Courage to Advance with Kim Bohr

Most leaders are still waiting for work to settle down. The research says the wait is the problem. In year two of SparkEffect's study of organizational trust, 85% of people reported a significant disruption in the past two years, up from 71%. Disruption is not the storm that passes. It is the climate.
The common response is to treat it as a stability problem and reach for another training. The data points somewhere else. Support is widespread but thin, no single form of help reached more than a third of people, and the weight of holding trust together during change lands on one person, the direct manager, who is being handed AI and told to figure it out at the same time.
Host Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, is joined by Aaron Delgaty, PhD, a cultural anthropologist and the founder of Note & Niche, who led year two of Trust in Turbulence. Together they make the case that trust is not soft or mysterious. It is measurable, and it moves the business.
What You'll Discover
Why business as usual was never a promise of stability
Why thin, one-size support is a bigger risk than most leaders realize
Why a resource employees do not know about does not functionally exist
Why AI landed twice as hard on managers
What employees actually want from a manager during uncertainty
How trust shows up in revenue, retention, and reputation
From the episode
Aaron Delgaty, PhD:
“The managers are a lot like the transmission in a car. They're constantly being used. And if your transmission goes out in your car, it's probably totaled.”
Kim Bohr:
“You can measure trust, and it has a direct impact on these four Rs. Companies should be concerned about the decisions their customers are making based on trust.”
About the Podcast
Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity, hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.

Most of us are taught to wait for proof before we move. Find the data, find the comparable, make sure someone has done it first. But the ideas that matter most rarely come with evidence attached.
In the fall of 2021, one of the best women's soccer teams in the country was one win from a championship, and not a single bar in Seattle would show the game. The response Jen Barnes got when she called around was casual and complete: maybe after the men's football games, if there is anything left. The inequity was not hidden. It had just become so normal that most people had stopped seeing it.
Jen spent more than 25 years leading other people's companies before she opened Rough & Tumble, the world's first bar built for gender equity in sports viewing, in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood in 2022. She did it with no market comparable, no proof of concept, and nearly everyone in her life telling her it would fail.
Host Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, sits down with Jen for an honest conversation about moving on conviction when the data has not caught up, and what every leader owes their own judgment when the room says wait.
What you'll discover:
- How Jen built a case for an idea with no market data behind it
- How to tell a gut instinct worth following from wishful thinking
- Why saying no to the industry playbook became her growth strategy
- What keeps a team together in an industry known for burning people out
- How leading changes when you stop building every decision around consensus
- The real costs putting neighborhood restaurants at risk
Notable Quotes
“There was no question in my mind that this was going to make it.”  - Jen Barnes
“This is a conversation about what it takes to carry a room when the only evidence you have is your own belief.”  - Kim Bohr
Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.

Most leaders are told to close the deal first and earn the relationship later. Witney Schneidman spent fifty years proving the reverse, and in this episode he shows host Kim Bohr how trust is really built.
In a market that rewards speed, most of us rush the one thing that cannot be rushed. SparkEffect's research found that 71% of employees have lived through a major disruption in the past two years, and that how leaders handle those moments can lift trust by 12% or sink it by 28%. Schneidman's career is a long argument for the patient, relationship-first path.
A Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the founder of Schneidman & Associates International, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, he built his work on understanding who he was dealing with, learning what they actually wanted, and aligning his goals with theirs before asking for anything.
What You'll Discover
How he decides whether a person or organization is worth trusting, before he commits
The relationship-first sequence he uses instead of rushing to a deal
Why leading with what you do not know builds trust rather than undermining it
How he aligns his goals with the other side's priorities to create a shared vision
How he stayed effective for fifty years by reinventing his focus every few years
Why a durable career runs on a vision larger than yourself
From the conversation
Witney Schneidman:
“Who is this person and how have I come to know them? Because relationships matter.”
Kim Bohr:
“Pausing and figuring out how to genuinely build relationships seems to be something that we need to focus even more on now.”
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.

Most organizations have already spent the money on AI training. Far fewer have anything that looks like real adoption. A DataCamp study found that 82% of organizations train employees on AI while 59% still report a skills gap. So what is actually going wrong?
On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and Elayne Fluker put the answer somewhere most rollouts overlook: trust. People will not commit to a tool that feels like a threat to their standing, and mandating adoption only sharpens the fear that they are training their own replacement. What closes the gap is whether people trust that their experience still counts.
Elayne is a Certified AI Consultant, an ICF-trained executive coach, and the founder of the AI-Ready Leader Platform. She spent 25 years as a media executive at Essence, Martha Stewart Living, and Conde Nast, and is the author of Get Over "I Got It" (HarperCollins Leadership). Her framework, Human Nurture, is the deliberate work of developing people so they can rise to the AI moment instead of being broken by it.
What you'll discover
Why AI adoption comes down to trust, not tooling
The four tenets of Human Nurture: safety over fear, development over extraction, honoring experience, and leaders who go first
Why mandates deepen the exact fear that blocks adoption
What it means to honor experience so people trust their expertise still matters
The Five R's of the Empowered Ask: Ready, Reasons, Receipts, Request, Reciprocity
How to test a big change before committing to it
Kim Bohr: "What if the AI era won't be won by the leaders with the best tools, but by the ones who protect what those tools can't replace?"
Elayne Fluker: "I think organizations are trying to mandate their way to AI capability."
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month.Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.

Only 2% of leaders believe their performance management process adds any real value. That is a problem, because the number one driver of profit growth in any company is people growth. When the system built to grow people is broken, growth stalls.
On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr talks with leadership team coach Mike Goldman about what actually holds teams back. It is rarely strategy or product. It is the wrong people, or good people no one is developing, papered over with annual reviews and core values that live on a website.
Mike Goldman is a leadership team coach and USA Today bestselling author of The Strength of Talent. Over close to 20 years working with small and mid-market leadership teams, he built the Talent Density Framework and its companion metric, the Talent Density Indicator, to help leaders grow people the way they grow revenue.
What You'll Discover
Why annual reviews fail as a growth tool, and what replaces them
How to tell whether your expectations are actually clear
The test that separates a real core value from website copy
Why protecting a high-producing culture violator costs more than the revenue they bring
How to make a difficult exit a kindness
From the Conversation
Mike Goldman:
“The number one driver of profit growth is people growth.”
Kim Bohr:
“There's a lot of scary stuff coming at us and we can put our head in the sand or we could embrace it and just step forward and take it on.”
About the Podcast
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders build the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, it brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. Subscribe for new episodes every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/
 
 

Most leaders are taught that apologizing is a legal risk and a sign of weakness. So they avoid the conversations that would repair a broken relationship at work, and the damage compounds. Jon Bui, J.D., makes the opposite case: apology is a skill leaders can learn, and avoidance is the costly choice.
Where most conflict resolution runs on the force of law and a monetary settlement, Jon saw a set of workplace problems that call for a relationship outcome resolved long before anyone hires an attorney. His fix is to treat apology as a structured process rather than a feeling: acknowledge the harm and your role in it, then make restitution that either restores the person or fixes the trait that caused the harm in the first place.
On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, talks with Jon Bui, an attorney, mediator, and founder of The Negotiated Apology Project. A graduate of Lewis & Clark School of Law and a former legal recruiter, Jon now teaches leaders how to turn mistakes into stronger relationships.
What You'll Discover
Why the legal-risk view of apology misses what actually repairs trust
The two kinds of restitution that repair harm, and the performative one that does not
Why rebuilt trust takes a new shape instead of returning to what it was
What low trust costs, from turnover to a $250,000 lawsuit
Why confidence, not technique, is what stops people from starting
Notable Quotes
Kim Bohr:
“Most leaders are coached to treat apology as a legal risk.”
Jon Bui:
“It’s better to permeate your organization with people who are comfortable having these tough conversations when the stakes are at their lowest.”
About the Podcast
Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/

If you stepped away from your business tomorrow, not for a week or a quarter but for good, would it still run? Most owners cannot say yes, and on this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and Ted Wolf dig into why that answer is also the reason so many businesses never sell. A company that depends on one person is not an asset yet. It is a job that ends when they walk away.
Most owners never see the trap coming. They fall in love with what they built, they reward the person who is great at putting out fires without asking why the fires keep starting, and they treat "someone will buy it someday" as a plan. Kim and Ted put real numbers to it: take a business to market today and you have about a 30 percent chance of selling it, which means roughly 70 percent of owners never find a buyer.
Ted Wolf knows both sides of that math. He and his brother started a technology staffing company with 500 dollars each, grew it to 650 billable people, and sold it to Iron Mountain, going through the full private equity process himself. He is the author of The Intelligent Business Equation and the Co-Founder and CEO of Guidewise.ai, where he helps leaders close the gap between what they expect and what actually gets done as AI reshapes work.
What you'll discover:
Why a business that depends on one person reads as risk to a buyer, and what makes cash flow transferable
What optionality means, and the five choices it gives an owner instead of a forced sale
The five closes Ted runs every month and quarter, and how they feed the next 90 days
Why adopting AI and planning your exit are the same governance question
How to bring AI in without breaking trust, and what not to do
Why resistance to change is usually protective rather than irrational
Kim Bohr: "If you stepped away from your business tomorrow, would it still run? Not for a week, not for a quarter, but for good."
Ted Wolf: "You don't grow a business just to sell it."
Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity, hosted by Kim Bohr, President and CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/

Senior leaders tend to hold two stories about Gen Z at once. One says they are lazy and entitled. The other says they are digital natives who will figure the rest out on their own. On this episode of Courage to Advance, host Kim Bohr and guest Ashlynne Valdez, PHR, make the case that both are wrong, and that the cost of believing either one shows up in the same place: retention, the hiring pipeline, and the talent you cannot seem to keep.
The problem Ashlynne names is not a generation. It is what happens on day one and every day after. Too many new hires are handed a laptop and a desk and told good luck, with no clear deliverables, no KPIs, and no picture of what success looks like. She lived it before founding her firm, and the realization that reframed her career was that the failure was not hers, and it was not unique to her.
Ashlynne is a Gen Z professional and a certified HR practitioner, the founder of SoundHR, the organizer of DisruptHR Las Vegas, and the president and founder of the People & Profits Association. She speaks from inside the generation and inside the function where assumptions about that generation meet payroll.
WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVER
Why the "lazy" and "tech native" stories about Gen Z both damage retention
What breaks trust on day one, and why "good luck, you'll do great" lands as abandonment
The questions to coach any new hire to ask, and what the answers reveal about a company
Low-cost moves that build loyalty, including bringing outside specialists in to educate employees for free
How to use AI to build structure so leaders get time back for the human work
Why HR belongs in the revenue conversation, and what happens to the pipeline when entry-level roles disappear
Ashlynne Valdez: "When you invest in your people, your profits will follow."
Kim Bohr: "Shifting that time into understanding one another and building trust instead of just the tasks and the to dos."
Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, President and CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe wherever you listen: https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/

The confidence gap that holds women back in leadership doesn't start in the workplace. It starts around age 14, and most organizations spend years trying to coach the symptom without ever naming where it began.
That's the throughline Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and guest Jilyne Jarvis follow in this episode. The hesitation leaders see in capable women, the reluctance to take the role, raise the hand, or apply before meeting every requirement, traces back to a middle-school pattern that never got named. Jilyne diagnoses it from the inside: she was a ski racer who looked unshakable on the podium and had no idea what she was worth the moment she stepped off it.
Jilyne is a seven-time NCAA All-American and retired U.S. Ski Team member. In 2014 she founded ZGiRLS to teach girls 11 to 14 the same mental tools elite athletes use to handle pressure and self-doubt, delivered by Olympic, collegiate, and professional women athletes who admit, out loud, that they feel fear too.
WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVER
► Why confidence is a skill you build through action, not a trait you're born with ► Why "fearless" is the wrong goal, and what elite athletes do with fear that never goes away ► How the confidence decline at 11 to 14 resurfaces in women leaders as hesitation around risk, visibility, and self-advocacy ► Why ages 11 to 14 are the window when a young brain can grasp "I have thoughts, but I'm not my thoughts" ► The "yet" move parents and leaders can use to model a healthier relationship with fear ► Why a leader who admits "I'm working on this too" sets what's safe to say on a team ► What nearly walking away from her own organization taught Jilyne about the labels that quietly cap a career
Jilyne Jarvis: "When I was standing on the top of a podium, I did. But when I wasn't, I had absolutely no idea what my value was in the world. All my self worth was wrapped up in achievement."
Kim Bohr: "We're doing a lot of these things as women leaders and not even recognizing it."
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders build the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, the show brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. Subscribe wherever you listen: https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/

Trust is the one thing every leader says they want more of, and the one most are quietly getting wrong. The instinct is to build it through competence or charisma: prove yourself, earn people's confidence, move on. Then the team goes quiet, the executive room gets political, and the organization stops believing what leadership says.
Executive coach Andrea Butcher has spent years inside executive and leadership teams watching this play out. The breakdowns she sees most often are not dramatic betrayals. They are unmet expectations, unspoken assumptions, and leaders too caught in the grind to notice the small moments where trust slips. Her reframe is direct: every communication, every email, every text, every Slack message is either building trust or eroding it.
Andrea Butcher is the founder of Abundant Empowerment and host of the Being at Work podcast. Her work centers on the being of leadership rather than the doing, and on the difference between predictive trust and the vulnerability-based trust that actually builds connection. In this episode, Kim Bohr continues a conversation that began when she joined Andrea on Being at Work to discuss SparkEffect's organizational trust research, this time focusing on how trust gets built.
What You'll Discover
The difference between predictive trust and vulnerability-based trust, and why the second one matters most
How a driven CEO built trust with his team through restraint rather than control
Why your strongest leadership trait can quietly become a liability
What labeling a difficult colleague costs you, and the question that rebuilds the relationship
Why dysfunction is a normal part of any team, and what separates teams that name it from teams that avoid it
The onboarding instinct that backfires, and the simple conversation that builds connection
Why circling back when something doesn't land is an active trust-building move
From the Conversation
Andrea Butcher:
“Every communication, every email, every text, every slack, everything I put out there is either building or eroding.”
Kim Bohr:
“When I think back in my own career, I've grown the most" from the more challenging situations. That's where I tell people that sometimes when they're going through those situations... this is where you're growing the most.”
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.