The Modern People Leader

Helping HR Leaders Build the Future of Work. We’ve learned from the best so you can lead like the best. Now we’re sharing those lessons—through our podcast, events, and Academy—to help you shape what’s next for HR and work.

CEO & Co-Host

Humu

Demand Generation Manager

Udacity

Digital Marketing Manager, Enterprise

Workify Inc

- Devised overall marketing strategy & execution at Workify
- Managed all demand generation activities (e.g., Paid Search, Marketing Automation, etc.) 
- Built out content strategy (e.g., blogs, webinars, case studies, etc.)

Marketing Manager

Marketing Analyst

Sales Analyst

I’m on a mission to learn what the leading orgs are doing to attract, develop, and retain their most important asset, their people.

Co-host of The Modern People Leader podcast: 
https://open.spotify.com/show/4nxU1ZaHfL608Y70AzNGwB?si=oc1MnBF-RlCHZkL3Ac5yug

_____________________________________
My posts are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my past employers.

What a way to celebrate five years of The Modern People Leader with MPL Live Austin this week. 

I’ve grown up with the pod. 

Since we launched in 2020, I’ve moved cities, gotten married, left corporate to do this full-time, and welcomed a beautiful daughter into my life.

This week I had a couple of those quiet moments where it hit me - oh shit, this is something really special that Stephen and I have built.

And there was no better way to mark five years than with the people who actually make The Modern People Leader what it is. The community of thoughtful, generous people leaders who have been with us since the jump.

Looking back on 2025, we did A LOT:
- 61 episodes
- 8 webinars (fist year doing these)
- 4 MPL Live events (including our first two-day event)
- 2 new Huertas (Stephen Huerta’s little one will be arriving any day now)

Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Can’t wait for what 2026 brings.

Daniel Huerta

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After interviewing 60+ HR leaders in 2025, one thing is clear:
Becoming an AI-first org is hard work.

Which is why next week’s MPL Live Austin is fully focused on what the AI-powered workplace actually looks like - and the change management it takes to make it real.

Two days.
Zero fluff.
Speakers who are the real deal.

If you live in Austin, come hang out. You’ve got until midnight to grab your Black Friday Pass before prices go back up: https://lnkd.in/gQ36TEDw

Day 1 Speakers:
- Kara Grenier, Chief People Officer, Sightly
- Vanessa Gutierrez (AI for HR)
- David Hanrahan, SVP People Success, SolarWinds
- Jackson Lynch (Talent Sherpa)
- 2 more to be announced in the next 24 hours
 
Day 2 Speakers:
- Jenna Eichberg, Chief People Officer, AlertMedia
- Priyanka Gupta, Head of People, Ownwell
- Shriya Josephsen, SVP Business Transformation @ R/GA

Come hang out with me, Stephen Huerta, and your peers who want to lead the transformation toward an AI-powered workplace.

HR folks - you’ve probably felt this tension lately.

Everyone’s saying “use AI”,  but not many people are showing how (we’re even guilty of this at this times at MPL).

The truth?

Most HR teams want to experiment, but they get stuck at the starting line -unsure what to build, how to get it approved, or where to even begin.

That’s why we’re having a live session that goes beyond the theory - real HR leaders sharing how they got over the biggest hurdle and showing 3 real examples of what they actually built.

Want to see what’s actually possible with AI in HR?

Sign up for our webinar with Brandon Sammut (Chief People & AI Transformation Officer, Zapier), Jenny Molyneaux (VP People at Vercel), and Valerie Gobeil (Head of Talent Management at Workleap) happening Thursday, November 20th at 1 pm CST.

Register here: https://lnkd.in/gUwXpc3b

When most people talk about “AI transformation,” they jump straight to tools.

Jessica Swank, Chief People Officer at Box, is thinking way bigger - she’s talking about rewiring how the entire business operates.

At Box, AI isn’t a layer on top. It’s baked directly into the product, which means the product strategy and business strategy move together from day one. That vision starts at the top, and it flows through every team.

Jessica’s People & Communities org is right in the middle of this shift, helping the company navigate one of the biggest transformations it’s ever taken on. 

And the way she breaks it down makes it feel a lot more doable:

1. Optimize: Look at every part of the employee experience and ask, “Where can AI actually make this better?” Not hype - real impact.

2. Elevate: Make sure every Boxer has the skills, training, and role clarity to thrive in an AI-native org and that the organizational systems evolve.

3. Amplify: Use Box’s own AI experiments to help customers, partners, and the industry understand what “practical AI” really looks like.

Her take is refreshingly honest: “This isn’t just a small upgrade. It’s a total rethink of people, processes, and how work gets done.”

Listen to the full episode with Jessica Swank here: https://lnkd.in/gXwgGqAg

#hr #podcast #ai

Most HR teams still approach the employee experience like a checklist.

Kit Krugman, SVP People & Culture at Foursquare, shared how different the work becomes when you treat it like an actual design problem.

What landed most was how she described the moment she stepped into Foursquare and realized the people team was carrying responsibility for experiences they didn’t fully control. We’ve seen that play out with so many HR leaders. They’re expected to “own” employee experience, while half of the experience lives in functions that never get invited into the design process.

The way Kit and her team rebuilt their approach is what impressed me.

Instead of making small fixes, they treated it like a full design reset:

1. Mapping the employee journey visually from end to end.

2. Capturing every signal they could find, not just the loud ones.

3. Pulling in cross-functional partners who actually shape the experience day to day.

4. Defining design principles to guide the feel of the experience, not just the mechanics.

5. Pairing qualitative narratives with quantitative data to pressure test what was real vs what was noise.

Go listen to our full conversation with Kit here: https://lnkd.in/gsEcbwQt

My biggest takeaways from Jessica Swank on building AI-native organizations:

1. At Box, AI isn’t being treated as a feature release - it’s a company-wide transformation. The People team is focused on three moves: optimize the existing employee lifecycle with AI, elevate job design and org structure around new skills, and amplify Box’s own story as a proof point for customers. AI isn’t a side project for IT. It’s a restructuring of how value gets created, how work flows, and how people grow.

2. In an AI world, a person with one year of deep AI experience can legitimately be the most knowledgeable person in the room - even when others have twenty years of domain experience. That flips the old hierarchy on its head. The leaders who win won’t just be the ones with the longest resumes; they’ll be the ones who are curious, comfortable in ambiguity, and willing to learn in public while they guide everyone else through the change.

3. HR doesn’t own AI, but they do shape how it shows up. Instead of fighting a turf war over who “owns” AI, Box created an AI council that brings together the CIO, COO, CPO, and leaders across the business. HR’s role is to bring the people lens: how work is changing, what skills are needed, how performance and rewards need to evolve. It’s not about bolting AI onto existing workflows; it’s about reimagining how work gets done and then rebuilding the people systems to match that reality.

4. Leading hybrid teams now means managing humans and agents. Box is already training managers to think of agents as part of the team, not just background tools. That raises new questions: How do you “give feedback” to an agent? What does performance management look like when part of the work is automated? How do you evaluate which agents are actually helping and which are slowing people down? Some of Box’s best agents are being built by ICs and then scaled to whole teams - and managers have to learn how to lead in that mixed environment.

5. Agent sprawl is the new shadow org chart. As more people spin up custom agents, Box is seeing exactly what you’d expect: duplicated effort, messy handoffs, and tools that nobody is quite sure are still useful. The fix is to treat agent management like team management. Tie agents to team OKRs. Track usage and outcomes. Share what’s working. And be willing to deprecate agents that aren’t pulling their weight. Not every experiment is supposed to survive - the discipline is in knowing when to let go.

Sign up for our newsletter to learn from some of the top people leaders: https://lnkd.in/gQvmd7aY

#hr #podcast

4 tips from two AI-first People leaders we've had on the show…

1️⃣ “The fastest way to learn AI is to start building with it.” Jenny Molyneaux, Vercel's VP of People, spent months in strategy meetings about how AI could reshape the People function - until she realized the real learning happens when you actually build something. So she made a simple tool to solve a personal problem: upload a photo of her apartment, layer in furniture images, and see how everything fits. No OKRs, no roadmap - just hands-on practice. Her takeaway: you don’t need a perfect strategy to get started. You need momentum.

2️⃣ AI can scale coaching in ways HR has never been able to.” Zapier’s L&D team built an AI-powered coaching bot that helps employees practice giving and receiving feedback, trained on their feedback model and filled with examples that deliver personalized guidance instantly without waiting for a manager, a workshop, or a live coaching session. Brandon Sammut’s view: AI won’t replace human coaching, but it finally makes quality coaching accessible at scale.

3️⃣ “Make AI a rhythm, not a one-off initiative.” Vercel's People team holds an internal AI offsite where everyone brings something they’ve built or automated, runs a Show & Tell on how they’re using AI, and then does a hackathon focused on eliminating manual work before turning what worked into a playbook the whole company can use. For Jenny, the offsite isn’t the magic - the cadence of continuous iteration is.

4️⃣ “Automate the questions so people can focus on the work only humans can do.” When Zapier was planning their company retreat, the People Ops team was drowning in repetitive logistical questions, so they built an AI chatbot to handle most inquiries automatically, freeing the team to spend time on the creative work that makes retreats memorable. This grew out of their internal “AI code red,” which pushed the entire company to stop theorizing and start prototyping. Today, over 90% of the org uses AI daily - and the People team helped lead the way.

____

Want to hear more from Brandon and Jenny on what’s possible with AI in HR? 

They’ll be joining our webinar with Valerie Gobeil (Head of Talent Management, Workleap) this Thursday at 1 pm CST.

Register here: https://lnkd.in/gUwXpc3b

For everyone in the middle of planning for 2026, this one hit me in a way I think will land for a lot of people teams.

Velocity without vibrancy doesn’t work. And vibrancy without velocity doesn’t either.

That line from Kit Krugman, SVP People & Culture at Foursquare, has been stuck in my head ever since we recorded.

Most teams pick one. They move fast but feel disconnected. Or they build a great culture but can’t execute. Kit walked us through how Foursquare's people team pushed for both at the same time, and the simplicity of the process is what stood out to me.

Here’s how they made it real:

1. They named the outcome they were trying to fuel: energy, connectedness, momentum, and speed.

2. They wrote a thesis for the year instead of pretending they had a perfect plan.

3. They split every people initiative into big rocks and prototypes. Big rocks were the must-move items. Prototypes were experiments they were willing to test and adjust.

4. They tied metrics to each one to understand what was actually working.

Nothing flashy. No overcomplicated frameworks. Just a clear direction, a willingness to iterate, and the discipline to measure what matters.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. You don’t need certainty to build something meaningful. You need a thesis. You need feedback loops. And you need to make the work legible enough for the team to move in sync.

Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gsEcbwQt

My biggest takeaways from our episode with DJ Casto (EVP, CHRO, Synchrony):

1. HR should think like a product team. Instead of shipping fully baked programs from a conference room, they've adopted an MVP mindset: build fast, co-design with employees, iterate every quarter. HR started mapping the employee journey, gathering real-time feedback, and treating every program like a living product. 

2. You need multiple listening channels - not one. Synchrony treats listening as an ecosystem. Quarterly surveys sit alongside ERG insights, roundtables, and - my favorite - tapping interns for fresh, unfiltered ideas. One intern even suggested piloting an on-site therapist. They MVP’d it… and the demand was so strong it became permanent. The lesson: surveys show signals, not instructions. The magic is in knowing where to lean in.

3. Feedback only matters if people see it turn into action. Synchrony doesn’t disappear into a black box after collecting feedback. They name the source. “This came from a roundtable in Orlando.” “This idea came from a call center associate.” That transparency builds trust. Not every idea gets approved - and DJ is blunt about that - but people know how decisions were made and why. That’s what scales belief in the system.

4. MVPs require elite communication muscles. Shipping an MVP is the easy part. Getting the org to understand it, adopt it, and evolve with it is the grind. Synchrony uses a 20x communication rule: every message must be delivered 20 different times, in 20 different ways. Manager standups. Town halls. Newsletters. Leader talking points. Stories. “You can’t send an email and call it a day.” In an MVP world, communication is the operating system.

5. Great companies aren’t perfect - they’re transparent.  DJ made this point over and over: being a great place to work doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. It means operating with honesty and iteration. When things don’t work, they own it. When tradeoffs are required, they explain them. That’s what allows them to keep experimenting without losing trust.

This episode is a masterclass in building with your people, not just for them.

Give it a listen: https://lnkd.in/gXwPWs4d

#hr #podcast

Open video: 271 - How 100-Year-Old Company (Synchrony Financial) Runs Like a Startup: DJ Casto (CHRO) on open.spotify.com

271 - How 100-Year-Old Company (Synchrony Financial) Runs Like a Startup: DJ Casto (CHRO)

Why AI agents need their own OKRs ⬇️

Jessica Swank has spent her entire career obsessed with the intersection of people, systems, and business strategy - from her early days studying human and organizational development at Vanderbilt to leading people teams at HP, Blue Bottle Coffee, and now Box.

So when the question came up, “will we eventually have OKRs for AI agents?”  you could hear the excitement in her voice to talk about where things are heading. 

Jessica describes the next evolution like this:
- Today, organizations move from company OKRs → team OKRs → individual OKRs.
- Tomorrow, there will be a new sub-layer beneath the individual: the specific outcomes owned by AI agents.

Not all agents will perform the same.

Some will consistently “get it right.”

Others will underperform and need to be rethought, retired, or realigned.

And all of it will need to ladder back to the business priorities of the team.

But Jessica also warns about the biggest risk ahead: agent sprawl.

As teams spin up dozens of agents across recruiting, marketing, operations, and beyond, the real work becomes:
- Identifying which agents actually move the business forward
- Deciding which belong within specific functions
- Ensuring every agent clearly supports a defined business problem
- Keeping prioritization and alignment front and center

Jessica’s point is simple but powerful:

AI doesn’t eliminate the need for clarity - it raises the bar for it.

This is the new systems thinking leaders will need: not just more agents, but the right ones, tied to the right outcomes, driving the right impact.

Listen to the full episode with Jessica in the comments.

#hr #podcast

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