Explore every episode of the podcast THE NEW WORK PLAYBOOK

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Peter Drucker never said or wrote it. It became a popular claim anyway and we often read a good culture into it. Read plainly, it doesn't say anything about which kind of culture beats a strategy. This episode explores what that line actually claims, why the gap between stated and lived values is so common that most people read straight past culture statements. I take a look at what happened after culture became a serious business topic in the 1980s and explore how Edgar Schein gave us a better understanding of how cultures form, transform, why they resist change and how we can influence it. Then we move to the level leaders actually shape. Your team is a group with its own culture. It's the one under your responsibility. Building a new team culture, shaping an inherited one, and transforming one that doesn't work are three different jobs but trust and psychological safety are the foundations for all three. As it changes how we work entirely, AI adoption is a culture transformation that needs to be managed well. We're asking people to work in a way they never have, with a technology they don't fully understand, while they read that it potentially replaces their jobs. Have a look at the values your company states, and ask yourself honestly whether you can see them in how people work. The next reflection episode turns culture work into leadership practice.

This reflection episode turns purpose and direction into two practices you can start this week. The first is about sensegiving and sensemaking. Three questions that build the line of sight between one person's job and who their work actually serves, and what to do with their answers once you have them. The second is direction. Five moves that give people guidance without you standing over them, from agreeing on what good looks like to protecting your team's focus from the noise around it. Both come with a way of working out where to start. One job and one conversation for the first. For the second, whichever symptom in your team is currently the loudest. Try them, then tell me what changes.

Ask people what meaningful work is and you get very different answers, yet most of us would take a pay cut for work that has more of it. This episode is about that gap, why purpose stays so fuzzy, and why it matters more than ever. I look at two of the most influential management thinkers. Peter Drucker, whose ideas about good management got reduced to a numbers game and William Edwards Deming, who was ignored at home and listened to abroad, and what both reveal about why good management frameworks cannot fix bad leadership. This episode shows you why purpose and direction are one connected leadership practice, and why no framework can do that work for you. I also look at what this means for AI adoption, and why it becomes a stress test for what an organisation already believes about the value of human work. On Thursday, the reflection episode follows with practices to build the connection between purpose and direction in your own team.

What is the foundation to becoming a great listener? This is the reflection episode following The Talking Reflex. It's designed to be practised, not just listened to. You'll hear a difficult conversation twice. Once with a manager who performs all the right listening moves and misses everything that matters, and once with a manager who actually wants to understand. The difference between them is the intention the manager came with. From there we get into two practices you can start using this week. The intention check, which is about catching what you really want from a conversation before it runs away with you, and four moves for asking better questions.

Most managers are sure they listen well while their people don't feel heard. This episode is about that gap, why it survives, and what us when we don't close it. I look at the research on how we really listen, why active listening so often becomes a performance without understanding. This episode shows you what the value of deep listening is. I also look at the influence of power and organisation structures and company culture, and how AI is making the problem worse. This is the main episode. On Thursday, the reflection episode follows with practices to improve the quality of your listening.

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 helping and where it isn't. The first practice is the muscle underneath all the others. The second turns AI mistakes into collective learning and trains a team to protect their critical thinking. Underneath both sits the responsibility to make sure that the reality of work reaches the people who decide about it.

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 organisations are currently making: AI adoption. The Nokia story shows what calibrated silence cost a company that should have survived. The Klarna reversal shows what happens when leadership confuses cost savings with value. And recent research reveals something uncomfortable about every AI adoption dashboard: High usage numbers can mean the opposite of what they look like. If you are leading inside an organisation making AI decisions right now, this episode shows you the risk of doing it without psychological safety. The reflection episode on Thursday gives you key practices to establish it.

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 relation with others. At the same time, the organisations leaders work in shape what shows up in the role through what they reward, allow, and tolerate. The two together are what we end up watching: a workplace performance most of us recognise far too well. I reframe authentic leadership as something we practise in tune with ourselves and the world around us. And I walk back through the six foundational topics of this season to show how each one helps a leader to stay in genuine connection with the people they lead. Season 2 starts June 30th with Psychological Safety.

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 measured, which means you have more influence on the carelessness around you than you may have realised. The second is a short reflection on the four trust dimensions to consider before you walk into a difficult conversation. The third is a set of three checks that help you focus and act on what someone actually needs. Together these practices turn the caring question from a nice opening into something that actually helps.

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 discovery journey that changed how I think about both. From psychology to neuroscience to philosophy, research has been pointing at a clear distinction for decades. And the difference between empathy and care shows up clearly in how we lead. I share a question that helps you turn empathy into care. I also look at why dark empathy is more common than we want to admit, and why the courage to practise care matters now more than ever.

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 for self-trust and two practices for trust with others. The practices are small. Their power is consistency. Trust starts with us. As trust and care go hand in hand, the next episode is about genuine care.

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 why the answer to bringing trust back may not start where most listeners expect. I tell the story of the people who walked away from OpenAI in 2021 to build something different, ask what their decision tells us about the kind of leadership that builds trust, and make the case that the leadership we are getting is the cumulative effect of millions of trust choices we are making every day. Can we bring trust back, especially in the age of AI? The episode answers that question but the answer requires more from us than from the leaders we want to follow.

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 were certain and turned out to be wrong. The practice of "Keep Asking" when AI hands you the surface answer. And two ways leaders bring curiosity back into their teams. When did you last let yourself wonder?

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 earlier this month: what are we actually trading away when we hand our thinking to machines? This episode connects directly to The Confidence Trap and sets up the next episode on trust.

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, and go deeper into the area where I've seen overconfidence do the most damage in business.

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 games of someone above have started reaching you. And I give you the strategy that keeps me grounded.

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 they can use it to advance themselves. That difference is hard to detect in hiring, but over time it defines the kind of leadership we get. Power also shifts the behaviour of even the most well-intentioned leaders. Which leads to the question: Why do the wrong people end up in charge? Resources mentioned: Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (2016) Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (2018)

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 triggers hit. Short, practical, and designed to make a difference.

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 is just performance. I also share Respect Stacking, an exercise I built for myself to uncover the patterns most of us don't see. Try it for three days before the reflection episode on Friday.

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 role as a leader. This episode is designed to be done, not just listened to. Pause where prompted. Answer honestly. If you want to go deeper across more areas, download the full Leadership Belief Audit for free at thenewworkplaybook.com. Link in the show notes.

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 modern expectations meet outdated assumptions about human motivation? And what does that mean for engagement, innovation, and the kind of leadership we actually need? Includes an invitation to run your own leadership belief audit. Free download in the show notes.

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 the reason their business exists. The future of work depends on the right leadership, not just technology. That is what The New Work Playbook is about. Monday episodes explore why something matters for leadership in the age of AI. Friday reflection episodes give you something practical to try. This podcast is for leaders who understand that work gets better when people matter.