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 practice, people-first leadership, performance systems, and workplace culture.

People Managing People is a business podcast hosted by David Rice, with 211 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

David Rice hosts People Managing People, a business show with 211 episodes published.

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  People Managing People

  Is AI Making Your Employees Worse At Thinking?

  Sep 29, 202625 min

  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 through it. David and Dr. Ore explore cognitive debt, skill decay, and why the usual AI metrics—seats, logins, prompts, adoption rates—say very little about whether workforce capability is actually improving. They discuss the risks of outsourcing judgment and critical thinking, the loss of institutional knowledge when organizations replace people rather than reskill them, and why AI transformation needs to be treated as a talent priority alongside a technology priority. Because faster work isn’t much of a win if the people doing it are slowly losing the skills that made them valuable in the first place. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts Connect with Lilian on LinkedIn Check out Lilian’s book — The Power of the Learning Mindset: How the Best Leaders Foster Curiosity, Develop Innovative Teams, and Achieve Exponential Growth Support the show

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  People Managing People

  Are Leaders Trading Future Capability For Short-Term AI Efficiency?

  Sep 22, 202636 min

  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 initiatives from expensive corporate hobbies. They also explore the human and operating systems that have to move together if transformation is going to stick—and why the technology itself is rarely the thing that sinks an AI project. Listeners may hear a little more conference-floor noise than usual, but that’s the price of capturing these conversations where they’re actually happening. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts Connect with Jana on LinkedIn Check out eHealth Support the show

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  People Managing People

  How Do You Automate Recognition Without Making It Feel Automated?

  Sep 17, 202622 min

  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-generated thank-you note. It’s giving HR and frontline managers a richer picture of employees, surfacing signals before problems become crises, and turning data into useful action. But there’s an important line running through the conversation: AI can recommend, filter, moderate, and nudge. Humans still need to own the judgment. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts Connect with Jesse and Dano on LinkedIn Visit Motivosity Support the show

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  People Managing People

  How to Turn Employee Engagement Into a Business Case

  Sep 1, 202640 min

  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 “disengagement tax,” why engagement metrics without business impact can become little more than dashboard theater, and what it actually means for HR to become bilingual. They also explore the impossible job organizations have created for managers, why AI tends to amplify the culture it lands in, and whether the CHRO role is big enough for the human side of the transformation ahead. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts Connect with Dr. Shindale on LinkedIn Check out SEADE Coaching & Consulting Support the show

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  People Managing People

  HR Has the Skills to Lead the AI Era—But Will It?

  Aug 25, 202659 min

  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 talk about why HR has the raw materials to lead this moment, but also some baggage to lose. They get into purpose washing, why not everyone needs a calling disguised as a job, what AI means for early-career development, and why designing better work requires considerably more than putting a mission statement on the wall and hoping everyone believes it. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts Connect with Jessica on LinkedIn Visit Leapsome Support the show

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