Monday Muse with Harriet Molyneaux

The more I study and work with people navigating our fast-paced world, the greater clarity I have on the need to slow down to think.

Of course, there are moments of crisis that demand decisions in the moment, but I observe so many judgement calls being swept up in our collective rush at work. My observation is this is increasingly counterproductive, particularly given the level of complexity we're facing.

Duro Oye is a masterclass in the value of taking time for rest and reflection to do his best work. Fascinatingly, he shares how this approach has helped him deliver on five-year plans in significantly less time.

Slowing down isn't the opposite of achieving more. In fact, it can be precisely what enables it.

If you're in search of doing things a little differently, this one's for you.

What does it really take to do exceptional work, achieve more in business and build an audacious life that you genuinely enjoy?

After conversations with extraordinary people across business and beyond, I'm increasingly interested in challenging the assumptions we make about work, leadership, success and fulfilment.

In this opening episode, I share why I'm expanding the focus of Monday Muse beyond doing our best work to thinking differently about how we work and live. We explore the possibility of having it all (even if not all at once), why conventional approaches to business performance, success and wellbeing might actually be holding us back, and what we can learn from people who seem to have found a different way.

It's an invitation to challenge conventional thinking, rethink how we do business and discover how we can achieve more, make a greater contribution and build lives we genuinely enjoy.

One of the biggest challenges of modern work is how many of us lose touch with what actually matters to us.

Not because we are careless, but because we are busy. Busy achieving. Busy performing.

Of course having a roof over our heads and food on the table is important. But if we are lucky enough to have those things are in place, then what is all our busyness in service of?

I spoke to the wonderful Christina Patterson, journalist, writer, broadcaster and executive coach, this week about ambition, identity, illness, beauty, loneliness and what it really means to live a good life.

And at the heart of our conversation is the question: What matters enough that you are willing to build a life around it?

The people I most admire are rarely the ones with the most perfect careers. They are the people whose paths feel coherent. People who have shaped both their work and their lives around what matters most to them.

One of the disciplines of leadership is the ability to see things differently. To step outside the stories we tell ourselves. To recognise that our perspective is only one view of the world. And sometimes to have the courage to question what we thought we already knew.

My guest today is Justine Whitaker, an inspirational ChiefPeople Officer whose career has taken her from New Zealand to Australia and now to the UK. She shares that the golden thread of her career has always been ending up in situations she never thought she would be in, leading to a careerrich with experience and interest. In this discussion we explore:

-         Expanded consciousness and the impact on leadership.

-         We talk through how to get our of entrenched thought patterns, and how to ‘get you of your own way’.

-         We delve deeply into the daily practice ofchanging thoughts and habits.

This is an inspiring and unashamedly positive discussionaround the possibility of creating life tackling big meaningful things, while living each moment with more ease. Let’s get musing!

How do you build deeply trusted leadership and embed it into an organisation’s DNA?

In this episode of Monday Muse, I speak with Michael Fraccaro, former Chief People Officer at Mastercard and now Senior Advisor at Egon Zehnder. Recorded during his final weeks at Mastercard, Michael reflects on his journey from school teacher to global CPO and explores why titles may grant authority, but moral courage creates real leadership.

We examine the difference between formal and moral authority, and introduce DQ, the Decency Quotient. Michael shares practical insight into how trust is built through everyday actions, disciplined decisions, and consistency under pressure, including how Mastercard embedded this culture directly into performance and reward.

This is a considered conversation about leadership that inspires rather than commands, and about making decisions you would be proud to stand behind. Let's get musing.

“The quality of our life is only as good as the quality of our connections.” - Esther Perel

In this episode of Monday Muse, Harriet Molyneaux explores the idea of the personal boardroom with Kirsty Lynagh, Chief People Officer at Baillie Gifford. Together they reflect on how the relationships we cultivate shape our leadership, offer outside perspective, reveal blind spots and sometimes simply provide the boost we need to move forward.

Monday Muse is built on a simple idea: that radical regulation and expanded consciousness create the cognitive capacity to lead. Few things expand us more powerfully than the people we choose to learn from, lean on and be challenged by.

Even while navigating a high growth environment and raising a family, Kirsty has intentionally made time to cultivate personal boardroom. There is the colleague who sharpened her commercial thinking. The mentor who holds up a mirror. The husband who grounds her when work feels all consuming. She shares that this has developed her leadership, resilience and building a life where she has no regrets about where she has spent her time.

At a time when many leaders feel stretched and increasingly isolated, this is a considered conversation about connection as a source of clarity and capacity.

Let’s get musing!

In this episode of Monday Muse, Harriet Molyneaux is joined by high performance coach, speaker, and former Olympic leader Dean Leak to explore what regulated leadership really looks like when it is tested in moments of conflict.

Drawing on Dean’s experience as Head of Talent for Team GB Taekwondo, this conversation looks at how leaders can stay grounded, clear and effective under pressure, and why regulated leadership and expanded consciousness matter in high stakes environments.

Together, Harriet and Dean explore:

• How regulated leadership shapes the quality of conflict at work

• The balance between being unrelenting about high performance, and leading with care and trust

• Dean’s ‘what it takes to win’ model and how it translates from elite sport into business

• Cognitive dissonance, when what we believe and how we act fall out of alignment, and the impact this has on problem solving and excellence

This is not an episode about managing conflict better. It is about the inner capacity leaders need for conflict to be healthy at all.

It's reflective conversation for leaders who want to be clear in order to be kind, and who care about emotional resilience, trust, and sustainable high performance.

“How do you take a decision when you don’t know how real or true a situation is?”
This question, posed by my guest Amanda Cusdin, Chief People and Places Officer at Sage, stopped me in my tracks. It captures one of the defining challenges of our time, from Covid to AI, and the difficulty of finding clarity when the path ahead is uncertain.

Amanda and I explore how to navigate uncertainty and high-pressure decisions. She shares three approaches to decision making and how to trust your intuition when the data is incomplete.

Season 2 of Monday Muse explores how leaders regulate themselves, expand their consciousness, and build the cognitive capacity to lead to complexity. Amanda embodies all three. I cannot wait for you to listen. Let's get musing!

I spent Autumn 2025 interviewing a group of people I admire, not only for what they do, but for how they do it. I also chose people who have impressive ownership of their career, and I wanted to understand what makes them so brilliant.

In this episode, I share three core insights from those conversations, including the importance of a fundamental sense of calm and learning to tune into energy rather than expectation.

I reflect on what I learned and introduce the framing for Season 2 of Monday Muse:

Radical regulation + expanded consciousness = the cognitive capacity to lead.

Guests include Amanda Cusdin, Chief People Officer at Sage; Michael Fraccaro, former Chief People Officer at Mastercard; and Sophie Hascher, neuroscientist. Together, we explore how rooting leadership in these three areas enables:

• Enhanced decision-making

• High-quality strategic and commercial thinking

• Calm in high-pressure situations

• Leadership grounded in empathy and influence

I can’t wait to explore these topics with you.

Let’s get musing!

I am thrilled to be joined by Jane van Zyl, CEO of Working Families, the UK’s national charity for working parents and carers. Together we explore equity of opportunity and experience in the workplace:

• Janes shares how growing up in South Africa and formative experiences that shaped a life devoted to reducing inequity• How far we have come since the 1970s, when men in the UK spent an average of just fifteen minutes a day with their children – a stat I am still getting my head around
• Why the flexible working debate needs nuance, and how for many people, flexibility is simply the ability to see their kids or support someone with a long term illness

Jane’s career is rich with meaning and purpose, and she makes a compelling case for retaining flexible working at a time when the trend in many places is to reduce it.

But before we dive in, Working Families does brilliant and important work, if you felt like checking out their website or supporting their cause, take a look here:Working Families - Changing the way we live and work or donate to their Big Give Christmas Challenge where all donations are being matched between now and 9th December: ⁠https://donate.biggive.org/donate/a05WS000007EMHZYA4