HR’s strategic influence depends not only on what the function delivers, but on how its leaders design the team, systems and personal capacity behind the work. In this episode, Brian Kuchcicki, SVP, People + Culture at Visiting Media, shares a practical approach to creating greater leverage: build a complementary senior team, experiment with AI around genuine employee needs, retain human accountability for every output and develop working practices that reflect how you actually operate. Brian explains why he deliberately built a lean People and Culture team around experienced professionals who can move between strategic and administrative work. Rather than separating higher-level thinking from execution, he wanted colleagues capable of owning work end to end, analysing the outcome and challenging an idea before it reached employees. The conversation explores how trusted internal debate can improve decisions and give a functional leader more capacity to contribute at executive level. The discussion then moves into people-first AI experimentation. Brian shares how initial encouragement helped make AI feel safe to explore without requiring him to match an expert’s technical ability from the outset. He describes using Claude and Claude Code to build an internal Slack assistant from approved HR information, as well as tools his team developed to support severance preparation and help employees compare the personal cost of benefit plans. His central lesson is to begin with a clear employee problem, ask the technology how an idea might be built and improve it iteratively rather than waiting for complete technical fluency. Brian also describes applying this approach during an international acquisition, when joining employees needed information before receiving company email or intranet access. According to Brian, Claude helped him create and translate a branded information website with action instructions and an English-Spanish language option. He also shares how he created a separate manager-facing nine-box tool when the company’s existing performance software did not provide the required functionality. Across both examples, the starting point was not the technology itself, but the experience employees and managers needed. That enthusiasm for AI comes with a firm warning about quality and accountability. Brian recounts building executive-offsite materials through successive AI-generated outputs, only to realise while presenting them that the result was generic, disconnected from the organisation and unusable. His response was to rebuild the work through staged prompting, review and editing. He argues that leaders should manage AI like an assistant: provide context, inspect intermediate work, give feedback and remain accountable for the final product. The episode also examines why verbose, unedited AI output creates a burden for everyone downstream and why distillation should become an explicit organisational expectation. In the closing discussion, Brian advocates learning in formats suited to the individual, gathering useful ideas in manageable increments and proactively seeking informal mentors. He shares that three women became significant unofficial mentors in his own development and emphasises the value of observing, asking questions and requesting access to relevant conversations. His final message for strengthening HR’s credibility is concise: “Understand the business and bring the people thought process to the table.” For senior people leaders, that means understanding the organisation’s commercial model and numbers while contributing a distinctive human perspective - moving HR beyond mandatory activity and towards genuine business partnership. For show notes and bonus resources, visit www.PeopleLeaderAccelerator.com/podcast. About The People Leader Accelerator Podcast Our goal with this podcast is simple: to help people leaders navigate the messy, complex, and deeply rewarding work of leading teams and organizations with more clarity, confidence, and community. Whether you’re the first HR hire at a startup or an experienced executive at a company with scale, you’ll find actionable insights you can use right away. We can’t wait to share these conversations with you. Welcome to the journey! Listen, learn, and connect: 🎧 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, YouTube). 💡 Find show notes and bonus resources at peopleleaderaccelerator.com/podcast. 📬 Share this episode with a colleague who’s ready to level up as a people leader. 🤝 Connect with your hosts: Jessica Yuen: linkedin.com/in/jessicayuen | jessyuen.com Andrew Bartlow: linkedin.com/in/bartlow | peopleleaderaccelerator.com
