This week, Mona sits down with Jennie Baird to pull the word apart. Jennie explains why tech is one of the least regulated fields that touches people's lives the most (would you hire an uncertified civil engineer to build your bridge?), why every builder needs their own personal code of ethics, and how the BBC's seven core values shaped real product trade-offs, including the call to walk away from Facebook Pixel tracking to protect user trust. They also get into what to do when your company's values and your own don't line up, why "yes, and" beats a flat "yes" when a stakeholder asks you to build something, and why finding a community of people who share your values matters more than any training program.

Ethical Decision Making is one of the seven skills inside the Sostibl Impact Innovation Hub.

Trust is not a feeling. It is a leadership mechanism — the thing that makes people follow you when you have no authority over them, and the thing that gets organizations to collaborate when their incentives don't align.

Amanda Ready has built that kind of trust across some of the hardest environments to do it in: a therapy practice grown entirely by word of mouth, a nonprofit she runs as a volunteer, and school communities where parents, teachers, and administrators all have different needs and agendas.

In this conversation, we get specific. What actually builds trust — and what breaks it. Why consistency is more powerful than charisma. How vulnerability works as a leadership tool, and when it backfires. What it means to lead with curiosity when trust cracks. And why relationship management is becoming the most urgent skill deficit she sees in young people right now — more than AI, more than technical skills, more than anything else.

Amanda is the founder and president of Ready to Empower, a nonprofit expanding access to mental health programs, and a licensed therapist partnering with schools on emotional wellbeing. She has been part of the Ready to Empower board for over three years. This conversation is real.

This is Week 4 of The Sostibl Leader series — seven skills, seven conversations with leaders who have lived them.

Cross-cultural navigation is not about cultural sensitivity training. It's about actually seeing the room you're standing in.

In this episode I talk with Jackie Watkins, Director of FCRS, who has spent years working with the youth community in Conakry, Guinea. Jackie brings one of the most grounded perspectives I've heard on what it actually takes to lead across cultures — and why ignoring difference doesn't make you unbiased. It just makes your expectations wrong.

We get into the school bus project that took years and still isn't simple, why a question as basic as "how far do you live from school?" means something completely different in Conakry, and what a reflexive mindset actually looks like in practice versus in a leadership book.

We also talk about where AI creates a new blind spot in cross-cultural work — and why the young people in Guinea may be better positioned for what's coming than most leaders in the West.

This is Skill #2 of 7 in The Sostibl Leader series.