In this blog post, I am seeking an answer to what challenges the rise of AI presents to people leaders. What will be the role of humans in a hybrid workplace shared with AI Agents? Will they be reduced to the maintenance staff, making sure the AI machine is properly oiled? Or will AI help people to use their full potential at work at a level we have not seen before? How can leaders help to realise the optimistic scenario of people blooming on AI steroids? What new skills will be required from them? How does the work itself need to be redefined? Why is being able to discover any skills and the entire potential of your employees more important now than ever? Enjoy reading and share your thoughts. Wojciech Pozarzycki, July 21, 2025 Robots are among us The robots are already working with humans in your organisation. According to the latest ABSL report on Business Services in Poland, almost 75% of them are already using Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). Probably due to the low coverage of automation, the robotic “colleagues” may remain invisible in your organisation. Less than one-fifth of the process is automated according to the ABSL. But […]
Is one number enough to understand your team? It might sound too simple, but it can be a powerful start. In the drive for data-driven decisions, many leaders turn to complex people analytics dashboards. But these tools are often useless without a crucial foundation: trust. Trust Before Technology Before you introduce any metric or dashboard, you must build trust. People share honest feedback only when they feel safe and secure. It is essential to explain the purpose behind collecting feedback and, more importantly, to demonstrate that you act on what you learn. Without this psychological safety, any data you collect is unreliable. If you cannot discuss the data openly with your team, you should not measure it. A Practical Example: The “Moodometer” Instead of starting with complex systems, I use a simple tool with my team: a “moodometer.” Each week, everyone provides a rating, and we review the collective result together. This number begins a talk about our engagement and mood. For many weeks, the trend has been stable, and we confirm that things are under control. However, when the result deviates from that trend, it serves as an immediate signal. It initiates a discussion. These conversations are invaluable; they […]
Communities are the mirror of the culture “So, this is how I shape the culture of our company?” That was the question that popped up in my mind when I was asked to speak about the communities of interest as part of a presentation of our technology hub culture for the new CIO. When I volunteered to drive the CIONET Tribes at our Technology Centre almost six years ago, I was driven by my belief that the best growth is through knowledge sharing with professionals with diverse experiences from various organisations. When I created the Team Leaders Network, I wanted to help team leaders survive the post-pandemic, hybrid work reality that has put so much pressure on them from employees and higher management. Reflecting on my involvement in various communities of interest, I’ve come to see a larger, picture: Communities are transformative tools for creating an organisational culture based on mutual respect, engagement, and genuine connections that break down the silos within an organisation. Many organisations today tout a culture of collaboration, empowerment, and breaking down silos. But how many truly live up to that promise? Communities of interest can be a good indicator of your organisation’s authentic culture. These […]
LinkedIn and other social media are flooded with comparisons of leaders versus managers, often depicting the latter in a negative light as someone focused on tasks, procedures, controls, and data. On the other hand, the leader is presented as an empathetic listener who understands what people think and need, using her heart to motivate them intuitively. So, should the true people leader focus on the music playing in their soul and avoid checking the hard facts? If you follow only your heart, you may fall into many traps when making decisions. From my observations as a people leader, I see that the most prominent mistakes are: I firmly believe that to be a great leader, you need to combine your inner compass with the data and metrics to make the best decisions. Therefore, I decided to start my new blog, “Leading with heart and data”, to promote a holistic approach to leadership. If you’d like to learn more or share your view on the topic, please visit my website at pozarzycki.pl and subscribe to my blog. Wojciech Pozarzycki, May 2025
If you miss a great mentor, read this post, and you won’t be waiting any longer. In the early years of my career, I dreamed of having a mentor – an experienced professional to guide my career. Unfortunately, I didn’t have such a guide, and I was envious of people who enjoyed such relationships. A few years later, I found a piece of advice that ultimately changed my perspective on mentoring. It said that instead of looking for a single “The Mentor,” you can learn from anyone you meet. Suddenly, I’ve shifted from the desert of mentoring to a sea of learning opportunities. When I meet anyone, I ask myself, “Is there anything I want to learn from this person?” It could be a presentation technique, engaging meeting participants, dealing with failure, or leading people. If you pick just one thing from any person you meet, how many improvement opportunities or career guidance can you get? The funny thing is that your mentor may not even be aware they are one. I remember my brief interaction with the famous, now-retired CEO of one of Poland’s largest banks. I had just started working for that bank, and my boss took me […]
Let’s be honest: remote work has been forced by COVID-19, and while most employees enjoy it, many leaders cannot wait to get people back to the office. Therefore, it is no surprise that more and more companies are mandating three to five days per week in the office. But is travelling back in time to pre-COVID-19 possible, and does it make sense? Although face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable for fostering strong relationships, trust and creativity within a team, it’s harder to justify the argument that returning to the office is necessary for enhancing team productivity. There are better ways to ensure productivity than conducting remote calls from the office. Outcome-focused frameworks, such as Objectives and Key Results (OKR), can help ensure teams stay productive without sacrificing the benefits of flexible working hours and locations. Shared goals, transparency, and collaboration in delivering outcome-oriented milestones offered by OKR are much better ways of ensuring that teams work towards achieving the organisation’s strategic objectives. While OKR helps to ensure teams are doing the right things, increasing the frequency of performance reviews and feedback check-ins is needed to ensure that every employee knows if they are doing the right things and if they are doing […]
Being pushed to work from home due to the pandemic made me ask myself, what is the secret sauce separating great teams and organisations from mediocre ones? Some early and popular explanations pointed to ad-hoc meetings at coffee machines as the events where great collaboration and innovations happen. But do we want to leave the chances of having great teams to serendipity? Searching for a better explanation led me to rediscover the concept of weak ties. Originally described by Nick Grannovetter in 1973, it underlined the importance of your outer circle of connections or a loose network of colleagues and acquaintances who most likely do not know each other. This is opposed to the inner circle, such as your project team, where all members know each other and build strong ties. For getting new information, ideas, and opportunities, weak ties are more important than strong ones. This concept is an instrumental foundation for designing collaboration measures for a smart workplace—our new hybrid work model at DB Schenker Technology Centre in Warsaw. We observed that collaboration in the inner circles (strong ties) remains good. Project teams, scrum teams, and so on have adopted new ways of working quickly and with good […]