At Work with The Ready

In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.

This week, Rodney and Sam look at the Sky—the external forces like market shifts, technological disruptions, and political changes that shape your organization. While most companies are comfortable staying heads-down in the day-to-day, failing to look outward creates costly blind spots that lead to org debt, misaligned strategy, and even existential risk.

Cultivating a regular practice of looking up and outward is the key to successfully meeting this moment—and all the ones to come.

Download the Depthfinding guide to get the template and examples of how to use it.

Want to learn more about Depthfinding? Head here: theready.com/depthfinding

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This episode's theme music is Yaggadang by BG & Coyote Radio.

Sound engineering and design by Taylor Marvin of Coupe Studios.

Over the last decade at The Ready, we’ve seen firsthand that the most significant organizational challenges are nearly all cross-functional. But most company structures? Very much not cross-functional. Adding more project managers, looking to external partners for one-and-done silver bullets, or assembling yet another task force just isn’t cutting it as the world changes faster than most organizations can keep up.

Enter Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges. In our new Depthfinding miniseries, Rodney and Sam will help you see your organization in a new way whether you’re individual contributor or a C-Suite executive. Ready? Let’s dive in.

Download the Depthfinding guide to get the template and example Rodney mentioned in this episode.

Want to learn more about Depthfinding? Head here: theready.com/depthfinding

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This episode's theme music is Yaggadang by BG & Coyote Radio.

Sound engineering and design by Taylor Marvin of Coupe Studios.

2024 felt like a bit of a rollercoaster—and while we’re ready to close the book on this year, we wouldn’t be first-class org designers if we passed up the chance to hold a retrospective. Add in the fact that this is Rodney’s 200th episode and BNW + AWWTR have crossed the one million download milestone, and a little celebration feels like the right thing.

In today’s episode, Rodney and Sam reflect on the show’s 2024 season—including the episodes they loved, the episodes they want a do-over on, and what they hope for the show in 2025.

We want to know what you think! Take our 2024 Listener Survey.

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Rebroadcast note: We're hard at work recording a brand new miniseries for January, so this week we're resharing one this episode from our Future of HR miniseries. As we've worked with companies over the last year to reimagine their HR departments, we've seen this episode's ideas and lessons about evolving the HRBP even more important in practice. So take a listen with some fresh ears, and we'll see in two weeks with a brand new episode.

The role of HR Business Partner is often a tale of two experiences. On the one hand, HRBPs are some of the most empathetic and passionate people you’ll ever meet. On the other hand, they’re stuck on the hamster wheel of busywork, bouncing from crisis to crisis without the authority to prioritize their energy—and without the respect from leadership to make a real difference. Look up “burnout” in the dictionary and odds are you’ll find a picture of an HRBP.

In this miniseries, Brave New Work’s Rodney Evans is joined by friend-of-the-pod and Ready OG Sam Spurlin to dive into how HR can become more resilient, efficient, and equitable.

Today on episode 5, they explore how this critical role took a hard left turn from it’s intended purpose, what its future-of-work glow-up (hello, HR Business Coach) could look like, and how HR Business Coaches + Mission-Based Teaming = unlimited potential.

References mentioned:

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Learn more about The Future of HR at our website.

Curious where your company sits on our 5-stage maturity model? Take our assessment and find out!

Have a burning HR question for Rodney and Sam to answer? Email us at [email protected].

Ready to get started moving your HR department into the future? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected].

It’s mailbag time! And while we know we said this last time, we really mean it that this was probably the hardest group of questions we’ve dealt with on the show yet! Rodney and Sam get out their thinking caps and answer some questions from listeners like you about non-traditional organizational leadership, workplace dynamics around project capacity planning, and more.

Questions tackled:

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Interested in learning more about Depthfinding and the ocean framework? Head here.

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There are plenty of organizations that say they want to be “customer-focused”—but in practice? It’s easy to fall back on leader-driven opinions and assumptions about what customers really want. That’s especially true in big companies with entrenched processes and hierarchies that prioritize internal agendas. In those environments, staying aligned with customer needs can be an uphill battle—and organizations instead get stuck building solutions based on what leaders think customers should want, rather than what they need, leaving exciting opportunities on the cutting room floor.

In this episode, Rodney and Sam dig into what it actually takes to adopt a product mindset. From navigating a “hammer looking for nails” ethos to designing flexible solutions that adapt to actual user behavior, they unpack how to bring customer-centricity into daily practice—and what to do when you start to veer off course.

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If you’ve been on LinkedIn this past month, you’ve likely seen at least one post (or more than you’d care to) about “founder mode.”

Presented as a counter to “manager mode” (meant to represent highly bureaucratic leadership rife with micromanaging and delegation), “founder mode” is all about championing the pioneering, hands-on behaviors of startup founders scaled to organizations of any size. And sure, when these are the only choices, anything that’s not “manager mode” sounds like a good option.

But show us a binary, and we’ll respond by asking tough questions. This week Rodney and Sam dig into how “founder mode” actually shows up in practice, whether it causes more organizational harm than good, and what it means when real leadership seems to be left out of the discussion entirely.

Get the full transcript and resources mentioned in this episode here: https://theready.com/podcast/episodes/awwtr22-founder-mode-vs-manager-mode-is-the-wrong-question

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00:00 Intro + Check-In
03:13 What Is Founder Mode? Defining the Concept Behind the Debate
08:00 What Founders Actually Do Well — and What Gets Mythologized
13:10 The False Binary: Why Founder Mode vs. Manager Mode Misses the Point
19:04 Why Founder Mode Is a Fragile Business Practice
25:20 How Founder Mode Creates Learned Helplessness Across an Organization
29:26 Founder Mode and Organizational Debt: The Hidden Long-Term Cost
32:02 What Actual Leadership Looks Like Beyond Founder Mode
38:02 Why Founder Mode Is Incompatible with Collaboration and Shared Ownership
45:47 When Financial Maximization Becomes the Only Mode
48:19 Checks, Balances, and Accountability for Founders
51:00 Wrap-Up

Over the last nine years, The Ready has seen firsthand how organizations designed to be people positive (a.k.a. a foundational belief that people are eager to contribute and capable of change) outperform those that aren’t. Turns out when you treat people like adults, it boosts your team’s motivation, adaptability, and contribution.

The only catch? Unlearning nearly everything traditional leadership and management science has taught us for decades. Once beliefs like “People are lazy,” “People can’t be trusted,” and “People will actively abuse any flexibility they get” get baked into an organization’s culture, it’s tremendously hard to change. But not impossible.

In this episode, Rodney and Sam get candid about the fears that come with letting go of control, offer real-world examples to help skeptical leaders flip the script on trust, and explore how people positive principles can lead to long-term benefits.

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Psychological safety is a buzzy topic every company claims to want—but only a handful actually achieve. Sometimes, it’s misunderstood as being about “niceness” or “politeness”, but real psychological safety is deeper and more complex than that. It’s an ecosystem of behaviors that add up over time to impact how your team shows up day after day.

Unfortunately, this misconception has a stranglehold on most leadership teams as well, who spend more time talking the talk than walking the walk. We’ve seen and worked with many executive teams over the years where people didn’t feel comfortable speaking up, challenging ideas, admitting mistakes, or sharing concerns without fearing retribution or embarrassment. When that’s happening inside the team responsible for some of a business’s biggest decisions, there are big consequences.

In today’s episode, Rodney and Sam break down why leadership teams often feel the most psychologically unsafe, how to move the needle on developing trust, and why a ropes course can’t solve a team or organization’s culture problems.

(Producer’s note: Ok, so we're zero for two this week with Sam's mic going rogue after Rodney's mishap last episode. Taylor's been working some major magic lately. Hopefully third time's the charm with episode 21 🤞)

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While exploring bad meetings a few episodes ago, Rodney and Sam hit on something that doesn’t often get a lot of air time: the power of good habits and the discipline to care about the small things. Because when we’re trying to change companies on an atomic level, it can feel like small potatoes to focus on check-in rounds, or writing Slack messages, or how we compose to-do lists.

But you can’t run toward the future of work at full speed when your shoes aren’t properly tied. Here’s what we know: High-performing teams—from ice hockey to symphony orchestras—all prioritize the fundamentals. So why don’t we do that in the workplace?

In this episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin dig into why building strong work habits are more important than you might think and the mundane but fundamental practices they start with.

(Producer’s note: We had a tech mishap during recording, so this week’s episode might sound a little different. We blame Rodney’s lake house ghost (more on that in the SXSW episode). We’ll be back to our usual sound next episode.)

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Interested in learning more about Depthfinding and the ocean framework? Head here.

Want future of work insights and experiments you can try delivered to your inbox? Sign up here.

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