THE NEW WORK PLAYBOOK

Most of what we consider to be leadership is about managing resources, not leading humans. AI is about to make that impossible to ignore.

The leadership practices that would actually make work better for us are not new. They've just never been trained and practised well enough.
Instead we focused on efficiency, control and output. That's management. Now that AI can handle all of that much better, what's left for us?

I think this is the defining question of our time.
Instead of asking if AI will replace leaders, we should ask whether we'll finally build the kind of leadership that deserves to stay.

The New Work Playbook is a podcast for anyone who believes that work gets better because people matter.

Main episodes explore why something matters for leadership in the age of AI. Reflection episodes give you actual practices to improve your leadership.

Interviews and conversations with people who already shape the future of work will come in to inspire and shift perspectives.

Hosted by Annett Burger, a practitioner with over twenty years of experience in executive search, leadership development, and consulting.

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Latest episodes

Getting Out of the Kitchen

‧ 16m 9s

This reflection episode gives you three practices for better decision making and accountability taking in your team.

The first is Leaving Traces: Three questions answered at the moment you decide, and a review date set whatever the outcome, so a decision can be judged on how it was made.

The second is Holding Still: Where to set the next responsibility, determine the risks worth stepping in for, and let people succeed on their own.

The third is Thinking Out Loud: What to add when you communicate a decision, and what to ask when someone brings one to you. This practice...

The Blame Machine

‧ 30m 49s

Think of the best and the worst decision you've ever made. Most of us sorted them by how they turned out, not by how we decided. That's outcome bias, and it doesn't stop at our own heads. It runs through how organisations judge decisions, distribute credit and place blame.

In this episode I look at what happens when the people who decide are not the people who answer for it. A company buys a new system. In one version it works and nobody asks how the choice was made. In the other it doesn't, and suddenly everyone is looking for...

Once, Twice, Culture

‧ 16m 57s

A family sits down and agrees that dinner is a phone-free time. Two weeks later, someone breaks the agreement. Tune in to hear what happens and why it matters for your team culture.

Every team has norms, whether anyone discussed them or not. They form out of what people do and what nobody stops. This episode is about two practices that I consider foundational for building a good team culture.

The first is a workshop you can run with your team to define your norms deliberately. I walk through how to run it and how to turn statements like "we...

The Culture Myth

‧ 26m 47s

"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,...

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