Courage to Advance with Kim Bohr

The 5 Culture Challenges Every CPO Is Still Struggling With

Most culture problems don't surprise anyone. That's the uncomfortable truth at the center of Scott McInnes's research - a study of Chief People Officers across Ireland that set out to identify what's actually blocking progress from the culture organizations have to the one they need. When Scott debriefed a group of respondents on his findings, the room didn't react with shock. They responded with wry smiles. Same stuff, different year.
Scott founded Inspiring Change in Dublin in 2017 after 25 years working in internal  communications and organizational culture across Ireland, the UK, and Europe. His clients include Boots Ireland, the FAI, Enterprise Ireland, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He's also the host of the Building Better Cultures podcast, with more than 150 episodes on culture, leadership, and engagement.
In this episode of Courage to Advance, Scott and host Kim Bohr compare what his Irish CPO research found with what SparkEffect's own US-based research is surfacing - and the overlap is striking. Geography changes very little. The five challenges Scott named are just as present in American organizations as in Irish ones.
What You'll Discover:
Why the same five culture challenges keep showing up decade after decade
How senior leaders cast a "long shadow" through behavior, not announcements
Why middle managers are the real culture carriers, as "chief sense makers"
How reframing "difficult conversations" as developmental ones changes everything
Why return-to-office mandates won't fix disconnection
Why trust is an outcome of behavior, not a value you can declare
Scott McInnes: 
"I might not know your values. But I can see your behaviors."
"Trust isn't a value. It's an outcome of us doing the things that we say we'll do."
Kim Bohr: 
"Most organizations know they have a culture problem long before they do anything about it. And the longer they wait, the more it costs them in talent, in performance, and in trust."
"If we can reframe difficult conversations as developmental conversations or support conversations, it changes everything about how people show up."
 
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and explores how leaders are building the organizations they wish existed. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe and listen at https://couragetoadvancepodcast.com

The Bravest Thing a Leader Can Say Right Now Is “I Don’t Know”

Most leadership advice assumes everyone on your team is okay. What happens when they aren’t? 
That gap between caring deeply and not knowing how to help is where most leaders live right now. Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer names what’s underneath it. Leaders aren’t undertrained on strategy. They’re undertrained on what to do when the people they lead are struggling. Many try to skip straight to healing without first stabilizing the team. Others mistake ongoing wear and tear for a one-time crisis and treat it as such. 
Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer is a Harvard-trained psychologist, author of Journey Through Trauma, and co-founder of the Center for Trauma and Leadership. She has spent two decades helping organizations including the CDC, hospital systems, forest service firefighters, and Alaska Native communities lead through the kinds of seasons most leadership programs don’t prepare anyone for. 
In this episode, Gretchen and Kim Bohr talk about the difference between trauma and moral injury, why community is the antidote leaders keep missing, what real vulnerability sounds like in a one-on-one, and why the survival strategies that get people promoted are often the same ones that hold them back as senior leaders. 
What You’ll Discover: 
The three situations every leader faces and why misreading which one you’re in costs you the team 
Why mission-driven leaders are the most likely to burn out, and what they tend to get wrong about helping 
The distinction between psychological trauma and moral injury, and why moral injury can’t be healed alone 
What real vulnerability sounds like in a one-on-one when a leader genuinely doesn’t have the answer 
Why perfectionism, hyper-independence, and refusing to delegate become liabilities at senior levels 
How to help a team in survival mode build base camp before asking them to climb anything 
Why stress management isn’t a perk. It’s how leaders stay capable enough to lead. 
Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer: 
“Moral injury is not a psychological disorder. It is a wound of identity. It’s when I don’t get to behave in a way that’s congruent with my values and with who I believe myself to be.” Kim Bohr: "In our research around the state of organizational trust, psychological safety is one of the most fragile domains we measured, especially during disruption."
Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about the work of leading people through real complexity. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. Subscribe for new episodes weekly at couragetoadvancepodcast.com. 

The Courage to Be Visible Before You Need to Be

Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect and host of Courage to Advance, sees it all the time: leaders who don’t think about professional visibility until they’re forced to. A layoff, a reorg, a pivot they didn’t plan for. And suddenly they’re trying to build a presence from scratch on a platform they’ve been ignoring. That’s not just inconvenient. That’s starting from zero when the stakes are at their highest.
The common pattern is to treat professional presence as someone else’s job. The marketing team handles the brand. The company page is there. But the reality is simpler than that: people trust people, not logos. Company pages generate almost no real engagement. And a leader who only shows up when they need something is working from the same deficit as someone who only calls a friend when they need a favor. You feel the difference. So does everyone else.
In this episode, Kim sits down with Nina Froriep, a visual storyteller, Emmy-winning producer, and LinkedIn content strategist who spent the early part of her career producing for Oprah and winning awards in documentary filmmaking. When the industry shifted, she turned that storytelling skill toward helping business leaders show up authentically through her firm, Clockwise Productions.
What You’ll Discover
Why leaders who wait until a crisis to build their network are already behind
How Nina’s move from Oprah to LinkedIn showed her that less production builds more real connection
The “List of 25”: a simple way to keep professional relationships warm before you need them
Why sharing personal things you care about (a dog, a photo exhibit, a place you love) actually builds professional credibility
How LinkedIn’s algorithm penalizes inconsistency and why once a week is plenty
Why engagement, not posting, is the real growth strategy right now
“If we create a void, it will be filled with conjecture. So give them something about you personally.” — Nina Froriep
Courage to Advance is where we talk to leaders who are building the organizations they wish existed. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each monthSubscribe and listen at https://couragetoadvancepodcast.com

Why Your Employees Aren't motivated - And It's Not Their Fault

Most companies treat employee motivation like a personality trait. When engagement drops, the default assumption is that the employee isn't driven enough or doesn't care enough. But what if the problem isn't who you hired? What if it's what you never asked them? Host Kim Bohr sits down with Daniela Tancau to unpack where the disconnect starts.
That's the pattern Daniela has spent 18 years diagnosing. Across thousands of interviews with employees and candidates, she's watched organizations reduce HR to two functions (hiring and administration) while ignoring the tools that actually shape whether people stay and produce. Companies run anonymous surveys that can't identify individual motivational drivers. They train employees based on company needs, not employee goals. They assume a shared mission means shared motivation.
Daniela founded Improve Work to close that gap. Based in Romania and serving entrepreneurs and team leaders across the U.S. and Western Europe, she developed a structured interview methodology organized around seven factors that affect employee motivation, from task alignment and manager relationships to salary expectations and career development. Her program is available as both a consulting engagement and a self-paced online course.
What You'll Discover:
Why "motivation comes from within" lets companies off the hook, and what they actually control
The difference between personal motivation and employee motivation, and why confusing them leads to disengagement
Why CEO-led motivation conversations signal care before asking for commitment
The seven factors that determine whether an employee stays engaged or quietly checks out
"You have to show care before you ask for the employees to care about your company and about your goals. So it's a two way street." – Daniela Tancau
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and explores how leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, sharing the real decisions, setbacks, and strategies behind meaningful change. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe and listen at https://couragetoadvancepodcast.com

Are You Doing Leadership or Being a Leader? What Most Leadership Development Gets Wrong

Most leadership development programs don’t fail because the content is wrong. They fail because of what organizations do, and don’t do, the moment the program ends. 
Richard Mirabile, PhD, is a leadership development researcher and practitioner with more than 30 years of applied work across organizational psychology, corporate environments, startups, and consulting. He is the creator of SparkEffect’s Leadership Development program, a 16-module facilitated development experience built from decades of research on what genuinely changes how leaders lead. 
In this episode, Mirabile and host Kim Bohr examine the gap too many organizations miss: the difference between doing leadership and being a leader. Most programs address the doing side: results, output, metrics. His argument is that the being side (how you show up, whether you listen, whether your team trusts you enough to tell you the truth) is what truly determines whether a leader holds up under pressure. And it’s rarely addressed in standard development programs. 
What You’ll Discover: 
Why the “single-shot” training approach almost never produces lasting behavior change 
The difference between doing leadership and being a leader, and why most organizations only measure one 
Why leaders are almost never terminated for technical failures, and what really derails them 
How “facilitated development” differs from training, and why that distinction matters for L&D ROI 
Where AI falls short in leadership development, and why human connection can’t be replaced 
What Mirabile's “to-be list” looks like in practice, and how to try it this week 
How SparkEffect’s Trust Elasticity research (71% of employees experienced major disruption in the last 24 months) connects to what leaders are doing, or not doing, right now  
“If the trust isn’t there, it almost doesn’t matter what else you do.” — Rick Mirabile, PhD 
About Courage to Advance: Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, Courage to Advance features researchers, executives, and practitioners doing the hard work of building organizations where performance and trust aren’t in conflict. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts at couragetoadvancepodcast.com. 

Our Story: What Transparent Succession Planning Actually Looks Like

What does it actually look like when a CEO spends years intentionally handing over the reins, and both leaders are willing to tell the whole story? 
This episode of Courage to Advance is different from any we’ve done before. There’s no outside guest. Instead, Kim Bohr sits down with Mike Humphries, her colleague, predecessor, and the leader who shaped Waldron for decades before the 2023 merger that created SparkEffect, to walk through their succession story together. 
From the sudden loss of co-founder Tom Waldron in 2017 to a pandemic that hit three weeks into Kim’s tenure, to a merger that brought two established firms together in 2023, to the moment Kim officially stepped into the CEO role in April 2026. This conversation covers the real decisions, the hard conversations, and the trust that had to be built and rebuilt along the way. 
In this episode, you’ll hear: 
Why the sudden loss of a co-founder forced a CEO to rethink risk, retention, and succession all at once 
The specific criteria Mike used to identify his successor, including why entrepreneurial experience and a failed business acquisition mattered so much 
How Kim went from saying “no” to the role to ultimately committing, and the boundaries she set before saying yes 
What it’s like to start a leadership role three weeks before a global pandemic shuts everything down 
How merging two established firms during a CEO transition tested trust in ways that couldn’t have been planned for 
Why “creating the space for someone to fill” (Mike’s words) worked better than any formal handoff plan 
What being fully open about the succession timeline did for team retention and followership 
If you’re a business owner thinking about when to start this process, or a leader who’s been told succession planning can't wait, this one’s worth your time. 
About Courage to Advance: Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, each episode features leaders who refuse to accept that business has to be dehumanizing. Based on SparkEffect’s Trust Performance Index research. New episodes every Tuesday. 
Learn more: couragetoadvancepodcast.com 
SparkEffect: sparkeffect.com 

Reading the Room: What Music Taught an IT Leader About Trust

What if the most important skill for leading a technology transformation has nothing to do with technology?It's a question Kim Bohr has been asking for years. And when she met Bob Wallis, she found someone who had spent his entire career proving the answer.Bob Wallis, fractional CIO and founder of 61 Keys LLC, has spent his career proving that the difference between a system rollout that succeeds and one that quietly destroys organizational trust comes down to one thing: how well you read the room. SparkEffect's own Trust Study found that only 36% of organizations that faced significant disruption emerged with stronger trust and in Bob's experience, the ones that lost ground almost always lost it the same way. Not because the software failed. Because the human foundation was never built.
A background that runs from music education to Fortune 500 leadership development to multi-million dollar ERP implementations taught him that people don't change because of a business directive. They change when the leader driving change has earned enough trust to ask for it.
Bob brings head and heart into every engagement interviewing vendor teams for fit, not just capability, setting honest expectations about the hard parts before they happen, and making sure HR has a genuine seat at the table rather than a notification after the decision is made. His measure of success isn't a smooth go-live. It's walking out the door knowing the internal leaders he developed don't need him anymore.What you'll discover in this episode:
Why trust is the real foundation of every technology transformation and what breaks it before the project begins
How to evaluate vendor relationships, not just vendor platforms
Why HR belongs at the table with authority from day one
What the Know-Feel-Do communication framework does for teams navigating uncertainty
How to develop internal leaders during a project so the organization comes out stronger than it went in
Why the best consultants measure success by what the organization can do without them
   "Choosing the vendor matters more than choosing the platform." Bob WallisConnect with Bob Wallis: 🔗 Website: https://61keysllc.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-wallis-512ba322/Connect with Kim Bohr and SparkEffect: 🔗  
Website:SparkEffect
Email: Kim.Bohr@sparkeffect.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbohr/

Childcare Isn't a Perk. It's a Workforce Strategy.

We’ve spent years implementing HR technology to fix workplace problems that technology was never going to fix. Calli Bakken built a career inside that system, watched it fail, and came out the other side with a different answer: if you want employees to show up fully, start by solving the problems they carry through the door.
After 15 years in HR, HR tech, and an employee engagement startup, Calli Bakken reached a conclusion most organizations aren’t ready to hear: companies had the data on what their people needed, and they chose not to act on it. No platform closes that gap. The will of leadership does.
That realization, combined with becoming a parent in early 2020 and navigating a broken childcare system firsthand, led her to found Wiggle Work. Her model helps mid-size employers (200 to 1,000 people) build community-integrated childcare that is financially sustainable, trust-building, and designed for the way families actually live. In this episode, Calli and Kim Bohr explore what it costs organizations to keep treating childcare as someone else’s problem, and what becomes possible when they don’t.
About Calli Bakken
Calli Bakken is the founder of Wiggle Work, a consulting company mobilizing workplace childcare as a strategic workforce solution, and the Interim Executive Director of Matthew’s Voice Project, a nonprofit supporting students experiencing homelessness. She is also the co-host of the Work Sucks podcast.
 

Why 70% of Change Initiatives Fail and What It Means for AI

What if 70% of change initiatives are failing for the exact same reason and your AI rollout is next? 
Ted Wolf, founder of Guidewise AI, has spent decades building businesses and overseeing technology implementations, including 300+ ERP rollouts, watching the same failure pattern repeat. The technology worked. The business case was solid. People just didn't change. After scaling a staffing company from $1,000 to 650 employees and an Iron Mountain acquisition, Ted co-founded Guidewise AI with his son to solve the problem nobody in the AI conversation is naming directly: people adoption is where every implementation actually wins or loses. 
His Changeworks platform delivers something no project management tool has ever provided: 40 human-centered metrics that surface what employees believe, feel, and make meaning of during an AI rollout in real time, so leaders can address adoption before it becomes a crisis. 
What you'll learn in this episode: 
Why 70% of change initiatives fail and why your AI rollout is hitting the same wall 
What "pilot purgatory" is and the three questions that get your organization out of it 
How beliefs, emotions, and meaning-making determine whether your people adopt or resist 
Why AI cannot be handed to IT, and which departments need a seat at the table from day one 
What 40 human-centered metrics look like and why your current tools are leaving you in the dark 
How HR leaders can stop being informed of the plan after it's already been made 
What the dual workforce looks like in practice and why managing AI agents isn't that different from managing people 
"You can spend years earning trust, but it really takes one decision and one bad day to completely destroy all the trust that was put in place." Ted Wolf 
Connect with Ted Wolf: 🔗   
Website: guidewise.ai 
Email: ted@guidewise.ai 
LinkedIn: Ted Wolf : https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedwolftwo/ 
Connect with Kim Bohr and SparkEffect: 🔗  
Website:SparkEffect
Email: Kim.Bohr@sparkeffect.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbohr/
 

Why Your Organization Needs a Fractional CHRO

What if your organization’s biggest people problems aren’t a skills issue — they’re an access issue? 
Only 2% of global CEOs have ever been CHROs. Dr. Suzi Potts spent 25 years watching family-owned businesses hit critical moments, generational transitions, restructurings, down markets, without anyone in the room who understood the human side of the decision. So she left a prestigious SVP role and built something different: a fractional CHRO model that gives small and mid-size businesses access to board-level people strategy exactly when they need it. 
In this episode, Suzi and Kim Bohr dig into how the model works, what it took to bet on herself when the income was uncertain and every instinct said go back, and the one thing she tells every leader sitting on the edge of a transition. 
What You’ll Learn 
Why P&L is a lagging indicator and what signals you’re missing upstream 
How “seasons and reasons” works in practice for high-stakes people strategy 
What radical transparency did for Suzi’s longest client relationship 
What every leader in transition needs to hear before they fold 
Key Quote 
“You absolutely can’t afford to not do it, because you’re already compromising.” — Dr. Suzi Potts 
Connect with Suzi: suzie@suziepotsconsulting.com 
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every 2nd, 3rd and 4th Tuesday of each month.