April 14, 2026

Situational Awareness for the C-Suite: Recognizing Workplace Bullies Before They Hollow Out Your Organization with Lori Adams-Brown

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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 strategizing how to take down the people they perceive as threats. Not because those people did anything wrong — but because they are competent, empathetic, and influential. They charm publicly and destroy privately. And they use the same psychological tactics as hostage-takers: isolation, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, and the careful, strategic destruction of a target's reality.

In this episode, Lori draws on research and the insights of seven past podcast guests, including Elaine Lin Hering (Unlearning Silence), Dr. Chuck DeGroat, Minette Norman, Catherine Matisse, Dr. Shveta Miglani, Rachel Radway, and Gary Ridge, to make the case that leaders need new skills, new protocols, and a new willingness to believe the people who speak up.

In this episode:

Why workplace bullies use the same psychological tactics as hostage situations, and why organizations are structurally unprepared
The predictable bully playbook: how they charm publicly, control the narrative, and isolate targets before anyone knows what happened
Three red flags every leader needs to be able to spot, and why silence in your organization is not a green light
What real protection looks like beyond HR departments and policy documents that collapse the moment someone actually reports abuse
Lori's direct challenge to leaders, and a free framework to help you detect internal threats before you lose your best people

About Lori Adams-Brown:

Lori Adams-Brown is a Strategic Transformation Executive, founder of Brava Global Advisory, and host of A World of Difference podcast with 153,000+ downloads, 285+ episodes, and listeners across 100+ countries. She has worked across six continents in six languages and spent over two decades helping organizations build psychologically safe, high-performing, and globally minded cultures.

Timestamps:

[00:00] Cold Open — Real crisis training and what was missing from it
[03:00] The threat from within: what nobody prepared us for
[05:00] The bully playbook, charm publicly, destroy privately
[07:00] Silicon Valley offices, nonprofits, and the mission statement contradiction
[09:00] The painful irony: the strengths that made Lori effective also made her a target
[11:00] Three red flags every leader must learn to recognize
[13:30] What real organizational protection requires
[15:30] Trauma-informed leadership: believing the target
[17:00] Lori's challenge to leaders and a free resource

Free Resource:

Download the SAFE Framework at: loriadamsbrown.com/safe

Subscribe, leave a review at aworldofdifferencepodcast.com/reviews/new, and share this episode with five people who need to hear it.

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Keep making a difference wherever you are!

Lori Adams-Brown, Host & Executive Producer

A World of Difference Podcast