The Leader's Mindset

The Leader’s Mindset is a leadership strategy podcast for executives, founders, and emerging leaders who want to think clearly, act decisively, and build high-performing teams. Hosted by Jason LeDuc, a former U.S. Air Force officer and leadership strategist, the show blends powerful interviews with practical Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) you can apply immediately. If you’re responsible for results and developing the leaders behind you, this show equips you to lead with clarity and confidence.

The Leader's Mindset is a business podcast hosted by The Leader, with 276 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

The Leader hosts The Leader's Mindset, a business show with 276 episodes published.

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  The Leader's Mindset

  What to Do When Your Best People Keep Quitting — Team Leadership Skills

  Sep 29, 20265 min

  Team leadership is usually the real reason your best people keep quitting — not money, and not a better offer somewhere else. By the time a great employee is interviewing elsewhere, you already lost them; the notice is just the paperwork. SHRM found that toxic workplace culture drove an estimated $223 billion in turnover costs over five years, and that 58% of employees who quit over culture said their manager was the main reason. What you'll learn: - Why the stay interview beats the exit interview, and the two questions to ask - The leadership skills habit of guarding the standard — your best people leave when you let your worst behavior stay - Why people leave because they stopped growing far more often than for money - How recognition works as the cheapest retention tool you own - Why organizational culture problems are usually manager problems, not perk problems - The bonus move: make leaving loud, and actually change something after an exit Jason LeDuc is a leadership consultant and former U.S. Air Force leader teaching practical team leadership skills. Find his leadership development programs and book a discovery call at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram ️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

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  The Leader's Mindset

  Succession Planning Starts on Day One — John Scott on Team Leadership Skills

  Sep 24, 202648 min

  The team leadership skills that decide who replaces you get built years before you leave.Most succession planning happens far too late to be planning at all — and by then the market has usually made the decision for you.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc talks with John Scott — a CPA and tax partner at a nearly 500-person firm, where he also leads the virtual CFO practice for law firms — about why the average age of your leadership group predicts your company's future better than your revenue does.What you'll learn:- Why a partner group averaging in its 40s is healthy, and one drifting past 50 means you are about to be acquired- The leadership development mistake that cost one firm its independence: nobody trained the next generation- Why emerging leaders leave when they cannot see a path up, even when they like the work- The promotion exercise that ends the argument — "write the case for how you are already doing the next job"- Why the hardest part of a merger is two good cultures that simply are not the same- The leadership skills young professionals lose when AI does all the entry-level repsHow to reach John Scott:Firm website: anderscpa.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-c-scott-cpa/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johncscottcpa/Connect with Jason LeDuc at leducleadership.com Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

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  The Leader's Mindset

  What to Do When Your Team Has Quietly Checked Out — Team Leadership Skills

  Sep 22, 20264 min

  Team leadership gets tested less when people are angry and more when they go quiet — and a checked-out team almost never complains. Nobody quits. Nobody pushes back. People are polite, on time, and doing exactly what's asked — and not one inch more. The spark is gone, and because no alarm is going off, most leaders miss it until output slips. Gallup found only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged at work in 2025, and attributes roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. What you'll learn: - Why a coasting team is more dangerous than an angry one - The leadership skills move that reconnects the work to a why people can actually see - Why asking your team for input and then ignoring it is worse than never asking at all - How recognition and real decision ownership re-engage people faster than perks - The team development habit of killing one soul-sucking meeting, report, or rule - The bonus check most leaders skip: whether your own energy is setting the room's temperature Jason LeDuc is a leadership consultant and former U.S. Air Force leader teaching practical team leadership skills. Find his leadership development programs and book a discovery call at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram ️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

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  The Leader's Mindset

  The Conversation Your Team Is Avoiding — Croft Edwards on Leadership Skills

  Sep 17, 202657 min

  The leadership conversation your team is avoiding is the one deciding your results.Your last meeting was pleasant. Everyone nodded. Nobody argued. And the thing that actually matters never got said.In this episode of The Leader's Mindset, Jason LeDuc sits down with Croft Edwards — a Master Certified Coach and U.S. Army veteran (five years active duty, another twenty in the National Guard and Reserve), now president of Croft & Company and author of The Liquid Accordion. Croft's teacher Bob Dunham put it this way: the root cause of all outcomes, positive and negative, are the conversations we have effectively, ineffectively, or fail to have. This conversation is about the third kind.What you'll learn:- What "cordial hypocrisy" is — a term popularized by Fernando Flores — and why being polite with someone you don't trust is the default state of most teams- The two kinds of missing conversation: the one you're dodging, and the one you don't even know exists- Why an organization is really a network of conversations, and what that changes about the leadership skills you need to run one- Why the most candid conversations happen at the front line, not in the boardroom — and what a platinum mine a mile underground taught Croft about trust- The "studs and duds" approach to change: spend your energy on the top and the bottom of the curve, not the middle- Why leadership is a practice, not a concept: you can't think your way into a hard conversation, you have to have it badly firstHow to reach Croft Edwards: https://croftandcompany.com/ https://liquidaccordion.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/croftedwards/ More from Jason LeDuc, including the Be The Boss program and the Leadership Academy for Tech Managers: https://www.leducleadership.com/ ️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

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  The Leader's Mindset

  What to Say When Two Teams Won't Work Together — Leadership Skills

  Sep 15, 20264 min

  Leadership is what turns two warring teams into one. When Sales blames Ops and Ops blames Sales, you don't have a people problem — you have a scoreboard problem.Two teams playing two different games will call each other the enemy, and the harder each one works, the deeper the trench gets. Meanwhile the customer is the one paying for it. Harvard Business Review found that 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional — missing on budget, schedule, spec, or what the customer expected. So if your teams can't get along, you're not broken. But normal here is expensive.In this episode, Jason LeDuc gives you five tactics — plus a bonus — to get two departments pulling in the same direction, drawn from rooms where engineers, maintainers, and aircrew all saw the same mission differently and turf could get somebody hurt.What you'll learn:- Leadership skills for naming a shared enemy so both teams stop aiming at each other- How one shared metric ends the fight that two separate scoreboards started- The one After-Action Review rule that makes a joint debrief safe: attack the process, never the person- Why trading seats for a single day ends a turf war faster than any meeting- How to turn a fuzzy handoff into a written contract both teams can holdThe leadership move most managers miss: publicly catching one team helping the other. What gets recognized gets repeated.Ready to turn two warring teams into one? Find Jason's leadership programs and book a discovery call at https://www.leducleadership.com/bethebossprogram ️ Stay informed without the noise: I use informed.now every day — the day's news texted straight to you, free of bias, clickbait, and ads. Try it: https://infmd.co/jld Disclosure: This description contains an affiliate link. If you upgrade to informed.now premium I may earn a small referral, at no extra cost to you. I partnered with them because I use and believe in the product.

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