People Managing People

AI isn't the first technology to promise better decisions by removing messy human judgment. But generative AI brings something different: the ability to sound convincing, authoritative, and remarkably human. And that makes questioning its recommendations harder than organizations might want to admit.David Rice sits down with Claire Maiers to explore why context matters more than ever in AI-assisted decision-making, what healthcare's experience with predictive systems can teach business leaders, and how organizations risk quietly redesigning themselves through thousands of automated decisions. The challenge isn't simply keeping humans in the loop. It's building organizations where human judgment still means something.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: TeamflectConnect with Claire on LinkedInSupport the show

We've all taken a workplace personality assessment that tells us something vaguely accurate about ourselves. We read the report, nod along, and promptly forget about it. So why do organizations keep investing in self-awareness tools that rarely change how people actually work?In this episode of People Managing People, host David Rice sits down with Dr. Jay Harrison, Co-Founder and Director of Behavioral Intelligence at Align, to explore the gap between behavioral insight and meaningful change. They discuss why treating everyone the same isn't necessarily fair, how managers can better understand the people they lead, and how behavioral intelligence can help teams anticipate friction before it becomes a problem. They also confront an important question: When does understanding someone's behavior help them grow, and when does it become another label that limits their potential?Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsVisit AlignSupport the show

Most executives think they understand how work gets done. They've got the org charts, process documents, and dashboards to prove it. The problem? Those neat diagrams bear little resemblance to the work employees actually do. And when organizations start automating processes they don't fully understand, they're just making flawed systems run faster.In this episode, David Rice speaks with Heidi Farris, CEO of ActivTrak, about the gap between AI adoption and actual business impact. They explore why employee workarounds are often what keep organizations functioning, how AI-driven productivity gains can simply move bottlenecks elsewhere, and why saving time means very little unless someone decides what to do with it.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: ActivTrakConnect with Heidi on LinkedInSupport the show

For decades, career advice has been simple: specialize, build deep expertise, and become indispensable. But what happens when AI makes that expertise accessible to almost anyone? The value of knowing how to do something is shifting toward knowing what should be done, why it matters, and whether the result is actually any good.In this episode of People Managing People, host David Rice speaks with Tony Castellanos, Head of People at Nextdoor, about why judgment, curiosity, and taste are becoming critical leadership capabilities. They explore how AI could invert the traditional hierarchy of specialists and generalists, why organizing teams around business problems makes more sense than defending functional boundaries, and what happens when the org chart stops dictating who gets to solve what.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: TeamflectConnect with Tony on LinkedInVisit NextdoorSupport the show

Most enterprise AI strategies start with the same question: What can we automate? It's a reasonable question if your ambition is to make the existing workplace run faster. It's a much less useful one if you're trying to build something better.In this episode, David Rice speaks with Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, about why human-AI collaboration demands a different approach to organizational design. They explore the hidden value of workplace friction, why employees need a seat at the table when redesigning work, and the danger of measuring AI success exclusively through efficiency. Because saving time is one thing. Preserving the judgment, relationships, and expertise that make an organization effective is another.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: TeamflectConnect with Paula on LinkedInVisit SalesforceSupport the show

Most companies are still figuring out what an AI agent should actually do. JLL has moved well past that question. With agents operating across facilities management, brand communications, and corporate functions, the company is learning that the hardest problems aren’t necessarily technical—they’re about proving value, building trust, and making sure AI solves an actual business problem instead of becoming another expensive corporate science project.Recorded at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas—with some of the inevitable conference-floor background noise—this conversation between host David Rice and Carlin Power, Global VP of AI and Platform Technology Enablement at JLL, explores what it actually takes to deploy AI at scale. They discuss why ROI needs to live inside the P&L, how decentralized AI development can accelerate useful innovation, and why eliminating entry-level roles in the name of efficiency may be exactly the wrong lesson to take from AI.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Carlin on LinkedInVisit JLLSupport the show

Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, this conversation puts David Rice and Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore—AI lead faculty and lecturer in strategic communication at Columbia University and co-author of The Power of the Learning Mindset—in the middle of one of the biggest questions surrounding workplace AI: Are companies gaining efficiency while quietly weakening their people’s ability to think? With the energy of a live conference comes some background noise, but the discussion cuts through it.David and Dr. Ore explore cognitive debt, skill decay, and why the usual AI metrics—seats, logins, prompts, adoption rates—say very little about whether workforce capability is actually improving. They discuss the risks of outsourcing judgment and critical thinking, the loss of institutional knowledge when organizations replace people rather than reskill them, and why AI transformation needs to be treated as a talent priority alongside a technology priority. Because faster work isn’t much of a win if the people doing it are slowly losing the skills that made them valuable in the first place.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Lilian on LinkedInCheck out Lilian’s book — The Power of the Learning Mindset: How the Best Leaders Foster Curiosity, Develop Innovative Teams, and Achieve Exponential GrowthSupport the show

AI may be changing the work, but the bigger risk is what happens when organizations optimize so aggressively for today’s efficiency that they stop building tomorrow’s capability.Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, host David Rice sits down with Dr. Jana Brown, Chief Human Resources Officer at eHealth, to unpack the long-term consequences of shrinking entry-level pipelines, why HR needs “transformation fluency” rather than technical expertise alone, and what separates useful AI initiatives from expensive corporate hobbies. They also explore the human and operating systems that have to move together if transformation is going to stick—and why the technology itself is rarely the thing that sinks an AI project. Listeners may hear a little more conference-floor noise than usual, but that’s the price of capturing these conversations where they’re actually happening.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jana on LinkedInCheck out eHealthSupport the show

AI in HR has a credibility problem: the technology is getting better at spotting patterns, summarizing data, and automating work, but none of that guarantees a better employee experience. In this conversation, Motivosity Chief Product Officer Jesse Dowdle and VP of Engineering Dano Gillette make the case for “appreciation intelligence”—using AI to remove administrative friction without automating the human moments that actually make recognition meaningful.The bigger opportunity isn’t an AI-generated thank-you note. It’s giving HR and frontline managers a richer picture of employees, surfacing signals before problems become crises, and turning data into useful action. But there’s an important line running through the conversation: AI can recommend, filter, moderate, and nudge. Humans still need to own the judgment.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jesse and Dano on LinkedInVisit MotivositySupport the show

When people stay quiet at work, organizations lose more than participation. They lose ideas, warnings, customer insight, process improvements, and market intelligence that never make it into the room. Seema Bhansali calls this the silence tax—the hidden cost companies pay when their environments make self-censorship the safer option.In this episode, Seema joins David Rice to unpack why “speak up” advice misses the real problem. Employee voice isn’t simply a confidence issue; it’s shaped by systems, social risk, management behavior, and the environments leaders create. They also explore why this matters even more as companies adopt AI, and why communication needs to be treated less like a soft skill and more like an operational capability tied to performance.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: TeamPulseConnect with Seema on LinkedInCheck out evolvEQ StrategiesSupport the show