WTF is Business Casual
Buckle up for real HR stories that'll make you laugh, cringe, and thank your lucky stars you're not that guy.
WTF is Business Casual is the HR podcast where two seasoned consultants—Sarah Bursten and Jenny Lavey, co-founders of RiseHR—dish on wild workplace fails, toxic bosses, employee drama, and leadership gone wrong. With 35+ years of combined experience in HR, leadership development, and people management, they offer surprisingly useful advice wrapped in real talk and hilarious storytelling.
If you’re an HR professional, small business owner, people manager, or just someone who’s survived office politics, this show is for you.
Subscribe to WTF is Business Casual—because work is weird, leadership is messy, and people always be peopling.
Hosted by Sarah Bursten & Jenny Lavey | RiseHR
www.risehumanresources.com
WTF is Business Casual
"Soft Skills" is a Terrible Name for the Most Important Skills You Have
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In this episode of WTF is Business Casual?!, Jenny and Sarah get real about why "soft skills" is a garbage term for the most critical thing missing from your workforce right now. Armed with a Harvard Business Review study of 70 million job transitions, they make the case that collaboration, communication, and problem-solving aren't the floor. They're the ceiling raiser.
And yet companies keep hiring, promoting, and paying for the wrong thing.
Whether you're a small business owner, a people manager, or just someone who's been on hold with a chatbot for forty-five minutes, you'll leave with:
- ✅ Why technical skills have a half-life of under two years, and what actually holds its value
- 💡 The real reason managers keep getting promoted into roles they can't handle
- 😂 A Wendy's AI drive-through that has customers ready to commit crimes
- ✅ One practical thing you can do this week to start building human skills in your organization
Highlights:
[00:00] Cold open: foundational skills beat specialists long-term
[01:02] "Soft skills" is a bad name. Let's call them human skills
[03:24] The HBR study: 70M job transitions, one big finding
[04:51] Technical skill alone destroys culture
[05:19] Internships vs. real-world people skills
[10:23] The half-life of technical skills is shrinking fast
[12:20] AI does the technical stuff — then what?
[13:19] What happens when a manager reads an AI script to an employee
[16:09] Why organizations invest in the wrong training
[18:46] Promoted for technical skills, unequipped to lead
[19:11] Gen Z, COVID, and why we're failing them
[23:51] Job postings: collaboration language up, supervision language down
[26:40] Why Jenny and Sarah's first product flopped (and why that matters)
[27:09] The coffee shop owner who threw her barista under the bus
[31:45] Engineering humans out of human resources
[32:14] The Airbnb nightmare — no human, no resolution
[38:45] Wendy's AI drive-through and the rage it's about to unleash
[41:03] Tactical takeaway: pick one human skill and define it
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