Leadership Recalibrated™

About Leadership Recalibrated™

A Leadership Series from Her Executive Ascent Inc. Leadership Recalibrated™ is a new lens on leadership for the modern era. It challenges outdated leadership advice and explores how women are uniquely positioned to lead in environments shaped by complexity, power dynamics, and artificial intelligence. Forget the recycled “be confident, lean in” playbook. This show gets tactical about what actually works. Each episode explores how leaders are recalibrating around three critical capabilities: Executive Judgment - Making clear, strategic decisions in complex environments. Strategic Influence - Navigating power, visibility, and decision pathways inside organizations. AI Leadership - Shaping how artificial intelligence informs strategy, governance, and leadership. Hosted by Lori Lalonde, founder of Her Executive Ascent Inc., the show features conversations with women who have learned how to operate differently and the decisions that changed the trajectory of their leadership. Leadership Recalibrated™ explores the ideas. Her Executive Ascent™ is where leaders strengthen the judgment, strategic influence, and AI leadership authority required to operate at the executive level. This is leadership for women who are done waiting for permission and ready to rewrite the rules. New episodes drop weekly.

Publisher

Lori Lalonde

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Feb 2026

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

27 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Think Like The Bad Guy: How to Find the Holes in Your AI Product Before Someone Else Does

   Ask a product team how their AI feature could be attacked, and the pause that follows tells you a lot. Petra Mifka's workshops start there. She gives the team a budget of 500 euros and a new job: you're the attacker now, so how do you break your own product? In her experience, once people see how little it takes, the conversation changes. They stop asking whether it could happen and start asking who gets the call at 3 a.m. when it does. The attackers aren't smarter than they used to be. They have tools that do the work faster. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Petra, who runs the Berlin consultancy noosphr, to talk about what it takes to find the weak points in an AI product before someone else does. Petra built her career in trust and safety, leading large global teams at Meta and TikTok, where the work is deciding what stays up and what comes down. It shows in how she runs a room. We talk about the question most companies skip, why the hardest calls are rarely made by the person with the title, and how a role-swap exercise can turn a vague worry into a number a CFO will fund. This is a conversation for anyone being told to ship AI faster instead of asking what could go wrong. About Our Guest Petra Mifka spent over 10 years in trust and safety at TikTok and Meta. At TikTok she was Global Head of Implementation and Head of Operations for EMEA, leading 600+ people. At Meta she oversaw a 1,500+ person operation across APAC. For most of that time, she'll tell you, she felt like an impostor and let the company logo do the talking. Leaving big tech meant figuring out who she was without it. Today she runs noosphr, a Berlin-based consultancy she co-founded with her husband, and mentors women through Extraordinary Women in Tech. She's Croatian, lives in Berlin, and writes about leadership, AI, and saying the quiet part out loud. You can connect with Petra on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-mifka/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-mifka/). You can book a free 30-minute call through her Calendly: https://calendly.com/mifkapetra/30min (https://calendly.com/mifkapetra/30min)

2. 

   13 Sept 2026

   The Story Builder: Why What's Missing Matters More Than What You're Saying

   The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with content or messaging and everything to do with finding what is missing. Including, for years, in how she told her own career story. Twenty years across state agencies, B2B SaaS, supply chain, and health tech, and when she walked into private sector rooms she talked about the parts she thought people wanted to hear. It took a mentor pointing out what she was doing for her to see what she had been cutting out. Not just a chapter of her resume. The reason companies kept hiring her in the first place. She shares one example of a product that would not sell, and where the answer turned out to be hiding. It was not in the data. It was not in the research. It was sitting with someone who had been in the room with customers the whole time and had no idea what he was holding. We also get into why hiring for the mold is costing companies the ideas they say they want, what actually happens in the room when teams discover they have been arguing over the same position in different vocabulary, how to get found now that buyers are searching through LLMs instead of Google, and the marketing rule Niki wants retired for good. This is a conversation for marketers, founders, and anyone who has been told their background does not quite fit. About Our Guest Niki McKinnell is the VP of Growth at Curbside where she leads marketing, sales processes, customer success infrastructure, and the GTM systems connecting it all. She is also the Founder of MCKINNELL Marketing Consulting. She has built and led global and regional teams across B2B and B2G SaaS, DaaS, supply chain, HealthTech, GovTech, and data providers, in both the public and private sectors. Her career started in press offices for state agencies and associations, running crisis communications and press conferences in an environment where nearly everything happened after the fact. That is where the pattern began. She kept finding what an organization was not saying and building the program around it, first with no funding and a camera she found in a supply closet, and later leading marketing departments through growth, rebrands, and product launches on the private sector side. Her specialty is scaling marketing departments and building unified strategies that blend AI, brand, demand generation, product marketing, and communications. Her expertise spans GTM strategy and execution, ABM, product and lifecycle marketing, brand positioning, buyer journey mapping, demand generation, pipeline growth, and SEO, SEM, GEO, and LLM optimization. What makes her perspective worth an hour is that she has built in rooms with no budget and rooms with real budget, and she can tell you exactly what carries over between them. You can connect with Niki on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikimckinnell/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikimckinnell/)

3. 

   6 Sept 2026

   The Rubber Band Only Stretches So Far: Why Misaligned Leaders Burn Out Their Teams

   Someone on your team is excellent at their job. So you promote them. That is how it works, and almost nobody questions it. Then things start to fracture. Deadlines get tighter. Processes multiply. People stop feeling included in decisions they used to be part of. Six months later you have a retention problem and a leader who is exhausted by a job they were never wired for. Cari Kenzie can show you exactly where that broke. And she can do it without anyone in the room having to make it personal. In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Cari Kenzie, founder of Kinza Collective™, a strategic advisory firm that works with founders on leadership alignment, operations, and finances so their businesses hold real enterprise value. Cari built a trade show and event marketing firm into a multi-million dollar company and then sold it in 45 days, off a text message she was not expecting, a year to the day before COVID hit. What she did not have going into that sale is most of the reason she does this work now. Her work starts with a question most organizations never think to ask. Not whether someone is capable, but whether the seat they are sitting in is one they can hold without breaking. Using Predictive Index, she can answer it. And what the data says about a struggling team is rarely what the leadership above them believes is happening. This is a conversation for founders and executives who have a team that is not working and have been treating it as a people problem. About Our Guest Cari Kenzie is a keynote speaker, leadership advisor, and former CEO who built and sold a multi-million-dollar agency in an unplanned exit. That experience revealed the gaps most founders don’t see — when the business isn’t fully ready, and neither is the leader. Today, as the founder of KINZA Collective™, Cari helps high-capacity women design businesses that thrive beyond them, leadership teams that execute with conscious awareness, and exits that protect both wealth and legacy. Known for blending strategic clarity with soul-led leadership, she is committed to ensuring no founder has to walk the exit road alone. To connect with Cari, you can email her at team@kinzacollective.com To learn more about Kinza Collective™, visit: www.kinzacollective.com (https://www.kinzacollective.com)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings