Truth, Lies and Work

When you hear the word propaganda, you picture a dictator, a politician, or an ad executive. You never picture yourself. But turns out, you are running the exact same campaign on yourself every day.

In this episode, charter occupational psychologist Leanne Elliott and entrepreneur Al Elliott are joined by psychologist, speaker, and author Owen Fitzpatrick. Owen has spent the last 25 years studying how beliefs form, why they change, and how they shape our leadership, choices, and success.

From coaching billionaires and Olympic athletes to speaking across 100 countries, Owen breaks down his concept of Inner Propaganda—the story you sell to yourself—and why logic bullying never works when trying to change minds.

🎙️ In This Episode:

💡 Top Takeaways

👤 About the Guest

Owen Fitzpatrick is a psychologist, international speaker, author of 10 books, and host of the Inner Propaganda podcast. He helps global companies, leaders, and individuals master belief leadership to drive better decisions, influence teams, and reduce polarization.

Website: owenfitzpatrick.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/owenfitzp/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/owenf23/

Listen to Owen's Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inner-propaganda-with-owen-fitzpatrick/id1441538919

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

Mental health support

🎧 Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Welcome to Episode 1 of our Summer Sessions on Truth, Lies & Work! For the next few weeks, Al and Leanne are taking a short break from the workplace news and heavy management analysis to bring you something a bit lighter, funnier, and completely fascinating.

Joined by special guest host Georgia Hodkinson (Associate Producer and Organisational Psychologist), the team goes head-to-head in a battle of bizarre careers. Each host brings genuinely real, highly specialised, and wildly strange jobs to the table—guessing what they involve, breaking down how you actually get into them, revealing what they pay, and scoring them on a leaderboard for sheer weirdness.

Whether you're lounging by the pool, commuting to work, or hiding from your inbox on holiday, hit play to discover the most unbelievable ways people make a living around the globe!

🎙️ Special Guest Host

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

Mental health support

🎧 Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

HR leaders spend all day surrounded by people. So why does it often feel like the loneliest job in the building?

In this episode, Tom Emery, former Chief People Officer at a top City of London wealth manager, 20-year corporate HR veteran (ex-HSBC), and founder of HEX Talent & Development, joins Al and Leanne to pull back the curtain on the reality of HR leadership.

Tom shares his powerful "Vet Analogy" for HR: just like veterinarians enter the profession out of love for animals only to see them at their illest, weakest, or most aggressive, HR leaders enter the role because they love people, only to be brought in when people are backed into a corner.

Together, they dive deep into how HR leaders can step out of the isolated "police officer" role and step into the room as true strategic drivers, how senior leaders can build psychological safety by simply asking for help, and why learning to disagree well is the missing ingredient in high-performing C-suites.

🎧 What We Cover in This Episode

⚡ Top 3 Takeaways

More from Tom:

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

Mental health support

🎧 Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

The Hiring Crisis, TikTok Training and Gen Z Perfectionism. PLUS How to Keep Quiet Teams Motivated

Welcome back to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning workplace podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

In this episode of This Week in Work, business owner Al Elliott and Chartered Occupational Psychologist Leanne Elliott break down why fewer than half of recruitment processes actually succeed, why TikTok-style L&D might be sabotaging employee memory, and how economic pressure is driving an epidemic of Gen-Z perfectionism. Plus, in Truth or Lie, we test the psychological myth: Can you bullshit a bullshitter?

🔥 Stories covered

1. Are we actually in a European hiring crisis?

While corporate layoff headlines dominate the news, data from McKinsey’s HR Monitor survey reveals European hiring success sits at just 46% when accounting for offer acceptance and probation survival. With an aging workforce retiring and AI changing entry-level work, skilled talent is scarcer than ever. We discuss why smart companies like Spotify are shifting focus from external recruitment to internal mobility and growing talent from within.

2. Why short-form videos are terrible for L&D

Thinking of using 60-second TikTok-style reels for workplace training? Think again. A new study demonstrates that chopping learning content into micro-clips tanks test scores and dramatically speeds up overnight forgetting. Brain scans revealed that continuous video syncs brain regions responsible for attention and memory formation, whereas micro-clips over-stimulate change-detection reflexes without actual absorption.

3. Is work making young people hyper-perfectionist?

Analysing 35 years of data across 82,000 students, a major study in Psychological Bulletin shows a sharp rise in socially prescribed perfectionism—the belief that others demand perfection and will judge mistakes harshly. Rather than being "fragile" or "entitled," Gen-Z employees are operating under intense economic pressure and fear of failure. We cover how leaders can foster true psychological safety to overcome paralysis and indecision.

🧠 Truth or Lie: "You Can’t Bullshit a Bullshitter"

It’s an age-old saying: frequent liars and exaggerators have a built-in radar for deception. But does the psychological research back it up?

Leanne examines studies by Christian Blötner & Sebastian Bergold (2023) and Dr. Shane Littrell et al. (2021). We break down the crucial difference between persuasive bullshitters (who talk a big game with buzzwords) and evasive bullshitters (who dodge questions defensively).

Workplace Surgery

In this week's Workplace Surgery, we tackle three real questions submitted by listeners:

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/truthlieswork

– Al Elliott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thisisalelliott

– Leanne Elliott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetleanne

– Email: [email protected]

– Book a call: https://savvycal.com/meetleanne/chat

Mental health support

UK & ROI — Samaritans Call 116 123 or visit https://www.samaritans.org

UK — Mind Call 0300 123 3393 or visit https://www.mind.org.uk

US — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline Call or text 988 or visit https://988lifeline.org

Australia — Lifeline Call 13 11 14 or visit https://www.lifeline.org.au

Global helplines

https://findahelpline.com

🎧 Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Have you ever put together a perfectly logical, data-backed presentation or sent a highly detailed company-wide email, only to be met with complete silence? Meanwhile, a seemingly trivial update or a random piece of news gets everyone talking.

In this episode of Truth, Lies & Work, we unlock the secret to getting people to actually listen to you. It isn’t about louder voices, longer emails, or bigger slide decks. It is entirely about storytelling.

Our guest is Ellie Glason, a leading PR consultant for founders and former publishing specialist. Ellie explains why our brains are hardwired to ignore dry information dumps and how you can use the classic "Seven Basic Plots" of human storytelling to get instant buy-in from your team, your board, or the media.

🎧 In This Episode, We Discuss:

📖 Resources Mentioned in This Episode

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

🧠 Mental Health Support

If you or someone you work with is struggling, please reach out to one of the trusted support services below:

Welcome back to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning workplace podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the ultimate audio destination for business professionals.

In this episode of This Week in Work, hosts Al and Leanne Elliott are joined by a very special guest: Rebecca Taylor, host of the HR Voices podcast! Together, they unpack the hilarious reality of unhinged leadership conversations, dive deep into the newly stalling progress of women at work, put "forced fun" to the test under the psychological microscope, and answer some incredibly sticky workplace relationship questions.

🔥 Stories Covered

1. The HR Rebel Calling Out Unhinged Leaders

You might not be surprised to hear that some of the conversations HR professionals have to have with leaders are… somewhat unhinged. But what happens when an HR professional calls them out on LinkedIn in the best, most direct way ever? We dive into the viral waves being made by the brilliant Emma Djemil (Founder of Be Unstoppable and The HR Club).

2. Is the "Lean In" Generation Now Leaning Out?

Women have made extraordinary gains in the past few decades across the world of work, but are things stalling? Sheryl Sandberg’s infamous 2013 book advised women to "lean in," but new data suggests women's progress at work appears to be stalling. Leanne and Rebecca dissect the learned behaviours—from over-apologising and avoiding conflict to taking on invisible "empathy tax" work—that are holding talented people back, and ask: Have workplaces actually changed enough?

🧠 Truth or Lie: Does Fun at Work Undermine Performance?

For generations, work has been treated as the serious part of life, while fun is something you earn once the job is done. If people are laughing or messing around, it must mean less work is getting done… right? Leanne dives deep into decades of organizational psychology to give you the ultimate verdict.

💬 Workplace Surgery❓

In this week's workplace surgery, we take on your real-life culture and management dilemmas:

"I’ve been casually seeing someone at work for about a year. Until now we’ve worked in different departments, but I’ve just been promoted and will be managing their department. Should I tell my employer about the relationship, or keep it private unless it becomes an issue?"

Plus we answer:

🎙️ Connect with Our Guest: Rebecca Taylor

We are thrilled to be joined this week by Rebecca Taylor, host of HR Voices—the incredible scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who have to make the tough calls in real-time employee relations.

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/truthlieswork

Mental health support

UK & ROI — Samaritans Call 116 123 or visit https://www.samaritans.org

Have you ever hit a massive milestone—like selling the business you spent a decade building—only to feel an unexpected wave of grief instead of pure joy?

In this episode of Truth, Lies and Work, we sit down with Richard Clarke, founder of software company Secret Source. He did what every entrepreneur dreams of: he grew his business, put team happiness at the absolute center of his culture, and successfully exited. But instead of finding ultimate contentment, Richard fell face-first into the ultimate happiness trap: "I’ll be happy when..."

Richard opens up about the bittersweet reality of exiting a business, the sudden loss of community, and how he had to use his own behavioral science background to climb out of the post-exit slump. Plus, he breaks down the 5 essential needs every human requires to be truly happy at work and thoroughly busts the famous myth surrounding Google's "20% time."

Key Takeaways from This Episode

Connect with Richard Clarke

📬 Grab Richard's short ebook outlining the fundamental science of workplace happiness, or reach out to him directly on social media:

– Free Ebook: https://www.richardclarke.eu/ebook

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

Mental health support

Truth, Lies & Work is proud to be part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Is AI really making us more productive, or are we spending more time managing it than benefiting from it?

Should employees pay the price when leadership gets strategy wrong?

And is Growth Mindset really the performance booster it's often claimed to be?

This week on Truth, Lies & Work, Leanne introduces a brand new Word of the Week: Botsitting – the hidden work of feeding AI context, checking its answers and correcting its mistakes. Drawing on new research from Glean's Work AI Index, we explore why AI may be creating a new form of invisible labour that's leaving employees exhausted rather than empowered.

We also unpack Microsoft's decision to cut around 3,200 Xbox jobs after CEO Asha Sharma admitted the business had "lost focus", asking where accountability should lie when strategy fails. Plus, new UK research suggests many senior finance professionals are choosing better leadership, career opportunities and work-life balance over higher salaries, challenging long-held assumptions about what motivates top talent.

In Truth or Lie, Leanne is joined by Professor Rob Briner, one of the UK's leading experts in evidence-based management, to separate the science from the hype around Growth Mindset. Together they explore what the research actually says, why fashionable workplace ideas often outpace the evidence, and why organisations should focus less on finding the next big trend and more on understanding the problems they're trying to solve.

Finally, in Workplace Surgery, we answer your questions about rebuilding team energy, supporting employees who don't want promotion, and whether exit interviews really reveal why people leave.

Resources & Links

Lincolnshire's unusual place names:
https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/local-news/strange-place-names-lincolnshire-list-438323

Rebecca Hinds' LinkedIn post:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rebecca-hinds_we-recently-published-our-first-work-ai-index-share-7478531898693066752-jv9u/

Glean Work AI Index:
https://www.glean.com/work-ai-institute/reports/work-ai-index

HR Director:
https://www.thehrdirector.com/business-news/remuneration/finance-candidates-no-longer-choosing-roles-salary-alone-report-finds/

Full Croft&Co Finance Professionals Report:

www.croftandco.com/report

Fortune:
https://fortune.com/2026/07/06/exclusive-xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-job-cuts-studios-axed-layoffs/

More from Rob Briner

Rob Briner on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-briner/

Rob Briner’s Is That Really a Thing LinkedIn posts (including one on Growth Mindset):

https://tinyurl.com/2rzzzus3

Corporate Research Forum’s Work Psychology Network:

https://tinyurl.com/4s4pmz9e

Work Psychology Network report on behaviour change in organizations:

https://tinyurl.com/3p3rwerb

Connect with Truth, Lies & Work

– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/truthlieswork 

– Al Elliott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thisisalelliott 

– Leanne Elliott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetleanne 

– Email: [email protected] 

– Book a call: https://savvycal.com/meetleanne/chat

🧠 Mental Health Support

UK & ROI — Samaritans Call 116 123 or visit https://www.samaritans.org 

UK — Mind Call 0300 123 3393 or visit https://www.mind.org.uk 

US — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline Call or text 988 or visit https://988lifeline.org 

Australia — Lifeline Call 13 11 14 or visit https://www.lifeline.org.au 

Global helplines https://findahelpline.com

Truth, Lies & Work is proud to be part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Welcome to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning workplace podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture.

How do you steady your team and maintain trust when everything around you is chaotic?

This week, we are joined by Andrew Blotky, an executive coach, author, and the founder of Azure Leadership Group. Andrew has managed internal communications at global scales, building Facebook’s first global employee communications function during a period of intense growth and scrutiny, and leading HR communications at Johnson & Johnson.

In this episode, Andrew shares practical wisdom on leading with integrity through periods of change, crisis, and uncertainty. Moving past standard PR templates, he dives deep into the human side of leadership, discussing how authenticity, self-reflection, and mindfulness can help you stay grounded when you are under fire.

💡 Key Takeaways From This Episode

The First 24 Hours: Why speaking early—even without all the answers—is critical to preventing people from creating their own negative narratives.

Honesty vs. Oversharing: Navigating the boundaries of what you can say, what you can't, and how to admit uncertainty without losing your credibility.

The Power of Pre-Work: Why the best crisis management happens long before the crisis hits by grounding your organisation in true core values.

Compassion in Commercial Decisions: Dealing with the fallout of modern workplace challenges, like mass layoffs and the anxiety surrounding generative AI.

Level 2 Listening: How to move out of a reactive "fight-or-flight" state and practice deep, curious listening to understand what your team truly needs.

👤 About the Guest

Guest Name: Andrew Blotky

Job Title: Executive Coach, Founder/CEO

Organisation: Azure Leadership Group

Website: https://www.azureleadership.com

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewblotky/

Instagram: @blotblot

Andrew’s Book: Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life

Get the book here: https://www.azureleadership.com/honestlyspeaking

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

Mental health support

🎧 Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

Welcome back to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning workplace podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. This week, we are breaking down major shifts in the AI landscape, the science behind how we handle workplace friction, and a deep dive into why we naturally root for the underdog.

🔥 Stories Covered

NatWest Group Commits to Responsible AI Training for All 60,000 Staff

While many companies are rushing into AI deployment, NatWest is taking a human-centric approach by prioritizing data ethics. They have announced mandatory AI and data ethics training for all 60,000 employees, rolling out principles previously built in partnership with the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute. The most fascinating takeaway? Over 50% of staff actively opted into extra training completely off their own back. With formal regulation still lagging behind, the bank is actively setting its own standard for corporate judgment and digital responsibility.

NatWest Case Study: https://www.business-school.ed.ac.uk/executive-education/case-studies/ai-data-ethics-programme-natwest-group-leaders-colleagues

NatWest Insights Article: https://www.natwestgroup.com/news-and-insights/latest-stories/ai-and-data/2025/may/upholding-ethical-use-of-ai-and-data-management.html

2. Ford’s AI Rollback: Rehiring 300 Human Engineers

In a major corporate pivot, Ford has confirmed it is rehiring more than 300 veteran quality inspectors after its automated, AI-driven quality checks failed to match human engineering expertise. Ford learned the hard way that automation cannot replicate decades of tacit institutional knowledge. These veteran engineers are returning to factory floors not just to inspect vehicles, but to mentor the next generation and properly train the AI systems moving forward.

BBC News Coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o

3. Talk or Type? The Psychological Reality of Disagreements

When friction arises at work, our immediate instinct is often to hide behind a carefully drafted email or Slack message. However, new research featured by the British Psychological Society highlights that talking it out outperforms typing every single time. Spoken conversations naturally foster more active listening language, lower conflict, and build better mutual understanding. Despite this, 84% of people still choose text over talk. Al and Leanne discuss why it's time to pick up the phone.

BPS Research Digest: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/better-disagreement-use-your-voice

🧠 Truth or Lie: Do We All Love an Underdog?

From global sports tournaments to workplace dynamics, there is an assumption that humans are universally wired to root for the underdog. Leanne dives into the behavioural science behind this phenomenon, looking at the "effort heuristic" and why we value struggle over raw talent. However, this preference comes with a massive catch: the moment the stakes get high or personal risk is involved, our support for the underdog evaporates.

💬 Workplace Surgery

This week, Al and Leanne tackle three real-world questions from the listener mailbag:

The Accidental Manager: "Nobody prepared me for management. I got promoted because I was good at my job, but managing people is a completely different skill. What is the one thing you wish someone had taught you before you took the role?"

The Workplace Drain: How do you handle watching a line manager slowly drain the happiness out of a stellar colleague when it's happening outside your department?

Pre-Meeting Chit Chat: Is a leader being a misery for wanting to skip the weekend catch-up and get straight to business, or is casual social time a vital team-building tool?

📬 Connect with Al & Leanne

– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/truthlieswork

🧠 Mental Health Support

UK & ROI — Samaritans Call 116 123 or visit https://www.samaritans.org

Truth, Lies & Work is proud to be part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the ultimate audio destination for business professionals