In this Media Minds interview, host David Wolf talks with leadership‑development expert Eddie Turner about the impact of his Keep Leading podcast, the evolving challenges leaders face across career stages and generations, and how leadership styles must adapt. Turner explains how emerging leaders on college campuses grapple with identity and cultural perceptions of leadership, while senior executives must move beyond the "what got you here won't get you there" mindset. He references Marshall Goldsmith, Daniel Goleman’s emotional‑intelligence research, and a six‑layer leadership model illustrated with a golf‑club metaphor that maps tools (driver, putter, pace‑setter) to decision‑making styles (coercive, democratic, pace‑setting). Turner discusses the nature‑versus‑nurture debate, citing Jim Kouzes’s claim that all leaders are born and that only one in a million lack any leadership capacity. The conversation shifts to media, where Turner describes how his podcast amplified his coaching reach and how he transitioned from public speaking to a fee‑based professional speaking business, emphasizing stage presence, storytelling, and integrating coaching insights into keynotes and workshops. Throughout, he highlights the synergy between podcasting, coaching, workshops, and speaking as a holistic platform for developing leaders worldwide.
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Welcome to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf.
Eddie Turner is a globally recognized leadership development expert. He's a bestselling author and the host of the Keep Leading podcast. He's been ranked among the top 10 motivational speakers in the world by Global Gurus and was named by Forbes as the preeminent authority on emerging leaders. And he's also trusted by top organizations like Apple, GE, the NFL, and the US Navy to develop their leaders. And he's a member of the prestigious Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. Eddie also holds multiple top-tier coaching certifications and is a regular contributor to major outlets. We all know these: CNN, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. Let's dive in. Eddie Turner, welcome to the program.
David, thank you for having me. What a pleasure.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's great to be with you. Um, The focus of our show in this series is around media, but so much about what you do is involved with media. You've been podcasting for years. Of course, we helped you launch your show way back. And I want to get a little perspective from your, from your view. How has doing Keep Leading changed the ecosystem you operate in as a coach and as a speaker and as a consultant and all the things you do?
I must start off with a hearty thank you to you and your team because of your expertise. The Keep Leading podcast did phenomenally well. It ended up being broadcast, picked up in over 80 countries throughout the earth. And the artwork that you all helped me with, the outstanding sound because you all have that— is it the University of Berkeley training? Just top tier. So the audio, the acoustics, lots of guidance with me on that. So I'm eternally grateful to you for it. The idea that I have as a leader myself is how I came up with that name, that leadership is, as I say in the closing, it's, it's a continuous action. It's not a title or a position. And because it's not a destination you arrive at, it's something you must continue to actively pursue and do. That's how I came up with the name Keep Leading. And so it impacts everything that I do as a coach because whether I'm working with emerging leaders on a college campus or leaders in the C-suite, my goal is to help them to understand that they must continue to improve, develop as a leader.
Eddie, what are some of the areas that you find your clients and the groups you speak with or train are struggling with around leadership? Are there any trends or threads that you could share that you like to address or you're finding that are useful to your clients?
Indeed. In some ways, it depends on the context. So when it's the young folks I'm coaching on college campuses, their challenges around leadership are in part what should their identity be as a leader. Uh, sometimes I'm dealing with young people who've come from different parts of the globe as they arrive here in America to study, and depending on where they come from, the very word leader might be considered something bad because they come from a place where the leaders are no one who you want to imitate. So you talk about being a leader it's the farthest thing from what some of them want to do.
That's fascinating.
Yes. And so how do you become a leader, understanding what it is, why it's something that we all should aspire to, is a part of challenge that we might face on at that scale. And scale in terms of in a corporation, you have employees who are either rising in management and needing to learn how to lead and not just manage. You then take it to the highest scales where you have those who are in senior leadership. And with them, obviously they know how to lead, they've been leading for a long time. However, they must learn how to lead in new ways. For example, Marshall Goldsmith wrote the book, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." And so, so many times individuals believe that they must continue to employ what's worked for them that got them to a specific level. When in fact new learning is required as they're going to go to a higher level of leadership. And as your responsibilities change and as the world around us changes, we must learn how to add to our leadership toolkit and not rely on those same tools.
I love that idea because I've thought about this in the business context. As you know, I run a small business and the business gets to a certain point and there's a certain style of leadership required there. And now we're looking to bust through a certain revenue line. And my role in my own business has shifted, and I feel that happening, and some of it I'm asserting. So as leaders sort of relearn leadership, what are some examples of what that might be? If you could unpack that a little bit more some of the challenges it might be when you're leading this way and now you want to lead this way. What's the delta there that you're helping them with? Just one example or two.
Well, let's take the idea that, for example, if you are a leader who has come from a specific time period, there was a leadership style that was very popular, command and control. I have some of my leaders who've transitioned out of military service. Now they've come into the civilian world. And this idea that someone is not going to listen to you just because you've got a higher rank, you've got more stripes, is a shock to some of them. One of them, their family member, I'm like, no, that's not going to work anymore. You have to be prepared to now have your authority challenged. You know, where's the— that wouldn't be tolerated. But now in a corporate world, your leadership will be challenged. You will have to lead through not authority, but more through an influence, more through soft power, and be prepared to explain reasons for— I don't want to say orders that you give.
That would run contrary, but I get it though. Yeah.
What you're trying to do in terms of leading the organization. So our style, Daniel Goleman popularized the phrase emotional intelligence.
Yeah.
So learning the difference between our intellect, our IQ, and our emotional intelligence is one aspect of development for a, a great number of leaders. Uh, and the idea that as we have 5 generations of people working in the workforce for the first time, wow, um, how we lead people who are of a particular generation and from a newer generation, uh, needs to be moderated. And it's a delicate balance that you must maintain.
There's a lot to sort out. There's a lot for you to work with. There's a lot of material. You've got the populations, the different age groups, the matter of command control versus more Socratic and the ability and capacity emotionally to allow for dissent on your leadership team. And perhaps does the nature of the decision-making change as your enterprise grows? I've read somewhere that that's true. Do you believe that's true?
Absolutely. And there's numerous thoughts around this. Again, I'll go back to the work of Daniel Goldman because he uses a very nice set of— there's a piece of research he's done where he's delineated to 6 different layers of leadership. And the ideal is he uses the analogy of a golf club. And so as a person who pulls out their tools, the golf bag, and pulls out your golf club on the golf course, certainly you are not going to start off with the putter.
You're not going to— the drive won't go well.
Precisely. That's why you got to use your driver. And I'm not a golfer, but I do understand that much. And you pull out that driver to drive that ball as far as you're going to go. And so he likens that type of leadership style to what you must do when you must be a little bit more coercive. So maybe it's a time of merger and acquisition. Maybe it's times of urgency. It's a time of crisis. You've got to be a little bit more driving and forceful in your leadership. But now for some leaders, that's the only club they want to use. They just wheel out people all through the organization. But that won't get you very far. And so he talks about the need to sometimes switch over to what you might use, the putter, right? At the end, you just want a nice gentle tap. Well, think about that in terms of your question, in terms of the style of decision-making. The decision-making, you would switch to the, what he calls a democratic leadership style, right? Now, democratic not in terms of political Democrat, right? But you're democratizing the decision-making in that you're putting it in the hands of everyone to weigh in on the decision. Where should we be going with this particular product, with this particular challenge? However, if you're always making it something that's being decided by the people, then that creates frustration because at a certain point they look at you and say, wait a minute, you're the leader. You set the vision, set the tone. So he has another theory there where he calls the pace setter. So as there's times you're going to switch to that club in your golf bag, you're going to set the pace, you're going to set the tone, and you're going to say, follow me. This is the way, this is the trend that I'm setting. This is the pace that I'm setting. Here's where I expect everybody else to keep up and go toward.
And then I know there's also this idea of the power of the question, right? Amidst all of this. Ask the power questions of your team is what I mean by that.
Yeah, that would be a part of the, what I would call perhaps the, the democratic style, because when you ask that question, you're now soliciting everyone's feedback and allowing them to weigh in, right? And certainly there, there's a place for that. You want to have it to where there's a, there's a balance, and it depends on what the circumstances are. We all have a default style, but the challenge is not to allow ourselves to only use that one default style. Yes, yeah, we must be able to pull out the appropriate golf club as we're on the course of life.
The course requires a very specific—
use it quarterly.
Yep. As you suggest, it requires an awareness of which club to use in what situation and be able to make that modal shift in terms of how you're communicating. Is this a time for this or is this time for that? It's beautifully— I love the golf metaphor. And I too am not a golfer, but I think it's perfect because it suggests this toolkit. Are leaders— I think I know your answer, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. It's a question a lot of people ask. Are leaders born or can they be made? I mean, your whole career is decidedly developing anyone into a leader that desires such. So over to you.
I think I'm laughing because I think the best answer to that question was given by Jim Kouzes. Well, I saw him speak to a group of coaches. He came out to speak to us and he is the author, the co-author of Leadership, The Leadership Challenge, and it's now in its 7th edition. And he said that when asked that question, are leaders born or are they made? He said, I've never met a leader who wasn't born.
Fine, we can leave it there. I love it. So yeah, it's sort of like we know, yeah, of course, if you wanna develop, you have the desire to do this, you can.
We all have the desire.
You know, it'll be, you'll develop as you do. All right, let's—
but he does say one other thing that I want to say. Please, please, that in their research, that only 1 in a million people have zero leadership capacity at all. Only 1 in a million.
Wow.
Meaning all of us, most of us I should say, have some capacity to lead. Now, like a, like a, a can of soda, right? Some of us might be that little small 7 oz Some might be the 12-ounce, right? So we all won't have the same capacity, but one— all but one in a million have some capacity to lead.
Brilliant. Brilliant. We're visiting with Eddie Turner, of course, the one and only EddieTurnerLLC.com, or you can find him on LinkedIn as well. I want to shift gears a little bit, Eddie, and this plays a little bit more into the title of this show, which is media. Speaking, and you're an experienced keynote speaker. Do you have— let me ask it this way. What have you learned on your path from becoming a beginning speaker to now someone who's well experienced? What shifted for you along that journey?
The big shift is to understand the difference between being a public speaker and a professional speaker. Meaning going from free to fee. And so one is a tool where you are giving speeches, you're educating people, you're uplifting people and spreading a message. Right. The other is you start to incorporate certain techniques, stage presence, to where people are willing to pay for that speech.
Yeah.
And the outcomes that you can produce for an audience.
That's interesting. You talk about stage presence. You know, you wonder about that. And I'm sure for many of us that are not used to being on stage in front of a large audience, they might experience imposter syndrome. So how do you break through if you're, let's just say categorically, you consider yourself an introvert or you're really not entirely comfortable with being in front of this performance idea. How do you break, do you help people break through? Is that something you do in the course of your coaching?
Absolutely.
Or you are more a speaker and that's the way you show up in this world. I'm not sure.
Both. I am an executive coach who also does give professional keynote speeches. And a great number of times, lessons from my coaching sessions are embedded in my speeches, right? Obviously, I never reveal any clients or anything confidential, but, you know, there's a lot of success stories I have. And there's also some folks who've had some really stubborn challenges they've had to overcome.
Mm-hmm.
And so there's nothing that will bring to, to life a point I'm making on leadership or development more than this wonderful person who's able to overcome that challenge. Yeah. And I don't like to make myself the object of the story, so I love highlighting other people. So that's one aspect of how my coaching and speaking go hand in hand. The other is the— I facilitate leadership development workshops. And in those workshops where we're taking people through a series of steps over a period of time, as opposed to the 30 minutes that a keynote speech might be, right? Those surface in those areas as well. And of course, I find myself quoting my guests, uh, leading— doing a podcast, the Keep Leading Podcast. I've interviewed some of the best thought leaders in the world. And I am always quoting what they say. So that form of media becomes another powerful tool that benefits me in all aspects of my work.
This is fascinating. And I too, from doing these shows and my previous show, Small Biz America, took away so much in terms of capital, knowledge capital from the guests just by asking questions and listening. And it's a wonderful mechanism. And it's a, and it's a, I found it a, an unexpected benefit to doing the podcast. You really are learning yourself and you're delivering it to your listening or viewing audience. Good stuff, Eddie. And of course you can find, we can find you doing exactly that on Keep Leading. We were talking offline before we started rolling today. You've got, you've got new distribution platform and you're starting to see your audience grow in a way that surprised you. So that's absolutely brilliant. Indeed. Indeed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's great to have you. Again, it's eddie-turner-llc.com. Eddie, always great to be with you. Keep leading. I know you are. And I'm going to try too. I learned a lot today. I hope our audience did as well. We'll do it again. Thanks, Eddie.
Thanks again for having me, David.
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