Understanding Your Leadership Defaults to Better Lead Your Team

Here's a question you may or may not be able to answer: What is your leadership default? In other words, what leadership style or preference do you naturally go to? It may be tough to answer that question because it take a level of self-awareness that is often difficult to face, especially when you're in a position of leadership and faced with tremendous expectations. But it is incredibly important when it comes to leading the team members in your span of care. To explore this further, we're going to turn to Barry Kirk and Shannon Lindwedel of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute. Barry and Shannon have helped countless leaders discover more about themselves and they're going to give a "real talk" example to help illustrate the situation. This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on Linkedin.

It's been almost 6 months now since we lost Bob Chapman, our late Chairman and CEO of 50 years. But that doesn't mean our mission has changed or we're wavering in our desire to uphold his legacy by continuing to show that business can be a force for good when you understand that human and economic vibrancy can work in harmony. If you didn't know, you can find everything about Bob, his writings, videos, everything about the book he wrote with Raj Sisodia: Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family online at the Bob Chapman Archive: bobchapman.co We're adding more content to the site all the time, but we hope it is a reference point for future leaders to learn from the words of the man himself. Speaking of Raj, on this podcast we want to reshare a webinar Bob and Raj gave together in 2020 to the Boston Chapter of Conscious Capitalism titled "Creating and Sustaining Caring Cultures." The discussion Raj and Bob have is just as relevant today as it was six years ago.

It's been almost 6 months now since we lost Bob Chapman, our late Chairman and CEO of 50 years. But that doesn't mean our mission has changed or we're wavering in our desire to uphold his legacy by continuing to show that business can be a force for good when you understand that human and economic vibrancy can work in harmony. If you didn't know, you can find everything about Bob, his writings, videos, everything about the book he wrote with Raj Sisodia: Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family online at the Bob Chapman Archive: bobchapman.co We're adding more content to the site all the time, but we hope it is a reference point for future leaders to learn from the words of the man himself. Speaking of Raj, on this podcast we want to reshare a webinar Bob and Raj gave together in 2020 to the Boston Chapter of Conscious Capitalism titled "Creating and Sustaining Caring Cultures." The discussion Raj and Bob have is just as relevant today as it was six years ago.

Recently in Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute's People and Performance Playbook Newsletter, Mike Budden and Gunnar Millot wrote a thought provoking article that may be contrary to your perceptions of how and why teams are successful. It was called A High-Performing Team Is Not Necessarily a Team of High Performers. Is that how things work in your organization? Do you just grab and group of the hi-pos, the people generally considered to be the best in the  company and throw them in a room and expect all the problems in your company's world to be solved? And does that always work out for you? Here's something they say in the article" "Capability, affinity, and alignment don't add up to value, they multiply into it. This means you can stack a team with extraordinary capability and still end up with almost nothing to show for it, because anything multiplied by a number close to zero stays close to zero.  "That's the arithmetic of the superstar team that loses. And here's the part leaders tend to miss: affinity and alignment don't just show up on their own. They get built, or quietly torn down, by whether people trust the person in charge.  "That trust rests on three things: Is the leader competent? Do they actually care? And are they congruent, meaning do they walk their talk?" This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on Linkedin. On this episode, to challenge your expectations about high performing teams, is Chapman & Co.'s Gunnar Millot and Mike Budden.

Brooke Erol has been an author, leadership coach and consultant for more than 20 years. She's currently based in the US, but as you'll hear in our interview, she's worked with people and organizations around the world. Brooke has been a big supporter of our message at Barry-Wehmiller for quite a while and had the opportunity to talk with Bob Chapman on a number of occasions and is determined to help continue his legacy. She has a new book out: More Than a Paycheck: A Step by Step Guide to Clarity, Alignment and Purpose to Find and Do the Work You Love. You can get it from booksellers such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble and you can find out more about Brooke on her website: www.yourbestlifeinc.com One of the messages that you'll definitely get from the book is in alignment with what Bob says at the beginning of each of our episodes: The way we lead impacts the way people live.

Is change a dirty word in your organization? Do scenes like this often play out: You schedule a town hall meeting. You talk about major new initiatives. You're met with blank stares and crossed arms. This may happen time and again and your leadership keeps saying the same thing: They just don't like change. They don't deal well with change. They don't want to change. But maybe, it's not a change resistance or change management problem in your organization. Maybe your people are trying to tell you something. This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute share their knowledge on leadership development. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co. on Linkedin. Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute was founded by the late Bob Chapman to bring Truly Human Leadership to companies around the world and improve their leadership, culture and performance. The discussion in this episode about change in organizations is led by Chapman & Co.'s Barry Kirk and Emily Gauvain. You can listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the link in the header above. 

Recently, in Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute's People and Performance Playbook LinkedIn Newsletter, there was an article by Jami Dix and Morgan Miller titled: The Five-Step System for Building Leadership Capability. Here's a section: "Most organizations treat leadership development as a series of programs to deliver. They ask: What workshop should we run next? Which coaches should we hire? What curriculum should we launch? "Organizations with true leadership systems ask different questions: What does our strategy demand of leaders right now? How do we assess reality against expectations? What experiences will actually build capability? And how do we reinforce it so it sticks? "This isn't just better planning. It's a fundamentally different approach to how leaders develop. "The shift from fragmented training to an intentional system changes everything." This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. This episode features Jami Dix and Praisy Issac expanding on the article referenced above. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on Linkedin.

Peter Menges is the SVP Customer Engagement & Loyalty for Unique Vacation Inc., an affiliate of the worldwide representative of Sandals & Beaches Resorts. He has more than 20 years of experience in leadership in the hospitality space and he has a strong personal commitment to the power of human-centered leadership, and a human-centered approach to engaging and caring for customers. Sandals has been on a multi-year journey to re-imagine their points-based customer loyalty program as something more innovative and meaningful, where loyalty becomes an outcome of a great experience and where every guest feels like an insider. Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute has been part of that journey from the day one, working very closely with the Sandals loyalty team to help them craft a more Truly Human experience. Chapman & Co. Leadership was founded by our late Chairman Bob Chapman to bring Truly Human Leadership to organizations around the world. On this podcast, Barry Kirk, a partner at Chapman & Co., talks to Peter about that journey, as well as how Peter became a Truly Human Leader. Their conversation also includes a story about how Sandals dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall in Jamaica in October 2025. The storm brought destruction and loss of life and livelihood across the island. Similar to Barry-Wehmiller when revenues collapsed during the great recession, the disaster also left Sandals Resorts facing a critical decision -- how to support the team members in their span of care when the very resorts they worked for had also been devastated by that storm.

Shortly after BW Chairman Bob Chapman passing in March 2026, it was announced that Pat Berges had been named CEO and Managing Partner of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute. Chapman & Co. was founded by Bob to bring Truly Human Leadership to organizations around the world, improving their leadership, culture and performance.  Pat was a longtime friend and colleague of Bob's, bringing more than 25 years of global leadership experience to Chapman & Co. He shares the convictions that drove Bob's legacy. Pat is the founder of H3 Leadership, now part of Chapman & Co., and has held senior leadership roles at Covidien and Medtronic. He previously served as executive director of The Curve Initiative, a nonprofit founded by bestselling author Simon Sinek, and has led large-scale leadership development and culture transformation efforts across more than 100 countries. On this episode of the Truly Human Leadership Podcast, Pat talks about his friendship with Bob and how his mentorship was inspiring and challenging. Pat talks about his leadership journey, the future of Chapman & Co. and why their work is more important now than ever.  

A couple of episodes ago, we talked about the $60 billion problem. That is the amount of money organizations spend on leadership training a year, although recent reports say that number may be as high as $100 billion a year. But are organizations really seeing the ROI on that money and if not, why? This is another installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. This episode is an discussion of a recent article in the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter by Theresa Carik, PhD titled: "If a Leadership Program Does Not Change Behavior, What is it Actually Changing?" Joining Theresa in this discussion is Chapman & Co.'s Gunnar Millot. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on Linkedin.