People Managing People

You can count system uptime down to six decimal places and predict when a machine will fail — but when it comes to your employees, you’re flying blind. You track turnover, burnout rates, engagement scores — but those are all lagging indicators, the wreckage after the crash. You’ve no real idea what’s happening beneath the surface: who’s sliding into despair, clutching exhaustion, or on the edge of burnout. If you wait until the met...

Most leaders are waiting for a perfect AI strategy. Meanwhile, their teams are already experimenting — just not out in the open. Charlene Li joins me to talk about the real blockers to AI adoption inside organizations, and it’s not the tech. It’s fear, control, and a lack of imagination.

We unpack why chasing ROI misses the point, how cultural mindsets shape our fears, and what it really takes to build AI fluency across your team — ...

Your AI tools aren’t failing because the technology is bad — they’re failing because your organisation wasn’t ready. The real issue isn’t the model. It’s the mismatch between how machines operate and how humans work. And the result? Millions sunk into tools that don’t get used, don’t earn trust, or quietly increase complexity instead of reducing it.

In this conversation with David Swanagon, founder of the Machine Leadership Journal,...

If you’re looking for a quick how‑to on rolling out AI in your org and actually seeing adoption—not just flashy pilots—you’ll want to stick with today’s episode. Glen Cathey joins us to get real about what it takes to move from “hey, we launched a chatbot” to a workforce that defaults to AI, and why most companies trip themselves up at the starting line.

We peel back the usual “let’s train everyone” playbook and instead ask: what ha...

We’re at a tipping point. The promise of AI to amplify human judgment and creativity is here—but too many organizations are instead using it as a surveillance tool, and in doing so, they’re sending a message: “We don’t trust you.” Amy Centers walks us through what’s really at stake when leaders outsource tough decisions to algorithms, when productivity becomes presence, when brain‑states and nervous systems are treated as afterthou...

AI won’t replace 90% of what a strong people analytics team delivers. But what exactly is in that 90%—and how long will it stay out of reach? Roxanne Laczo (Head of People Analytics at Cloudflare), Cole Napper (VP of Research, Innovation & Talent Insights at Lightcast), and Noelle London (Founder and CEO of Illoominus) join David for a grounded roundtable on what AI can and can’t do in HR today.

This isn’t a breathless tour of s...

We’ve reached the point where “AI in HR” isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a mandate. But with every vendor promising a smarter, faster, more predictive future, it’s getting harder to tell the difference between innovation and smoke and mirrors. In this episode, Alana Fallis and I go deep on how to navigate the noise: What should you actually invest in? How do you build real AI readiness, not just compliance theater? And how do you make s...

If you’re out there being told to slap AI tools onto everything and call it “digital transformation,” this episode is your reality check. I sat down with Darren Murph—yes, the remote‑work oracle behind GitLab’s all‑remote strategy—to pull back the curtain on what needs to exist before you ever type “chatbot” or “LLM integration” into your roadmap.

We dug into why good documentation isn’t optional anymore, why remote‑work lessons are...

AI isn’t just generating insights anymore—it’s acting on them. In this episode, I talk with Francisco Marin, CEO of Cognitive Talent Solutions, and Dan George, the company’s Chief Experience Officer, about how agentic AI is changing the game for HR. These aren’t your standard dashboards—they’re autonomous systems that detect workforce patterns in real time and proactively intervene, from mentoring and onboarding to retention and bu...

We’re in an era where everyone’s talking about AI, but few are actually getting value from it. In this episode, futurist and author Ravin Jesuthasan joins host David Rice to unpack why the ROI of AI is still so elusive — and why most organizations are looking at it backwards.

Ravin argues that the problem isn’t technological; it’s human. Companies are rushing to deploy tools before they rethink the work itself. He explains how leade...

Generative AI has crossed the threshold from novelty to necessity—but most organizations still haven’t caught up. In this episode, I talk with Kenneth Corrêa, global AI educator and author of Cognitive Organizations: Leveraging the Full Power of Generative AI and Intelligent Agents, about what it actually means to be AI fluent. Kenneth breaks down how leaders can move from scattered experimentation to systems-level adoption, why up...

Why is financial wellness such a universally agreed-upon priority yet so painfully hard to deliver in practice? In this episode, I sit down with Jason Lee—founder of DailyPay, Salt Labs, and now Chief of Chime Enterprise—to break down why employees don’t engage with financial programs, why saving feels like the world’s most boring habit, and what it takes to design benefits that people actually use.

Jason lays out why most employer ...

Most people don't burn out because they're working too hard—they burn out because they’re performing at a pace they were never built to sustain, chasing goals that don’t align with who they are. Matt Granados joins David Rice to unpack why the language we use around productivity—high performance, hustle, passion—is misleading at best, and actively harmful at worst.

They get into the mechanics of optimal performance, the di...

In a world where AI is eating the routine work and career ladders look more like Escher paintings, what does leadership agility really mean? In this episode, I sit down with David Jones, CEO and Partner at Mercer Assessments, to explore how leaders can ground themselves in productivity, positivity, people, and purpose while rethinking the broken systems we’ve inherited.

We dig into why organizations don’t actually have a leadership ...

We’ve all heard the pitch: “Hybrid work is the future.” But dig beneath the slogans and you’ll find wildly different realities—some thriving, others quietly imploding. In this episode, I sit down with Lynette Caruso, a PhD candidate at Australian National University, to unpack her field research across public and private sectors on what makes hybrid work succeed—or fail.

From the power of casual coffee chats to the pitfalls of hot d...

We’ve spent the last few years talking about mental health at work like it’s always a crisis—trauma, burnout, damage done. Bryan Power, Head of People at Nextdoor, thinks that framing actually makes the conversation harder. Instead, what if we positioned mental health as something everyone can access, not just people in distress? In this episode, we cut through the jargon and look at resilience, performance, and the everyday practi...

What happens when an executive quietly outsources performance reviews to ChatGPT? Or when your C-suite is loudly preaching about AI adoption while refusing to touch the tools themselves? In this episode, I sit down with Talk HR to Me columnist and Head of People at Quantum Metric, Alana Fallis, to tackle real listener questions in a live advice-column format.

We dig into the messy realities of AI in the workplace—from misplaced trus...

Layoffs are often treated like a dirty secret—a rushed, impersonal process designed to move people out the door with as little friction as possible. But the way you offboard employees says just as much about your company culture as the way you welcome them in. In this episode, I sit down with Jena Dunay, founder of Recruit the Employer and host of Culture Uncovered, to talk about how organizations can approach layoffs, exits, and a...

If you’ve ever sat through a personality test during hiring and thought, “This feels a bit like corporate astrology”—you’re not wrong. In this episode, I talk with Jason Hreha, Founder & CEO of Persona, about why so many workplace assessments are built on outdated theories and questionable science, and how to separate the gimmicks from the tools that actually help you hire better. We dig into what reliability and predictive val...