Leading Others Starts With Not Ignoring Yourself (feat. Dr. Marline Duroseau)
Dr. Marline C. Duroseau, widely known as Dr. Mar, is the Managing Director of HR and Leadership Development at Brandon Hall Group, where she helps organizations connect leadership strategy, human-centered work, and measurable business impact. A former Chief Financial Officer, CPA, TEDx speaker, award-winning author, and leadership strategist, Dr. Mar brings a rare combination of financial acumen, executive leadership, and deep human insight to the future of work conversation.
HOST
Matt Poepsel, PhD
Vice President & Godfather of Talent Optimization
GUEST
Dr. Marline C. Duroseau
Managing Director, HR & Leadership Development, Brandon Hall Group
Most leadership advice treats the person and the professional as two separate jobs. Dr. Marline C. Duroseau’s career says otherwise. She started in payroll at twenty-one, worked her way up to CFO of a 1,500-person healthcare organization, then walked away from finance to lead HR and leadership development at Brandon Hall Group, all while carrying a fifteen-year infertility journey she didn’t talk about at work until she wrote a book, then took the story to a TEDx stage.
In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Dr. Marline C. Duroseau, Managing Director of HR and Leadership Development at Brandon Hall Group and author of It’ll Happen By 30, to trace how a payroll job taught her to see people inside every spreadsheet, why she left the CFO title to chase the root causes she kept finding in the numbers, and what it took to stand on a TEDx stage and name the “secret battle” so many high-achieving women carry alone. Dr. Mar makes the case that resilience isn’t pushing through until you stop feeling anything. It’s knowing when to pause, when to ask for help, and how to keep showing up without abandoning yourself. Together, they get into what it means to lead people while you’re still figuring out how to lead yourself.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Numbers Tell You What, People Tell You Why: Financial discipline without the human side of the business creates disconnect. The strongest leaders read both.
- HR Earns Its Seat With Business Fluency, Not Just Policy: HR departments that stay in compliance mode get treated as reactive. The ones with a seat at the table connect data to the story behind it.
- Invisible Disruptions Are Universal: Infertility, divorce, caregiving, grief. The details differ, but the identity question underneath is the same: who am I now, and how do I keep leading from here?
- Resilience, Not Performance: Real resilience means adapting without pretending you’re unaffected, and building systems that let the people around you recover too.
Highlights:
(00:00) Meet Dr. Marline C. Duroseau
(01:52) Seeing the people behind every line item
(04:25) Two buildings, same budget, different outcomes
(09:53) Why she left the CFO seat for HR
(14:10) How HR earns a seat at the table
(19:16) The mentor who taught her to speak up
(20:20) The $522,000 lesson in speaking up
(22:29) Turning a 15-year infertility battle into a TEDx stage
(26:10) Why every disruption feels different but the identity question is the same
(28:11) Redefining resilience as not abandoning yourself
Resources:
Follow Dr. Marline on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marline-c-duroseau/
Get her book, It’ll Happen By 30
Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpoepsel/
Subscribe to The Predictive Index on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePredictiveIndex
Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: shareyourgenius.com
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