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If you’re a senior leader who keeps noticing what your rising people aren’t doing yet, you might be measuring them against the wrong person. That person is you, twenty years later. David walks through the “apples to apples” comparison he now uses in his coaching. First, stop comparing a junior person to who you are today. Compare them to who you were at their age. Then ask the question that really matters for succession: are they on a growth trajectory that will take them past you? Humanergy is a leadership development firm that has worked with leaders and teams in real organizations since 2000. Learn more at humanergy.com. Watch, think about who on your team you might be measuring unfairly, and share it with a leader who’s building their bench. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

A newly promoted manager is leading a direct report who applied for the same job. She has 15 years at the company and is great at her work, the one-on-ones go well, and then she undermines the team's plans in meetings when her manager isn't there. Humanergy coaches Corey Fernandez and Jim Marshall talk through where empathy turns into enabling, how to set up accountability before the next miss, and how to help someone decide whether to recommit or move on. Humanergy has been doing leadership development and coaching since 2000; learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Succession planning usually gets assigned to HR, the CEO, or the board, and everyone else waits to be told what to do. That waiting is where succession plans stall. When someone else formally owns succession, it’s easy to treat it as their project and show up as a participant. Then a retirement gets announced, or a health issue forces a sudden exit, and the final weeks turn into a scramble to hand off work nobody was prepared to pick up. In this free Humanergy workshop, coach Corey Fernandez walks through five practices any leader can start on now, whether their exit is two years away or ten. Corey draws on his executive coaching work, including a two-year exit plan built with sticky notes on a wall and the way financial advisors introduce clients to their successors years in advance. Humanergy is a Michigan-based leadership development firm that has worked with leaders and teams since 2000. These workshops are free and run the second Wednesday of each month. Register at humanergy.com. Watch with your own role in mind, and pass it along to a colleague who’s carrying a lot of work only they know how to do. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

When you and a colleague are locked in opposing positions, the conflict usually gets worse, not better. In this short episode, David Wheatley walks through four steps from Humanergy’s Green Path: engage the right person directly, align on what success looks like, learn from each other’s perspectives, and coordinate next steps based on facts. He explains why this one practice has been the answer to many of the challenges leaders have brought to him in coaching recently.  Humanergy is a leadership development firm that helps organizations solve business problems by developing their leaders; learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

When plans keep changing during a period of rapid growth, it's easy to start wondering if you're the problem. Humanergy coaches Jim Marshall and Quay Eady take on a scenario from a director leading a team through a post-acquisition scale-up who is frazzled, defensive, and doubting herself. They use Humanergy's CIMA tool to separate what's in your control from what isn't, and share practical ways to plan for change, respond to new ideas without getting defensive, and bring your team into the change instead of pushing it onto them.  Humanergy has been doing leadership development and coaching since 2000. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

When a CEO leaves, the entire organization goes through the transition, and how the exit is handled shapes what the next leader inherits. In this second conversation on executive transitions, David Wheatley, Judy Brown, and Rick Eigenbrod talk about why sense-making has to start the day a departure is announced, how boards and outgoing CEOs can plan the narrative together, and what it takes for a transition to end well. They also share a family business handoff that worked against conventional wisdom and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld's four styles of leadership exits. Humanergy is a leadership development firm helping leaders and executive teams since 2000; learn more at humanergy.com. Link to 1st executive transitions conversation. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Three months of silence. A leadership group that doesn't seem to get along. A board meeting on the calendar that might explain everything, or might explain nothing at all. This week's scenario comes from someone stuck in exactly that gap: no information, no clarity, and a growing sense that something's happening without them. David Wheatley and Quay Eady dig into why silence gets filled with conjecture almost every time, what to actually say in the conversation that clears it up, and how a communication vacuum at the top usually traces back to something much more fixable than office politics: a delegation problem, a missing cadence of one-on-ones, or a leader who's simply overloaded. You'll walk away with a clearer way to think through uncertainty at work, not a script to read off. The Coaching Table is Humanergy's live coaching series, part of the Humanergy Leadership Podcast. Real scenarios, real coaches, no prep. Learn more about Humanergy's leadership development work at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Succession plans live in a binder nobody opens until someone quits, and by then it's out of date. Here's a two-part excise you can actually run this week.  In this episode, David Wheatley opens a four-part series on succession planning by skipping the expensive consulting version most companies pay for and never use again. Instead, he breaks it down to two tools built to actually get used - 2 Names, 3 Charts. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

A lot of leaders build their careers on being the expert in the room. What happens when that stops working? David Wheatley talks with Nikki Patterson about why, as AI makes information available to everyone instantly, the leaders who succeed won't be the ones who know the most. They'll be the ones who can build a team willing to challenge them, question the machine's output, and learn faster than the situation changes. They get into what Nikki calls the silence tax, the cost organizations pay when people can see a problem coming and don't feel safe enough to say so, Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, and what it actually takes to shift your own identity from expert to expert learner. Humanergy has spent over two decades helping leaders build stronger teams and better conversations. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Seven books. One summer. A few of them might change how you think about leadership. David Wheatley, co-founder of Humanergy and host of the Humanergy Leadership Podcast, wraps up the season with his annual summer reading list for leaders. This year's picks span decentralized leadership, AI, gender dynamics in the workplace, coaching philosophy, team performance, and how people build a life worth living. The books on the list: Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet — a classic on leader-leader culture that keeps coming back into the conversation for good reason. The AI-Driven Leader by Jeff Woods — the book Humanergy has been recommending all year for leaders trying to get a practical handle on AI. The Only Woman in the Room by Lisa Davis — not just for women. David interviewed Lisa earlier this season; this is a good companion listen. The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh — a look at what actually goes into building a winning culture, from the coach who rebuilt the 49ers. And It Was Beautiful by Phil Hay — the story of Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds, and a counterpoint to Walsh worth reading alongside it. What Great Teams Do Great by Humanergy — if you haven't read it yet, it's 98 pages and worth every one of them. What to Make of a Life by Jim Collins — his newest book. If you know Collins from Good to Great or Great by Choice, you know what to expect: rigorous, research-driven, and worth your time. Drop your own summer reading recommendations in the comments. Humanergy is a leadership development company based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

AI tools create a specific kind of trust problem on teams, and most leaders aren't sure what to name it or where it's coming from. In this Practical Field Notes episode, Mimi and David react to a Harvard Business Review piece by Jayshree Seth and Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and AI integration. They connect the article's ideas to what leaders are actually navigating in their organizations, including how to build learning loops that keep AI use transparent and how leaders can model the kind of openness that makes it safe for teams to question, challenge, and learn. Humanergy is a leadership development company that helps leaders and teams work better under real conditions. Learn more at humanergy.com. (Note: The HBR article is behind a paywall. HBR offers free monthly access, if you're out of free reads, you can still follow this conversation without it.) Link to article here: https://hbr.org/2026/02/how-to-foster-psychological-safety-when-ai-erodes-trust-on-your-team Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Managers know when a performance conversation is overdue. What stops them is not knowing what to say, or worrying the conversation will go sideways. In this free workshop, Humanergy coach Jim Marshall shares two practical tools: the WXYZ framework for giving specific, grounded feedback without triggering defensiveness, and Feed Need Seed Weed, a four-part structure for organizing accountability conversations from recognition through correction. If you're sitting on a conversation you've been delaying, this one's for you. Humanergy is a leadership development company that helps leaders work better and make better decisions in real organizations. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Three high-performing individual contributors got promoted to lead roles. All three are now miserable. The manager who promoted them is asking what to do. In this episode, Humanergy coaches John Barrett and Quay Eady work through exactly that scenario — why it happens, what the manager can do now, and what organizations consistently get wrong about developing people before they're promoted. The conversation covers a practical tool called FROM/TO for mapping where someone's strengths came from and what success looks like in their new role. Humanergy helps leaders and organizations work through real challenges like this one. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

When leaders ask "why," they often get defensiveness instead of dialogue, even when that's not what they intended. In this episode, David Wheatley explores why the word "why" tends to put people on the front foot and shares a simple language shift that changes the whole tone: replacing "why" with "what's causing that?" It's a small swap, but it opens conversations that might otherwise close down.  Humanergy is a leadership development firm dedicated to practical, human-centered leadership. Learn more at humanergy.com. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.

Most organizations prepare for system changes with FAQs and talking points. When Honor Credit Union switched its core banking platform overnight, 110,000 members woke up to something unfamiliar, and some of them were not happy about it. Jen Wagner and her social media team responded to nearly a thousand comments over two weeks. Not with scripted replies or copy-paste answers. With real people, talking to members like humans. The result was so striking that Honor's social team became the first-ever recipient of Humanergy's Green Path Award. In this episode of the Humanergy Leadership Podcast, David Wheatley talks with Jen about what actually made it work, months of preparation, a clear response framework, the mindset shift that kept the team energized, and why empathy is a practice, not a personality trait. If your team is heading into any kind of major change, this one's worth your time. Topics covered: How Honor's team prepared for and responded to a major core banking conversionThe three-step response structure that kept communication caring, honest, and directWhat it looks like to hire for empathy and then build systems around itWhy the most frustrating comments were actually the most valuable Humanergy is a leadership development company that helps teams do the hard work of leading well. Visit humanergy.com to learn more. Learn more about Humanergy's work: https://www.humanergy.com Join the Humanergy community on LinkedIn. Sign up for our FREE leadership workshops.