Build Your Edge

How do you have difficult conversations without damaging relationships? In this episode of Build Your Edge, Jeremy sits down with Tom Day, Partner at PA Consulting, to explore how leaders, managers, and team members can tackle difficult conversations with confidence, empathy, and clarity. Whether you’re giving difficult feedback, addressing poor performance, resolving workplace conflict, speaking...

Most of us end the day feeling busy but not accomplished. The meetings happened. The emails got answered. The messages were dealt with. Yet the work that really mattered somehow never got done. In this episode, mindset and leadership coach Zahra Saleh explains why that happens and why it’s not a personal failing. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and her own experience leading complex technolog...

Technical people are often brilliant at solving problems, but not always at explaining them. In this episode, Jeremy sits down with Ben Pearce, a former Microsoft leader, founder of Elevated You, and host of the Tech World Human Skills podcast, to explore why communication has become one of the most important skills in modern technical careers. Ben spent more than a decade leading technical teams...

In Part 2 of this Hiring Masterclass, former Amazon Bar Raiser Sean O’Neill explains how great hiring teams compare evidence, challenge assumptions, and make confident decisions about who joins the team. The interview only gathers the evidence. The real hiring decision happens in the debrief. Sean shares the debrief practices he learned and refined across thousands of interviews, including blind v...

Hiring is the highest-leverage decision a leader makes. Choose the wrong person and they can drain energy, slow the team down, and create problems for months. Choose well and you strengthen the entire organisation. In this episode, former Amazon Bar Raiser Sean O’Neill shares the interviewing techniques he developed after conducting thousands of interviews and hiring hundreds of people across Amaz...

AI is moving fast. Faster than most of us can fully process. It promises efficiency, creativity, and progress. But what might we be losing along the way? In this episode, Eloisa Tovee explores the hidden costs of AI, from the impact on jobs, critical thinking, and creativity to deeper concerns around bias, online harm, misinformation, and the erosion of human connection. As a UN Delegate for Women...

Burnout rarely arrives overnight. For many leaders, it builds quietly over time, until one day it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. In this episode, Jeremy speaks with Andy Skipper, CEO and Founder of CTO Craft, about why burnout is so common among CTOs and senior technology leaders, how it develops gradually, and what happens when leaders finally hit the wall. Andy shares his own experience...

We were all given the same advice. Pick a lane. Specialise. Stick to the plan. Work hard. Climb steadily. For decades, that approach made sense. In a stable world, depth and certainty were safe bets. But the world of work isn’t stable anymore. In this episode, Jeremy sits down with  Kieran Cornwall  to challenge the very foundation of modern career advice. Together, they explore why rigid career p...

Leaving corporate to work independently sounds simple. Take your experience, pick your clients, set your own terms. In reality, many consultants, fractional leaders, and NEDs discover something else instead: unpredictable income, one “client that feels like a job”, and a constant low-level anxiety about what happens next. In this episode, I sit down with Dan Gwalter to unpack why this happens and...

If you’ve got the seed of an idea you keep pushing aside, you owe it to yourself to explore it. Not to quit your job. Not to take a reckless leap. But to see whether it could become something real. This episode is for senior leaders who feel successful on paper but quietly stuck; people who sense there’s more they could be building, yet don’t know where to start or how to do it safely. We are join...

In this episode, we sit down with Freddie Quek—Research Associate at Henley Business School, award-winning technology leader, advisor, and founder of  #JoiningTheDots —to explore a question every tech professional needs to confront: What is our responsibility as technology leaders in a world where millions are still digitally excluded? Freddie has led digital transformation across global organisat...

Most people treat interviews like an exam: tense, rehearsed, high-stakes. But what if the real key to performing well is the same thing that makes a great first date: connection, curiosity, and being your authentic self? In this episode, Marylin Schlamkow returns to the show to share a fresh, more human way to approach interviews. Drawing on the surprising parallels between dating and interviewing...

Most people think progressing into senior technical leadership is about becoming “good at everything.” It isn’t. In this episode,  Meri Williams  breaks down the six skills that truly define modern technical leadership; the real capabilities behind roles like CTO, VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, and Staff-plus IC. Meri has led engineering at Monzo, M&S, Moo, Healx and Pleo. She’s been...

Hard work will get you started, but it won’t take you all the way. Every ambitious professional eventually hits a point where more effort stops creating more progress. You take on more, say yes to everything, work longer hours, yet somehow feel less effective. That’s ' the effort ceiling' , and today’s guest has built a way to break through it. In this episode, technologist and former Tide VP/CTPO...

Every day, around 12,000 people in the UK become carers, often right at the peak of their careers. Most don’t plan for it. Many don’t even realise they are carers. But the impact on their work, well-being, and future is enormous. In this episode, Jeremy sits down with leadership coach and former tech MD  Kirsten Hurley , who shares her deeply personal journey caring for her two autistic brothers w...

Let’s be honest: your website probably sucks. It’s slow, out of date, confusing, and says everything except what your business actually does. In this episode,  Craig Burgess , Creative Director of  Genius Division , joins Jeremy to share five simple ways to fix your website and make it work harder for your business; no coding, no jargon, and no expensive rebuild. Everything he shares can be done w...

A strategy is only as good as the people who deliver it. You can have the sharpest vision, the boldest goals, and the slickest slides, but if the message doesn’t land with your teams, it goes nowhere. In this episode, Andy Toor joins Jeremy Burns to unpack how to make strategy stick. Together, they explore what happens after the town hall; how to turn leadership intent into clear, consistent actio...

Most people move through their careers by reacting to opportunities rather than creating them. But the most successful careers — the ones that lead to meaning, mastery, and momentum — are built with intention. In this episode of Build Your Edge , Jeremy Burns talks with Bruce Pannaman , a startup technology leader who developed the Tech Career Strategies framework. This free downloadable guide hel...

Your photo speaks before you do. Whether it’s your LinkedIn headshot, a team photo, or the images that sell your product, people decide what to think of you in about two seconds. In this episode, professional retoucher  Beth Perkins  shares five fast edits that make any photo look sharper, brighter, and more trustworthy without turning you (or your brand) into something fake. You’ll learn: Why you...

When a big project goes off the rails, panic spreads fast. Deadlines slip. Teams freeze. Leaders stop sleeping. That’s when you call someone like  David Crawford , a delivery leader known for running toward the fire, not away from it. David’s built a reputation for rescuing complex, high-stakes programmes and turning them back into wins. You can use his approach to rescue everything from small, ti...

Job interviews are meant to reveal the best people for the job, but too often, they don’t. Candidates feel lost in the process, managers make rushed decisions, and both sides leave thinking, ' that could’ve gone better.' In this episode,  Sam Grill —a hiring manager who’s sat on both sides of the table—breaks down the  interview process  step by step. He explains what really happens behind the sce...

Most career frameworks stop at progression: tick the boxes, climb the ladder, chase the promotion. But what if growth was about more than just the next level? In this episode, I sit down with  Dan Ashby  to explore how traditional frameworks fall short and how his approach flips the script by focusing on  impact . Dan shares how to connect your personal growth with company objectives, why tasks al...

Communicating with senior leaders isn’t like talking to your peers. The C-Suite live in a world of packed diaries, rapid context-switching, and high-stakes decisions. If you can’t deliver  clarity ,  brevity , and  impact , you’ll lose their attention and your opportunity. In this episode of  Build Your Edge ,  Cheryl Warlow  joins Jeremy to share her playbook for making your mark at the top. We t...

Giving feedback is one of the hardest yet most important parts of being a manager. Do it badly and you dent confidence, damage relationships, and risk losing people. Do it well and you unlock growth, build trust, and create a culture where people excel. In this episode, leadership coach Clem Pickering joins Jeremy to break down why feedback so often goes wrong and how managers can flip it into a p...

Too many organisations spend months wordsmithing values and end up with one-word posters nobody uses. The result: wallpaper slogans that don’t shape culture or guide behaviour. In this episode of Build Your Edge, I sit down with culture consultant Alya Lilani to show how to define and embed values that actually work. We cover: Why most company values fail Three steps to turn values into daily beha...