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 to spot it. We talk about why individual solutions alone won’t fix a system problem, and what both individuals and leaders can actually do about it.
We also get into how we got here: the addiction to constant connectivity, hybrid work blurring the boundaries between work and life, AI accelerating the rate of change, and workplaces that now reward responsiveness over effectiveness.
And we close with an honest answer to a hard question: are we positive about where this is going?

Debbie Pearmain is a dynamic executive coach and leadership consultant who specializes in unlocking the potential of people, teams, and workplace cultures. With over 25 years of experience in leadership development, workplace culture, and employee engagement, she partners with organizations to drive higher performance, stronger collaboration, and resilient, values-based leadership.

Debbie has worked as a consultant, facilitator, and coach with globally recognized organizations, including Accenture, Global Knowledge, LHH Knightsbridge, DDI, Homewood Health, Gallagher, and TELUS Health. Her coaching style blends strategic insight with a practical, people-first lens—supporting leaders to navigate complexity, strengthen decision-making, and inspire sustainable change within their teams and organizations.

A thought leader with Erickson Coaching International, Debbie contributes to the advancement of the coaching profession through leadership insight, applied practice, and thought leadership. She is a sought-after speaker who regularly presents at conferences and industry events on topics such as Resilient Leadership, Creating Cultures of Accountability, Emotional and Positive Intelligence, and Employee Engagement.

Known for her ability to connect, challenge, and empower, Debbie creates safe yet high-impact coaching spaces where leaders gain clarity, confidence, and capability. She is deeply passionate about helping organizations build workplaces where people and performance thrive together.

Debbie is an ICF-certified coach and holds certifications as a Flourishing Life Coach and Flourishing Workplace Coach. She is also certified in emotional intelligence, personality, resilience, and leadership assessments, enabling her to integrate robust data with human-centered coaching for meaningful and measurable outcomes.

References:

Debbie Lang Pearmain LinkedIn profile

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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 smartphone, and what that means for how this generation expresses disagreement, discomfort, or distrust without ever raising their voice. That silence becomes harder to ignore once you understand what Benoît calls the three selves (private, professional, and social) all of which now show up at work, and all of which make trust something to be earned, not assumed.
It’s also why someone leaving a company can look sudden to a manager, when in fact the signals were there all along, just not in a form leaders were trained to recognize.
The conversation also turns to AI, and a surprising claim: Gen Z isn’t afraid of the technology itself, but has a sharp instinct for spotting what’s authentic and what isn’t. We close on something more personal: what Benoît has learned, after years of co-living and working alongside young people, about where the real insight actually comes from.
A conversation for anyone who manages people and wants to understand what they might be missing.

Benoît Vancauwenberghe is a European keynote speaker and leadership auditor. After nearly two decades working with major brands as co-founder of the Brussels-based agency 20something, he found himself facing a paradox: the more he “understood” younger generations, the less his own organization worked.
What he first saw as a generational problem turned out to be something else entirely, a structural failure in how companies are designed and led. Today, he works directly with executive teams across Europe to audit and redesign leadership models that have become economically incoherent.
The Gen Z Shift is the result of this fieldwork.

References:

Benoît Vancauwenberghe LinkedIn profile

https://www.20something.be/

Get the book: The Gen Z Shift

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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 about what actually goes wrong, and what a more deliberate approach to transition looks like.
We discuss why the skills that get you hired into the C-suite are rarely the ones that determine whether you succeed, what Marshall Goldsmith’s “what got you here won’t get you there” really means in practice, and why vertical development (expanding how you think, not just what you know) matters more than most executives realise.
Navid also walks us through his Double Diamond Framework©, a seven-phase approach to executive transitions spanning twelve to eighteen months. We touch on the pre-onboarding phase, stakeholder mapping, and why phases one and seven (the ones that bookend the entire journey) are almost always the first to get skipped.

Navid Nazemian is the world’s #1 executive coach, ranked by CEO Today three years running, and the international bestselling author of Mastering Executive Transitions. A former global HR leader at Vodafone, Roche, and BAT, he has coached 350+ executives across five countries — more than half of them CEOs. He’s the creator of the Double Diamond Framework© and lives in Dubai.

References:

Navid Nazemian LinkedIn profile

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