Episode Details

Summary In today's episode, we outline the ten best podcasts for leaders in 2019.

Transcript Welcome to episode 53 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges.

As leaders, podcasts offer a tempting solution to continuing our professional development and keeping in touch with broader trends. We can simply pull on the headphones and learn about almost anything. But with over 700,000 active podcasts, it can be hard for a leader to know where to start. Fortunately I've done the heavy lifting for you, with today's episode outlining the ten best podcasts for leaders in 2019.

It's important to note that these are the ten best podcasts for leaders - they're not the ten best podcasts about leadership. Instead, they provide a broad range of perspectives, topics and approaches.

You're unlikely to love them all - there's clearly an element of preferences around style and content. But if you pick up one or two new podcasts then hopefully this episode has served its purpose.

And, for the pedantic, I'm actually going to list 14 podcasts - there were a few ties along the way. I have links to all of the podcasts in the show notes.

So, for dramatic effect, I'm going to start at number 10 and work my way up.

As leaders it's important to challenge our perspectives and broaden our thinking, which brings me to number 10.

10 - Akimbo by Seth Godin https://www.akimbo.me

Seth Godin is one of the most popular and successful authors and bloggers of our time, producing content at a frenetic pace. It's a little hard to tie his Akimbo podcast down, but he's bound to challenge your thinking and bring new perspectives to the way you lead. There's a solid 15% of what he says that I tend to either disagree with or think he has gotten completely wrong. And there's a solid 15% that makes me think about the world in a completely new way, so that seems like a fair trade off. Episodes vary dramatically in length from 20 minutes to 45 minutes.

Teamwork, engagement and culture are rich topics to explore and it's helpful to have a seasoned expert to guide the way. And who better to that than Patrick Lencioni at number 9.

9 - At The Table with Patrick Lencioni https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-the-table-with-patrick-lencioni/id1474171732

Patrick is a well known author of books including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The podcast is setup as a chat between Pat and a few of his work colleagues. The format is pretty casual and relatively new, so they're still bedding down the style a little bit. Episodes are around 30 to 40 minutes.

People are diverse and difficult to understand, but having deep insight into what motivates and drives others is a key part of leadership. That's where podcast number 8 comes in handy.

8 - Hidden Brain from NPR. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brain

Hosted by Shankar Vedantam, this podcast is a gem which combines science and storytelling to uncover the often subtle forces that drive our behaviour. Always thought provoking and really well produced. Episodes range from 25 minutes up to an hour.

Setting up workplaces that are engaging and motivating is what leaders do to achieve results, and that's the focus of podcast number 7.

7 - WorkLife with Adam Grant from TED. https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife

As an organisational psychologist, Adam's podcast focuses on motivation and meaning at work. He's a university professor and the author of several books, including cowriting the excellent Option B with Sheryl Sandberg. Get your thumb ready to skip past the adverts, but otherwise it's