I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with leadership. I have never identified as a leader, and overall as a topic, I am not drawn to content created around training leaders or being one. 

That said, anyone who owns their own business is a leader of a sort. 

Even the solo professional or very small business owner. 

When I was introduced to Judith Germain and her body of work around The Maverick Paradox, I immediately thought of either charismatic or rogue leaders. You probably did as well. But then I found that part of her definition included being “willfully independent.”

That landed for me in a big way. 

I spent a lot of time in the hallway in middle school for mouthing off to the teacher or making snarky remarks. (Now, I get paid speaking gigs to do that – lol.) 

In fact, my whole life might be summed up with those two words. 

Maybe I am a maverick leader after all…

It was fun to chew on this before recording my podcast interview with Judith. As context, she is in the UK so our conversation was at 8 AM Central time and I am not a morning person. I set two alarms to make sure I would be awake and optimally caffeinated. 

I am pleased to share that my strategy worked quite well and we had a great conversation. 

We talked about the bloodbath of layoffs here in the U.S. and why I hate the term “redundancy” that they use elsewhere. I don’t think anyone wants to feel that they are easily replaceable or no longer valuable. 

I loved that Judith chose the “decent human” phrase to call out, because that is what we really need right now. Common courtesy is shockingly uncommon. We could fix a lot of what is broken in the workplace with common courtesy and simple human decency.

This was the first of many podcast interviews to promote my new book, but I am sharing it here because the topics we covered are very relevant to any business – large or small. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on it. 

You can listen to “Episode 288: The employer as a decent human” of The Maverick Paradox Podcast with this link – or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple, Spotify, Google, Audible). 

You might want to check out a few episodes. 

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash