Hard Earned with Laura Massetti

Real Work Ready
The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.
 Learn more: https://www.realworkready.com

Everyone tells you to chase the dream job. Nobody tells you what to do when you don’t get it, or when you land a role that looks perfect and slowly wears you down. And now AI sits between you and the hiring manager, which makes getting the right job harder than ever.

Kim Steiner is a VP at Fource Recruiting, a women-founded recruiting firm, after 20 years in media and ad tech sales. She has built teams, worked side by side with hiring decision makers, and pivoted into a new industry mid-career. She knows what employers want because finding it is now her job.

In this episode:

• How missing out on an ad agency job led to a 20-year career across CBS, Condé Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., and ad tech
• What happened when Kim took a senior role that clashed with her values, and how she walked away from the “gilded cage”
• Why AI screening has made employers more risk-averse, and what clients look for now across every interview round
• The advice Kim gives her own daughter about trusting your gut and believing you belong in the room
• How to tell your story beyond your resume without burying the lead

Real Work Ready
Kim’s best career moves came from trusting her gut and knowing how to tell her story. Real Work Ready teaches early professionals those behaviors before the stakes get high.
Get started: https://www.realworkready.com
For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: https://realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Kim:
Website: https://www.fourcerecruiting.com
Career positioning and profile feedback: https://www.fourcerecruiting.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-steiner-85a463
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimstein05

Connect with Laura:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realworkreadyhq
Website: https://www.realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready
The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.
 Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Nobody tells you that great work is only half the job. The other half is people. The manager who second-guesses you, the peer who agrees in the meeting and undercuts you after, the colleague who always seems to be playing an angle.

Amy Gallo is an author and Harvard Business Review contributing editor who has spent her career studying how people behave at work. Her book Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) gives a practical framework for the relationships that drain us most. In this conversation, she and Laura dig into why conflict feels so personal and what you can do about it.

In this episode:

• Why early-career professionals struggle when feedback, expectations, and power dynamics are unfamiliar
• How your brain turns small moments of tension into negative stories about other people
• The common difficult behaviors at work, from the insecure manager to the passive-aggressive peer to the political operator
• How to respond with agency and set boundaries when a relationship cannot be fixed
• Why every conversation is a negotiation between different needs, values, and styles

Real Work Ready
Real Work Ready teaches early professionals how to communicate, handle feedback, and navigate the people side of work before it becomes a problem. The behaviors are learnable, and the earlier you start, the better.
 Get started: www.realworkready.com
For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Amy Gallo:
Website: https://www.amyegallo.com | Book: Andare d'accordo: https://www.amazon.it/-/en/Amy-Gallo/dp/8836203418/ | Newsletter: https://www.amyegallo.com/newsletter | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyegallo | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amyegallo

Connect with Laura Massetti:
Website: https://www.realworkready.com | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realworkreadyhq

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most leaders who are good at sales built that success on instinct. Nobody ever made them write it down. Nobody made them build a system around it. And that works great until the day they try to hand it off, hire a team, or scale beyond themselves. Then everything breaks.

Aleasha Bahr is the founder of the Black Sheep Sales Method and the host of two podcasts: Sales is NOT a Dirty Word and Black Sheep Network. She has spent her career helping leaders turn intuitive sales success into something that does not depend on them being in the room. Formerly based in Denver, now building her business from Spain.

In this episode:

• Why 50 to 70 percent of lost deals are actually winnable and what is happening in those conversations that kills them
• What breaks down the moment a leader who sells well tries to hand it off or scale it to a team
• Why hiring a VP of Sales before you have a documented system is one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make
• What the Black Sheep Sales Method does differently and what a leader can start building this week

Real Work Ready

Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to grow into the kind of leader who has this conversation. The behaviors are learnable before you need them.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Aleasha:

Website: aleashabahr.com

Book a Sales Call Audit: calendly.com/aleasha/sales-level-up

Assessment: https://assessment.aleashabahr.com/ 

Podcast: Sales is NOT a Dirty Word

Podcast: Black Sheep Network

Instagram: @aleashabahr

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aleashabahr

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most people spend years inside an organization trying to figure out why things work the way they do. Nobody tells you before you start that the answer is not the org chart, the leadership team, or the company values on the wall. It is the culture. And culture is not a vibe. It is a system. And like any system, it can be read.

Nick Holmes is a PhD researcher in organizational behavior, the founder of Culturnova, and one of the most practical voices working on what workplace culture actually is and how to diagnose it before it costs you. In this conversation he shares the framework he has spent years building, and what it means for anyone trying to understand the environment they are working inside.

In this episode:

• Why culture is the operating system of every organization and what that means for how people work, grow, and feel at work
• The four domains of culture: Maps, Wires, Patterns, and Sparks — and what each one tells you about whether an organization is working or quietly breaking
• Why burnout is caused less by overwork and more by role ambiguity and misalignment, and what to do about it
• What managers can shape in a person's first 90 days and why that window matters more than almost anything else
• What to ask in a job interview that will tell you more about a company's real culture than anything on their website

Real Work Ready

Understanding the culture you are walking into is one of the things nobody teaches before you need it. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to navigate any environment from day one.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Nick:

Culturnova: culturenova.co.uk

UNTHINK: weunthink.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nickholmeshr

TikTok: @nickholmes_culturedesigner

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready
 The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.
 Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most HR professionals are brilliant at understanding people, organizations, and value. They are far worse at pricing their own. Nobody ever taught them how to quantify what they are worth, so they default to undercharging and overdelivering until it breaks them.

Sam Eaton is the founder of MindAbility Business Coaching, a global business coach for the HR and talent profession with 25 years of experience building HR consultancies internationally. In the last five years, she and her team have guided over 260 founders to build 6, 7, and 8 figure businesses. In this conversation she breaks down why HR professionals cannot see their own value, and what a failed gardening business taught her about knowing when to walk away.

In this episode:

• Why HR professionals consistently struggle to quantify their value, and what it costs them with clients
• How Sam scaled an HR consultancy from £650K to £4.3M, and what that growth actually required
• The story behind her book The Trouble With Pink Wheelbarrows, and what a failed online retail business taught her about forecasting, ego, and knowing when to pivot
• Why objections in a client conversation are often an opening for a deeper conversation, not a rejection
• How to turn a founder's personal goals into an actual commercial strategy

Real Work Ready
Knowing your value does not start with a pricing formula. It starts with the professional foundation Real Work Ready builds in the first years of a career.
Get started: www.realworkready.com
For people managers, HR leaders, and L&D teams: realworkready.com/masterclass

Connect with Sam:
Website: mindabilitybusinesscoaching.com

MindAbility Business Club: mindabilitybusinessclub.com
Book: The Trouble With Pink Wheelbarrows: amazon.com/dp/B0BBJN5CFB
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samanthaeaton1450
Instagram: @sam.eatonagain
 YouTube: @mindabilityconsulting5705

Connect with Laura:
 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti
 Instagram: @realworkreadyhq
 Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most career advice is about skills. Nobody tells you that the professionals who last the longest are not the most skilled ones. They are the most resilient ones. The ones who built their defenses before they needed them, who knew their vulnerabilities before someone else found them, and who understood that resilience is not a response to pressure. It is a decision you make before it arrives.

Salwa Rafee is a biomedical engineer turned global cybersecurity executive who has spent over 20 years protecting the systems that protect patients, including leadership roles at Accenture, IBM, Siemens, Raytheon, H-ISAC, and USAID across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. She is a speaker, an advocate for women in STEM, and the author of Defending Digital Lifelines: Healthcare in the Cyber Age. In this conversation, she brings the framework she built for protecting hospitals into the conversation every early professional needs about protecting their career.

In this episode:

• What twenty years across the world's most complex organizations taught her about how professional environments actually work underneath the surface
• What the path of building a career in a technical, leadership-heavy field gave her that she is most grateful for
• What she wants every young professional, especially young women, to understand about building confidence and not waiting for permission
• How the framework inside her book, know your vulnerabilities before threats find them, build your defenses before you need them, applies as much to a career as to a hospital system

Real Work Ready

The behaviors that protect a career are learnable before you need them. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to build them, before they spend years figuring it out the hard way.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Salwa:

Website: salwarafee.com

Book: Defending Digital Lifelines: Healthcare in the Cyber Age

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/salwarafee

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for the first years of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Most of us were handed the same career map. One employer. One ladder. One title at a time. Nobody told us the map was drawn for a world that no longer exists.

Andreia Fernandes is the founder of the Portfolio Career Institute in Zurich, a keynote speaker on failure culture, and the creator of the Portfolio Career Canvas framework. She has spent over a decade helping professionals build careers that do not fit one title, one ladder, or one employer, and she is making the case that this is not a risk. It is the strategy.

In this episode:

• What a portfolio career actually is and why it is fundamentally different from a side hustle or an inability to decide what you want
• Why the professionals who build the most fulfilled and financially resilient careers are the ones who stopped trying to fit one box
• What failure culture is and why your relationship with failure determines more about your career than your skills do
• What someone can do right now, before they enrol in anything or quit anything, to start building a career that reflects their full range

Real Work Ready

Real Work Ready gives early professionals the foundation to grow into the kind of leader who designs a career on their own terms. The behaviors are learnable before you need them.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Andreia:

Portfolio Career Institute: portfoliocareerinstitute.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andreiarfernandes

Instagram: @andreia_r_fernandes

YouTube: @andreiafernandesPFC

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a Real Work Ready podcast. Leaders who built something, for the people building toward it.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Most people get the job. Almost nobody gets the briefing.

Hard Earned with Laura Massetti is a leadership podcast for people building toward a business leadership seat. Every episode is one senior leader on one thing they had to learn the expensive way. Where they learned it. What it cost before they knew it. And what it means for someone still climbing.

Not the keynote version. Not a memoir. A briefing for the person coming up behind them.

Laura Massetti spent fifteen years inside Fortune 100 organizations hiring, evaluating, and deciding who moved up. She watched capable people do everything right and stall anyway, and she could never explain it to them in a way that helped. So she started asking the people who got past it. Not what they achieved. What they had to learn, what it cost them, and what they would hand to someone coming up behind them.

New episodes every Tuesday.

WHAT EVERY EPISODE GIVES YOU
• The lesson a senior leader learned the expensive way
• What that lesson cost before they knew it
• What to do with it while you still have time
• Career and leadership advice that assumes you are already good at your job

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Realworkreadyhq
Podcast: https://realworkready.com/podcast
Also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

FOR PEOPLE MANAGERS, HR LEADERS, AND L&D TEAMS
Real Work Ready is the professional readiness training that teaches the six behaviors determining how work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Companies bring it in for the people they are investing in.
Join the masterclass: https://realworkready.com/masterclass

CONNECT WITH LAURA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realworkreadyhq
TikTok: @realworkreadyhq
Website: https://realworkready.com

Subscribe now so the first episode lands in your feed on Tuesday.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.comMost career advice tells you to find your lane and stay in it. Nobody tells you that the people who move fastest are the ones who keep raising their hand and asking for more, even when nobody is asking them to.

Mariza Fotiou spent 20 years building a global career across financial services and energy, including as Digital COO at HSBC Private Bank and VP of Digital Product Management at BP, across New York and London. She changed roles every two to three years throughout her career by doing one thing: raising her hand when she was bored and asking for more. In this conversation, she shares what that habit actually built, what the hard moments actually taught her, and what she now knows that she wishes someone had told her at the very start.

In this episode:

• Why raising your hand when you are bored, not waiting for the right moment, is the single most powerful career strategy most people never use
• What the colleague-to-boss transition actually looks like and why nobody prepares you for it
• What it feels like to lead a team through organizational transformation when you yourself do not know what is going to happen to you
• What AI is actually doing to entry-level work and why early professionals need to understand that the job market they are walking into is not the one that existed two years ago

Real Work Ready

The habit of asking for more is something you can build before you ever need it. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the operating system for a career that lasts.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Mariza:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mariza-fotiou

CuriousIQ: curiousiq.org

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com  

Real Work Ready

The professional readiness program built for years 0 to 5 of a career. Six learnable behaviors that determine how your work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered. Nobody teaches them. Now someone does.

Learn more: www.realworkready.com

Nobody tells you that the career you plan is not the career you get. Nobody tells you that some of the biggest turns will come from a decision somebody else makes about you, in a room you are not in. And nobody tells you that the logic of your own path only becomes visible looking backwards.

Danijel Brener leads the Enterprise PMO for Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care. Before that he was Chief of Staff and Head of International Markets. Twenty two years ago he walked into an interview expecting a sales job, was told he was not a sales person, and was sent to a country he had not chosen. Five cities and two continents later, he coaches early and mid career professionals on the thing nobody explained to him: how to tell a right yes from a wrong one.

In this episode:

• Why the career you plan is almost never the career you get, and what to do with that instead of fighting it
• What it actually costs to say yes to an opportunity you did not choose, and what it buys you that staying put never will
• What he believed about how big decisions get made when he was junior, and what he found instead
• How to tell a right yes from a wrong one in year two, before you can see anything looking backwards
• Why learning to say no early is a career skill rather than a career risk

Real Work Ready

Nobody hands you a map for the first five years. Real Work Ready gives early professionals the six behaviors that determine how work gets received, planned, communicated, and delivered, so that when the unplanned opportunity arrives, they are ready to take it.

Get started: www.realworkready.com

Connect with Danijel:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dbrener

Connect with Laura:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauramassetti

Instagram: @realworkreadyhq

Website: realworkready.com

No One Tells You This is a Real Work Ready podcast. Every episode is a conversation with leaders, executives, and professionals who finally decided to say what nobody said to them: the unwritten rules, the invisible dynamics, and the things that actually determine who succeeds.

Laura Massetti
Founder of Real Work Ready™

 www.realworkready.com