Biz-Souls

Welcome to the BizSouls podcast! We talk about the business of everything and we get to the heart, soul…and humor… of business and the people who make it happen.

Biz-Souls is a business podcast hosted by Jeffrey Hansler & Rona Lewis, with 239 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Jeffrey Hansler & Rona Lewis hosts Biz-Souls, a business show with 239 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #238

  Episode 238: Your Weakest Connection Might Be Your Strongest Opportunity

  Sep 28, 202612 minS2026

  Networking. Everybody says they’re good at it. Then you go to a conference, and someone walks up, hands you a business card, says, ‘Hi, I’m in real estate,” and immediately begins explaining the 14 things they sell’. Congratulations. You have just experienced ‘show up and throw up.’ In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler tackle the strange, wonderful, occasionally horrifying world of professional networking, and ask a question that sounds simple but turns out to be surprisingly complicated: Do professional relationships actually have to become friendships to be valuable? Rona is, apparently, a networking machine. Put her in a room with 150 people and she’ll meet approximately 125 of them. Jeffrey, meanwhile, prefers fewer people, deeper conversations, and an inner circle he actually trusts. So naturally, they agree. Except when they don’t. And then they start talking about Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves, influencers, background checks, business cards, trust, cocaine, reputation, and the fine art of deciding whether someone you just met is actually someone you should recommend to your clients. Because networking isn't just about collecting contacts. It’s about knowing who you can trust when your reputation is attached to the recommendation. And here's where the science gets interesting. A massive study involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users found that weaker professional connections - people you know, but don't know particularly well - can actually be more useful for discovering new employment opportunities than your closest connections. The researchers found that these “weak ties” can expose us to information and opportunities outside our immediate circles. In other words, that person you chatted with for seven minutes at a conference might be more useful to your career than the person you've known for 20 years. Which is mildly insulting to your best friend. It makes sense. Your closest friends probably know the same people, attend the same events, hear the same stories, and have access to much of the same information you do. Your casual acquaintance from London, however, may know someone who knows someone who can open an entirely different door. Rona's networking philosophy suddenly has some serious science behind it. Jeffrey's response? Yes, and I'm still keeping my inner circle. And honestly, that's probably the point. You don't have to turn every business contact into a dinner companion. You don't have to invite everyone you meet into your life. And you definitely don't have to swap underwear with them. Yes, that somehow comes up in this episode. We have questions too. You do, however, need to pay attention to people. How do they treat the waiter? How do they treat someone who can't do anything for them? Do they follow through? Do they know what they're talking about? Are they trustworthy enough that you'd put your own reputation behind them? Because when you recommend someone, their behavior doesn't just reflect on them. It reflects on you. While this episode is about networking, it's really about something bigger: Relationships without pretending everyone has to become your friend. It's about trust without naïveté. It's about being open to unexpected connections without being stupid about who you let into your professional orbit. And, perhaps most importantly, it's about asking better questions instead of immediately telling strangers what you sell. So, share, follow, and subscribe to Biz-Souls and maybe, just maybe it might result in your next critical connection. Related Biz-Souls Episodes Episode 177: Margie Zable Fisher - Storytelling, Connection, and Authentic Influence • https://open.spotify.com/search/Biz-Souls%20Episode%20177 • https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Biz-Souls+Episode+177+Margie+Zable+Fisher

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  Episode #237

  Episode 237: Great Culture Slogan, Too Bad It’s Fantasy

  Sep 21, 202616 minS2026

  You can put ‘People First’ on the wall. You can put, ‘Our people are our greatest asset!’ on the website. You can even give everyone a company mug that says, ‘Teamwork Makes the Dream Work’. Eventually somebody must actually create a culture where people want to work. In this episode, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler take on five warning signs that your company culture may be heading south. And Jeffrey, apparently heading south himself, arrives looking like culture has already won. The conversation starts with engagement or, more accurately, the disturbing lack of it. Gallup’s latest global workplace research says only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025, while low engagement was associated with an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. Managers aren't exactly thriving either: manager engagement fell to 22%. So, basically, congratulations! Your employees aren't engaged, your managers aren't engaged, and Jeffrey is so exhausted he may be engaging primarily with his pillow. The five warning signs: 1. Engagement is alarmingly low 2. Managers shape culture far more than the mission statement does. 3. Managers themselves are struggling. 4. Curiosity may be one of our last human advantages. 5. Leaders may say they love curiosity—right up until somebody gets curious. This may be the great cultural paradox. Leaders say they love innovation. They say they love creativity. They say they love people who ‘challenge the status quo.’ Right up until someone challenges their status quo. Then suddenly curiosity becomes, ‘Why are you questioning this?’, ‘Who approved this?’, ‘Can't you just follow the process?’, and ‘Is there a reason you keep asking questions?’ The result is a culture where people learn very quickly that the safest employee is the employee who keeps their head down and their questions to themselves. And then there's Jeffrey. Somewhere along the way, Jeffrey appears to have become the living embodiment of Episode 204, The Great Exhaustion. Rona is discussing culture. Jeffrey is discussing culture. Jeffrey is also apparently conducting an unauthorized longitudinal study on what happens when a human being records too many podcasts. At one point, the conversation wanders through Sarbanes-Oxley, middle management, AI, curiosity, Steve Jobs, Bear Bryant and the general human tendency to make things unnecessarily complicated. Which is, frankly, exactly why we have Biz-Souls. The hosts eventually land on the real issue: Good culture isn't what you say. It's what people experience. And the interesting part? Bad culture can be remarkably durable. The episode points to examples where the personality and behavior of a founder or leader can continue influencing an organization long after the person is gone. The takeaway… If you want people to engage, don't just tell them to engage, give them something worth engaging with. Have you ever worked somewhere where everyone knew the culture was terrible except the people in charge? Rona and Jeffrey would love to hear about it. In the meantime, make their day by sharing, following, and subscribing to Biz-Souls. A few facts worth weaving into promotion The Gallup numbers make the episode particularly timely. Its 2026 report says global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the second consecutive annual decline, with manager engagement falling to 22%. Gallup estimates the resulting low engagement cost the global economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, or about 9% of global GDP. There's also a useful AI connection: Gallup's July 2026 research says U.S. employee engagement remained flat in the first half of 2026 even as AI adoption accelerated, and employees were more likely to be engaged when AI was introduced with clear expectations, thoughtful implementation and manager support. The SEC notes that the 2002 law strengthened management's responsibility for internal controls and financial reporting following scandals including Enron.

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  Episode #236

  Episode 236: Leadership Landmines - Are You Standing on One?

  Sep 14, 202614 minS2026

  Leadership has landmines though not the cool kind from an action movie. Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler get into a conversation about the things that can quietly derail leaders and teams and, as usual, manage to wander into Apple, NASA, Steve Wozniak, JCPenney, ego, fear, cash flow, poker faces, and why sometimes the best thing a leader can do is get out of their own way. The conversation starts with a Harvard Business Review idea about four behaviors that can cause serious trouble for leaders: certainty, inconsistency, emotional reactivity, and justification. This isn't a lecture on leadership theory, it’s more like two people looking around the business world and saying, ‘Oh yeah. We've seen that.’ A lot. There's the leader who becomes so certain they're right that contradictory information becomes nothing more than an annoying interruption. There's the leader who is perfectly calm and reasonable one day and apparently auditioning for the role of “angry boss” the next. And everybody around them learns an important survival skill: figure out which version of the boss showed up this morning. Then there's emotional reactivity. Jeffrey freely admits that he doesn't exactly have a poker face, which is probably not ideal when you're running a company and your employees are trying to figure out the financial health of the organization by watching your eyebrows. And that leads into one of the more personal parts of the conversation: what happens when you're running a business and cash flow is tight, payroll is looming, and every lost sale suddenly feels like a five-alarm fire. Because leaders don't leave their emotions at the office door, neither do employees. Then there's justification, the wonderfully human tendency to explain why the decision we made was actually a good decision, despite the increasingly large pile of evidence suggesting otherwise. Rona and Jeffrey get into Ron Johnson's spectacularly complicated journey from Apple retail success to his much less successful run at JCPenney, and the uncomfortable question that follows almost every leadership failure: At what point do we stop explaining what happened and start asking what we did? That's where this episode gets particularly interesting, because underneath all the stories is something much harder than leadership technique: Self-awareness. It's easy to recognize bad leadership when somebody else is doing it. It's considerably more difficult when somebody says, ‘You know, you do that too.’ Suddenly we're not talking about leadership theory anymore. We're talking about ourselves. And that's where Rona brings the conversation around to something that has become a recurring Biz-Souls theme: play. Not mandatory fun. No trust falls. Not another corporate exercise where everyone has to reveal their favorite kitchen appliance. Real play. The kind that lets people experiment, loosen up, see things differently, and—perhaps most importantly—stop treating every disagreement like a threat to their authority. Maybe that's one of the best antidotes to leadership ego. Sometimes you don't need another strategy session, you need to get out of your own head. And laugh at yourself once in a while, because the funny thing about leadership landmines is that they're much easier to see when they're sitting under somebody else's desk. Until you realize there's one under yours. Listen to this episode, and then, just for fun, ask your team what you do that makes their lives harder. We take no responsibility for what happens next, and we would really like to hear the answer. Listen, subscribe, share, and bring your sense of humor, because business is serious, and people are complicated. And apparently, leaders are people too. Related Biz-Souls episodes: Episode 136: Mature Gnome with Ego • https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SrTBRzWZ9MbhycJw5Nkwv • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl6sKzNUWTo The official Biz-Souls podcast archive is here as well: https://biz-souls.com/listen-now/

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  Episode #235

  Episode 235: Your Face Is Talking and AI Is Listening by watching

  Sep 7, 202615 minS2026

  What happens when artificial intelligence gets really, really good at reading people? Well, apparently, poker is about to become a lot less fun—and Jeffrey Hansler is about to become a lot poorer. In this episode of Biz-Souls, Rona Lewis and Jeffrey Hansler dive into the fascinating, and slightly creepy, world of AI analyzing facial expressions, body language, breathing and those tiny involuntary reactions humans make before they say, ‘I’m not bluffing.’ Now a computer may be letting others know, ‘Your left eyebrow says otherwise.’ And that's where this conversation gets much bigger than poker. If AI can detect a bluff at the poker table, what happens when that same technology walks into a boardroom? A negotiation? A job interview? A courtroom? A Zoom meeting where someone says, ‘We’re really excited about this opportunity,’ while their face is apparently screaming, ‘Please get me out of this meeting.’ Rona and Jeffrey explore what happens when AI starts interpreting human behavior, and whether we should actually trust it. Because humans already have plenty of problems interpreting each other. Now we're handing the job to a machine. The conversation wanders, because, well, it’s Biz-Souls, and it lands on some seriously important questions: • Should AI be allowed to determine whether someone is bluffing? • What happens when technology starts judging candidates based on facial expressions or personality? • Could AI actually reinforce the biases we're trying to eliminate? • Should a CEO be penalized because an algorithm thinks they don't look confident enough? • What happens to thoughtful leaders who naturally keep their options open? • And at what point does “using data” become “letting the machine decide who you are”? The hosts also get into the fascinating work of Dr. Paul Ekman and micro expressions, the tiny facial reactions that can reveal emotions before we consciously control them. His research became the inspiration behind the television series Lie to Me. Perhaps the biggest question is this: Just because AI CAN read us, should we let it? Technology can process enormous amounts of information. It can spot patterns humans miss. It can analyze thousands of signals simultaneously. Humans aren't spreadsheets. We're complicated. We change our minds. We second-guess ourselves. We bluff. We get nervous. We say something stupid and then spend the next three days wondering why we said it. And sometimes a thoughtful person looks uncertain because they're actually thinking. That might be a problem if an algorithm decides uncertainty equals weakness. The conversation eventually lands where Biz-Souls loves to land: • How do we use technology without losing our humanity? • Because the future probably isn't going to be human versus AI. • It's going to be humans using AI and figuring out when to trust it, when to question it, and when to tell it, ‘Thanks, HAL, we'll take it from here.’ And as for Jeffrey's poker career? Let's just say he's already admitted that people can read him like a book. Apparently, they don’t even need AI. So, watch, listen, laugh, think, and if you play poker with Jeffrey afterward, he’ll supply the cash. Then share, subscribe, and follow for more fun with Biz-Souls. #BusinessWithAnEdge #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIandHumanity #FutureOfWork #Leadership #LeadershipDevelopment #HumanBehavior #MicroExpressions #BodyLanguage #EmotionalIntelligence #Negotiation #NegotiationSkills #PokerFace #Bluffing #DecisionMaking #HR #HumanResources #Hiring #WorkplacePsychology #LeadershipLessons #BusinessPodcast #PodcastMarketing #LearningAndDevelopment #FutureOfBusiness #TechnologyAndHumanity #AIethics #KeepTheHumanHuman

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  Episode #234

  Episode 234: Congratulations! You're Promoted... Now What?

  Aug 31, 202615 minS2026

  Congratulations! You're the best employee in the company. Your reward? A brand-new job you're completely unprepared for. What could possibly go wrong? This week on Biz-Souls, Jeffrey Hansler and Rona Lewis tackle one of business's oldest traditions: "You're amazing at your job, so let's immediately stop letting you do it." It's the corporate equivalent of saying, ‘You're a fantastic violinist, congratulations, you're now conducting the entire orchestra.’ Jeffrey explains why companies confuse technical excellence with leadership potential, while Rona shares stories about top salespeople who became managers—and suddenly discovered that motivating people is a lot harder than closing deals. Along the way you'll discover: • Why "me, me, me" has to become "we, we, we" • Why some doctors, engineers and salespeople make spectacularly bad managers • The hidden danger of insecure bosses • Why organizations keep rewarding the wrong behaviors • The real difference between leadership and management And somewhere in the mix, Jeffrey gets accused of being insecure. If you've ever been promoted and immediately thought, ‘Wait, nobody showed me how to do this job!’ Welcome to the club. Research proves it’s a big club and even has a name, ‘The Peter Principle’. The classic concept from Laurence J. Peter suggests that people are often promoted based on success in their current role until they reach a position where they are no longer competent. While often discussed humorously, later research has found evidence that organizations often reward past performance rather than assessing leadership capability. Gallup's workplace research consistently finds that managers have an outsized influence on employee engagement, retention, and performance. One of Gallup's most cited findings is that managers account for a substantial share of the variance in team engagement, reinforcing the episode's point that managing people requires a different set of skills than individual contribution. There’s hope, because leadership Is a learnable skill. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership and other leadership-development organizations shows that effective managers are developed through coaching, feedback, mentoring, and deliberate practice—not simply by receiving a promotion. While research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson proves that teams perform better when employees feel safe asking questions, admitting mistakes, and contributing ideas. Managers who rely on fear or ego often reduce collaboration and innovation—an issue Jeffrey and Rona discuss throughout the episode. Finally, if you've ever survived a bad boss, this episode may explain exactly how they got there. So, listen now! Listen often. Like. Share. Subscribe. You never know what other advantages listening to Biz-Souls can provide for you. Related Biz-Souls Episodes: Episode 233 – Every Leader Is in Sales • https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Biz-Souls+Episode+233 • https://open.spotify.com/search/Biz-Souls%20Episode%20233 Episode 227 – Confidence vs. Intelligence • https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Biz-Souls+Episode+227 • https://open.spotify.com/search/Biz-Souls%20Episode%20227 Episode 225 – Happiness, Success & The Myths We Believe • https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Biz-Souls+Episode+225 • https://open.spotify.com/search/Biz-Souls%20Episode%20225 Episode 176 – Leadership and Decision Making with Judge Daren Margolin • https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Biz-Souls+Episode+176 • https://open.spotify.com/search/Biz-Souls%20Episode%20176 leadership development, first-time manager, new manager training, Peter Principle, management mistakes, employee promotion, leadership coaching, emotional intelligence, workplace culture, leadership skills, organizational development, sales management, management training, employee engagement, Biz-Souls podcast

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