Welcome to Your Leadership Podcast

“Your Leadership Podcast” is about you and your leadership journey. Co-hosts Kathy Edersheim and Mike Madison take a conversational approach, making leadership practices relevant in new ways, no matter where you are or want to be. They blend big picture questions with ground level explorations and takeaways that can be put into practice today. And classic leadership skills – vision, strategy, voice, team-building, collaboration. emotional intelligence among them – come in for re-thinking in the era of AI and data.

HOSTS

Kathy Edersheim is the founder and president of Impactrics, a global consulting practice that focuses on nonprofit governance, and the author of Connect, Engage, Thrive: The Art of Alumni Relations (2024).

Your Leadership Podcast is Kathy’s first podcasting venture.

Michael Madison is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies governance in knowledge and information-focused settings, and he has been teaching and writing about leadership for more than a dozen years. He is chair of the board of a responsible AI nonprofit organization and previously chaired a global nonprofit service enterprise. From 2018 to 2023, he co-hosted The Future Law Podcast, a show that explored all of law’s futures.

CONTACT US

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RECENT EPISODES

SEASON 2 – FALL 2025 / WINTER 2026

ESSAYS

While Your Leadership Podcast fueled up for Season 2, co-hosts Kathy Edersheim and Michael Madison kept the momentum going with short essays based what we learned during Season 1.

Leadership As Letting Go (September 3, 2025)

A leader is often pictured as the person who rolls up their sleeves first, yet leaders often shine by not doing the work personally. Equally important: not only is it important for leaders to empower and support those around them, and to find the best person for the job, but also leaders can undermine their own leadership role by taking on too many tasks themselves.

Leadership As Letting Go

A leader is often pictured as the person who rolls up their sleeves first, yet leaders often shine by not doing the work personally. Equally important: not only is it important for leaders to empower and support those around them, and to find the best person for the job, but also leaders can undermine their own leadership role by taking on too many tasks themselves.

Delegating as leadership

Effective delegation is not shirking; it is resource allocation. Leaders who ask others to act assume and reinforce their leadership, sometimes formally, sometimes informally.

Delegating effectively is a key to one of the primary functions of effective leadership: ensuring that everyone in the organization is focused on the group’s shared purposes. Handing off tasks to capable colleagues does not mean a loss of control. It means that the leader has freed up mental bandwidth for scanning the horizon, spotting risks, and sustaining momentum – classic leadership roles.

Reading the room

Context determines which stance – doing or delegating – earns trust in the leader. In a volunteer setting, stepping forward to draft the agenda or set up the meeting room can legitimize an informal leader; in a boardroom, the same act might signal that you have not yet learned to leverage the team. The so-called “note-taking trap” is a perfect illustration: the person recording meeting minutes gains influence over the record but sacrifices real-time participation in the debate.

Leaders should be aware of trade-offs between doing and delegating, in order to avoid losing or diluting their leadership authority.

Expertise sets the delegation boundary

Delegation works best when assignments match expertise. A leader need not be the top technician yet must know who the top technician is and when that their know-how is critical. Delegation done well realigns authority with competence, raising the group’s ceiling without sacrificing the leader’s relevance.

The career calculus of pushing back

Corporate settings add stakes: someone who aspires to leadership but refuses a direct assignment in favor of delegating can look agile (good) or insubordinate (bad). Someone in that position should weigh the motivation behind the request. Is this a deliverable that simply needs to be completed, or is it a stretch test of your judgment?

Leaders who “look around corners” anticipate the political fallout of each option and frame their response accordingly. They offer a plan, not an excuse.

“What does this actually mean for me?”

Both experienced leaders and those stepping into new roles can take away these practical lessons:

1. Audit the task. Is this core to your unique value, or could someone else excel and elevate the outcome?
2. Match talent to stakes. Delegate outward when deep expertise or fresh perspective will raise quality.
3. Signal ownership, not abandonment. Stay accountable for scope, deadlines, and support even after handing off.
4. Read the context corners. In high-stakes corporate asks, propose delegation only with a rationale that advances both the mission and your credibility.

Leadership is less about how much you personally can carry than about how well you arrange the load for collective stride. Choose to do when doing teaches, inspires, or accelerates; choose to delegate when another’s expertise can advance the goal better than your own hands-on effort.

Leadership and Expertise: How Leaders Weave Them Together (August 25, 2025)

Leadership and expertise often share the stage, but they do not play the same role in the organizational drama. Think of leadership as the art of guiding movement: setting direction, making calls, reading the room. Expertise is mastery of the material that movement relies on. To borrow a different metaphor, leadership is the craft of charting direction, mobilizing people, and deciding under uncertainty; expertise is deep command of subject matter, fueling sound judgment. Whatever the story, leaders have to weave them together, recognizing how they interrelate, overlap, and at times diverge.

Leadership and Expertise: How Leaders Weave Them Together

Leadership and expertise often share the stage, but they do not play the same role in the organizational drama. Think of leadership as the art of guiding movement: setting direction, making calls, reading the room. Expertise is mastery of the material that movement relies on. To borrow a different metaphor, leadership is the craft of charting direction, mobilizing people, and deciding under uncertainty; expertise is deep command of subject matter, fueling sound judgment. Whatever the story, leaders have to weave them together, recognizing how they interrelate, overlap, and at times diverge.

Core capabilities for leaders

Every leader needs to develop three core capabilities: decision-making, strategic direction, and wisdom – sometimes called judgment, street smarts, or savvy. These are portable skills: leaders can carry them from a shoe company to a nonprofit or a paratrooper platoon. They anchor a leader’s authority even in new or unfamiliar domains.

Basing capabilities on expertise

Putting those capabilities into practice, effectively, requires subject matter expertise, the “knowing” that goes with “doing.” Expertise deepens judgment by giving leaders a sharper picture of what is possible, what is risky, and what excellence looks like. Phil Knight, founder and long-time leader of Nike, made his way from accountant (and runner) to “Shoe Dog” – the title of his autobiography – as he absorbed the craft of designing and making athletic shoes. Having his feet on the ground, so to speak, helped Knight make smarter growth decisions for company. Similarly, Tom Kolditz’s research on “in extremis leadership” in the military makes the same point, starkly: an officer commanding a cohort of paratroopers is a more effective leader if the officer can make jumps with his team.

The feedback loop

Expertise doesn’t always come first. Leaders who start light on technical depth can and should build it by listening to frontline experience, testing ideas, and iterating strategy. A leader’s vision and skill with operations and logistics may get an organization under way. Technical mastery can follow as experience and scale teach ways to improve. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink popularized this feedback loop: as technical competence rises, decision speed improves; pattern recognition accelerates sound judgment.

When leaders stumble

But feedback loops work well only if leaders keep learning and stay alert to when the old pattern no longer fits. Pattern-locked expertise can calcify. Leaders who cling to yesterday’s mental model risk misreading new signals and drifting into ornamental or ineffective roles. Likewise, organizations that hire “celebrity CEOs” for their résumé of past wins sometimes discover that portable leadership skills alone cannot compensate for a shallow grasp of the new company’s technologies, markets, or culture.

“What does this actually mean for me?”

Both experienced leaders and those stepping into new roles can take away these practical lessons:

Update your priors. Revisit old rules of thumb whenever the environment shifts; agility and adaptability protect leaders from expertise ossification.

Audit your toolkit. Ask whether a stalled initiative stems from weak decisions (leadership gap) or fuzzy facts (expertise gap).

Schedule deliberate immersion. Walk the factory floor, literally or metaphorically, shadow users, or code alongside engineers – whatever “jumping with the troops” looks like in your world.

Build a two-way ladder. Pair high-potential domain experts with seasoned leaders so each climbs toward the other’s strengths.Some long text that will be expanded when the show more button is clicked by the visitor.

Lessons on Leading: Followership (August 12, 2025)

When we talk about leadership, we usually focus on leaders themselves — their skills, capabilities, experiences, decisions, and influence. But leadership isn’t a solitary practice. Leaders operate in groups. To borrow a page from the research of Professor Robert Kelley, leaders depend on followers, and good leadership depends on good followership.

Lessons on Leading: Followership

When we talk about leadership, we usually focus on leaders themselves — their skills, capabilities, experiences, decisions, and influence. But leadership isn’t a solitary practice. Leaders operate in groups. To borrow a page from the research of Professor Robert Kelley, leaders depend on followers, and good leadership depends on good followership.

What’s new about followership?

A recent Gallup Global Leadership Report flipped the script by asking followers what they want most from leaders. The top answer? Hope,even more than trust, compassion, or stability. That finding speaks volumes about the follower-leader dynamic and how important it is to understand what followers are actually seeking.

It also raises the deeper question: What does it mean to be a good follower? How can leaders create and use “hope” productively?

Hope means learning to lead

Whether as a CEO, a nonprofit director, or the founder of a grassroots movement, leadership only becomes real when others choose to follow. Sometimes, followers are assigned, as in a corporate structure. Sometimes, they’re earned, as in a startup or a movement. Either way, a leader’s influence only matters when others respond to it. Hope alone isn’t enough. Neither is simple direction.

Being a good leader means creating conditions for people to contribute meaningfully, to act on hope. That includes helping followers grow, listening to their input, and encouraging them to develop their own leadership capabilities as part of the organization’s shared purpose.

Followership is a role, not a status

Just as someone can lead in one setting and follow in another, followership is not a fixed identity. It’s role, and it’s a vital one. You can be a leader at work and a follower in your community group. You might lead a project and follow a team strategy.

Good followers are engaged. They bring voice, values, and ideas. They support leaders when the mission is right, and they challenge leaders when challenging is needed. Constructive criticism, delivered ethically and respectfully, is a critical part of healthy organizations. Followership includes honesty, integrity, and sometimes even dissent.

How voice matters

“Voice,” in leadership terms, means who you are and what you do as well as what you say, and how. Words aren’t everything; not all people with voices are leaders. A speechwriter, for example, helps shape messages without leading the organization. Likewise, followers can find and use their voice in powerful, supportive ways beyond speaking with integrity. Voice among followers can add depth and strength to leadership in different ways, whether by representing the organization externally, mentoring others, or simply reinforcing a shared vision. Leadership voices set direction, for example, and mentor voices nurture others. Both can live among followers. Both help sustain a culture of shared purpose.

Followers can be both “active” and “passive”

Followership is not a binary of good or bad. Some followers are more active, especially in new or evolving organizations where roles are fluid and contributions from many followers are critical. Others are more reserved, especially in larger, more stable institutions. What matters is aligning action and attitude with the organization’s values and mission.

“What does this actually mean for me?”

Both experienced leaders and those stepping into new roles can take away these practical lessons:

Leadership should be “other directed.” When Gallup tells us that hope is what people want most from leaders, it reminds us that leadership is relational. It’s about building something people believe in. Followers fuel that vision. They carry it into teams, communities, and the future.

Lessons on Leading: Ethics (July 7, 2025)

Stories about leadership in popular culture often focus on results. Does that mean anything goes in leadership, as long as it works?

Absolutely not. Leadership is “about” communities, organizations, and shared purpose, but at its core leadership is also importantly, deeply personal, and one of its essential dimensions is ethics. Ethical leadership isn’t just a “nice-to-have.”

A leader should have and know their own moral core. That’s the foundation of long-term impact, organizational trust, and personal integrity. That doesn’t make it easy. In fact, ethical leadership is often harder than results-driven leadership, because it requires knowing and doing the right thing even when it costs you in the short term – and sometimes longer.

Lessons on Leading: Ethics

Stories about leadership in popular culture often focus on results. Does that mean anything goes in leadership, as long as it works?

Absolutely not. Leadership is “about” communities, organizations, and shared purpose, but at its core leadership is also importantly, deeply personal, and one of its essential dimensions is ethics. Ethical leadership isn’t just a “nice-to-have.”

A leader should have and know their own moral core. That’s the foundation of long-term impact, organizational trust, and personal integrity. That doesn’t make it easy. In fact, ethical leadership is often harder than results-driven leadership, because it requires knowing and doing the right thing even when it costs you in the short term – and sometimes longer.

The temptation of “effective” but unethical leadership

In fast-moving or high-pressure environments, it can be tempting to bend the rules. Leaders may feel pressured to manipulate data, cut corners, or ignore red flags, all in the name of short-term gain or a “good” outcome. But the methods matter just as much as the result. Doing the wrong thing to get the right result is still wrong.

Ethics, meet systems

Ethical leadership isn’t just about personal virtue. It’s about building an organizational culture that supports honesty, transparency, and responsibility at every level. Leaders can’t just be ethical. They have to build environments that expect ethics.

Play the long game

Being ethical may slow leaders down. It may cost deals, promotions, or popularity. But leadership means a long game. Ethical leadership builds organizations that endure, reputations that last, and teams that thrive. Leadership isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about having the courage to stay the course. doing the right thing the right way, even when it’s hard.

“What does this actually mean for me?”

Both experienced leaders and those stepping into new roles can take away these practical lessons:
1. Structure matters. Build an organization and an organizational culture that expects, values, and rewards ethical behavior.
That means:
Creating systems that catch small problems before they become large ones.
Encouraging dissent and transparency over blind loyalty.
Rewarding behavior that aligns with values, not just outcomes.
2. Take the long view. Ethical leadership builds organizations that endure, reputations that last, and teams that thrive. Leadership isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about having the courage to stay the course. doing the right thing the right way, even when it’s hard..

Why and How Context is Crucial (June 24, 2025)

Leadership is not one-size-fits-all. Whether you’re stepping into the executive director role of a nonprofit, leading a team in a corporate setting, serving in government, or volunteering in a community group, leadership styles and strategies that work in one setting may be off-base in another. Our point is simple but powerful: leadership is always contextual.

Why and How Context is Crucial

Leadership is not one-size-fits-all. Whether you’re stepping into the executive director role of a nonprofit, leading a team in a corporate setting, serving in government, or volunteering in a community group, leadership styles and strategies that work in one setting may be off-base in another. Our point is simple but powerful: leadership is always contextual.

What we mean by “context”

Leadership is – and should be – influenced by:

Entity type (nonprofit, for-profit, government, community)
Organizational scale (small, medium, large)
Formality of structure (rigid hierarchy vs. flat network; durable vs. transitory; fluid v. fixed)
Stage of development (startup, growth, maturity, or transformation)

A founder may need to be visionary and hands-on. A nonprofit leader may have to focus on collaborative decision-making and mission alignment. A public sector manager may emphasize accountability and transparency. Good leaders don’t just show up with a style. They diagnose their context and respond accordingly.

Context, meet structure

Even in flexible or flat organizations, structure matters. “Structure” doesn’t mean bureaucracy. It means clarity. Leaders either inherit structures or build them. While those structures evolve over time, no organization can thrive without foundations: systems, communication pathways, roles, and norms.

Structure allows a visionary leader to scale. It enables mentorship and team development throughout an organization. It helps a leader stay grounded amid uncertainty and change. And a wise leader recognizes when structure itself must shift to serve a new purpose.

The moral compass

Across all settings, leaders need a moral compass, a guiding set of values that aligns the internal culture of an organization with external expectations of fairness, responsibility, and integrity. Context may change how a leader applies those values, but it should never erase them. The best leaders earn trust not just through competence but by standing for something larger than themselves and rallying the rest of the group around that shared purpose

“What does this actually mean for me?”

Both experienced and new leaders can take away these practical lessons:

Assess your context. Ask: What does this organization need now—visionary energy? Stability? Transformation?

Build (or adapt) structure. Even informal teams benefit from routines, clear goals, and roles. Structure is not the enemy of agility. It makes agility possible.

Lead with values. Your voice, decisions, and culture-building should reflect a consistent ethical stance, one that can hold up both now and in hindsight.

Support others. Strong leaders cultivate other strong leaders. Build a leadership pipeline.

Why Your Leadership Podcast matters (June 9, 2025)

Leadership is one of the most talked-about topics in business, education, and community life. We’re flooded with frameworks, buzzwords, and success stories. Amid all of that, we aim to make leadership real, relatable, and actionable, for both experienced leaders and those just stepping into new roles, no matter their title.

Why Your Leadership Podcast matters

Leadership is one of the most talked-about topics in business, education, and community life. We’re flooded with frameworks, buzzwords, and success stories. Amid all of that, we aim to make leadership real, relatable, and actionable, for both experienced leaders and those just stepping into new roles, no matter their title.

“What does this actually mean for me?”

We don’t try to reinvent the leadership wheel. We don’t have a new theory or a framework. We focus on distilling what’s already out there – the big ideas, the lived experiences, and the research-backed practices – in ways that are easy to grasp and easier to apply.

It’s not about oversimplifying complex ideas. It’s about making them accessible and relevant. We use clear language, real examples, and a conversational tone that makes it feel like you’re sitting in on a conversation between two people who happen to care deeply about helping others lead well.

We come back again and again to a handful of key themes. We’ll start with them below and elaborate in later essays.

Key theme #1: leadership lives in context

Leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept. What works in a startup may not fly in a 100-year-old nonprofit. Leading a team of volunteers is different from leading a department with KPIs and annual reviews. Leadership means different things in different settings, depending on where you are, who you’re working with, and what you’re trying to achieve. The challenge is knowing not only “what good leaders do” but also “what does this leader need to do here?”

Key theme #2: leadership is personal

Leadership is about people. On the podcast, we talk about the personal side of leadership— the inner work, the importance of ethics and integrity, the relationships, the conflicts and tough moments, and the small wins that add up over time. Leaders have to practice what they preach: to respect the intelligence of the listener and also to respect their time and reality. Leaders do not need to be flashy. They aim to be useful.

Key theme #3: leadership lives beyond the corner office

We adopt an inclusive definition of leadership. Leadership is not just for executives or people with “president” or “director” in their title. Leadership is anyone who’s trying to make a positive impact—at work, in a community, or even in their family. But we do not assume that our listeners have control over everything. Most of us are operating within constraints, including time, resources, and history. Focus on what you can do, right now, from where you are. That is as true of followers as of leaders. Neither can thrive without the other.