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Growth Hacking Culture: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Ivan Palomino
The Growth Hacking Culture Podcast is a series of insightful interviews with prominent experts on mindsets, skills and mental resources to grow individually, lead motivated teams and create human-centric work cultures. These episodes are about thought provoking ideas to scale up and growth hack human-centric and performing work cultures. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.
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- 2 days ago40 min
How to Leave a Toxic Job Without Losing Yourself | Jeff Davis
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.
- 1 weeks ago42 min
Colette Molteni: Emotional Intelligence for People Who Think in Systems
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
- 2 weeks ago37 min
Wisdom Over Intelligence: A World Champion's Framework for Smarter Decisions | Andres Kuusk
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 Kuusk Website: https://andreskuusk.com/ Book: Unlocking the Success Puzzle LinkedIn: 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
- 2 weeks ago46 min
From Bottleneck to Coach: Brad Sugars on the Leadership System Most Organizations Never Install
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 Sugars Website: bradsugars.com | actioncoach.com Instagram: 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.
- 3 weeks ago38 min
How to Diagnose Employee Disengagement Instead of Just Measuring It with Dustin Snyder
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 be
- Jun 28, 202639 min
Fix Work, Not People | Burnout, Job Design & What Good Work Actually Looks Like ft. Dr. Kat Page
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. Here's the question most leaders never ask: what if the problem was never your people? What if it was always the work itself, how it's structured, how it's led, how it distributes autonomy, meaning, and control? What if every wellbeing program you've ever launched was treating symptoms while the system kept producing the damage? Dr. Kat Page has spent two decades studying exactly this. She's an organizational psychologist, leadership partner at Pymany, and the author of Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out. In this episode, Kat and host Ivan Palomino challenge the entire premise of corporate wellbeing — and make the case for something more radical: fixing the design of work itself. What you'll learn in this episode: The evidence has been building for over a hundred years in the work design literature, but it stays locked inside academia. The core finding: a poorly designed job is worse for your mental health than unemployment. When high demands combine with a lack of control, what researchers call job strain, you more than double the risk of depression. This isn't a motivation problem or a resilience problem. It's a design problem. Kat unpacks why the resilience myth is so persistent and why telling people to be stronger is, in her words, almost offensive to your best people. She introduces the concept of moral injury at work: the specific damage done when people can't fulfill their purpose because of broken internal systems. This isn't about long hours. It's about being unable to actually help the people you're there to help. The conversation also goes deep on what a "good work" leader actually does differently — not in theory, but behavior by behavior. What questions they ask, what they stop adding to the system, how they protect focus and recovery time, and why removing friction matters more than any motivation program. Ivan brings his own story — 20 years of corporate habits that followed him into entrepreneurship, the fear underneath the perfect PowerPoint, and the slow realization that we often collude with the systems we're trying to fight. Key topics covered: — Why a poorly designed job is worse for mental health than being unemployed — The resilience myth: what your best people are actually being resilient to — Moral injury at work and why it burns people out without long hours — Is the corporate wellness industry giving organizations permission to avoid real change? — The 4-level maturity model: why you can't skip straight to fixing the system — What if performance was measured by energy, not hours? — The Microsoft data: people interrupted every 2 minutes and what it really costs — What a "good work" leader actually does, day by day — The corporate detox: how to unlearn 20 years of broken habits — Why we are often colluding with the system we're trying to fight About Dr. Kat Page: Dr. Kat Page is an organizational psychologist and leadership partner at Bymany. She has worked with leaders across industries — from healthcare systems in Melbourne to global organizations in Sydney — helping them build workplaces that are genuinely good for people. She is the author
- Jun 21, 202647 min
The Shame Loop Keeping Smart People Stuck | Burnout, Executive Function & Breaking Free ft. Frankie Berkoben
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 environments in Silicon Valley. She works with engineers, founders, and product leaders who are genuinely brilliant — and burning out faster than anyone around them. In this episode of the Growth Hacking Culture Podcast, Frankie and host Ivan Palomino unpack the hidden loop that traps high performers: the shame cycle that shuts down executive function, destroys focus, and makes everything harder the more you try to fix it. This isn't a conversation about meditation apps or morning routines. It's about understanding why your brain works the way it does — and designing your life around that reality instead of fighting it. What you'll learn: The gap between your potential and your output doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means there's a mismatch between your responsibilities and your capacity — and shame is making it worse. When high-potential people feel that gap, shame kicks in. And shame doesn't push you to perform better: it suppresses executive function, the exact cognitive system you need for planning, focus, follow-through, and emotional regulation. The harder you push, the more capacity you lose. Frankie introduces her framework of 7 types of bandwidth — creative, emotional, mental, physical, sensory, social, and values — and explains how to stop running on empty by going where your energy actually is, not where you think it should be. She also breaks down why nonlinear thinkers (roughly 25% of the workforce) are disproportionately at risk, and why interest-based motivation — often dismissed as laziness — is neurological, not a character flaw. Ivan brings his own experience as a late-stage founder who hit burnout twice, once in corporate and once raising capital, and the conversation goes deep on what actually changes when you stop trying to fit a broken system and start designing for how you're wired. Key topics covered: — Is overwhelm the real problem, or a symptom of something deeper? — The capacity-responsibility gap and why it compounds over time — How shame physically suppresses executive function (the neuroscience) — Hustle culture, Elon Musk, and who's really picking up the slack — Why peak performance is statistically impossible to maintain — and why expecting it makes things worse — Tony Hsieh, intrinsic motivation, and the danger of building without a personal "why" — The 7 types of bandwidth and how to use them daily — Three things you can do when a situation feels like a complete mismatch — Why design thinking applied to yourself is more powerful than any productivity system — What to do TODAY if you're sitting at your desk feeling overwhelmed and stuck About Frankie Berkoben: Frankie Berkoben is a San Francisco-based executive coach specializing in gifted, ADHD, and nonlinear-thinking professionals in tech. She coaches engineers, product leaders, and founders at companies including Google and Airbnb, helping them close the gap between potential and sustainable high performance. She is known for combining design thinking with deep self-knowledge to help clients build systems that work for their actual brain — not an idealized version of it. Connect with Frankie: LinkedIn: Frankie Berkoben Website: frankieberkoben.com About Growth Hacking Culture: The Growth Hacking Culture Podcast explores the human side of high performance — the mindset, habi
- Jun 15, 202643 min
How to Become a High-Impact CHRO: Mindset, Habits & Career Moves That Actually Work | Tom Emery
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 People Officer. Tom spent over 20 years in HR leadership across financial services and wealth management before building a coaching practice dedicated to helping HR leaders and Chief People Officers lead with genuine impact. Whether you're an HR business partner aiming for the C-suite, a first-time CPO finding your footing, or a seasoned CHRO looking to sharpen your edge — this conversation is packed with honest, practical insight you won't find in a textbook. In this episode, you'll learn: Why your functional HR expertise might be holding you back from the C-suite The daily habits and mindset routines of truly impactful CHROs and Chief People Officers How to get your CEO to listen to you — and earn a real seat at the table The "observation + question" mirror technique for influencing without triggering defensiveness How to manage your emotional triggers before they manage you Why the best HR leaders embrace discomfort — and how to start practicing this today The career moves and experiences that separate future CHROs from those who plateau Tom's one piece of advice for every ambitious HR leader: stop taking it so seriously About Tom Emery Tom Emery is the founder of Hex, an executive coaching and leadership development consultancy, and the author of People People, a practical guide for current and aspiring Chief People Officers. With over two decades in HR leadership — including as CPO at a City of London wealth management firm — Tom now works with HR leaders and executive teams to build the mindset and skills that drive real organizational change. 🔗 Free copy of People People (UK only): https://www.hex-development.com/book-request/ 🔗 Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-emery-b8809818/ 📘 Buy People People on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Reach-potential-Chief-Officer/dp/1788607414 About Growth Hacking Culture Growth Hacking Culture is the podcast for HR leaders, people professionals, and executives who believe culture is the ultimate competitive advantage. Every episode brings you honest conversations with practitioners and thinkers who are changing how organizations treat their people — and what that means for business results. 🔔 Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. 📘 Ivan Palomino's new book (French version) is now available: Périmé?: La science de rester indispensable quand le marché préfère le neuf → https://www.ivanpalomino.net/perime-livre-ivan-palomino
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About Growth Hacking Culture
The Growth Hacking Culture Podcast is a series of insightful interviews with prominent experts on mindsets, skills and mental resources to grow individually, lead motivated teams and create human-centric work cultures. These episodes are about thought provoking ideas to scale up and growth hack human-centric and performing work cultures. Hosted by Ivan Palomino.
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