300. 300 Conversations That Changed How We Lead: Lessons from The Leadership Project Podcast with Mick Spiers

Leadership lives in the moments people spend with you—every check-in, every decision explained, every hard conversation you choose to have. To celebrate 300 episodes, we pull together the clearest patterns from hundreds of leaders, psychologists, authors, and operators and turn them into practical moves you can use tomorrow.

We start with meaning. People don’t just want a job; they want to know why their work matters and who benefits. You’ll hear how to connect the macro why of your team’s purpose with the micro why behind tasks and decisions, so your people shift from compliance to care. From there, we go deep on emotional intelligence as modern table stakes: noticing and naming emotions, creating space to respond rather than react, and using empathy to choose actions that steady a room and strengthen trust.

Culture comes into focus through our relationship with failure and feedback. High-performing teams don’t dodge mistakes—they learn from them. We share a five-question daily reflection and the SBIA feedback framework to move from blame to systems and from avoidance to growth. We then explore diversity of thought and psychological safety as real performance levers: who gets heard, who gets interrupted, and how to reward healthy debate so inclusion becomes muscle, not motto. Finally, we highlight listening as a leadership superpower—reflecting back meaning, asking better questions, and helping people walk away clearer than they arrived.

You’ll also hear gratitude for the listeners, guests, and the team who make this community possible, plus a look at what’s next: deeper psychology in leadership, real-world Q&A, and more ways to connect. If this conversation sparks something, share it with a leader ready to grow, hit subscribe, and leave a quick review to help others find us. What small action will you take this week to make someone feel seen, heard, and valued?

Chapters

• 0:00 Milestone And Core Question;
• 1:35 Why The Leadership Project Exists;
• 4:40 Leadership As Daily Practice;
• 8:26 Five Truths Begin: Meaning At Work;
• 12:28 Emotional Intelligence As A Must;
• 17:04 Learning From Failure And Feedback;
• 21:15 Diversity Of Thought And Inclusion;
• 24:30 Great Leaders Listen Deeply;
• 27:04 Gratitude To Listeners And Team;
• 29:56 What’s Next For The Show;
• 33:10 Reflection Prompts And Personal Actions;

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever stopped to really ask yourself, what kind of leader Am I becoming? Am I becoming the kind of leader people tolerate or the kind of leader people choose to follow? But if someone on my team was asked privately, do you love coming to work, what would they honestly say? Today we're celebrating episode 300 of The Leadership Project podcast, 300 conversations, 300 explorations into leadership psychology and the human condition, 300 opportunities to challenge the status quo and rethink what it means to be a great leader in the modern world. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project, where we explore what it truly means to lead with purpose and to create a world where people love coming to work. Today is a very special milestone. This is episode 300 of The Leadership Project podcast. In today's episode, I want to do three things, take you behind the scenes of why this podcast exists in the first place, share some of the biggest patterns and lessons that have emerged across 300 episodes, and invite you into the next chapter of this movement. Because this is not just my journey, it's ours. So as you listen today, I'd love you to keep one question front of mind. If I truly believed my leadership could change someone's life for the better, how would I show up differently tomorrow? Okay, so let's dive in. Let's start with why The Leadership Project exists. I want to start with a confession. When I first started The Leadership Project, I wasn't trying to build a media brand or a content engine. I was wrestling with a simple but heartbreaking statistic, only a small percentage, something like one in five, people in the world, truly love their job and like their boss. For most people, work is a source of stress, not joy. For anyone that's not aware, I've carved out my career in the world of urban mobility, which is also a very purpose LED industry in this world, in this part of my life. My vision is to create a world where people can move freely around their cities, without delays, without disruption, and ultimately, without stress. My purpose is to de stress the commute to and from work. But then I had this dawning realization that for many people, the commute wasn't the only stressful part. The stressful part was the time that they spend inside those four walls. And I find this a real tragedy. I remember thinking to myself, we're spending up to a third of our lives at work. How is it okay that so many people dread Monday morning? That's where the vision of The Leadership Project came from, to inspire all leaders to challenge the status quo and to empower modern leaders with the knowledge and emotional intelligence to create meaningful impact, to make leaders realize that leadership is a responsibility. You are responsible for the place where people are spending up to 1/3 of their life, and you can be the difference between whether they have a very good day or a very bad day. Let me ask you this question. When someone goes home from work, back to their family and they've had a bad day. What are they talking about? Tell you what they're not talking about. They're not talking about some spreadsheet that didn't behave themselves or or something to do with their craft. They're talking about the other human beings that they experienced at work, and the number one human being that they experience is their leader. They're going home to their partner and their loved ones and saying, Are you not going to believe what that jerk did to me today? So leadership is a responsibility. You are the difference between whether they're having a good day or a very bad day, and you're responsible for the place where they are choosing to invest 1/3 of their life. So I wanted to have some real conversations, sometimes confronting, sometimes emotional, with leaders, authors, psychologists and thinkers from all walks of life, so we could ask better questions together. What does inspirational leadership actually look like in a modern, digital hybrid world? How do we help leaders transition from Star individual contributors to people who can bring out the best in others, and how do we address the lack of diversity in leadership and build cultures? Where people feel safe to speak up when we launched back in 2021 I had no idea we'd reach leaders across the world, be downloaded in more than 100 countries, or become a weekly staple for so many of you. But here we are, 300 episodes later, and I'm still in awe that we keep showing up, ready to learn, ready to reflect and ready to grow. As for me, I just feel blessed every week I get to have this front row seat with experts in their field and ask them any question that I like, and that's the hallmark of the style of the show, is I'm trying to learn. I'm learning from the others, and that's why you'll hear me reflect back to the guest what I'm hearing from them, to make sure that I'm getting the right takeaway. And in doing so, I'm hoping that it has that impact for you as well, where you can hear the key takeaways from each of the guests. And guess what, I do my best to go and implement what I heard, and I'm hoping that you are as well. So in each and every lesson, there's at least one to three actionable takeaways where in my own leadership, I go and experiment, and I try that out, and I'll see what sticks, I'll see what works, see what doesn't quite work, and I'll work on my leadership every single day. A question I sometimes think about is, Have I become a better leader because of the podcast? The answer is absolutely yes. But guess what? I'm not perfect either. Leadership is something that you practice every day, that you get better at every day. There's no such thing as a perfect leader. But what is important is that we show up every day with intention to be the best leader that we can be, and that we keep on working on our craft. One of the frustrating things is that what works for us today might not even work six months from now, so we need to keep on evolving and adapting. Another struggling part with leadership is what works for one individual on your team won't work for another individual on your team, so we need to apply adaptive leadership. And the other part is that what works in one situation won't work in another situation. So we need to apply situational leadership, and think about how our leadership needs to pivot and adjust depending on the situation that we're faced. Whether we're in business as usual or it's crisis mode, or your team is approaching something new that you've never done before, you need to pivot and adjust to the situation. So adaptive leadership is adapting to the individual and situational leadership is adapting to the situation in front of you. So yes, The Leadership Project can help you to become a better leader, but it's you that needs to put in the work. And you never finish leadership. You need to keep working on it each and every day. So what have these 300 episodes taught us about leadership across the 300 episodes, whether we're talking about emotional intelligence, delegation, creative play, trust, resilience or inclusion, some clear patterns have emerged, and I want to share with you today some of the big truths that keep showing up again and again. Truth Number One, people don't just want a job. They want meaning. One of the greatest privileges of this podcast is listening to leaders describe the bosses that they'll never forget. And we've had many guests do this, the ones who change the trajectory of their careers. When people talk about those leaders, they almost never say, Oh, they hit all of their KPIs. They say things like they believed in me before I believed in myself. They showed me how my work mattered. They made me feel like a human being, not a resource. The consistent message here is people will do almost any legal ethical task, even if it's not always fun, if they understand why it matters and who it serves as leaders, our job is to connect the dots between task and purpose and effort and impact. You've heard me describe on the show before breaking this down into a Mick. Micro, why, and a micro why, the macro Why is, why does this team exist? What problems do we solve? Who do we serve? What's the greater impact of why our team or our organization exists and having that clarity of purpose and vision that makes our work meaningful, a micro why comes down to things like tasks or decisions? What makes this task important? Does it unlock someone else's ability to do their job? What makes this decision important, and why have we made this decision? Once again, people can accept decisions that may be contrary to what they wanted to have happen, as long as they understand the rationale behind why that decision was made. So ask yourself, have I clearly connected every role on my team to a purpose bigger than the job description? Do my people know who benefits from their work? Because when people find meaning, they don't just comply. They care. There's something that I found for sure in the show is that what people want in the workplace is to feel seen, to feel heard and to feel valued and to feel valued. They need to feel that they matter. And the funny thing is, when they feel like they matter, they do things that matter, and when they feel valued, they add value. And that's on you, that's on you as a leader, to help someone see why they matter, and to do so on a regular basis, to make them feel seen and heard. These are all in the micro moments, remembering something about a previous conversation, making them feel that you know their name. Sometimes leaders don't even know the names of their people, remember their name, speak to them with their name, and remember something about them to make them feel seen and heard, and in those micro moments where they come up with ideas and meetings, make sure you take the time to truly listen to them and to thank them for raising their ideas or their concerns that makes them feel seen and heard as well. So a primary role of any leader is to make someone feel seen, to make someone feel heard, and to make someone feel that they matter. Truth. Number two, emotional intelligence is no longer optional. Again and again, our guests have highlighted the role of emotions in leadership, not as something to suppress, but as data that tells you what's really going on. Emotion is information. It's raising your attention to something that you need to pay attention to. A positive emotion is a reward that you've done something that you're happy about, and it's trying to reward you so you'll do it again. Sometime, a negative emotion is telling you about an unmet need. Might be the need for love and belonging, the need to feel valued, the need to feel that you matter, is being challenged. Now that doesn't mean that you should react. It means that you should be aware. So we've talked about emotional awareness, noticing what you're feeling before you react, notice and name the emotion. What is this emotion? Sometimes we can mislabel it and misunderstanding it. Frustration can show up as anger. Hunger can show up as frustration, all kinds of things, so notice and name the emotion. What is this emotion? Why this emotion? Why this emotion? Now, what is it trying to draw my attention to? Then we go into emotional regulation. Notice the word is regulation, not suppression, where we choose a response that serves the moment instead of being hijacked by your amygdala. So the art here is not to react, it's to respond when an emotion hits you, take a beat, take a few deep breaths, take the time to notice and name the emotion and then choose a response that will serve you and the other person and your team and your business in the best possible way. The gap between the emotion and the response that's where freedom lives, instead of being on autopilot and auto responding or auto reacting, we're going to consciously and intentionally respond to the situation, and then we have empathy, whether it's emotional empathy or cognitive empathy or empathic concern. It. It's being willing to sit in someone else's perspective, even when it's uncomfortable. Cognitive empathy is just to see the world through someone else's eyes, to understand their perspective, to understand, oh, okay, now I can see what they're seeing. Now I can hear what they're hearing. And emotional empathy is to be able to sit with it and go, okay. Now I understand why they might be feeling the way they're feeling, if they're feeling challenged, if they're feeling threatened, unless you put yourselves in their shoes, you won't be able to process that. So emotional intelligence starts with yourself. It starts with your own emotional awareness and regulation, but then it turns into the ability to understand someone else's perspectives and emotions in a world of uncertainty and constant change, people don't just need leaders who are smart, they need leaders who are self aware. So here's a question to sit with when I walk into a room, what emotional wake do I leave behind? Another way of looking at it is, when I walk into a room, what emotional wake do I want to leave behind, which is where intentionality comes in. So instead of being on autopilot and leaving it up to others and the situation to govern how people are going to feel. What feeling do you want them to have? And start behaving in that way, as Maya Angelou famously puts it, people may forget what you said, they may forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And this is true of all great leaders. Sit and think about this for a moment. Think of all of the great leaders that you've had. In fact, all leaders the good, the bad, the ugly, I can tell you, the great leaders made you feel something and they made you feel something good about yourself. They made you feel good about the work that you do, and the less than great leaders, they probably made you feel two inches tall. Think about that with you as a leader. What kind of leader do you want to be? Do you want to be a leader who empowers and trusts and makes people feel important and valued, or you want to be a leader who belis people and makes them feel too inches tall. One thing for sure, great leaders in my career is they all had this calmness about them, even in a crisis, they're kind of person that sits in a room and and that people might be debating a hot topic for 45 minutes or even three hours, and people are getting agitated, excited about the topic. And the great leader was the one that sat there and listened to all of the perspectives, stayed calm and was able to cut through and to be able to decipher all of those opinions that were in the room, to work out what the best course of action would be so for your own leadership, when you come into the room, do people feel calmer or do they feel more anxious? Do people feel more seen, or do they feel more invisible? And how you show up emotionally is part of your leadership legacy. What do people say about what it feels like to experience you as a leader? This is at the heart of emotional intelligence. Truth Number three, the way you handle failure shapes your culture. We've dedicated whole episodes to our relationship with failure, and a pattern has emerged. High performing, healthy cultures don't avoid failure. They learn from it. Guests have shared stories about projects that didn't land, strategies that looked brilliant on paper but fell apart in reality and personal missteps where ego got in the way. The difference between a toxic culture and a learning culture is not whether things go wrong, because they always will. The difference is what leaders do next. Do you look for the person to blame or the system to improve. Do you shut people down, or do you invite them in to reflect and grow? A powerful question you can ask after something goes wrong, is this, what did we learn? What did we learn about ourselves, our assumptions, our approach that we wouldn't have learned any other way. So turn it into something powerful. Let failure be your teacher. All of this is at the heart of self reflection, which can be done individually or collectively. For those that have listened to the show for a while, you would know that for the past, what's going on 12 years now, I asked my. Half the same five questions every single day, what went well today? What didn't go well? What would I do differently next time? And what did I learn about myself? And what did I learn about others? By paying attention to these things, we become a better leader every single day. We learn from our mistakes. We learn from our failures. There's no such thing as a perfect leader, but a great leader leans into this and becomes better every day. Another connected lesson here is that great leaders don't avoid feedback. This is a common mistake I see in so many people's leadership, and I've got to say, I'm guilty of this myself. This is one of my biggest weaknesses as a leader that I am working on, and that is the avoidance of feedback. Great leaders do not avoid those crucial conversations, those uncomfortable conversations. We lean into it. People can't fix what they don't know about. So feedback is a gift. People are not mind readers. If something is not going to plan, you need to be able to tell them about it. This is also how you treat failure or even behaviors. So if you're the kind of leader who is avoiding giving feedback because it's uncomfortable, you're doing your team a big disservice. They need to know they cannot fix what they don't know about. So you need to lean into these conversations. The first thing is to remember that feedback is a gift and that you're doing them a big disservice by not telling them, in fact, you're robbing them from their own learning and growth, if you're not leaning in and telling them about the things that they need to work on once you've gotten over that mental hurdle, use a framework like sbia, Situation, Behavior, Impact and action. What was the situation? What was the behavior? What was the impact of that behavior and what action do you want the person to take in future to avoid that situation again? So please stop avoiding feedback, your relationship with failure, your relation with feedback, are things that really impact how you're perceived as a leader and your impact as a leader. Truth. Number four, diversity of thought is a competitive advantage from early episodes through to our most recent conversations. One theme keeps surfacing. Teams that embrace diversity of thought consistently outperform teams that are full of people who look, think and act the same. We've spoken about gender diversity, cultural and ethnic diversity, neuro diversity, and even diversity of backgrounds and disciplines like engineers, creatives, finance, operations. But diversity by itself is not enough. You can have a beautifully diverse team on paper and still have a culture of silence If people don't feel safe to speak up. So the real work of leadership is not just to get different people in the room, but to create the psychological safety where every voice can be heard to reward healthy debate instead of quiet agreement, and to notice whose voices are missing and invite them in diversity without inclusion is not impactful. One of my favorite simple challenges to leaders is this, in your next meeting, pay attention to your attention, who gets your eye contact, who gets interrupted, whose ideas are explored and whose are ignored. Your habits in those micro moments, tell your team exactly what and who you value. So if you want to co create something amazing, this is where you need to have inclusion and diversity of thought in the room, I can tell you right now, in any team, if you do this the right way, you can create something greater than any of the individuals could have by allowing those collection of voices and collection of diverse perspectives into the conversation to create a better answer to whatever problem that you're trying to solve, which leads us beautifully to Truth Number five, great leaders are great listeners across all of our conversations. One quality keeps rising to the surface. The leaders we admire most are the ones who truly listen, not the kind of listening where you just waiting for your turn to talk, but the kind of listening where someone walks away feeling that they feel seen, heard and that they matter. We've explored the power of asking better questions being full. Present in conversations, reflecting back what you've heard, not to prove you're smart, to prove to prove you care. If there's one thing that I've been truly humbled by in listener feedback, it's when people say, Mick, you really listen to your guest. For me, that's not an accident. It's an intentional choice, because I believe listening is one of the greatest gifts a leader can give. We've spoken a lot on the show about the art of deep listening, and deep listening is the ability to go beyond to just listening to things that confirm what we already believe, to be able to listen truly, with an open mind, truly with an open heart, and truly with an open will to imagine a new reality. You're not listening to confirm you're listening to understand, to understand the other person's perspective, which is where asking better questions comes in, to be able to truly reflect back to the other person what you're hearing, but then to extract meaning from what you're hearing, asking better questions like, Oh, tell me more. Or what makes that impactful for you? Or when you say this topic, what do you mean by this? Like, to ask without judgment, better questions to help the other person explain what's on their mind. Not everyone is great at communicating their ideas, but if you can ask better questions, you can help them to draw out what they're trying to say. So ask yourself these questions. Who in my world needs to be listened to more deeply. When was the last time someone walked away from a conversation with me feeling lighter, clearer, more helpful simply because I listened now as we celebrate 300 episodes, I also want to take you behind the mic and give some gratitude to the people behind the show. Episode, 300 is not just a number, it's a thank you note in audio form, firstly, to you the listener, whether you're on your commute, out for a walk at the gym or hiding from your inbox for 30 minutes, thank you for trusting me with your time and attention. You've shared the show with colleagues, with your teams, with your friends. You've sent messages telling me how an episode helped you navigate a tough conversation, rethinking your culture or showing up differently as a leader. Let me tell you, I read those messages every one of them, and they matter more than you know. So please do keep on sending those messages. It really warms our heart to know that the show is working for you. Secondly, to our incredible guests, all 300 episodes worth of them, thank you for your vulnerability, your wisdom, your stories and your courage, you have made this show what it is experts from around the world willingly giving up their time to spend with us and share their wisdom and their actionable insights. And thirdly, to the people behind the scenes, we've had a great team. Over these past years, we've had rica Vadnais, we've had Faris Sadek, we've had Joanne goes on, but two people in particular have stayed with me for the entire journey to Gerald calibo, who works tirelessly on the editing and production. So these episodes sound the way that they do. Gerald has put so many hours of editing. I get to do the fun part. I get to have these wonderful conversations with the guests. Gerald puts in hours into the editing of the show so that you can enjoy the end product and finally, but certainly, not least, to my amazing wife say, who does so much of the heavy lifting in the background? She keeps this whole thing moving, and she keeps me grounded when I need to be grounded. Zay does all of the booking of the guests. She manages all of the social media and the promotion of the show. She works tirelessly on this, and not to mention the sacrifice that imagine that your husband gets up at 430 in the morning to do these interviews with people from around the world, and she gives me the space to do so. She's the most supportive and loving person on the planet, and every day, I thank my stars that she came into my life. Thank you so much. Say there's no way that I could do this without you. This is not a solo act. This is a team effort, and I'm deeply grateful for you every day. So what's next? As we look beyond episode 300 I see three big directions. For The Leadership Project Number one, we're going to dive deeper into psychology and leadership. We've already started the journey of looking at leadership through the lens of psychology, how people think, how they feel, how they decide, how they behave, and understanding human behavior is a great way to become a better leader. We'll keep diving into topics like mindset, motivation, bias, resilience and identity, not just as theory, but as practical tools you can use as a leader. We'll have more real world leadership Q and A, I want to bring more of your real challenges into the show, the situations you're facing with your teams, your boards, your stakeholders, your cultures, and we'll explore them together with a coaching lens so you don't just get abstract ideas, you get applied leadership, and finally, community and conversation. I don't want this just to be a podcast you listen to, I want it to be a community you belong to. That means more ways for you to interact, sharing your questions, your stories, your experiments in leadership and learning from each other along the way. So my commitment is this, to keep asking better questions, to keep bringing you inspiring voices and to keep challenging the status quo So together, we can create a world where people love coming to work as we close episode 300 I want to bring it back to you. Take a breath and sit with these questions for a moment. What kind of leader Am I becoming? How do people feel after interacting with me, valued or dismissed, energized or drained, trusted or controlled. If my team's experience of work was my legacy, would I be proud of it. Over the next week, I'd love you to reflect on these prompts. What is one story from my own life that I could share with my team to help me understand why our work matters? Where do I need to listen more and talk less? What's one small action I can take this week to make someone feel on my team, that they're seen, heard and valued, and how can I show someone empowerment and trust? Because at the end of the day, leadership is not about your title, your office or your LinkedIn profile. Leadership is about the human experience you create for the people around you. If this podcast has helped you in any way, if a guest's insight shifted your thinking, a story helped you through a hard day, if a reflection question changed how you lead I have two simple requests share this episode or your favorite episode with someone who's ready to grow as a leader, and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next, the next 100 episodes and the next evolution of this journey. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being part of The Leadership Project. Thank you for your courage to lead, and as always, be the leader who listens, be the leader who learns, and be the leader who leads with heart. I'm Mick Spiers, this has been episode 300 of The Leadership Project podcast, and I can't wait to see where we go together from here. You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode, and to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible? None of this happens without them around here. We believe leadership is a practice, not a position, that people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter, that the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app, and if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing until next time, lead with curiosity, courage and care.