The Bosshole® Chronicles
Never waste a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss. Our guests and Subject Matter Experts share their stories about challenging, difficult, and even mean bosses that they have had through their careers. Hosts Sara Best and John Broer explore what happened, what made the relationship difficult, and even the role WE play in our Bosshole experiences. More importantly, we apply some of our insight and analysis around behavioral science and emotional intelligence so that we (and managers listening in) can learn from the experiences and avoid common Bosshole® Blunders. If you have questions or stories you want to share, contact us at info@realgoodventures.com
Episodes
You can be amazing at your job and still be unprepared the moment you become “the boss.” We rewind to our first conversation with Ryan Hawk, host of The Learning Leader Show and author of Welcome to Management and The Pursuit of Excellence, to talk about the messy, human reality of leadership growth and what it takes to earn trust after a promotion. If you have ever worried you’re faking it as a new manager, this ...
Silence at work may look like “alignment” until the results start slipping. We’re talking about Psychological Safety as the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes and why that belief is one of the strongest predictors of team performance. When interpersonal risk feels high, people protect themselves, not the work, and dangerous silence tak...
The fastest way to break a team isn’t a big scandal, it’s a slow drift: overloaded managers, constant change, and people leadership getting pushed to “later.” We sit down with Brad Rowe, Senior Vice President of People and Culture at SSOE, to talk about what it takes to build a sustainable culture inside a high-performing architectural and engineering firm and how leaders can avoid slipping into The Bosshole...
Cognitive ability is one of the strongest predictors of job performance, and it still makes a lot of leaders nervous. We sit down with Dr. Anthony Belluccia, senior product scientist at The Predictive Index, to pull the curtain back on PI’s Cognitive Assessment and explain what it is and what it is not. If you’ve ever worried that a cognitive test is just an IQ test in disguise, or you’ve seen teams mishandle it a...
The fastest way to break a team is to promote a high performer into management and then give them zero training. We bring back a powerful conversation with Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Abilitie and co-author of The 12-Week MBA, to get honest about why first-time managers struggle, why traditional MBA programs often underweight people leadership, and what actually helps when the job stops being about your personal work product.
HERE ARE M...
The most dangerous bottleneck in a growing company is often the person working the hardest. We’re joined by returning guest Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and author of Busy Is Broken, to unpack why constant motion can feel heroic while quietly weakening execution, draining talent, and lowering company value.
Most hiring advice skips the uncomfortable truth: if you can’t clearly explain the job, you can’t reliably hire for it. We pick up part two with Mike Kuenzi from Titus Talent Strategies and get painfully specific about role clarity, modern job descriptions, and why so many organizations still post vague requirements that attract the wrong applicants. We also talk about how AI can be useful in recruiting, but only when i...
Most leadership training feels great on Friday and disappears by Monday, and that is exactly what we challenge here. I sit down with Mike Kuenzi, Vice President of Talent Optimization at Titus Talent Strategies, to get brutally practical about what actually changes behavior at work and what is just a polished event with a certificate at the end.
The return-to-office debate loves a simple story: more time in the office equals more connection. Our conversation with Jason Lauritsen continues and flips that assumption with a research-backed curveball from the 2026 Human Connection Study. In their data, non-management employees working fully on site show the highest levels of disconnection, while fully remote employees score as the most connected. That’s not a verdict on ...
If your engagement strategy feels like it keeps hitting a ceiling, it may be because you are measuring the outcome instead of building the cause. We sit down with returning guest Jason Lauritsen in this two-part episode to unpack The 2026 Human Connection Study, a deep dive into connection-shaped motivation, retention, and performance at work, and why “connection” is more than team chemistry or feel-good culture.
You can white-knuckle your way into the next quarter and still feel strangely heavy, foggy, and tired. That’s the problem we unpack with leadership coach and somatic therapist Kate Dethmer from the Conscious Leadership Group: when we don’t complete what didn’t happen, we carry it forward as unfinished emotional residue. And that residue quietly shapes how we lead, how we relate, and how much energy we actually hav...
The moment you snap, fix, control, or go quiet isn’t a “personality flaw” it’s often a nervous system response to a threat you didn’t even notice. Sara Best sits down with somatic leadership coach Kate Dethmer of the Conscious Leadership Group to unpack what conscious leadership looks like when it’s real: messy meetings, subtle fear, and the everyday triggers that pull us out of presence.
If your workplace culture feels tense, fragile, or weirdly stuck, it might not be a motivation problem at all. It might be a communication and unlearning problem and it shows up fastest in the gap between Gen Z, millennials, and the leaders still running on yesterday’s playbook. Sara Best sits down with Amanda Schneider, author of Work for What’s Next, in Part 2 of her TBC interview to talk about why culture is failing ...
Everyone has an opinion about Gen Z at work, but most of the hottest takes miss what’s actually breaking: the workplace is still built on analog rules while expectations move at digital speed. We sit down with strategist, researcher, and keynote speaker Amanda Schneider to talk about her national bestselling book, Work for What’s Next, and why “get back to the office” is not a culture strategy.
Joy gets treated like a perk, a vibe, or a distraction from “real work.” We don’t buy that, and Jenn Whitmer doesn’t either. Joy, the way she teaches it, is a leadership discipline and it’s the fuel that makes healthy performance possible when the world feels unstable and your calendar is packed.
Fear is expensive, and not just emotionally. It slows decisions, kills creativity, and quietly trains good people to play it safe. In this TBC Flashback, we sit down with Rich Sheridan, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations and author of Joy Inc. and Chief Joy Officer, to unpack what it really takes to build a joyful workplace culture that performs without burning people out.
- Click HERE to find Rich's book "Chief Joy Of...
Power is easy to grab. The harder move is refusing it, and that’s where George Washington still teaches modern leaders the most. With America on the eve of its 250th anniversary, we take a close look at why Washington became the unanimous choice to lead the Continental Army and later serve as the first President of the United States, then translate those qualities into practical leadership lessons for managers and supervisors...
Nobody tells you the hardest part of becoming a manager: the job changes overnight, but your skill set doesn’t. I rewind to the early 1990s, when I stepped out of individual contributor sales and into leading sales and marketing with almost no real mentoring. I was frustrated, second-guessing myself, and running into old-school management habits that looked normal on paper but felt wrong in practice. That’s what sent me...
Your attention isn’t just getting interrupted, it’s getting retrained. We sit down with digital wellness guide and speaker Mark Ostach to unpack why so many of us feel rushed, reactive, and oddly disconnected even when we’re “caught up.” Mark joins us to share the heart behind his new book, The Gift of Connection: Reclaiming Presence in the Age of Distraction, and to make a clear case that presence is ...
A dusty box in the basement turns into a full-on leadership time machine. I stumble onto a stack of handwritten memos from my old manager “Fred,” the same boss from our early “Don’t Bring Him Back” story, and reading them instantly brings back the stress of being managed by metrics instead of being led by insight.
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