Key Takeaways

• Frontline managers are the single biggest lever on company performance. All three CHROs agree the most consequential management layer sits closest to the customer and the workforce. At ISS, that's 10,000 site managers with P&L responsibility. At JD Sports, it's store managers across 5,000 locations. At Cushman & Wakefield, 48,000 of 54,000 employees are frontline.

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• Strategy fails when it isn't deployable in the field. Liz Benison: companies waste enormous sums on dashboards, frameworks, and initiatives that frontline managers can't actually use. The discipline is fewer priorities, executed relentlessly. ISS runs on three priorities and eight initiatives, full stop.

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• AI coaching's strongest use case is performance support, not training. Holly Tyson describes a shift away from "take a course, check a box" toward in-the-moment support: Nadia helps a manager role-play a difficult conversation with a specific teammate, remembering context across sessions.

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• Hire for attitude, train for skills, and AI is making this measurable. ISS uses AI to consistently test for aptitude and attitude at scale. Holly Tyson adds that curiosity and adaptability, once differentiators, are becoming table stakes.

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• AI coaching is being measured against real business outcomes. Cushman & Wakefield is running controlled experiments comparing Nadia users to non-users on performance ratings, engagement, and retention. Valence's research with advisors Prasad Setty and Jennifer Carpenter shows Nadia power users are 31% more likely to move up a performance band, drawn from 45,000 coaching sessions.

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• Good is often good enough; raise the bar selectively. Most roles benefit from a clear floor of competence. A smaller set of competitively differentiating roles is where the bar should rise. Knowing the difference is itself a management skill.

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Full Transcript

Welcome and Introduction

Anand Chopra-McGowan | 00:06 – 02:02

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Hello. Welcome, everyone. We are delighted to have you. Welcome to a spirited live session: What Makes a High-Performing Manager, CHROs on AI and the Future of Talent. My name is Anand Chopra-McGowan. I am part of the leadership team at Valence. I'm normally based in London, but today I'm in Amsterdam. Do drop in the chat where you are joining us from, as well.

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Valence is the enterprise AI lab behind Nadia, the most widely deployed AI coaching platform in the Fortune 500. Nadia is now deployed across over 100 companies, including Analog Devices, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Merck, Schneider Electric, Telefónica, WPP, Zillow, and of course Cushman & Wakefield as well.

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Over these deployments, what we've learned is that when you put an AI coach in all of your managers' pockets, you have much more than just a coach. You have a platform for company performance. Our customers are using Nadia for setting goals that are more aligned with their strategy, making learning programs more impactful, making performance management more effective, and so much more.

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Today, we will hear insight and perspective from three Chief HR Officers, including one who has deployed Nadia at scale. To introduce our topic, our speakers, and to kick off the conversation, I'm delighted to welcome Hein Knaapen. Hein is an advisor to CEOs and CHROs around the world. You're also Valence's Europe Advisory Board Chair, and a former CHRO of ING Bank among other places. Hein, I'll kick it over to you to introduce our speakers.

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Meet the Panel: Three CHROs on Manager Performance

Hein Knaapen | 02:02 – 04:05

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Thanks, Anand. It's a joy to be here, and it's an even greater joy to have such formidable guests in this session.

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So we're having Holly Tyson. Holly, you are the CPO of Cushman & Wakefield, a globally operating real estate services company. After a beautiful career across many industries, we'll get you to talk about your experience with Nadia in a moment.

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My second guest is Liz Benison. Liz, you made a wonderful business career with many P&L roles. Now you're the Global People and Technology Officer at ISS, a 325,000-person services company. We're interested to get your perspective on HR matters with your beautiful business background.

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The third guest I'm welcoming is a man I've known for very many years because we were once in the same team at Unilever: Marten Booisma. Marten, you of course have worked the world, in many industries and roles, as Chief HR Officer, the latest one being with JD Sports. Welcome to this conversation.

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As a first question, I'm interested in this, and I've got my own thoughts as well. Thinking about company performance: where do managers have the biggest impact? I know this is an easy question and difficult to answer. Liz, can I start with you, given your own business background? What would your first thought be on where managers have the biggest impact in driving company performance?

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Where Frontline Managers Have the Biggest Impact on Company Performance

Liz Benison | 04:05 – 05:02

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For those who don't know ISS, we're a facilities management company. We have 325,000 people across 60 countries, hundreds of thousands of locations. For us, the critical managers in our organization are those at the site. Whatever we do top down is absolutely pointless. We have a saying that if nothing changes on the site, then nothing's changed. The critical layer for us are the 10,000 site managers, first-line managers. That is our single biggest lever on business performance because every single day, they're taking thousands of decisions, small local decisions that impact a customer or an employee or the bottom line. If we can make sure that they make those decisions in the best possible way, then our job becomes easy as they all roll up. So our biggest impact is there.

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Hein Knaapen | 05:02 – 05:07

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And those 10,000, Liz, that is your frontline management?

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Liz Benison | 05:07 – 05:31

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Yeah. They're the people who are out on a customer site, and they're the first point who has P&L responsibility. So they'll manage to a budget. They'll have service responsibility. They'll have people responsibility. They'll have teams of maybe tens of people, maybe hundreds of people. It's them, and getting them to make the right decision every time they make those thousands of small decisions.

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Hein Knaapen | 05:31 – 05:51

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I get that. Holly, how's that for you? You're also a big company operating at very many sites. What's your view and your experience across industry about where management makes the biggest impact? I know it's a broad question, but I'm keen to get your views.

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Holly Tyson | 05:51 – 07:50

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It is a broad question, but I think, Hein, it's actually the question. I 100% agree with Liz. I've worked across a bunch of different industries. Real estate services, but we also do facility management. Before that I was in pharmaceuticals. I was in logistics. I was in retail. The same type of role (I call them crucible roles) exists across different industries. It is the pivot point between top-down strategy and bottom-up execution. If it doesn't change in the field, nothing changes. Those people are somewhat the same no matter what industry it is. Those are the linchpins of translating. Sometimes in small countries or country leads, but it's translating top-down vision and strategy for an organization into what does this actually feel and look like on the ground? What does Joe do when he wakes up on a Tuesday morning, and how does that link to the three- or five-year strategy that the company has already committed to Wall Street?

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In terms of what makes it most effective: a manager's ability to take something that can be ephemeral or vague and actually translate it into something practical and tactical. Something that people can get their hands around so that they understand every day how what they are doing is impacting the global company and the broader strategy. I sometimes call it sculpting fog. Going from vagueness to something that is real. I think that's the number one lever managers can pull to help people be clear on what their expectations are.

Where Do Managers Have the Biggest Impact on Company Performance?

Across three large frontline workforces (facilities management, real estate services, and retail), the CHROs converge on the same answer: the most important managers sit closest to the customer. At ISS, 10,000 site managers with P&L responsibility make thousands of small decisions daily that roll up into business performance. At Cushman & Wakefield, Holly Tyson calls these "crucible roles," the pivot point between top-down strategy and bottom-up execution. The single greatest lever a frontline manager pulls is translating company strategy into clear, daily expectations for their team.

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Hein Knaapen | 07:50 – 08:23

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Totally. And it's interesting, Holly, how we talk endlessly about leadership in the vaguest and most romantic possible wording and overlook the competence and skills by which those people lead the operation. I'll come back to that point. Marten, since you've been in many regions and many industries, give me your thinking about where the impact of management sits and where the weak spots are.

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Marten Booisma | 08:23 – 09:40

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It was a pleasure, Hein. I'm very aligned with Liz and Holly here. I've been in many countries, many industries, but the majority of my time I spent in retail. My latest company was the JD Group, an omnichannel retailer with 5,000 stores across the globe. The key critical role is the store manager. If you get it right with the store manager, you get it right with the store. They have the interaction with the customer on a daily basis, but also with the teams and the people. In retail, 90% of your workforce is on the shop floor. If you want to drive performance, if you want to really make a change, it only comes when you see it back on the shop floor. The store manager is the most critical role to drive that performance. It has a lot of similarities across the different industries. When I listen to Liz, when I listen to Holly, we hit the same theme: those who interact with the majority of the workforce are the ones who are the most critical in driving performance.

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Building Deployable Tools for Frontline Managers

Hein Knaapen | 09:40 – 10:09

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I'm sure each of us has got the scars on our back from when we did these things wrong. Looking at all this, in particular since you've been a line manager yourself, what would be the one or two most vital points to improve in order to drive management effectiveness?

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Liz Benison | 10:09 – 11:26

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It is funny that I've been on the receiving end of great ideas from the group P&C in the past. To now be the person who comes up with the great ideas is interesting. To me, whatever the great idea is, if it's not deployable in the field, it's literally not worth anything. When I look at how many things we've sent down: a great example at the moment is, we suddenly thought all these people need data. If they just get data, then they'll make the right decisions. So we've spent a fortune creating dashboards for first-line managers. They don't have the skills and competencies (not many people do, to be honest) to actually get insight from a dashboard.

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To me, it's about creating tools and frameworks and guidelines that are easy to use and easy to deploy in the field. Let's assume that they're really intelligent and they want to do the right thing. Give them tools that enable them to get on and do the right thing if we give them the context. Companies waste an awful lot of money with things that make no difference because they're simply not deployable in the field.

Why Strategy Fails When It Isn't Deployable

Liz Benison, Global People and Technology Officer at ISS, argues that the most common reason large-company initiatives fail is not bad strategy but undeployable tools. ISS spent significant budget building data dashboards for first-line site managers who lacked the time and analytic training to extract insight from them. The lesson: design frameworks and guidelines that assume intelligent, well-intentioned managers and give them context and tools they can actually use in the field on a Tuesday morning.

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Protecting Manager Time

Hein Knaapen | 11:26 – 12:14

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There is this beautiful book a few years old, written by Bob Sutton, the Stanford professor. The book is called The Friction Project. It is extremely well written. He starts saying that the top of the company should be the guardians of the time of their management. That sounds simple, and may be simple, but is very difficult. Then he says, in actual fact, the top of the company are the robbers of the time of their management, with all those new, interesting, fascinating, transformative ideas. That does ring a bell to me. Holly, have you experienced something similar? This idea of an overwhelming amount of new ideas and initiatives, and we drive people?

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Holly Tyson | 12:14 – 14:50

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I just wrote that down: that it's our job to be the guardians of our managers' time. That is brilliant. It's very true. Your question was around what are the top levers we can pull to be effective managers, and protecting their time is a really good one.

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I boil it down to two things: what a manager needs from their teammate and what the teammate needs from the manager. It sounds overly simple, but it's that clarity piece, to Liz's good point. If it's not something that can be deployed and be really practical, it doesn't matter. So it's giving the employees on your team very clear expectations. It comes down to goals all the time. I say that to my board all the time, with compensation plans. Give me a strategy, I'll give you a comp plan. It depends on what the goal is that we're setting. We spend a lot of time designing things and then not enough time talking about what's the actual goal. What does good look like? How do we know when it's done? Getting super clear on things that are observable and measurable. That's critical so that people wake up on a Tuesday and know what they're doing.

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The other piece is what they need from us. The best way for us to do that as leaders and as managers is to really understand the personal motivations of the people on our teams. I've never been one of those leaders who says that we're like a family because you're not always telling your uncle what he needs to hear. The best companies really are like sports teams: you are coming together at a point in time to deliver a shared common goal. Sometimes you're going to shed some players, and sometimes you're going to recruit some new players. Understanding the motivations while you are in this team together, understanding what each person needs and making sure those needs get met. Some people want adulation. Some people want money. Some people want flexibility. What is most important to each person, and making sure that they really feel seen and validated? My experience has been that's when people go above and beyond for you, their manager, for the company, for the common goal. It's when they feel really unleashed and validated. Basically, what do you need from them and what do they need from you?

How Effective Managers Set Clear Expectations and Motivate Their Teams

Holly Tyson, Chief People Officer at Cushman & Wakefield, frames effective management as a two-way exchange: clarity about what the manager needs from each teammate, and understanding what each teammate needs from the manager. The clarity side comes down to observable, measurable goals so people wake up knowing what they're doing. The understanding side requires knowing each person's individual motivations (recognition, money, flexibility, growth) and making sure those needs are met. Tyson compares high-performing teams to sports teams, not families: a shared common goal with the right people in the right roles at the right time.

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Strategic Simplicity: Do Less, Land More

Hein Knaapen | 14:50 – 15:19

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That's well said. And here's this interesting thing: despite all our engagement programs, people may join for the company, but they certainly run away from the manager. Marten, you have worked in people-rich companies, but also in capital-rich companies; you started your career at Shell. Give me your views. Are there any incisive differences between various industries?

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Marten Booisma | 15:19 – 16:26

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Not sure. From my perspective, at least from a people perspective, it's almost agnostic. Of course, the environment requires different levels of how you organize yourself and the complexity. But what I've learned a long time ago, by making many mistakes in trying to do too much and trying to create too much impact and transformation and change: if you really want to go fast, slow down. Show simplicity and do less, and make sure that things land before you move on to the next.

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Often in enabling support functions, you see the tendency to over-design, to try to make things perfect, but it does not always resonate with the workforce, the people who need to work on a daily basis with those tools or technologies. Simplicity and slow down, do less, with greater impact on the long term. Those are two lessons I've heard in the past decades from that perspective.

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Hein Knaapen | 16:26 – 17:25

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Here's another thought I'm curious to get your thoughts on. Over the past five years, I worked with CEOs and Group HR officers on acceleration of value creation from the talent angle. What I found is that CEOs never find it difficult to boil down the strategy to the four or five spots where most of the value creation sits, nor do they find it very difficult to attach one or two priorities to each spot. The biggest difficulty is to then align it (or I would say contract it) in the top team. The problem starts there, because if you don't agree on a limited set of priorities at that level, then you know where you end. That's what you referred to, I think: being at the receiving end of all kinds of pet hobbies.

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Liz Benison | 17:25 – 18:58

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Yep. I completely agree. I've been in a couple of companies, or times within companies, where we've got it right. To me, if you can't boil your strategy down onto a one-pager, and if that one-pager doesn't last at least three years, then it won't create value. So ours at the moment is three priorities and eight initiatives, and that is it. All of our businesses have the right to wave that one-pager in my face and say, "It's not on the one-pager list, so we're not doing it." We've just after two years made the first revision to that, but they're tiny revisions that have come up through the businesses as demands rather than top-down things.

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It's a constant discipline because in a number of companies, you do that, but then a good idea comes. We are all so attracted to good ideas, and they bubble up from somewhere, and we all get very excited about them again. We forget that we've agreed: no, we're just doing eight things, and we're going to do those things relentlessly. To your point, Marten, the fewer the better. We're going to do them relentlessly and with quality. When we've done the eight, then we might find a ninth. But it's so hard to do in a world where we get to these positions because we're talented and because we have great ideas. Then we're trying to please: don't have any great ideas for the next six months. We don't need them. It's hard. It's against the grain.

How Strategic Simplicity Drives Manager Effectiveness

The CHROs agree that the discipline of doing fewer things is harder than designing more things. Marten Booisma's lesson from decades across Shell, Unilever, and JD Sports: if you want to go fast, slow down, simplify, and let things land before adding the next initiative. Liz Benison runs ISS on a single page: three priorities and eight initiatives, defended against new "great ideas" for a minimum of three years. Frontline managers cannot execute on what their leaders cannot agree to leave off the page.

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Strategy, Culture, and Talent: A Three-Legged Stool

Marten Booisma | 18:59 – 19:47

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Fully agree, Liz. On strategy: it's often overestimated. Strategy is, of course, important. You do it once, set it for multiple years, and review the progress. But it's not only the strategy. It's the alignment with the strategy, with your operating model, with your culture, with your processes. When you get that right, then you create performance in the company. Often you see misalignment in the top team on the priorities and the direction, and also misalignment in not being consistent: your strategy is not aligned with how you have organized yourself, or where you put your priorities. Then you derail the organization into a downward spiral.

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Liz Benison | 19:48 – 20:12

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You mentioned culture, Marten. Again, where things have failed in the past, that becomes part of the problem because they just assume that anything that comes from group is going to fail. So they don't pay very much attention at all. Any big transformation means you've got to get people accepting that these are going to work, and we're going to abide by them. Sorry, Holly.

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Holly Tyson | 20:13 – 21:20

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I was just going to add on because I fully agree. I'm a big believer in what we call SOAP, Strategy On A Page. But one of the things that we've done here is actually we've put strategy, culture, and talent on one page, recognizing it's a three-legged stool. The first thing was the strategy for clarity. But we've got three pillars of our strategy, we've got three pillars of our culture, and we've got three pillars of our talent. Putting them all on literally equal footing to recognize that we can only do the strategy because it's the what, the why, the how, and the who. We can only do the strategy if everything else is aligned to it, and there's clarity and infrastructure alignment: everything from setting goals to how we coach our employees, to what our values are, to how we measure performance. Recognizing that it's all lined up to whether you are going through the strategy, the culture, or the talent. And then the talent is around selection, development, and deployment importantly.

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Marten Booisma | 21:20 – 22:01

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Yeah. Holly, what you said, I fully agree. Where we as Chief HR Officers can have a role in the team is to protect the company and protect the team: to not go off that one page and create new stuff and create new ideas. We need to speak up in the top team first, because if you don't get this right in the top team, for sure you will not get it right at the other levels. The gap will widen going down in the organization.

Why Strategy, Culture, and Talent Belong on the Same Page

At Cushman & Wakefield, Holly Tyson built a single-page operating document that places strategy, culture, and talent on equal footing: three pillars each, what she calls a three-legged stool. The point is alignment: performance reviews, goal-setting, values, and coaching practices must all reinforce the same direction. Marten Booisma adds that misalignment in the top team (between strategy and operating model, or between stated priorities and actual investment) is what derails performance further down the organization.

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How Cushman & Wakefield is Using Nadia at Scale

Hein Knaapen | 22:01 – 22:30

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This is industry-agnostic, isn't it? These are general patterns you see across industries. Holly, I think you showed us a few first numbers about the way Nadia has been landing in your company. Give us a feeling. What do you like? Where is the jury out? How does it help you in the matters that we just discussed?

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Holly Tyson | 22:30 – 25:33

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I'd answer that on two levels, Hein. One is that the wheel I just talked about, we call it our wheel of strategy, culture, and talent. We have our purpose, and we have our values that we call DRIVE: Driven, Resilient, Inclusive, Visionary, and Entrepreneurial. We measure all of that. Nadia has been a core communication vehicle, not only to communicate out, but to allow managers to check and infuse those concepts culturally into how they are interacting with their employees. So to the point we started with on these pivotal goals of going from strategy to execution, Nadia has been a really strong partner in helping us do that, because she can scale. We have 9,000 managers across our 54,000 employees, and Nadia can be with each one of those managers. We don't have it yet for all 9,000; we're getting there. But for those she's partnered with, it's right there to allow the manager (or to remind the manager, or to infuse the manager's commentary and thinking) with what is most important to Cushman & Wakefield in terms of the culture and how we want to develop and retain talent. That's the translating-strategy-down piece.

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The other piece I have found really effective is that, because she can be where we need her around the sun, around the globe, at that point in time. One of my philosophies, and Anand and I have discussed this before, is that I think the future of learning in industries is going to move away from "take a course, do your training, check a box" to performance support. People's attention spans are shorter. Their memories are shorter. If they were tossed something two months ago and now they need to apply it, they're probably not going to remember all of it. People are used to having everything they need at their fingertips. Moving to performance support is what I see Nadia allowing us to do: to be that performance support to a manager. "I've got to have a tough conversation with Joe. Last time he got really upset." Well, Nadia knows Joe. Nadia knows Joe because I've talked with Nadia about Joe, and Nadia can help me role-play. If Joe is angry in this one, she's going to play the role of Joe. Or maybe he understands some of it but he's going to react differently on something else. The role-play piece of Nadia, I think, is where there's real value unlocked. Because you can be told how to do something; you learn by doing. Allowing managers to practice ahead of time, get real-time coaching and guidance, has been an unlock for us. I'm excited for when we get it to all of our managers globally.

What is Performance Support in AI Coaching?

Performance support is help delivered at the moment of need, replacing the traditional model of "take a course, check a box, hope you remember." Holly Tyson, CPO of Cushman & Wakefield, describes how Nadia gives managers in-the-moment support before a tough conversation: the AI coach remembers the specific teammate, the prior context, and the manager's own goals, then runs a tailored role-play. The shift from periodic training to embedded performance support reflects what Tyson calls the future of learning in large enterprises.

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Hiring as a Step Out of Poverty: Equipping Managers in Service Work

Hein Knaapen | 25:33 – 26:42

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I get you. When I make presentations, I like to joke (but it's only a half joke) that I was privy to many leadership programs, and I developed a few myself. The ones I developed myself were brilliant, of course, and the others were much less so. What they had in common was that none of them contributed visibly to company results. I find that a sobering thought. What I've come to see, to your point, Holly, is that having managers in a safe space to practice the conversation is so powerful. That's probably where you feel the help of Nadia.

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Liz, with your 325,000 people: we discussed it before because you've got some very strong and even touching thinking about elevating poor people from their poverty by giving them meaningful work. The managers, I believe, are respectable human beings, but often hardly any more advanced than the people they lead. Tell us about that. You've got some beautiful thoughts.

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Liz Benison | 26:42 – 29:08

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Yeah. We pride ourselves that for many, many people, we are the step out of poverty. We are the difference between them being able to pay their rent, feed their family, and that first step of gaining some dignity through work, being able to start to think about what's next. What a privilege that is, to be able to start to worry about what you want to become. That's the second step in our employee value proposition.

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We have got fantastic stories. We've got a program going in London at the moment where we're taking homeless people. They're in this loop where they can't get a job because they haven't got an address, and we found a way of getting out of that loop. We're putting homeless people into jobs, and we're the first cohort of that. We're getting some amazing results.

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We rely very heavily on refugees, because if we can help onboard them, signpost them to the right services, we'll probably get two or three really good years out of a refugee before they realize that their qualifications are good where they are, and they may then want to go on and do something else. That's absolutely fine. We get fantastic employees through that route. People with disabilities: again, we've got some amazing success stories.

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You're absolutely right. The old adage is so true: people join a company and they leave a manager. If they get to us and then that manager is not either equipped, able, or given the space and support to support those individuals in their journey, then it can go wrong very, very quickly.

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The ways that we're using AI on all of this: we are increasingly using AI on recruitment, because it allows us to routinely test for aptitude and attitude when we're hiring. We're hoping that over time, that'll be the first test that gets people in through the door. At some point, we'll start to use that on promotions as well. And then, how do we support a line manager who could just be one step above all of that? They might be working on a mobile device for the first time in their life. They might be working non-native language.

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Hein Knaapen | 29:08 – 29:49

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Yes. You just don't realize this could occur. Before we take this further, I hope all those who are watching this enjoy the conversation as much as I do. Feel free to drop us questions in the chat box; we can include those in the conversation.

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Back to performance management and showing restraint in target-setting. Marten, what's your experience there? Please give us a juicy example where you did that totally wrong.

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AI in Performance Management and Target-Setting

Marten Booisma | 29:49 – 31:47

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Target-setting is more an art than a science, and most companies don't get this right. With target-setting, you get your budget cycle. With your budget cycle, you get your targets: the personal targets for the leadership and then the teams. Before you know it, you are chasing numbers and figures, which is maybe not exactly wrong, but also not always helping the performance.

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Let me take this from another angle and combine it with a bit more of technology. The JD Group started with performance management on an AI tool. What it was helping, basically, was that for the first time, from a global perspective, you got insight about the capabilities in your company, because the data became very feasible across the globe. That gives such a rich insight about where we need to focus (especially on the store manager, the key critical role in retail) and how to build the right capabilities, and to focus on the right thing instead of trying to solve everything for them. That was a really big change, with the help of AI, having that tool in the company. It's only for one year now, so it's pretty new and the group is still learning. But it's incredibly insightful. On the back of that, it might help with setting the right targets on the longer term.

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Target-setting as such, Hein: I know we spend a lot of time and energy in the boardrooms about it. But, yeah, let's be fair, and I don't want to simplify it: it's the budget of last year plus a little bit extra, and there you go.

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Marten Booisma | 31:50 – 31:56

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Let's move on, because the real performers often come from different things.

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What AI Means for Frontline Manager Roles

Hein Knaapen | 31:56 – 32:30

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Exactly. There is a question coming in from Matthew Lucas. Can the panel give thoughts on fundamental changes for those critically important frontline managers as some processes and tasks become automated or virtualized with AI? That's interesting. Holly, have you spent time thinking about this? How does that change what you expect from the skills of a manager?

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Holly Tyson | 32:30 – 35:30

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For sure. I'm going to give the horrific answer of "it depends," because there are certain roles that are going to go away. There are certain roles that are going to be enhanced, and there are certain roles that are going to change wholesale. The experience of where AI can be incorporated, deployed, or replacing people is going to depend on what the actual work is that people do.

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From our standpoint, our business has a big relationship component because we help people buy and sell buildings. I'm in New York. The building right there is Radio City Music Hall, a famous theater here in New York. We help people buy and sell buildings, but we also have 48,000 of our 54,000 people who are frontline people who manage facilities and do skilled trades and unskilled trades, like scrubbing toilets and changing light bulbs. It's going to be a long time until AI can do the physical component of humanity.

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Think about the human piece: you've got the emotion, you've got the cognitive, and you've got the physical. The cognitive piece is what's going to be impacted first with AI; it's artificial intelligence. There's an emotional piece that makes us truly human, and a physical piece that, right now, while we see the robots walking and running, it's going to be a while until they're scrubbing toilets. Those pieces of those roles are not going to change.

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For those who are more in the knowledge-based world: get out your surfboard because the wave is coming, and you've got to surf that tsunami. I equate it to (and I'm going to show my age) when I first joined as a consultant with Accenture in '94, I didn't have email. I didn't have a laptop. Laptops didn't exist. Nobody had a phone. The way we do work now is virtual, constant, where you are, in your palm. My job didn't go away. It just changed. Same thing with calculators, computers, all the things this next level of the workforce has always been around. They're digitally native. For those of us who aren't, our jobs didn't go away. We created new jobs, and the drudgery of a lot of these positions has actually been automated.

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A lot of it is just putting things in perspective. Fear is our worst enemy when it comes to coexisting with this capability of AI. We've got to leverage it, and remember that we're still the boss.

How AI Will Change Frontline Manager Roles

Holly Tyson, CPO of Cushman & Wakefield, breaks down AI's impact on roles using three components of human work: cognitive, emotional, and physical. The cognitive layer changes first because AI is, by definition, artificial intelligence. The emotional layer (the relational work managers do) is hardest to replace. The physical layer is furthest from automation: 48,000 of Cushman & Wakefield's 54,000 employees do facility work that no current AI can perform. The implication for frontline managers: knowledge-task automation will reshape what they spend time on, freeing capacity for relationship-heavy and physical-world judgment.

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Hiring for Attitude in the AI Era

Hein Knaapen | 35:30 – 36:24

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I like the way you categorize that. Very interesting. If we go to realizing and being aware that leadership, as we like to call it, and management: it's horses for courses. The effectiveness of a manager depends on the circumstances and the challenges in that particular stage and environment. Nonetheless, what are your thoughts in general? If you go down the ranks at lower levels of management, is there anything you would say typically the more effective managers do this and that, which the less effective managers don't do? Marten, have you got any thoughts?

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Marten Booisma | 36:24 – 37:36

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Building a bit on what Holly was just explaining, which I fully agree with: I believe it's a big opportunity and even a bit of a breakthrough that, with the right uses of the new technologies in AI, it's actually very helpful for the managers who are directly in contact with the teams, the frontline managers. What you often see is that managers are distracted by doing a lot of stuff and not able to spend enough time where they need to spend time, in my view, which is with the people in the teams on the shop floor or wherever they lead. I believe with AI and the new technologies and mobile, we can free up probably more than 50% of the time, which they can then refocus on the right stuff: how to build stronger, better teams and individuals within those teams. We should focus on that. If we can make that happen for our frontline managers, it will drive performance for sure.

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Hein Knaapen | 37:39 – 38:16

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There's a question coming in from Bronke Brown. Bronke says: I would love to hear the panel's thoughts on the challenge companies will face finding talent that possesses not just skills, but mindsets to perform well in this environment where convergence is happening in roles. Much more comes together. What skills or mindsets do you check on? Do you check on mindset at all, Liz? I'm just asking myself: do I check on mindset, and how would I check on mindset?

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Liz Benison | 38:16 – 39:08

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Yeah. We do. We have a phrase: we hire for attitude and train for skills. In our frontline hiring process, the attitude we seek for at the moment is service, a service culture. Can they work in a service culture?

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We've got quite an interesting story on whether technology is going to replace people. Last year, we had five customers come to us independently with cost constraints saying: we want to take people away from the reception, and we want to put an avatar and a tablet. Without exception, within nine months, all of them had come to us and said, "Please, can we have the receptionist back?" Because the avatar can't do the amazing thing of, "Hi, Hein. Nice to see you again. Was it three months ago you were here last time?" They just can't do that.

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Liz Benison | 39:12 – 39:33

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We absolutely hire for attitude. One of the great things is you can test that through AI. What we're able to do now is much more consistently than we could in the past. To me, it's one of the ways that technology helps us do some of these really important things really well and more consistently.

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Hein Knaapen | 39:33 – 39:58

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I would say I've got the scars on my back from the many times that I thought a selection interview was a valuable part of the selection process. It's probably the worst part of the selection process because you meet someone, and in one minute you've made up your view, and the rest of the conversation is only justification. Yes, Holly, you're going to say something.

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Holly Tyson | 39:58 – 41:08

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I'd like to weigh in on the question because I think I might have an unpopular point of view. I don't think it's actually that different what it's going to take people to be successful in this AI environment versus what has truly differentiated the most successful people in the past. When we talk about attitude and aptitude, you need both. The aptitude piece comes down to curiosity, to openness, to having a learning mindset. What I say is, potential is: does the person know what to do when they don't know what to do? That ability to pivot, turn, and adjust is just going to become more and more a requirement. What used to be a differentiator is now going to become table stakes. That same success profile, in terms of being able to consistently be curious and figure things out as the things are changing around them: that's going to go from being a real differentiator to becoming part of what's required for everybody.

How to Hire for the AI Era: Attitude, Aptitude, and Curiosity

Two CHROs converge on hiring philosophy. Liz Benison at ISS uses AI-based assessments to test for aptitude and attitude (specifically, fit with a service culture) at the front end of frontline hiring. Holly Tyson at Cushman & Wakefield argues that curiosity and adaptability are no longer differentiators but baseline requirements: "Potential is, does the person know what to do when they don't know what to do?" Both warn against over-relying on the traditional selection interview, which Hein Knaapen describes as the weakest part of most hiring processes.

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The Digital Divide Risk

Hein Knaapen | 41:08 – 41:13

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Interesting. Liz.

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Liz Benison | 41:13 – 41:58

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I completely agree, and curiosity to me is the essential skill to progress in life, if not in an organization. But what I would say is that whole digital divide thing starts to become really real. The access to digital skills early in life is a privilege, and we're really putting a lot of energy into how we level the playing field, to give people those very, very basic digital skills so that they can get on that first step and be curious. That is a real concern: we can just create an even bigger us-and-them through the deployment of AI if we're not very deliberate about the way that we do it.

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Measuring the Impact of AI Coaching

Hein Knaapen | 41:58 – 42:28

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Very interesting. There's a new question. Melissa says: I'm curious to hear how these leaders have measured how Nadia is improving. That's a new thing to me. Holly, have you got experience already? There are two questions probably. First: do you visibly see how management practices improve? Second: is there anything like self-learning in Nadia, where you would say the system gets better? I have no idea really.

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Holly Tyson | 42:28 – 44:27

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I'll answer your second one first. The answer is yes. Like most generative AI, it teaches itself, or she teaches herself. The more she learns about the company, about you as a manager, about each of your teammates, the more she can extrapolate and apply. So she gets better and better and better.

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To the other piece, we're beyond proof of concept for sure, but we're still in the "we're doing it because we know we need it" phase. We're setting up a controlled experiment: those who use Nadia versus those who do not, and looking over time at performance rating differentiation, engagement scores for those managers, and retention for those pockets. We're going to be looking at those differences. We don't yet have those data points because it takes time. Like culture, it takes a while to measure. But we are setting up those controlled experiments, basically to show the ROI of it.

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At the end of the day, we know we don't have enough leadership capability at this point in time. Even our HR business partners (what we call people partners) at any point in time, we know that the vast majority of our 9,000 managers are kind of out on their own. There's an understanding (I don't want to say gut feel, but a knowledge) that they need more support to do their roles.

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Another piece that we're looking at is risk and employment-relations issues, the things that come up because oftentimes managers are out there on their own just trying to figure it out, and you don't always end up with the best judgment when that happens.

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Marten Booisma | 44:28 – 44:56

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Another angle, Holly: from a business perspective, when you start to measure this company-wide, you would like to see the impact on the productivity of the company. That's where it also starts to count. It's easier for the colleagues in the business to continue with those tools and ways of working because they also see it back in the numbers. It will drive productivity in the longer term as well.

How is AI Coaching Measured Against Business Outcomes?

Cushman & Wakefield is running a controlled experiment comparing Nadia users to non-users across performance ratings, engagement scores, and retention. Holly Tyson is also tracking reductions in employment-relations risk, where solo managers without coaching support often produce worse judgment calls. Across Valence's broader deployments, Anand Chopra-McGowan references research from Valence advisors Prasad Setty and Jennifer Carpenter showing Nadia power users are 31% more likely to move up a performance band, based on 45,000 coaching sessions. Marten Booisma adds that the strongest signal for business adoption is when AI coaching shows up in company-wide productivity numbers.

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Performance Ratings vs. Real Performance Impact

Hein Knaapen | 44:56 – 45:33

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Yeah. There are a few things here. If I introduce the two concepts of value creation and value destruction: value creation should in the end result in better performance of the company on the metric of choice. Value destruction is: you don't have any breakdowns. The point you're making, Holly, you just referred to it: less employment-relations issues. That is very interesting to see. Is it too early to say, or do you have indication that these cases are dropping?

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Holly Tyson | 45:33 – 45:35

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It's too early for us to say.

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Hein Knaapen | 45:35 – 46:27

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Yeah. Anand is weighing in here. He says this is about how Nadia is improving. Where we have deployed over longer periods, the research is compelling. We've got a few great advisors, Prasad Setty and Jennifer Carpenter, and they found that Nadia power users are 31% more likely to move up a performance band, drawing on 45,000 coaching sessions. That's interesting.

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There is an element of cynicism, and I'm probably too long in HR. The sheer fact that performance assessments go up does not yet necessarily say performance goes up. I don't want to be cynical. Liz, what's your view?

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Liz Benison | 46:27 – 47:31

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You know my views on performance management. I've been subjected to lots of very elaborate performance management processes in the past, and I'm not sure they were the things that made me perform or not perform. I realized I was creating a bit of a religious war when I said that to my team in my first week.

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But certainly, it's one of the things we're looking at: better ways. Of course, you have to do performance management. I just don't think it has to be in this ritual of: you set goals at the start of the year, and you do a mid-year, and you do an end-year. There are far better ways of doing it.

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This whole thing around value creation: we've done the analysis. Our turnover is normal-ish for the industry, but we churn 100,000 people a year. So we have to go out to the market and recruit 100,000 people a year. We have done the work to say there is a massive prize. I sometimes forget when I say it out loud that it's such a big number.

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Liz Benison | 47:32 – 48:37

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We've done the work to say how much it costs the organization. If we can create a seamless people journey throughout, we can start to chip away at all of those costs. We've made that direct connection: things like employee tribunals, legal cases, and so on. If we can equip our managers to handle those better, we know there's a financial prize because we'll reduce the number of settlements we have to make. We know there's a financial prize in basic churn: if we only have to recruit 50,000, happy days.

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It's taken applying the same discipline from the operation to HR to say, let's make those direct connections, because that gets you a seat at the top table. Whatever you're talking about, what you just said, "let's increase performance ratings," that means nothing unless you can directly tie it to a line in the P&L. Gets you nowhere.

Why Performance Ratings Alone Aren't a Useful AI Coaching Metric

Liz Benison, Global People and Technology Officer at ISS, cautions that an improvement in performance ratings is not, on its own, evidence of an improvement in performance. The harder discipline is tying people-investments directly to lines on the P&L: cost of recruiting the 100,000 people ISS churns annually, settlements from employment tribunals, retention savings. When CHROs can draw those direct financial connections, AI coaching investments earn a seat at the top table; without them, the metric improvements are an internal story rather than a business case.

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Performance Management as a Forward-Looking Process

Hein Knaapen | 48:37 – 49:30

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What has helped me greatly over my career in thinking about performance management is to redefine its aim. The aim, in my thinking, is to improve future performance. If you consistently take that perspective, then much of what you see in current performance management is unnecessary. The idea of equipping the manager with the skill and confidence to have an ongoing conversation with each of the employees. You may remember the book by Marcus Buckingham a few years old, Nine Lies About Work. A very nice book. The title is more provocative than the text, but the text is really good. It's all about performance management as a forward-looking process rather than a backward-looking process. I like that a lot.

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Holly Tyson | 49:30 – 50:20

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There is also a truth to raising the bar. Performance is both absolute and relative. Harvard just came out this week saying they're going to cap the number of A's they give students. Obviously the bar there is high because everyone there is super capable, but you need to also be relatively performing in relation to your peers. There's something about managing the performance in relation to those around you. Where you put in a really high performer, everybody needs to raise up because, you know, steady eddies don't actually perform at that same level anymore. The companies that actually continue to raise the bar and be clear about what good enough is and what great is, those are the ones who actually accelerate their performance.

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Differentiated Performance Standards: When Good Enough Is Enough

Hein Knaapen | 50:20 – 51:04

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Holly, Liz, and Marten as well, because you're all experienced in people-rich companies. This is not cynicism, on the contrary. I could see how there are four, five, or six things that any employee in your businesses should do well. If they do those well, that is good. It shouldn't go below the well level, but going above the well level doesn't get you any further. Again, this is not meant to be cynical, but there are these cases where good is truly good enough. What do you think? Am I totally confused now?

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Holly Tyson | 51:05 – 51:58

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I'll add in: there was a book back in the early 2000s called The Differentiated Workforce, and it asked the question of who do you think are the most important jobs in an airline? Most people say, oh, it's the pilot. It's actually not the pilot. It's the operations folks who actually make all those decisions. A pilot, unless you're going to be Sully Sullenberger and land a plane on the Hudson: for the most part, if you can take off a plane and land a plane, you're good. Going above and beyond that actually isn't differentiating for that business.

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To your very good point: not all jobs are equal in terms of the value and the competitive differentiation they create for a company. The vast majority of roles, good enough is good enough. But there are critical roles, competitively differentiating roles, where the bar actually does need to be raised if you're going to compete successfully. That's my take.

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Liz Benison | 52:01 – 52:30

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I'm a real believer that perfect is often the enemy of the good. You only need perfect in the stuff that really touches a customer, or potentially touches your team. The rest: good enough is perfect to me. That is a mindset and a culture thing, teaching people to. I also think that's a real step in people's managerial development: that point where they start to let go about doing everything perfectly and realize as a general manager, you've got to watch across everything and make sure none of the plates that are spinning fall.

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Marten Booisma | 52:39 – 53:23

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Hein, you made a point earlier about relative performance. If there is a certain baseline of performance, and if you want to differentiate, it's more about the relative performance than the true performance. It's a little bit overestimated, and often we spend too much time on this process in the company. The easier we can make it to get through this (and Liz, you mentioned it, the traditional way of doing it is not the right way of doing it nowadays), I fully agree with that. But in the end, you can measure those performances back in the numbers of the company. It's more the company performance in the end where I would like to focus.

Should Companies Hold All Roles to the Same Performance Bar?

No, and the CHROs argue this is itself a management discipline. Holly Tyson cites The Differentiated Workforce (early 2000s): in an airline, the most strategically important roles are not the pilots but the operations team making thousands of routing decisions. The vast majority of roles need to clear a clear competence floor; a smaller set of competitively differentiating roles is where the bar should rise. Liz Benison's principle: perfect is the enemy of the good; reserve perfect for the work that touches a customer or a team.

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Leadership and Management at the Senior Level

Hein Knaapen | 53:24 – 54:06

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If we go up the management ranks for a moment: we've rightly been focused on the people that are at the frontline. It's right to pay more attention there. If you go up the ranks, to your own level, Liz and Marten and Holly: there's management as well. Is there anything different there, in terms of us being flawed human beings? What do you think, Holly?

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Holly Tyson | 54:06 – 54:13

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Well, in six minutes, I'm heading into my mid-year review with my CEO, so I'll let you know.

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Hein Knaapen | 54:13 – 54:15

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You will review him, Holly. You will review him.

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Holly Tyson | 54:15 – 55:14

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Well, she will review me. She will review me. I wrote my mid-year review, and she's going to be reacting, responding. I do think that as you go up a little bit more, at the C-suite level from my standpoint: if you've got a C in front of your name, you manage yourself, you lead yourself, and the CEO should be reacting and responding to your ideas and changes that you want to drive, versus management. I actually recruit for the same. I've got a team of senior vice presidents who report to me, and what I say to them is: your job is to manage me. My job is not to manage you. I want to be reacting and responding. I tell you what your outcome needs to be, and you tell me what you need from me to achieve it. As you go down in the organization, they need to translate more into "this is what I need you to do." But as you go up in an organization, the more autonomy you have, the caliber and expectations need to rise.

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Hein Knaapen | 55:14 – 56:16

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Very well said. I remember the first time in my professional life when I launched a new performance management practice that was effective. I'd been around for over thirty years by that time. That launch heavily focused on the quality of conversation and the skills a manager needed for conversations. In that process, the CEO said to me, "I know exactly what you want me to do. I don't know how." That was a wonderful moment, that the CEO turned into apprentice.

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What did we do? A little naughty. I was working with actors. I had two actors, and I had briefed them very well, so they made his life very, very difficult. After that session, he said this was really one of the best leadership trainings I ever had. "I went home happy. I woke up sad: that it had taken me thirty-two years to find out that this is the essence of steering people." That's an interesting lesson.

How Management Changes at the Senior Level

Holly Tyson, CPO of Cushman & Wakefield, draws a sharp line between management at frontline levels and at the C-suite. Below the senior level, managers translate strategy into "this is what I need you to do." At the C-suite, autonomy and accountability flip: "Your job is to manage me. My job is not to manage you. You tell me what outcome you need to deliver, and tell me what you need from me to achieve it." Even senior leaders, however, benefit from coaching on conversation quality, the underlying skill of "steering people" that Hein Knaapen describes as the essence of leadership.

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Closing Thoughts: Leadership Versus Management

Hein Knaapen | 56:16 – 56:34

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I think we're arriving at the end. We've got one or two questions. Liz, any thoughts you would like those who have joined this session with you would like them to leave the session with?

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Liz Benison | 56:34 – 57:02

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On that leadership versus management thing: I hate it when people talk about leadership as the higher plane. To me, they're two parallel but different skill sets. If you ever work for a good leader who's a terrible manager, you know it really, really well. Concentrate on both. Of course, we all want to work for good leaders. It's great fun. It's inspiring. But please recognize that being a good manager is just as important, if not more so.

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Hein Knaapen | 57:02 – 57:11

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I like that a lot. I fully, fully, fully agree. Yes, Holly, any thought you would like to leave this session with?

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Holly Tyson | 57:11 – 57:31

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I think Liz said that very, very well. It does come down to: you can have a vision, but if you can't translate that vision into clear expectations and then consistency of partnering with your people to achieve that together, things fall apart.

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Hein Knaapen | 57:31 – 57:35

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Exactly. Marten, anything you would like to add?

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Marten Booisma | 57:35 – 58:04

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What I would like to add: in this time and age, I would stimulate and support embracing the technology, just to drive better management and to help build better management capabilities. We have a unique kind of period right now where we have a lot of technology advances and opportunities to do this, much more than in the past decades.

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Hein Knaapen | 58:04 – 58:27

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The interesting thing is, as a general comment: the more tools you have, the more solutions you have, the more difficult it is to remain focused on the few things that really matter. Again, this is not cynicism, but the scars on my back. I think we're arriving at the end of this session. Anand, you're joining in again. I'll leave it to you to close the session.

Leadership vs. Management: Why Both Matter

Liz Benison, Global People and Technology Officer at ISS, pushes back on the common framing of leadership as a higher plane than management: "If you ever work for a good leader who's a terrible manager, you know it really, really well." Leadership and management are parallel skill sets, not a hierarchy. Holly Tyson reinforces the point: a vision that can't be translated into clear expectations and consistent execution produces nothing. Marten Booisma's final word is to embrace the current generation of AI technology specifically to build better management capability, not just better leadership rhetoric.

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Session Closing

Anand Chopra-McGowan | 58:27 – 59:22

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Thank you so much, Hein. This is a great discussion. Holly, Liz, and Marten, thank you so much for sharing what I think is a really nice blend of big-picture frameworks and ways to think about organizing the world, but also some really practical steps that you've taken. I know we've been taking notes, and we will be sharing some posts and some takeaways with the group here. We'll also share some stuff externally as well because there's so much rich material here. Thank you, everyone, for your questions as well. Participating in these sessions while we're all so busy is such a great learning experience, but it's hard to make the time for. We do appreciate it. Thank you again to all of our speakers, and Hein, thank you so much for moderating. We'll let you all get back to your day and hope to see you at a future session. Thank you all so much.

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Hein Knaapen | 59:22 – 59:26

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Thank you. Have a very good day.

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