Growth Hacking Culture
Most workplace advice treats people as the problem. Growth Hacking Culture starts from the opposite premise: if your best people are disengaged, burned out, or leaving, the system is broken, not them. Hosted by Ivan Palomino, this top 5% global podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with the people rewriting the rules of work: executives from Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Zappos, organizational psychologists, neuroscientists, and founders who've built cultures that perform without burning people down. No corporate wellness fluff. No recycled leadership clichés. Just the behavioral science, psychology, and uncomfortable truths behind workplace culture, employee engagement, and leadership that actually works. For HR leaders, CHROs, founders, and executives who suspect the standard playbook is the problem.
Episodes
Picture the busiest person you know. First to answer email, last to leave a meeting, always available. Now ask yourself: are they actually the best decision maker in the room? John Nieuwenburg has coached hundreds of leaders through exactly this contradiction, and his answer might surprise you.
John spent decades working his way up in retail, eventually running a $3 billion operation as company president. That experience taught him...
At 43, at the peak of his career as music director of Broadway's Hamilton, Julian Reeve had a stress related heart attack. The two things driving it, workaholism and perfectionism, are the same two things now deciding who thrives with AI and who burns out trying to outrun it.
Juli...
Power changes everyone, especially leaders, whether they realize it or not. Discover the hidden neuroscience behind how authority rewires your brain, alters your behavior, and can transform you in ways you never expected.
In this episode, Ivan Palomino speaks with leadership expert Nick Kinley, a former forensic psychotherapist whose work spans prisons, boardrooms, and decades of research into power. Together, they unpack what real...
There is a version of you that walks into a job feeling capable, energized, and sure of who you are. And there is a version, months or years later, who can't remember when that confidence left. Nobody names the moment. There usually isn't one. Just a slow accumulation of small cuts that eventually add up to a person who doubts themselves.
Jeff Davis has spent years collecting these stories. He's an award-winning author, TEDx speake...
If you think in systems, empathy probably never made sense as a soft skill. It felt vague, unquantifiable, impossible to debug. But what if it is not a personality trait at all, just a system you have not built yet.
Colette Molteni spent 20 years working inside data analytics, sales operations, and engineering teams before founding Empathy Elevated. She does not ask technical people to become someone they are not. She gives them a ...
There is a version of you that works harder, thinks faster, and still ends up in the same place. Not because you lacked the ability — but because the process producing your decisions had a flaw you never examined. And the smarter you are, the longer it takes to notice.
This conversation is abou...
Most senior leaders do not know they are the bottleneck. They think they are the standard.
They are in every key decision, every escalation, every thread that matters. And they have quietly trained their teams to wait for them. It does not feel like a problem. It feels like leadership.
Brad Sugars is the founder of ActionCoach, the world's largest business coaching firm operating in 1,000+ offices across 80 countries, and author of...
Most organizations know something is wrong long before they run a survey. The sense that good people are pulling back, that processes are harder than they need to be, that the same conversations keep happening in the same conference rooms without anything changing. The survey confirms it. And then, usually, not much else happens.
Your organization has a wellbeing program. Maybe a meditation app, some mental health days, a resilience workshop or a Friday yoga session nobody attends because everyone is still in back-to-back meetings.
And your people are still burning out.
Burnout isn't a motivation problem. It's not a willpower problem. And if you're one of the smartest people in the room — it might be happening to you precisely because of how good you are.
Executive coach Frankie Berkoben has spent years inside Google, Airbnb, and the most demanding startup env...
Most HR leaders never make it to Chief People Officer — and those who do often struggle to create real impact once they get there. The difference isn't technical expertise. It's mindset, habits, and knowing exactly which career moves accelerate your path to the top.
In this episode of Growth Hacking Culture, Ivan Palomino sits down with Tom Emery, founder of Hex and author of People People: Reach Your Potential as a Chief Peo...
AI use in HR climbed to 43% in 2026, yet most HR leaders still spend the majority of their day on spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, and transactional work that adds zero strategic value. In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, John Sansoucie, CEO of Cognet, shares a practical roadmap for HR leaders who want to implement AI in HR, eli...
The job description for HR leader just changed. Again.
Not the version that added culture after COVID. Not the version that added AI literacy after ChatGPT. The version that nobody has written yet — the one where you are responsible for a workforce that is part human...
Most HR leaders already know the survey isn't working.
They know because they've seen the same deck three years in a row. They know because the workshops got scheduled and nothing changed. They know because the employees who participated last year are participating again this year with slightly less enthusiasm and exactly the same frustrations.
And yet the survey gets launched again. Because it's what you do. Because the contract r...
Most organizations lose their most experienced people without ever understanding why.
Not through dramatic exits or public conflicts. Through a quiet, cumulative process of being overlooked, underinvested in, and gradually made to feel that what they bring no longer fits. And by the time anyone notices, the knowledge, judgment, and institutional memory they carried has walked out the door with them.
Lucy Standing has spent years st...
Most organizations say they have a safe to fail culture.
Then someone actually fails. And you find out very quickly whether they meant it.
Megan Petrini spent years at Zappos — one of th...
Seven out of eight organizational changes fail.
Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the timeline was unrealistic. Not because the employees were difficult.
Because nobody on the leadership team knew how to have the real conversation that change requires. Not the announcement. Not the update. The one where you sit with someone's ambivalence, listen to what's underneath the pushback, and help them find their own reasons t...
Most leaders think they have a talent problem.
They don't. They have a clarity problem.
When winning isn't defined, performance becomes an opinion. And when performance becomes an opinion, the wrong people get rewarded — not because the system is broken, but because nobody built a scoreboard in the first place.
Jamison Carrier has spent decades doing the unglamorous work of building performance-driven teams across some of the...
There's a conversation happening in most organizations that nobody is having out loud.
Experienced professionals going quiet in meetings. Younger leaders assuming everyone speaks the same language. Messages that land perfectly with one part of the team and completely miss another. And somewhere in the middle, a slow leak of engagement, trust, and performance that shows up on the bottom line long before anyone names the cause.
You've done the work. Hit the targets. Delivered consistently. And yet somehow, when the promotion conversation happens, your name isn't the first one that comes up.
It's not about performance. It's about presence. And most of us were never taught the difference.
Amy Reczek has spent years helping professionals bridge that gap — not with grand gestures or personal branding frameworks, but with something far more accessible: t...
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