At Work with The Ready

AUA: How Do Leaders Stop Being The Decision Bottleneck?

It happens gradually: a leader makes one call that should have been decided by one of their reports, then another, until the whole team has quietly stopped deciding anyth

55. Your Org Can Be Built to Benefit From Change. Can You?

Most of us were told to find the one thing we're great at and ride it. Build the team around your gaps, get good at your specialty and let someone else cover the rest. Th

AUA: Why Does Every Decision Take Forever?

Most organizations run on two default modes of deciding: build consensus until everyone's exhausted, or debate until the boss makes the call. Both feel normal and both qu

54. Change Only Sticks If It Starts At The Top: Resetting Your Executive Team

Hard truth time: your executive team sets the ceiling on how fast everything below it can move and most of them aren't built for that job. Decisions pile up on the CEO's

AUA: Are Ego-Driven Leaders The Only Kind That Succeed?

Sam Altman and Elon Musk built some of the most valuable companies on the planet while doing nearly everything we would advise against. So a listener wants to know: if eg

53. The Chief of Staff’s Real Job: Turning Strategy Into Action

If you hired a chief of staff to be your leadership team’s star athlete, don’t let them languish on the bench. At many organizations, chiefs of staff are meant to execute

AUA: When Do Well-Meaning Checklists Turn Into Compliance Theater?

Every org has process that started as protection and calcified into performance: boxes we check to prove nothing bad happened, rather than to help good work happen. In t

52. Welcome to the Liminal Space (Buckle Up!)

Volatility is just the new normal, and it's crushed everyone's appetite for complexity at the exact moment complexity demands attention. Executives who used to love a whi

AUA: How Do You Tell Leadership The Truth Without Getting Fired?

You can see it clearly: the project is FUBAR, the reporting is rosy, and the people with the power to do something about it are several levels above you. But sending a fl

51. It's Time, Babe: How to Know When to Leave Your Job

Everyone tells you leaving a job is a math problem: runway, comp, the next offer, the spreadsheet that finally tips. But most people who ask "how do I know when it's time

AUA: How Do You Make Employee Ownership Actually Feel Real?

Plenty of companies make the move to employee ownership—ESOPs, EOTs, buyouts—and then wonder why nothing really changes. The shares transfer, the announcement goes out, a

50. The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?

Fifteen years ago, the future of work seemed inevitable: bureaucracy was crumbling, adaptive organizations were the next default, and a whole movement of practitioners wa

AUA: Is Real Change Possible Inside Federal Bureaucracy?

Most of the conversation about the future of work is aimed squarely at the corporate sector—growth engines, dual transformation, quarterly targets. But what if your organ

Traditional Consulting Sold You a Great Idea. Now What? [Rebroadcast]

Producer's Note: It’s been two years since this episode first aired, and it’s every bit as relevant today. We’ve got some exciting things on these themes coming really so

AUA: How Honest Should Leaders Be During a Transformation?

Your company announced a shiny new transformation, set to herald a new era of possibility. But a few weeks in, it's starting to feel a lot more like a top-down cost-cutti

49. How To Make Big Things Happen At Work

You've built the asset. You've done the comms. You even held office hours (that no one came to). And still…nothing changes. Sound familiar? These moves are still everyone

AUA: How To Lead When You Don’t Have The Answers?

The higher up you go, the more everyone expects you to have the answers. Your team wants reassurance about AI. Your peers want to know what other companies are doing. Lea

48. Office Politics: The Fun and Frustration of Palace Intrigue

Office politics doesn't happen because people are scheming. It happens because no one wrote anything down. In the absence of clear ways of working, the preferences of the

AUA: How Does HR Rewrite Job Descriptions for AI?

Every HR team is getting the same ask right now: rewrite our job descriptions to reflect AI. It sounds reasonable—until you realize you're being asked to update a documen

47. The Chaos Tax is Slowing Your Org Down

Everyone talks about slaying bureaucracy and cutting organizational sludge but there's an equally pernicious force that doesn't get nearly enough airtime: the organizatio