THE NEW WORK PLAYBOOK

In the main episode I made the case that psychological safety is a key performance indicator, and that the way we handle AI adoption exposes and amplifies the leadership already in place. This reflection episode is about what you can actually do about it with your own team. I share two practices and one principle for building and protecting the environment where people feel safe to say where AI is...

Season 2 opens with the practice that everything else depends on. Most leaders treat psychological safety as a culture conversation. Google's own research proved it is a key performance indicator and Amy Edmondson has uncovered its value for over 25 years. So why has so little changed? In this episode I look at what happens when climates of fear meet the most consequential workplace decision organ...

Authentic leadership has been one of the biggest ideas in modern leadership development. More than twenty years of it, and we haven't ended up with more genuine leaders. In this closing episode of Season 1, I trace how modern authentic leadership movement focused the search for authenticity too much on self-awareness and self-discovery and missed that authenticity in leadership is built in relatio...

Care is not just good intention. It needs practice. Three tools to turn caring into practice. The main episode made the case for why empathy and care are different and why leaders need both. This reflection episode gives you three practices to make care part of how you lead. The first is the simplest and most powerful. Small acts of care propagate through your network in ways researchers have meas...

Do you know the difference between empathy and care? Many leaders don't. And it's costing us more than we realise. Most of us have been trained on empathy and assume care comes with it. But empathy and care don't even activate the same areas of the brain. And empathy without care is what's been draining leaders for years, without the results we hoped for. In this episode I take you on the discover...

What moral value would most people say they live by? Across cultures, the answer is honesty. So why do we pass on the small daily moments where saying something honestly costs hardly anything? This is the reflection episode following The Broken Spine. I tell the story of a stranger who once spared me a real embarrassment, and what that moment taught me about kindness. We move through two practices...

What happens when trust collapses at every layer of our world? When companies replace thousands with AI, when politicians are serving their personal interests, and the AI race runs faster than the questions it should answer first? In this episode I look at why trust as the spine of our society is broken. Why even the right kind of leaders are subject to the pressures that make trust collapse. And...

We were told humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. That's a myth turned into popular knowledge. The story has been useful to industries that profit from us believing we are smaller than we are. This reflection episode looks at how diminished beliefs about us shape the environments we accept, and what curiosity has to do with rebuilding them. A private reflection on the times you w...

When was the last time you let yourself wonder about something for more than a few minutes, instead of reaching for an answer? This episode is about what curiosity actually is, why most organisations have been quietly destroying it for decades, and what that means now that AI is walking on stage. From a 1995 computer science classroom, to two CEOs who took the opposite path, to research published...

How quickly does your brain jump to an answer? Do you recall your success stories as they were, or how you would like them to sound? Do your opinions about others run your conversations with them? This reflection episode will put your confidence to the test. Two reflections to catch your patterns, and two practices you can start using right away.

We tend to trust confident people. We follow them, hire them, promote them. But what happens when that confidence isn't grounded in actual competence? This episode is about the two directions from which we can fall into the confidence trap: Falling for the confidence of others, and falling for our own. I share my most painful personal experience of overconfidence, explain the Dunning-Kruger effect...

This is the companion episode to The Power Paradox. Power doesn't corrupt us all at once. It works on us slowly, in small choices we don't notice making. This reflection walks you through the three areas where the pull is strongest: Your relationship with feedback. How you talk about people who aren't in the room. How you handle advantages and favours. I also share three signs that the political g...

Do you like the feeling of others having power over you? Power shapes everything, leadership, companies, and the societies we live in. What we rarely question is what drives people to seek it in the first place. Not everyone wants a leadership position with the same intent. Some step into it to take responsibility and build something meaningful. Others are primarily drawn to power itself and how t...

Three days after We Are Losing Respect, it's time to turn what you noticed into practice. What did the post-its show you? In this reflection session, we work with your Respect Stacking patterns to find what sits underneath them. I share five practices you can start using immediately. Three daily habits to build the foundation of grounded respect. Two countermeasures for the moments when your trigg...

Most of us consider ourselves respectful. But what happens to that respect when we're stressed, tired, or in a hurry? When we're talking to someone we don't need anything from? When the person in front of us is slowing us down? This episode is about why respect collapses under pressure. What research tells us about the cost of disrespect at work, and why respect that isn't grounded in our values i...

This is a guided reflection on the beliefs that shape your leadership. It will help you uncover what impacts your thinking about the role of a leader and show you where a review and update could be valuable. In this 10-minute reflection episode, you will walk through the five-stage framework from the Leadership Belief Audit (Mirror, Origin, Test, Cost, Rewrite) applied to your beliefs about your r...

A room of over 100 leaders is asked to get creative and draw something in pairs. They reach for safe little landscapes with houses, trees, the sun in the corner. Then the brief changes, and the same room produces something completely different. This episode is about how our beliefs shape environments and produce outcomes that confirm those beliefs, but may not be what we wanted. What happens when...

What if the biggest threat to the future of human work isn't AI, but what most organisations believe about the meaning of work in our lives? Over the past 20 years, my work has taken me through different industries, countries, and companies. What I've seen again and again is that organisations fall into two categories: those that treat people like any other resource, and those that see people as t...