Leading With Respect

This week, the Leading With Respect podcast turns one year old — Episode 52. I've got separate posts running on that milestone, so I'll keep this part short: thank you dear guests for your wisdom and heart, on this critical topic. I want to lead with the actual argument of this week's episode, because it's worth stating plainly before I get into the story.
My guest, Adam Nemer, was a CFO and operations executive at Kaiser Permanente, and is now the author of the new book Simple Mental Health. His core claim, backed by two decades sitting on the finance side of a 200,000-person organization, is this: Listening is the highest-leverage, lowest-cost leadership skill in your business, and almost nobody is managing it as a metric.
That's not a soft observation. That's a gap in your operating model.
Read the article on LinkedIn.

Respect Shows Up Differently by Culture
Michelle Zou, PCC, MBA, PhD Candidate in Happiness Studies on happiness research, cross-cultural blind spots, and why what feels respectful to you may feel like the opposite to someone else.
We tend to think of respect as something we either have or don't. A character trait. A cultural value. Something leadership declares and HR measures once a year in an engagement survey.
Michelle Zhou — executive coach, wellbeing researcher, and PhD candidate in happiness studies — sees it differently. To her, respect is a lived experience, and my hand goes up big time to that!
The gap between what a leader intends and the impact on employees is where most organizations are quietly losing people. This ties to low engagement scores.
This week's conversation on Leading With Respect is one worth sitting with slowly.
Read the article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/respect-shows-up-differently-culture-bobby-bakshi-bfb7c

Treating people as objects creates the absence of respect.
Phillip Cave on pattern recognition, personal responsibility, and why honoring someone is a verb — not a value on a wall.
Most leaders I talk to genuinely believe they respect their people. They also have teams where trust is low, feedback is guarded, and conflict gets buried. So what's the gap?
This week on Leading With Respect, I sat down with Phillip Cave, a former software engineer and principal program manager who backed into the people side of business and never left.
Consider his wisdom and share it with your people, your network.n, personal responsibility, and why honoring someone is a verb — not a value on a wall.

There is a question I have asked in boardrooms, at leadership offsites, and in quiet one-on-ones with founders who are wondering why their organizations feel harder to run than they should be. The question is deceptively simple:
Do your people believe you count their needs as important?
Not do you have a good benefits package? Not do you hold quarterly town halls? Not do you have a stated set of company values printed somewhere on a wall?
Do your people — in their bones — believe that you, as their leader, genuinely regard their needs as worthy of your consideration?
This week on the Leading With Respect podcast, I had the privilege of sitting down with Craig Devereaux, Founder and CEO of Advius Group, an executive search and coaching firm built around a thesis I find both intellectually rigorous and morally grounded: that executive failure and team underperformance are, at their core, a respect problem. And that leaders who get this right don't just build better cultures — they build better business outcomes.
The conversation went places I didn't expect. I want to bring the best of it to you here.
Read the full article on LinkedIn.

We’ve all seen the corporate posters. The ones plastered in breakrooms or splashed across landing pages featuring buzzwords like Integrity, Collaboration, and, most frequently, Respect.
But what happens when the rubber meets the road? What does respect actually look like when financial targets are missed, a high-paying client treats your team like scum, or a massive organizational shift is underway?
In this week's episode, I sat down with Rishad Tobaccowala—author, speaker, and former Chief Strategist and Growth Officer at Publicis Group. Over a 45-year career spanning massive corporate ecosystems and his current chapter as a "company of one," Rishad has mastered the art of organizational reinvention.
He shared a masterclass on what true workplace respect looks like, how to navigate toxic cultures, and why human emotion is our ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI.
See the LinkedIn article summarizing the conversation here.

In this week's podcast episode, I share a conversation that didn't just skim the surface of Leading With Respect—it delved into the depths of the human experience. I sat down with Dov Baron... The Science of Emotion, a global leadership powerhouse and a true polymath. Dov is also the host of the podcast, The Dov Baron Show. Link to his site below.
I’ll admit, "polymath" wasn't a word I used daily until I prepped for this episode. By definition, a polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Dov isn’t just a leadership strategist; he is a master of quantum physics, neuroscience, and psychology. He uses this diverse toolkit to crack the "emotional source code" of what makes us human.
Our conversation hit on a nerve that many leaders are trying to soothe right now: How do we stay relevant in a world dominated by algorithms? The answer, as Dov puts it, isn't in working harder—it’s in being more courageously human.
 
Get to know Dov's work and podcast at www.DovBaron.com.
 
Read and subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/courage-egonomics-human-edge-age-ai-bobby-bakshi-h0djc/

We often think of "strategy" as a cold, analytical game—a series of spreadsheets, market forecasts, and tactical maneuvers. But what happens when we strip away the jargon and look at the humans actually making the decisions?
This week on the Leading With Respect podcast, I share my conversation with, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, a strategy expert from the Netherlands who has transitioned from the world of academia and consulting into the profound space of coaching leaders to "stand tall."
Jeroen’s approach is a breath of fresh air: he’s on a mission to humanize strategy. We delved deep into a topic that is often discussed but rarely defined: Respect.
Read the LinkedIn newsletter article.  Consider subscribing to the newsletter and the podcast.

In this week's episode of the Leading With Respect podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anju Choudhary, Chief People Officer at Xoxoday. Her work centers on supporting leaders and teams as they navigate major change, digital transformation, and complexity. And her perspective on respect cuts straight to where most organizations get it wrong.
You can be polite and still be disrespectful.Respect Is Not What Most of Us Were Taught
One of the most consistent themes across this podcast is how often guests challenge the surface-level definition of respect.
Real respect, in Anju's view, is built on three things:
FairnessClarityConsistency
It shows up in how decisions are made, how feedback is given, how conflict is handled, and how leaders use power when no one is watching.
Read the full article on LinkedIn.

In the world of Organizational Effectiveness (OE), we often get bogged down in frameworks and academic theory. But when I sat down with Christine Wickland, the Director of OE at Expedia Group, we got down to the basics.
Christine’s journey didn't start in a boardroom; it started on the sales floor at Nordstrom. That "human-first" perspective has stayed with her through leadership roles at Amazon and Robin Hood, and it informs how she defines the most misunderstood word in business: Respect.
Read the newsletter article here.

This week’s podcast conversation was with Njideka U. Harry. A reminder how respect is a business imperative.
Not because it was theoretical. Because it was structural.
We often talk about respect as a "soft skill" in culture. Njideka reframed it as something far more critical:
Respect is governance.
And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.
Read the article on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/respect-starts-boardroom-bobby-bakshi-sjw3c/