LEAP Listens

There are a handful of genuinely useful ideas - the emotional vs. transactional engagement distinction, change readiness interviews, and the logistics of simultaneous floor-by-floor briefings - but the episode is padded with several minutes of host banter, a personal anecdote about a supermarket crush, and platitude-level advice ('empathy first', 'listen to your people'). The insight-to-runtime ratio is low for a 27-minute episode.

“your engagement stats might be in the 70s, and you think, yeah, we're doing okay, that reports well. But when you read the comments, you think, Oh, maybe not so well”

“we found was that people there's a difference between being emotionally engaged with the organization and transactionally engaged”

The emotional/transactional engagement distinction surfaced from the Kingston University project is a modestly fresh framing, and the 'toothbrush' visualisation technique for persuading executives is a practical original contribution. However, the episode's core argument - tell employees first, use empathy, segment your audience - is standard internal comms doctrine with no contrarian or first-principles challenge to received wisdom.

“This is an example I call toothbrush, so I remember it if I'm prepping for an interview or something”

“tell them a little story so they have a little film of visual running in their head, they can actually realize if you arrive at work in that state, it's not going to go well”

Rachel Tolhurst is a genuine 30-year practitioner with named institutional experience (Civil Aviation Authority, a major government engineering supplier, financial services mergers) who has clearly done the work at scale. She is self-employed and credible, but not an executive-level decision-maker or someone who built and scaled a function at a well-known organisation - she is a senior IC consultant, not a C-suite operator.

“I worked for a large engineering firm that was a major supplier to government, um, I managed the employee engagement surveying there”

“one lovely method I learned at the Civil Aviation Authority was to do change readiness interviews”

The episode scores reasonably well on specificity: named data sources (Gartner, Kingston University), real figures (74% to 43% change willingness, 31% AI sabotage, 44% Gen Z, 2,500-worker survey), and operational detail (four-floor simultaneous briefings, 9 a.m. stock-exchange delay, 20,000+ employees across two organisations). The main gap is no named organisations, no outcome metrics from the interventions described, and no before/after data on loyalty or retention.

“Gartner found that employees' willingness to support enterprise change dropped from 74% in 2016 to just 43% in 2022, a period when the average employee went from experiencing two plan changes a year to 10”

“31% of them admitted to actively sabotaging their employers' AI strategy. And among them, the Gen Z workers were for that that figure rose to 44%”

The hosts do ask a few useful follow-ups ('Did you have any other pushback?', 'What was different about how people experienced that?') and Roger's A/B testing challenge is a genuinely sharp probe. However, the episode opens with nearly three minutes of self-congratulatory banter, the AI question is openly framed as a mandatory checkbox, and Roger's personal Safeway anecdote consumes significant runtime without advancing the discussion.

“Did you consider doing any A-B testing where you did tell some branches or didn't tell others? Well that that would give you the case study data”

“it's mandatory for all conversations to mention AI. Um, so we've reached that bit”