HR Unfiltered - brought to you by SOPEOPLE

To close out season one, it's just the two of us and we've saved one of the most important topics in people leadership for last. Psychological safety has had a decade of utter hype. Google gave it a TED Talk moment, a lot of HR decks have slides on it and yet most organisations are measuring it wrong, talking about it wrong, and - crucially - doing it wrong. In this episode Dean goes full geek-mod...

What happens when an FCIPD-qualified HR consultant spends their evenings performing as an award-winning drag queen? In this candid, funny and surprisingly thought-provoking conversation, Tom Henderson-Griffiths (better known on stage as Aunty Ginger) explores the tension between authenticity and professionalism, the realities of bringing your whole self to work, and why HR and leadership still has...

What if the biggest risk posed by the Employment Rights Act isn’t legal at all? In this episode of HR, Unfiltered, Dean and Sue are joined by employment lawyer Dan Smith from People Law to explore a provocative idea: Many of the challenges organisations fear from the Employment Rights Act may actually be management problems in disguise.  Drawing on years of tribunal advocacy, employment law practi...

What does it take for HR to be seen as a genuine business function rather than a support service? In this week's episode, Dean and Sue are joined by fractional Chief People Officer and one of HR Mag’s Most Influential, Nebel Crowhurst, to explore the future of HR, leadership and work itself. From building influential networks and communities to challenging the profession’s obsession with engagemen...

Dr Jo Burrell is a Clinical Psychologist, co-founder of Ultimate Resilience, and co-author of the 2026 HR Mental Wellbeing Report which is now in its third year and drawing on data from nearly 3,000 HR professionals. The numbers are confronting: 74% showing symptoms of depression, 73% anxiety, 62% likely experiencing burnout, and 38% considering leaving the profession entirely. But in this convers...

This week, Dean Corbett and Sue O’Callaghan are joined by leadership consultant and former CPO Lorna Baines for one of the most honest conversations we’ve had yet about leadership, HR and organisational reality. Together, we explore: Why “helpful HR” may actually be holding the profession back The difference between being nice and being kind Why psychological safety is not the absence of difficult...

Everyone says they care about AI ethics. Very few organisations are actually doing anything meaningful with it. This week Dean and Sue sit down with Oliver Hill - Head of HR, qualified AI ethics practitioner, and former nightclub bouncer - to have the conversation most leadership teams might be avoiding. It's not theoretical, it's not policy-heavy, it's about what happens at the point of decision,...

Erica Farmer, author of AI for People Professionals and host of AI for the Average Joe, joins Deano for this episode to state the obvious and less obvious... AI has landed in HR - but most organisations are still stuck somewhere between dabbling, panicking and pretending they have a strategy because someone switched on Copilot. In this episode, Deano and Erica chat to cut through the noise and tal...

Sue is back. And we've brought in someone who has spent her career in rooms where the numbers matter, the pressure is real, and the conversations people most need to have are the ones nobody's having. Carolyn Hobdey - author, Lean Master, YouTuber and self-described work in progress - talks about the inner t**t we all carry, why most leadership failure is about avoidance rather than aggression, wh...

In this episode of HR, Unfiltered, Deano is joined by Michelle Hartley for a conversation that goes far beyond “showing up differently.” Michelle shares her experience of burning out three times in a single year, and the slow, deliberate journey back to herself through what she calls “1% moments.” Together, they explore the psychological cost of performing a False Self at work, and why reclaiming...

Deano catches up with Anwen Bottois, founder of Purple Sky Consulting and host of the HR Strategy in the Hot Seat podcast. Anwen spent over two decades as an HR leader across manufacturing, not-for-profit, British Gas, and higher education before setting up on her own to focus on what she cares about most: Helping leaders actually love the job of leading. This is a conversation about what really h...

Thirty years of employee engagement surveys, billions spent, and the data is getting worse, not better. In this episode, Dean and Sue take a hard look at why the engagement model isn’t working, and why many organisations are measuring symptoms instead of fixing causes. From “HR archaeology” and the illusion of action plans, to the role of managers in shaping everyday experience, they unpack what’s...

In this episode, Deano flies solo and is joined by Sean Miller, who brings nearly 30 years in HR (incl. L&D and OD), and is a specialist-in-training in organisational transactional analysis, for a conversation about why organisations get stuck and what HR can actually do about it. They cover: The "Yes, But" game and why it's not incompetence, it's pattern; Berne's ego states and how language s...

Chris Manning joins Dean and Sue, and makes a compelling case that employee experience isn't a platform you buy or a project you launch; it's the sum total of every process, system, approval chain and human interaction your people touch every single day. Armed with real examples from Unilever and Nuffield Health, he unpacks the frameworks that actually move the needle, and explains exactly why 70%...

What happens when AI stops being a shiny tool and starts quietly reshaping how work, judgement and even identity function? In this episode of HR, Unfiltered, Dean and Sue sit down with futurist Matt O’Neill to explore the less comfortable bits of the AI conversation that many organisations are skirting around. Not whether AI can save time, draft emails or automate admin. But what happens when peop...

What happens when you invite a VP of Client / Customer Success to hold talk about HR? Turns out, quite a lot, and most of it grabs us in all the right ways. Rachel Rewerts has spent 15 years in Customer Success, a function that proves its value every quarter, in public, with numbers. In this episode, she draws an uncomfortable and energising parallel between CS and HR business partnering, two func...

What happens when a CEO with a psychology degree bans Friday meetings, challenges “bring your whole self to work”, and tells CPOs to get commercially dangerous? Find out in this episode, when Luke McKeever joins us for a blunt, intelligent and occasionally uncomfortable conversation about leadership, AI, and the future credibility of HR/People. We explore: Why authenticity at the top is harder tha...

In this episode of HR, Unfiltered, Dean Corbett and Sue O’Callaghan are joined by CFO Sam Park to explore what commercial HR really looks like from a finance perspective. Sam shares how great recruitment and thoughtful organisational design directly impact financial performance, why people issues show up clearly on the P&L, and what makes a people strategy credible at executive level. The conv...

In this episode, we sit down with Kirsty Baggs-Morgan, author of The HR Confidence Playbook, for an honest conversation about identity, confidence and what happens when your job becomes your entire sense of self. After being abruptly and unexpectedly let go from a senior HR role, Kirsty found herself at rock bottom. What followed wasn’t a polished reinvention story; it was a difficult, deeply pers...

Restructures have become the default response to pressure, a kind of panic button! Markets wobble, cash tightens, leaders feel the heat... so the org chart gets redrawn. It looks decisive. It feels controllable. It rarely fixes the real problem. In this episode, Sue and Dean unpack why restructures so often fail to deliver. We explore why leaders start with boxes instead of outcomes. Why change is...

In this episode of HR Unfiltered, Dean and Sue sit down with Ian Redmond from Explore Training to talk about something HR rarely names clearly enough: What it takes to manage clients well, especially when the work is complex, emotional, and commercially exposed. This isn’t about “stakeholder management” as a training slide title. It’s about psychology, boundaries, trust, contracting, and courage,...

Tom Emery joins Sue and Dean for a conversation about his book People People: Reach Your Full Potential as a Chief HR Officer, a narrative-led, painfully relatable story of “Joanna”, a CHRO under pressure, and the coaching framework that helps her regain agency, clarity, and impact. Together they explore why “seat at the table” is outdated, and why the bigger question is what HR leaders do once th...

In this episode of HR Unfiltered, we take a long-overdue swing at one of HR’s most sacred cows: best practice. It sounds sensible. It feels safe. And in today’s complex, exhausted, fast-changing world, it’s quietly doing more harm than good. We walk through where best practice came from, why HR clings to it, and why copying what worked elsewhere is increasingly failing organisations now, especiall...

What if HR stopped acting like a support function, and started operating like a product team? In this episode of HR Unfiltered, Dean and Sue are joined by Seb Hochmuth, a product and technology leader with 15 years’ experience scaling startups, to break down exactly how product thinking can transform modern HR. Dean and Sue try to adopt the 'consciously incompetent' mindset to get the most out of...

In this episode of HR, Unfiltered, Dean and Sue dismantle one of HR's most hyped - but least understood - concepts: Adult culture. Neither Netflix or HR commentators invented it; the idea has been around for nearly a century. So, why are organisations still running Parent-Child workplaces while preaching autonomy, empowerment and trust?    Across almost 60 minutes of honest conversation, we explor...