Work Positive

Marcus sits at his kitchen table on a Sunday evening. A glass of bourbon. Six exit interview transcripts.

Five of the six carry the same three words: "I felt invisible."

He sets them down and tries an exercise his coach recommended. Eight people on his team. Name what each one does best.

He reaches three and stops. That’s all he’s got. And after fourteen months as their people leader.

That night his teenage daughter Jad...

Scott McInnes founded Inspiring Change in Dublin and hosts Building Better Cultures. He joins Dr. Joey on why your brain files the unfamiliar as negative, why culture is a vehicle for strategy, and why values hold weight only as behaviors.

Seven out of ten people choose a job based on culture when everything else is equal. So why do most organizations still leave theirs to chance?

Scott McInnes helps leadership teams answe...

Do you ever wonder what's next? Sure you do for the company you work with and your team, but what about for yourself?

Julian Lighton spent more than 30 years watching companies decide whether to develop people or rent them. He advised them at McKinsey. He operated inside them at Cisco and Hitachi. He convened them as Chief Strategy Officer at four billion-dollar public companies. Now he coach...

Most leaders diagnose their people challenges alone, behind a closed door, with a spreadsheet. Dustin Snyder does the opposite. As founder of Wayforward, he goes into companies at major turning points and maps what is actually happening inside the workforce, using a method he created and named Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping or SWIM, for short. He wro...

EP 197 | Five Lenses That Transform How People Leaders Cultivate | Dr. Joey Faucette

• Bad events carry roughly four times the psychological weight of good events of equal magnitude, according to Roy Baumeister's research at Florida State University. One piece of negative feedback drowns out about four pieces of positive feedback.
• Negativity bias kept your ...

Everyone needs to be needed. How needed do you need to be?

When your team waits on your opinion for every decision, they feel supervised instead of trusted, and you finish the day exhausted. Parker McCumber offers a different route, one he found while flat on his back in an Afghan cesspool.

Parker McCumber brings a rare combination of military leadersh...

Episode 195 · On It and In It: How to Create a Team That Stays Brave | Mickey Wilson & Dr. Chris Endersby

Rate the team you lead on a scale of 1 to 10 for alignment and unity. Not just within the team, but between the team and the company. What is your score?

Alignment and unity are two of the loudest indicators of engagement, and engagement is the prime meridian of growing people and profits.

This week Dr. Joey welcomes Mickey...

Episode 194 · People Leave Feelings Instead of Jobs (Season 4 First-Half Wrap)

Twenty-plus guests. One truth. Across the first half of Season 4, every conversation kept circling the same finding: people leave feelings instead of jobs. In this solo wrap, Dr. Joey Faucette looks back across episodes 168 through 192, with D.R.E.A.M. (193) as the capstone, and pulls the whole season into a single word every people leader can act on. Se...

Episode 193 | Cultivate the Teams You D.R.E.A.M. About | Dr. Joey Faucette

How do you cultivate a Work Positive team culture when nearly 4 out of 5 people on your team are somewhere between going through the motions and actively working against you? How do you create a team so strong that people line up to join it, refuse to leave it, and do their best work inside it? Dr. Joey Faucette unveils his groundbreaking D...

Episode 192 | Lead Change Without Losing Your People | Sharon McLaughlin

Disruption is the norm now, and wave after wave of it leaves people leaders worn down in body, mind, and heart. Sharon McLaughlin shows you how to guide change so it transforms your culture rather than batters your people. You care for yourself first, then you care for the team you lead, and you trade more strategy for the real conversations th...

Episode 191 | Make People Matter, and Watch Challenges Shrink | Stephen de Groot

“Take the values off the wall. Paint over them.” Stephen de Groot once showed up to a consulting engagement with a roller and a paint can, and nearly got fired for it. His point lands hard and simple: your values stay just words until your actions give them meaning.

As you live the values you say you believe, your culture t...

Episode 190 | Curiosity: The Secret to Culture Transformation | Dr. Domonique Revere

How do you transform a work culture where people don't just survive a toxic workplace but thrive in a space where they feel seen, heard, valued, and have skin in the game? How do you move from overfunctioning as a leader to offloading responsibility and allowing autonomy and agency in your team? How do you make leadership accessible and practical f...

How do you close the gap between knowing something and actually doing it as you drown in knowledge but lack the ability to translate it into consistent repeatable action? How do you create a culture so Work Positive that an ordinary person put in the right environment with the right tools suddenly becomes extraordinary? How do you transform from a leader who points out issues to one who helps people reach their full potential? Tr...

EP 188 | T.H.R.I.V.E. @ Work: Mental Health Culture Framework | Dr. Joey Faucette

How do you transform your work culture as one in five adults deals with a mental health condition and one in three faces an anxiety disorder? What creates mentally healthy cultures as 54% of all lost work time in the United Kingdom traces back to work-related stress, anxiety, and depression? How do you lead people through chaos as they look to you fo...

Episode 187 | Give Before You Take: AI as Force for Equity | Bala Muthiah

How do you create people-first technology that scales for high-performance teams? How do you lead engineering groups under pressure as you develop resilience and innovate sustainably? How do you champion AI as a force for equity rather than replacement, democratizing mentorship and surfacing areas for growth? 

Transform your approach to empathy, psycholo...

Episode 186 | Make Well-being Visible in Your Culture | Dr. Jamie Hardy

How well do you understand the direct connection between performance and health in your work culture? What creates teams who are energized, engaged, and endure rather than quietly dimming or walking out the door? How do you embed executive well-being into the very culture of work rather than treating it as an afterthought? Transform your approach to retention...

How do you navigate the chaos as work transforms faster than ever before? How do you lead people through a world that feels brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible? How do you want to be augmented as generative AI reshapes every aspect of work?

Transform your approach to strategic thinking and future-focused leadership on this episode of the Work Positive Podcast with Dr. Joey Faucette and Dr. Bob Johansen. Bob is a dist...

How do you create a continuous learning positive work culture when only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged in their work? What if three out of four people on your team are among the ranks of The Working Dead, costing the global economy $8.9 trillion in lost productivity annually? How do you grow a culture that starts with souls, not systems?

Discover the proven framework to grow your leader soul and cultivate a root-to-fruit c...

Episode 183 | Free to Lead: Unleash Your Hidden Leadership Genius | Will Steel

What are your hidden beliefs that keep you from fulfilling your purpose as a people leader? What's the invisible script or background soundtrack playing in your head? What are your blind spots as a result of this head trash? How do you dismantle the constraints that limit your performance and your fulfillment so you can act freely, lead powerfully, and c...