The Human Revolutionaries Show - HR, Leadership, Well-Being and Culture stories in the news – Details, episodes & analysis

This week I'm talking to Jeannette Linfoot. She is a highly experienced corporate CEO turned Entrepreneur with over 30 years of global expertise. She is a mentor and provides individuals and boards with strategic advice, backed by her 'Brave, Bold, Brilliant' ethos, to help them foster high-performance and drive tangible results. She’s also deeply committed to diversity and inclusion, and champions initiatives like Balance the Board and Everywoman in Travel. She is the host of the 'Brave, Bold, Brilliant' podcast, reaching audiences in 120+ countries and is an energising and inspirational leader. 

I wanted to talk to her about her recent brush with illness and what it taught her about her long term health and what really matters in her life. 

We discuss: 

• How her health scare had a disproportionate effect on her approach to her health
• The vital importance of a team and building relationships
• What being unwell revealed about herself, others and what matters in life
• Being imperfectly perfect versus trying to be perfect all the time

...and much more. 

You can find Jeannette on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeannettelinfoot/

Her website is https://www.jeannettelinfootassociates.com/

Her YouTube Channel is https://www.youtube.com/@braveboldbrilliant

Her podcast is called Brave, Bold, Brilliant https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/brave-bold-brilliant/id1524278970 

If you want to discuss having me speak at your upcoming event please contact my manager, Diana Stoney diana@behindthemic.co.uk  

To find out more about my work with leaders and helping organisations through change, visit https://www.thatpeoplething.com/

And I'm on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/blairepalmer/

In this episode, which continues a season of shows focused on our health and wellbeing as leaders, I am talking to Dr. Arina Cadariu. 

Arina is a physician, educator, and public health expert with more than 30 years of experience spanning academic medicine, high-acuity inpatient care, public health leadership, and translational systems work. She founded Health In Context as a space for scientific integrity, narrative precision, and biologically grounded education, outside the noise of clinical commodification, consumer trends, and flattening metrics.
 
 After defecting from communist Romania in her early twenties, she rebuilt a life and career through medical education in Germany, postgraduate training at Yale, and years of leadership in teaching hospitals and health institutions across the U.S. and Europe.
 
She holds a Master of Public Health in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale and an MD from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. 
 
She spent more than two decades teaching at Yale as an Assistant Clinical Professor, mentoring medical students and residents in clinical reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, and whole-person care. 

However, as you’ll hear in this interview, she became increasingly disillusioned both by the conventional approach to healthcare and by the claims being made by many self-professed health experts online. 

In this conversation we talk about her journey for clues about why she feels as she does about our approach to health and our healthcare systems.

She shares the shocking insight that her most successful VIP patients - founders, execs, leaders - have the worst health

She talks about the importance of ‘agency’ and to what we should expect from the society we live in

She explains which clients do particularly well to break their habits around their health

We discuss the consequences of double or triple tasking

And how we can use health data badly…or well

Arina's website is https://health-in-context.org/

Her LinkedIn is here

If you want to discuss having me speak at your upcoming event please contact my manager, Diana Stoney diana@behindthemic.co.uk  

To find out more about my work with leaders and helping organisations through change, visit https://www.thatpeoplething.com/

And I'm on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/blairepalmer/

Hello and welcome to season 2 of The Human Revolutionaries Show!

I've missed you!

This season I've set up a whole bunch of interviews (well, conversations really) with people who inspire me with their thinking about the future of work and the issues facing us as we try to create spaces where people can do their best work.

It's not just Covid that is changing how we think about work. As today's guest points out, it's also George Floyd 's death and the higher profile of Black Lives Matter as a result, following on the heels of the Me Too movement , we've got very low unemployment rates and much higher awareness of issues around discrimination and privilege.

That's why I thought Fudia would be so interesting to talk to. Our internet was a bit dodgy at the start (it gets better!) but it's absolutely worth sticking with it because we talk about recruitment, intersectionality, unconscious bias, the role of the law in changing attitudes and behaviour and some very practical ways you can play a part in making the workplace more fair. I learnt a lot and I hope I asked the questions you're grappling with!

You can find out more about Fudia here - https://www.fudiasmartt.com and on LinkedIn

The book Fudia mentioned is Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication by Vanessa Van Edwards. 

You can connect with me on LinkedIn  and message me if you want to discuss any of the topics talked about on the show. 

Please share this show with colleagues and friends! If we want to revolutionise the workplace we need to get people talking about how things can be better!

Hi and welcome back to the show.

Dating app, Bumble, has joined companies like LinkedIn and Hootsuite shutting down for a few days to give employees a proper break from work.

On today's show Natasha and Blaire talk about -

* whether it's a good idea that other companies should follow
* pandemic burnout
* how to assess productivity versus busy-work
* whether burnout is inevitable when a company is growing fast
* whether our expectations of founders should be different to our expectations of workers
* what causes burnout
* and some more sustainable ideas for getting productivity without breaking people!

Here's more on the story

Please follow us on LinkedIn -

Here's Blaire's profile

Here's Natasha's profile

Please remember to share this show with colleagues, friends and random strangers! 

And please give us a star rating, leave a review and subscribe! 

See you next time!

Hello and welcome back!

Please do subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your colleagues. That means more people know about it and can get involved in the conversation!

This week we are talking about presenteeism. Maybe we were optimistic to think that the pandemic would mark an end to old style presenteeism and that hybrid working would mark the start of a focus on productivity and outputs instead.

It seems that isn't the case.

We talk about research that presenteeism is alive and well, even people feeling obliged to go in to the office during lockdowns so that their face gets seen. And we discuss WHO research that quantifies the health impact of long hours globally. It's huge by the way.

Here's more on the stories we discuss -

Presenteeism
Long Hours
Munitions workers in WW1

We also discuss a 21 day challenge we are doing with Deepak Chopra - we will let you know in future episodes how we get on!

Stay in touch by connecting with us on LinkedIn -

Blaire on LinkedIn
Natasha on LinkedIn

Hi and welcome back to the show!

This week we talk about a breaking news story relating to cool, punky beer company BrewDog.

A letter from ex-BrewDog staff alleges a culture of fear, a cult of personality and a toxic attitude towards junior staff at the company. The founders have said they are sorry and that they would listen, learn and act but not everyone believes the apology or that there is a genuine commitment to address the allegations.

We discuss the risks of presenting yourself as having a special culture as part of your brand identity, the issues that have been raised and what impact this might have on the business and what we would do if we were invited to help the company as they take action.

Here's more on the story.

We would love to hear from you if you have personal experience of the business or if you are part of the comapny and think we might be able to help. And if you've worked in places that sound like this, what did you do to turn things around?

Our LinkedIn contact details are:

Blaire on LinkedIn
Natasha on LinkedIn

On a lighter note we also talk about the acceptable use (or otherwise) of the words 'Staycation', 'Holibobs' and 'FamFam' which are getting a lot of usage as we approach summer and how companies might adapt to the trend for shorter more frequent vacations versus the traditional 2 or 3 week 'big holiday' we've been used to in the past. 

Please remember to subscribe, leave and review and share the show with anyone you think would enjoy it. And please do get in touch if you want to talk about any of the issues we've raised in this episode.  

Hello and welcome back to the show!

This week we've got two meaty topics - new research from the USA which suggests 1 in 4 people want to leave their job post-pandemic, and research which confirms that women are taking the brunt of the 'household management' during this time to the detriment of their mental health.

We start by talking about mental load, particularly as single parents, and our own experiences during the pandemic. We cover what specifically is difficult and what might be needed to get parents who have been carrying significantly more than normal during this period back to full mental good health.

And then, in Work in the News, we talk about why people may be thinking of quitting their jobs, their industry and maybe even their whole lifestyle, what we in HR can do to re-think some of the fundamentals of 'career', advancement and professional development and even the idea of an amnesty where give ourselves and others in the organisation permission to admit they aren't fully on board so we can get to the heart of what the issue is...and try and find solutions.

We'd love to know your thoughts on these topics especially if you have particular experience or disagree with our assessment!

Please follow us on LinkedIn.

Blaire on LinkedIn

Natasha on LinkedIn

And don't forget to subscribe, share and comment! This helps us grow our audience so others can get involved in these conversations. 

Here's more about the 'mental load for household management' story

Here's more on the story that 1 in 4 want to quit their job

Welcome back to the show!

This week we dive in to the thorny issue of PTSD at work and the role of NDAs and disclaimers inspired by a story about a former Facebook moderator who has been giving evidence about her experiences.

We talk about recruiting and selection for people in such roles, the imbalance of power between the employer and the employee, when NDAs and other contractual caveats are cause for concern, and importantly, what HR's role is (alongside legal and comms) when it comes to creating a fair and safe environment even for staff who do mentally dangerous roles.

We would love to hear your views. We post on LinkedIn about these stories and would love you to add your expertise to the debate. Links below.

Please also keep sharing this show and remember to subscribe and leave a review so that stangers can find us and get involved in the conversation.  We would love to hear about HR teams who use the show to inspire conversations within their team about the issues raised!

Links to the Accounting Web awards and the HRZone Culture Pioneers awards also below.

More about this story here.

Blaire on LinkedIn

Natasha on LinkedIn

Here's a link to the Accounting Web awards - we'd love to hear from accounting practices who are Investing in People!

Here is more about the HRZone Culture Pioneers awards 

Hi and welcome back to the show!

This week we are talking salary transparency.

More and more companies are opening up about how much their employees are paid and some are getting the staff themselves involved in setting salaries. 10Pines is an example of a business where a flat, self-managing structure has led to total openness about payrises and hiring decisions. Everyone gets involved.

But what are the downsides? Would your business be ready from a cultural perspective to deal with this level of openness? And what would you need to put in place first to make it work...if you'd even want to!

We would love to know your thoughts about CEO salaries, self-management and financial transparency especially if you've been working on any of these! Best way to connect is LinkedIn!

 Blaire on LinkedIn

Natasha on LinkedIn

And here is more about the story!

Please remember to subscribe, give us a reivew and a star rating and share the show with your colleagues so more people can get involved in the conversation. We want to revolutionise HR and we need your help!

Hello and welcome back to the show!

This week we are talking about the rise of a new kind of corporate consultants who are claiming to help with the spiritual well-being and spiritual awareness of employees.

So is work, as one Guardian columnist rages "supposed to bring us money and stolen office supplies" and stay well away from enlightenment? Or, as one of these Spiritual Consultants suggests, is it important to find your inner 'monk' - your internal self, your purpose in life, your values, your intuition at work as well as outside?

We talk about the dangers of introduing spiritual ideas to people who may have their own spirituality or religion, and the risks of imposing any one practice on your workforce.

We explore what benefits these consultants might bring to companies and how to tell the charlitains from the real deals.

We would love to know whether you've worked with spiritual consultants or whether your company has embraced spiritual practices in any way...or have your drawn the line at this?

Herte's how to connect with us -

Blaire on LinkedIn

Natasha on LinkedIn 

Here's more about the story

And The Guardian's take on this!