Unprofessionalism

Hosted by Dr Myriam Hadnes

Management EducationInterviews guests

Website RSS feed

Episodes

382

Latest episode

Jun 2026

Language

EN-GB

About the show

Professional performance is exhausting. Maintaining the mask. Editing ourselves. Pretending we know when we don't. This podcast is about people who dropped the performance. And what happened next. Each episode features someone who broke professional conventions and found something better on the other side: the executive who disclosed grief in a corporate setting and found it opened new ways of relating; the coach who realised her authority came from integrity, not compliance; the designer who ignored the 'approved tools' and saved thousands of hours. Conversations circle around three questions: What does it cost us to perform professionalism instead of showing up as ourselves? How do we create spaces where people can bring their full attention and humanity to work? When is the “unprofessional” move actually the most responsible one? If you feel the tension between who you are and who you're expected to be at work, this podcast shows you what happens when people stop managing that tension and just stop performing. Hosted by Dr Myriam Hadnes—behavioural economist and founder of workshops.work. New episode every week.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 16, 202646 min

023 - The Third Space: Belonging Comes First with Donatella Caggiano

Donatella Caggiano was living in a Best Western while her flooded apartment got fixed when she watched a SWAT team raid a neighbouring house to catch a fugitive. She caught herself rooting for the person running and then realised she was the person running. Donatella accepted the hint her body and the universe were giving then drove to her office that morning and quit.The job she walked away from was a corporate role she had stayed in through a merger and acquisition that kept her and her team in the dark, and left everyone working in an unfinished office surrounded by moving boxes for months. The message was clear long before the layoffs: stop investing. Stop expecting. Just wait.The hotel window was Donatella's accidental third space — the room outside both home and work where she could finally see herself. She now designs that room intentionally, for teams. She helps organisations have conversations the office wasn't built for, to rebuild belonging in places where gratitude is demanded and silence is rewarded.We talked about why grief gets skipped when organisations change, what happens to a team when a leader hands back agency instead of holding the line, and what four haircuts taught her about leading through change.Links to learn more about Donatella Caggiano:WebsiteLinkedInNewsletterSubstackPodcastAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

June 9, 202641 min

022 - Speak Up or Shut Down with Gustavo Razzetti

Gustavo Razzetti once sat next to a woman at a corporate conference, judging the regional VP presenting on stage until she revealed that was her husband. Instead of backpedaling he apologised, then stood by every word. That instinct of owning the mess without pretending he didn’t mean it is the backbone of his work.He has spent decades inside corporate and agency life watching great ideas die because of terrible culture. He now works with teams on what he calls conversational debt: the gap between what people nod through in meetings and what they actually act on. His research found that when people are asked why others don't speak up, the answer is fear, but when asked why they themselves don't, the answer becomes pointlessness: a learned belief that nothing will change anyway.Gustavo refuses to live that way. He fires clients before the work even starts if the fit is wrong. His rule is that he'd rather lose his job over one conversation than avoid a hundred — and he did.We talked about the power dynamics that shape what is considered professionalism, the most dangerous type of silence in organisations and why we should all drop the invisible contract nobody handed us and stop waiting for permission to speak.Links to learn more about Gustavo Razzetti:Forward Talk (Gustavo’s new book)WebsiteSubstackWorkshopsAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

June 2, 202646 min

021 - Innovation Before Consensus with Rori DuBoff

Rori DuBoff once took an unused office at Accenture, tore it down, and built a virtual reality studio from scratch with no formal approval and that's how she got the firm into the metaverse. She didn't wait for the green light. She brought in a few people who were equally excited, and delivered.She's spent decades in digital innovation and marketing, watching organisations say they wanted disruption and then treat the people delivering it as the problem.That’s made her conclude that 80% of innovation is change management. Rori explains how most of us obsess over the idea while it is actually the smallest part of the problem. The larger part is whether the people around you feel safe enough to hear it.She acted before consensus throughout her whole career, took the heat for it, and now she is sharing the blueprint.Links to learn more about Rori Duboff:LinkedInWebsiteAll Things TrustSubstackAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

May 26, 202643 min

020 - Fitting Out at Work with Emanuele Mazzanti

Emanuele Mazzanti is a day one rule-breaker. When he moved to EY Italy, his boss asked to be called "Dottore." He noticed the distance being created and suggested, politely, that they drop the formalities and just use first names. Surprisingly, the answer was yes.That’s a pattern he kept running into. Different countries and roles but the same kind of distance disguised as formality to keep things simple and boost performance. In consultancy, where everyone is climbing the same ladder, connection becomes a liability as only one person can move up at a time.The irony is that the performance everyone’s after lives exactly in the connection they've learned to avoid. That’s the space Emanuele keeps moving towards for nearly two decades. Sometimes the barriers are pushed and sometimes they push him. His solution? Love - the deepest form of connection.Emanuele firmly believes that love belongs at work and is a core leadership trait and nothing will inspire people to do and be their best at work like feeling loved.Links to learn more about Emanuele Mazzanti:LinkedInAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

May 19, 202642 min

019 - How to Find Your Real Voice Again with Cathey Armillas

Cathey Armillas built her career the way most people are told not to. She doesn't separate what she loves from what she sells. Her sneaker collection became a filter for clients. Her obsession with waterfalls became a corporate training product. Her decades as a competitive softball pitcher became her coaching methodology. Her background in marketing psychology became her speaking framework.She coaches TED speakers and executives to do the same. To stop becoming a flatter version of themselves the moment they walk into a professional space, and to trust that what makes them recognisable outside of work is exactly what will make them land inside it.She has a name for what happens when people don’t believe who they are is enough: voice masking. Her argument is that the moment an audience senses someone performing instead of connecting, they stop listening. Not consciously. Viscerally. And no amount of memorisation fixes that.We talked about the wall we are told to build between our personal and professional lives, and why Cathey's career is a case for replacing the bricks with glass so you can see what's on the other side and decide what's worth bringing through.Links to learn more about Cathey Armillas:WebsiteLinkedInSpeaker Skills AcademyAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

May 12, 202654 min

018 - The Norm Breaker's Privilege with Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor was once brought in to help eleven chief executives navigate a merger that would cost the job of some. Before the meeting, a more senior colleague on his team pushed back on touching that topic. It would embarrass them, he said. It was better to keep things “professional”.Benjamin thought the opposite. That staying professional in that room was going to make it impossible for anyone to have an honest conversation. What happened next? An awkward silence and the topic remained untouched for the rest of the that meeting.He has spent his career walking into rooms like that one. And what he keeps finding is that most people just don't know there's another option. Sometimes it takes someone breaking the rule in front of you for you to realise that you’ve been following one all this time.We talked about where professional norms come from and why they're so hard to name, what it costs to break them and what it costs not to.Links to learn more about Benjamin Taylor:WebsiteLinkedInSir John Kay's LectureSitcom ‘Dear John’Any thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

May 5, 202644 min

017 - Small Talk Is Big Talk with Julie Brown

When Julie Brown was being poached from one company to another, they asked what she was currently earning. She told them a number she wanted to be true — what she deserved, not what she was making. They didn't blink.That’s how she spent 17 years as one of the highest-paid professionals in a male-dominated field before realising that the secret lay in building relationships. She's turned that into a book called This Sh!t Works, and a speaking career with keynote speeches 99.9% of audiences want to hear again. Turns out, the sh!t does work.We talked about why everyone keeps asking the question they hate being asked, how a woman complimenting her flowered pants on the street turned into the perfect lesson on what networking was always supposed to feel like, and what it actually takes to be someone people remember after the room clears.Links to learn more about Julie Brown:WebsiteLinkedInAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

April 28, 202641 min

016 - The Courage to Say: I Don’t Understand with Jussi Hermunen

Jussi Hermunen was brought in as a consultant on a multimillion-euro project when he discovered that his go-to tool was on the client's prohibited software list. He used it anyway. Not out of recklessness, but because a diagram reads the same on a factory floor as it does in a boardroom.A clarity that a 70-page document full of acronyms that nobody in those steering group meetings would admit they hadn't read could never provide.He has spent decades inside large organisations finding the people whose working lives are shaped by decisions they had no part in making, and asking the questions everyone inside stopped asking on day three. We talked about what happens when organisations become the very obstacle standing between themselves and the change they're trying to make and what changes when you stop delivering that change to people and start designing it with them.Links to learn more about Jussi Hermunem:LinkedInPersonal WebsiteCompany WebsiteAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

April 21, 202647 min

015 - The Price of Being Difficult with Tramaine Schilders-Teo

Tramaine has a rule for herself and everyone she manages: what you allow will continue. She learned by watching what happened when she didn't set a boundary, and what happened when she did.With +15 years of managing teams across industries and seven countries around the globe, she spent a lot of that time being called difficult for doing things like putting her own phone number on an emergency contact list so her junior team members could have Christmas or pushing back against a request that would disrupt her team’s weekend.Tramaine is a leader who runs toward the hard conversation, takes the consequence that comes with it, and has taken a demotion more than once because she decided the price of staying was higher than the price of leaving. We talked about what it costs to be called difficult as a woman in corporate, how she decides what's worth the fight, and why everything - every choice, every boundary, every stance - has a price. The only question is whether you've made peace with paying it.Links to learn more about Tramaine Teo:LinkedInAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/

April 15, 202636 min

014 - The Cost of Being Yourself with Michael Bungay Stanier

Thirty years ago, in a room full of blue suits with padded shoulders, pearls, and red ties — all competing for one of the most prestigious academic scholarships in the world — Michael Bungay Stanier walked in with long blonde hair, earrings, and a pink tie-dye tie.He was in his mid-twenties, in Australia, competing against people he knew might be sharper than him. His logic was simple: if I try to beat them on their terms, I lose. So he placed a different bet. One where he'd either come last by a long way, or come first.He came first. It wouldn't be the last time betting on himself paid off. You might be familiar with The Coaching Habit, a best-seller book he self-published a decade ago and has over a million copies sold around the globe.Sometimes knowing who you are comes with a price-tag. Michael lost a $300.000-a-year contract because a CEO hated the name of his company ‘Box of Crayons’. Instead of changing, he went looking for clients who loved it instead. We talked about what it costs to hold that line, and what happens when you stop making decisions to preserve a reputation almost nobody was tracking in the first place.Links to learn more about Michael Bungay Stanier:The Coaching Habit 10th AnniversaryLinkedInNewsletterPodcastYouTubeWebsiteAny thoughts? Share them with us!Support the show✨✨✨If you miss the "workshops work" podcast, join us on Substack, where Myriam builds a Podcast Club with monthly gatherings around old episodes: https://myriamhadnes.substack.com/