for everybody else. Stop making them. And if nothing changes, be willing to lose the numbers. This is managing difficult employees at the level that shapes your whole workplace culture: not just what one person does, but what the rest of your team learns from what you tolerate. ---------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  3. Oct 2

    They Agree With Everything You Say. That's Not Loyalty.

    New manager tips usually tell you to watch out for the person who argues with everything. This episode is about the person you should actually worry about: the one who agrees with everything. Every idea you bring them gets the same answer. Love it, let's go. It does not matter if it is your best idea or your worst one. We call that loyalty. We call that person our right hand. It is not loyalty. Most of the time it is a good employee who figured out, somewhere along the way, that agreeing with you was safer than disagreeing with you. And we taught them that, without meaning to, one small "yeah, but" at a time. The research backs this up. In a 2012 paper in the Academy of Management Journal, Ethan Burris found across three studies that managers rated employees who challenged their ideas as weaker performers than employees who went along with them, and in one study rated the challengers as less loyal. We are all wired to pay for the easy yes. In this episode John Espinosa walks through The Easy Yes, three moves to get your go-to person's real thinking back. ONE. FIND THE LAST NO. Ask yourself when your most trusted person last told you no about something that mattered. Watch for two early signs: they always ask what you think first, and they change when you change. Then be honest about what you did the last time they disagreed. TWO. ASK BEFORE YOU SHOW YOUR HAND. Take your answer out of the question. Say "here's the problem, what would you do" instead of "here's what I'm thinking, what do you think." Get their take in writing before they see your face, and sometimes give them the job of making the case against you. THREE. PAY FOR THE PUSHBACK. Your attention, your praise, the good projects and the next conversation are the currency, and right now they go to agreement. Thank the pushback even when you do not take it, put it in the review, and when they are right, change the plan and say who changed it. This is people management at the level most managers never look at: not who performs, but what you are quietly rewarding in the people closest to you. ------------------------------ Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  4. Sep 29

    Your Team Made A Rule Out Of Something You Said Once

    New manager tips almost never cover this one. Six months ago you said one sentence. You were probably walking out of a meeting, thinking about something else, and you said something like "yeah, let's just run those by me first." You forgot it by lunch. Your team did not. They wrote it down, they told the next new hire, and it is still running today. That is an accidental rule. You made it. You just were not in the room when it got made. This is not about the policies you wrote on purpose. It is about the offhand comment, the one bad day, the one time you got surprised in a meeting — the things your team filed permanently while you filed them as a passing remark. Every one of them is costing you speed, and more importantly, every one of them is a piece of somebody's judgment they quietly handed back to you. In this episode John Espinosa walks through The Accidental Rule — three moves to find the rules you never made, kill the ones you did not mean, and stop creating new ones every week. Go find the rules you never made. Ask "why do we do it that way" three times this week, then be quiet and listen for the answer that starts with "because you said." They hide in four places: approvals, formats, timing, and who is allowed in the room. Kill it out loud, with your name on it. The correction has to be as public as the original was casual. Name it, own it, kill it clean, and say what replaces it — because a rule removed without a replacement gives people uncertainty, not freedom. And never ask why they were still doing it. Label it before they file it. Tell your team what kind of thing you are saying as you say it: this is a decision, I am thinking out loud so do not act on this, this is a preference and not a standard. Then add the four words worth the whole episode — that is your call, not mine. This is leadership communication at the level where it actually breaks: not the big announcements, but the small sentences your team is still following months later while you have no idea they exist. ---------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  5. Sep 25

    Take A Week Off. Don't Check In. That's The Test.

    How to delegate as a manager gets tested exactly once or twice a year, and most managers throw the result away. You take a week off. You spend the four days before you leave pre-deciding everything, you write the handoff doc, you tell three people to call you if anything comes up. Then you check your phone at the gate, at baggage claim, and nine more times on Tuesday. And you come home and say it went fine, nothing blew up. That week was not a risk you survived. It was the only honest report you will ever get on your own leadership, and you spent it erasing the data. Here is the problem with evaluating your own leadership. You cannot observe it, because you are standing in it. Every meeting you have run, you were in the room. Every decision you watched your team make, you were there while they made it. You are in every piece of evidence you have about yourself. So you do not have a read on your team. You have a read on your team with you in it, and those are two different organizations. A team that can reach you did not run without you. It ran with a slower version of you. In this episode I walk through The Empty Chair, three moves for using an absence as a measurement instead of surviving it: ONE. LEAVE A DECISION, NOT A LIST. A handoff doc is a list of answers to questions you already thought of, and the real week contains three things that are not on it. Leave a decision boundary instead. Who decides, one name. How far, in real units. What genuinely waits. And the line that does more work than the other three combined, which is I will back you. TWO. GO DARK ON PURPOSE. One person has your number, and the bar should be almost embarrassing to say out loud. No Slack, no skimming email, no Tuesday call you scheduled with yourself. Every time you answer while you are away, you delete a day of data, because the moment your team knows you are reading, they start writing for an audience. THREE. READ THE PILE. Did anything break is the wrong question, because it has two answers and one of them is a lie. Read everything that waited for you before you clear it. What waited that should not have is a permission gap, not a delegation gap. What got decided, and whether it was defensible, is not the same as whether you would have decided it that way. And who got asked while you were gone is your real org chart. Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the one day you can run this on without waiting for a vacation. ------------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  6. Sep 22

    They Were About To Quit. So You Promoted Them. Now What?

    Employee retention breaks the day your best person starts drifting and the only lever you can move fast is a title. You feel them getting ready to go. You do not have a plan. You have a promotion you can get approved in four days. So you give it to them, and it works, and they stay. And then you spend the next year watching the best person on your team turn into somebody you are having hard conversations with. A promotion is a job assignment. That is all it is. It says here is different work and we believe you can do it. But that is not how managers use it. We use it as currency, as a thank you, as a raise we cannot get approved any other way, and most of all as the thing we grab when we are afraid somebody is about to walk. And a promotion is the only reward that takes the work a person is excellent at and swaps it for work they have never done. It is the only thank you that can make somebody worse at their job. In this episode I walk through The Title Trap, three moves for the moment you can feel somebody getting ready to leave: ONE. ASK WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. Not what is wrong, which makes them the complainer, and not what would it take to keep you, which hands them a blank check. Ask what changed, then go quiet. And make no offer that day, because anything you put on the table in the first ten minutes is fear talking. People leave for five reasons, the money, the manager, the load, the path and the meaning, and a title only touches one of them. TWO. PAY WITHOUT PROMOTING. You have five levers, not one. Money, scope, access, mastery and relief. Never give a title you would have to explain, and here is the test for that. Plus the cost nobody warns you about, which is that the rest of your team just watched you publish the price list on how to get promoted around here. THREE. GIVE THE WORK BACK. For the managers who already did this eighteen months ago. You cannot un promote somebody, but you can name it before their reputation does, cut the one piece of the role that is drowning them, and deliberately give back the work they were great at. Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the job description test you can run today on the last person you promoted. Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  7. Sep 18

    When Someone Quits, Your Team Isn't Watching Them. They're Watching You

    How to handle employee resignation is the part of managing nobody trains you for. Somebody gives notice on Monday. By Tuesday the announcement is out, their meetings are canceled, and you have a job posting half written in another tab. You think your team is processing the loss of a coworker. They are not. They are watching you, all week — what you say about the person who left, what you do about the hole they left, and how fast you act like it never happened. The week after somebody quits is the most honest week your team will ever spend evaluating you, and most managers sleepwalk through it. They do two things in the first forty eight hours. They go quiet, and then they move fast. Both feel like leadership. Neither one is. And the second resignation, the one that lands about ninety days later, is almost always the one the manager caused in that week. In this episode I walk through The Week After, three moves for the five days that actually decide whether anybody else starts looking: ONE. SAY IT FIRST. Within twenty four hours, you tell the team yourself, plainly, and you say one true good thing about the person who left. Your silence is not privacy, it is a vacuum, and your team already knew before you did. Two warnings included, because the way most managers talk about a departing employee teaches everyone still in the room exactly what will be said about them. TWO. ASK THE STAYERS, NOT THE LEAVER. An exit interview is an autopsy. Instead, inside five days, sit down individually with the two or three people whose leaving would hurt most and ask one hypothetical question that costs them nothing to answer. Then do not defend it and do not promise to fix it, because an unkept promise in that week costs more than the silence did. THREE. DO NOT BACKFILL THE FEELING. Moving fast is usually about the manager's discomfort, not the team's need. Name what is actually dropping, put an end date on every piece of extra work you hand out, and go back to the person carrying the most and say what it is costing them. Work flows to whoever complains least, and that person is your next resignation. Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And why losing a good person is not the test — the five days after are. ----------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

  8. Sep 15

    Nobody Disagreed In Your Meeting. That's The Problem.

    How to run a meeting your team will actually be honest in is the skill nobody trains. You run the meeting, you ask if there are any questions, you get silence, and you walk out thinking it went well. Ninety seconds later, the real meeting starts. Two people in a hallway. A group text. Somebody's truck in the parking lot. That is where your team decides what they are actually going to do about what you just said, and you are not in that room. Here is the part most managers get wrong. The second meeting is not disloyalty. It is normal, every team does it, and you did it too before you had a title. The problem is not that it happens. The problem is the distance between the two meetings. If the parking lot conversation is a completely different conversation than the one you ran, your meeting could not hold the truth, and every decision you make from here gets quietly renegotiated somewhere you cannot hear it. In this episode I walk through The Second Meeting, three moves that shrink that distance: ONE. FIND OUT WHO HOSTS IT. Every team has one person whose read everybody waits for. To find them, watch eyes and not mouths. Then talk to that person before the meeting instead of after, and hear the parking lot conversation while the plan can still change. Two warnings included, because done wrong this becomes a spy or a favorite. TWO. MAKE THE ROOM ABLE TO HOLD IT. "Any questions" is not a question, it is a closing ritual. Replace it with something specific and small enough to answer. Then stay quiet for ten full seconds. And know that what you do with the first objection decides whether you ever get a second one. THREE. FOLLOW THE DECISION, NOT THE MEETING. Forty-eight hours later, ask two or three people what the read is out there. Then come back to the group with one thing that changed and say where it came from. That is how the parking lot gets a route back into the room. Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the quietest meetings of my career, which I mistook for alignment until somebody good put in their notice. ------------------------------ Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here Ready to take your leadership to the next level? Join our Coaching Program and start building clarity, focus, and real momentum. 👉 Apply here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/workwithjohn

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About

John Espinosa is an educator, dynamic speaker, frontline leader, and podcast host dedicated to serving others. With a passion for helping individuals reach their goals, John is known for his down-to-earth approach and commitment to making a difference. Follow him on social media for inspiring content and insights that reflect his mission of empowerment and service.

Information

  • Creator
    John Espinosa
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    345
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © John Espinosa
  • Show Website
    Leaders Leading Leaders