In this thoughtful episode, Elena Armijo welcomes Teri Riddle, CEO and founder of the Crossland Group, to reflect on leadership, trust, and the deeper forces shaping organizations today. With more than twenty five years of experience guiding leaders across the public and private sectors, Teri brings a rare combination of strategic clarity, humanity, and lived wisdom to the conversation.

Check out Elena's website to learn more about how she can support you in seeing and using the power that resides within you.

Elena opens with a coaching reflection centered on a question many leaders are quietly holding right now: when everything feels uncertain, what does trust require of me? She reflects on trust as something built slowly through ordinary moments of follow through, honesty, and repair. Alongside trust, she names three other forces that often move through organizations at the same time: joy, grief, and change.

Teri brings a powerful layer to this reflection. Early in her career she worked in hospice care, an experience that profoundly shaped how she understands transition and loss. In organizations, change always carries a form of grief. When that grief is ignored, it often appears in other ways such as disengagement, conflict, or burnout. Naming what is ending alongside what is beginning can help leaders guide people through change with greater honesty and care.

Teri also reflects on how these ideas shape her own leadership practice. Inside her firm, practices such as eliminating time tracking, offering annual sabbaticals, and prioritizing well-being are rooted in a simple belief that trust must be lived, not just discussed.

These values have also shaped the evolution of the Crossland Group itself. Over twenty five years, periods of reinvention became defining moments in the firm's journey. One pivotal shift involved moving beyond traditional organizational charts and focusing instead on purpose, strategy, and the shared responsibility leadership teams hold for the success of the whole system.

The conversation closes with reflections on mentorship, generational responsibility, and the importance of illuminating truth as leaders navigate an increasingly complex world.

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Teri Riddle:

LinkedIn | Website

This podcast was produced by the following amazing team:

Ulrich Wolvaardt, Audio Engineer

Aaron Boykin, Musician & Artist (Get updates about Aaron's music via Instagram)

Jo van Eeden, Project Manager

In this episode, Elena Armijo sits down with Colonel Dede Halfhill of the United States Air Force for a powerful conversation on leadership in moments of chaos, uncertainty, and collective strain. Drawing from 25 years of military leadership, including deployments in Iraq and service at the highest levels of national defense during the early Covid crisis, Dede brings a rare blend of grounded wisdom, operational clarity, and deep humanity to the question of what leadership requires when the stakes are high.

Check out Elena's website to learn more about how she can support you in seeing and using the power that resides within you.

Elena opens with a coaching reflection on how leaders can navigate upheaval by regulating themselves before trying to stabilize others, narrowing priorities with compassion, creating rhythms that offer steadiness, and anchoring decisions in values rather than urgency. The conversation moves into the lived realities of leadership under pressure, including loneliness, fear, and the quiet burden many leaders carry when they believe they must hold everything alone.

Dede speaks candidly about the isolation she experienced as a senior leader and the cost of trying to carry responsibility without enough connection. She reflects on the importance of building trusted support systems before the crisis arrives, and the role vulnerability plays in making leadership more sustainable. She also offers a striking perspective on fear of irrelevance, emotional suppression in leadership cultures, and the necessity of naming what is true without losing steadiness.

This episode is a reminder that leadership is not meant to be performed in isolation. It is an invitation to lead with clarity, humanity, and courage, and to remember that hard things become more bearable when we face them alongside others.

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Want to hear more from Elena? Click here!

Learn more about The C-Suite Collective

Connect with Elena on LinkedIn

Schedule a complimentary session: Click here

DeDe Halfhill:

LinkedIn | Website | Instagram | YouTube | Pinterest

This podcast was produced by the following amazing team:

Ulrich Wolvaardt, Audio Engineer

Aaron Boykin, Musician & Artist (Get updates about Aaron's music via Instagram)

Jo van Eeden, Project Manager

In this episode, Elena Armijo explores the value of conflict with executive and leadership coach Mark Hunter, founder of Pinnacle Coaching and author of The Brink: How Great Leadership Is Invented. With three decades of coaching experience, Mark brings a grounded, practical lens to one of the most misunderstood leadership skills: learning to work with conflict instead of avoiding it.

Check out Elena's website to learn more about how she can support you in seeing and using the power that resides within you.

Elena opens with a coaching reflection that reframes conflict as a signal, not a failure. When teams treat tension as data, they gain access to what is often left unspoken, including unmet needs, misalignment, and values trying to surface. She also unpacks generative conflict as a capacity builder, an essential ingredient for innovation, trust, and cultural clarity.

With clarity and deep care for teams, Mark reframes conflict as a powerful leadership tool, especially inside executive teams where roles are designed to hold healthy tension in service of better outcomes. He introduces generative conflict as purposeful disagreement aimed at optimizing a shared goal rather than protecting ego. He outlines a grounded yet disciplined approach: start where the team is, understand how conflict currently operates through a listening tour, define what healthy conflict looks like, and name the willingness required to practice it consistently.

Elena and Mark examine the somatic dimension of conflict. Drawing from decades of leadership and team development work, Mark makes a compelling case that avoidance is often the true source of nervous system strain. When conflict is vilified or suppressed, tension accumulates beneath the surface. In contrast, when conflict is normalized and practiced with skill, it becomes regulating, steadying, and even energizing for a team.

This conversation invites leaders to build cultures grounded in trust rather than control, to replace reactivity with curiosity, and to cultivate the capacity to fight alongside each other in service of something greater than ego.

Let's Get Social!

Want to hear more from Elena? Click here!

Learn more about The C-Suite Collective

Connect with Elena on LinkedIn

Mark Hunter:

LinkedIn | Website

This podcast was produced by the following amazing team:

Ulrich Wolvaardt, Audio Engineer

Aaron Boykin, Musician & Artist (Get updates about Aaron's music via Instagram)

Jo van Eeden, Project Manager