Jean Marie Speaks - The Renaissance Leader

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Jean Marie Speaks - The Renaissance Leader We help leaders untap hidden talent and unlock new ideas among your teams using the 5 Core Renaissance Leadership Principles.

We deliver 3 & 6 month Leadership Programs, Executive Coaching and Team Effectiveness Sessions.

What if the talent you are looking for is already within the team you lead? Every person on your team brings unique gif...
10/13/2026

What if the talent you are looking for is already within the team you lead?

Every person on your team brings unique gifts, strengths, experiences, and perspectives that may never show up in their day-to-day responsibilities.

Yet how often do we take the time to discover them?

When we get curious about the whole person, we uncover talents that may be overlooked, undervalued, or underutilized.

And that can change how we collaborate, solve problems, and innovate.

I invite you this week to take some time and ask a team member:“What's one strength, skill, or talent you have that you wish you had more opportunities to use?”

Then listen. You may discover something that changes how you see that person and the value they can bring.

Curiosity helps us recognize the brilliance that's already in the room.
Asking the right questions uncovers it.

♻️ Reshare to help another leader out.
🔔For more powerful questions you can use with your team to increase trust, psychological safety and engagement, check out my Linkedin Learning course below.

What if you viewed your people like diamonds in the rough?Imagine how differently you might lead them.Some of the greate...
10/01/2026

What if you viewed your people like diamonds in the rough?

Imagine how differently you might lead them.

Some of the greatest talent inside an organization is hiding in plain sight.

The person hired for finance may have an incredible talent for facilitating difficult conversations.

The engineer on your team may have spent years living in a region you're trying to expand into.

The quiet person in the meeting may have solved the exact problem everyone else is struggling with.

But we'll never know if we don't ask.

We tend to know people through the lens of the role they were hired to do.

Their job title tells us what they're responsible for.

It doesn't tell us everything they're capable of.

Every person brings a lifetime of experiences, interests, relationships, knowledge, strengths and talents to work with them.

How much of that brilliance are we actually tapping into?

One of the greatest untapped resources in most organizations may already be on the payroll.

This week, ask someone on your team a question you've probably never asked:

“What experience, expertise or talent do you have that we may not know about?”

You may be surprised by what you uncover.

Where are the hidden diamonds in your organization?

♻️ Reshare to help another leader out.
🔔 If you want more tips on how to lead like a Renaissance Leader, be sure to click the bell on the bottom right corner of my banner to receive notifications when I post.

** Image of the world's second largest diamond found in Botswana

We ask our teams to be vulnerable, open, real. But then many of us lead in a way that makes that impossible. And, often...
09/29/2026

We ask our teams to be vulnerable, open, real. But then many of us lead in a way that makes that impossible.

And, often we are unconscious of it. We are trying to be the leader people can look up to, who is strong, confident and put together.

But then we become guarded in the hard meeting, or change the subject when it gets personal, or shows frustration when the same issue keeps coming up.

We end up modeling the exact armor or behaviors we're asking everyone else to drop.

People don't open up because you tell them to.
They open up because they watched you do it first, and survived.

The most human cultures aren't built by the leader who asks the most questions.
They're built by the one willing to answer a hard one themselves.

And, shows their vulnerability as a human being.

Are you asking your team for an openness you haven't been willing to model first?
If so, I invite you this week to show more of your humanity.

You might be surprised with how people respond.

♻️ Reshare to help another leader out.
🔔 If you want more tips like this every Tuesday, be sure to click the bell on the bottom right corner of my banner to receive notifications when I post.

When something stops working, most of us push harder at it. Rarely do we stop and ask if we're solving the wrong problem...
09/22/2026

When something stops working, most of us push harder at it.

Rarely do we stop and ask if we're solving the wrong problem entirely.

It makes sense, though. Pushing harder feels like effort, discipline, resolve.
Like we are being productive.

Stopping to question the whole approach feels like quitting.
So we optimize the thing that should be abandoned, and call it persistence.

Some of the most important leadership moments aren't “how do I fix this?”
They're “what if the shape of this is wrong?”

That's a braver question.
It risks more.

And it's usually the one that actually changes things.

What are you currently pushing harder at that might need a different question instead of more effort?

♻️ Reshare to help another leader out.
🎯 For powerful questions to ask your team, check out my Linkedin Learning course on "Powerful Questions to Increase Trust, Psychological Safety and Engagement" in the comment

Every leader is running on values they never consciously chose.The ones handed down by a parent, a first boss, a culture...
09/19/2026

Every leader is running on values they never consciously chose.

The ones handed down by a parent, a first boss, a culture you grew up in.
👉 "Work harder than everyone."
👉 "Never show weakness."
👉 "Don't take up too much space."
👉 "Stay humble."

At some point they protected you, so you kept them.

But inherited values have an expiration date no one warns you about.
For me, the value of humility was a huge one in our family. And, I'm grateful it was a strong value instilled in my brothers and I.

But, it can also limit me when I need to promote myself and my business.

Some traits that kept you safe at 25 can be the exact thing limiting you at 50.
And because it still feels like a virtue, you never think to question it.

The work of a mature leader isn't just acquiring new strengths.
It's noticing which old ones have started to cost you.

Which value did you inherit that served you once...and might be holding you back now?

How much of what you know is still sitting with you?💡 We learn something that works.💡 We solve a difficult problem.💡 W...
09/08/2026

How much of what you know is still sitting with you?

💡 We learn something that works.
💡 We solve a difficult problem.
💡 We create a tool that saves us time.
💡 We discover a better way to approach something.

And then we move on.

Sometimes we assume other people already know it.
Sometimes we're so busy that sharing it doesn't cross our minds.
And sometimes we hesitate because we don't want to look like we're promoting ourselves.

But an insight only creates so much value when it stays with one person.

Imagine what could happen if more of what we learned traveled across our teams, departments and organizations.

🎯 Someone could build on your idea.
🎯 Adapt it for an entirely different challenge.
🎯 Avoid a mistake you've already made.
🎯 Save hours solving a problem you've already solved.

Or take your thinking somewhere you never imagined.

This week, think of one thing you've learned, created or figured out that someone else could benefit from.

Then share it.

Before you tackle a major issue, how often do you seek out others who may have solved it before?The amount of time we lo...
09/01/2026

Before you tackle a major issue, how often do you seek out others who may have solved it before?

The amount of time we lose reinventing the wheel inside organizations can be staggering.

One team develops a tool that works beautifully.
Another team creates something nearly identical six months later.

One region solves a problem that another region is still struggling with.
Someone discovers a better way of working, but the learning never travels beyond their immediate team.

We spend so much time thinking about innovation as creating something new. Sometimes innovation begins by discovering what already exists and finding a new way to use it.

This is what I call "Magnifying the Value", the fifth Renaissance Leadership principle I share in my Leadership Programs.

Before building from scratch, get curious and ask these questions:

🎯 Who else has faced this challenge?
🎯 What solutions, tools or resources already exist?
🎯 What could we adapt rather than recreate?
🎯 Who knows something about this that we don't?

The value of a great idea grows when it travels.

This week, before you create something new, find out what already exists that you can learn from, leverage, or build upon.

Where might your organization already have an answer that no one knows about?

We spent decades designing education around producing answers.Then we invented a machine that can produce answers extrao...
08/27/2026

We spent decades designing education around producing answers.

Then we invented a machine that can produce answers extraordinarily well.

And now it's forcing our education systems and workplaces to rethink what we value.

And how we measure the importance of our...

Understanding.
Reasoning.
Discernment.
Ability to communicate.
Ability to engage another human being in conversation.

This thought came out of a fascinating rabbit hole I went down with AI this morning...about AI.

I was wrestling with the growing challenge of authenticity. If we use AI to save time, why are we then penalized when our writing "sounds like AI"?

That led me to AI detection tools, especially after I gave one something I had written years before generative AI existed and it told me some percentage was likely written by AI.

That got me thinking.

AI learned language from humans. So how accurately can a tool determine whether something was written by a human or AI based on the language alone?

And then my mind went to education.

In my day, education was often about learning (or memorizing) and then regurgitating back what I learned.

There was little test of actual understanding.

With so much technology in education, kids using smartphones for much of their communication, and AI able to create beautifully written papers, we need to start asking more questions that create dialogue and demonstrate understanding.

For example, asking students to...

Defend their position.
Respond to an unexpected question.
Apply what they've learned to a situation they haven't seen before.
Tell us what they disagree with and why.
Explain what AI suggested and why they accepted or rejected it.

This is how we deepen learning and test for understanding.

And imagine the additional benefit when those students enter the workplace:

They know how to articulate their ideas, listen, think on their feet, respond to different perspectives and have meaningful conversations.

One of the greatest gifts AI can give education is forcing us to rethink what it actually means to learn.

The same can apply in the workplace.

How are you creating experiences where people can demonstrate and deepen their learning rather than simply produce an answer?

What kinds of questions are you asking to open the dialogue, challenge thinking and help people learn from one another?

Sometimes the best answer is a great question.

☝️Follow me for tips, tools and insights to lead with curiosity in this age of AI.
🎯 Check out my Linkedin Learning courses below on "Communication Skills for the Modern Leader" and "Powerful Questions to Increase Psychological Safety, Trust and Engagement on Your Teams"

A better question will outperform a better answer almost every time.We spend so much energy getting to the right answer ...
08/25/2026

A better question will outperform a better answer almost every time.

We spend so much energy getting to the right answer that we rarely stop to check if we're answering the right question. A brilliant answer to the wrong question is just confident wasted motion.

The leaders who shift things don't always know more.
They ask differently.

They replace “How do we hit the target?” with “Is this still the right target?” — and the whole conversation changes.

This week, before solving your next problem, spend two minutes sharpening the question itself. Ask: “What are we really trying to solve here?”

You'll be surprised how often the question was the problem.

What's a question you've stopped asking because you assumed you already knew the answer?

♻️ Reshare to help another leader out.
🎯 For powerful questions to ask your team, chekc out my Linkedin Learning course on "Powerful Questions to Increase Trust, Psychological Safety and Engagement" in the comment

I don’t procrastinate. I marinate.It took me decades to figure that out.For years, I thought I was the world’s worst pro...
08/23/2026

I don’t procrastinate. I marinate.

It took me decades to figure that out.

For years, I thought I was the world’s worst procrastinator. Every paper in school. Every college project. Writing my first book.

I’d wait until the deadline was staring me in the face and then suddenly I would get it done.

Every time I promised myself, “Never again. Next time I’m starting earlier.”
And every time, I did it again.

It wasn't until I started paying attention to what was actually happening that I noticed a pattern.

The minute I knew I had a deadline, my brain went to work.
🎯 I’d capture an idea on my phone.
🎯 Bookmark something I came across.
🎯 Wake up at 3am with a thought.
🎯 Make connections while doing something completely unrelated.

I may not have been sitting at my desk working on it, but the work was happening.

That’s when it hit me: I don’t procrastinate. I marinate.

Once I understood my process, I stopped making myself wrong for it.
And something surprising happened.

I actually got better at managing it. I learned to give myself enough time at the end to pull everything together, sit with it, and make changes.

Sometimes we spend so much energy trying to fix the way we work that we never stop to understand how we work best.

What if something you’ve labeled a weakness is simply a process you haven’t fully understood yet?

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