People Managing People

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 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 Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Connect with Kamaria on LinkedIn
Support the show

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 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 Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Check out this episode’s sponsor: Intuit QuickBooks Payroll
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn
Visit Kyndryl
Support the show

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—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 Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Connect with Barbara on LinkedIn
Visit Polly
Support the show

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 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 Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn
Visit HiBob
Support the show

You don’t need to be using AI constantly to be hooked on it—you just need to feel relief when you do. That’s the uncomfortable premise at the heart of this conversation with psychologist and conflict expert Dr. David Zierk. AI doesn’t just give you answers; it removes uncertainty. And in doing so, it quietly rewires how you think, learn, and connect.
What starts as convenience can quickly become dependency. Leaders, in particular, are at risk of trading away the friction that produces insight, the curiosity that fuels growth, and the empathy that sustains relationships. The result? Faster answers, thinner thinking, and a growing gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
Related Links:
Join the People Managing People Community
Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
Check out this episode’s sponsor: Intuit QuickBooks Payroll
Connect with Dr. David on LinkedIn
Support the show