{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"High Octane Leadership","title":"Your Best Employees are Quitting Quietly - Warning Signs You Can't Ignore","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3121,"description":"Business right now is loud. AI disruption, declining trust, employees going quiet, leaders buried in meetings that don't move anything forward. Donald Thompson isn't trying to cover all of it. For 2026, he's narrowed his focus to four things: leadership excellence, employee engagement, AI in the human workforce, and trust-based brand authority.\nOn this episode of High Octane Leadership, Don hands guest host Jackie Ferguson — two-time founder, best-selling author of The Inclusive Language Handbook, and former host of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox — the questions, and lets her put him on the record about why these four pillars, and not the twenty other things he could be talking about.\nHe opens with the standard he holds himself to: “When things are broken, it’s my fault. When we miss a sales number, it’s my fault.” That's leadership excellence in one sentence — are you a protector of your team, or a blame assigner?\nLeadership Excellence: Inside the LeaderView Diagnostic\nLeadership excellence is about the behaviors leaders model, not the behaviors they ask for. Don's case: if an organization only rewards financial metrics while claiming to care about people, that mismatch becomes a cultural problem that shows up downstream, whether leadership intends it or not. This pillar is also where Don's diagnostic tools live. LeaderView is Donald Thompson's whole-team leadership diagnostic, measuring how senior leadership teams function together rather than scoring individual leaders, and presents a redefined take on growth mindset that's rooted in resilience and after-action review instead of just learning.\nEmployee Engagement\nDon's argument is that engagement is business-critical because great leadership behavior means nothing if it doesn't convert into how employees act when no one's watching. He points to two reasons engagement investment keeps failing: leaders treat a single town hall like it's enough communication (when digital marketing alone tells you it takes 12 to...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/lgmj79F6u_aksHXmYERU-fwjthI5JqnlRVWJ-A5NESw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80MGQ0/YjZiYWJmNDlkMWNh/N2Q1YjEzNTgwMzA3/ZDEzYS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}