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.
45episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
When Your Expertise Stops Being Yours
Apr 700:38:14Tap to summarizeAI is supposed to free people up for “higher-value work.” Fine. But what, exactly, is that work? In this episode, David Rice talks with cyberpsychology researcher and psychotherapist Dr. Rachel Wood about the part of AI adoption most organizations keep skimming past: the human cost of automating too much, too quickly, without a real philosophy for what should remain deeply, stubbornly human.Their conversation cuts through the usual AI optimism and gets to the more uncomfortable truth. Some friction should absolutely go away. Nobody needs to spend an hour copying and pasting spreadsheet data. But some friction is the job: disagreement, discernment, hard conversations, learning by getting things wrong, and figuring out who you are when your expertise is suddenly easier to imitate. This episode is really about that distinction, and why leaders need to stop treating AI as a software rollout and start treating it as a human development challenge.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Rachel:LinkedInAI Mental Health CollectiveRachel’s websiteSupport the show
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What Great Leaders Do Differently Under Extreme Pressure
Mar 3100:47:27Tap to summarizeLeaders love to frame AI transformation as a technology problem. It’s cleaner that way—tools, roadmaps, implementation plans. But what Anouk Brack lays out here is less flattering and far more consequential: this is a biological stress test, and most leadership teams are quietly failing it.Under constant uncertainty and pressure, your nervous system defaults to survival mode. That means the very capabilities you’re counting on—strategic thinking, self-reflection, sound judgment—start to degrade. Not dramatically. Subtly. You keep moving, keep deciding, keep “leading.” But you’re doing it with a shrinking field of view and a growing pile of bad bets.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Anouk:LinkedInLeadership EmbodimentAnoukA TrainingSupport the show
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Corporate Retail Therapy: Why More AI Tools Won’t Help
Mar 2400:48:14Tap to summarizeYour leadership team doesn’t have a strategy problem—it has an execution problem disguised as one. The offsite went great, the vision is crisp, and the slides look expensive. But somewhere between “bold initiative” and “Tuesday morning,” nobody translated strategy into what people should actually do. That gap? That’s where most organizations quietly stall.Tom Healy argues that L&D is the missing link leaders keep ignoring. Not because it’s ineffective—but because it’s unglamorous. CEOs will talk endlessly about growth, retention, and performance, yet fail to connect those outcomes to how people are trained, onboarded, and supported day-to-day. Meanwhile, AI is making content creation trivial. The real work—the uncomfortable, strategic clarity about culture, behavior, and expectations—is still being skipped.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Tom:LinkedInPeopleOps360mentummSupport the show
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AI Can Make a Good Job Feel Too Small
Mar 1700:40:47Tap to summarizeWhen turnover is low, leadership loves to call it stability. Jay Caldwell makes the more uncomfortable point: sometimes it is just fear with better optics. In this conversation, he and David unpack why “quiet staying” can become a serious organizational liability in an AI era—especially when people are still hitting goals, still showing up, and still slowly draining the place of experimentation, risk-taking, and fresh thinking.They also get into the deeper workforce consequences of AI adoption: why broad rollouts often create anxiety instead of momentum, why the most AI-engaged employees may be the most likely to leave, and why cutting entry-level hiring might solve a short-term budget problem while quietly wrecking your future talent pipeline.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 Jay:LinkedInADPSupport the show
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Why Expertise Is Becoming Cheap—and What Leaders Must Build Instead
Mar 1000:57:15Tap to summarizeIf your organization looks successful on paper but feels strangely tense in practice, there’s a good chance fear—not excellence—is quietly running the show. In this episode, David Rice talks with Brave Together author Chris Deaver about how fear disguises itself in high-performing workplaces: polished presentations, perfect metrics, and meetings where nobody laughs—and nobody challenges anything either.Their conversation explores what happens when organizations reward superhero behavior, visibility over collaboration, and certainty over curiosity. The result is brittle excellence and teams that quietly fracture under pressure. The alternative, Deaver argues, is building cultures of co-creation—where leaders shift from being the smartest person in the room to becoming integrators, connectors, and context builders. In a world reshaped by AI and constant disruption, the real advantage isn’t information anymore—it’s shared wisdom, deep empathy, and the courage to build together.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Chris:LinkedInLead with a Question podcastCheck out Chris’ book: Brave TogetherSupport the show
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Why Every Org Should Be Investing in Predictive AI
Mar 300:33:33Tap to summarizeBusinesses are pouring millions into generative AI—chatbots, copilots, “agents”—while quietly ignoring the other half of the AI stack that’s been delivering measurable value for decades. Predictive AI doesn’t write poetry. It predicts who’s going to churn, which transaction is fraud, and which customer is worth contacting. It calculates probabilities and helps you act on them at scale. Not glamorous. Just effective.In this conversation, Eric Siegel—author of The AI Playbook and founder of Machine Learning Week—makes a subversive claim: most organizations should be investing at least as much in predictive AI as generative AI. The problem isn’t the math. It’s the gap between tech and business. Companies celebrate models as value. But the model isn’t the value. Acting on predictions is.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: DeelConnect with Eric:LinkedInGooder AICheck out Eric’s book: The AI PlaybookSupport the show
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Why Mindset Beats Skill in AI Transformation
Feb 2400:44:47Tap to summarizeYou were told AI would clear your calendar. Instead, you’re answering 800 chats a day and wondering what, exactly, you accomplished. Productivity is up. So is the volume. You 10x your output and somehow inherit 10x the work. Welcome to the hamster wheel.In this episode, Eliza Jackson, COO at ButcherBox, and I unpack the real transformation behind AI at work. It’s not about learning a new tool. It’s about unlearning how you work. It’s about rethinking what you own versus what you delegate. And it’s about building the kind of resilience and mindset that don’t show up on a résumé—but determine whether your team can survive what’s coming.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Eliza on LinkedInCheck out ButcherBoxSupport the show
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Why AI Power Users Will Outpace Everyone Else
Feb 1700:40:30Tap to summarizeMost employees are using about 1% of what AI can actually do. Not because they’re lazy. Not because they lack access. But because no one has shown them how to think with it. Meanwhile, somewhere in Silicon Valley, a 23-year-old is running a startup like they’ve got 28 PhDs sitting beside them—for a penny a minute. That gap isn’t theoretical. It’s operational. And it’s widening by the hour.In this conversation, Kevin Surace and I dig into what that gap really means—for your productivity, your profession, and your relevance. From three-paragraph prompts to million-dollar consulting projects replicated in minutes, we explore why this wave looks familiar (desktop computers, the internet, Excel) and why it’s moving faster than all of them. Resistance isn’t noble. It’s career-limiting.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsCheck out this episode’s sponsor: DeelConnect with Kevin on LinkedInCheck out Kevin’s website and Appvance.aiSupport the show
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What We’re Getting Wrong About AI and Productivity
Feb 1000:55:46Tap to summarizeSo yeah—your dashboards look great. Your team’s shipping faster, summarizing more, “getting leverage” with AI… and all the while you might be quietly trading away the one asset you can’t buy back on a subscription plan: human judgment.In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Vivienne Ming—neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and an “AI realist” who has zero patience for utopian hype or Skynet fan fiction. Vivienne lays out a clean fork in the road: cognitive automation (AI does the thinking for you) vs. cognitive augmentation (AI makes you think better—often by making the work harder). If your AI strategy is mostly about convenience, this is your gentle-ish warning that convenience is not a strategy. It’s a sedative.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Vivienne on LinkedInSupport the show
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Designing for Readiness, Not Just Efficiency, in an AI-Augmented World
Feb 300:30:56Tap to summarizeAI didn’t replace your job—it replaced your value proposition. In this episode, we sit down with Taylor Blake, SVP of AI Labs at Degreed, to talk about the uncomfortable truth facing L&D teams: if your job is framed as delivering content, unblocking employees, or feeding answers in the flow of work, AI is already doing it better, faster, and without your calendar invite.But where AI stops short is precisely where L&D’s future begins. Taylor shares how her team at Degreed lives as “customer zero,” using their own tools before shipping them to clients—which means they’re embedded in the mess, not just pitching the promise. From readiness over responsiveness to the emotional toll of relentless efficiency, this conversation explores what it really means to build capability in a world where one employee now has the power—and pressure—of ten.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Taylor on LinkedInCheck out DegreedSupport the show
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