Podcast · Business

People Managing People

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 p

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 35 min
Latest: 13 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026 · 40 minNew

The Human-AI Handoff Is More Complicated Than Companies Think

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 e...

Play episodeWhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

6 Oct 2026 · 25 min
How Do You Prove AI ROI When The Return Is Only 1%?
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 Vega...
29 Sep 2026 · 25 min
Is AI Making Your Employees Worse At Thinking?
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 throug...
22 Sep 2026 · 36 min
Are Leaders Trading Future Capability For Short-Term AI Efficiency?
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 ...
17 Sep 2026 · 22 min
How Do You Automate Recognition Without Making It Feel Automated?
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-g...
15 Sep 2026 · 42 min
What Happens When Employees Stop Speaking Up
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 s...
8 Sep 2026 · 35 min
Why AI Transformation Starts With Organizational Clarity
AI transformation has a funny way of becoming an organizational X-ray. The companies getting real value from it aren’t necessarily the ones buying the most tools or burning the most tokens. They’re the ones that understand what they’re trying to accomplish, what excellence looks like, and which problems are actually worth solving. In this episode of People Managing People, David Rice speaks with Zapier’s Chief People and AI Transformation Officer, Brandon Sammut, about why AI ROI starts with ...
1 Sep 2026 · 40 min
How to Turn Employee Engagement Into a Business Case
HR has been told for years to “speak the language of the business,” usually as code for proving it deserves to be in the room. But Dr. Shindale Seale makes a stronger case: this isn’t about self-defense. It’s about leadership. If disengagement, poor management, weak culture, and badly handled transformation all carry measurable financial costs, HR needs to connect the human consequences to the numbers executives use to make decisions. In this episode, host David Rice and Dr. Seale unpack the ...
25 Aug 2026 · 59 min
HR Has the Skills to Lead the AI Era—But Will It?
There are two ways the AI transformation of work can go. We can hand the keys to the efficiency obsessives and spend the next decade trying to engineer the humanity out of organizations. Or HR can recognize that understanding motivation, organizational design, and how people actually experience work is suddenly a strategic advantage—and start acting like it. Jessica Zwaan, VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built For People and Purpose In Work, joins David Rice to ...
18 Aug 2026 · 50 min
What AI Surveillance Can’t Tell You About Your Employees
Nobody sets out to build a workforce surveillance system. It usually arrives dressed up as optimization, productivity, wellness, or efficiency. But as AI makes it possible to monitor everything from keystrokes and mouse movements to emotions and physical behavior, the line between legitimate measurement and invasive surveillance gets harder to ignore. In this episode, I speak with Lynn Parramore, Director of Special Projects at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about what gets lost whe...
11 Aug 2026 · 33 min
Why The EU Pay Transparency Directive Is More Than A Compliance Exercise
The EU Pay Transparency Directive isn’t just another reporting requirement. As pay reporting expert Tom Heys puts it, it’s closer to the UK gender pay gap regime “on steroids”—combining organization-wide reporting with individual employee rights, restrictions on recruitment practices, and requirements to group jobs of equal value and explain the pay differences within them. The bigger issue is what happens when organizations are finally required to show their work. Pay transparency exposes we...
4 Aug 2026 · 26 min
Why AI Isn’t Delivering The Productivity Gains We Expected
AI spending continues to hit record highs, yet most organizations are still struggling to translate that investment into better work. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Ofir Bloch of WalkMe to unpack the findings from the State of Digital Adoption 2026 report and explore why the problem isn't model capability—it's everything surrounding it. From the massive disconnect between what executives believe employees experience and the reality of day-to-day work, to the growing importanc...
28 Jul 2026 · 30 min
The New Leadership Test: What Makes Someone AI-Native?
AI is quickly becoming the new test of executive credibility—but there's a growing gap between leaders who use AI and leaders who've fundamentally rebuilt how they work around it. In this episode, David Rice sits down with JC Christian, President of executive search firm Christian & Timbers, to explore why "AI-enabled" is no longer enough and what it actually means to be AI-native at the executive level. Together, they unpack how executive hiring is changing, why demonstrating real AI dep...
21 Jul 2026 · 57 min
Why Traditional AI Risk Frameworks Are Breaking Down
AI adoption isn't slowing down—and neither are the risks. The challenge isn't that organizations don't know AI can create problems. It's that employees are already using it in ways leaders can't fully anticipate, while governance models built for yesterday's technology struggle to keep pace. In this episode, David Rice sits down with AI ethics expert and The Ethical Nightmare Challenge author Reid Blackman to explore why traditional AI governance is falling behind the rise of generative and a...
14 Jul 2026 · 38 min
The Team Habit That Separates High Performers From Everyone Else
AI isn't creating high-performing teams—it’s exposing the difference between teams that already know how to work well together and those that don’t. In this episode, David Rice sits down with social psychologist and Superteams author Ron Friedman to unpack new research on what separates the top 8% of teams from everyone else. The conversation challenges the assumption that AI is a universal productivity boost, revealing instead how it can amplify poor habits, deepen burnout, and create false ...
7 Jul 2026 · 43 min
Why AI Usage Reports Don’t Mean Much
AI transformation doesn't fail because the technology isn't good enough. It fails because organizations try to layer it on top of cultures that were already struggling with trust, learning, experimentation, and leadership. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Meagan Bond, Founder and CEO of The Human Method, to unpack why psychological readiness—not technical readiness—is the real foundation of successful AI adoption. Together they explore the hidden costs of dysfunctional culture,...
30 Jun 2026 · 41 min
Your Best Candidate Might Have The Worst Resume
Resumes still matter—but not for the reasons we think. In a world where AI can polish anyone’s experience into a compelling narrative, the traditional hiring signals many organizations have relied on are losing their value. Heather Krueger, Chief People Officer at Engine, joins David Rice to explore what comes next when a polished resume becomes proof of tool usage rather than proof of talent. Their conversation challenges hiring leaders to rethink where and how they evaluate candidates, shif...
23 Jun 2026 · 40 min
AI Is Forcing Everyone To Become Their Own Economy
AI isn’t arriving as a gradual workplace evolution—it’s arriving as a societal shift that many leaders are still struggling to describe honestly. In this conversation, David Rice sits down with Leap Academy founder and CEO Ilana Golan to explore what happens when skills expire in one to two years, organizations expect dramatically higher productivity, and career stability becomes the exception rather than the rule. Together, they unpack why adaptability is becoming the defining professional s...
16 Jun 2026 · 35 min
Why Making Employees Work The Same Way Backfires
David Kolbe argues that most organizations are only measuring two-thirds of what drives performance. We assess what people know (skills) and how they tend to behave (personality), but often ignore how they instinctively take action. That missing piece—what Kolbe calls conation—shapes how people gather information, solve problems, make decisions, and navigate uncertainty. In this conversation, David Rice and David Kolbe explore why burnout is often a mismatch problem rather than a motivation p...
9 Jun 2026 · 40 min
AI Is Rewarding The Loudest Employees
Most reward systems were built for a world where speed, volume, and visible output were reliable signals of performance. But AI now produces all three at scale. That leaves organizations facing an uncomfortable question: if AI can generate more output than ever, what exactly are you rewarding? In this episode, David Rice sits down with Anju Choudhary, Chief People Officer at Xoxoday, to explore why recognition systems need a redesign for the AI era. They discuss the growing gap between produc...
2 Jun 2026 · 35 min
Your Employees Stop Thinking The Moment They Feel Unsafe
What 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 m...
28 May 2026 · 11 min
AI Saved Oyster’s HR Team 400+ Hours a Year — Here’s How
AI 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 m...
26 May 2026 · 34 min
Is Leadership Experience Becoming a Liability?
Most 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 qu...
21 May 2026 · 14 min
Fewer Jobs, Higher Pay: The AI Compensation Paradox
Kyle 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 notici...
19 May 2026 · 22 min
Community Is the New Buzzword—But We’re Doing It Wrong
Most 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...
14 May 2026 · 19 min
AI Is Making People Decisions Worse—Here’s Why
AI 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 imp...
12 May 2026 · 31 min
Only 10% of Leaders Use AI—So Who’s Teaching Everyone Else?
Only 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 tensio...
5 May 2026 · 32 min
The “Mirror Test” Every Leader Needs Before Adopting AI
Most 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 work...
28 Apr 2026 · 47 min
How Great Leaders Prioritize in a World Where Everything Feels Urgent
Everything 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...
21 Apr 2026 · 19 min
The AI “Sandwich”: Why HR Teams Are Caught in the Middle
AI 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 i...

About People Managing People

People Managing People is a English business podcast from David Rice. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: David Rice
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 35 min
Latest episode: 13 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1494538739

RSS feed Apple Podcasts

More English business

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.