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 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.

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 2 June with psychological safety.

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.