How to develop the most challenging “soft” skills required to navigate today’s leadership complexities.

I’m a leadership consulting and coaching psychologist, founder of the Towerscope and Towerscope Leadership Academy, an Associate Professor, a Psychology Today columnist, author of the Millennials Guide to Workplace Politics, and the accompanying workbook, and had my own leadership career before transitioning to helping teams and high-achieving women navigate their leadership complexities.

The Hard Skills show combines research and practical tips to explore the highly nuanced leadership skills needed to navigate today's leadership challenges, such as creating inclusive and healthy workplaces.

Through expert interviews and live coaching calls, we challenge the notion of "soft skills," question long-held but inaccurate leadership development beliefs, and offer real, practical solutions for complex leadership challenges.

The show appeals especially to socially-conscious, high-achieving leaders who come from a technical background within healthcare, STEM, tech, and academic industries. It is also a draw for organizational misfits (folks who might feel a misalignment between the organizational culture and their leadership style). But the leadership "soft" skills we discuss apply to anyone on their leadership journey.
 

I listened and enjoyed many podcasts myself, but I chose this medium because I personally enjoy deep, meaningful, one-on-one conversations with smart people. This lets me keep learning and exploring my ideas and learning from others, while I also teach others and help increase my visibility in the work I do. I already wrote a lot (books, Psychology Today blog, newsletters), but the podcast medium allows people to connect better with my personality.
I started my podcast in July 2023 and we released the first episode in August after we had four episodes completed.
 

I currently release episodes once a week. I use a company (TalkRadio.nyc) to produce it. We air it live on Tuesday evenings, and then it gets translated into a podcast afterward. I have developed a system to find guests, and help walk them through the guest onboarding and prep process using a 10-page guide I created, and Google Forms to help me collaboratively develop the skeleton outline for the introduction, the questions I will ask them, and the social media information we need to promote the episode. I have an assistant who uses a template I created to develop the social media assets and draft announcements we use. Using this system, it only takes me about 1-2 hours to prepare each episode, but that's because I fund it myself by outsourcing marketing and production, as I described.
 

I do not currently take sponsorship from the podcast, though I would be open to considering it. So podcasting currently doesn't benefit me monetarily but I use it to enhance my personal brand, increase awareness and connection to new folks who don't yet know me (top of the sales funnel), and keep learning.
 

Since I outsource the actual production and editing piece, I don't worry about the software or hardware. But I do use a nice Yeti microphone and earbuds. The large majority of the guests I have had on my show so far were folks already in my network that I invited. Once I reached about 50-60 episodes, I had fewer folks in my network I could invite but began receiving outreach from podcast PR folks wanting to get their clients on my podcast. I have a system to evaluate the fit of each guest. I use Google Forms to have each guest who is unknown to me apply to see if they meet my criteria. If they are a good fit for what I am looking for, I will invite them to set up their episode date through my Calendly link, read my 10-page guide to prep in general, and fill out a social media promotion and prep form (also via Google Forms) to help me plan out the episode by pulling out their responses about their area of expertise. In that form we ask guests to upload their headshot and bio and my assistant uses that information to develop social media promotion assets. Since it is our first live show, I interview guests using Zoom, which can livestream to various online places through our production team. They use that video to upload the recording into YouTube and other places as well as the audio to podcast platforms.
 

We live stream to Twitter/X, Twitch, YouTube, LinkedIn, and then it gets added to Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and other audio platforms. They can find us anywhere. I don't have a breakdown of specific platform acquisition but YouTube and LinkedIn (my main platform) seem to be my best marketing channels.
 

What I learned was that (a) doing a live show can be very liberating in some ways because I had to let go of worrying about creating a perfectly edited show and instead embrace authentic dialogue, (b) I waited for a long time to get started, but I truly have enjoyed the process when I started, (c) outsourcing was critical to my success - I would never have the time to do this otherwise, (d) sometimes I do wonder if all the work is worth it, but as long as I am enjoying the process I will continue, (e) it's not enough to do the podcast - you must promote it and ideally invite guests who aren't shy about promoting it - it's what helps with visibility.
 

The best places to find me are here:
www.GoTowerscope.com
https://www.linkedin.com/company/towerscope/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/towerscope-leadership-academy/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/MiraBrancu
https://www.instagram.com/MiraBrancu
https://bsky.app/profile/mirabrancu.bsky.social
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBRIDM9zFt53CbF8-Y_LiHx_12xdIQpT1
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-skills/id1706366751