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28 episodes

The Hard Call: If You Love Your People, Can You Let Them Go? Leadership Lessons with Jamie Ramsden
07/14/2026 | 19 mins.
Can real love for your people and the hard decision to let one of them go ever coexist? That's the paradox at the center of this bonus episode of A Podcast About Leadership, where host Jonathan Kirschner, CEO of AIIR Consulting, sits down with his close friend Jamie Ramsden — a former CEO with 25 years of international business experience, executive leadership coach, and author of Let's Go: How Great Leaders Shape the Future. Across a wide-ranging conversation touching life, love, and leadership, the two trade personal stories about the moments that test a leader's identity most: not the strategy decisions, but the human ones.
Failure Isn't the Opposite of Success — Jamie explains why the accomplishments people admire most are usually "hatched from failure," and why failure only becomes a gift when it's examined instead of avoided.
The Sleepless Night Before the First Firing — Jamie opens up about the distress of letting go of an employee for the first time, and the surprising clarity that followed once the decision was made.
Can You Love Someone and Still Let Them Go? — The conversation's central dilemma: true love is unconditional, but true leadership means actualizing a vision through others — even when that means prioritizing the business over an individual's feelings.
Culture Is What You Tolerate — Jonathan shares the costly lesson of giving an underperformer "one more quarter," and the two high performers he lost as a result.
Compassion and Hard Calls Aren't Opposites — Why the "how" matters more than the "what," and how leaders can treat people with empathy and sympathy while still making the tough calls no one else can make for them.
This bonus episode is for any leader who has ever hesitated to make a hard call out of fear of hurting someone they care about. Jamie and Jonathan make the case that real compassion isn't avoiding the hard conversation — it's how you show up inside it. To learn more about how AIIR Consulting helps leaders navigate the hardest calls in business and in life, visit aiirconsulting.com.
From Have-To to Want-To: What 50+ Years of Leadership Looks Like with Peter Arthur Smith
06/18/2026 | 1h 10 mins.
Most organizations are running on the wrong fuel — and they don't know it. The tools leaders reach for most instinctively — competition, incentives, fear, measurement — may be the very things quietly killing the culture they're trying to build.
Peter Arthur Smith has spent more than five decades studying, practicing, and quietly refining a theory of leadership that cuts against nearly everything business schools teach. A former British Army captain turned organizational consultant, Smith founded Leadership Solutions in Manhattan in 1994 and has advised leaders across nearly ninety countries. In this episode of A Podcast About Leadership, host Jonathan Kirschner, CEO of AIIR Consulting, sits down with Smith to explore the ideas behind his forthcoming book, The Enlightened Leader.
Have To vs. Want To — Smith's central argument: most organizations operate on extrinsic pressure (his SIGFAM model — competition, incentives, goals, fear, accountability, measurement), when the highest-performing cultures are built on intrinsic motivators like purpose, camaraderie, and autonomy.
The Five Curses of Conventional Management — Bureaucracy, hierarchy, efficiency obsession, negative messaging, and corruption — Smith names the forces that quietly hollow out organizations, and offers a concrete antidote to each.
Periscope Time — Why the most important discipline a leadership team can develop is a structured, recurring practice of looking beyond today — and exactly how to build it.
Leading from the Center, Not the Front — Drawing on military history and his own experience commanding troops, Smith makes the case that the most effective leaders are orchestrators, not heroes — and what happens when that distinction collapses.
AI as a Leadership Symptom — A striking provocation: the rise of AI as a workforce replacement may be less about technology than about leaders who never learned to lead people in the first place.
If you've ever suspected that the pressure-driven management culture around you is producing compliance but not commitment, this conversation will give you language — and a framework — to change it. The gap between conventional management and enlightened leadership is not abstract. It is the difference between an organization that winds itself up and one that slowly runs down.
To learn more about how AIIR Consulting helps leaders build resilient, high-performing teams, visit aiirconsulting.com.
TOPGUN Leadership: Lessons from Naval Aviation's Elite
06/04/2026 | 1h 9 mins.
What separates the best from everyone else isn't talent — it's what they do with failure. At the Navy's elite TOPGUN school, thirty percent of training flights end in failure by design. The question is never whether you'll fall short. The question is how you respond when you do.
In this conversation, host Jonathan Kirschner, CEO of AIIR Consulting, welcomes three veterans of naval aviation to A Podcast About Leadership: Mike "Wizzard" McCabe, a former Top Gun instructor, J. Todd Ross, who served as Top Gun's intelligence officer after nearly four years of flying in the backseat of an F-14, Traci Ross, one of the very first women to deploy on a U.S. aircraft carrier in a combat role. All three are now executive coaches who bring the culture of carrier aviation directly into the boardroom.
"We, Not Me" as a Culture Strategy — Top Gun's legendary patch means nothing if you're playing for yourself; Wizzard breaks down why culture always defeats tactics, and how one founding principle has held for five decades.
The Top Gun Debrief — Goods and others, never strengths and weaknesses: J. Todd unpacks the debrief framework that built a learning culture across an entire military branch — and why civilian organizations still resist it.
The Weight of Being First — Traci Ross on carrying the burden of representation, the isolation of being the only woman in a squadron, and why that experience made her a better coach for leaders under scrutiny.
Listen, Learn, Then Lead — Why Wizzard's three-word sequence is deliberately ordered, and what happens to organizations when leaders skip the first two steps.
Crisis as a Leadership Laboratory — J. Todd Ross on his assignment after 9/11, and why being physically present — with no agenda except care — is sometimes the only leadership that matters.
If you lead a team and have wondered why excellence is so hard to sustain, this episode offers a precise and practical answer. The culture that built TOPGUN can be built anywhere — and these three coaches will show you how.
To learn more about how AIIR Consulting helps leaders build resilient, high-performing teams, visit aiirconsulting.com.
Bricks, Culture & The Building Blocks of Leadership with Brickworks' Steve Bell & Jamie Ramsden
05/21/2026 | 1h 8 mins.
What does a brick — one of humanity's oldest building materials — have to teach us about leading through disruption, integration, and change? The answer turns out to be more than you'd expect, and it starts with the paradox at the heart of great leadership: enduring strength combined with the willingness to adapt.
Steve Bell is President of Brickworks North America, the US subsidiary of Australia's largest brick manufacturer — a company producing over 300 million bricks a year across eight facilities. His path to the top is anything but conventional: Steve came up through HR, which gives him a rare lens on people, culture, and what it actually takes to build an organization that lasts. He joins Jonathan Kirschner, CEO of AIIR Consulting, on A Podcast About Leadership alongside Jamie Ramsden — former CEO, author of How to Shape a Better Future, and one of AIIR's elite executive coaches — who has coached Steve through the transition from trusted advisor to final decision-maker.
Culture Is Never a Finished Project — Steve and Jamie dismantle the dangerous myth that M&A integration has an end date, and explain why treating culture like a spreadsheet exercise is the fastest path to silent organizational collapse.
From HR Advisor to the Hot Seat — Steve reflects on what the move from HR leader to president actually cost him psychologically, and why the hardest shift wasn't operational knowledge — it was learning to own the decision.
Humble, Hungry, and Even-Keeled — Jamie unpacks the three qualities he looks for in a leader worth betting on, and explains why the most dangerous executive in any room is the one who needs the credit.
Compassion Without Paralysis — Both Steve and Jamie confront the uncomfortable truth about tolerating the wrong person in the wrong role, and why the truly compassionate act is often the hardest one.
The Three Domains of Sustainable Leadership — Steve shares the personal framework he uses to keep work, family, and self from falling out of balance — and why all three require active investment, not just good intentions.
This one is for any leader who has ever confused loyalty with leadership, or mistaken a quiet team for an aligned one. You'll finish this conversation with a clearer sense of what it means to build something that lasts — in business, and in life.
To learn more about how AIIR Consulting helps leaders build resilient, high-performing teams, visit aiirconsulting.com.
When Culture Is the Strategy: Lessons from Elite Leaders in HR
05/05/2026 | 1h 3 mins.
The CHRO role has been quietly transforming — not in the gradual, incremental way of most professional evolution, but in a sharp, compressed shift that has redrawn what it means to lead people inside a major organization. The question is no longer whether HR belongs in the room where strategy gets made. The question is whether HR leaders are ready for what that actually demands.
Jonathan Kirschner sits down with three accomplished voices in the field: Maxine Carrington, Chief People Officer at Northwell Health, Bill Strahan, EVP of Human Resources at Comcast, and John Touey, Managing Partner of Trilogy Talent Advisors. The result is one of the most candid and substantive conversations about the CHRO role you're likely to hear.
From Functional to Enterprise Leader - The CHRO has moved from managing the competition for talent to sitting alongside the CFO and COO in the highest-stakes business decisions; John Touey explains why this shift has fundamentally changed what boards are asking for.
Culture as an Enabling Force - Maxine Carrington makes the case that culture isn't a feeling or a values poster — it's the infrastructure that allows organizations to move fast, absorb shock, and do things they never thought possible, as Northwell proved during COVID.
What M&A Gets Wrong - Both Carrington and Strahan share hard-won lessons on why cultural due diligence has to come before policy alignment, org charts, and branding — and what it costs when it doesn't.
The AI Reckoning - The panel surfaces the uncomfortable truth underneath all the AI enthusiasm: organizations risk hollowing out the human judgment they need most, right at the moment they're being told to automate faster.
Leading Teams Into an Uncertain Future - Touey's parting challenge lands hard: your people are being trained for jobs that won't exist in five years, and it's on HR leadership to see that clearly and act now.
This episode is for anyone who leads people — or leads leaders — and wants to think more honestly about what that responsibility requires in 2026 and beyond.
To learn more about how AIIR Consulting helps leaders build resilient, high-performing teams, visit aiirconsulting.com.

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About A Podcast About Leadership

Leadership has the power to shape the future — of work and of the world. But in a period of history increasingly defined by complexity, uncertainty, and change, the skills and mindsets leaders need to succeed are shifting faster than ever. A Podcast About Leadership faces this challenge head-on, offering the insights and inspiration leaders need to navigate change and shape a better future.Each episode, we speak with leaders and leading thinkers in business, leadership, psychology, neuroscience, and human performance. Together, we explore the challenges leaders face today— from leading through volatility and uncertainty to developing the empathy, resilience, and strategic vision required to thrive in the years ahead.Whether you’re an individual leader looking to increase your impact or a human resources (HR), talent, or learning and development leader shaping the future of leadership across your organization, A Podcast About Leadership has the information, inspiration, and practical application you need.Meet the HostsDr. Jonathan Kirschner is the founder and CEO of AIIR Consulting, a global authority on executive coaching and leadership development. A psychologist and entrepreneur, Jonathan has nearly two decades of experience helping leaders at the world’s most respected organizations accelerate performance, transform cultures, and unlock human potential. His expertise sits at the intersection of behavioral science, business strategy, and technology, making him a sought-after advisor to executives navigating complexity and change.Dr. Joy Nissen is a psychologist and seasoned executive passionate about helping leaders unlock their full potential and accelerate business performance. Joy brings both scholarly rigor and deep human empathy to her work, and has a unique ability to translate psychological insight into practical strategies that drive organizational results. Her coaching has shaped C-suite leaders, rising executives, and high-potential talent, making her a trusted voice for anyone serious about leadership growth.Presented by AIIR ConsultingAIIR Consulting is a global leadership development firm trusted by Fortune 500 companies and forward-thinking organizations across industries. With a foundation in psychology and a commitment to measurable business impact, AIIR helps leaders and teams excel in today’s complex world. From executive coaching to team effectiveness to leadership development at scale, AIIR delivers solutions that enable organizations to thrive. You can learn more at www.aiirconsulting.com.

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