🧭 INSPIRE
June kept asking me one question, in five different voices.
Not What’s your strategy? Not What’s the next initiative? Something quieter and far more consequential: Who are the people in your care… and do they know it?
We’ve all absorbed the message, somewhere along the way, that caring is the soft stuff. The nice-to-have. The thing that even gets in the way of the real work of results. This month’s listening dismantled that idea, conversation by conversation. From a military veteran’s reflections on teams where trust is a matter of life or death, to a manufacturing CEO who spent fifty years proving that caring compounds like interest, to a gathering expert who insists connection should never be left to chance… every episode kept returning to the same truth.
People aren’t a distraction from the work. People aren’t even the means to the work. People are the work.
Here are my Top 5 Leadership Podcast Picks for June 2026… episodes that challenged and inspired me to keep the people at the center, where they belong.
Read through them individually, or spoiler alert… you can skip to the end for a curated playlist of all five!
🎧 LEARN
1. The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant | “The Highest Performance Strategy is Caring About People” ft. Simon Sinek
If you caught last month’s list, you know I’ve been loving The Curiosity Shop. This month, Brené and Adam welcomed their first-ever guest… and they didn’t ease into it. Simon Sinek joined them, and the three of them together are exactly the kind of gold you’d hope for.
The conversation ranges wide: the chaos hitting C-suites, the human cost of misaligned incentives, AI-driven layoffs, and leaders playing defense when they should be playing offense. But the through-line is right there in the title: caring deeply about the people you lead isn’t soft. It’s essential. It is, in fact, the highest performance strategy available to you.
What resonated most deeply with me was the perspective drawn from the military. When teamwork is literally a matter of life or death, what do the strongest teams run on? Not fear. Not incentives. A culture of love and loyalty… people who know, without question, that the person next to them has their back. If caring is what holds teams together when the stakes are highest, then the argument that it’s “too soft” for business collapses entirely. We’ve had it backwards: the things we’ve been told to leave out of leadership… love, care, human connection… may be the most important things we can bring to it.
Three of the clearest thinkers in leadership, all arriving at the same place from different directions. Start your month’s listening here.
2. The Leadership Habit with Jenn DeWall | “Stop Subtracting Yourself to Fit In! Authentic Leadership” with Dale Wilsher
I explored this conversation in Edition 045 of The 5-Minute Mentor, and it keeps proving useful in coaching conversations.
There’s a pattern I’ve watched play out again and again, especially with leaders newer to the role. They study someone they admire… how that person runs a meeting, gives feedback, commands a room… and then, almost unconsciously, they start trying to become that person. Dale Wilsher, leadership coach and founder of Your Authentic Personality, offers a refreshingly clarifying alternative.
She frames authentic leadership around two questions every person on your team is quietly asking: Do you care about me? and Can you deliver results? Those questions map to warmth and strength, and the most influential leaders consistently demonstrate both. But here’s the catch: most of us naturally lean toward one. And when we get feedback about the side we’re missing, our instinct is to subtract… to dial back the warmth to seem more decisive, or mute the confidence to seem more compassionate.
Wilsher’s reframe is simple and powerful: Don’t subtract. Add. Your natural tendencies aren’t the problem… they’re your genius. The goal isn’t to become less of who you are. It’s to complement how you naturally show up so your team can answer yes to both questions.
Notice how this connects to the theme: even the work of self-awareness isn’t really about you. It’s about the people trying to answer those two questions when they look at you. (If this thread pulls at you, it pairs well with a reflection I wrote earlier this year: Every Strength Casts a Shadow.)
3. The Mel Robbins Podcast | “Try It for 1 Week: Small Ways to Make Your Life Fun and Exciting Again” with Priya Parker
I unpacked this one in Edition 047 of The 5-Minute Mentor, because Priya Parker’s work has genuinely changed how I lead.
I first read The Art of Gathering when I was a principal, and I haven’t led a meeting, planned an event, or sent an invitation the same way since. Hearing Priya with Mel Robbins reminded me all over again why her work matters: we put enormous effort into the logistics of gathering… the venue, the food, the agenda, the calendar invite… and almost no effort into the thing that actually makes a gathering meaningful. The people. The connection. The purpose.
Priya’s starting question for any gathering is deceptively simple: What is the need here? Not the agenda. The need. And a strong purpose has three qualities: it’s specific (meaning lives in specificity), unique (what does this team, this season, this moment actually need?), and disputable (a good purpose creates boundaries… when you’re clear about what a gathering is for, you’re also clear about what it isn’t).
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of applying her thinking: gathering with intention doesn’t start when people arrive. It starts with the invitation. On my last team, before bringing leaders from across the region to a conference together, we sent each person a small box… a curated invitation, a shared Spotify playlist we all contributed to, a list of who was attending, a few travel essentials. Simple and inexpensive. And it said everything we wanted to say: We can’t wait to connect with YOU and create something special… TOGETHER. The gathering hadn’t started yet. But the connection already had.
Every meeting, every meal, every moment we bring people together is a chance to say: your presence matters, you matter, and here’s why. That’s the art.
4. Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast | “Productivity Expert: Stop Procrastinating on What Matters Most” with Jon Acuff
Every leader has something they keep putting off. Jon Acuff joins Craig Groeschel to name the procrastination cycle that keeps us stuck… and to dismantle the story that procrastination is a character flaw. It isn’t laziness. It’s a “solution” we reach for to avoid discomfort, fear, uncertainty, and criticism. Which means the way out isn’t more willpower. It’s better habits and more honest mindsets.
At the heart of his new book, Procrastination Proof, are four specific permissions, given in this order: permission to dream, permission to plan, permission to do, and permission to review. Lean into all four consistently, and it’s almost hard not to succeed. But each of us tends to get stuck at one of them. Dreamers get stuck dreaming… a thousand ideas, zero actions. Perfectionists get stuck planning… ready to change the world as soon as the plan is perfect. Hustlers get stuck doing… skipping the plan, allergic to the review. And analysts get stuck reviewing… replaying past mistakes and predicting future failure. Knowing which trap is yours (and which traps your team members fall into) changes how you lead through all of them.
What also stayed with me is the evolution woven through Jon’s own story… and the permission that sits underneath it: you’re allowed to evolve for different seasons of your life. He’s open about the fact that he couldn’t have written this book earlier in his career; the evidence had to come first. The version of you that built the last chapter isn’t obligated to run the next one the same way. As someone who has navigated a few of those season changes myself, that framing landed deeply.
And here’s where it connects to this month’s thread. When Craig asks what leaders procrastinate on most, Jon doesn’t say email or reports. He says difficult conversations… and points out that the conversation you’re avoiding is already happening without you. The question isn’t whether it happens. It’s whether you’ll be part of it, and whether you’ll infuse it with truth instead of fear. Because as Jon puts it, “People don’t stay with companies, they stay with people.” The people-work is what we defer… and it’s precisely what matters most.
5. A Bit of Optimism with Simon Sinek | “Remembering Bob Chapman: The Mentor Who Changed My Life”
I shared this one in Edition 049 of The 5-Minute Mentor, and I’ve saved it for last on purpose. It’s the heart of this month’s list.
Bob Chapman passed away this spring. For fifty years, he led Barry-Wehmiller, a manufacturing company built on an idea most CEOs never say out loud: that the people who work for you are someone’s precious child, placed in your care. In this tribute episode, Simon Sinek returns to the factory floor in Phillips, Wisconsin… this time to remember the mentor at the center of Leaders Eat Last, and to let Bob’s legacy speak in his own words.
What Bob understood, and what most of us miss, is that we treat caring like a personality trait… you either have it or you don’t. Bob believed caring is a skill. Something that can be modeled and taught. So his company built a real curriculum around it: empathetic listening (listening to validate, not to debate), recognition and praise (catching people doing something right, and naming it), and a culture of service (moving from “it’s all about me” to genuinely caring about the person next to you).
And the feedback that came back wasn’t only about work. It was about marriages getting stronger and parents showing up differently for their kids at home. That’s the ripple 🌀… when you care for someone, you release in them the capacity to care for others.
None of it is soft, either: Barry-Wehmiller compounded double-digit growth for over two decades. Bob’s argument was never that caring is nice. It’s that caring is the strategy.
As Bob said: “You can retire from a job, but you can’t retire from a calling.” He never did. And the skills he taught don’t stay with him… they get carried forward by everyone he reached. Including, now, you.
🌀 AMPLIFY
🎧 Want to give these a listen? Check out my Top 5 Leadership Podcasts from June 2026 playlist here:
As you work through these episodes, here’s the thread I keep pulling on:
The people are the point.
Simon, Brené, and Adam make the case that caring about people isn’t the soft alternative to performance… it’s the highest performance strategy there is. Dale Wilsher reminds us that even our self-awareness work is in service of the people quietly asking whether we care and whether we can deliver. Priya Parker shows us that connection is never an accident… it’s designed, starting with the invitation. Jon Acuff names the truth that what leaders procrastinate on most isn’t paperwork… it’s the difficult conversations, the people-work that matters most. And Bob Chapman… Bob spent fifty years proving that when you treat every person as someone’s precious child, the ripples reach places a strategy deck never could: marriages, kitchens, kids, communities.
Five different conversations. One through-line: the work was never really about the work. It’s about the people doing it, the people affected by it, and the people we become while leading it.
As you listen, notice which conversation speaks most to where you are right now. And when something resonates, share it and tag me on social media (@melodystacy) 🌀 so we can keep learning and growing together.
The world needs leaders who believe. Keep going.
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