All episodes

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.