Modern work is demanding. Even for people who are good at what they do, the human complexity around it can be exhausting. Stepsero is a podcast for professionals who want to feel less overwhelmed by it all. Every episode is a focused, honest conversation on one of the topics that make modern work challenging: leadership, communication, difficult conversations, AI, mental well-being, and more. No filler. No hour-long rambles. One short conversation at a time, towards a little more clarity.
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In this conversation, leadership and performance facilitator Richard Gordon Kelly explores the invisible beliefs we carry about who we need to be, and how those beliefs, more than the work itself, create pressure and burnout. The discussion covers where these beliefs originate, why pressure acts as “expensive fuel,” and what happens when a thought is noticed rather than believed. It closes on…
Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg joins Stepsero to discuss her co-authored paper, “AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture.” The conversation covers how reliance on the same AI tools drives convergence in language, methods, and questions, plus a productivity paradox, where individual gains in output create more collective work rather than less. It also touches on leadership overconfidence in…
In this episode, Olga Solovyeva explains why AI adoption inside organizations is so uneven, often coming down to leadership. Some leaders give teams freedom and time to experiment; others pause and “park” AI altogether. That caution has a cost. When leadership restricts AI, employees often turn to personal accounts instead (what Olga calls shadow AI use) which strips away any oversight the…
Most people approach their careers the same way: skip the thinking, go straight to applying. Hundreds of applications to roles they half-want, hoping something sticks. Alex McCann has spent the last few years trying to understand why, and building something to fix it. In this conversation, he breaks down why so many career decisions get made on autopilot, why the debate between following your…
Psychological safety is one of those terms everyone has heard, and most people misunderstand. It’s not about being nice. It’s not about avoiding conflict. And it’s certainly not about lowering the bar. In this episode, Mehmet Baha breaks down what psychological safety actually means, why the data behind it is hard to ignore, and what gets in the way of building it in most organisations. The…
Stress happens when the demands of a situation outweigh the resources available to meet them. In the modern workplace, that gap is widening and it’s costing more than most people realise. In this episode, stress scientist Alexandra Crosswell breaks down what chronic low-grade stress is actually doing to the body, why AI has introduced a new kind of threat that hits differently from other workplace…
What happens to your professional identity when the role that defined you disappears? In this conversation, executive coach Costas returns to Stepsero to explore one of the most pressing questions in modern work: how do we stay relevant and grounded when everything around us is changing? We get into why identity and job title are not the same thing, and why confusing the two is one of the biggest…
Something feels off at work, and it’s not just you. We are experiencing unprecedented levels of cognitive demand in the modern workplace. People are exhausted, struggling to prioritize, struggling to focus, and struggling to make decisions. And yet we keep reaching for resilience training and wellness programs as the answer. In this episode, we get into what cognitive overload actually is and how…
Gen Z gets called quiet, disengaged, even entitled. Generational Strategist Benoît Vancauwenberghe thinks that read is simply wrong. In this episode, Benoît makes the case that silence at work isn’t the absence of a message, but rather the message itself. He walks us through why Gen Z operates on what he calls a different “operating system,” shaped by a communication shift that began with the…
Executive transitions are more fragile than most people assume. 40% of executive appointments fail within the first 18 months, not because of technical incompetence, but because of people, politics, and culture. And yet organisations continue to spend 90% of their budget on selection, and only 10% on supporting the executive once they are in the role. In this episode, we speak with Navid Nazemian…
