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.
Latest episodes
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36 min
Should We Still Build Careers Around Deep Specialization?
For decades, career advice has been simple: specialize, build deep expertise, and become indispensable. But what happens when AI makes that expertise accessible to almost anyone? T…
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40 min
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 m…
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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 communic…
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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 Uni…
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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.Re…
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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 expe…
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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 ma…
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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 mos…
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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 is…
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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 organiza…
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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 monit…
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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”—comb…
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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 wit…
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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.…
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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…
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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 sit…
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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,…
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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 organizat…
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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 s…
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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),…