We spend a fortune on governance, tooling and RACIs, then lose our best people to one person who nobody will have a difficult conversation with.
Lisa Martello has spent her career in rail, from a Transport for London graduate scheme to programme and director roles at HS2 and beyond, with detours into utilities and construction. By night she runs Catching Bees, a 20,000 strong following built on holding a sarcastic mirror up to workplace behaviour: the exec petting zoo, the strategic seagull, talent stretching, the one way flex.
In this episode she makes an argument most organisations quietly avoid. We are far too forgiving to the people behaving badly, and far too demanding of the people on the receiving end. The victim gets a list of actions: gather examples, prepare, call it out in the moment, call it out afterwards, book the meeting. The culprit gets the benefit of the doubt.
We also get into:
Writing bids and then wishing you could deliver them, and what changes when you become the client
Why the fun is seeping out of projects at exactly the point teams need it most
The five step slide from benefit of the doubt to resignation, and where leaders usually intervene too late
How "below the line behaviour" gets weaponised to shut down anyone who says the project is in trouble
Code switching, unprofessional hair, and the role model who arrived at exactly the right moment
Skanska's two word intervention, "not cool", and why sitting in the discomfort works better than a meeting
Three steps out of dickhead territory, including the "is it me" moment that stopped Lisa from performance managing someone out of a job she has since excelled in
Imposter syndrome as a preparation engine, and a healthy disregard for authority
Lisa Martello is a Director at ResoLex and a Member of the Board of Trustees at the Association for Project Management. Over nearly 20 years, she has led and supported major projects and programmes in the UK and Australia spanning infrastructure, rail, aviation, digital transformation, and organisational change, helping teams deliver results, navigate complexity, and work more effectively together under pressure. Alongside her day job, Lisa is the founder and content creator behind Catching Bees, a workplace satire platform with almost 20,000 followers across LinkedIn and Instagram. Whether she’s talking about The Office Gandalfs, The Lifter-Uppers, The Credit Thieves or the Proximity Peacocks, Lisa’s content holds up a playful mirror to the characters, behaviours and dynamics that quietly shape our working lives and careers. She speaks about leadership, advocacy, workplace culture, and the people who help us grow, combining real project leadership experience with humour, sarcasm, and the kind of uncomfortable workplace truths that make audiences laugh, wince, text their colleagues mid-session, and leave seeing their working world slightly differently.
