What separates leaders who build lasting impact from those who simply solve problems?

In this episode of Grounded Engagement, Liberating Leadership, Kristina Katayama sits down with Dr. Rick Hefner, Senior Director at the Caltech Center for Technology and Management Education, to explore what it truly means to develop people, create learning organizations, and lead through uncertainty.

Drawing on over 45 years of experience in aerospace, systems engineering, organizational transformation, Lean Six Sigma, AI adoption, and leadership development, Rick shares powerful lessons on building trust, creating psychologically safe teams, managing change, and shifting from being the expert in the room to becoming a multiplier of others' potential.

Whether you're a new manager, an aspiring leader, or an experienced executive navigating change, this conversation offers practical insights into leadership, innovation, resilience, and lifelong learning.

In this episode:

✅ The difference between fixing problems and developing people
✅ Leading organizations through uncertainty and change
✅ Creating psychological safety for innovation and experimentation
✅ How to manage resistance to change and technology adoption
✅ The transition from expert contributor to servant leader
✅ Building high-performing teams through trust and shared purpose
✅ Why lifelong learning is the most important leadership skill
✅ Lessons from aerospace engineering, Lean Six Sigma, and AI transformation
✅ Turning conflict into collaboration
✅ Leadership failures that became powerful learning moments

Key Takeaway

"The real work of leadership isn't about driving change—it's about building the capacity that remains after you're gone."

About Dr. Rick Hefner

Dr. Rick Hefner is a leadership expert, systems engineer, researcher, author, and Senior Director at the Caltech Center for Technology and Management Education. Throughout his career, he has helped organizations improve performance, adopt emerging technologies, and develop the next generation of leaders.

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#Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #Management #ServantLeadership #OrganizationalDevelopment #ChangeManagement #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #LearningOrganization #PsychologicalSafety #TeamLeadership #LeanSixSigma #PersonalDevelopment #BusinessLeadership #GroundedEngagement

Connect with Rick Hefner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickhefner/
If this conversation stayed with you, share it with a leader in your life. That's how this work travels.

I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly.
– Kristina and the Grounded Engagement podcast team

Connect with Kristina Katayama on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristina-katayama-029834
Visit the Be Possible website here: bepossible.com

Listen to Grounded Engagement on these podcast platforms:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033t4qPBxizCWyIisE77pC
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grounded-engagement/id1896884338
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9f6697fa-3ece-4e35-9588-5be82ace196d

#groundedengagement #kristinakatayama #liberatingleadership #culturalchange #organizationalleadership #leadershipdevelopment #psychologicalsafety #workplaceCulture #equityandbelonging #systemschange #leadWithHumility #continuousImprovement #orgDevelopment
Grounded Engagement: Liberating Leadership is a podcast for leaders who know that real change goes deeper than tools, frameworks, and training programmes. Hosted by Kristina Katayama, founder of Be Possible and a whole systems change consultant with over 25 years of experience across 30+ countries, each episode is a genuine conversation with leaders navigating the hardest parts of organisational life — culture gaps, leadership transitions, equity work that stalls, and the tension between who an organisation says it is and what people actually experience every day.
Kristina brings a rare combination of cross-sector pattern recognition, relational depth, and a belief that transformation starts with how people relate to each other — not with the next initiative or intervention. Her guests are the leaders doing that work in real organisations, in real time. If you lead a team, a department, or an entire organisation and you're ready for honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a culture of belonging and vitality, this show is for you.

Jim Herrington grew up the eighth of nine kids in Kansas City, raised largely by his mother and siblings in a household where you learned fast how to get along, advocate for each other, and show up for the people around you. He spent over 25 years as a Kansas City police officer before becoming Director of Safety and Emergency Management at Kansas City University -- and the through line across all of it is the same: the leaders who actually changed people weren't the ones with the best credentials or the highest test scores. They were the ones who showed up as human beings first.
In this conversation with Kristina Katayama, Jim reflects on what two and a half decades of working with people in crisis taught him about leadership, accountability, and what it means to genuinely have someone's back. He talks about what it felt like to fail the sergeant's exam five times and keep going, about the supervisors who led through fear versus the ones who quietly changed the room without ever raising their voice, and about a moment at a train station -- just after becoming a grandfather for the first time -- that he still considers the most important thing he ever did in uniform.
What you'll take away from this conversation:

Why the leaders who shaped Jim most weren't always the good ones, and what learning from a bad boss actually looks like in practice
What 25 years of policing taught him about meeting people at their worst and why that's where real leadership begins
The quiet supervisor who de-escalated a situation from 50 feet away, without saying a word about what Jim was doing wrong
Why failing the sergeant's exam five times didn't stop him, and what kept him going when the system didn't reflect what he knew he could do
How active shooter training actually changes behaviour, and why compliance-first programmes often miss the point entirely
What his mother's fierce advocacy for him as a struggling reader taught him about what people need from their leaders

Connect with Jim Herrington on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-herrington-mba-cpp-2ba4192a
If this conversation stayed with you, share it with a leader in your life. That's how this work travels.

I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly.
– Kristina and the Grounded Engagement podcast team

Connect with Kristina Katayama on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristina-katayama-029834
Visit the Be Possible website here: bepossible.com

Listen to Grounded Engagement on these podcast platforms:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033t4qPBxizCWyIisE77pC
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grounded-engagement/id1896884338
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9f6697fa-3ece-4e35-9588-5be82ace196d

#groundedengagement #kristinakatayama #liberatingleadership #culturalchange #organizationalleadership #leadershipdevelopment #psychologicalsafety #workplaceCulture #equityandbelonging #systemschange #leadWithHumility #continuousImprovement #orgDevelopment
Grounded Engagement: Liberating Leadership is a podcast for leaders who know that real change goes deeper than tools, frameworks, and training programmes. Hosted by Kristina Katayama, founder of Be Possible and a whole systems change consultant with over 25 years of experience across 30+ countries, each episode is a genuine conversation with leaders navigating the hardest parts of organisational life — culture gaps, leadership transitions, equity work that stalls, and the tension between who an organisation says it is and what people actually experience every day.
Kristina brings a rare combination of cross-sector pattern recognition, relational depth, and a belief that transformation starts with how people relate to each other — not with the next initiative or intervention. Her guests are the leaders doing that work in real organisations, in real time. If you lead a team, a department, or an entire organisation and you're ready for honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a culture of belonging and vitality, this show is for you.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Grounded Engagement Podcast hosted by Kristina Katayama!

What actually separates organizations that keep getting better from the ones that plateau or decline? Ken Snyder, Executive Director of the Shingo Institute at Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, has spent decades studying exactly this. Drawing on 40 years of Shingo Prize data and his own 30-year career in manufacturing leadership, Ken breaks down the three things he wishes he'd known as a leader — and why most organizations are measuring the wrong things entirely.
In this conversation, Ken and Kristina explore why KPIs are what Shingo himself called "death certificates" — by the time you're reading the results, it's already too late. They dig into what it really means to lead with humility (hint: it doesn't mean being soft), how psychological safety and trust create the conditions for continuous improvement, and why the best organizations eventually reach a point where the team improves faster than leadership ever could on its own.
What you'll take away from this episode:

Why tracking results instead of behaviors is the single biggest reason improvement efforts fail
How purpose and systems either drive or destroy the right behaviors in an organization
The difference between leaders who can navigate tension and those who can't
Why humble leaders can actually demand more from their teams, not less
How psychological safety directly impacts an organization's ability to improve
The inflection point where great cultures become self-sustaining

Connect with Ken Snyder:
linkedin.com/in/snyderken
Explore the Shingo Institute:
shingo.org

I hope you enjoy this episode! Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly.
– Kristina and the Grounded Engagement podcast team

Connect with Kristina Katayama on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristina-katayama-029834
Visit the Be Possible website here: bepossible.com

Listen to Grounded Engagement on these podcast platforms:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033t4qPBxizCWyIisE77pC
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grounded-engagement/id1896884338
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9f6697fa-3ece-4e35-9588-5be82ace196d

#groundedengagement #kristinakatayama #liberatingleadership #culturalchange #organizationalleadership #leadershipdevelopment #psychologicalsafety #workplaceCulture #equityandbelonging #systemschange #leadWithHumility #continuousImprovement #orgDevelopment
Grounded Engagement: Liberating Leadership is a podcast for leaders who know that real change goes deeper than tools, frameworks, and training programmes. Hosted by Kristina Katayama, founder of Be Possible and a whole systems change consultant with over 25 years of experience across 30+ countries, each episode is a genuine conversation with leaders navigating the hardest parts of organisational life — culture gaps, leadership transitions, equity work that stalls, and the tension between who an organisation says it is and what people actually experience every day.
Kristina brings a rare combination of cross-sector pattern recognition, relational depth, and a belief that transformation starts with how people relate to each other — not with the next initiative or intervention. Her guests are the leaders doing that work in real organisations, in real time. If you lead a team, a department, or an entire organisation and you're ready for honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a culture of belonging and vitality, this show is for you.