Path Forward: Real Conversations About Leadership invites you into unrehearsed conversations with people like you who are seeking to understand what it means to be a leader. In these conversations, Jim Hessler, the Founder of Path Forward Leadership and the author of Land On Your Feet, Not On Your Face, taps into his 4 decades of leadership experience to share perspectives and to challenge guests with provocative questions. The guests are real people who come to the dialog with humility, curiosity, and relatable challenges and perspectives.
I am Jim Hessler. And this is path forward. Real conversations about leadership. The show is about living as a leader in a world that needs leaders. For the past 21 years, we have been teaching leadership, primarily through the process of great open conversations. You can't learn leadership entirely from books, you have to do it. We get people in the trenches working on their current business challenges, and we give Them a way to learn new skills and new awareness, you know, the early days I was kind of just doing a bad impression of a bad boss and I suffered for.
It as the CEO. You know, I am always kind of staying on top of it, but what I realized is, it's not just me. I love my ego and my pride to take over there because it was getting fed and I hurt.
Myself. I have worked at some organizations that had, you know, big Tech clients and I would tell you the amount of fear that's driven from leadership. It's so toxic. I went from owning zero percent of the company, Tony, 100% of the.
Company. I have been devalued in certain places and I have been really valued and others, so It's Tricky, space.
In every episode, these conversations are with real people, we're going to explore the messiness of leadership. The parts that can't be addressed through a simple solution. We're not going to do case studies, and we're not going to do simplified versions of their lives or their situations. It's not easy. Easy thing to lead, and we all need help in the process. It's very lonely to be at the.
Top and then the hiring director emailed me like a couple days later. He's like, what happened?
And you can suffer from imposter syndrome to the nth degree. I feel like gosh, I wish they just care as much or see as much or be as effective as I am or as.
Efficient and then it was a fight from the beginning to get anything done. I thought wrongly That I would have no problem coming back in but I did have a tough time and folks wanted to understand what the Gap was on my resume.
I think that's where I struggled. It's the kind of find that line to where I apply the right amount of pressure. No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the challenge is, no matter how confusing or difficult things are, there's always a path forward.