🎙️ Hero to Zero | Episode 2: "Do the Music and Lyrics Match?"
Guest: Fred Deschamps, Founder of FitMe

What happens when the culture your company sings doesn’t match the one your people hear?

In this episode, Ken Pearson sits down with Fred Deschamps—cultural strategist and founder of FitMe—to dissect the dangerous disconnect between stated values and lived experience inside organizations.

Using the metaphor of a dysfunctional orchestra, they explore how corporate leadership often acts as the conductor, shouting “people first” while setting a tempo that burns people out. From HR to high performers, from silent middle managers to performative policies, this episode tackles the reality of what happens when the music and lyrics of workplace culture don't match.

Fred brings 30+ years of corporate experience and the data to back up what many have felt but couldn’t prove: culture misalignment can now be measured. And when it's ignored, it doesn't just cost you talent—it breaks trust, destroys engagement, and creates dissonance that no mission statement can fix.

In this episode:
🎼 Why employees fake harmony when leaders are out of sync
🧠 How culture becomes weaponized by well-meaning managers
🧛 “Vampires and Zombies”: the hidden risk of toxic high performers
📉 Real-life moments when policies killed trust (“Bring us a death certificate”)
🧾 How record profits and pizza parties became the new gaslight
📊 What FitMe is doing to measure and predict culture fit—before it’s too late

If you’ve ever been promised belonging and given burnout…
If you’ve ever watched a quarterly town hall and thought, “Do these execs even like each other?”…
If you’ve ever wondered whether the culture is really what it claims to be…

This one’s for you.

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
If you missed Episode 1 with Dean Trimble, it’s streaming now:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7iLN4wCQwyqL2bcaOqvqsp
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-01-recruiting/id1810908481?i=1000708583152

About the Host:
Ken Pearson is the founder of ShadeTree Consulting and architect of the Eye to I framework. He’s spent two decades coaching executives, rebuilding cultures, and calling out the gap between what organizations say and what they do. Hero to Zero is where those stories get told—with candor, context, and a refusal to sanitize the truth.

🎙️ Thanks for listening to Hero to Zero — where the real stories of HR, leadership, and corporate life get told (finally).

📩 Got a wild workplace story? We want to hear it:
ken.pearson@shadetree-consulting.com

🧠 New episodes drop monthly — subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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