THE NEW WORK PLAYBOOK

Annett Burger
  • 5.0 (2)
  • MANAGEMENT

Most of what we consider to be leadership is about managing resources, not leading humans. AI is about to make that impossible to ignore. The leadership practices that would actually make work better for us are not new. They've just never been trained and practised well enough. Instead we focused on efficiency, control and output. That's management. Now AI can handle all of that much better. What's left for us? I think this is the defining question of our time. Instead of asking if AI will replace leaders, we should ask whether we'll finally build the kind of leadership that deserves to stay. The New Work Playbook is a weekly podcast for anyone who believes that work gets better because people matter. Monday episodes explore why something matters for leadership in the age of AI. Friday reflection episodes give you something practical to try. Hosted by Annett Burger, a leadership practitioner with twenty years of experience in executive search, leadership development, and consulting.

  1. Practicing Care

    1D AGO

    Practicing Care

    Care is not just good intention. It needs practice. Three tools to turn caring into practice. The main episode made the case for why empathy and care are different and why leaders need both. This reflection episode gives you three practices to make care part of how you lead. The first is the simplest and most powerful. Small acts of care propagate through your network in ways researchers have measured, which means you have more influence on the carelessness around you than you may have realised. The second is a short reflection on the four trust dimensions to consider before you walk into a difficult conversation. The third is a set of three checks that help you focus and act on what someone actually needs. Together these practices turn the caring question from a nice opening into something that actually helps.

    12 min
  2. Daring to Care

    3D AGO

    Daring to Care

    Do you know the difference between empathy and care? Many leaders don't. And it's costing us more than we realise. Most of us have been trained on empathy and assume care comes with it. But empathy and care don't even activate the same areas of the brain. And empathy without care is what's been draining leaders for years, without the results we hoped for. In this episode I take you on the discovery journey that changed how I think about both. From psychology to neuroscience to philosophy, research has been pointing at a clear distinction for decades. And the difference between empathy and care shows up clearly in how we lead. I share a question that helps you turn empathy into care. I also look at why dark empathy is more common than we want to admit, and why the courage to practise care matters now more than ever.

    27 min
  3. Rebuilding Trust in Yourself and with Others

    MAY 8

    Rebuilding Trust in Yourself and with Others

    What moral value would most people say they live by? Across cultures, the answer is honesty. So why do we pass on the small daily moments where saying something honestly costs hardly anything? This is the reflection episode following The Broken Spine. I tell the story of a stranger who once spared me a real embarrassment, and what that moment taught me about kindness. We move through two practices for self-trust and two practices for trust with others. The practices are small. Their power is consistency. Trust starts with us. As trust and care go hand in hand, the next episode is about genuine care.

    16 min
  4. Trust: The Broken Spine

    MAY 4

    Trust: The Broken Spine

    What happens when trust collapses at every layer of our world? When companies replace thousands with AI, when politicians are serving their personal interests, and the AI race runs faster than the questions it should answer first? In this episode I look at why trust as the spine of our society is broken. Why even the right kind of leaders are subject to the pressures that make trust collapse. And why the answer to bringing trust back may not start where most listeners expect. I tell the story of the people who walked away from OpenAI in 2021 to build something different, ask what their decision tells us about the kind of leadership that builds trust, and make the case that the leadership we are getting is the cumulative effect of millions of trust choices we are making every day. Can we bring trust back, especially in the age of AI? The episode answers that question but the answer requires more from us than from the leaders we want to follow.

    21 min
  5. Reclaiming Our Curiosity

    MAY 1

    Reclaiming Our Curiosity

    We were told humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. That's a myth turned into popular knowledge. The story has been useful to industries that profit from us believing we are smaller than we are. This reflection episode looks at how diminished beliefs about us shape the environments we accept, and what curiosity has to do with rebuilding them. A private reflection on the times you were certain and turned out to be wrong. The practice of "Keep Asking" when AI hands you the surface answer. And two ways leaders bring curiosity back into their teams. When did you last let yourself wonder?

    17 min
  6. The End of Why

    APR 27

    The End of Why

    When was the last time you let yourself wonder about something for more than a few minutes, instead of reaching for an answer? This episode is about what curiosity actually is, why most organisations have been quietly destroying it for decades, and what that means now that AI is walking on stage. From a 1995 computer science classroom, to two CEOs who took the opposite path, to research published earlier this month: what are we actually trading away when we hand our thinking to machines? This episode connects directly to The Confidence Trap and sets up the next episode on trust.

    28 min
  7. The Confidence Check

    APR 24

    The Confidence Check

    How quickly does your brain jump to an answer? Do you recall your success stories as they were, or how you would like them to sound? Do your opinions about others run your conversations with them? This reflection episode will put your confidence to the test. Two reflections to catch your patterns, and two practices you can start using right away.

    14 min
  8. The Confidence Trap

    APR 20

    The Confidence Trap

    We tend to trust confident people. We follow them, hire them, promote them. But what happens when that confidence isn't grounded in actual competence? This episode is about the two directions from which we can fall into the confidence trap: Falling for the confidence of others, and falling for our own. I share my most painful personal experience of overconfidence, explain the Dunning-Kruger effect, and go deeper into the area where I've seen overconfidence do the most damage in business.

    26 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Most of what we consider to be leadership is about managing resources, not leading humans. AI is about to make that impossible to ignore. The leadership practices that would actually make work better for us are not new. They've just never been trained and practised well enough. Instead we focused on efficiency, control and output. That's management. Now AI can handle all of that much better. What's left for us? I think this is the defining question of our time. Instead of asking if AI will replace leaders, we should ask whether we'll finally build the kind of leadership that deserves to stay. The New Work Playbook is a weekly podcast for anyone who believes that work gets better because people matter. Monday episodes explore why something matters for leadership in the age of AI. Friday reflection episodes give you something practical to try. Hosted by Annett Burger, a leadership practitioner with twenty years of experience in executive search, leadership development, and consulting.

Information

  • Creator
    Annett Burger
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The New Work Playbook. All rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission.
  • Show Website
    THE NEW WORK PLAYBOOK