Advertise on podcast: Engage for Success

Guest: Annisha Taylor, Group Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Ofcom In this episode, Annisha Taylor, Group Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Ofcom, shares her journey from retail to broadcasting to regulation, highlighting the importance of embedding EDI into organisational culture. Annisha is a culture and organisational transformation leader with 15+ years shaping the conditions for high performance inside some of the UK’s most influential organisations, including Ofcom, the BBC and the John Lewis Partnership. Annisha’s work centres on the belief that culture is a system, not an initiative. When you align behaviours, leadership, ways of working and governance, organisations become more agile, innovative and trusted and they deliver results faster. Join us as we discuss strategies for developing effective EDI initiatives, the role of leadership, and the impact of lived experience on workplace inclusion. Host: Jo Moffatt

Guest: Dr Carol Wheeler – Leadership Consultant, Keynote Speaker & Founder, NopaLeadership Dr Carol Wheeler is a keynote speaker and leadership consultant who helps organisations stop losing good people to bad management. Through her Clarity × Connection = Commitment framework, she helps leaders build the clarity and connection that drives real, lasting commitment from their teams — from the stage and in the room. As the founder of NopaLeadership, Carol has spent more than 25 years studying why good people leave, and what organisations can do about it. Her two flagship programmes, The Connected Manager and The Connected Team Journey, give organisations a practical path from disengagement to genuine commitment. Dr Wheeler holds a PhD in Leadership Education from Oklahoma State University, a Master’s in Higher Education and Student Affairs from Indiana University, and a Bachelor’s in Leadership Development from Texas A&M University. She is also a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach with extensive experience using CliftonStrengths to help teams understand each other and perform at a higher level. Carol’s new book, The Connected Leader: Leading with Strengths in a Disconnected World, is an immediately actionable guide to closing the gap between where your team is and where you want them to be, showing leaders how to turn simple moments of connection into resonant actions of leadership without changing who they are to get there. With turnover rising and engagement falling, Carol argues the real issue is a connection crisis between leaders and their people, not a talent shortage. Join us as we discuss how leaders can build the clarity and connection that drives real commitment, and why employees quit managers, not jobs. Host: Jo Dodds

Guest: Jon Randall – Culture and Employee Engagement Specialist, Bladonmore Jon is a culture and employee engagement specialist at Bladonmore. He helps organisations connect their people with company strategy, bringing psychological insight and creativity to how employees understand, experience and contribute to the business. A trained executive coach and psychosynthesis therapist, Jon brings a systems view to organisational life, and has led culture and brand practices across agencies as well as in-house for a global organisation with 65,000 employees. His previous clients include British Airways, Generali and IMI. Drawing on his experience as both a psychosynthesis therapist and culture and employee engagement specialist, Jon explores what the world of therapy can offer business. We’ll look at how to notice what is actually happening within and between us, understand competing needs, and balance care with the will to act. Join us as we discuss how greater awareness and connection can help people make clearer decisions, navigate tensions and free up energy for what the business needs to achieve. Host: Jo Moffatt

Guest: Anna Lundberg – Leadership Coach and Speaker Anna Lundberg is a leadership coach and speaker who works with organisations on the beliefs that drive how people work. She calls them success scripts: rules about work we pick up early and rarely question, like “be the reliable one” and “busy proves you matter.” Anna began her career at Procter & Gamble, has delivered over 1,000 talks and workshops, and her TEDx talk “Where Your Idea of Success Really Comes From” is available on YouTube. In this conversation, Anna talks about why capable people keep saying yes when they’re already at capacity, why promotions often come without letting go of anything, and what managers and HR teams can do to help people rewrite the rules that no longer serve them. Join us as we discuss how to spot and rewrite the success scripts that quietly run our working lives. Host: Jo Dodds

Guest: Laura Greenwood – Founder and Clinical Lead, Laura Greenwood Therapy Laura Greenwood is an Accredited Psychotherapist with over 18 years’ experience in the mental health field, including more than a decade within the NHS. She specialises in parental and family mental health, combining clinical expertise with lived experience as a mother. Known for her warmth, honesty, and ability to articulate what often goes unspoken, Laura supports parents to move beyond survival mode, rebuild a sense of self, and navigate the complex intersection between identity, work, and family life. Alongside her clinical practice, she works with organisations and education systems to improve how parents are supported. Join us as we discuss what good parental support in the workplace looks like. Host: Andy Goram

Guests: Molly McMunn, BBC People Experience Project Manager, and Ed Cook, People Experience Partner, BBC Ed Cook is a People Experience Partner at the BBC, where he leads initiatives across workplace culture, colleague engagement and organisational change. Combining a strategic HR focus with modern project management expertise, Ed specialises in designing workplace environments and employee journeys that help teams thrive. Molly McMunn has a passion for enhancing employee experiences. Her diverse career includes roles in journalism within BBC News, as well as leading Diversity, Inclusion and Career Development initiatives that put people at the heart of everything the BBC does. Translating complex intersectional data into tangible business outcomes, Molly’s background in the charitable sector and her commitment to human rights and education enrich her approach to people experience. When radio arrived in the 1920s, people had to learn a completely new way of paying attention. Today, organisations face a similar challenge. Despite having more employee data, feedback channels and insights than ever before, many still struggle to genuinely understand what their people are saying. Join us as Ed and Molly discuss the BBC’s journey to explore what meaningful listening really means — what they’ve learned about employee voice, the assumptions they’ve challenged, and why good listening is about much more than surveys, metrics and feedback platforms. Host: Jo Dodds

Guests: Molly McMunn, BBC People Experience Project Manager, and Ed Cook, People Experience Partner, BBC Ed Cook is a People Experience Partner at the BBC, where he leads initiatives across workplace culture, colleague engagement and organisational change. Combining a strategic HR focus with modern project management expertise, Ed specialises in designing workplace environments and employee journeys that help teams thrive. Molly McMunn has a passion for enhancing employee experiences. Her diverse career includes roles in journalism within BBC News, as well as leading Diversity, Inclusion and Career Development initiatives that put people at the heart of everything the BBC does. Translating complex intersectional data into tangible business outcomes, Molly’s background in the charitable sector and her commitment to human rights and education enrich her approach to people experience. When radio arrived in the 1920s, people had to learn a completely new way of paying attention. Today, organisations face a similar challenge. Despite having more employee data, feedback channels and insights than ever before, many still struggle to genuinely understand what their people are saying. Join us as Ed and Molly discuss the BBC’s journey to explore what meaningful listening really means — what they’ve learned about employee voice, the assumptions they’ve challenged, and why good listening is about much more than surveys, metrics and feedback platforms. Host: Jo Dodds

Guest: Leandro Herrero – Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. We may think we left the “great man theory” of history behind in the 19th century. We didn’t. We simply smuggled it into corporate life. And this leadership lens is especially seductive in turbulent times. Modern organizations still behave as if performance, culture, and even ethics hinge primarily on a handful of heroic individuals at the top. The result is a persistent overinvestment in leadership personalities and an underinvestment in the systems, networks, and everyday behaviours that actually shape how work gets done. In this interview, Leandro challenges the heroic-leader narrative and reframes organizations not as machines directed by exceptional operators, but as living systems shaped by patterns of behaviour. It argues that our obsession with “who is in charge” is crowding out a more useful question: what everyday behaviours are being encouraged, tolerated, and replicated — and by whom? Until we shift attention from heroic individuals to contagious behaviours, we will keep misdiagnosing both success and failure in leadership and culture. Join us as we discuss his pioneering Viral Change™️ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change Host: TBC

Guest: Jane Sartin – Executive Director, The Flexible Space Association (FlexSA) Jane Sartin is Executive Director of The Flexible Space Association (FlexSA), the trade body representing the UK’s flexible workspace sector. FlexSA supports and advocates for more than 1,000 flexible workspace locations across the country, championing the interests of operators and the wider industry. Where we work has changed dramatically in recent years – but what does that mean for how people actually experience work? For younger employees in particular, the workplace can be much more than somewhere to sit with a laptop. The right environment can provide opportunities for connection, collaboration and creativity, while flexibility over where and how we work can play an important role in wellbeing, work-life balance and people’s sense of autonomy. In this episode, Jane joins us to explore the relationship between workspace, flexibility and employee engagement – and why creating a great place to work increasingly means thinking about both the physical environment and the different ways people want to work. Join us as we ask: if we want people to feel engaged, connected and able to do their best work, how much does the place where they work matter? Host: Andy Goram

Special Guest: Lara Morgan – Scentered and KitBrix When a business comes under financial pressure, what happens to engagement — and how do leaders communicate difficult news without pretending everything is fine? This conversation covers pay reductions, restructuring and uncertainty: how to be transparent without simply dumping anxiety onto employees, how to retain trust when you can’t give people everything they want, and what founders trying to “keep morale up” need to do more of. We’ll also touch on where AI creates room for people to focus on better, more interesting work. Join us as we discuss how to keep people engaged when you have to make unpopular decisions. Lara Morgan is a British serial entrepreneur, investor, bestselling author and internationally recognised keynote speaker. She founded Pacific Direct at just 23 and grew it from a bedroom start-up into a global leader in luxury hotel amenities, ultimately selling the business 17 years later for £20 million. Having built and exited a multi-site international company spanning brand licensing, global distribution and manufacturing, Lara brings practical, hard-earned insight into leadership, sales, resilience and scalable growth. Her entrepreneurial journey is captured in her bestselling book More Balls Than Most, an honest and often humorous account of building a business from nothing and learning to win commercially. Today, Lara leads a brand ownership and investment strategy, backing purpose- driven consumer and wellbeing brands that enhance everyday performance and save time, life’s most precious asset. Her portfolio includes Scentered, the mindful aromatherapy brand she helped conceptualise and scale; SOMO, a pioneering sleep fitness brand delivering science-backed recovery tools; KitBrix, a modular performance luggage system engineered for endurance athletes, actively minded individuals and highly organised professionals and amateur competitors alike; Gate8, which designs intelligent travel solutions for airline crew and frequent flyers; BetterSpace, a corporate wellbeing and rewards platform supporting employee performance; and Parcca, a premium warming coat brand designed for athletes, outdoor enthusiasts and spectators in colder climates. Lara speaks with authenticity, commercial sharpness and infectious energy. She shares real-world lessons on high-performance leadership, sales mastery, customer obsession, resilience and the critical link between wellbeing and sustained success. A co-founder of StartUp Britain, she is also a proud mother of three daughters and lives the performance mindset she teaches, balancing global work with endurance training and charitable cycling challenges. Host: Jo Moffatt

Special Guest: Dan Sodergren – Author and keynote speaker on AI and the future of work Leadership, AI and what this means in this… the Fifth Industrial Revolution We’ll explore this through Dan’s Fifth Industrial Revolution framework of artificial, emotional, independent and organisational intelligence, and consider how those capabilities connect with Engage for Success’s four enablers. We’ll also look at the choices organisations now face: whether to use AI simply to cut costs and reduce headcount, or to retrain, retain and equip people so they can become more productive, innovative and capable of scaling. Join us as we discuss why we may be the last generation to manage only human beings, and what leadership looks like when teams increasingly include people, AI systems and “automated interns”. Host: Jo Dodds

Guest: Gustavo Razzetti – CEO of Fearless Culture; Bestselling Author of “Forward Talk” Gustavo Razzetti is the bestselling author of Remote, Not Distant and Stretch for Change, and his forthcoming book, Forward Talk. He is a culture strategist, workshop facilitator and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience — first as a marketing and advertising executive, now as CEO of Fearless Culture, a culture design consultancy. He has facilitated more than 1,500 workshops with leadership teams at Mars, Microsoft, Merck, the Inter-American Development Bank and hundreds of organisations worldwide. Gustavo is the creator of the Culture Design Canvas, now used by over 500,000 practitioners globally, and the Forward Talk framework, which helps teams surface issues early, challenge groupthink, and turn avoided conversations into decisions that stick. U.S. organisations lose an estimated $359 billion every year to what Gustavo calls conversational debt — the silent accumulation of avoided conversations, unchallenged assumptions and false harmony. It’s the hidden force behind circular meetings, “alignment theatre” and leaders mistaking motion for progress. AI tools only amplify existing dynamics: high-trust teams get smarter, while low-trust teams fall into faster groupthink, performative agreement and decision paralysis. Join us as we discuss why AI didn’t break workplace culture, it exposed it, and how teams can rebuild the conversational agency needed to turn avoided conversations into decisions that stick. Host: Jo Moffatt

Special Guests: Sarah Pass and James Court-Smith, EFS Advisory Board Members The 2026 Engage for Success (EFS) Annual Survey is built around one central message: productivity starts with people, and people perform best when they are engaged. Strong performance does not come from investment, systems, or technology alone. It depends on whether people are trusted, supported, listened to, and equipped to contribute their skills, judgment, and ideas effectively. Dr Sarah Pass is Senior Research Manager at CIPD. She is a member of the Engage for Success Advisory Board, sits on the steering group, chairs the East Midlands Area Network, the Line Managers TAG, the Engagement Champion TAG, and co-project lead for the EFS annual survey. James Court-Smith leads Stillae Ltd – helping companies make sense of the data they collect, and put it to profitable use, across multiple industries in Europe. He chairs the Engage for Success Steering Group and is a member of the Advisory Board. James is the co-project lead for the EFS annual survey and is a Visting Fellow at Nottingham Business School. Join us as we discuss the Engage for Success Annual Survey results 2026. Host: Jo Dodds

Guest: Fiona Stephens – Director of People and Culture, Migrant Help Fiona Stephens is a senior people and culture leader with more than 35 years’ experience across the public sector, NHS and not-for-profit organisations. She is Director of People and Culture at Migrant Help, an advisory charity for people affected by displacement and exploitation, where she has built the people and culture function from the ground up. She has previously brought HR leadership to the civil service, the NHS and the British Council, with deep expertise in change management and organisational development. She holds an MBA, is a chartered fellow of the CIPD, and has a postgraduate qualification in coaching and positive psychology. She was named on HR Magazine’s Most Influential list for 2026. Seven years after building her people strategy on the Engage for Success model, Fiona reflects on what it takes to keep that approach alive inside a charity — working with budgetary constraints, emotionally demanding frontline work, and constantly shifting demand. Join us as we discuss what happens when you build a people strategy using the Engage for Success Four Enablers, seven years in. Host: Andy Goram

Guest: Emerson Resende – Founder, Zeno Life Plan | Former UN Climate Finance Leader Emerson Resende is the founder of Zeno Life Plan, a structured framework that helps organisations align business mission with employees’ life purpose. His work focuses on helping teams build clarity, engagement and long term meaning at work through practical life planning tools that translate personal purpose into professional performance. Emerson has applied this approach with organisations including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and several UN system agencies, supporting leaders and teams in strengthening engagement, reducing burnout and improving retention. Before founding Zeno Life Plan, Emerson spent 15 years working internationally on climate policy and finance across the United Nations system, living and working in over ten countries. His work today sits at the intersection of employee engagement, personal development and organisational culture. Join us as we discuss how institutions perform best when people understand not only what they do, but why they do it. Host: TBC