How Work Actually Works

Joe Marques with KayLee Hansen
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Management
  • Updated Biweekly

Work isn't supposed to feel like this. And most people know it. How Work Actually Works is for the people ready to close the gap between what work could be and what it actually is. Hosted by Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen, the show explores what it really takes to build cultures where people don't have to pretend, where leaders shape environments worth showing up to, and where the work itself means something. Real stories. Honest conversations. Practical ideas to make it happen. 🎧 New episodes every other week. 💡 More at AuthenticUnlimited.com

  1. 1d ago

    Most Performance Problems Aren't People Problems | Episode 19

    Most leaders think a performance problem is a people problem. Usually it isn't. It's a clarity problem. An environment problem. A leadership problem. The trick is knowing which one you're staring at before you start fixing the wrong thing. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen take performance management apart and rebuild it as something useful. Not the annual review. Not picking a number on a five-point scale and delivering it in December. The real thing underneath it: why people thrive, why they stall, and why the score was never the point. KayLee brings the boat. A few people pull at the front, in sync, driving the whole thing forward. Most sit in the middle, paddling part of the time, capable of more if the conditions were there. A few sit at the back doing nothing, and some are rowing the other way. Here's the catch: most leaders pour 80% of their energy into the back of the boat and assume everyone else has it handled. Joe pushes back on the starting point itself. How do you even know where people sit? That's your score. It isn't the truth. So they work through three lenses worth checking before you label anyone: the conditions you set, the clarity you give, and the person in the seat. On conditions, they get into hiring for talent instead of a resume, whether the culture actually fits the person, and why you shouldn't pretend you're Disneyland in the interview when you're not. On clarity, Joe lands the bowling test: bowling tells you what a perfect game looks like from the first frame, so why does work feel like a mystery box you don't get to open until year end? And on the person, they separate competence from commitment. Some people can't. Some people won't, and the won't is a signal you haven't earned their best yet. KayLee tells the story of the high performer everyone saw walking out the door, except leadership. Joe shares the leader who rewrote every performance review around each person's style, changed not one word of content, and got a wave of feedback on how thoughtful she'd been. Same scores. Better experience. They also share a few simple ways to lead performance like it actually matters: ask the person to say success back to you, because clarity should end with a question, not a statementdeliver the same message differently depending on who's in front of yourun a retention interview with your best people before you ever need an exit interviewmake it a rhythm of check-ins, not an annual event, and weight it toward what's workingBecause when you treat performance as a number to manage instead of a signal to read, you miss the talented person in the wrong seat, the top performer quietly burning out, and the hidden gem who's just waiting for a reason to row. Key Takeaways Why most performance problems are really clarity, environment, or leadership problemsThe boat, and why leaders spend 80% of their time at the back of itThree lenses before you label anyone: the conditions you set, the clarity you give, the person in the seatThe bowling test for clarity, and why success should be obvious from the first frameCompetence vs. commitment, and why the won't is a signal about youThe three questions to ask yourself before you call anyone a performance problemPerformance is a signal. Stop managing the score and start reading what it's pointing at.

    40 min

  2. Jun 2

    The Three Selves and the One Worth Bringing to Work | Episode 18

    Most of us don't say the real thing at work. We say the safe thing. The polished thing. The version that won't rock the boat. And the more we do it, the more the whole place starts to feel like theater. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen take apart corporate theater: the language we hide behind every day, and the LinkedIn posts that put it on full display. All the world's a stage, Shakespeare wrote in 1599, and it still describes most workplaces. They start with the humble-brags, the four-year-old who somehow delivers profound business wisdom, and the everyday phrases we all lean on. Let's circle back. Let's take that offline. Great discussion. Sounds like we're aligned. Then they ask the harder question: why do we do it? The answer starts with threat. We seek safety and we feel threat, and our very old brain treats social risk the same as physical danger. Say the wrong thing and you might get left out, and somewhere deep down that still registers as a matter of survival. Joe and KayLee dig into the strange experiments that prove how strong this pull is: the waiting-room video where strangers stand up at a random beep for no reason at all, and the monkeys who keep enforcing a rule none of them remember learning. Every workplace runs on the same conditioning, a set of unwritten rules nobody hands you but everybody expects you to follow. From there they land on the heart of it: the three selves we carry. Your whole self is everything you are, and you don't bring that to work, or to most relationships. Your false self, the safe self, is the sanitized version that plays it safe and says the approved lines. Your best self sits in between: real, capable, willing to say the true thing and ask for help, edited by choice instead of fear. As KayLee puts it, the best self isn't the edited self, it's the chosen one. They also share a few simple ways to drop one layer of the act, starting today: say the real thing one level more directly than feels comfortableswap the polished statement for the plain one ("I'm at capacity and something has to give" instead of "it's been a full season")ask what your best self would say here, instead of what you're trying to avoid sayingBecause the cost of all this theater isn't just awkward meetings and cringey posts. It's a culture where nobody says what actually needs saying, and the real work never gets done. Key Takeaways Why we default to safe, sanitized language at workHow threat, status, and the fear of being left out keep us faking itWhat conformity experiments reveal about everyday workplace behaviorThe difference between your whole self, your false self, and your best selfWhy real vulnerability is specific, and fake vulnerability is just a blanket statementSimple ways to say the true thing one layer more directlyYou don't need to bring your whole self to work. You need to bring your best self. The rest is just theater.

    44 min

  3. May 19

    The 3 Coaching Questions Every Leader Should Steal | Episode 17

    Most leaders think they’re coaching. But too often, they’re answering faster than people can learn. They solve the problem. They give the answer. They step in, clean it up, and wonder why everyone keeps bringing every decision back to them. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen talk about what coaching actually looks like in real life, not as a buzzword, not as HR wallpaper, and definitely not as “grabbing people by the face mask and telling them what to do.” Yes, that story is real. They break down the difference between helping people and quietly creating dependency. Joe shares why leaders should ask before they tell, why “Have you thought about…” is usually advice pretending to be a question, and how good coaching helps people discover the answer without making them feel small. Joe and KayLee also get into the invisible tax of over-helping, why high performers often get ignored until something goes wrong, how delegation builds trust when it happens in stages, and why silence may be one of the most underrated leadership tools you have. And they leave you with three questions you can use immediately: What are you seeing that I’m not? What would growing through this look like, separate from solving it? How can I help without taking this over? Key Takeaways Why many leaders confuse coaching with faster problem-solvingHow giving answers can train people to keep coming back for moreWhy support turns into rescuing when leaders remove responsibilityThe difference between fixing performance and growing peopleHow to delegate without dumping work on someone too soonWhy “tell me more” and a few seconds of silence can change the whole conversationCoaching is not about having the best answer. It’s about helping someone become more capable because of the conversation.

    42 min

  4. May 5

    Four Beliefs That Shape a Culture | Episode 16

    The same workforce. The same equipment. The same town. One system produced absenteeism, low quality, and a factory GM had to close. The other system produced GM's number one plant. What changed wasn't the people. It was what the people were allowed to do, allowed to say, and allowed to care about. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen dig into the NUMMI story — the joint venture where Toyota reopened a shuttered GM factory in Northern California with the same workforce GM had given up on — and use it to surface four beliefs that quietly shape any healthy culture. People are thinkers, not just a pair of hands. Problems are discussable, not buried. People care about the outcome, not just their piece. The system is built for learning, not blame. They walk through what each belief looks like when it's real, and what it looks like when it's faked. KayLee tells the story of pushing back on a two-week training rollout, winning six months instead, and building the program with the people who'd actually use it — to a waitlist. Joe makes the case for why he'd have killed his own executive program if leadership had cut the coaching. They get into the buried Gallup survey, the militant manager whose terrified team gives him perfect scores, and Marilyn's pocketful of coins — start the day with coins in your left pocket, move one to your right every time you catch someone doing something well. They also tackle why installing a yellow cord doesn't matter if pulling it gets you fired, why "what happens in the five seconds after someone names a problem" tells you everything about a team's safety, and why surveys keep failing the cultures they're supposed to measure. And yes — there's a horse named Salty who was a saint in the big pen and a menace in the small one. You'll understand. Key Takeaways Why the same people in a different system produce a different result — and why that's true everywhere, not just on a factory floorThe four beliefs that quietly shape a healthy culture, and the behaviors that fake themWhat "management by walking around" actually does — and how to do it virtuallyTwo questions that surface what your team has been waiting to say: "where is the work harder than it needs to be?" and "how would you break this process?"Why surveys keep measuring fear instead of culture, and what to do insteadSame people. Different system. Everything changes.

    35 min

  5. Apr 21

    You Don’t Need More Time. You Need Better Choices. | Episode 15

    Most people who say they do not have enough time are not really talking about time. They are talking about the way their week keeps getting taken from them. It happens slowly. A calendar fills up with meetings. Urgent things crowd out important ones. Other people’s priorities take over. And before long, you are moving all day, solving problems, putting out fires, and ending the week wondering why the work that actually mattered never got your best energy. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen take on a question that came straight from a listener: how do you actually get more time back in your week? Their answer is simple, but not simplistic. This usually is not a time management problem. It is a choice problem. They break the conversation into three practical areas: protecting your time, delegating in a way that actually works, and planning proactively instead of living in constant reaction. Along the way, they challenge some of the usual advice people hear but rarely find useful. Joe talks about the value of protecting time before it disappears, whether that means blocking work time on purpose, shortening meetings, or creating harder boundaries around when work is allowed to enter your life. KayLee brings in the role of energy, making the case that managing your time well also means knowing when you are at your best and when certain kinds of work are more likely to drain you. They also dig into delegation in a more honest way than most workplace conversations do. Delegation is not just dumping work on someone else or getting things off your plate. Done well, it builds capability. Done badly, it creates confusion, frustration, and a task that keeps boomeranging back to the leader. Joe and KayLee talk through why delegation often fails, what leaders need to clarify up front, and why letting go does not have to be all or nothing. And in the final part of the conversation, they look at proactive planning. Not as a productivity hack, but as a way to stop living at the mercy of urgency. They explore why so many people confuse being busy with being effective, how status and crisis can become addictive, and why important things like relationships, health, and real priorities often get pushed aside until they become urgent the hard way. They also share a few practical ideas leaders and professionals can use right now, including: how to protect the most important work before meetings consume the weekwhy shorter meetings can create more space and better focuswhat effective delegation sounds like when roles, decisions, and expectations are clearhow a simple weekly planning practice can keep important priorities from getting buriedwhy boundaries matter even more when no one else is setting them for youBecause the problem is not always that there are not enough hours in the day. Sometimes the real problem is that the day no longer belongs to you. Key Takeaways Why time pressure is often really a choice problemHow to protect time before it gets swallowed by meetings and urgencyWhy delegation should build capability, not just remove tasksWhat makes delegated work keep coming back to the leaderHow proactive planning helps you focus on what matters before it becomes a crisisWhy busyness can feel productive while still pulling you off courseHow better boundaries can give you more control over your weekYou do not get your time back by squeezing more into the day. You get it back by being clearer about what deserves it.

    42 min

  6. Apr 7

    The People-First Sales Leader | Episode 14

    Most sales teams are built on pressure. Hit the number. Check the pipeline. Watch the leaderboard. And when the numbers slip, push harder. But what if pushing harder is exactly what's breaking the team? In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen sit down with Graham Nordin, VP of Business Development and Sales at Latitude Wines, a leader with 18 years of progressive leadership across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the UK. Graham has built and rebuilt high-performing sales teams across industries and borders, and he's done it by leading with people first, not performance metrics first. Graham makes the case that leaders can hold a high standard and still be deeply invested in the people doing the work. He calls it separating standard from style: the targets don't change, but how you help someone get there can be flexible, personal, and human. He shares the story of being promoted to lead the very team he was on, calling the most senior person first, and what happened when he said the six words most new leaders are afraid to say: I can't do this without you. Joe and KayLee dig into what happens when the leader above you doesn't lead this way, how to manage up without putting yourself at risk, and why the old leaderboard culture of who's winning and who's losing misses everything that actually drives long-term results. Graham challenges the idea that focusing on outcomes is the fastest path to outcomes, arguing that training the process and uncovering friction is what builds teams that sustain. They also explore what it really takes to make the shift from top performer to leader, why that transition is one of the biggest gaps in leadership development today, and how the move from execution to empowerment changes everything about the way a team operates. Key Takeaways Why the first 60 seconds of a one-on-one matter more than the forecast reviewHow to separate standard from style and hold both at the same timeWhat managing up looks like when your leader is pressure-forwardWhy great leaders don't ask for updates, they uncover frictionHow consistency in small moments builds a culture that outlasts any single leaderWhy the transition from top performer to leader is one of the most underdeveloped skills in businessPeople don't perform for pressure. They perform for people who see them, believe in them, and build something worth showing up for.

    42 min

  7. Mar 24

    Three Reasons People Stay (or Don't) | Episode 13

    People don’t stay because of one big thing. And they usually don’t leave because of one big thing either. They stay, or start to drift, based on three everyday experiences at work: Do I feel seen here? Do I feel like I belong here? Am I still growing here? In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen break down the three human conditions that shape whether people stay connected to the work or slowly start checking out: being seen, belonging, and growth. They explore what each one really means in practice, how leaders tend to overestimate how well they’re doing, and why people often begin leaving internally long before they ever resign.  Joe unpacks why being seen is about more than recognition. It’s about knowing someone’s strengths, understanding what energizes and drains them, and caring enough to see the person behind the output. KayLee reflects on how even small moments of being remembered can change the way someone shows up and why people work harder when they feel genuinely known.  They also dig into belonging as something deeper than inclusion on paper. It’s the feeling of being part of something, being trusted, being included in decisions, and knowing the team has your back. They talk about what happens when that kind of leader leaves, how quickly belonging can collapse, and why connected teams can handle hard conversations better than disconnected ones.  And on growth, they challenge the usual organizational clichés. Growth is not just access to training or a list of courses. It’s whether the work is stretching you, whether someone sees what’s possible in you, and whether development is built into the work itself rather than pushed off to personal time.  They also share a few practical ideas leaders can use right now, including: how psychometric tools can help people feel more seentwo simple questions that reveal what matters personally and professionallywhy teams need a “soft reset” after change, reorganization, or turnoverBecause retention doesn’t start when someone gives notice. It starts much earlier, in the daily experience of whether this place still feels like somewhere I matter.  Key Takeaways Why recognition is not the same thing as being seenHow belonging is built through trust, shared beliefs, and real connectionWhy people can be productive and still feel deeply unseenWhat happens to culture when the “glue” person leavesWhy growth has to live inside the work, not outside of itHow leaders can re-recruit great people before they ever think about leavingPeople stay where they feel known, connected, and still becoming.

    35 min

  8. Mar 10

    3 Trade-Offs People Make When Trust Is Gone | Episode 12

    When trust breaks down, people don't just disengage. They adapt. They go quiet in meetings, cc: six people on every email, and stop asking questions they actually need answered. They trade truth for peace, ownership for CYA, and curiosity for safety — not because they're weak, but because they're surviving. In this episode of How Work Actually Works, Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen unpack what happens when people stop feeling safe at work — and the invisible trade-offs that follow. Joe shares a metaphor that hit him after two friends described their breaking points: a frozen lake in springtime, where every step feels uncertain and the only goal is not falling through. They break down each trade-off — why people stop speaking up, why "just confirming" emails multiply like rabbits, and why no one admits they don't know something. Joe tells the story of the McDonald's CEO whose team let him post a cringe-worthy burger video because nobody felt safe enough to say don't. KayLee shares a technique where she handed out job descriptions from other departments and told her team to solve problems as if they were the CFO. They also get into the parking lot moment — that gut-check when you turn off your car and stare in the rearview mirror, rehearsing how to survive another day. And why that feeling is the clearest signal a leader could ever get. Key Takeaways Why people affirm things they don't believe in — and how to invite the truth backThe difference between blaming first and leading with curiosity when someone misses a deadlineHow "what did we learn?" changes everything about how a team handles failureA self-check: Do people tell the truth early, take ownership quickly, and ask questions freely?Why appropriate professional vulnerability is the fastest way to build trustThe "even better if" question that replaces deficit-thinking with creative momentumTrust isn't a value on the wall. It's what people feel in the parking lot.

    40 min
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5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Work isn't supposed to feel like this. And most people know it. How Work Actually Works is for the people ready to close the gap between what work could be and what it actually is. Hosted by Joe Marques and KayLee Hansen, the show explores what it really takes to build cultures where people don't have to pretend, where leaders shape environments worth showing up to, and where the work itself means something. Real stories. Honest conversations. Practical ideas to make it happen. 🎧 New episodes every other week. 💡 More at AuthenticUnlimited.com

Information

  • Creator
    Joe Marques with KayLee Hansen
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Joe Marques with KayLee Hansen
  • Show Website
    How Work Actually Works