In this episode of Work Is Third, host Dawn Hunter sits down with Michael Tennant, founder and CEO of Curiosity Lab, creator of Actually Curious, and author of The Power of Empathy, for a conversation about grief, felt values, and what it takes to build empathy as an actual skill.

In this episode of Work Is Third, host Dawn Hunter sits down with BJ Talley, Founder and President of the strategic communications firm Gladius, to talk about what actually builds trust on a team. BJ shares how his fully remote company opens its books to every employee, why he believes leaders should help people find work elsewhere if it's a better fit for their strengths, and how redefining balance around equal investment changed the way he leads.

Emily Adams left the Amish community at 17 with no roadmap—jumping out of a two-story window in the middle of the night with no plan. She went on to manage production lines for Ford, GM, and BMW, save millions in operational gaps inside a global tech company, bootstrap a tech platform from scratch, and help lead Tampa Bay Tech Week to a profitable 40-event week as COO.

On this episode of Work Is Third, Dawn Hunter talks with Jonathan Cave about daring to become that person instead. Jonathan is the author of The Tree and the Mountain – Dare to Become where he shares his journey to redefine himself.

Brooke Dukes has built four companies in 24 years, and she's found the same problem inside every one of them: the founder becomes the bottleneck. Brooke Dukes is the founder of Success by Design, a leadership operating system for founders and CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses and the author of Burn On, Not Out. In this episode, Brooke and Dawn get into what that bottleneck really is: control and fear, dressed up as "just being hands-on," and why it's often the same pattern showing up at home and at work.

Self-Published Author, Speaker, Female Mentor and Women's Advocate, and corporate finance professional, Urmi Hossain joins Dawn to talk about "friendtors," speed mentoring, and the boundaries that let her invest in herself so she can invest in everyone else. She shares tips on managing time so that she can do all the things that fill her up.

Have you ever felt like you didn't belong somewhere but couldn't explain why? Organizational scientist, adjunct professor, and keynote speaker Andrea D. Carter has spent years studying exactly that feeling — and she has the data to prove it's not in your head. It's in your nervous system. Her belonging research, validated across 8 industries and over 150,000 people, makes one thing undeniable: belonging isn't soft. It's science. It's infrastructure. It's how people perform.