Ep 319 – Davida Lindsay-Bell (Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson)

1. AI transformations fail when companies put tools before people

The biggest obstacle to AI adoption usually isn’t the technology. It’s the environment employees are being asked to use it in.

Before introducing a new tool, leaders need to get clear on three questions:

1. Why are we introducing it?
2. Who is it serving?
3. What problem are we trying to solve?

Employees also need a voice before decisions are finalized — not after a platform has already been selected. That means HR, technology leaders, managers, and employees should help shape the approach together.

When employees don’t feel safe admitting confusion, challenging a decision, or saying that a tool isn’t working, organizations lose the honest feedback required to improve. The companies struggling with AI adoption may not have a technology problem at all. They may have skipped the conditions that make meaningful adoption possible.

2. Psychological safety should be translated into observable behavior

Psychological safety can feel abstract, which makes it easy for leaders to dismiss or misunderstand. Davida’s approach was to make it practical through Dr. Timothy Clark’s four stages:

1. Inclusion: I feel welcomed and accepted.
2. Learner: I can ask questions and make mistakes.
3. Contributor: I’m invited to participate and add value.
4. Challenger: I can question the status quo.

Hanna Andersson then translated those stages into behavioral competencies, leadership expectations, and calibration rubrics for every level of the organization. That turned culture from an aspiration into something employees and leaders could actually observe and measure.

“Culture is only real when you start to change the behavior.”

The takeaway: don’t launch psychological safety as a standalone initiative. Build it into how people are hired, developed, evaluated, promoted, and expected to lead.

3. Move your culture from “nice” to “kind”

A nice organization avoids tension. A kind organization cares enough to tell the truth.

That distinction became an important part of Hanna Andersson’s culture work. Conflict avoidance can easily be mistaken for care, but withholding feedback often creates more confusion and frustration over time.

“Nice is conflict avoidance dressed up as care. Kind is caring enough to say what’s actually true.”

To make that shift, employees need shared tools for giving feedback, raising concerns, and having difficult conversations. Hanna Andersson reinforced the idea through radical candor, leadership development, and clearly defined behavioral expectations.

The practical question for leaders is simple: are people being polite in the meeting and honest afterward? If the real conversation consistently happens outside the room, psychological safety hasn’t been fully established yet.​

4. Start culture transformation with relational capital

Frameworks matter, but Davida’s playbook starts with trust.

Before trying to transform culture, People leaders need credibility with the CEO, the executive team, their own team, and employees across the business. Without that relational capital, even the strongest strategy will struggle to gain momentum.

“In order to do all this, you’ve got to have air cover.”

Davida uses a framework called LARA:

• Listen.
• Absorb.
• Respond.
• Act.

The “absorb” step is especially important. Don’t rush to defend the company, explain away criticism, or build a solution after hearing one comment. Listen for themes, including the uncomfortable feedback, and avoid creating programs employees haven’t actually asked for.

Trust has to exist up, down, and across the organization. That is what gives a People leader the agency to move from reacting to problems to becoming what Davida calls a “credible proactivist.”

5. Culture and strategy should never operate on separate tracks

At Hanna Andersson, culture isn’t positioned as an HR program sitting beside the business strategy. It is part of the strategy itself.

Davida framed the connection through a simple argument: culture and strategy share the same source — purpose, vision, and values — and must come together to drive results.

“Strategy drives, culture delivers, and both are required.”

That framing helped establish “Cultivate Excellence” as a formal strategic pillar with KPIs reported to the executive team and investors. The measures include engagement, retention, workforce composition, organizational excellence, and elements of the company’s distribution footprint.

This changes the role of the CPO. Instead of asking leaders to support a people agenda, the People team becomes responsible for helping deliver the enterprise agenda.

To earn that position, HR leaders must understand the business deeply, bring data and external context to the table, and show up as genuine business and thought partners.​

6. Create room for intelligent failure — without removing accountability

Experimentation only works when employees understand the difference between an intelligent failure and a preventable one.

An intelligent failure happens when a team tests a thoughtful hypothesis in an uncertain environment, learns something useful, and adjusts. For example, a company may run a small pilot of an enterprise AI tool and discover that it doesn’t meet the organization’s needs. The pilot didn’t succeed, but the company gained valuable information without making an irreversible commitment.

A preventable failure is different. It happens when the organization already has the information, feedback, or evidence it needs — and chooses to ignore it.

“The Right Kind of Wrong gives permission without removing accountability.”

Hanna Andersson has used that thinking to shape a three-part approach to AI:

1. Activate the AI capabilities already available through current vendors.
2. Create an AI champions network to test tools, learn, and help others adopt them.
3. Pilot more specialized use cases within teams such as creative and design.

The goal isn’t to eliminate failure. It’s to make experimentation safer, smaller, and more informative — while remaining disciplined about what the business learns from it.

That foundation appears to be strengthening employee trust. Hanna Andersson saw an eight-point engagement gain with 95% participation, followed by 96% participation in its next spring survey.

The larger lesson: people will experiment with new technology when they believe their voice matters, their mistakes will be treated as learning opportunities, and the organization is using AI to augment human judgment — not simply replace it.