If culture’s in HR, it’s in foster care.

Karl Treacher has spent 25 years inside boardrooms, including the war room of a big four bank during the Royal Commission, and he has watched leaders hand culture to the one department that was never meant to own it. Engagement scores can look healthy while the culture underneath is quietly turning toxic, and the board is often the last to know.

Karl built a culture diagnostic later featured in Harvard Business Review, and he says measuring culture is far easier than most leaders believe. He and Andrew get into what boards consistently misread about the culture they lead, and the afternoon in an aged care day room that set the course of his career. If you sit on a board, run a team or answer to one, this conversation will change how you look at your own organisation.

 00:00 Who really owns culture in your company?
 01:31 Nursing homes, Olive and the moment Karl saw the system was the problem
 07:41 “If culture’s in HR, it’s in foster care”
 09:31 Culture vs climate: the confusion boards keep making
 11:38 Building the culture diagnostic HBR called the gold standard
 14:43 Donuts, beers and gaming the engagement survey
 15:41 Inside a big four bank’s war room during the Royal Commission
 16:59 Return to office: what the evidence actually says
 22:32 Small business: when the founder’s character becomes the culture
 24:30 Why most leaders have burnout wrong
 28:45 Writing a book on burnout, and burning out
 31:37 Why we’re running antique cultures not fit for today

Find out more about Karl’s work and the Culture Institute: https://builttoburn.com.au/
Connect with Karl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treacher/
Get Karl’s book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Built-Burn-People-Leaders-Cultures/dp/1394456514
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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Lost jobs. Bankruptcy. Marriages that did not survive. Unmanaged ADHD can leave a trail most of us never see, because the risk-taking that looks like drive on the outside is fed by the same low dopamine that quietly pulls a life apart. Lindy Hadges maps the layers sitting beneath the label, and makes the case that you cannot work with ADHD until you understand what is actually holding it in place.

View the ADHD Cake model: https://performanceintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ADHD-Cake-of-Understanding.png
Find out more about the ADHD Foundation: https://adhdfoundation.org.au/about-us
Connect with Lindy: https://ccaa.net.au/practitioner/200102-14/

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

You’re exceptional at your job. That isn’t the problem. The skills, the experience, the judgement, you’ve spent years building those and they aren’t going anywhere.

The question is whether you’ve still got the capacity to use them. Enough in the tank for the project that matters. Something left for the people at home afterwards. The momentum to get where you told everyone you were going.

And the wave is coming either way. A bigger year, a harder quarter, a team asking more of you than it did last time. Capability isn’t what keeps you upright when it lands.

Byron Cannon has the capability. He is the CEO of LDK Seniors’ Living, a business about to triple in size, and a year ago he worked out capability wasn’t what he was running out of. Andrew and Byron walk through how they built Byron's leadership capacity to sustain his performance and how this rippled onto his leadership team.

Byron didn’t do anything you couldn’t do. He just did it before he had to.

00:00 Why senior leaders really get pushed out
07:12 The hotel room phone call: “I can see burnout on the horizon”
11:02 Inside Byron’s full physical and psychological assessment
13:41 Dr Tom Buckley on what the data showed
20:20 Love, decency and kindness: the mission to change retirement living
26:33 Larry the gnome and how LDK builds its culture
29:46 The mindset shift: treating leadership capacity as strategy
38:47 AI: why depleted leaders outsource their thinking
47:34 How Byron rewrote Andrew’s framework: from survival week to surge week
52:50 “I felt selfish”: the hidden barrier to putting yourself first
56:29 Eight months later: the reassessment results
01:06:45 Unscripted: Byron’s team shares what changed for them

Want to learn more about Leadership Capacity? Start here: https://performanceintelligence.com/building-leadership-capacity/

Follow Byron on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byroncannon
Learn about LDK: https://ldk.com.au/

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Ask Lisa Alexander who the best coaches she has known were, and almost none of them were the best players. Alexander spent a decade running the Australian Diamonds netball team to an 81 per cent win rate, one of the most dominant coaching records in Australian sport, and she names the pattern directly: serial winning coaches are rarely elite players themselves.

The reason has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with what coaching actually requires. What that is, and who she credits with teaching her the difference, is where this goes.

You can find Lisa at the TGI website: https://tgisport.com.au/talent/lisa-alexander/
Or the Celebrity Speakers website: https://www.celebrityspeakers.com.au/speakers/lisa-alexander/
Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-alexander-am-a83bb378/?originalSubdomain=au

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Divorce at the start of the year. A great white shark attack, live on television, in the middle of it. The death of his eldest brother at the end. That was 2015 for professional surfer Mick Fanning. Performance coach Nam Baldwin, who has worked with world champions across multiple sports, was in his corner for all of it.

Baldwin says the conventional playbook for elite athletes, push through, stay hard, don’t let it show, would have made things worse. What he coached instead, and why it had to come before any return to competition, is what this one is about.

Visit Nam's website: https://www.nambaldwin.com/
Visit Hupo's website: https://hupo.com.au/

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Olympic gold medallist, Michael Klim, explains why the mentality that won him 17 years of world records nearly destroyed his life after retirement. Michael took the same win-at-all-costs approach into business: redeye flights, fourteen-hour days, no off switch, and it cost him his relationship, his mental health, and eventually his body.

You can find Michael at his TGI Sport Profile: https://tgisport.com.au/talent/michael-klim/
At his Website: https://www.michaelklim.com/
Or on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelklim1/?hl=en

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Creatine has spent decades filed under gym supplements, something for building muscle and nothing else. Dr Tom Buckley says that filing is out of date. A recent meta-analysis found measurable improvements in memory, attention and processing speed among people taking creatine, distinct from any effect on strength or size. Buckley, who has spent his career researching human performance, is careful about what the research does and does not show. What it does show, for a desk-bound brain rather than a gym-bound body, is the part worth hearing.

Find Dr Tom here
View the UNSW Study
View the Hair Loss Study
Read the study on creatine and cognitive function
Read the creatine articles from the AFR and The Guardian

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Most productivity systems quietly punish you for a bad week. Andrew May's Better Week framework budgets for them. The target is 25 to 30 genuinely good weeks a year, a number most high performers find uncomfortably low, which leaves room for the stretches when everything lands at once. 

He walks Angela Poon, Performance Intelligence COO, through the maths. What he calls the rest of the year, and what changes when you say it out loud to your team on a Monday. High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

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Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Years of touring teach cricketers to be very comfortable in their own company. Coffee when you want it, lunch when you want it, a day built entirely around you. Former Test wicketkeeper Steve Rixon argues the skill cuts both ways: it protects you on the road, then quietly isolates you once the career ends and the kids leave home. Former Test fast bowler Stuart Clark has already had to work it out for himself. What each of them realised was missing, and why it had nothing to do with cricket.

You can find Stuart at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuart-clark-32019360/
Book Steve to speak at your next event: https://www.celebrityspeakers.com.au/speakers/steve-rixon/ 

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Most people who benefit from the status quo work hard to keep it. Michael Bungay Stanier, Rhodes Scholar and bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, says it was built for him, and decided to spend some of that advantage.

First through curiosity and humour, the quieter tools for shifting who holds power in a room. Then through the harder move: stepping down as CEO of Box of Crayons, the company he founded. What that handover asked of him, and the temptation he had to resist to make it stick.

Find Michael at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbungaystanier/

Or Website: https://www.mbs.works/

Buy a copy of Michael's books: https://www.booktopia.com.au/michael-bungay-stanier/author1256.html

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

A professor at Harvard and MIT wrecked his knee and stopped running the 7.5 miles he ran every night of his adult life. 5 months later he could not finish his own work. He was losing the thread in conversations, forgetting things he had never forgotten, and getting angry in a way he did not recognise. He was convinced he had developed adult ADD in middle age.

He hadn't. He had just stopped running...

The psychiatrist who worked that out went looking for evidence that barely existed at the time. 2 decades later it became Spark, the book that put exercise and the brain in the same sentence for most of us for the first time.

You already know you should move more. That is not the problem. The problem is the distance between knowing it and doing it, and what that distance costs you if you are paid to think for a living. Attention? Mood? Whether you can still hold a hard problem in your head at four in the afternoon?

Dr John Ratey is now 78 years old. He has been at Harvard since his residency, he has written 12 books, and his own protocol is far simpler than anything you would expect from a Harvard laboratory. He explains what BDNF does to a brain, why he now describes muscle as an endocrine organ rather than scaffolding, what the last 10 years of research has added to the case he made in Spark, and the one thing he could not write at the time because the evidence was not there yet.

You can keep treating exercise as the thing you do for your body when there is time left over. Or you can treat it as maintenance for the organ you are actually being paid for.

00:00 The Harvard genius who lost his mind when he stopped running
 06:05 The cocktail party patient who started it all
 11:01 The 1970s discovery behind the runner's high
 14:05 Turn ADHD into a superpower: the Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes
 20:06 The real prescription for a distracted mind
 24:54 The school that got smarter by moving more
 29:08 Meet BDNF: the brain's own Miracle-Gro
 32:45 Dr Ratey is 78, and he's nowhere near done
 37:11 Inside Spark 2.0: what's changed since the first book
 43:26 Why a fit brain matters more in the age of AI
 53:16 John's own weekly training plan
 1:04:16 The question John didn't expect: why he took up Zumba at 75

Learn more about Dr John Ratey here: https://www.johnratey.com/ 

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.