REPLUG launched just weeks before the pandemic. It went remote out of necessity and stayed remote by choice. Co-founder Luca Mastrorocco, who spent years managing teams in person, shares what that shift taught him about running a company where people rarely share a room. The conversation covers why remote work isn’t for everyone, why REPLUG…

Influencing without authority isn’t just a challenge for junior employees: it follows people all the way to the top of an organization. This episode breaks down what influence actually means, using a simple framework of control, influence, and concern, and explores why pushing too hard, too fast, can trigger pushback rather than agreement.The conversation covers…

In this episode, we talk with Geoff Curtis, author of Embracing Your Own Purgatory, about what happens when the identity you built around your work disappears. Geoff describes the armor he built around his career, and how he used work to avoid dealing with harder things in his own life. We talk about destination addiction…

Giovanni Di Felice talks about what it takes to build a personal brand while representing an employer. He shares why he sees personal branding as helpful rather than necessary, how his following grew organically over just few years, and where he draws the line on authenticity (open about work challenges and opinions, but private about…

Giving feedback is one of the hardest parts of managing people, and most of us were never taught how to do it. In this conversation, we sit down with Katie O’Brien Ceccarini, Certified Executive Coach and author of Fearless Feedback, to unpack what actually makes a feedback conversation work. We start with mindset (Katie’s reframe…

In this conversation, leadership and performance facilitator Richard Gordon Kelly explores the invisible beliefs we carry about who we need to be, and how those beliefs, more than the work itself, create pressure and burnout. The discussion covers where these beliefs originate, why pressure acts as “expensive fuel,” and what happens when a thought is…

Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg joins Stepsero to discuss her co-authored paper, “AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture.” The conversation covers how reliance on the same AI tools drives convergence in language, methods, and questions, plus a productivity paradox, where individual gains in output create more collective work rather than less. It also touches on…

In this episode, Olga Solovyeva explains why AI adoption inside organizations is so uneven, often coming down to leadership. Some leaders give teams freedom and time to experiment; others pause and “park” AI altogether. That caution has a cost. When leadership restricts AI, employees often turn to personal accounts instead (what Olga calls shadow AI…

Most people approach their careers the same way: skip the thinking, go straight to applying. Hundreds of applications to roles they half-want, hoping something sticks. Alex McCann has spent the last few years trying to understand why, and building something to fix it. In this conversation, he breaks down why so many career decisions get…

Psychological safety is one of those terms everyone has heard, and most people misunderstand. It’s not about being nice. It’s not about avoiding conflict. And it’s certainly not about lowering the bar. In this episode, Mehmet Baha breaks down what psychological safety actually means, why the data behind it is hard to ignore, and what…