At Work with The Ready
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin have helped teams around the world adopt more modern ways of working and on At Work with The Ready they’re sharing the inside scoop with you, too. Whether you’re struggling with a carousel of ineffective meetings, annual strategy sessions that go nowhere, or decision-making churn that never ceases, they’ve seen it all and are here to help. In each episode, they'll break down common workplace challenges and show you the moves—both big and small—to start making real, lasting change. (Formerly “Brave New Work” with Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans)
Episodes
April 21, 2025 • 45 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into one of the most pivotal (and misunderstood) aspects of the framework: stewardship. Depthfinding is built on the idea that organizations are like oceans, not aquariums. That means leaders have to show up in an entirely new way—not as a b...
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April 7, 2025 • 41 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam zoom out. Because here’s the truth: the experience the last few months in the U.S.? It’s not an exception. It’s the environment we’re working in now.
From top-down compliance crackdowns to the resurrection of five-layer approval chains, we’re wa...
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March 24, 2025 • 53 mins
Rebroadcast note: With everything happening in the world right now, we're taking a quick break from our miniseries to reshare this episode about layoffs. Because sometimes large layoffs are necessary, but they shouldn't be the norm and those being let go should still be treated like humans, rather than a line on a spreadsheet. If you listened the first time around, share this episode with someone in your network who might need it (...
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March 10, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into the Midnight Zone—the deepest layer of organizational life, where the lived experiences, emotions, and unspoken reactions of individuals shape everything that happens above. While many organizations focus on surface-level solutions, ign...
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February 24, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam step into the Twilight Zone—the often-overlooked but deeply influential space where teams navigate the “how” of work—the “how” of collaborating, meeting, deciding, and experimenting. Many organizations put all or most of their focus on visible ou...
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February 10, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into the Sunshine Zone—the highly visible work of organizations, from strategy decks and OKRs to mission statements and financial targets. While these elements are easy to track and refine, spending too much time in the Sunshine Zone often le...
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January 27, 2025 • 50 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam look at the Sky—the external forces like market shifts, technological disruptions, and political changes that shape your organization. While most companies are comfortable staying heads-down in the day-to-day, failing to look outward creates costl...
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January 13, 2025 • 36 mins
Over the last decade at The Ready, we’ve seen firsthand that the most significant organizational challenges are nearly all cross-functional. But most company structures? Very much not cross-functional. Adding more project managers, looking to external partners for one-and-done silver bullets, or assembling yet another task force just isn’t cutting it as the world changes faster than most organizations can keep up.
Enter Depthfindin...
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December 23, 2024 • 34 mins
2024 felt like a bit of a rollercoaster—and while we’re ready to close the book on this year, we wouldn’t be first-class org designers if we passed up the chance to hold a retrospective. Add in the fact that this is Rodney’s 200th episode and BNW + AWWTR have crossed the one million download milestone, and a little celebration feels like the right thing.
In today’s episode, Rodney and Sam reflect on the show’s 2024 season—includin...
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December 9, 2024 • 39 mins
Rebroadcast note: We're hard at work recording a brand new miniseries for January, so this week we're resharing one this episode from our Future of HR miniseries. As we've worked with companies over the last year to reimagine their HR departments, we've seen this episode's ideas and lessons about evolving the HRBP even more important in practice. So take a listen with some fresh ears, and we'll see in two weeks with a brand new epi...
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November 25, 2024 • 47 mins
It’s mailbag time! And while we know we said this last time, we really mean it that this was probably the hardest group of questions we’ve dealt with on the show yet! Rodney and Sam get out their thinking caps and answer some questions from listeners like you about non-traditional organizational leadership, workplace dynamics around project capacity planning, and more.
Questions tackled:
Are great teams and strategies impossible ...
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November 11, 2024 • 46 mins
There are plenty of organizations that say they want to be “customer-focused”—but in practice? It’s easy to fall back on leader-driven opinions and assumptions about what customers really want. That’s especially true in big companies with entrenched processes and hierarchies that prioritize internal agendas. In those environments, staying aligned with customer needs can be an uphill battle—and organizations instead get stuck buildi...
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October 28, 2024 • 46 mins
If you’ve been on LinkedIn this past month, you’ve likely seen at least one post (or more than you’d care to) about “founder mode.”
Presented as a counter to “manager mode” (meant to represent highly bureaucratic leadership rife with micromanaging and delegation), “founder mode” is all about championing the pioneering, hands-on behaviors of startup founders scaled to organizations of any size. And sure, when these are the only cho...
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October 14, 2024 • 41 mins
Over the last nine years, The Ready has seen firsthand how organizations designed to be people positive (a.k.a. a foundational belief that people are eager to contribute and capable of change) outperform those that aren’t. Turns out when you treat people like adults, it boosts your team’s motivation, adaptability, and contribution.
The only catch? Unlearning nearly everything traditional leadership and management science has taug...
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September 30, 2024 • 44 mins
Psychological safety is a buzzy topic every company claims to want—but only a handful actually achieve. Sometimes, it’s misunderstood as being about “niceness” or “politeness”, but real psychological safety is deeper and more complex than that. It’s an ecosystem of behaviors that add up over time to impact how your team shows up day after day.
Unfortunately, this misconception has a stranglehold on most leadership teams as well, w...
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September 16, 2024 • 55 mins
While exploring bad meetings a few episodes ago, Rodney and Sam hit on something that doesn’t often get a lot of air time: the power of good habits and the discipline to care about the small things. Because when we’re trying to change companies on an atomic level, it can feel like small potatoes to focus on check-in rounds, or writing Slack messages, or how we compose to-do lists.
But you can’t run toward the future of work at ful...
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September 2, 2024 • 50 mins
No burying the lede this week: Employee engagement surveys are broken.
We expect them to tell us everything about a workplace’s culture—but they often miss the mark, capturing just a sliver of what's going on and usually only symptoms instead of underlying causes.
As leaders try to make sense of the data, there’s frequently a lot of smoke chasing, but nobody can tell where the fire is, or if there’s one at all. Add to that emplo...
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August 19, 2024 • 51 mins
We talk a lot about the importance of emergence—of being more comfortable with being uncomfortable. However, it’s hard to practice what you preach… especially for a podcast with a tight schedule. Normally, when one of two hosts is out of commission, you don’t record. But when this recently happened to us, we asked “How might we?” and took a big ol’ step into the unknown.
We’re glad we did, because this week’s guest is Dr. Jason Fo...
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August 5, 2024 • 43 mins
It’s mailbag time! We’ve been diving into specific problem areas every episode—and turns out if you go deep, your audience will go even deeper. Listeners, the questions you send us are getting hard! The ones that feel extra complex and extra tangly? We take those to the airwaves to unravel them live and share our knowledge back with you.
On today’s episode, Rodney and Sam tackle another batch of our audience’s thorniest questions....
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July 22, 2024 • 57 mins
Planning a corporate workshop or off-site often feels like making a burrito. So many options—and so many opinions on what should go in it. A presentation rodeo on the next quarter’s objectives? Absolutely. Time for a key initiative to get the spotlight in front of the C-suite? Yes, please. Extra scoops of mandatory team-building to strengthen your culture? Why not. Everyone likes fun, right?
But when it’s time to actually chow dow...
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