Workplace Culture Episodes

Have you ever followed a leader who shared their struggles on stage, said all the right things about brokenness, and still left everyone around them feeling smaller? Therapist and professor Dr. Chuck DeGroat has a name for that: fauxnerability.

Chuck returns to A World of Difference the day after launching his new book, Who You're Becoming, for an honest conversation about narcissism in leadership across tech, politics, faith communities and nonprofits, and the slow work of building real charac...

Workplace culture isn't broken. According to Dr. Lauran Star, it's working exactly as it was designed, and that should make every leader stop and look closely.

Organizational psychologist and forensic cultural behaviorist Dr. Lauran Star joins Lori for a candid, funny, and unflinching conversation about the high-stakes environments most consultants won't touch: where leadership is misaligned, accountability is blurred, and everyone can feel something is wrong, but no one will say it out loud.

...

What if people do not resist change at all, and what they resist is change that is done to them? Karen Zeigler, CEO of Human Score, joins Lori to explain why so many change and AI efforts stall, and what leaders can do differently this week.

This conversation was recorded live on LinkedIn, with comments and questions from the community along the way.

In this conversation, Lori and Karen explore:

Why leaders misread their own workforce, and how fear shows up as projection

What Karen means by ...

Have you ever felt that the moment you catch your breath, three new demands are already waiting? Organizational consultant Melissa Swift gives that feeling a name, work intensification, and explains what helps.

In this conversation, Lori and Melissa explore:

How three years working in London showed Melissa that a shared language does not mean a shared culture

What work intensification is: too many tasks in too little time, too many people involved in every decision, and too much emotion at wo...

Have you ever worked with someone who just didn't get you, not because they were difficult, but because you were wired completely differently? In this episode, Lori sits down with Enneagram expert Joey Schewee to unpack why understanding motivation, not just behavior, is what actually transforms how teams work together.

Joey has spent decades helping thousands of employees and hundreds of teams understand each other through the Enneagram, and her new book, When Working Together Doesn't Work, distills that experience into a practical workplace guide. She and Lori dig into why so many people mistype themselves at work, why "culture fit" hiring can quietly push out your most brilliant thinkers, and how managers can stop putting people in boxes and start understanding what actually drives them.

What if everything you've been taught about managing performance was built for a workplace that no longer exists? Dr. Edie Goldberg returns to A World of Difference to unpack the research behind her new book, revealing why the system most companies use to drive performance is quietly working against them.

What does it cost to keep climbing when you're not sure the ladder is leaning against the right wall? Cynthia Lai spent two decades in multinational banking before a health warning sign forced her to ask that question, and to walk away from a role that looked successful from the outside.

In this conversation, Cynthia, a governance advisor, leadership educator, and ICF certified executive coach, joins Lori to talk about:

Why high achievers so often ignore the warning signs their bodies are sending them

Reframing governance from a system of control into a way of building trust across cultures

What it actually takes to navigate an identity shift after leaving a role that defined you

How assumptions get in the way of cross-cultural communication, and what to do instead

Why resilience means more than "bouncing back," and how mindfulness practices like journaling support it

The AI race is real. So is the hidden cost. Lori introduces the Speed Tax, the Culture Architecture Framework, and a free 5-question diagnostic for HR leaders. 6th anniversary solo episode.

Picture two fish swimming in a bowl. One asks the other, how's the water? The second fish replies, what's water? That's culture, says Maria Angela Calmet, and it's exactly why so many leaders never notice the assumptions shaping how their teams communicate, decide, and trust one another.

In this episode

Why cultural competence is now ranked among the World Economic Forum's top future-of-work skills

The tree analogy: why cultural conflict happens at the roots, not the visible leaves and flower...

What if the traits that get someone labeled difficult in one workplace are exactly what makes them extraordinary in another? Tara May, CEO of Aspiritech, a technology company where more than 90 percent of the team is autistic, joins us to talk about what she calls the ROI of kindness, and why building for neurodivergent talent makes every workplace better.

In this episode

Why Tara calls it “the ROI of kindness,” and what that means for the bottom line

The “spiky cognitive profile” reframe: wh...

Karen Tay built a peer-support program for women navigating workplace bullying and burnout, ran it through Princeton research, and found something a lot of managers don't expect: the problem usually isn't a lack of effort. It's a lack of support.

In this Leading Through Change encore, Karen and Lori unpack what Karen's Princeton-backed research found about workplace adversity, why women in the senior-manager to senior-director range are most likely to drop out of the workforce, and what actually helps.

One week ago, twin earthquakes tore through the Venezuelan coastline Lori Adams-Brown grew up on. In this solo episode, recorded live and shared here as this week's show, Lori reports what's actually happening on the ground, draws on her firsthand experience coordinating relief after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, and gives you a vetted list of where to send help right now.

The scale of the disaster: two quakes thirty-nine seconds apart, the strongest Venezuela has felt in over a century, and a d...

What happens when an organization says all the right things about culture, puts the values on the wall, launches the initiative, and nothing actually moves? Carlee Wolfe has spent more than two decades inside that gap, and her answers will challenge how you lead.

Carlee Wolfe is Associate Vice President of Leader Development and Organizational Effectiveness at Hyatt Hotels, where her work sits at the intersection of global leadership, talent strategy, and culture. Her perspective is shaped not only by the boardroom but by two decades of coaching volleyball and volunteering with the Olympic and Paralympic movement, including adaptive sports.

What if the silence in your meetings has nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with culture? Organizational psychologist Neelu Kaur joins Lori Adams-Brown to decode the invisible operating systems shaping how professionals communicate, advocate for themselves, and lead across cultures and organizational hierarchies.

IN THIS EPISODE:
- What the "self-trust recession" is and why it matters for global leaders right now

- The paradox at the heart of corporate America: individualistic ...

What happens when you spend 18 years building a company to $5 million in revenue across 80 countries, finally sell it, and then wake up with no idea who you are without it? Fiona Macaulay knows that moment intimately, and what she built from it is changing how thousands of accomplished women think about what comes next.

In this episode, Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Fiona Macaulay, founder of The Wild Network, co-author of Aim High and Bounce Back, and creator of the Next Chapter Accelerator,...

What does it mean when the only HR professional in a room of 6,000 AI innovators refuses to stay silent? Anju Choudhary attended HumanX in San Francisco, looked around, and decided that was not a coincidence. It was a calling.

In this live conference conversation recorded at HumanX, Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Anju Choudhary, a seasoned Chief Human Resources Officer, to talk about what it really means to keep humans at the center of one of the most consequential shifts in how we work. Anju's message is clear: people leaders do not belong on the sidelines of the AI conversation. They belong at the head of the table.

In this episode, you'll hear:

Why Anju was the only HR professional among 6,000 attendees at a major AI conference, and what that signals for the profession
The mindset shift every people leader needs right now: from "human in the loop" to "human in the lead"
How building her first AI agent in under two minutes changed the way she talks about AI adoption
Wha…

What if the life you have been imagining could actually begin somewhere else?
At Move Abroad Con in San Diego, at the Hard Rock Hotel, Lori Adams-Brown stepped onto the conference floor to have three honest conversations with people living and breathing the conference about the expat life. Each one brought a different perspective. All three pointed to the same truth: the world is more open than most people think.



Why people from all walks of life, and all stages of life, are reconsidering wh...

What if executive presence has nothing to do with how you look in a room and everything to do with how aware you are in your own body? Presence-based leadership coach Bradley McDevitt joins Lori Adams-Brown to explore why trust is built somatically, not just strategically, and why the discomfort you feel in a meeting might be pointing you directly toward your greatest growth.

In This Episode:

Why executive presence has shifted from gravitas to availability and agency

How trust is built throug...

What happens to your identity when the system that formed you was built to erase it? In this deeply personal and clear-eyed conversation, New York Times bestselling author Tia Levings returns to A World of Difference with her new book, a survivor's guide that meets you wherever you are on the road to recovery. Whether you were raised in high-control religion, are navigating the aftermath of leaving, or are simply trying to understand why you still silence yourself in rooms where it feels unsafe ...

What if the resistance you're seeing in your organization isn't defiance, it's information? What if the way you're talking about change is the very thing blocking it?

Episode Summary
In this episode of A World of Difference, host Lori Adams-Brown sits down with Jeff Wetherhold, founder of the Sustainable Change System and MI for Health, to unpack why 88% of organizational changes produce no lasting results, and what evidence-based leaders can do differently. Drawing on more than 20 years of exp...

You were trained for almost everything. Nobody trained you for this.
In this solo episode, Lori Adams-Brown draws on her extraordinary career of working in civil war zones, surviving riots targeting American citizens, leading evacuations, and navigating genuine life-or-death threats across multiple countries to name the one threat most leaders are completely unprepared for: the workplace bully.

Research tells us these individuals spend approximately 80% of their time watching, planning, and str...

What if the blueprint for thriving in the AI era has been buried for centuries, inside the civilization that built the pyramids? Organizational psychologist Christine Mikhail joins Lori Adams-Brown live from the Transform Conference in Las Vegas to unpack one of the most urgent (and under-discussed) challenges in the modern workplace: we're racing to implement AI, but we're forgetting the humans doing the work.

In this episode, you'll discover:

Why Christine coined "compounded change" and why ...

What if the reason you're exhausted isn't because you're doing it wrong — but because you're doing too much? Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey (Nell3D) is here to challenge the most dangerous assumption in modern leadership: that progress always comes from piling more on.
In this episode, we unpack:

Why high-capacity, values-driven leaders are drowning in ambition — not lack of it

The Leading in 3D Framework: aligning Me, We, and World as a stable, sustainable triad — not a trade-off

What Nell lear...

Live from the Transform 2026 conference floor in Las Vegas, Lori sat down with Daria Maneche, founder of The Working Optimist, for a candid, neuroscience-backed conversation about what it actually takes to build human connection at work, and why the stakes for getting this right have never been higher.

Daria brings a deeply personal why to her work: after years of her own struggles and many forms of support that fell short, it was understanding the neuroscience of the brain that finally changed...