I broke my ankle at CrossFit doing legless rope climbs. Three minutes after I got home, my husband got the call to deploy. He left the same day for three and a half months. The house was on the market, I was leading operations full-time at a fitness company, and we had a new puppy. The partner who carried half the logistical load of everything in my life was gone.

That week made me a different kind of leader.

In this episode of UNLEASHED, I walk you through the seven moves I ran with our team inside that week, what came out of it that I had not planned for, and what I am building today because of it. I share the trap I almost rebuilt years later inside a different company, the real role I think a leader plays, and where AI actually fits in the work.

The biggest problems inside your business are usually already solvable by the people inside your business. The answers live in the people closest to the work. Your job as a leader is to facilitate the room that gets to those answers.

If you are running a team and the load only stays up because you are carrying it, this one is for you.

FREE OPERATIONS FRICTION DIAGNOSTIC

Take the free 5-minute, 15-question diagnostic at loyaltyops.com/friction to see where your team is losing the most coordination time right now.

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There's a quiet pattern in the return-to-office debate that nobody is naming.

Workers resisting RTO know exactly what they're resisting: going to an office to do the same parallel work they were already doing from home.

The leaders pushing RTO are picking up on something real that's missing inside their teams. The fix they're picking is the wrong one. A building won't build the structure that turns capable individuals into a team.

In this episode, Mickey walks through why remote, hybrid, and onsite teams all face the same underlying problem. She names the game of telephone that strips context out of every priority moving from leadership down to the people doing the work, the psychology of why teams default to "not my circus, not my monkeys" and stick their heads in the sand, and the leadership decision-making bottleneck that builds up when teams can't solve problems without context.

She covers what force multiplication actually means with the example of a marketing, sales, customer service, and engineering leader in a room together diagnosing a customer journey breakdown in fifteen minutes.

She walks through the difference between accountability meetings (most of which could be an email) and collaboration meetings (which most leadership teams only run quarterly), the exact structure of a collaboration meeting that produces shared plans and named commitments, the five principles that make it work, and a specific homework you can run every two weeks to start unlocking what your team is actually capable of.

The decade ahead will be decided by whether you built the structure that lets your team collaborate. Where they sit while they do the work is downstream of that.

Take the free Operations Friction Diagnostic at loyaltyops.com/friction to see where your team is losing the most coordination time right now.

Five minutes, fifteen questions, free.

How you put it together is the real competitive advantage. The recipe and the secret sauce that most organizations skip in the race to add AI.

In this episode, Mickey breaks down why most AI implementations stall six to twelve months in: the team and the organization haven't built the foundation that lets AI actually pay off. A

I accelerates whatever the team is already doing. When the standards are clear, the team is aligned, and ownership is named, AI speeds up real work. When the team has grown faster than the foundation, AI speeds up the inconsistency.

Mickey walks through what it takes to make AI actually deliver. She covers the four things that need to be in place across the people side of the company before AI can pay off, the five-question AI Amplification Test you can run from your seat on any piece of work AI is currently doing, and why investing in your people is what will separate the businesses that win the next decade.

Plus, an exciting update at the end about what's coming for UNLEASHED.

Take the free Operations Friction Diagnostic at loyaltyops.com/friction to see where the gaps in your business are sitting right now.

Five minutes, fifteen questions, free.