Podcast
People Managing People
Hosted by David Rice · EN
The People Managing People podcast equips forward-thinking leaders to thrive in the AI era—reshaping teams, systems, and strategy without losing what makes work human. Hosted by David Rice, each episode brings real-world insights from innovators, executives, and people leaders on topics like AI in practice, people-first leadership, performance systems, and workplace culture.
36episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Your Employees Stop Thinking The Moment They Feel Unsafe
Yesterday00:34:53Tap to summarizeWhat if the leadership skills we've spent decades rewarding are no longer the ones that matter most?In this conversation, mediator, peacemaker, and author Douglas Noll argues that AI is making critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and human connection more valuable—not less. As technology takes over more analytical work, leaders who can regulate trust, create psychological safety, and keep people engaged will have a growing advantage.Doug challenges some of the deepest assumptions in modern management, including the idea that people are primarily rational actors. From emotional contagion in the workplace to the three questions every nervous system is constantly asking, this discussion explores why leadership in the AI era may be less about technical expertise and more about understanding human behavior.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Douglas on LinkedInCheck out Douglas’ websiteVisit Noll AssociatesSupport the show
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AI Saved Oyster’s HR Team 400+ Hours a Year — Here’s How
5d ago00:10:25Tap to summarizeAI promises efficiency, but the real question is what teams do with the time they get back. In this conversation from Transform in Las Vegas, Oyster’s Erin Goodey joins David Rice to unpack how global HR teams are balancing automation with human connection—especially when managing distributed workforces across countries, compliance requirements, and sensitive employee situations.Erin shares how Oyster is using AI to eliminate repetitive administrative work, freeing HR teams to focus on the moments that actually require empathy, judgment, and strategic thinking. From global expansion challenges to the evolving role of HR business partners, this episode explores what “human-centric” HR really looks like in an AI-enabled workplace.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Erin on LinkedInVisit Oyster HRSupport the show
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Is Leadership Experience Becoming a Liability?
1w ago00:34:16Tap to summarizeMost leaders think they’re navigating another wave of disruption. Sara Loncka argues we’re in something far more unsettling: discontinuity. The old assumptions don’t just need tweaking—they’ve stopped working altogether. Past experience, the thing leaders have spent entire careers building confidence around, is suddenly less reliable as a guide for the future. And that’s creating a strange kind of friction: teams keep pushing harder with familiar playbooks while the terrain underneath them quietly changes shape.In this conversation, David Rice and Sara unpack why experienced leaders are often the most vulnerable in moments like this, how organizations get trapped by expertise, and why the future of strategy looks less like certainty and more like continuous inquiry. They also explore collective intelligence, learning agility, and why redesigning work now requires leaders to think more like designers than operators.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Sara on LinkedInVisit Experience Institute and NYU SternSupport the show
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Fewer Jobs, Higher Pay: The AI Compensation Paradox
2w ago00:14:00Tap to summarizeKyle Holm has spent 25 years advising companies on compensation, and right now he’s watching the logic of corporate hierarchy break in real time. Not because executives suddenly discovered organizational theory, but because AI is collapsing the distance between capability and influence. The old model—slow progression through management layers, credential accumulation, carefully staged promotions—is running into a technology that rewards direct value creation instead. And executives are noticing.In this conversation from Transform Las Vegas, Kyle and David unpack what happens when AI-native companies stop hiring “mid-level” talent altogether, why compensation systems built on titles and tenure are struggling to keep up, and how the next generation of workers may leapfrog traditional career ladders entirely. It’s a conversation about compensation on the surface, but underneath it’s really about power: who gets heard, who creates leverage, and who gets left behind when organizations flatten faster than expected.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Kyle on LinkedInVisit Sequoia Consulting GroupSupport the show
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Community Is the New Buzzword—But We’re Doing It Wrong
2w ago00:22:11Tap to summarizeMost companies say they’re building community. What they often mean is: they launched a Slack channel no one reads, hosted an event with a neon sign and a DJ, watched people post about it on Instagram, and called the whole thing a success. Meanwhile, the people in the room never actually connected.In this episode, David sits down with Jessie Jacob, Culture First Community Manager at Culture Amp, to unpack why relational atrophy is becoming one of the defining workplace problems of the AI era. Jessie manages a global community of more than 100,000 people, and her argument is simple: if people don’t feel safe, welcomed, or genuinely connected, no amount of “community strategy” will save you. In a world increasingly optimized for efficiency, automation, and performative engagement, human connection is quickly becoming the real competitive advantage.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Jessie on LinkedInVisit Culture AmpSupport the show
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AI Is Making People Decisions Worse—Here’s Why
3w ago00:18:28Tap to summarizeAI is speeding up people decisions at exactly the moment those decisions require more care, more context, and frankly, more humility. In this episode, Matt Poepsel from The Predictive Index joins David Rice at Transform to unpack the growing gap between what AI can do and what organizations actually understand about the people data they’re feeding into it. Because while everyone is obsessed with automation, agents, and productivity gains, most managers still don’t know how to ask the most important question: “Do we actually have the right context for this decision?”The conversation digs into the uncomfortable reality underneath modern workplace AI adoption. Companies are compressing timelines because AI can generate outputs faster, but they’re still operating from old assumptions about productivity, management, and collaboration. The result? Burnout, shallow decision-making, and what Matt calls “work slop” — endless AI-generated summaries, presentations, and outputs that create distance between people while pretending to improve teamwork. The deeper challenge isn’t technological. It’s behavioral. And most organizations still aren’t equipped to deal with that.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Matt on LinkedInVisit The Predictive IndexSupport the show
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Only 10% of Leaders Use AI—So Who’s Teaching Everyone Else?
3w ago00:30:38Tap to summarizeOnly 10% of senior leaders admit to using AI. Which raises an awkward question: if leadership isn’t really using the tools, who exactly is teaching everyone else how to work with them? Increasingly, the answer is peers. In this conversation from Transform, David Rice sits down with returning guest Kamaria Scott to unpack why AI adoption is becoming less of a top-down transformation initiative and more of a global peer-learning experiment happening in real time.They explore the growing tension between organizational pressure to adopt AI and the complete lack of capacity many employees have to actually experiment with it. Along the way, they dig into manager enablement, skill atrophy, learning agility, performance management, and the uncomfortable possibility that companies are automating away the very expertise employees need to judge whether AI output is any good in the first place. The result is a candid discussion about why managers may become the bottleneck in AI adoption—and why organizations that failed to build real learning cultures before this moment are now paying for it.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Kamaria on LinkedInSupport the show
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The “Mirror Test” Every Leader Needs Before Adopting AI
4w ago00:32:12Tap to summarizeMost leaders are making AI decisions in the dark—restructuring roles, cutting headcount, and chasing use cases without understanding how work actually gets done. Not the org chart version. The real, messy, task-level reality. And that’s a problem, because when you don’t understand what creates value, automation becomes guesswork dressed up as strategy.Victoria Pelletier joins the show to challenge the prevailing top-down approach. Instead of starting with AI capabilities, she argues for working backwards from business strategy to task-level workflows, skills, and human contribution. The result? A more grounded, more human, and frankly more effective way to redesign work in an AI-driven world.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: Intuit QuickBooks PayrollConnect with Victoria on LinkedInVisit KyndrylSupport the show
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How Great Leaders Prioritize in a World Where Everything Feels Urgent
Apr 2800:47:10Tap to summarizeEverything is urgent—until it isn’t. When every ticket is a fire, teams don’t move faster; they burn out. In this episode, Barbara Nicholas (CEO at Polly) borrows a lesson from search and rescue: urgency only matters when it actually changes outcomes. Most white-collar work isn’t life or death, but we’ve built cultures that pretend it is—and people are paying for it in cognitive overload and constant distraction.Barbara walks through how she operationalizes a triage system across her company—embedding shared language into tools like Slack, Notion, and Jira, and empowering teams to challenge urgency instead of blindly accepting it. From AI experimentation to customer demands and internal comms, this is a conversation about cutting through noise, making better calls under pressure, and remembering what actually matters.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Barbara on LinkedInVisit PollySupport the show
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The AI “Sandwich”: Why HR Teams Are Caught in the Middle
Apr 2100:18:41Tap to summarizeAI in HR is finally moving out of the pitch deck and into the messy reality of day-to-day operations. In this conversation, Tim Fisher sits down with Josh Rod from HiBob to unpack what’s actually changing—and what’s still just noise. The headline? Most organizations aren’t chasing some agentic, fully automated future. They’re trying to make today’s workflows less painful, faster, and marginally more effective.But underneath that pragmatic adoption sits a deeper shift: the structure of work itself is being quietly rewritten. When every employee becomes a “manager” of AI, the old hierarchies start to wobble. HR isn’t just implementing tools anymore—it’s being asked to design the operating system for how humans and machines collaborate. And that’s where things get interesting.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Josh on LinkedInVisit HiBobSupport the show
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