Transform Your Workplace
Most management advice sounds fine in a book and falls apart on a Tuesday afternoon. This show is for the people who have to make it work anyway. Transform Your Workplace is a weekly HR and leadership podcast hosted by Brandon Laws and sponsored by Xenium HR. Every episode is a real conversation with an author, researcher, executive coach, or HR leader about the parts of managing people that nobody trains you for. How to give feedback that lands. What to do when you cannot bring yourself to delegate. Why good people leave. What AI is actually changing about the job. Since 2012, over 600 episodes have featured guests including Nir Eyal, Kim Scott, Josh Bersin, Amy Edmondson, Alex Dorr, and Deloitte's David Mallon, along with hundreds of other researchers, coaches, and practitioners. Episodes run about 35 to 45 minutes and are made for owners, managers, and HR leaders at small and mid-sized companies, where the person running the team is often the closest thing to an HR department. You'll leave every episode with something you can use in your next one-on-one. New episodes every week. Transform Your Workplace is produced by Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon. Learn more at xeniumhr.com.
Episodes
Most leaders treat problem behavior at work as a people problem. Dustin Snyder treats it as a design problem.
Dustin came up through HR, then took both the VP of HR and president seats at a 600-employee manufacturing division that had been losing money for years. The turnaround taught him something uncomfortable. The HR toolkit he had been trained on, including progressive discipline, was built to limit li...
Most managers have one move in a hard conversation. They tell people what to do. It works until it doesn't, and when it stops working, most of us just tell harder.
Executive coach Heather Graves-Ramsey lays out three kinds of leadership conversations. Managing and mentoring both push. Coaching pulls. The difference is whether you walk in with the answer or walk in believing the person across from you can f...
More than half of adults say they feel lonely. Among young men, 27 percent say they do not have a friend at all. Dr. Tracy Brower has spent her career studying what work does to people, and her new book is about what happens when the relationships go missing.
This conversation starts with the research and then turns practical. Tracy explains how convenience removed the small interactions that used to hold ...
Every leader has run the meeting where the team can list twenty reasons something won't work and zero ideas for how it could. Alex Dorr has a name for what's happening in that room, and a five step process for getting out of it.
Alex is the CEO of Reality-Based Leadership and the author of How We Could, out September 22, 2026. In this conversation with Brandon Laws, he walks through the Call to Greatness f...
Most leaders who cannot delegate assume it is a process problem. Susan Drumm has studied both sides of it, and her answer is that the skill gap is real but it is rarely the whole story. Underneath it is usually a belief you have been carrying since long before you managed anyone.
...
Most managers already know what good management looks like. Give real feedback. Delegate. Have the hard conversation. Knowing it has never been the problem.
Nir Eyal spent years asking why people who have the right answer still don't act on it. His conclusion is that the gap is not motivation or discipline. It's belief. And beliefs are harder to spot than habits, because from the inside they feel like fact...
Deloitte's David Mallon on the Culture Debt AI Is Building
Most organizations are treating AI like the last big tech rollout. Buy the licenses, run some training, expect results. The data says that approach is backfiring.
David Mallon leads the research behind Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends report, now in its 15th year. In this conversation, he explains why 59% of organizations taking a tech-first ...
How you feel on Sunday night tells you something real about your relationship with work. Amy Leneker, the author of Cheers to Monday, calls it one of the most honest assessments we have, and she would know. Seven weeks into medical leave after a panic attack, she sat in a doctor's office, got handed a questionnaire, and could not answer a question about what she did for fun.
In this conversation,...
You wrote the announcement, rehearsed it, sent it, and a week later the questions rolled in anyway. In this episode, communication strategist Lee Caraher explains why most workplace communication fails on delivery, not message, and what to do about it. She shares a practical three-send formula for making any announcement stick, a protocol for deciding which messages belong in email, Slack, or a meeting, and a test for...
Stress has become so normal at work that plenty of people wear it like a badge. Justin Hai wants that to change. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rebalance Health and the author of Stress Nation, and he studies what our always-on habits do to our stress, our sleep, and our health.
Justin breaks down cortisol, the hormone he calls the body's alarm system, and explains why it gets stuck in the on position when we never put the phone d...
Most leaders think self-awareness means understanding their patterns. Cam Yenokida sees where that falls short. The executive coach and founder of Achieve Excellence explains why intellectual self-awareness alone never changes anything, and what it takes to turn insight into new behavior.
Cam and B...
Most leaders treat their technology problems as technology problems. Richard Tarity has spent 26 years watching companies prove otherwise.
In this episode, Brandon Laws talks with Richard, the founder of truCX and author of ...
The job market feels broken to a lot of people right now. Bonnie Dilber has a different read on it. As Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Zapier, she looks at hiring data for fun, and she says the problem is not that the jobs disappeared. It is that more people are competing for a pool of roles that has stayed flat, while plenty of work in trades, healthcare, and education goes unfilled.
In this conversation, Bonnie and Brando...
What does it mean to truly see your employees? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Zhou Fang, founder of Intersectional Group LLC, to explore how an intersectional lens can transform the way leaders support their teams. Zhou draws on her experience as an immigrant, multilingual professional, and DEI consultant to unpack what most organizations get wrong ab...
What separates a leader people want to follow from one they're quietly escaping? Mark Miller, longtime Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of the bestselling book The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, joins Brandon Laws to unpack the timeless leadership framework he helped develop over 25 years of research. With more than 700,000 copies sold and now in its fo...
What if the problem was never the student, but the system? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Beven Byrnes, Executive Director of Bridges Middle School in Portland, Oregon, the only school in Oregon exclusively serving neurodivergent students. Beven shares how Bridges is flipping the script on traditional education through relationship-based teaching, sen...
If 82% of people lack a time management system and the average worker spends half their day on low-value tasks, what's the real cost of doing nothing about it? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with bestselling author Peter Economy, who has written over 140 books, to dig into his latest release, Wait, You Need a Win? The Essential Guide to Time Management, Pr...
Most of us answer "how are you?" with busy, stressed, or exhausted, and somewhere along the way we decided that was just the cost of doing good work. Meghan French Dunbar lived that way for years as a startup CEO, until a panic attack made her stop and question the whole script.
You've invested in the dashboards. You've declared data a top priority. So why does transformation still feel out of reach? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Dr. Sebastian Wernicke, author of Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation, to unpack one of business's most frustrating paradoxes: companies that succeed at data... and still don't change. Sebastian challenges the...
What if the very success of your company is what eventually destroys it? Eric Ries, the mind behind the Lean Startup movement, is back with a warning every founder, leader, and employee needs to hear. In his new book Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Eric tackles the question he admits he failed to ...
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