What Juices You Podcast

If AI frees up your team's time, will they bring their best thinking to the work, or wait to be told what to do?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Nancy Priest, Chief Experience Officer of Glass of Learning. An award-winning program designer with more than 20 years of building learning strategies for organizations around the world, Nancy spent part of her own career in manufacturing, and much of her firm's work today is with manufacturers. She remembers standing on a shop floor in 1987 as new equipment arrived, and she hears the same questions about AI now. In this fourth and final conversation of our Leading Humans in the Age of AI series, she lays out the three conversations leaders need to have with their people to bring AI in without losing their best thinking.

Nancy's argument is that AI raises the stakes on leadership basics many organizations were already missing, from setting expectations to talking honestly about what's changing. When leaders treat their people as partners in redesigning the work, the human side becomes what brings the technology to life.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why telling people their jobs are safe can backfire when headcount cuts follow, and what happens when leaders stay quiet and rumours fill the gap
• The question Nancy suggests asking employees before deciding what AI should take on: if the mundane tasks went away, what would you do with that extra capacity?
• Why handing a tangled process to AI won't fix it, and the three questions Nancy asks first: what are we trying to accomplish, why does it matter, and how can the technology help us invest in our people?
• What happens on a plant floor when people believe they're supposed to park their brains at the door, and how leaders can shift from directing every task to partnering with the people who know the equipment best
• Why training only changes behaviour when direct managers are involved, and the simple follow-up questions Nancy gives managers to keep new skills alive after the session ends

If you're leading people through the arrival of AI and want them bringing their judgment to the work, this episode will give you the three conversations to start with and the leadership basics that help them land.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

If AI lets your team clear a week of work by lunch, who has the capacity to judge whether it's the right work?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Christy Pettit, CEO and co-founder of Pollinate Networks Inc. For more than 25 years, Christy has worked in organizational development and knowledge transfer, helping organizations build leadership capacity through structured mentoring. She developed the Knowledge Transfer Index and the matching technology behind Pollinate’s Cross-Pollinate AI™ platform, so she comes to this conversation as someone who uses AI to connect people and insists it can’t replace the relationship itself. In this third conversation of our Leading Humans in the Age of AI series, she explains why AI is sending work back up to leaders faster than they can review it, at the same moment more people are deciding the leader’s job isn’t one they want.

Christy's argument is that leadership capacity has always been stretched thin, and AI is making the strain impossible to ignore. The judgment AI can't supply is built person to person, through mentors who have walked the path and know you well enough to tell you the truth.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why decades of pushing work down to empowered teams are now reversing, as AI lets people send finished work up faster than leaders can assess it
• Why so many people look at the manager's role, see someone stuck between senior leaders and a reluctant team, and opt out, and how a mentor who isn't responsible for your performance can change that picture
• The difference between hearing "good job" from Claude and hearing it from a mentor who knows what you've been through, and why that emotional tie is what makes a lesson stick for years
• Christy's case for keeping AI out of your relationships: use it to build the plan, then own the work by reading it and thinking through how it will land with people
• What makes an organization ready for mentoring, and why mentors often learn as much as the people they guide once they put their tacit knowledge into words

If you lead people who are moving faster with AI than you can keep up with, this conversation will show you where your judgment matters most and how mentoring can grow the next leaders who will share that load.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

If your team believes AI can think, why would they keep doing the thinking themselves?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Aaron Barth, PhD, founder and president of Dialectic, a learning company focused on soft skills and critical thinking. A former philosophy professor at Western University who specialized in human reasoning and decision theory, Aaron now helps leaders understand how AI actually works so they can judge when to trust it. In this second conversation of our Leading Humans in the Age of AI series, he explains why the story we tell about AI is raising anxiety at work, and why understanding the technology is the best way he's found to bring that anxiety down.

Aaron's central argument is that one of the most important things a leader can do right now is learn how AI actually works. Once people see it as a statistical tool predicting the next word, the facade of intelligence falls away and they start trusting their own judgment again.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why the dominant story about AI drains the empathy, critical thinking, and relationship effort teams depend on, and how leaders can bring the temperature down
• Aaron's GPS analogy for how a large language model builds its answers, and why hallucinations are built into the way it works
• What "human first" looks like in practice: write it, design it, or think it through yourself first, then bring AI in as an editor and give it no more weight than another perspective
• Why AI tools are built to tell you you're right, and two quick tests for pressure-testing any answer: run the same prompt in three fresh tabs, and ask it about something you know deeply
• How an AI-written email from someone he respected changed the way Aaron felt about that relationship, and why he recommends writing your own

If you're leading a team that's already using AI, or quietly uneasy about it, this conversation will give you a clear way to talk about what the technology is and isn't, so your people can use it well and keep doing their best thinking.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

If AI is supposed to make your organization more capable, why does rolling it out so often leave your people less able to adapt?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Mark Patterson, Founder and Executive Director of Magnet at Toronto Metropolitan University, a national platform connecting talent with opportunity across Canada. Mark's work focuses on how AI is reshaping jobs and organizational strategy, and his stated mission is to build the adaptive capacity of Canadians. In this opening conversation of our Leading Humans in the Age of AI series, he explains why so many AI projects stall when organizations bolt new tools onto old ways of working. He also explains why the fear those rollouts create shuts down the very thinking that adoption depends on.

At the heart of the conversation is Mark's conviction that the biggest risk in the AI shift is a leadership gap. When people feel precarious about their future, their executive function shuts down, and they stop experimenting at exactly the moment experimentation matters most.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why bolting AI onto an existing workflow moves the friction to another part of the process, and what happens when a supervisor suddenly has ten times more documents to review
• How precarity, the fear that your job or skills won't survive, shuts down the executive function people need to experiment and adapt
• Why Mark recommends that large organizations build a "digital twin" of a priority process at the edge, prove it in parallel, and then bring it into the core
• The "workforce bargain" Mark says leaders need to strike: co-designing the future of work with employees so they can see their own path to higher-value work
• Why anchoring your identity in the mission you serve makes it easier to become a novice again and again as the tools keep changing

If you're leading a team or an organization through the AI shift and wondering why adoption feels harder than it should, this conversation will give you a clearer view of what your people need from you to adapt, and where your investment will actually pay off.

--------

Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

Why is it always the direct leader who gets coached to be more likable, and almost never the likable leader who gets coached to be more accountable?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with M.K. Palmore, founder of Apogee Global RMS, a 22-year FBI veteran who led the San Francisco Division's Cybersecurity Investigative Branch before moving through Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud into board-level risk advisory work. Palmore built his career on being unmistakably direct, the same instinct FBI investigators are trained to use to open up a hostile or guarded subject, and he's spent decades learning what that trait costs when nobody around him will name it.

The conversation keeps circling back to a double standard most leaders never notice: candor gets coached, but charm rarely does. The trait quietly costing a team the most is often the one nobody's ever asked you to fix.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why direct leaders get coached to be more likable, while likable leaders are almost never coached to be more accountable
• What Palmore's FBI training taught him about putting people at ease before you can extract the truth from them, and how that applies to any hard conversation
• The one habit MK says builds trust faster than any apology: not what you say when you're wrong, but how fast you say it
• The leadership mistake MK admits to making himself, walling off his own turf instead of listening, and what it taught him about the gap between competence and trust
• Why building genuine collaboration on an executive team means suppressing individual agendas in favor of the team's, and how hard that actually is to enforce

If you've ever been coached to soften your delivery, or never been told anything at all because everyone already likes you, this conversation will change how you think about which leadership trait is actually costing your team the most.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

What happens when the most generous thing you can do for someone is stop covering for them?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Tim Windsor, author of The Power of You and host of the UNCOMMODiFiED Podcast, to dig into a word most leaders flinch at: accountability. Tim makes the case that accountability isn't a leadership stick to wield over other people. It's a biological energy source that returns power to whoever owns their part, and drains it from whoever avoids it. Returning for his second conversation with Brady, Tim brings the framework from his new book: three deceptively simple questions that turn reaction into real ownership.

The conversation moves from personal history into leadership, parenting, and even climate accountability, but it keeps landing on the same idea: the object of accountability is almost always wrong. We aim it at holding others when the real leverage is in holding ourselves.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why the brain treats owning a mistake as a reward, not a punishment, and what that means for how leaders talk about failure
• The three-question sequence Tim uses to move from reaction to real ownership, and why skipping the first question breaks the whole thing
• Why “who dropped the ball” is exactly the wrong question to ask when something goes sideways, and what to ask instead
• How over-functioning for your kids, your team, or your partner can quietly rob them of the accountability they need to grow
• Why candor without compassion becomes punishment, and compassion without candor isn't actually kindness

If you're a leader who has ever taken on someone else's problem because it felt safer than trusting them with it, this episode will change how you think about what real ownership costs, and what it gives back.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

Why does pushing harder under pressure often leave you with less capacity to solve the problem, not more?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with John Todor, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist who spent decades helping leaders and organizations navigate disruptive change, including years of consulting work for Hewlett-Packard. Todor built his Resilient Brain Program and his Everyday Ways to Vitality practice around a discovery from that work: the leaders who got stuck weren't lacking information or opportunity, they were lacking vitality, the fuel the brain needs to see new possibilities.

Todor and Brady trace a straight line between the neuroscience of an overloaded brain and the organizational cost of a depleted team, arguing that the capacity to adapt has to be restored before it can be demanded.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• The specific eye and posture shift that can interrupt catastrophizing and rumination in seconds, without touching your thoughts directly
• Why touching a doorframe, or another small physical cue, on the way out of a meeting keeps unresolved issues from quietly draining you all day
• What actually happens in the brain when you grind on a problem, and why it makes you see fewer solutions, not more
• How partnering with your team on a messy, unresolved issue produces better outcomes than handing them a tightly structured agenda
• A simple daily habit, like cooking without a recipe or seeking out small novelty, that builds the brain's capacity for genuine innovation over time

If you're a leader who keeps trying to think your way out of pressure, this episode offers a set of small, physical practices that restore the vitality your brain needs to find the answer that grinding never will.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

How much of your day gets consumed by something that already happened and can't be changed?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Neal Schore, Founder & CEO of The 25th Hour Group. After building and scaling Triton Digital into a global leader in podcast technology, Schore spent two decades coaching some of the most consequential executives, board members, and private equity leaders in the country on a pattern he calls the swirl: the replay loop that keeps leaders stuck in what already happened, or what hasn't happened yet. His debut book, The 25th Hour, launches August 11 and makes the case that leaders don't lose time to their workload, they lose it to their reactions.

Brady and Neal arrive at the same conclusion from entirely different careers, one spent developing leaders and unlocking the energy needed to drive performance, the other spent coaching senior business leaders, board members, and private equity executives. The leaders who reclaim the most time are the ones who learn to manage themselves, not the ones who manage everything around them. Their exchange also circles back to an idea at the heart of the 20th-anniversary edition of Brady's The Power of Conversation: that a single question asked before a conversation begins can change its entire trajectory.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why a demanding workload can leave a leader sharper, while an unmanaged internal loop can quietly cut them down to a fraction of who they are
• How giving yourself credit, not waiting on someone else's recognition, is what actually breaks the pattern of chasing external approval
• Why a phrase like "that's way above my pay grade" trains the people around you to believe it, and what to say instead
• A simple math exercise that exposes how much energy gets spent defending against outcomes with less than a 1% chance of happening
• Why disrupting small, harmless routines can be the fastest way to loosen the grip of automatic thinking everywhere else

If you've ever replayed a meeting for days after it ended, this conversation gives you a way to name the loop, interrupt it, and get the hours back.

--------

Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

Why do the leaders who try hardest to control people so often get the least out of them?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Jennifer Paylor, executive coach and former Head of Learning & Development, Talent, and Culture for Capgemini in North America, whose career has been built on a refusal to treat people like resources. Jennifer built and scaled one of the largest internal coaching practices in the world at IBM, reaching tens of thousands of employees across dozens of countries, on a simple premise: you cannot fully predict a human being, and building for that unpredictability is where the real gains show up. She's since taken that philosophy into her own coaching practice, working across industries from technology to law.

Together, Brady and Jennifer explore what happens when organizations try to engineer uncertainty out of the people, and why the leaders who make room for what they can't predict tend to get the most from the people around them.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why Jennifer refuses to call people "resources," and what that word quietly does to how leaders treat their teams
• How a coaching program built around dopamine, not compliance, reached tens of thousands of employees inside IBM
• Why freedom, in Jennifer's world, means releasing people into who they're already wired to be
• The blunt question Jennifer asks executive teams the moment a conversation narrows down to just the numbers
• Why the same skill that makes someone a great coach, asking questions that create real tension, is what separates a useful AI conversation from a hollow one

If you're a leader who has ever tried to control an outcome by controlling a person, this episode will change how you think about what leadership is actually for.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice  

What if the empathy you're showing your team is actually the thing holding them back?

In this episode of the What Juices You Podcast, Brady Wilson sits down with Matthew James, President and CEO of Purity Life Health Products, Canada's leading full-service distributor of natural health, wellness, and grocery products. Over the past decade, Matthew has led Purity Life through sustained growth and a major acquisition — bringing three distinct businesses, cultures, and teams under one roof and building toward a single, unified organization.

What Matthew keeps finding at the center of every integration challenge is not a technology problem or a strategy problem. It is a conversation problem. The leaders who stall the integration are almost always the ones who have been protecting people from the truth rather than partnering with them through it.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why the employee rated excellent in every annual review ends up fired without warning — and what that pattern reveals about the cost of avoiding difficult conversations
• How Matthew parlays the physical discomfort of early-morning CrossFit workouts into the mental readiness to have the leadership conversations he is dreading
• What "One Purity Life" actually requires from leaders — and why alignment across different cultures cannot be achieved through control
• How Purity Life is using AI not to replace people but to remove the drudgery that drains engagement, and what that shift is doing to the energy of the organization
• What the difference between ruinous empathy and genuine candor looks like in practice — and why Brady argues that withholding hard feedback is an act of self-betrayal

If you are leading a team through change and have ever wondered whether your instinct to protect people is actually serving them, Matthew James offers a candid, grounded perspective from the middle of the work.

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Transforming Workplace Engagement For Over 20 Years

Whether you’re looking to grow leadership capabilities, build high-performance teams or fuel everyday innovation, Juice’s proven content and customized learning solutions will deliver lasting impact and help you transform your workplace. For 20 years, we’ve partnered with companies around the world to transform employee engagement. Every day, we work with leaders like you to unlock the energy needed to fuel performance. 

•  Leadership Training Programs
•  Learning Experiences
•  Leadership Resources
•  Webinars & Workshops
•  About Juice