Digital HR Leaders with David Green

What if the resistance you're seeing from your team isn't opposition at all?

David Green is joined by Travis Hahler, who leads global strategy and transformation at Salesforce and is also the founder of Neurological Nomad, where he applies neuroscience and neuropsychology to how leaders manage change. Travis is the author of the new book Rethink Resistance, and his central argument reframes almost everything: resistance isn't personal, it's protective.

Why resistance to change should be read as information, not opposition:

The six neurological barriers to change, and why leaders need to understand each one
How routine and old habits quietly pull people back toward what made them successful before, even when they're not against the future
Why cognitive load and pacing determine whether people actually learn through a transformation, or just survive it
What employees are really losing in change that's genuinely good for them, and why leaders often miss it
How to apply these insights practically to workforce transformation and AI adoption

Whether you're leading a transformation right now or preparing for one, this conversation will change how you think about the resistance you're seeing.

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222

Additional resources:
Rethink Resistance: Embracing Neuroscience to Lead Transformational Change
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is your HR function organised the way employees actually experience it, or just the way it's always been done?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Tony Truong, VP of People Strategy, Operations, Technology and Analytics at Chime, to unpack why most HR functions are still organised in silos, by specialty, while employees experience work as a series of moments: getting hired, being onboarded, going for a promotion. Tony has spent the last two years closing that gap, rebuilding Chime's people function from the ground up as the company has scaled into a public company.

In this episode, David and Tony discuss:

Why the real limitation holding HR back is fragmentation, not ambition
What it's taken to rebuild a people function from the ground up at a newly public company
How AI has reshaped recruiting at Chime, cutting a process that used to take days down to hours
Tony's three-stage framework for thinking about AI's role in the business: assistance, automation, and orchestration
What it actually looks like to move people analytics from the periphery of HR to the centre of how a business makes decisions

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222

Additional resources:
Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2026 Report
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you tell the difference between AI that's genuinely transforming HR and AI that's just a slide in a vendor deck?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Parker Mitchell, Founder and CEO of Valence, the team behind the AI coaching platform Nadia, to discuss what it really takes for HR to prove value in an increasingly crowded AI market.

Join them, as they discuss:

How to separate genuine AI capability from marketing claims in an increasingly crowded market
Why AI budgets are increasingly coming from the C-suite rather than HR, and what that means for how HR shows up in these conversations
What CHROs should be asking before choosing between an AI-native provider and a legacy platform with bolted-on AI features
How the best people analytics teams are proving ROI from AI coaching, beyond adoption metrics
What it looks like to make performance management continuous rather than a once or twice-a-year process
Why frontline and operational workers need a different approach to AI coaching than knowledge workers
Valence's recent partnership with Microsoft and what it signals about where AI coaching is heading

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What would your organisation look like if it worked more like an octopus — distributed, adaptive, and capable of sensing and reacting without waiting for instructions from the centre?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner, Executives in Residence at Amazon Web Services and authors of The Octopus Organization, to explore why so many transformations fail to stick — and what a more adaptive, human approach to change actually looks like.

Join them as they discuss:

What the octopus organisation metaphor is, and why it offers a different model to the traditional, hierarchical "Tin Man" organisation
The three themes — clarity, ownership, and curiosity — that separate organisations that adapt well from those that don't
Why transformation can no longer be treated as a one-time event
HR's evolving role in driving and supporting transformation
How to measure whether change is actually working, beyond vanity metrics
Real examples of leaders and organisations putting these ideas into practice

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222

Resources:

The Octopus Organization by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is purpose at work as straightforward as we've made it out to be?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Jessica Zwaan, VP People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work, to explore what the research actually tells us about purpose at work — and what that means for how HR shows up for people.

Join them as they discuss:

Why treating HR like a product function changes the questions you ask
What the research on purpose at work really reveals, and why the reality is more nuanced than the narrative
What purpose washing is, how it happens, and what it can look like in practice
What a more grounded alternative to purpose-led culture could look like
Why really knowing your people is the foundation of all of it
How perceptions of HR are evolving, and what's driving that shift

This episode is brought to you by Leapsome - the people-first HR platform that connects performance, engagement, and HR operations in one place, so you get a complete picture, not half the story.

See it in action at leapsome.com/demo.

Resources:
Built for People by Jessica Zwaan
Purpose and Work by Jessica Zwaan
People over Perks, the Leapsome Community
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.