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.
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
58 minutes ago
58 minutes ago
47 min
Six extra hours a week. That's what AI has reportedly handed back to people using it well. The real question isn't the time, it's what they do with it. Chartered psychologist Sarah Rozenthuler has spent nearly two decades studying how humans talk to each other about what actually matters, and she's noticed something: more people are turning to AI to think out loud about their purpose, their leadership, their next move.
Sarah is a leadership coach and the author of three books on purpose and dialogue, including Now We're Talking, shortlisted for the Business Book Awards, and Powered by Purpose, with a foreword by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. Her clients include Standard Chartered Bank, BP, and Saïd Business School at Oxford.
In this conversation, Ivan and Sarah test whether talking to a machine can genuinely help someone get clearer on their purpose, or whether it just becomes a comfortable way to avoid the real conversation.
In this episode:
Why AI can be a legitimate rehearsal room for a hard conversation, and the exact moment it turns into a hiding place instead
The difference between AI as a clean reflective mirror and an echo chamber that just agrees with you
Why 70% of managers avoid the difficult conversation, according to Sarah's own research, and whether AI makes that better or worse
What "crucible moments" are, and why the clearest sense of purpose usually comes out of the hardest experiences, not a chatbot
Why some leaders say AI is freeing up hours while others feel like they've lost time policing AI's mistakes
This one is for the leader who's already talked to AI about a hard decision and isn't sure if that counts as cheating or just good preparation.
Connect with Sarah Rozenthuler:
Website: https://sarahrozenthuler.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-rozenthuler/
Books: Now We're Talking and Powered by Purpose
📅 Join Ivan on 10th September: a free live session, The 7 Fears: What Employees Actually Think About AI, decoding what 36,165 employees actually said about AI at work, across 5,000 companies. Limited to 40 senior HR leaders, recording sent to all registrants.
Register: https://luma.com/x10qnpqq
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
58 minutes ago
47 min
Aug 30, 2026
Aug 30, 2026
41 min
Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox, authors of Leading in Chaos, explain why human-centric leadership has hit its ceiling, and what comes next.
For fifteen years, leadership development meant one thing: build emotional intelligence, train empathy, create psychological safety. It worked, until it didn't. Some of the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders on the planet are still freezing under pressure, still overcorrecting in a crisis, still making the wrong call. Not because they lack empathy. Because empathy was never the missing piece.
Nicholas Janni has spent over 25 years advising CEOs and senior leadership teams worldwide and teaching at top business schools, including IMD. His book Leader as Healer won UK Business Book of the Year. Amy Elizabeth Fox is Co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, and has spent two decades running trauma-informed, transformational leadership programs for Fortune 500 executives and professional services firms. Together they wrote Leading in Chaos, their account of what leadership requires in a world stuck in permanent crisis.
📖 About the book Leading in Chaos:
Portals to a New Future argues that today's polycrisis, institutional fragility, and sustained uncertainty demand more than better tools or best practice. Janni and Fox call it next practice: a shift from control to coherence, from speed to presence, and from purely cognitive leadership to a wider, embodied intelligence. Drawing on decades of work with senior teams, the book blends vertical development and trauma-informed practice into a practical case for how leaders can regulate themselves well enough to lead clearly through chaos.
In this conversation, Ivan Palomino asks them to define what actually comes after human-centric leadership: a deeper form of consciousness built on vertical development, trauma-informed leadership, and nervous system regulation, not just more empathy training.
In this episode:
Why fifteen years of emotional intelligence training plateaued, and what CHROs got wrong measuring its impact
The real difference between a leader who is calm because they are regulated, and one who is only suppressing panic
Why the average person spends just 5 percent of their day in a state of flow, and what that reveals about modern workplace culture
What vertical development and trauma-informed leadership actually look like in practice, without a single hour on a therapist's couch
How hyperarousal and hypoarousal quietly hijack a team's best decisions under pressure
Why boards are no longer willing to tolerate high-performing but harmful leaders, and what replaces that old model
A simple two-minute practice that changes the quality of every meeting a leader runs
This one is for the CHRO who invested heavily in emotional intelligence training and still isn't seeing the culture shift they were promised, and for any leader who suspects the old playbook has quietly stopped working.
🔗 Connect with Nicholas Janni and Amy Elizabeth Fox
📘 Book and Course, Leading in Chaos: https://leadinginchaosbook.com/
🌐 Nicholas Janni: https://www.nicholasjanni.com/ | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-janni/
🌐 Amy Elizabeth Fox / Mobius Executive Leadership: https://www.mobiusleadership.com/ | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyelizabethfox/
🎙️ More from Growth Hacking Culture Podcast home: https://podcast.ivanpalomino.net
Newsletter: https://simplyhuman.substack.com
📘 If this episode resonated, you might enjoy Ivan's own book, Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable in a World Obsessed with New, on why experience is still your biggest asset in a workplace obsessed with novelty: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.
Aug 30, 2026
41 min
Aug 23, 2026
Aug 23, 2026
49 min
Every organization wants to hire the best. Stack the roster with top performers, invest in individual excellence, let talent density do the work. It sounds like a winning strategy. The research says otherwise.
Dr. André Martin is an organizational psychologist, former Chief Talent Officer at Mars, and author of Collective Confidence: The Winning Formula Behind the World's Most Unbeatable Teams. He has spent decades studying hundreds of teams across radically different environments, from submarine crews to Olympic gymnasts to Silicon Valley startups, and his findings keep pointing to the same place: the teams that win are not the ones with the most talent. They are the ones that believe they can figure it out together.
Ivan and André dig into why collective confidence outpredicts individual performance, what six principles every unbeatable team shares, and how the way we hire, onboard, and develop people is built around a model that stopped working years ago.
In this episode:
Why collective confidence is a stronger predictor of team performance than individual talent, backed by decades of research
The three types of confidence (individual, contributory, collective) and why organizations invest in the wrong one
Six principles shared by every unbeatable team André studied, from Navy crews to gymnasts to startup founders
How a Burning Man camp leader's philosophy of "make everyone the boss of something" reveals what corporate hiring misses
Why teams that learn together retain nearly 100% while solo learners lose 70% in three days (the Ebbinghaus curve hack)
The trust formula with four variables where self-interest is the denominator that can destroy everything else
What André would fix first as CHRO: not culture programs, but onboarding and the leadership team
This one is for the leader who looks at a talented team and thinks: we should be performing better than this. For the HR professional who suspects that stacking resumes is not the same as building a real team. And for anyone who has been on a scrappy squad that somehow outperformed everyone's expectations and wondered why it worked.
🔗 Connect with André Martin
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/docmartinpdx
Book: Collective Confidence (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Collective-Confidence-Winning-Formula-Worlds/dp/1966280084
First book: Wrong Fit, Right Fit Newsletter: More Than the Sum (on LinkedIn)
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Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
Ivan Palomino's new book Expired?: The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth is now availble https://a.co/d/036NVnVe
Aug 23, 2026
49 min
Aug 16, 2026
Aug 16, 2026
45 min
Most of us were handed a script before we were old enough to question it. A school told us what to study. A parent told us what success looks like. A career ladder told us which rung comes next. And somewhere along the way, we confused following the script with actually living.
This conversation with Dr. Audrey Tang starts with a simple but unsettling question: what if the detour was never the problem? What if the belief in a straight line was?
Dr. Audrey Tang is a Chartered Psychologist, leadership trainer, and award-winning author of The Leader's Guide to Resilience and The Leader's Guide to Wellbeing (winner, Business Book Awards 2024). For years she has worked with leaders and organisations on the psychology behind performance, confidence, and behaviour change. Her own life, which has crossed teaching, performing, writing, broadcasting, and building a charity, is anything but linear.
Ivan and Audrey explore the neuroscience behind why we default to linear thinking, why the corporate habit of setting fixed goals makes us worse at life, and what it actually takes to build confidence in the face of the unexpected.
In this episode:
Why the brain fills in narrative gaps automatically, and how Gestalt psychology explains our obsession with sequences and conclusions
The difference between happiness and relief, and why "I'll be happy when I achieve X" is one of the most common traps we fall into
How parental scripts get installed early and how to start asking whose critical voice you are actually hearing
The skills vs. strengths distinction: why getting promoted on things you are good at but that drain you is one of the quietest career crises there is
How dopamine reinforces the wrong behaviours, keeping people climbing ladders that lead somewhere they never wanted to go
Why "follow your passion" can tip into obsession, and the better question to ask: what problems do you want to solve?
The stretch zone framework: how small daily discomforts build the resilience to handle real uncertainty without panic
What to do when you are stuck in the mess right now, cannot see the point, and do not know where to start
This one is for the experienced professional who suspects the path they are on was never quite theirs, and is ready to ask what comes next.
🔗 Connect with Dr. Audrey Tang
Website: https://www.draudreyt.com/
Book - The Leader's Guide to Resilience: https://a.co/d/064klLMC
📘 Ivan's new book Expired? The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth — for the 50+ professional navigating relevance, visibility, and what experience is actually worth. Launching September 2026: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
Aug 16, 2026
45 min
Aug 12, 2026
Aug 12, 2026
39 min
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 the busiest executives are rarely the most effective ones. He's now spent 20+ years coaching leaders using the Socratic method, helping them ask themselves better questions instead of handing them answers.
In this conversation, Ivan and John unpack what actually separates leaders who scale their impact from those who just scale their hours, and why the answer has almost nothing to do with working harder.
In this episode:
Why the captain of a rowboat, a yacht, and an aircraft carrier all need a completely different definition of "work"
The difference between personal trust and structural trust, and why only one of them scales past ten people
What "delegation debt" costs you when you keep saying "it's just faster if I do it myself"
Why Jeff Bezos treats 5 good decisions a year as a successful year, and what that means for how you spend your time
The real difference between being available and being accessible, and how to protect blocks of real, focused work
How to run an executive update using BLUF (bottom line up front) instead of a 50-slide deck nobody reads
Why culture is defined by what a leader tolerates, not what's written on a wall, and how to build one worth keeping
This one is for the leader who's proud of how busy they are, and quietly wondering if that busyness is actually working against them.
Connect with John Nieuwenburg
Website: w5coaching.com
Coming Soon: The Culture Signal: a free online session for senior HR leaders on what your people actually fear about AI, and what to do about it
Register on https://luma.com/x10qnpqq
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
Aug 12, 2026
39 min
Aug 9, 2026
Aug 9, 2026
45 min
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.
Julian Reeve is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and founder of Perfect Equilibrium. He spent years helping high achievers reclaim their health and their sense of self after getting trapped in what he calls the achievement machine, and he built his own AI assistant three years ago to help him do exactly that.
In this conversation, Ivan and Julian reframe AI not as a threat but as a mirror, and unpack why burnout, perfectionism, and the fear of being replaced all trace back to the same root cause: confusing skill with identity.
In this episode:
Why Dr. Christina Maslach's six drivers of burnout reveal that overload was never the real problem for most people
The difference between skill (what AI already does well) and capability (what only humans can do), explained through a plumber standing in your kitchen
Julian's three pillars of "unmistakable identity," identity, creativity, and judgment, and why none of them can be trained the way skills are
Why 95% of people believe they're self-aware while the real number is closer to 12%, according to Dr. Tasha Eurich's research
Martin Covington's self-worth theory and why perfectionists are structurally the most vulnerable to burnout
What "acceptance and permission" mean in practice, and why recovery is about doing less, not more
Why Gen Z may need to know themselves at 20 the way Julian needed to know himself at 40, and what that means for the future of entry-level work
This one is for anyone who has built two decades of career on being reliable, consistent, and hard to fault, and is now watching a machine do that part faster than they ever could.
🔗 Connect with Julian Reeve:
julianreeve.com | Human Capability Indicator: free download Book: Captain Perfection and the Secret of Self Compassion https://amzn.eu/d/03J6jm4x
TEDx: Julian Reeve perfectionism https://youtu.be/mi-kD8_dyKw?si=HV6GbumnEKrHpS5B
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📘 Ivan Palomino's book Expired? is available now in English. The science of staying indispensable when the world keeps moving the goalposts. → ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast hosted by Ivan Palomino, exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace performance.
Aug 9, 2026
45 min
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
53 min
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 really happens in the brain when people gain authority: why power can boost confidence while also reducing empathy, distorting decision-making, and making even strong leaders more vulnerable to blind spots.
You’ll learn:- Why power affects everyone, not just “bad” leaders- How authority changes brain structure, chemistry, and behavior- Why leaders often overestimate how open people are with them- The role culture and context play in amplifying power’s effects- What organizations can do to detect and reduce the negative side of power
This conversation is especially relevant for founders, executives, managers, HR leaders, and anyone interested in leadership, psychology, and workplace culture. If you want to understand how power shapes behavior and how to lead without losing your values, this episode is for you.
Nick Kinley is the author of The Power Trap, an evidence-based look at how leadership changes people and what to do about it.
Listen now to explore the neuropsychology of power and what it means for the way you lead.
The latest book of Ivan Palomino on the psychology of the midlife is now available: Expired? https://a.co/d/0hV4tNnu
Aug 4, 2026
53 min
Jul 27, 2026
Jul 27, 2026
40 min
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 speaker, and mental health advocate whose latest book, The Courage to Leave: Breaking Free from Toxic Workplaces, pulls back the curtain on toxic work cultures through raw storytelling and research-backed insight, including his own experience surviving and eventually transforming a toxic company from the inside.
In this conversation, Ivan and Jeff go deep on why toxic workplaces are built to look normal, why smart people stay far longer than they should, and what it actually takes to get out without losing yourself in the process.
In this episode:
Why more than half of workplaces are experienced as toxic, and why almost nobody says it out loud
The subtle leadership tactics that do more damage than a screaming boss: gaslighting, the "fake friend" trap, and constantly shifting goalposts
Why the small daily put-downs are often more corrosive than one big blowup
The real reasons capable professionals stay: fear, loyalty, financial security, and a job market that feels impossible
What chronic workplace stress does to the body over months and years, not just the mind
How to protect yourself while you're still inside: building allies, rebuilding self-esteem, and going minimalist to prepare a real exit
Jeff's own story of being pushed out of a role a year ago, and how it led him somewhere far better
This one is for the professional who has already asked themselves "is it me, or is this place actually toxic" more than once, and hasn't found a safe way to say it out loud.
Connect with Jeff Davis:
Website: jeffdspeaks.com
Book: The Courage to Leave: Breaking Free from Toxic Workplaces
Email: jeff@jeffdspeaks.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/speakerjeffdavis/
If this conversation resonates, Ivan's own book, Expired?: The Science of Staying Indispensable When Your Company Bets on Youth, digs into why we're wired to undervalue what's already proven, ourselves included. The English edition is coming September 2026: https://www.ivanpalomino.net/expired-book-ivan-palomino
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.
Jul 27, 2026
40 min
Jul 20, 2026
Jul 20, 2026
42 min
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 framework: a repeatable, practiceable system for reading a room, managing a hard conversation, and building trust, the same way you would approach any other technical skill.
In this episode, Ivan and Colette get into why brilliance alone stalls careers, why most corporate EQ training is forgotten by the following Monday, and the 4-step system she uses to turn empathy into something you can actually practice and measure.
In this episode:
Why being brilliant gets you hired but will not get you trusted or promoted
Her 4-step system for pausing, asking, considering, and empathizing under pressure
Why organizations often reward and produce emotionally unintelligent leaders without meaning to
Why corporate EQ training fails once people are back at their desks
How to read a room and adjust your communication without becoming someone you are not
Whether AI coaching tools can genuinely build emotional intelligence, or only imitate it
The one small, repeatable habit to start practicing tomorrow
This one is for the engineer, data scientist, or product manager who has been told they are hard to work with and wants an actual system for fixing it, not another personality assessment.
Connect with Colette Molteni
Substack: https://empathyelevated.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettemolteni/
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
Jul 20, 2026
42 min
Jul 15, 2026
Jul 15, 2026
37 min
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 about that flaw, and what it actually takes to correct it.
Andres Kuusk is a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, the most successful all-around mental strategist in recorded history, a PhD economist, and C-suite executive. His book, Unlocking the Success Puzzle, draws on decades of high-stakes competition and corporate advisory work to map the hidden thinking errors that undermine even the most talented professionals.
Ivan and Andres explore what separates people who keep improving from those who keep repeating — from the role of curiosity in sustained success, to the untested assumptions quietly sitting at the center of most corporate failures, to what it actually means to judge a decision well.
In this episode:
Why effort, talent, and motivation are necessary but not sufficient and what the missing variable actually is
How to use curiosity as a filter for goals that are genuinely your own, including the one question Andres uses to tell the difference
Why process-oriented goals consistently outperform outcome-oriented ones in competition and in leadership
The difference between being effective and being efficient, and why mixing them up is so costly
How intelligence enables sophisticated self-deception — and what self-awareness actually requires to be useful
Why judging decisions by their outcomes alone leads to systematically wrong conclusions (the pocket aces example)
What board games teach about deciding under uncertainty that most leadership programs never address
How to identify the recurring pattern underneath your mistakes, not just the individual events
This one is for the senior leader or high achiever who has the track record, the credentials, the capability — and still senses that something in how they think and decide could be fundamentally better.
🔗 Connect with Andres KuuskWebsite: https://andreskuusk.com/ Book: Unlocking the Success PuzzleLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andres-kuusk-1081b25b/
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino
Jul 15, 2026
37 min
Jul 13, 2026
Jul 13, 2026
46 min
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 18 books on business, leadership, and organizational performance. For 30 years he has worked with executives across 80 countries who built high-performing reputations and high-dependency teams at the same time. He also had to confront this in himself: at 26, he built an organization that could run without him, then spent two years sabotaging it because he was not emotionally ready to step back.
In this episode, Ivan and Brad map the full leadership progression from indispensable technician to organizational coach. They get into the management infrastructure most companies quietly dismantled in the 2000s, the psychology of leaders who need to be needed, and what it actually takes to build a team that performs without you in the room.
In this episode:
- Why the behaviors that made you a high performer become the exact ceiling on your organization's growth, and how to recognize which leadership stage you are actually operating from- The two-word definition of management that disappeared from most organizations in the late 90s, why its absence creates chronic underperformance, and how to reinstall it systematically- How a simple competency and productivity scoring exercise reveals that a team's weak performance is almost never the team's score — it is the manager's- The LION meeting structure: a Monday group session and Thursday 1-on-1 that systematically eliminates the constant flow of decisions and questions escalating to you- Why senior leaders who need to be needed always have one thing in common: a goal that is not big enough to make the current role feel small- The five-stage success formula Brad deploys across global organizations: Dream, Goal, Learn, Plan, Action, and why skipping the learning phase guarantees plans that just repeat the past- What AI actually requires before it can improve organizational performance, why most companies are not ready for it yet, and why the leaders who digitize now will define the next decade
This one is for the senior leader who has built a capable team on paper but cannot seem to step back without everything slowing down.
🔗 Connect with Brad SugarsWebsite: bradsugars.com | actioncoach.comInstagram: DM "playbook" to get 10 free business ebooks and audiobooks
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.
Jul 13, 2026
46 min

Jul 6, 2026
Jul 6, 2026
38 min
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.
The problem is not the data. The problem is that most organizational listening tools were built to measure sentiment, not to trace its origins. They tell you where it hurts. They have no mechanism for telling you why.
Dustin Snyder spent fifteen years in labor relations and several more as the president of a manufacturing company before he concluded that the standard diagnostic toolkit was missing something fundamental. His workforce was not performing the way he needed it to. He tried the conventional fixes. They did not hold. What he eventually discovered, and what he has since spent years proving across nearly every industry in the United States, is that employee behavior is not a character issue. It is a design issue.
People respond rationally to the conditions around them. If those conditions make the wrong behavior the easiest path, that is the behavior you will get, consistently, regardless of who you hire.
In this conversation, Dustin and Ivan explore what it actually looks like to move from measuring employee feelings to diagnosing the environmental forces that generate them, why that shift is harder than it sounds, and what changes when a leadership team finally sees the wiring diagram behind their engagement score.
In this episode:
Why engagement surveys can only return answers to questions leadership already thought to ask, and what that structurally excludes
How employees answer surveys strategically when they have learned that honesty carries a risk, and why the gap between score and reality keeps widening
What the SWIM methodology (Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping) traces that a score never can: the specific conditions, processes, and structural frictions driving the behavior keeping leaders up at night
Why the employee who looks like the problem is almost always the place where system stress is surfacing, not its source
The concept of organizational equilibrium and why well-designed change initiatives get quietly absorbed by the structure underneath them
How a healthcare network scored low on communication for two consecutive years, added more communication channels, and scored even lower, until a diagnostic revealed the opposite problem
The Hawthorne Effect, Schrodinger, and the psychodynamic interviewing techniques SWIM uses to get data that does not steer itself
What a leader should do first, before touching anything, when they realize they have been treating symptoms for years
This one is for the HR leader, CHRO, or senior executive who has run the survey, built the action plan, and watched the same number come back twelve months later, and who suspects the loop will not break until the questions themselves change.
🔗 Connect with Dustin Snyder
Website: https://wayforward.work/
Book: Sink or Swim https://a.co/d/0asu3lm5
LinkedIn: Dustin Snyder https://www.linkedin.com/in/snyderdustin/
Growth Hacking Culture is a top 5% global podcast exploring the neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science behind leadership and workplace culture. Hosted by Ivan Palomino The Growth Hacking Culture is ranked on the 14 Best Growth Hacking Podcasts by FeedSpots Podcast
Jul 6, 2026
38 min








