The Leadership Lesson I Learned the Hard Way | David Lehman, President & COO of Birdeye

What happens when the leadership playbook that made you successful suddenly stops working?

Dave Lehman, President and COO of Birdeye, has spent more than two decades building and scaling teams at Salesforce, Yext, Campaign Monitor, and Birdeye. But one of his most important leadership lessons came from a painful moment: after aggressively scaling a business, Dave had to cut half his team.

“All I could do was blame myself.”

In this episode of Lead the Team, Dave shares how that experience changed the way he leads—and why a leader’s job isn’t simply to keep the machine growing, but to see where it could break before it does.

Dave also reveals why Birdeye is now testing job candidates for “AI aptitude,” the human skills becoming more valuable as AI improves, and how leaders can move their teams from repetitive “negative-one work” toward higher-value strategic work.

You’ll discover:

• Why successful playbooks eventually stop working

• The hiring mindset Dave used while scaling Salesforce’s Chicago office

• The painful leadership mistake that changed how he approaches growth

• Why leaders need to know their numbers before problems surface

• How Birdeye is testing leaders and salespeople for AI aptitude

• Why “AI can make that mistake—you can’t”