With Special Guest: Brian Biro, America's Breakthrough Coach and Bestselling Author of The ROI of Kindness

Kindness has an image problem in business. Brian Biro has spent decades proving that image is wrong.

In this episode, Meridith welcomes her longtime mentor Brian Biro, "America's Breakthrough Coach," to make the case that kindness is not a soft skill leaders can afford to skip. It is the foundation of trust, performance, and results. Brian traces his passion for kindness back to his own mentor, legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, and shows why the companies that top every industry, from Southwest Airlines to Starbucks to Kaiser Permanente, all share kindness as a core value.

Brian introduces his ESPN framework for building people: deliver thanks with real Effort and energy, use the power of Surprise, be fully Present, and choose Now over "as soon as." He and Meridith also tackle the question every leader eventually faces: how do you stay kind while still holding people accountable? Through stories, including Coach Wooden confronting a star player over a broken team rule, and Meridith's own story of delivering hard feedback to a talented young executive, they show that real kindness means telling someone the truth because you believe in what they can become, not withholding it to protect their feelings, or yours.

What you will take away from this conversation:

• Why the Pygmalion effect means what you focus on in your people is what you create in them
• The ESPN framework for building trust: Effort and energy, Surprise, Presence, and Now
• Why kindness and accountability are not opposites, and how to deliver a hard message with genuine care
• The difference between being liked and being respected, and why leaders who chase the first lose both
• Brian's closing truth: "The love we fail to share is the only pain we live with"

If you lead people through uncertainty and want a culture that performs and holds together, this conversation gives you the blueprint.

Connect with Brian Biro:
brianbiro.com | Book: The ROI of Kindness

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianbiro/

With Special Guest: Richard Newman, Founder and CEO of Body Talk

Most leaders think a failed change initiative comes down to a bad strategy. Usually, it comes down to bad delivery. In this episode of Ask for Change, I sit down with Richard Newman, founder and CEO of Body Talk and author of the bestseller Lift Your Impact. Richard has trained over 150,000 leaders at companies like Microsoft, Virgin, and 3M. His path started in an unlikely place. He was a painfully shy teenager who spent six months in a Himalayan monastery with monks who spoke no English. That forced silence became the foundation of his career.

Richard's research with UCL psychology professor Adrian Furnham surveyed more than 2,000 people worldwide. The results are hard to argue with. A few specific shifts in posture and presence changed how people voted for a candidate by 59 percent. Nonverbal signals move an audience 42 to 44 percent more than words alone.

We talk about why teams lose trust in a leader before that leader even speaks. We break down the three Cs every leader needs during change: clarity, care, and courage. And we unpack why the habits you call "just who I am" are actually the habits holding your influence back.

If your organization is running into change fatigue, this episode gives you a different lever to pull. Not new words. A new presence.

Connect with Richard:

http://www.richardnewmanspeaks.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnewmanspeaks/

https://www.instagram.com/richardnewmanspeaks/

The Shift from Doers to Deciders: Neil Redding on Leading Through AI Disruption

Neil Redding has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of technology and business, building future-innovation teams inside firms like MediaCom, Gensler, and ThoughtWorks, and helping organizations including Visa, Nike, Apple, and Verizon translate emerging technology into practical value. He calls himself the Near Futurist, and on this episode he explains exactly why: rather than forecasting a distant horizon, Neil focuses leaders on the 24-month window that actually determines whether a business stays relevant.

Neil and Meridith unpack what he calls the shift from doers to deciders, the identity-level disruption happening as AI absorbs more of the tasks people have spent entire careers mastering. They talk through why old-style command-and-control planning cannot keep pace with how fast AI lets people execute, a mismatch Neil calls clock drift, and why the businesses actually benefiting from AI are the ones willing to redesign how work gets done rather than just accelerating their existing workflows. Neil offers a simple, repeatable starting point for leaders at any level: delegate first. This is a grounded, calm conversation about a genuinely disorienting shift, and it leaves listeners with a clear next step rather than more anxiety.

Key takeaways:

• The shift from doers to deciders: as AI takes on more execution, the higher-value (and more tiring) work becomes judgment and decision-making
• Clock drift: the widening gap between how fast AI lets individuals build and how slowly organizations are structured to approve and adopt
• Delegate first as a practical starting habit, treating AI like a capable intern you give context to, evaluate, and iterate with
• Why command-and-control leadership, reinforced since 2008 and again through COVID, is now actively working against organizations
• Speed as the real competitive advantage in an AI-enabled market, illustrated through how fast-moving companies out-decide their competitors
• Adaptability is not a new skill humans lack, it is the same capability used in parenting and raising capable people, applied to how we build capable teams

Connect with Neil Redding:

• https://linkedin.com/in/reddingneil

• https://www.instagram.com/neilredding/

• https://youtube.com/neilredding

Building a predictable sales pipeline has never been harder, and Meridith's guest this week has spent his entire career solving exactly that problem. Jason Bay is the founder and CEO of Outbound Squad, where he has helped B2B sales teams take the guesswork out of cold outreach since 2008. Jason has personally closed millions in revenue and has trained over 250 sales teams and 20,000-plus reps, work that has taken him from a one-person outsourced SDR shop to a training partner for companies like Zoom, Shopify, and iHeartMedia.

In this conversation, Jason and Meridith dig into why AI has flooded buyer inboxes with noise, why reply rates and pickup rates keep falling, and why the reps who are winning today are the ones treating their pipeline like business owners, not order takers. Jason breaks down his Too Good to Ignore framework and explains why the best salespeople are no longer chasing everyone, they are disqualifying fast, making offers buyers cannot refuse, and using a repeatable structure to provoke real conversations. This episode is a tactical playbook for anyone whose number depends on a full pipeline in an uncertain market.

Key takeaways:

• Top-performing reps book 4.5 times more meetings than average performers, and the difference comes down to strategy, not hustle
• The Too Good to Ignore framework: Disqualify, Offer, Provoke, starting with a tight ideal client profile so reps stop chasing the wrong 80 percent of their book
• Three tiers of offers, from "selling the blind date" (pitching your own expertise) to a custom insight built specifically for the buyer
• The Trigger, Tension, Trust structure for cold calls, emails, and voicemails, and why trigger-based outreach can 5x reply rates
• Why in-person relationship building and referral systems are becoming the highest-leverage moves in a noisy digital environment
• An uncertain marketplace is the best time to grow, because competitors pull back and customers need trusted partners more, not less

Connect with Jason Bay:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasondbay

Website: outboundsquad.com
Free masterclass: outboundsquad.com/masterclass

Build Relationships Before You Need Them, with Barb Betts

In a world racing toward automation, Meridith's guest this week makes the case that human connection is still the ultimate competitive advantage. Barb Betts has built a seven figure business over the past decade without ads or cold outreach, relying instead on authentic, trust based relationships. She is a keynote speaker, CEO, and author of The Relationship Advantage, and she has spent her career teaching leaders and sales teams that in an increasingly automated marketplace, the businesses that win are the ones that stay genuinely human.

Barb and Meridith dig into why we are more connected and more disconnected than ever, why the Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, and why scrolling past someone on social media is not the same as having a relationship with them. Barb shares her real estate origin story (including the day she got chased by a dog while door knocking) and breaks down the practical system she teaches to stop relationships from quietly drifting apart. This episode is a clear, actionable framework for anyone who has ever felt awkward asking for business, or realized too late that they only reach out when they need something.

Key takeaways:

• Relational drift is real: relationships fade not because people stop caring, but because no one is intentional about staying connected
• Barb's four part connection framework: listen to understand, notice the details people give you, document what you learn, and use it consistently
• The five by five method: five thoughtful, no agenda messages a day to five people, five days a week
• A simple ranking and frequency system for staying in touch with the people who matter most in your business, so nothing falls through the cracks
• Why AI should be used to free up time for more human connection, not less, and why automated messages can quietly damage trust
• Build relationships before you need them, so that when you do need to ask, it never feels transactional

Connect with Barb Betts:

https://www.instagram.com/barbbetts/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbbetts/

With Special Guest Dan Gingiss

Customers don't remember transactions. They remember experiences. That single idea has driven Dan Gingiss's entire career, and it is the difference between businesses that compete on price and businesses that never have to.

Dan spent nearly a decade at Discover Card, where he built and led their digital customer experience team, before becoming a keynote speaker and author known as "the experience maker." He has helped brands like McDonald's, Humana, and Discover turn everyday interactions into their strongest growth engine. In this episode, Meridith and Dan get into exactly how that works, at any budget, at any company size.

Dan breaks down his WISER framework: Witty, Immersive, Shareable, Extraordinary, and Responsive. He explains why price becomes irrelevant when experience is treated as a fifty-fifty partner with product. And he shares the exact open-ended questions that surface what customers actually value, which is rarely what a business assumes.

You will hear the story of a fast food owner who could not figure out why customers kept leaving, and the one small fix that changed everything. You will learn why customer service is what happens when customer experience breaks, and why fewer service calls should be the metric that gets a CEO's attention. And you will hear why treating customer experience like a multi-year transformation project is the single biggest mistake companies make.

In this episode:

• Why customers are experience sensitive, not just price sensitive
• The WISER framework for building remarkable experiences at scale
• How to ask questions that get customers to tell you the truth
• Why the small, inexpensive moments outperform big-budget overhauls
• How to make the business case for customer experience to a CFO

About Dan Gingiss:
Dan Gingiss is an international keynote speaker and customer experience expert with a dynamic and engaging speaking style that has captivated hundreds of audiences around the globe. He spent over twenty years in marketing and customer experience leadership, including nearly a decade at Discover Card, before building a career helping organizations turn everyday moments into growth strategy.

Connect with Dan:

Linkedin - linkedin.com/in/dangingiss

Instagram - instagram.com/dgingiss

YouTube - youtube.com/@theexperiencemaker

Facebook - facebook.com/dangingiss

Website - dangingiss.com

About Meridith Elliott Powell:
Meridith Elliott Powell is a Hall of Fame Speaker, Business Growth Strategist, and Award-Winning Author who helps organizations turn uncertainty into competitive advantage.

Learn more: meridithelliottpowell.com

with Special Guest, Marilyn Sherman

Most people are sitting in the balcony of their own life. They know it. They complain about the view. And they stay seated anyway.

Marilyn Sherman is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and author of "Front Row Success" who has spent more than twenty-five years helping leaders at companies like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and NASA move from watching the game to playing it. Her philosophy started at a concert, in a balcony seat so far back she could barely see the stage, in the middle of a life she didn't want either. What happened next, a single uncomfortable conversation with a stranger, changed the way she thinks about opportunity for good.

In this episode, Meridith Elliott Powell sits down with Marilyn to unpack why so many of us stay comfortable in seats we don't even like, and what it actually takes to move. Marilyn shares the story of a business conference where her own assumptions nearly cost her one of the most fascinating conversations of her life, and why she now chooses to be more interested than interesting.

You will hear why disengagement is a leadership problem before it's an employee problem. Why the gap between your current seat and your front row seat is the only measure that matters. And why the best leaders act less like managers and more like ushers, illuminating the path for the people behind them.

In this episode:

• Why people stay in seats they don't like, and what finally moves them
• How to define your own version of the "front row" in work, relationships, and life
• The difference between comfort and stagnation, and how to tell them apart
• Why leaders unintentionally keep their teams disengaged, and how to fix it
• The mindset shift that turns envy of others' success into your own momentum

About Marilyn Sherman:

Marilyn Sherman is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, Certified Speaking Professional, and author who has spent more than three decades helping leaders, teams, and organizations strengthen engagement, communication, resilience, and performance. Her new book, Front-Row Success: How to Live and Lead from the Best Seat in the House, challenges people to move beyond hesitation and comfort into intentional action and impact. Through her signature Front-Row philosophy and the SEAT of Success framework, Marilyn inspires audiences to take responsibility for their growth, lead with courage, and help others find their own better seat in life. For more information go to https://FrontRowSuccess.com.

Connect with Marilyn:

● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynsherman/

● Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/MarilynShermanSpeaker

● Facebook (Business): https://www.facebook.com/FrontRowGirl/

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrowmarilyn/

● TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@frontrowmarilyn

Using Humor to Find the Success in Uncertainty

With Special Guest: Joel Zeff, Work Culture Expert, Keynote Speaker & Author

Uncertainty is serious business. But the leaders who navigate it best may have one thing in common: they never stopped having fun.

In this episode, Meridith sits down with Joel Zeff — work culture expert, improv performer, and author of Make the Right Choice — to make the case that laughter is not a soft skill. It is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

Joel has spent 25-plus years turning corporate audiences into improv performers and proving that the same instincts that make a great improv scene — listening, adapting, supporting your team, saying yes — are exactly the instincts that make a great leader.

What you will take away from this conversation:

• Why improv is not just entertainment — it is one of the most powerful leadership development tools available
• How fun drives engagement, passion, and performance in ways that money simply cannot replicate
• The one question every leader should be asking their team — and almost never does
• Why the ability to embrace change is a choice, and how to start making that choice consistently
• How creating psychological safety for mistakes unlocks creativity, risk-taking, and results

Whether your team is burned out, playing it safe, or just going through the motions, this episode is the permission slip to lead differently — and the roadmap to make it stick.

Special offer from Joel: Mention Ask for Change when you connect with him and receive a free chapter from his new book on change.

Connect with Joel Zeff: joelzeff.com | LinkedIn: Joel Zeff