Transform Your Workplace

Christian Poensgen earned his PhD studying stress and performance. Then he started a company right out of school and came close to burning out anyway. He was working 80-hour weeks and sleeping seven or eight hours a night, and he still woke up exhausted. Every morning, the day already felt lost. This episode is a little different. It's about your own performance, and it applies to the people you l...

Plenty of companies say they're all in on AI. Privately, a lot of them aren't sure what to do with it. Jeff Wilser sees that gap in leadership rooms all the time, and he calls what often fills it AI theater. Think shiny tools that never make it into real workflows, or quotas that punish people for not using AI enough. Brandon and Jeff get into why leaders are usually excited about AI while their m...

A quiet team can feel like proof that things are going well. Suzi Wear sees it differently. If you're not hearing suggestions, feedback, or even complaints, something is usually keeping people from being open and honest with you. In this episode, Suzi and Brandon dig into the moment a frustrated employee shows up at your door. The common reflexes are to smooth it over, avoid it, or get defensive a...

Tanya Uyigue applied for a promotion she was qualified for and didn't get it. She asked why. Nobody ever told her. That silence became the starting point for her book, What Your Team Won't Tell You. It's written for the employees who can't safely give their managers honest feedback, and for the managers who were never trained to see what their people are seeing. Brandon and Tanya talk about what h...

Most leaders who carry everything already know they're doing it. Alli Murphy did. Four years ago on this show, she named her own patterns, from perfectionism to finding it easier to advocate for her team than for herself. She had a coach. It still nearly broke her. Alli is back to talk about what finally changed. She describes becoming what she calls the Chief Everything Officer, the leader that e...

Your Employee Did Their Research. It Was for the Wrong Industry. An employee walks in with AI research, fully confident they're owed back wages and penalties for missed 10-minute rest breaks. The research wasn't made up. It was valid information for a different industry, and it didn't apply to their employer. Xenium HR Director of HR Services, Nicole Blevins, is back to walk through what happened...

Most leaders treat problem behavior at work as a people problem. Dustin Snyder treats it as a design problem. Dustin came up through HR, then took both the VP of HR and president seats at a 600-employee manufacturing division that had been losing money for years. The turnaround taught him something uncomfortable. The HR toolkit he had been trained on, including progressive discipline, was built to...

Most managers have one move in a hard conversation. They tell people what to do. It works until it doesn't, and when it stops working, most of us just tell harder. Executive coach Heather Graves-Ramsey lays out three kinds of leadership conversations. Managing and mentoring both push. Coaching pulls. The difference is whether you walk in with the answer or walk in believing the person across from...

More than half of adults say they feel lonely. Among young men, 27 percent say they do not have a friend at all. Dr. Tracy Brower has spent her career studying what work does to people, and her new book is about what happens when the relationships go missing. This conversation starts with the research and then turns practical. Tracy explains how convenience removed the small interactions that used...

Every leader has run the meeting where the team can list twenty reasons something won't work and zero ideas for how it could. Alex Dorr has a name for what's happening in that room, and a five step process for getting out of it. Alex is the CEO of Reality-Based Leadership and the author of How We Could, out September 22, 2026. In this conversation with Brandon Laws, he walks through the Call to Gr...

Most leaders who cannot delegate assume it is a process problem. Susan Drumm has studied both sides of it, and her answer is that the skill gap is real but it is rarely the whole story. Underneath it is usually a belief you have been carrying since long before you managed anyone. Susan has spent two decades coaching C-suite executives, and her work centers on pattern recognition and pattern disrup...

Most managers already know what good management looks like. Give real feedback. Delegate. Have the hard conversation. Knowing it has never been the problem. Nir Eyal spent years asking why people who have the right answer still don't act on it. His conclusion is that the gap is not motivation or discipline. It's belief. And beliefs are harder to spot than habits, because from the inside they feel...

Deloitte's David Mallon on the Culture Debt AI Is Building Most organizations are treating AI like the last big tech rollout. Buy the licenses, run some training, expect results. The data says that approach is backfiring. David Mallon leads the research behind Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends report, now in its 15th year. In this conversation, he explains why 59% of organizations taking a te...

How you feel on Sunday night tells you something real about your relationship with work. Amy Leneker, the author of  Cheers to Monday , calls it one of the most honest assessments we have, and she would know. Seven weeks into medical leave after a panic attack, she sat in a doctor's office, got handed a questionnaire, and could not answer a question about what she did for fun. In this conversation...

You wrote the announcement, rehearsed it, sent it, and a week later the questions rolled in anyway. In this episode, communication strategist Lee Caraher explains why most workplace communication fails on delivery, not message, and what to do about it. She shares a practical three-send formula for making any announcement stick, a protocol for deciding which messages belong in email, Slack, or a me...

Stress has become so normal at work that plenty of people wear it like a badge. Justin Hai wants that to change. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rebalance Health and the author of Stress Nation, and he studies what our always-on habits do to our stress, our sleep, and our health. Justin breaks down cortisol, the hormone he calls the body's alarm system, and explains why it gets stuck in the on pos...

Most leaders think self-awareness means understanding their patterns. Cam Yenokida sees where that falls short. The executive coach and founder of Achieve Excellence explains why intellectual self-awareness alone never changes anything, and what it takes to turn insight into new behavior. Cam and Brandon get into the quiet reality of senior leadership, where the higher you climb, the less room you...

Most leaders treat their technology problems as technology problems. Richard Tarity has spent 26 years watching companies prove otherwise. In this episode, Brandon Laws talks with Richard,  the founder of truCX and author of  The Intelligence Within , about why how  an organization decides matters more than the tools it buys. They get into how slow discovery quietly kills good projects, why sittin...

The job market feels broken to a lot of people right now. Bonnie Dilber has a different read on it. As Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Zapier, she looks at hiring data for fun, and she says the problem is not that the jobs disappeared. It is that more people are competing for a pool of roles that has stayed flat, while plenty of work in trades, healthcare, and education goes unfilled. In t...

What does it mean to truly see your employees? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Zhou Fang, founder of Intersectional Group LLC, to explore how an intersectional lens can transform the way leaders support their teams. Zhou draws on her experience as an immigrant, multilingual professional, and DEI consultant to unpack what most organizations get wrong about inclusion, how to hold people...

What separates a leader people want to follow from one they're quietly escaping? Mark Miller, longtime Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of the bestselling book The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do , joins Brandon Laws to unpack the timeless leadership framework he helped develop over 25 years of research. With more than 700,000 copies sold and now in its fourth edition, The Secret has rea...

What if the problem was never the student, but the system? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Beven Byrnes, Executive Director of Bridges Middle School in Portland, Oregon, the only school in Oregon exclusively serving neurodivergent students. Beven shares how Bridges is flipping the script on traditional education through relationship-based teaching, sensory-aware classrooms, and a deep...

If 82% of people lack a time management system and the average worker spends half their day on low-value tasks, what's the real cost of doing nothing about it? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with bestselling author Peter Economy, who has written over 140 books, to dig into his latest release, Wait, You Need a Win? The Essential Guide to Time Management, Productivity, and Powerful Habits T...

Most of us answer "how are you?" with busy, stressed, or exhausted, and somewhere along the way we decided that was just the cost of doing good work. Meghan French Dunbar lived that way for years as a startup CEO, until a panic attack made her stop and question the whole script. In this conversation, Brandon and Meghan get into why so many workplaces wear people down, and what the leaders and comp...

You've invested in the dashboards. You've declared data a top priority. So why does transformation still feel out of reach? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Dr. Sebastian Wernicke, author of  Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation , to unpack one of business's most frustrating paradoxes: companies that succeed at data... and still don't...