Your intentions may be good, but is your team experiencing the leadership you think you’re showing?Discover how self-awareness, curiosity, and better communication can transform the way you lead.In this episode of NeuroConversant Leadership, Jeremy Doran speaks with executive coach Nader Vasseghi about the gap between what leaders intend and the impact they actually have. Nader shares practical insights on understanding your communication style, building psychological safety, and uncovering the hidden motivations that shape your decisions. You’ll also learn how to align your personal and professional purpose, make room for joy and creativity, and replace snap judgments with genuine curiosity.⏱️ Chapters00:00 – Why self-awareness matters in leadership02:15 – The three dimensions of leadership awareness03:53 – When good intentions have the wrong impact07:21 – How executive coaching builds awareness12:05 – Uncovering the motivations behind our decisions14:14 – Coaching, growth, and moving forward15:05 – Building psychological safety at work18:39 – Aligning personal purpose with professional goals21:23—Rediscovering joy, creativity, and play25:38—The communication shift from judgment to curiosity💡 Key takeawaysGood intentions don’t guarantee good impact. Pay attention to how people actually experience your words, emotions, and decisions.Build awareness in three areas: your inner world, your relationships with others, and the impact you have.Use assessments as conversation starters. Tools such as DISC, the Enneagram, and Working Genius can help reveal communication preferences and patterns.Get curious about your motivations. Look beyond the obvious explanation to understand the fears, beliefs, or assumptions influencing your choices.Create psychological safety through everyday actions. Trust is built by how leaders listen, respond to feedback, and handle disagreement, not just by what a company’s values statement says.Align your personal and professional missions. Make room for relationships, work, play, and health when deciding what success means to you.Replace judgment with curiosity. You don’t have to agree with someone to become curious about how they reached their point of view.🔗 Links & resourcesConnect with Nader Vasseghi.Website: https://cnergist.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadervasseghi/ Books: https://cnergist.com/conscious-creation/ and https://cnergist.com/the-book/ Connect with NeuroConversant LeadershipWebsite: https://NeuroConversantleadership.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremydoranspeaks/ Learn about coaching, workshops, and leadership development: https://NeuroConversantleadership.com/contact-communication-leadership-training/ 👍 Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe for more practical conversations about communication, leadership, and helping technical professionals become more effective leaders.💬 Join the conversation: What’s one situation where your intention was different from the impact you had? Share your lesson in the comments.🔎 About this episodeThis conversation explores executive coaching, leadership development, self-awareness, communication skills, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, workplace culture, and conscious leadership. It’s for technical leaders, managers, founders, and executives who want to communicate more effectively, build trust, and lead people with different perspectives and working styles.

Most scope creep advice focuses on contracts and change orders. Jake Lewon says the real defense starts earlier than that, in the relationship you build before a problem ever shows up.

Jake, VP of Construction for the Middlesex Corporation, and Jeremy talk about why Jake pushes for weekly face-to-face meetings with owners instead of letting them slide to monthly, why he frames every project as a shared-goal partnership rather than us-versus-them, and what happens once that trust erodes: a small disagreement over "100 feet of guardrail" can turn into guardrail at every endpoint on the job if nobody's paying attention. They also get into "issue stacking," why unresolved problems compound faster when they pile up together, why stripping personal pronouns out of formal project letters can lower the temperature on a dispute, and the informal, off-the-record check-ins Jake runs with his counterparts to catch friction before it becomes a real conflict.

Connect with Jake on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-lewon-56040031/ or through the Middlesex Corporation.

Conflict between a CEO and someone on their leadership team is uniquely hard to resolve, because there's almost no one to talk to about it. Not HR, not the board, often not even a spouse. Liz Crowley spent years in HR and employee relations before finding herself doing exactly that: stepping in as a neutral, confidential resource for CEOs and founders caught in conflict with the people they lead alongside.

She and Jeremy talk about why unresolved conflict is so distracting, how a leader can start second-guessing every decision once trust with a peer breaks down, and the two patterns she sees most often at the top: misaligned expectations on performance, and growth outpacing the team that got a company there. They also revisit something Jeremy's talked about before, the case for hiring for culture fit, as long as "fit" means a culture that rewards candor and pushback instead of silence.

Liz closes with her best piece of communication advice: find a trusted, confidential person to talk things through with, even when, especially when, you don't want to.

Connect with Liz on LinkedIn or at www.hrcollaborativesolutions.com

"Stop hiring for culture fit" is popular advice right now. The logic: if everyone on the team thinks alike, nobody catches the bad ideas before they cause real damage. Jeremy agrees with the diagnosis but pushes back on the fix. In this episode, he argues that culture isn't the problem, the definition of culture is.

Most hiring managers use "culture fit" to mean someone who feels like a natural match, and that gut check quietly overrides the actual skills and experience on the checklist. Jeremy redefines culture as something closer to psychological safety: a place where disagreement is expected, differing ideas get real consideration, and managers are willing to be wrong. He backs it up with research from Ernst & Young, HP, and JPMorgan Chase, all of which found that cognitively diverse teams outperform homogenous ones on complex problems, not as a diversity initiative, but as a business decision.

He also covers what happens after the hire: cognitively diverse people who get overruled or ignored stop sharing ideas and disengage, which erases the advantage of hiring them in the first place.

Jeremy's running a free webinar on hiring practices on October 7th at noon Eastern, aimed at startup founders but relevant to any first-time manager. Email JDoran@NeuroConversantLeadership.com to reserve a spot.

Related reading on the shift away from "culture fit" hiring:

• Gallup: https://gallup.com/workplace/402503/move-beyond-hiring-culture-fit.aspx
• HR Brew: https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2024/12/20/hr-2025-ditch-bad-recruiting-habits
• Haiilo: https://haiilo.com/blog/10-weird-hr-trends

Jeanna Malines built a 25-year career in executive recruitment before a late AuADHD diagnosis sent her in a new direction. She now runs Trajecta, working with neurodivergent and neurotypical professionals on career transitions, job searches, and workplace communication.

She and Jeremy talk about why late diagnosis is so common, particularly in women during perimenopause, why so many parents are only recognizing their own patterns after their kids get diagnosed, and why Jeanna stopped using labels for how she feels and started naming the feeling instead. That shift, she says, changed how she handles task paralysis and executive dysfunction day to day.

They also cover the Pomodoro technique and why the first small step matters more than motivation, how to reframe rejection as a numbers game, what's actually happening behind the scenes when a job application gets rejected, building a 30-60-90 day onboarding plan, and how to know when and how to disclose neurodivergence at work.

Connect with Jeanna on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jeannamalines or at www.trajecta.net

Command, currency, credibility, culture. Those are the four ways a leader gets things done, and command is the one people reach for first even though it costs the most.

Jeremy walks through all four, then spends most of the episode on culture specifically. Southwest Airlines used to be a case study in it: no assigned seats, funny pilots, a flight attendant rolling toilet paper down the aisle for a free drink. Then outside investors came in, the focus shifted to cost cutting, and the culture went with it. Same story shows up in healthcare. Hospitals build everything around the patient. Disney builds everything around the employee, and the guest experience follows from that.

The episode ends on project leaders specifically, since most of them don't have real authority over anyone. Command's off the table, so culture, credibility, and currency are the tools that are left.

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Scope creep and remote communication are two of the biggest challenges facing distributed teams, and this episode's guest deals with both daily. Sarah DeSimone made an unusual career jump from biology to book editing to IT support at a 33-office environmental consulting firm, and she's picked up a lot along the way about what makes cross-functional communication actually work.

We talk about the gap between how IT gets looped into projects (usually last) versus how it should work, why writing everything down is the single most effective scope creep prevention tool her team uses, and how tools like Teams and AI-generated meeting transcripts help teams stay aligned across offices spread from New England to New Mexico.

Sarah also shares how her company held onto culture through COVID and the "great resignation," why face time still matters even in a highly virtual company, and her take on the third-place spaces kids and communities have lost, and why that connects to how we build trust and rapport as adults.

Her closing communication advice ties directly back to the core idea of this show: the way you understand a message is not the same as the way the person next to you understands it, and building that awareness into how you communicate changes everything.

Have ideas for a show topic? Drop me a line and make a suggestion. I'd love to explore the topic and whether or not you would like to be the guest to discuss it!

Improv is more than a hobby, it's one of the best leadership training tools out there. In this solo episode, I break down how personality traits, specifically introversion and extroversion, shape both improv performance and business communication.

I recently auditioned for a house improv team (I made it) and a musical improv team (still recovering from the nerves), and it got me thinking about the Myers-Briggs dimensions and how directly they map onto what happens on stage, and in meetings.

Introverts tend to want a complete thought before they speak, both in improv and at work. That's a strength, it means better listening and closer observation. But it can also mean missing the moment to contribute before the conversation moves on. Extroverts think out loud, which helps them stay engaged and responsive, but can mean talking over others or jumping in before a scene, or an idea, has had time to develop.

I share the improv saying "follow your feet," a practical meeting tip that helps introverts and extroverts prepare differently for the same conversation, and why I think everyone in business, yes, even the terrified ones, should try an improv class at least once.

Next week: an interview on leading cross-functional teams. Coming up in future solo episodes: the rest of the Myers-Briggs dimensions and their connection to improv, plus an interview with a neurodivergent improv coach.

Got a personality trait you want me to dig into next? Email me: JDoran@neuroconversantleadership.com

Chapters

00:00Introduction to improv and business connection

02:10Understanding Myers-Briggs introversion and extroversion

03:42How personality traits influence improv performance

05:08Benefits of introversion in improv and business

06:51Challenges faced by extroverts in improv

08:48Practical applications of improv for leadership and meetings

10:56Encouragement to try improv for business growth

12:10Upcoming topics and future episodes