Below the Surface: How the best people leaders build high-performing teams

Erica Bourne, Chief People Officer at LSEG, believes AI transformation is a people change before it is a technology change. The London Stock Exchange Group runs the infrastructure financial markets depend on, so it has to innovate without putting that reliability at risk. Her approach keeps people at the helm: accountable for judgment and outcomes, experimenting inside clear guardrails, with each team moving at the pace its risk allows.

She joined LSEG in January 2023 and sits on its Executive Committee. Before that she spent four years as Chief People Officer at Burberry and 12 years at American Express, where she rose to EVP running international HR across more than 30 countries.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Joelle and Erica get into:

• Why she prefers "human at the helm" to "human in the loop," and the SAFER rules LSEG gives everyone for experimenting: stay in scope, be accountable, check for fairness, explain your use, and review before you rely
• Why a company that runs critical market infrastructure has to protect reliability while it experiments, and how it builds a culture of experimentation anyway
• Starting with tasks instead of roles, and pairing early-career AI experts with deep subject matter experts to redesign the work
• How LSEG balances bottom-up experiments with a small number of top-down AI big bets that start from a business outcome
• Leading by learning in public, from her own coursework to graduates reverse mentoring the CEO and the board
• Why LSEG is doubling down on early-career hiring, and the harder work of redesigning what the first years of a career look like
• What she learned at American Express and Burberry about high performance, and why culture comes to life through leaders
• How the people team's job shifts from workforce planning to org capacity across employees, external workers, and agents

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Erica Bourne
01:03 Why AI change is a people change
02:52 Transforming a 300-year-old fintech
04:31 Human at the helm, not human in the loop
05:28 The SAFER rules for experimenting
07:14 Start with the task, not the role
09:10 Leaders learning in public
12:08 Balancing experiments with enterprise value
16:26 Top-down AI big bets
17:53 Move fast, without breaking things
21:16 Pairing AI experts with content experts
25:03 Bringing deep experts on the journey
28:57 It's never too late to start
31:43 Why LSEG is doubling down on early careers
34:29 Redesigning early-career roles
38:32 Four tenets of high performance
41:55 Culture comes to life through leaders
45:17 The people team as architect of org capacity
48:55 Lightning round
50:23 Closing thoughts

Show Links:

• Follow Erica on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-bourne-9763203/
• Follow Joelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/
• Follow Joelle on X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson
• Learn more about LSEG: https://www.lseg.com
• Learn more about Surface: https://surface.ai
• Explore All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcast
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268
• Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

Peter Fasolo, Johnson & Johnson's longtime CHRO, believes HR is not about HR. It is about linking people practices to the value a company is trying to create. That belief shaped how he built J&J's people data science team, reorganized the HR function, and ran two CEO successions.

Today Peter is a Senior Advisor at TowerBrook, where he leads the firm's human resources practice, and a Professor of the Practice at Boston University's Institute for Leadership and Work, which he previously directed. He spent 14 years leading HR at Johnson & Johnson, and before that was one of the first chief talent officers in private equity, building the talent function at KKR.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Joelle and Peter get into:

• How J&J's Credo guides leaders through real trade-offs, and why every paragraph is linked by the word "and"
• Building a people data science team that tied hiring, pay, training, and manager data to business outcomes
• What the data showed about college hires versus experienced hires, and what actually drove turnover
• Why he moved much of HR into global shared services, and how to lead a transformation that size without going it alone
• What a well-run CEO succession looks like, from painting the future to the board's final decision
• What private equity taught him about focusing HR on value creation
• How CHROs earn a seat in strategy formation, and the story they should be telling employees about AI

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Peter Fasolo
01:24 J&J's Credo and the power of "and"
04:13 When the Credo shapes a hard decision
08:03 Building a people data science team
11:45 Why college hires outperform after 18 months
13:43 What actually drives turnover
16:53 Moving HR into global shared services
21:16 How to lead a major HR transformation
25:01 What a well-run CEO succession looks like
29:43 What private equity taught him about HR
33:31 How CHROs earn a seat in strategy
37:56 The AI story CHROs should be telling
42:17 Lightning round
45:27 Closing thoughts

Show Links:

• Follow Peter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-fasolo/
• Follow Joelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/
• Follow Joelle on X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson
• Learn more about Johnson & Johnson: https://www.jnj.com
• Learn more about Surface: https://surface.ai
• Explore All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcast
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268
• Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

Patrick Martin, Chief Talent Officer at Moody’s, believes AI transformation is a people challenge, not just a technology one. That is why Moody’s put its AI enablement team on the people team. It is also how a company built on caution has moved quickly on AI: sorting every task into work people own and work AI owns, rebuilding how it hires, and training everyone from new hires to the executive team.

At Moody’s he owns hiring, learning and development, talent strategy, and employee experience. He has spent his career on how people actually build skills, as Chief Learning Officer at Bechtel and then leading talent for XPO Logistics and its workforce of more than 100,000, before joining Moody’s in 2021.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Joelle and Patrick get into:

• Why Moody’s AI enablement function reports into the people team, and what changes when you treat AI as a change initiative rather than a technology rollout
• The four-square exercise his teams used to sort every task by complexity and value into people-owned and AI-owned work, and why almost nobody believed AI would take anything on the first pass
• How a company built on being deliberate got permission to move boldly, from the CEO pulling everyone together to the AI cafes where employees demo what they have built
• Why pure bottom-up experimentation ends with five people building the same agent, and the governance he added without shutting the experimenting down
• What rebuilding the hiring process actually took: a listening tour, a renamed function, and a human still making every candidate decision
• What candidates applying through AI agents are doing to his funnel, and the job categories he thinks come out of it
• Why he refuses to cut early-career hiring, and where he thinks the next generation of leaders comes from

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Patrick Martin
01:03 What a chief talent officer owns
03:35 Why AI enablement sits on the people team
06:06 Sorting every task: people or AI
09:59 Getting people to want automation
12:04 A caution-first company moving boldly
15:33 Inside Moody's AI cafes
16:33 Top-down and bottom-up together
20:09 Tokens are not free
21:11 Rebuilding the hiring process
26:16 Candidates are applying with agents
27:59 Bias in AI, bias in humans
29:51 Moving fast and getting things wrong
31:50 From "what is AI" to Claude Code
34:18 Manage Forward: rebuilding managers
36:56 Why early career talent still matters
39:11 The pitch to a skeptical CEO
42:06 Lightning round
44:11 Closing thoughts

Show Links:

• Follow Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-martin-22b734/
• Follow Joelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/
• Follow Joelle on X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson
• Learn more about Moody’s: https://www.moodys.com
• Learn more about Surface: https://surface.ai
• Explore All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcast
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268
• Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

Hannah Pritchett, Chief People Officer at Anthropic, believes the ability to learn starts with ambition. Her test for whether a company is truly set up to learn is simple: are people encouraged to think expansively, take meaningful risks, and pursue ideas that could materially change what’s possible?

A linguist by training, Hannah worked in trust and safety at Facebook, spent seven years at Stripe across risk, payments operations, and talent, and led people at Binti, where she also stepped in as interim head of engineering, before joining Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Joelle and Hannah get into:

• Why "AI adoption" is the wrong metaphor, and what changes when you onboard AI the way you onboard a new team member
• Why every individual contributor now runs a team, and every frontline manager just became an executive
• Selection, expectations, interactions: her framework for how a culture actually gets made, and why copying Anthropic's playbook wouldn't work
• How Anthropic rewards the big swing, from retros on every project to the strength-training rule she brought to work
• Flat titles, no offer negotiation, and the case for paying a superstar team the same
• Why efficiency gains should raise a company's ambitions instead of shrinking its headcount, and why people belong in the R&D line rather than the cost line
• Fit, function, flourish: what a people team is for, and how to earn a bigger mandate without waiting for permission

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Hannah Pritchett
01:10 AI is a new team member, not a tool
04:28 Everyone at your company now runs a team
06:42 Let the practitioners lead the change
08:48 Selection, expectations, interactions
12:39 Rewarding the big swing
14:23 Are you dreaming big enough?
15:12 Flat titles and intrinsic motivation
18:43 Hiring for mission, even at a bank
20:25 From linguistics to the people seat
22:23 Fit, function, flourish
24:48 A survey only counts if you act on it
27:16 Onboarding people, and onboarding Claude
29:00 How Anthropic's people team uses Claude
33:34 Don't wait for permission
36:29 Fewer people, or bigger ambitions?
40:23 Moving people across roles
44:35 What the AI and jobs debate gets wrong
47:03 The case for optimism
49:02 Lightning round
50:24 Closing thoughts

Show Links:

• Follow Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-pritchett-261b0a74/
• Follow Joelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/
• Follow Joelle on X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson
• Learn more about Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com
• Learn more about Surface: https://surface.ai
• Explore All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcast
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268
• Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

Ask a CEO to name their hardest problem and they will rarely call it a people problem. Beth Karlsson will take that bet every time. From her seat at Lightspeed she watches dozens of the fastest-scaling companies in the world figure out talent in real time, and the ones getting it right have stopped hiring for pedigree and started hiring for how fast someone can learn.

Beth Karlsson is Partner and Chief HR Officer at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the global multi-stage venture firm that was an early backer of Anduril, Anthropic, Glean, Snap and Wiz. She started at Apple on the retail floor in the earliest days of its stores, moved into Apple's people organization, and was head of people at Pinterest through its IPO.

They get into:
1. What a CHRO actually does inside a venture capital firm
2. Why she interviews for turning points instead of experience
3. The Apple research that found compassion set its best leaders apart, and how it got built into interviews and reviews
4. How "pace and purpose" carried Pinterest through its IPO and the year that followed
5. Why the runway a company gets to scale has compressed, and the talent that survives it
6. The one capability she screens every HR candidate for that almost nobody has

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Beth Karlsson
01:13 A CHRO inside a venture capital firm
03:06 Hiring for potential, not pedigree
05:11 The trait Apple's best leaders shared
09:27 If you want perks, look elsewhere
10:54 The perks arms race at Pinterest
12:43 Pace and purpose through the IPO
14:57 What the best portfolio companies get right
17:15 You can't make everybody happy
21:49 There is no AI magic wand
26:09 When your team fears being replaced
30:37 Everything is about people
33:46 People are the only moat
36:35 Telling a more optimistic AI story
40:45 Lightning round
43:31 Closing thoughts

Where to find Beth Karlsson:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethkarlsson/

Where to find Joelle Emerson:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelle-emerson-4a24225/
X: https://x.com/joelle_emerson

Learn more about Lightspeed: https://lsvp.com
Learn more about Surface: https://surface.ai

Where to find Below the Surface:
All episodes: https://surface.ai/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/below-the-surface/id1896941268
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGqJCL9HLx7dE7bn

Companies have spent the last few years measuring the value of AI by the headcount it lets them cut. Sarah Franklin calls that a strategic error — one the market is already correcting. Her bet: the companies that win the next five years will be the ones that build for the success of people first.

Sarah Franklin is CEO of Lattice, the people platform, and the first non-founder to lead the company. Before Lattice, she spent 15 years at Salesforce, where she built Trailhead into the company's learning platform and rose to president and chief marketing officer.

Joelle and Sarah get into why Lattice promoted its own chief people officer to run the company's AI transformation, what changes in a calibration meeting when the evidence comes out of the systems where work actually happens, why even OpenAI buys this software instead of building it, the AI coach that sits in on one-on-ones and tells managers when they talked over someone, and why every company that kills the performance review ends up bringing it back.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Superhuman's return-to-office mandate wasn't working. The required days came, and the desks stayed empty. So Kenny Mendes scrapped the mandate and changed what the company rewards instead.

Kenny is Chief People Officer at Superhuman, the AI productivity company formed by the merger of Grammarly and Coda. Before that, he was the first recruiting hire at Box, where he built the recruiting team that helped take the company to IPO.

Joelle and Kenny get into the opt-in office plans that replaced the mandate, the program that let employees voluntarily trade salary for equity, why managers no longer set compensation at Superhuman, and what changed when the people team stopped waiting on the sidelines and started talking to employees directly.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

When Katy Shields joined Notion as Chief People Officer, she didn't ask her team to improve what was already there. She asked them to throw it out.

Katy joined just over a year ago, when Notion was around 800 people. Before that, she helped scale DoorDash to nearly 20,000 employees, built culture at VSCO, and worked at Google X and Waymo. Her first month was spent mapping guiding principles from a blank page rather than iterating on the playbook she inherited, with Notion's own product as the test bed.

Joelle and Katy get into what got retired and what replaced it: the 41-question annual engagement survey, the pilot she rolled out to a fifth of the company too early and then owned publicly, why she calls headcount a vanity metric, how Notion rewrote its company values, and why she thinks AI will make work more human rather than less.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Hiring is in a doom loop. Candidates are using AI to apply to more jobs than ever, companies are using AI to screen them out faster than ever, and both sides are getting worse outcomes for the effort.

Daniel Chait is co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse, the hiring platform behind more than 7,500 companies. He's been arguing for structured hiring for over a decade, and he thinks it matters more now than ever, because AI applied on top of a chaotic process just scales the chaos.

Joelle and Daniel get into why neither employers nor job seekers are winning right now, what the best companies do differently before AI enters the picture at all, how AI interviews can either destroy or expand fair access to a first conversation, and what happened when Paradigm's own hiring process ran into candidates who weren't who they said they were.

Below the Surface is a show about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Most companies aren't failing at AI. They're failing at change. That's the argument from Jevan Soo Lenox, Chief People Officer at WRITER, who says the technology is rarely the problem. The culture around it is.

Jevan is a five-time chief people officer who has scaled teams at Square, Stitch Fix, Blue Bottle Coffee, and AI drug discovery company insitro, and he's been working at the intersection of technology and people for over two decades.

In this episode, Jevan and Joelle Emerson dig into why AI amplifies whatever your organization already is, for better or worse. Jevan shares findings from WRITER's recent adoption survey, including the surprising number of employees actively sabotaging AI initiatives at their companies, and explains why bottoms-up experimentation alone almost never produces business results. They also get into why he predicted years ago that the chief people officer would need to become the chief change officer, what he learned about humans and algorithms working together at Stitch Fix a decade before it was fashionable, the return of the generalist, and the difference between an efficiency culture and a resilience culture.

Below the Surface is a podcast from Paradigm about how the best companies build their teams, hosted by Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm.

How does Linear build a $1B+ business with under 200 people, without a culture of burnout?

Cristina Cordova is COO of Linear, the product development system for teams and agents. Before Linear, Cristina was an early employee at Stripe, helping scale the company from under 30 employees to over 3,000, and later helped build partnerships at Notion.

In this episode, Cristina joins host Joelle Emerson to discuss why Linear has explicitly rejected the 996 culture common in tech startups. She explains why Linear treats headcount as a deliberate choice rather than a byproduct of growth, why the company's hiring bar is about learning ability and risk-taking rather than resume checkboxes, and why focus, not raw output, is Linear's real competitive advantage.

They also discuss Linear's paid work trials, how the company organizes engineering into project-based "collapsible teams," and why investing in brand early pays off for years.

If you're thinking about how to build a high-performing team without overhiring, or how to design a hiring process that actually predicts success, this conversation is for you.

What does hiring look like at the frontier of AI?

Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. Before joining Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, led global recruiting at Pinterest as the company grew from 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and built Growth by Design Talent into the talent advisory firm behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma.

In this episode, Adam joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about why most companies are still building recruiting teams the way they did decades ago, and what needs to change now. He explains Cursor’s approach to hiring, why the best recruiting processes look more like executive search than a traditional funnel, and why companies should focus less on hiring efficiency and more on hiring efficacy.

They also discuss talent density, referral mining, work trials, founder involvement, compensation philosophy, AI in recruiting, hiring junior engineers in an AI-native world, and what it takes to close exceptional candidates in a market where speed, judgment, and conviction matter more than ever.

If you’re thinking about how AI is changing recruiting, team design, and the future of high-performance organizations, this conversation is for you.

The job of the people team is being rewritten in real-time. We created Below the Surface to learn how category-defining companies are navigating people, talent, and culture right now.