A short YouTube interview excerpt where James Laughlin asks a guest (Speaker B) about motivations for writing a leadership book. Speaker B says their experience at Disney created empathy for leaders and revealed that many executives lack core leadership behaviors—relying on title for compliance rather than fostering engagement, passion, and learned leadership skills.
You've actually written a book, so you're an executive, but are you a leader? What a great title. Because you and I have probably both met lots of executives that actually truly lack the basic tenets of leadership, the traits, the behaviors. And to me, those are learned behaviors. Not everyone is born a leader in terms of I have all the skill sets. We develop those and we improve those. So what inspired you to write that book?
Well, exactly what you said. I think that it was partially my own experience at Disney and creating this empathy for leaders, but also recognizing that a lot of leaders don't know better. Right. I did. Right. I did know better and I wasn't behaving well. But a lot of leaders don't know better, and they do lean into their title and they think because they're an executive that just do what I say because I have this title. And you get compliant. You might get compliance that way, but you're not going to get engagement, and you're definitely not going to get passion.
