Are Psychosocial Hazards Present in Your Workplace?

About Are Psychosocial Hazards Present in Your Workplace?

Are you able to confidently spot the psychosocial hazards your team may be facing? Caitlin Ible, an employment law expert from MinterEllison, joins us to provide the practical tips every leader needs to quickly and easily identify and minimize their team's psychosocial risks. To stay a part of this important conversation, join us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/theleaderslab/

Publisher

Dr. Michelle McQuaid and Dr. Paige Williams

Category

business · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Jun 2021

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

39 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Leading Change Well

   When change keeps coming, your leaders plan harder and work longer to protect their teams, and nobody counts the cost. In this fourth episode of Season 8, The Change Diaries, hosts Katie Beresford, CEO of The Michelle McQuaid Group, and Dr Michelle McQuaid go behind the scenes of the training Michelle has spent the past month running with more than 500 leaders across hospitals, schools, government, aviation and local communities. Michelle shares the five ways leaders respond to change and what each one teaches a team over time (from dodging accountability to waiting to be told), why the leaders who sense and adapt as changes unfold are staying well and getting results, and the nervous system skills, conversation maps and simple heart check that give your leaders a shared language to notice which response they've slipped into and choose the one the moment calls for. 00:57 Michelle describes what she's hearing from leaders in every industry right now: people worn out, no end in sight, and a pace of change our nervous systems weren't built for. 05:58 Michelle unpacks the four most common ways leaders respond to change, controlling, rescuing, avoiding and resisting, and the worry sitting underneath each one. 12:30 Michelle introduces the fifth response, adapting, and why the leaders who sense and adjust as changes unfold are more likely to feel well and to see their changes succeed. 15:39 Michelle explains why leaders can't think their way out of a stress response, and the see, soothe and settle skills that get blood and oxygen back to the thinking brain. 18:30 Katie shares why leaders need to practise these tools when they don't need them, borrowing from how paramedics stay calm at a critical scene. 20:24 Michelle walks through what each response teaches a team over time, from a leader who rewrites everyone's work to one who leaves people waiting to be told. 30:38 Michelle explains how she helps leaders assess their own approach without judgment or shame, using a leader chart and a team chart that are hard to unsee once you've seen them. 33:34 Michelle answers whether adapting is always best: it depends on the context, the resources and how much energy the team has left for this change. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Join our new Change Fatigue Antidote mini-masterclass, live in October, where Michelle teaches the five change approaches and shares the leader and team charts, conversation maps and playbooks, at thechangelabs.com.

2. 

   21 Sept 2026

   Shrinking Big Changes Into Smaller Moments

   Are restructures causing distress and fatigue for your leaders and teams? We've found that whether people feel safe enough to be honest early about how a change is landing is the single biggest difference between changes that succeed and changes that don't. In this episode, Katie takes us behind the scenes of a large educational institution navigating a restructure, senior leadership changes and new psychosocial hazard obligations at the same time. She shares how they used the five HEART factors, honour feelings, engage purposefully, appreciate strengths, reach out and take tiny steps, to break the change into smaller moments, and how their leaders moved from overwhelmed and discouraged to equipped and energised. 00:03 Katie outlines what the institution was facing: a restructure, senior leaders leaving, changing roles and arriving (including a new CEO), and new psychosocial hazard obligations, all landing at once. 04:20 Katie explains how honouring feelings worked in practice: executives committed to talking about hard things, and every team used the four-question safety check chat to name what was working, what was a struggle, what they were learning and what to try next. 08:32 Katie describes engaging purposefully through learning goals set alongside performance goals, so people had something within their control even when the restructure wasn't, and every leader got the same training no matter when they joined. 13:50 Katie shares how appreciating strengths through team mapping revealed superpowers, collision points and gaps, and shifted one of their top hazards, inadequate reward and recognition. 17:57 Katie explains why reaching out for help was hardest for siloed faculties and for senior executives who felt they should have the answers, and how playful practice helped them unlearn that. 21:51 Michelle and Katie connect nervous system regulation to asking for help: the leaders who could settle themselves were the ones who could look up, get curious and find solutions beyond their own group. 25:51 Katie shares how taking tiny steps happened through regular group coaching, starting with the executive team because they're the most contagious people in any workplace. 29:59 Katie defines what success looked like: leaders moving from overwhelmed and discouraged to equipped and energised, a board now engaged, and a way of leading that carries beyond this restructure. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our new Change Fatigue Antifote mini-masterclass — at thechangelabs.com.

3. 

   21 Sept 2026

   Sensing Into Self-Doubt With AI Tools

   How are you protecting your team's strengths, confidence and connection as AI tools become part of everyday work? Our research found that burnt out workers who regularly use AI are using their strengths at less than half the rate of those who rarely use it, are carrying noticeably more self-doubt, and are more likely to turn to a chatbot than a colleague when they're stuck. In this episode, Michelle takes us behind the scenes of her own team's two-year experiment with AI, sharing why they set clear boundaries around when to use it, and the simple strengths-mapping exercise now helping people decide what's theirs to own and what's the tool's to run day to day. 00:54 Michelle unpacks three warning signs from the research: burnt-out regular AI users using their strengths less than half as often as light users, carrying more self-doubt, and turning to the bot before a colleague. 05:20 Michelle traces how her team's AI use evolved from early experimentation two years ago to choosing tools and tasks deliberately, guided by a clear policy about what stays human and what doesn' 09:54 Michelle describes how passive, prompt-and-wait AI use started disrupting her own flow state, leaving her feeling foggy and slower at work that used to feel effortless and energizing. 13:21 Michelle connects the dots between two findings: as strengths use drops off, self-doubt and quiet isolation from colleagues both tend to rise together. 17:03 Michelle unpacks the five-question HEART check the team built for talking honestly about how AI is landing for each person, from naming feelings to celebrating tiny wins. 23:02 Michelle walks through the simple, paper-and-pen strengths-mapping exercise the team uses to decide what's theirs to own on a task and what's the AI's to run. 28:00 Michelle names the real risk behind all of this: not just learned helplessness, but slowly losing capabilities she's spent years building and isn't ready to give up. Take our free five-minute change survey to see how you're navigating change right now at thechangelabs.com. Want to go deeper? Grab the research and explore evidence-based tools for navigating change — including our new Change Fatigue Antifote mini-masterclass — at thechangelabs.com.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

160,601

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 59 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

59

Social presence

0

YouTube

86

Engagement

60

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Guest appearances

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