Stop Promoting the Wrong People: Laurie Maddalena on Revolutionizing Leadership as a Profession

"The barista at Starbucks often gets more training than people in leadership roles — and we wonder why teams are struggling." — Laurie MaddalenaWhat if the thing quietly killing your company's growth isn't your product, your market, or your strategy — it's how your leaders are leading people?In this episode, Karl sits down with Laurie Maddalena, CEO of Envision Excellence, keynote speaker, and author of The Elevated Leader, to explore why the business world desperately needs to stop treating leadership as a perk of technical performance and start treating it as a true profession.Laurie unpacks the shift every scaling organization needs to make — from managers who fix problems to leaders who build capacity — and gives you the practical tools to get there.What you'll walk away with:Why promoting your top technical performer into leadership is often a catastrophic mistake — and what to do insteadThe difference between "managing tasks" and "leading people," and why it changes everything about your team's outputHow the shift from "answer giver" to "question asker" multiplies your impact and removes you as the bottleneckLaurie's "Elevated Leader" framework and how intentionality sits at the core of sustainable high performanceThe productivity sprint strategy that helped one leader reclaim her lunch break — and her sanity — after 12 years of spinning her wheelsWhy the early flat part of the leadership growth curve is not failure — it's the foundation for the hockey stickIf you manage people, lead a team, or are building a company culture that actually performs, this episode is your playbook.#H2H #LeadershipDevelopment #ClientSuccessLeadership #ScalingCompanies #HumanConnectionPodcast===You can connect with Laurie Maddalena here:https://www.lauriemaddalena.com/elevated-leader-bookwww.lauriemaddalena.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/lauriemaddalena/You can connect with Karl Pontau here:www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontauhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!