S10E224: Why We Forgive Bad Behaviour At Work with Lisa Martello
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 A serious conversation with a lot of laughing in it. FIND LISA AND CATCHING BEESCatching Bees on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catching_bees/Catching Bees on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catching-bees/Lisa Martello on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-martello-2b65463b/ FIND USWebsite: https://projectchatter.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/projectchatterpodcast/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectChatterPodcast The Project Chatter Podcast has been running since 2018 and is free to access, always. If this episode was useful, share it with one person who needs to hear it.