Building High-Performing Teams From the Inside Out With Sean Patton, President of No Limit Leaders

Sean Patton is the President of No Limit Leaders, a leadership development and executive coaching organization. A former US Army Special Forces Green Beret commander and airborne ranger, Sean translates elite military experience into practical business leadership. Through coaching, speaking, and his podcast, No Limit Leadership, he helps executives lead themselves first and lead others with clarity and purpose. He is also the author of A Warrior’s Mindset: The Six Keys to Greatness.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:15] Why leadership is about who you are, not just what you do
• [3:55] How Sean Patton’s military background shapes his leadership coaching
• [7:40] What inspired Sean to found No Limit Leaders
• [11:50] The impact of strong leadership culture on employee morale
• [14:45] Can you still lead well in a job you dislike?
• [42:00] How to respond when leadership strategies fail

In this episode…

Modern leadership requires more than just hitting KPIs — it demands emotional intelligence, purpose, and personal growth. Many professionals operate on autopilot, managing tasks instead of truly leading people and culture. How can leaders inspire trust, drive transformation, and stay aligned with their own vision while serving others?

According to executive coach Sean Patton, effective leadership starts with self-leadership. Drawing from his military roots, Sean emphasizes that the best leaders cultivate clarity, embody their values, and create cultures where feedback, vision, and individual goals align. He shares practical strategies for embracing feedback, shifting mindset, and becoming a person others genuinely want to follow.

In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen hosts Sean Patton, President of No Limit Leaders, for a conversation about cultivating self-leadership, creating resilient workplace cultures, and why even elite teams need strong leadership support. Sean unpacks his approach to coaching, stories from the military, and mindset shifts that unlock exponential growth.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Rise25
• Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
• Sean Patton on LinkedIn
• No Limit Leaders
• A Warrior’s Mindset: The 6 Keys to Greatness by Sean Patton
• No Limit Leadership podcast
• Novus Global 
• Harry Allen on LinkedIn
• Studio Bank

Quotable Moments:

• “Leadership is a way of being — it’s not something you do, it’s someone you are.”
• “The best leaders don’t wait for permission to grow. They get messy early and often.”
• “Your team won’t trust you until you trust and respect them first.”
• “Discipline isn’t about willpower — it’s about design. Make the right thing the easy thing.”
• “If you don’t know who you want to be, how can you expect others to follow you?”

Action Steps:

1. Clarify your personal leadership vision: Write down who you want to be as a leader and revisit it often.
2. Start with self-leadership: Model discipline, integrity, and clarity in your own behavior first.
3. Ask for honest feedback: Regularly check how others perceive your leadership to align intention with impact.
4. Lead with vulnerability: Open up first to create a culture of trust and encourage reciprocal honesty.
5. Create alignment between team and personal goals: Understand what motivates each team member and connect it to the larger mission.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:04

Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show powered by Rise25 Media. We feature top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.

Chad Franzen: 00:20

Chad Franzen here, co-host of the Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by rise 25. We help B2B businesses reach their dream relationships and connect with more clients, referrals and strategic partnerships and get ROI through done for you podcasts. If you have a B2B business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way to do it than to profile the people and companies that you admire on your own podcast. To learn more, go to rise 25 or email us at.

Support at rise 25. Com. My guest today is Sean Patton, president of No Limit Leaders, a leadership development and executive coaching organization. Sean is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, podcast host. The podcast is called No Limit Leadership and author of A Warrior’s Mindset The Six Keys to Greatness.

He is a former US Army Special Forces Green Beret commander and US Army Airborne Ranger, whose military leadership foundation informs his work today, helping executives and teams build resilience, clarity and impact through Self-leadership. Sean, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?

Sean Patton: 01:28

Yeah, thanks for invitation, man. I’m excited to be here.

Chad Franzen: 01:31

Hey, tell me, as you talk to executives, I’m sure they have their own leadership story and leadership challenges, but you’ve probably gone through something that most most of them, not all of them have could never imagined. In terms of your military training, especially Green Beret leadership, things like that. How how do how does your leadership, at least in that regard, relate to maybe the people you’re speaking to?

Sean Patton: 01:57

Yeah. Great question. You know, leadership is about a way of being. And I think that is the what translates across regardless of if you’re on a a lead military team or your, you know, running a large company or you’re a solopreneur with just like a few people, whatever that is, that leadership really just comes down to who who you are, how you show up, how you carry yourself. And are you the type?

I mean, if we if we stripped it back to its bones, right? If we just like, kept digging on leadership, we get down to do other smart, dedicated and driven people want to follow you. Okay. And and so I think where maybe some leaders can go awry or get confused as we start thinking about it, it’s something external to us, right? It’s about the company we’re creating or it’s a set of skill sets.

I need to learn these skill sets, or I need to figure out this thing, or if I just read this other book or do this course and they think that it it’s about these external results, when in reality the work has to start with how do you lead yourself and are you a person and how do you become a person if you’re not already? Or how do you embody that? More like how are what is the way of being for you? That is a person other people want to follow?

Chad Franzen: 03:13

Sure. Yeah, that’s that’s good stuff. We’ll get into that in just a little bit more into that. Into in just a little bit. Hey, what led you to start No Limit Leaders?

Sean Patton: 03:24

You know, even though I spent ten years as an active duty officer, both in the infantry, as a rifle platoon leader and sniper platoon leader, and then an army special forces as a Green Beret team commander two times. I mean, I was never really the gun guy or the gear guy. I know people are, like, sometimes surprised to hear that, but for me, what I loved about all of those roles was it was about the people and it was about the problems we were solving. And that was really where my passion was all along. That’s what I loved about it.

I loved working with great people, trying to do really hard but powerful and impactful things. And so when I got out of the military in 2015, so ten years over ten years ago now. It was I knew that I wanted to do what I’m doing now. So I knew I wanted to work with leaders. I knew that I wanted to see, you know, between ten years as an officer and four years at West Point, I feel like I crammed a lifetime of leadership lessons into those into that time period.

But you know what? What applies outside of that structure and what doesn’t and what else is there to learn and and how can I impact those leaders? Because what I had seen inside the military, I’m sure you’ve seen this on the private side. I know I’ve seen it in both sides now. When you have a strong leadership culture, when you have a an organization and a group of people and a team where people are aligned with what is valuable to them and what is valuable to the team, and they’re aligned on mission and they’re bought in and they’re working together.

Life is just better. Like, it can be fun to go to work, right? Like it can give you energy. It can bring you passion. It changes the way we experience life.

And on the other side of that coin is Monday again, another meeting that should have been an email. They don’t even care about what am I doing here? Right. Just it’s about to me it if it gets down to like do you value your your time. Do you value life?

And if you if, if you value and think there’s inherent value in the way that you live and the way you spend your time and just life itself, let’s not waste it. Let’s do something amazing. And we’re going to do that together. And that’s going to take leadership.

Chad Franzen: 05:55

So if you’re in a position that you I don’t know that you you’re a good leader, but you don’t like your your job or you don’t like the company that you work for, is it still possible to just to be a good leader? Because that’s who you are?

Sean Patton: 06:08

Absolutely. And and that doesn’t mean that that has to be your life forever. Right. And I think there’s lessons in in how we approach things. So life is as it occurs to us.

It’s not the way it is. It’s the occurrence that we choose to have. And so as you go into that experience, maybe you’ve got like a maybe you got a crappy manager or just like the culture’s not great, but like, you know, maybe the people you work for or the, the actual work you enjoy of it, you can approach that two different ways, right? And we can be in the same situation. We can approach that with a mindset and occurrence of Again.

I’m just wasting my time. I’m biding my time I can disengage, I can, I can do that. That’s a option. And there maybe is another option. It might be more resourceful way to view that occurrence, that situation, which is what can I learn here?

Because I’ll tell you that some of the most powerful leadership lessons I’ve learned have not necessarily been from great leaders, and it’s been what not to do. And so oh, wow, that’s interesting. Like what they did that this had this negative influence. Let me let me remember that. Like how would I do that differently.

Oh I would try this I would do that. Like you could go through and see different lessons and you could be growing tremendously even in a situation that isn’t ideal. And then you can also, you know, start local so you can impact your team just because maybe your experience isn’t great. What about the what about the three direct reports you have? How can you how can you, how can you set the example there?

And a lot of times you’ll see in these organizations that it’s, you know, it’s great. If it’s top down, it can be faster and transformative. If it’s top down where you get buy in from the top to say, we’re going to, we’re going to transform culture. These are our values that can that can happen organizationally so much faster. But you also see the senior manager in tech sales start changing the way she does things and then have other teams be like, wait a minute, why aren’t we doing that?

And then somebody across the other departments like, wait, what’s going on over here? Why are they performing that way? And all of a sudden you have change from the inside out. And that also is possible. And I wonder how your experience would be of life of your job if you chose that occurrence.

Chad Franzen: 08:40

Yeah. That’s that’s great. That’s great insight. So you mentioned how you lead yourself first. What what does that mean.

Sean Patton: 08:48

So it has to. That’s the first lesson that they teach you when you get to West Point, right? You show up and you’re not in charge of anybody. You’re just in charge of yourself. And so it’s the same way you would lead.

So you had a team and well, where are you going to start? Well, what’s your mission? What’s your vision for this team? What are you going to accomplish. Because what are you going to direct the team at.

Are you just going to come in and be like, we’re just going to do stuff? You would never do that with a team, right? You would start be like, what’s our mission? What’s our vision, what’s our impact? How are we going to do that?

Alright, how do we get our systems in place to accomplish that? That’s the same thing for yourself and it has to start with you. So, you know, if you walk into, let’s just say as an example, you walk into that role that you talked about maybe where you’re like, it’s so, so it’s all right. It’s a job. You know, we get things done.

That’s okay. I mean, that’s again one way to approach that. But what is if you don’t have a greater vision for yourself, it can stay like that. But maybe it’s okay. I’m going to learn as many lessons as I can.

But ultimately, here’s my vision for my life. And what does that look like? What is what is questioning what I think is actually capable? What am I capable of? And then chasing that.

Because the thing is that all inspiring, empowering leaders that we want to follow have a noble purpose greater than themselves, right? They’re all striving toward something. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be an organizational thing. People want to follow you because you have a big vision for your life, and they see you have integrity, i.e. you do what you say when you say you’re going to do it right, you have some self-discipline, and then all of a sudden it’s like, you know, an example of this would be my my wife. I’ll brag on her a bit.

This was years ago when she was a, a brand new manager at a sales company, and they were in person, one of those big call centers. And she would show up and, you know, it was one of those things. It was like cold brews and pizzas and Donut Day and all that stuff. Right now we go out to eat and lunch and her and I trained jiu jitsu. I own, I own a couple Brazilian jiu jitsu gyms and we would train and she was competing.

So she would show up, bring her lunch, right, have a salad, go to the gym, go to the gym at lunch, whatever. Do that. All of a sudden people started off kind of making fun of her, right? They were kind of like, oh, you know, the rabbit over here chewing on her lettuce, you know, whatever. Don’t come over here.

And, you know, we’re gonna go get, you know, after work. And she’s like, no, I’m gonna go train. She would do that. But then just by her doing that, all of a sudden people started asking her, hey, do you mind if I sit and eat with you? Hey, are you gonna go to the gym before you work out?

There’s a gym in the building. Like they start going with her, and all of a sudden. Then when she got promoted to a new position, everyone wanted to be on her team.

Chad Franzen: 11:27

Oh, nice. Wow.

Sean Patton: 11:29

Because they saw how she led herself and they respected that. And all of a sudden she became a leader of others that other people wanted to follow because of how she had led herself.

Chad Franzen: 11:42

Yeah, that’s that’s like, yeah, you don’t really have to talk. He just. You just do it. So let’s say somebody’s listening. You know, I’ve, I’ve had I’ve worked for some managers or supervisors who were just like my bosses that they appointed.

And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to follow their lead if I didn’t have to. I’ve probably been that person, too. I’ve probably been somebody who people would want to follow and been somebody who people would roll their eyes at. What’s the first step you can take? Let’s say you’re a manager and you realize, like, you know, I don’t think I don’t think I’m really leading this group.

I’m just managing. What’s the first step you can take where you can be like, okay, how do I transition my own mindset to be somebody who people would want to follow?

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