Episodes
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This week's professional risk - inspired by Charlie
Make the thing you've always kept furthest from work the centre of it.
Description
Charlie Robertson spent years keeping two lives carefully apart: the consultant at a well-respected firm, and Charlene Coco, the drag persona he performed in nightlife and mentioned to almost no one at work. Then he left the consulting career, went freelance as a facilitator, and — only about a year ago — did the thing that still makes him flinch when he posts about it on LinkedIn: he brought Charlene into the boardroom.
What follows isn't a coming-out story so much as a working theory of costumes. Charlie's argument, borrowed from RuPaul: we're all in drag, every day — the suit, the meeting voice, the confidence we perform. Most of us just never chose ours. Drag queens choose everything: the wig, the makeup, the walk, the reaction they want from the room. So what happens when you bring that level of intention to how you show up at work?
Along the way: why Charlene was once braver than Charlie in gay bars and is now more nervous than him in offices; the workshop participant who paces her flat in her highest heels before big video calls; what Charlie's dad means when he calls all of this "my Britney thing"; and a discovery neither of us saw coming until it happened mid-conversation — why an audience wills a drag queen to succeed, and what that reveals about which leaders we're actually willing to get behind.This episode invites you to reflect on:
Where the line sits between adapting to a room and disappearing into itWhat your version of the high heels is — the small, deliberate thing that switches your confidence on before you walk inOver to you!
What's the one part of yourself you edit out before every meeting — and what would it take to wear it on purpose instead?
About Charlie
Charlie Robertson is the co-founder of Make it Werk, a consultancy helping organisations build teams worth being part of — and cultures worth staying for. He and his best friend Safiya started it after realising the inclusive spaces they created in nightlife were exactly what companies were missing. He facilitates trainings, offsites and workshops — sometimes in full drag, as Charlene Coco.
Links to learn more about Charlie:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsoncharles/
instagram.com/thecharlenecoco
https://www.makeitwerk.co/
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This week's professional risk - inspired by Mariam Halfhide
Telling someone honestly how their behaviour affected you, instead of hiding behind professionalism, blame or silence.
This episode invites you to reflect on:
Why do we suppress a difficult emotion although we know that it makes it even stronger?Why feedback falls flat when we can't name what a behaviour actually did to us.Why the leaders people trust most build the conditions for others to grow, rather than solving every problem for them.Most of us were trained how to behave professionally. Almost none of us were trained in how to handle frustration, disappointment, or hurt. So we hold it in, stay composed, and let it surface later as a clipped reply, a quiet withdrawal, or blame aimed at someone who never heard from us the true impact of their behaviour. The more "professional" we try to look, the harder an honest conversation becomes.
Mariam Halfhide does the opposite, on purpose. When something gets to her, she doesn't swallow it, and she doesn't fire back — she steps away, settles herself, then goes to the person and tells them plainly how their behaviour landed on her, without assuming they meant harm. She's found that these conversations end with more trust than they started. Across feedback, leadership, altered states and emotional regulation, she keeps returning to one question: how do you become more honest without becoming less trustworthy?
Would you dare?
The next time someone's behaviour unsettles you, could you tell them how it landed on you — as a person, not a process — instead of letting it leak out as a rant or complaint?
About the guest
Mariam Halfhide works at the intersection of AI strategy and human connection. Having lived and worked across many cultures, she brings a sharp perspective on adaptation, belonging, and the courage it takes to choose a workplace where more of yourself is welcome.
Links to learn more about Mariam Halfhide:
LinkedIn
Watch on YouTube: The Projection Exercise
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Missing episodes?
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Jamell Crouthers has held a full-time job the entire time he's been writing. Sixty books in eight years, a podcast, blog posts, all of it built in the hours around his day work. He writes fiction about social issues — race, workaholism, homelessness, addiction — the kind of conversations most workplaces won't touch directly.
When he worked at a medical office, he used to sit in the break room before his shift with his laptop and coworkers walking past started asking what he was writing. Some began buying his books. His supervisor became a regular listener of his podcast.
At his current job in banking, almost nobody knows. The difference, Jamell says, has less to do with courage of opening up or wanting to remain professional but more about whether the environment makes curiosity possible at all and how fast a numbers-driven, fully remote workplace can make that kind of connection feel like effort.
We talked about what happens when work becomes only about hitting targets, and what it takes to bring the parts of yourself that don't fit the job description into the room anyway.
Links to learn more about Jamell Crouthers:
eBook
Paperback
Audiobook
Blog
Podcast
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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:
Website
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Substack
Podcast
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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)
Website
Substack
Workshops
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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:
LinkedIn
Website
All Things Trust
Substack
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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:
LinkedIn
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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:
Website
LinkedIn
Speaker Skills Academy
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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:
Website
LinkedIn
Sir John Kay's Lecture
Sitcom ‘Dear John’
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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:
Website
LinkedIn
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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:
LinkedIn
Personal Website
Company Website
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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:
LinkedIn
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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 Anniversary
LinkedIn
Newsletter
Podcast
YouTube
Website
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While working in Vietnam, the uni president, once told me I was getting away with a lot — working from home, teaching with comic books, skipping the standard slide show — because I was young, female, pretty, and white. As harsh as it might sound, I know my Vietnamese colleagues would indeed never have had the same latitude.
The freedom to show up unpolished isn't equally available. Sometimes is contextual. Sometimes we are born closer to that permission than others.
Maybe that's why it's been harder than I expected to find female guests for the podcast. Being unprofessional, in the corporate world, it's often a verdict. Putting your name next to a show celebrating not following the script might be risky.
This episode is me thinking out loud, as someone who still hasn't fully dropped the mask, about what it actually costs to be yourself at work and how to make this space safer for those who have more to lose
Links to learn more about me:
Website
LinkedIn
Substack
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Roi Ben-Yehuda was one dissertation away from finishing his PhD when he realised he didn't want what was waiting on the other side. He walked away. Then years later, settled into a good job he liked, with a new mortgage and two small babies at home, he felt that pull again and walked away from that too, right in the middle of a pandemic.
Both times, the "thou shalt” voice telling him to stay on course was very loud. Both times, he ignored it. But the last one he gave himself nine months to make it work or face the consequences.
In less time than that, he built a company centred around the virtue behind his "unprofessionalism". One he believes to be the source of all virtues: courage.
He even has a mathematical formula: courage = power x purpose ÷ dragons. The dragons are the doubt, the fear, the inner voice that tells you the risk isn't worth it. And his whole work is about shrinking them — not by ignoring them, but by naming them, auditing them, and asking one simple question: what is the cost of doing nothing?
He also makes the case that we celebrate courage only when it works out. And that this is exactly how companies train people out of trying.
Links to learn more about Roi Ben-Yehuda:
LinkedIn
Website
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Leanne Hughes wrote the name of a podcast she didn’t have on a blue Post-it note, dropped it in a hat, and when her name was called — walked on stage and described the show as if it existed. It didn’t. A few months later, the First Time Facilitator was born. That’s also how she landed a Wiley publishing deal, and sold out a 50-person consulting conference in eight days.
The pattern is always the same: claim it first, build it second. Resourcefulness shows up after commitment, not before it. Waiting until you’re ready is the riskier move.
In this episode: why tight deadlines are a gift, what happens when you fuse your identity with your work, and why disliking failure and fearing it are two very different things.
Links to learn more about Leanne:
Website: https://www.leannehughes.com
Work Fame Substack: https://workfa.me
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leannehughes/
Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/@LeanneHughes
YouTube: https://www.instagram.com/leannehughes/
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When Martin Frederik Garbers’ company was acquired, he was handed the unenviable job of letting twenty-five people go. His own days were numbered too, but he chose to spend them sitting through the hard conversations, one by one, as a human being first – a CFO second.
As he walked the Camino after redundancy, his body told him with every fibre of his being, that he wasn't going back to corporate life. Now he lights a candle in the early hours of the morning, takes executives for long walks in nature, and asks his coaching clients to slow down long enough to hear what their inner tutor would tell them.
We talk about why the unspoken rules often do the most damage, what gets buried when leaders aren't allowed to feel, and why two hours walking in nature will do far more for your business than a back-to-back calendar full of big, important meetings.
Links to learn more about Martin:
Linkedin
Website
Book
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As her classmates chanted the purpose of business (spoiler: to make money), Philippa White couldn’t help but feel like she'd wandered into the wrong room, as the business school black sheep.
She'd grown up watching her uncle bridge worlds in apartheid South Africa – endlessly curious, fascinated by people and possibility, and the doctor of Nelson Mandela. He taught Philippa something that no business school curriculum was ever going to: the return on being more human. Today, she takes this conviction into boardrooms across the world.
We got into what happens when people genuinely care about each other at work, and what it costs when they don't. As Philippa will tell you, connection and belonging isn’t the soft, smushy stuff in business, it's by far your greatest asset.
Links to learn more about Philippa White:
LinkedIn
Website
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Alex McCann isn’t a qualified career coach, occupational therapist, or psychologist. But he’ll be the first to tell you that.
He walked away from a six-month internship, would sneak off to watch films when he should've been serving popcorn, and then decided he was done pretending he had it all figured out. Now at just 25 years old, he’s figuring it all out in public. After hundreds of conversations about why people feel lost in their careers, he’s building an AI career coach for the ones tired of faking it.
Alex doesn’t claim to have all the answers though – and that’s precisely the point. We talk about what happens when you stop performing expertise — and start solving problems from the inside.
Links to learn more about Alex McCann:
Substack
LinkedIn
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Anna Lundberg had spent her whole life being the good girl. Top of the class as valedictorian, Oxford graduate, and the shiny P&G title to show for it. She’d ticked every box, perfected the image, and then she did something very off-brand: she quit.
What she didn’t expect was how long the good girl mindset would follow her. Even now, a decade into solopreneurship and 370 episodes into her podcast Reimagining Success, Anna still feels the pull of the old scripts. Say yes, never chase, be likeable, and fill up your diary to feel important.
We talk about what success looks like once the gold stars disappear and you’re left to figure it out on your own. Anna’s advice? Bring your A game, set the boundary, go the extra mile – but whatever you do, don’t go two.
Links to learn more about Anna Lundberg:
Website
LinkedIn
Book
Podcast
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