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What if leadership were less about being impressive and more about being useful?

Robin Goad joins me to get painfully honest about how most of us learn leadership the wrong way, then spend years unlearning it. She’s a technology executive at Amazon Web Services, a speaker and coach, and the author of Girl By Birth, Woman By Fire, and she brings a clear message: leading well is selfless, practical, and deeply human.

We talk about what it looks like to protect your team in corporate America, from taking the heat when things go wrong to giving your people real ownership when things go right. Robin explains why compassion at work is about guardrails — clear boundaries, consistent accountability, and earned trust that create the conditions for resilience, better performance, and healthier teams.

Along the way, she shares the leadership question she wishes every manager would ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up, and how can I help you get there?” That single sentence changes career development, retention, and the honesty people bring to work.

We close with a look at organizational culture and employee feedback, including a simple daily mechanism at Amazon that surfaces anonymous insights and makes leaders pay attention. If you care about compassionate leadership, employee engagement, and building trust inside big systems, this one will stick with you.

Robin Goad is a technology executive at Amazon Web Services (AWS), speaker, and coach who helps ambitious women master the corporate game without losing themselves. She is the author of Girl by Birth. Woman by Fire, with practical strategies for thriving in corporate America and in life. Her message is simple and bold: you can achieve extraordinary success without sacrificing your soul.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

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