The Lift: Executive Leadership for Organizational Change

People with a best friend at work are *seven times* more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Yet most leaders spend zero budget, zero strategy, and zero intentional effort on workplace friendships. 

Tom Rath has done the research to understand the power of friendship at work, and how leaders can better foster it. 

Topic Highlights:

– Why Gallup's employee engagement prompt "I have a best friend at work" is its most predictive

– The exact number of close relationships we actually need, despite high-achievers chronically under-building this number

– Why Tom thinks his book about work friendships is his worst seller

– The psychological barrier that’s creating a friendship recession for men in midlife

– The "one coffee pot in the office" approach to designing workplaces that create connection

Guest Bio:

Tom Rath is a workplace researcher, author, and one of the most widely-read voices on human wellbeing of the last two decades, with over 10 million books sold worldwide.

Episode Links:

Books by Tom Rath

The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman 

True North by Bill George & Peter Sims

Little Bets by Peter Sims 

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Here’s a scorching hot take: modern workplaces make it nearly impossible for employees to forge real connections. But according to third space culture expert Adam Tanaka, it’s not the connections themselves that are impossible – it’s the space where they’re (not) happening in.

So we took this episode into a wood-fired Finnish sauna pop-up on the Brooklyn waterfront to test his theory. 

Topic Highlights:

– The power of physical space design to create real human connection 

– The case for wellness as infrastructure, not luxury

– What the "dinner party rule of six" tells us about why most meetings and offsites fail

– The analog advantage: why real human experience offers an exponential premium in an AI-saturated world

Guest Bio:

Adam Tanaka is the COO of Therme Group US, a global wellness infrastructure company. Adam holds a PhD in urban planning.

Episode Links:

Therme Group

Culture of Bathing (Substack)

Building a park in the sky (Robbie Hammond’s TED Talk)

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No one loves a genuine truth bomb more than kids – unfiltered, no social contract, no concern for how it will land.

Ginny McCormick has spent her career figuring out what that kind of radical honesty, and the play that produces it, can teach the rest of us.

Turns out the principles that work in the playroom work just as well in the boardroom. We just forgot them somewhere along the way.

Topic Highlights:

– Why "clarity always wins over complexity"

– The "first pancake" ritual: a team practice for normalizing failure that actually works

– Why structured gamification at work is inauthentic and what real play actually looks like in an adult environment

– What children's unfiltered feedback reveals about the feedback loops most organizations are missing

– The one parenting skill that every leader should be stealing right now

Guest Bio:

Ginny McCormick is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at tonies, a screen-free children's audio platform operating in over 100 markets globally. She is a veteran of Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro.

Episode Links:

tonies

Play by Stuart Brown

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When was the last time someone on your team told you something you didn't want to hear? If you have to think about it, you have your answer (too long ago).

Too many leaders have spent their entire careers avoiding conflict, and now they're running teams where nobody tells them anything useful, nothing real gets decided, and everyone is very, very pleasant about it.

According to Amy Gallo, this isn't harmony – it's dysfunction with better manners.

Topic Highlights:

– Why the cost of staying silent is almost always higher than the cost of speaking up

– The "eight-lane highway to harmony" metaphor about conflict avoidance

– How AI is quietly making us worse at disagreeing with real humans

– The important difference between being liked and being respected

– The practice of "conversational receptivity"

Guest Bio:

Amy Gallo is an expert on workplace conflict and feedback, a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, and the author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People).

Episode Links:

Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)

Radical Candor

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

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During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services published a manual teaching ordinary citizens how to sabotage the enemy from within. One of the tactics: hold unproductive meetings. 

Nearly a century later, Dr. Rebecca Hinds is dedicating her career to studying why meetings fail – and what it actually costs when they do.

Topic Highlights:

– The WWII sabotage manual that became standard business practice and makes meeting culture work against you

– The 4D CEO test: a two-part filter for deciding whether any given meeting should exist at all

– Why AI is making meetings worse, not better, and the one rule that changes that

– The "meeting doomsday" intervention: what it is and why it works

– The Babble Hypothesis: who's actually perceived as a leader in meetings

Guest Bio:

Dr. Rebecca Hinds is an organizational psychologist, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, founder of the Work Innovation Lab at Asana, and founder of the Work AI Institute at Glean. 

Episode Links:

Your Best Meeting Ever

The Surprising Science of Meetings

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual

Asana Anatomy of Work Index

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Roughly 75% of the global workforce has a faith identity that shapes how they work, when they need time off, and whether they feel like they can truly show up.

Reverend Mark Fowler isn't asking leaders to get a theology degree. He's simply asking them to be a better host.

Topic Highlights:

– How religion is already happening at work – usually in quiet corners and over lunch – and what leaders are missing by pretending otherwise

– The legal reality: religious accommodations aren't special treatment, they're a protected right

– The "hospitality framework" for religious inclusion that can be more useful than DEI training

– Why "manage your behavior, not other people's beliefs" might be the most useful leadership principle you’ve heard yet

Guest Bio:

Reverend Mark Fowler is the CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, an ordained interfaith minister, and a conflict resolution specialist who has been helping organizations navigate diversity at work for 20 years.

Episode Links:

Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding

How to Be a Perfect Stranger (multi-faith etiquette guide)

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Many business relationships can’t seem to get out of transactional mode. That’s why Marco Ziegler flew almost 100,00 miles in one year – not to close deals, but to show up for his clients. There's a difference, and that’s the whole point.

Marco has a formula for this philosophy. And it’ll make you reconsider how you think about client relationships. 

Topic Highlights:

– The Trust Equation: four variables that determine whether clients see you as a vendor or a partner  

– The specific moment Marco stopped confusing vulnerability with weakness 

– What nearly 100,000 miles of travel taught him about meeting people on their terms, not yours 

– The mid-pitch moment that revealed a major blind spot about self-orientation 

– How running the Office of the CEO reset everything he thought he knew about credibility

Guest Bio

Marco Ziegler is a global client leader at Accenture and former head of the Office of the CEO for Julie Sweet, one of the most powerful executives in global business.

Episode Links

Accenture

The Trust Equation framework

Athens Classic Marathon

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One in five Americans has a learning or thinking difference, and 53% of Gen Z identifies as neurodivergent. That means neurodivergent employees are already on your team, whether you know it or not. Nathan Friedman isn't here to make this a DEI checkbox issue. He's here to make it a business case.

Topic Highlights:

– Why the best neuroinclusive management practices are just...good general management practices 

– The "design for the margins" principle and the value of closed captions and pre-read agendas

– What companies get wrong about job postings, interview questions, and the "great handshake" test 

– Why 50+% of neurodivergent employees choose not to disclose, and what that means for your systems

– The business case for neurodivergent talent and data on top-line growth, turnover, and productivity 

Guest Bio

Nathan Friedman is the Co-President and CMO of Understood.org, a nonprofit serving 70 million Americans with learning and thinking differences, and the host of the Minds at Work podcast.

Episode Links

Understood.org

Minds at Work podcast

Kay Sargent’s Designing Neuroinclusive Spaces guide

The 4A's Foundation

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Charles King has been arrested more than 300 hundred times. Not because he's reckless – quite the opposite, in fact: because he's strategic. As the CEO of Housing Works, he's spent 35 years cycling between courtrooms, legislative offices, protest frontlines, and memorial services, doing whatever it takes to pull whichever lever of power any given moment demands.

His thesis: it's all advocacy. It's just “in front of different judges.”

Topic Highlights:

– Why civil disobedience is a calculated leadership tool, and how to know when to use it 

– The "different judges" framework: how to map your forms of influence to the situation

– What the Housing First model actually does for drug users

– How Housing Works landed the first cannabis store license in New York 

– Why Charles, now 70, still lives in one of Housing Works’ residential facilities

Guest Bio

Charles King is a lawyer, an ordained minister, an activist, the co-founder and CEO of Housing Works, the nation's largest community-based HIV/AIDS and homeless services organization.

Episode Links

Housing Works

ACT UP Oral History Project

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

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Most brands don’t fail because they’re ugly. They fail because they’re unclear about the most fundamental question: what is our purpose?

Éva Goicochea has built a category-defining company, maude, in one of the most taboo industries in business: sexual wellness. She did that by stripping the “brand” down to one thing: clarity. 

Simply put, if you can’t say what you are in one sentence, you don’t have a brand. You have noise.

Topic Highlights

– Why aiming for “cool” is a trap, and what offers the real competitive edge in branding instead

– The difference between a brand, a product, and a commodity

– What maude did right to make sexual wellness feel…ordinary

– The right (and wrong) way to partner with a celebrity

– Why saying “no” might be your most valuable growth lever

Guest Bio

Éva Goicochea is the founder and CEO of Maude, the modern intimacy brand that brought sexual wellness into mainstream retail, including Sephora.

Episode Links

maude

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Forever and Everlane, Amen 

A Century of Flight (Delta documentary)

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