Positive Leadership

The voice in your head has been talking since before you finished this sentence. For most leaders it is the least managed instrument they own, and the most consequential.
Ethan Kross is the psychologist and author who has spent over two decades studying that inner voice. He directs the Emotion & Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, advises Fortune 500 leaders and Navy SEALs, and wrote the international bestsellers Chatter and Shift. He also discovered his single most-cited tool by using it on himself, at 3am, mid-spiral, when he caught himself typing "bodyguards for academics" into a search bar and said out loud: "Ethan, what are you doing?"
I came to this conversation with my own history with that voice. I spent my career in high-pressure rooms where the most important conversation was often the one running inside my own head, and nobody ever handed me the manual for it. Ethan has spent twenty-five years writing that manual, and he makes it practical: self-talk you can actually change, anxiety you can read instead of fear, emotions that become information. And as a new grandfather, I did not expect a conversation about the brain to end up teaching me so much about grace.
In our conversation, we explore:
→ Why your emotions are information to read, not problems to delete, and what changes the moment you believe that
→ Distanced self-talk: how the simple shift of using your own name reroutes the way your brain handles pressure
→ Why self-awareness is only step one, and the mental tools that have to follow it
→ The business case for mental fitness: how unmanaged emotion quietly consumes the attention your organisation is paying for
→ How a leader gives hard feedback from a secure base, and why leadership falters when we shy away from it
"This brain over here does not come with a user's manual." Ethan Kross, psychologist and author
If you have ever read to the end of a page and realised you absorbed none of it because your mind was somewhere else, this episode hands you the beginning of that missing manual.
RELATED EPISODES
Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks head coach (2021), Learning to "always compete": https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/9268299
Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google X (2021), Engineering happiness for yourself and others: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/8944613
Dr Caroline Leaf, neuroscientist (2024), Managing your mind: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/15018482
New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/
Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

Six months into her first management job, Anu Bharadwaj got the feedback no leader wants to hear: she was too intense, she pushed her team too hard. She was stunned. She was only asking them to do what she would do herself.
Anu Bharadwaj began at Microsoft building video games, then made a bold leap to Atlassian in 2014, where she rose from product lead on Jira to COO and then President. Along the way she shaped Team Anywhere, led one of the company's hardest cloud transformations, and kept returning to a single question: how do teams actually work better together?
I came to this conversation as someone who made the same early mistake she did. In my first years at Microsoft I was known as Mr Plus, always asking for more, always raising the bar, until coaching taught me the difference between driving people and leading them. Anu and I share a Microsoft DNA, and most of this episode felt like comparing notes.
In our conversation, we explore: 
→ Why leading people is never about you, and the manager feedback that taught her the hard way 
→ How a values exercise she runs with every team becomes the real source of psychological safety 
→ Energy management over time management, and why self-care is not selfish 
→ Why an AI rollout fails when leaders treat it as a tools problem instead of a human fear 
→ What an AI-native company actually looks like, and why judgment stays human
"When you lead people, it is not about you. It is about them. You want to understand what they want, and take them to a place they want to go." Anu Bharadwaj, former President of Atlassian
If you have ever pushed a team toward your finish line and wondered why they were not following, this conversation will stay with you.

RELATED EPISODES
Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks head coach (2021), Learning to "always compete": https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/9268299
Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer (2022), Empowering people to achieve more: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/10382268 
Ranjay Gulati (2023), Creating purpose-driven teams: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/12903145
New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/
Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

In 2011, Stéphane Bancel walked away from the security of leading a 6,000-person diagnostics company to join a startup of about 50 people, built on an idea most scientists had dismissed: that messenger RNA could become medicine. Almost everyone told him not to do it. He gave the bet roughly a five percent chance. Nine years later, that same bet helped the world face a pandemic in 63 days.
Stéphane Bancel is the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna. Under his leadership the company designed a COVID-19 vaccine on a computer within days of the genetic sequence being posted, delivered the first dose to a human just 63 days later, and scaled from zero manufacturing to a billion doses in twelve months. Today Moderna is building personalized cancer vaccines and using AI to reinvent how medicines are discovered and made.
This conversation sits right at the heart of what I believe about leadership. That the chief executive is really the chief energy officer. That the boldest decisions are rarely about appetite for risk, they are about the asymmetry between what you could give the world and what you could actually lose. Stéphane lives both, and he is refreshingly honest about the storms, the doubts and the mistakes along the way.
In our conversation, we explore: 
→ The five percent bet: how he weighed an enormous upside against a manageable downside, and why his wife was the only one who said yes 
→ What sailing without GPS taught him about staying calm when the storm hits, and why a storm always passes 
→ The 63-day sprint, and the Sunday phone call that saved the manufacturing of a billion doses 
→ Why he slowed a trial down so it would be a vaccine for the world, not a vaccine for white people 
→ The future he sees: personalized cancer vaccines, the human body mapped in silico, and why he calls chemotherapy tomorrow’s barbaric history
“I still believe that we have not invented yet our best drug.” Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
If you have ever faced a decision that everyone around you called too risky, this one is about how to think, and how to stay calm, when you choose to leap anyway.

🎧 Related Episodes: 
Pascal Soriot on the purpose-led culture that transformed AstraZeneca, and the assume-good-intent principle Stéphane says he shares: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/18782083
Satya Nadella on mission, mindset, and why the CEO has to own the technology shift: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/8966432
Bertrand Piccard on exploration and staying comfortable in the unknown: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/14487275
New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/
Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

Donna Hicks spent three decades at the world's hardest conflict tables and found one hidden injury beneath them all: a violation of human dignity. From the Middle East to Northern Ireland, she watched negotiations stall not over policy, but over something no one in the room had named. This episode is the word that changed everything, and the model she built around it.
Dr Donna Hicks, author of Leading with Dignity and Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, spent her career as a third party in unofficial diplomacy across the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Colombia and Northern Ireland. She co-facilitated the BBC series Facing the Truth alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and her earlier book, Dignity, reshaped how the world understands conflict, connection and leadership.
 
This one runs close to home for me. As a young boy from a Pied-Noir family — French people of European origin who had left Algeria after its independence — newly arrived in Nice, I was once told by a schoolmate to “get out of here.” I came home devastated. My father’s answer, that I should be proud of where I came from and that I had something real to give, was dignity restored long before either of us had a word for it.
In our conversation, we explore:
 → Why respect is earned but dignity is not, and how leaders who confuse the two quietly damage their teams
 → The ten elements of dignity, and the single one that 80% of employees say is violated most at work
 → What happened when the BBC sat victims and perpetrators face to face, and why healing did not require forgiveness
 → Why Donna now teaches dignity to eight-year-olds, and her advice to young leaders entering a harder world
 → Mandela consciousness: the three connections that rebuild dignity in any team, family or boardroom
"I don't believe we need to find common ground. I believe we need to find higher ground."
 - Dr Donna Hicks, Harvard University
If you have ever watched a meeting derail over something that was never really about the agenda, this conversation hands you the missing word, and a practical model for what to do next.
🎧 Related Episodes:
 Amy Edmondson on psychological safety, the dignity element 80% of employees say is violated most at work: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/15687150
 Stephen M.R. Covey on trust as the foundation of culture, and what sits beneath even trust: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/12252258
 Barbara Fredrickson on Love 2.0, and why dignity is the fastest path to genuine connection: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/9437036
New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/
Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

À 27 ans, il a marché seul jusqu'au bout de la Terre. Ce qu'il a trouvé là-bas n'était pas un sommet.
À 27 ans, Matthieu Tordeur devient le plus jeune explorateur au monde à rallier le pôle Sud à ski, en solitaire et sans ravitaillement. 1 150 kilomètres en 51 jours. Un traîneau de 115 kilos. Moins 50 degrés. Et la solitude la plus radicale qu'un être humain puisse choisir.
Né à Rouen, formé chez les scouts et nourri aux aventures de Tintin, Matthieu fait ses études à King's College London et à Sciences Po Paris avant de transformer une thèse de fin d'études en tour du monde en 4L, à travers 90 pays, pour donner une voix aux invisibles de la microfinance. À 27 ans, il atteint le pôle Sud. Aujourd'hui, il consacre ses expéditions à la science : il vient de rentrer d'« Under Antarctica », 4 000 kilomètres en kite-ski en 80 jours avec la glaciologue Heïdi Sevestre, sous l'égide de l'UNESCO et de la Décennie d'Action pour les Sciences Cryosphériques.
Sa conviction n'a jamais été d'accumuler des sommets. « Je ne suis pas un collectionneur de sommets », dit-il. Ce que Matthieu a découvert dans la solitude antarctique n'était pas un record, mais un pôle intérieur, la capacité de se rejoindre soi-même quand tout autour disparaît, et la conviction que toute traversée se sépare en deux niveaux : ce qu'on contrôle et ce qu'on doit lâcher.
Quatre routines apprises à -50°C qui tiennent à 9 heures du matin, dans n'importe quelle traversée professionnelle ou personnelle :
L'inconfort est temporaire. Les douleurs, les cloques, les courbatures, ça ne dure pas pour la vie.
Remets ton rêve de pôle Sud à la surface. Quand tout est difficile, retourne dans l'état d'esprit où tu rêvais ce projet.
Séquence la longue route en petits pas atteignables.
Lâche prise sur l'incontrôlable. La météo, la neige molle, ce ne sont pas tes leviers. Ta respiration, ton geste, ton alimentation, eux, le sont.
Cette conversation rejoint un fil que je porte depuis des années à travers Live for Good : comment aider chaque jeune à trouver sa propre boussole intérieure dans un monde qui les bombarde de distractions. Mes années chez Microsoft m'ont appris qu'aucune stratégie ne tient si elle n'est pas portée par des personnes qui savent pourquoi elles se lèvent le matin. 
Dans cette conversation, nous explorons :
Pourquoi Matthieu est parti seul, pas par défaut, mais comme un cadeau qu'il s'offrait à lui-même
La lettre de son père, à n'ouvrir qu'en cas d'abandon, qu'il a portée tout au long de l'expédition
Les quatre routines de leadership apprises au pôle Sud
« Under Antarctica » avec Heïdi Sevestre : transformer l'aventure en science climatique sous l'égide de l'UNESCO
Pourquoi il refuse l'image du collectionneur de sommets, et ce qu'est pour lui le vrai sommet
« L'inconfort, les douleurs, les cloques, les courbatures, c'est temporaire. Ça ne va pas durer pour la vie. »
 Matthieu Tordeur, explorateur polaire

🎧 Épisodes liés :
Bertrand Piccard, "Exploration and innovation toward sustainable future" 
Dr Nadia Medjad, "Neuroscience of effective leadership"
John Elkington, "Sustainability, Systems Thinking & Regenerative Business" 
New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/
Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.
🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf