At Work with The Ready

No burying the lede this week: Employee engagement surveys are broken.

We expect them to tell us everything about a workplace’s culture—but they often miss the mark, capturing just a sliver of what's going on and usually only symptoms instead of underlying causes.

As leaders try to make sense of the data, there’s frequently a lot of smoke chasing, but nobody can tell where the fire is, or if there’s one at all. Add to that employee distrust around anonymity, spun-up initiatives to make changes that never go anywhere, and the fact that most surveys don’t even ask the right questions, and it’s no wonder everyone, from the C-suite to the frontline worker, suspects these surveys do more harm than good.

In this episode, Rodney and Sam explore what “engagement” actually means, what organizations should be measuring instead and why, and how to truly understand the health of your organization.

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We talk a lot about the importance of emergence—of being more comfortable with being uncomfortable. However, it’s hard to practice what you preach… especially for a podcast with a tight schedule. Normally, when one of two hosts is out of commission, you don’t record. But when this recently happened to us, we asked “How might we?” and took a big ol’ step into the unknown.

We’re glad we did, because this week’s guest is Dr. Jason Fox, a self-proclaimed wizard-philosopher, best-selling author, and senior leadership advisor to Fortune 500 companies around the world. In classic wizard-philosopher fashion, he and Sam throw out the script for a far-reaching conversation about the importance of rituals, the roles we play when we’re at work, and how embracing uncertainty is where the magic truly happens.

Learn more about Jason:

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Got an idea for future episodes or a thorny workplace question you need answered? Shoot us a message to [email protected].

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It’s mailbag time! We’ve been diving into specific problem areas every episode—and turns out if you go deep, your audience will go even deeper. Listeners, the questions you send us are getting hard! The ones that feel extra complex and extra tangly? We take those to the airwaves to unravel them live and share our knowledge back with you.

On today’s episode, Rodney and Sam tackle another batch of our audience’s thorniest questions.

Questions tackled:

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Got an idea for future episodes or a thorny workplace question you need answered? Shoot us a message to [email protected].

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Planning a corporate workshop or off-site often feels like making a burrito. So many options—and so many opinions on what should go in it. A presentation rodeo on the next quarter’s objectives? Absolutely. Time for a key initiative to get the spotlight in front of the C-suite? Yes, please. Extra scoops of mandatory team-building to strengthen your culture? Why not. Everyone likes fun, right?

But when it’s time to actually chow down, it quickly becomes clear you’re dealing with an overstuffed, leaky, $20,000 mess. And everything the workshop was supposed to accomplish? Yeah, that didn’t happen—so you’re back at square one come Monday.

In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore why our workshop eyes are often bigger than our workshop stomachs; standard off-site practices we need to offload; and how to design new experiences that are actually meaningful and productive.

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Got an idea for future episodes or a thorny workplace question you need answered? Shoot us a message to [email protected].

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It’s an unspoken truth in most knowledge work that summer is a wasted season. From late May to early September, many teams face reduced numbers and it’s nearly impossible to spin up anything new. The director you need approval from? On a cruise. The graphic designer you need for that new marketing campaign? Camping with the kids. When people just aren’t around, it can sometimes be easier to keep the lights on during the vacation relay race and run out the clock until fall.

The two most common sense solutions: take vacation yourself or focus on different things when people are away. But actually doing either of those things? Way harder than you’d expect, especially when modern work is tuned to overwhelm mode 24/7/365.

In this episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin talk about why summer is where organizational progress goes to die, and how we can stop spending those months doing business as usual and instead live a hot employee summer.

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

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Got an idea for future episodes or a thorny workplace question you need answered? Shoot us a message to [email protected].

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The world is changing faster than ever. But leadership teams seem a little… stagnant. Sure, there’s plenty of changeover as one CEO is replaced by another, or as new C-suite roles pop up, but the way leadership teams operate is largely unchanged from the 1950s. That model? It’s antithetical to the change that’s needed for the rest of an organization to become more adaptable and resilient.

In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore the ways in which leadership teams are holding their organizations back from the future. They’ll dig into how leaders can shift from defense to offense, set the right expectations for their teams, and recognize what their “real work” actually is.

Get the full transcript and resources mentioned in this episode here: https://theready.com/podcast/episodes/awwtr13-leadership-teams-of-the-future-act-like-org-designers

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00:00 Intro + Check-In: If we had to get a non-traditional pet, what should your co-host get?

04:33 We’re in a new era, but leadership hasn’t evolved

08:31 Traditional leadership is diametrically opposed to most change work

14:30 Leadership often avoids all discomfort because they don’t have the reps

17:16 Leadership teams often don’t have clarity on their shared work as a group

24:49 Leadership teams are often playing defense, not offense

29:23 Leadership needs to start doing “real” work

38:17 Rodney and Sam’s evolving thoughts on leadership

41:15 Change work is messy and leaders need to be doing their own self-work

43:54 Identify the shared work of your leadership team

46:05 Setting the right expectations

49:32 Closing round

50:51 Wrap up: Leave us a review and share the show with your friends

It seems everybody’s up in arms about meetings these days. “There’s too many! They ones we have suck! We have meetings to prepare for other meetings! They keep me from doing my actual job!” We get it, and we hear you. In fact, between BNW and our current show, we’ve devoted 9 episodes to meetings! What more could there be to say in a tenth?

Turns out, a ton. There’s so much intertwined with modern meeting culture that we’re often doomed to failure before we even get in the room. From the trap of the status meeting to leaders hogging all the stage time, Rodney and Sam dissect where most meetings go wrong and give you the tools to rewrite the script for how to start holding meetings that matter.

If you’re looking to make your next meeting better, make it a huddle! Learn more about how huddles can bring side-by-side collaboration and creativity to your remote teams at Slack.com.

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

Prefer to watch rather than listen? Check out the extended live cut over on Youtube.

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We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

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In the nearly five years since launching this podcast, our inbox has received one type of question more than any other: “If I’m trying to change a system that just doesn’t want to change, how do I keep going? When should I admit defeat and leave?” As people who function as “professional resistance” in organizations all over the world, this questions always hits us hard—because change itself is hard and often can lead to burnout.

So we’re finally having this conversation out in the open to tackle why the people who care the most are the ones who leave. Rodney and Sam dig into why burnout is so common among change agents, how to identify signs of meaningful progress, and when individuals and leaders should see the writing on the wall and throw in the towel.

Oh, and we're on Instagram now! Check us out there for fun behind the scenes stuff and extra things you won't find anywhere else.

To see the video version of this episode, head on over to Youtube.

Mentioned references:

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We’re on LinkedIn! Follow Rodney, Sam and The Ready for more org design nerdery and join the conversation around episodes after they air.

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Read the book that started it all at bravenewwork.com.

The RACI matrix (as well its cousins DACI, DARCI, etc.) aims to neatly categorize stakeholders into roles—who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for every decision your team makes. We spend a lot of time filling out those RACI boxes, because it’s supposed to give us order and predictability—a single source of truth for all future choices.

We’re all about achieving real clarity, but we often see RACIs treated as a one-and-done exercise, rather than something that evolves with a team. People end up in the “R” or “A” space without having the actual authority to execute a role, and then we make those roles the fall guy for a system never set up for them to succeed.

In this episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore the good intentions that lead us to make RACIs in the first place, where they fall flat, and why decision making is always more complicated than what can be captured on a chart.

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

Mentioned references:

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

We’re on LinkedIn! Follow Rodney, Sam and The Ready for more org design nerdery and join the conversation around episodes after they air.

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Read the book that started it all at bravenewwork.com.

“Ask Us Anything” episodes were a Brave New Work tradition, and we knew they were going to live on in this next new chapter of the show. What we didn’t know was how much harder the questions would be this time around! Turns out, after nearly 200 shows our audience is pretty sharp and asking some very specific questions.

On today’s episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin look at what arrived in our inbox and tackle our listeners thorniest questions…and even tease a little something coming on the horizon.

Sign up to become the first to hear when the thing Rodney teased in this episode is live!

Check out the extended live video version of this episode on our Youtube channel or shoot us a message if you'd like a transcript.

Questions answered in this episode:

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We’re on LinkedIn! Follow Rodney, Sam and The Ready for more org design nerdery and join the conversation around episodes after they air.

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

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

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Read the book that started it all at bravenewwork.com.