Leading Through Change | Sam Valentine

How can organisations make space for creativity while helping people navigate change? Sam Valentine from Miro joins Ksenia Izotova to discuss the everyday ways of working that support new ideas, how employee surveys can reveal more than scores, and how managers can use communication, coaching and feedback to help teams stay oriented through change. The conversation also touches on empathy, responsible AI use and Sam’s personal priorities for 2027.

Guest: Sam Valentine · Miro
Host: Ksenia Izotova · Co-Founder and Director of Studies at UnifyHub

Sam Valentine works at Miro. In this conversation, he shares his perspective on the culture and ways of working that support creativity, the use of employee feedback, and the role of managers in helping teams through change. His comments about Miro reflect his experience and perspective in the interview. A specific job title and approved biography were not provided.

What helps people share early ideas, learn from feedback and keep doing meaningful work as an organisation changes? Sam Valentine and Ksenia Izotova discuss how creativity depends on everyday culture as well as training, why psychological safety matters, and how teams can make iteration part of their normal ways of working.

They also explore employee surveys and the context that written comments can add to quantitative results. Sam describes how AI may help teams look for patterns in feedback, while emphasising the need for human judgment. The conversation moves from Miro’s growth and change to manager coaching, clear communication, retention, empathy and Sam’s personal areas of focus for 2027.

Sam describes creativity as part of how work is organised, rather than something that depends only on a dedicated workshop. He points to company rituals such as hackathons, public demos, documenting decisions and moving quickly from an early version to feedback and another iteration. In his view, these practices help people build on one another’s ideas.

He also acknowledges the tension: when many people are creating at once, a company can lose sight of what needs to stay stable. His account presents creativity as a balance between experimentation and shared foundations, rather than unrestricted change.

Sam says some parts of creativity can be taught, such as communicating an idea, brainstorming or learning a tool. He places greater emphasis on creating conditions where people feel safe to share unfinished work, receive feedback and develop an idea without expecting the first version to be perfect.

He estimates that creativity is "90% structure and culture, 10% training." This is his way of expressing a view in the conversation, not a measured statistic about Miro. He connects the cultural side to psychological safety, iteration and a general willingness to create.

Sam describes a process that encourages people to label an early piece of work as a "bad version," invite input and revise it before moving to a more polished version. The point is to make iteration visible and normal, so colleagues understand that an early draft is an invitation to contribute, not a finished answer.

He also mentions psychological safety, giving and receiving feedback, listening to customers and the market, and training managers. In his account, these practices help people connect creative work to a need or goal instead of creating in isolation.

Sam says Miro runs quarterly surveys covering topics such as confidence in the company, engagement and relationships with managers and leaders. Scores and percentages provide one kind of information. Written comments can add context, explain how people experience an issue and point to themes that a rating alone may not show.

He notes that manually reading many comments takes effort and can introduce bias, while narrow question-by-question summaries may miss subtext. His discussion frames employee feedback as something leaders need to interpret over time, including when a topic becomes less visible in responses.

Sam describes using an AI agent to examine survey comments as a dataset and help surface patterns, including topics employees may not mention directly. He gives the example of questions around AI: enthusiasm about tools and anxiety about jobs may be visible, while references to ethics or customer outcomes may be less prominent.

The purpose, as he explains it, is to give leaders questions to investigate and help them decide what to communicate or explore further. The interview does not establish that AI can reliably identify unspoken views on its own. Any such themes still need careful human review and context.

Sam describes a major shift in the company during the period since he joined. He mentions rapid product development, the growing influence of AI, and a company moving from a scaling stage toward a more mature organisation with clearer behaviours, expectations and rituals.

He also talks about changes in how the company approaches productivity and performance, including a move from a product-led approach toward communicating product value. He recognises that growth can bring identity changes and mixed feelings for people who joined a smaller, less structured company. This is his account of Miro’s evolution, not a claim that every organisation experiences growth in the same way.

Sam describes a four-part way to think about performance during change: orientation, commitment, delivery and impact. Leaders help teams understand the direction and what has changed. People then decide what they can own and what they may need to drop. Managers support delivery by identifying blockers and opportunities, and teams make the impact visible through recognition and feedback.

In this model, change is not simply something employees are expected to endure. Clear priorities, autonomy, support and regular feedback can help people understand where they are going and how their work contributes, even when priorities shift.

Sam says Miro’s manager framework centres on coaching, communication and driving work forward. Coaching includes giving feedback and recognition, helping people unblock problems, and listening carefully to what employees say about barriers and opportunities.

He describes hierarchy as a way to support decision-making and autonomy, rather than as a command structure. In his view, honest and useful conversations help teams adjust, keep learning and respond when circumstances change.

Sam connects communication with people’s ability to understand expectations, see the impact of their work and feel valued. He says salary can attract people, but that long-term commitment also relates to ambition, meaningful work, an inspiring environment and feedback. These are his observations from the interview, not a universal formula for retention.

He describes communication as necessary at each stage of his change model: setting direction, agreeing commitments, supporting delivery and making impact visible. When people cannot see what they are working toward or whether their contribution matters, it becomes harder for them to do their best work.

Sam uses the sender-message-receiver model to explain why communication can go wrong. A leader may know the context behind an announcement, while employees receive it with different information, pressures and priorities. A message can be reshaped or misunderstood as it passes through an organisation.

His practical suggestion is to start with what the audience needs to know, rather than simply passing on everything the sender knows. Leaders can translate a broad announcement into team-level conversations and then listen to responses to understand whether the message has landed.

The conversation turns to how Sam talks with his son about the way a message may be received. He encourages him to consider what another person might have meant and how his own words could sound to someone who does not know his intentions. Ksenia adds the idea of "reading the room" and considering what may be behind someone’s reaction.

Their discussion connects empathy with listening and awareness of context. The same words can land differently depending on what a person is experiencing, so understanding the receiver matters as much as choosing the right words.

Speaking personally, Sam says he wants to build performance management systems that support growth and good work rather than merely measure performance. He highlights listening to employees and acting more quickly on what surveys reveal, integrating talent management, and recognising the less visible work that keeps teams running.

He also says he wants to explore more strategic uses of AI. These are the priorities Sam names for himself in the interview; the conversation does not announce an official company roadmap for Miro.

Ksenia Izotova: Welcome to HR Unwritten by Unifi Hub, the podcast about the people's side of work. I'm Ksenia, your host. Today, I'm speaking with Sam Valentine from Miro about building a culture that supports creativity, listening to employee feedback and helping people navigate change. We also discuss how AI can help make sense of employee surveys, what managers can do through coaching and communication, and why empathy matters at work. Sam, welcome to HR Unwritten.

Sam Valentine: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ksenia Izotova: So how did you get into people and culture work in general?

Sam Valentine: I left University of 21 without any real clue what I was going to do with myself. I saw an advert to go and teach English for three months. I thought about that'll fill some time. So straight out of university, I did that to go and fill three months. Ended up teaching English in Indonesia for a couple of years. That took me to then moving to Slovakia for a year, Thailand for a year. Then I joined the British Council and sort of moved around the world for a number of years.

The thing that kept me going was learning about people. I think teaching is 50 percent teaching, 50 percent learning about people, relationships. And that sort of took me into I did a diploma in English language teaching. I learned a lot about communication. I then did a master's degree in communication. I think communication is culture.

Communication is all about obviously people to people. And that sort of really sparked my interest. And that's where I sort of just found myself being much more motivated by the culture side of things and the people side of things.

That sort of took me into leadership. Eventually I joined a company where I was in a leadership position. It was great. I spent quite a lot of time talking to HR colleagues and complaining about different things and learning about different things. And after a while, one of my colleagues turned around and said, like, you complain a lot. Why don't you have a go at doing it? Like, you do it. I was like, yeah, OK, I'll take that chance. I took that pivot into communications engagement experience.

Ksenia Izotova: So speaking about your current company, speaking about Miro, what do you enjoy most about working there?

Sam Valentine: I loved Miro before I joined Miro. So I was a Miro user for a number of years. I think from a company culture point of view, the will to collaborate, the bias for innovation and the absolute optimization for people, really talented, intelligent people working very productively with each other.
And like that obviously manifests in an amazing product. We see the challenges of that, like people can spark off each other. Like the pace is very high. You know, there can be those challenges, but I think that the creativity that comes from that is always really inspiring.

Ksenia Izotova: I'm curious about creativity. Do you have any specific trainings or workshops that spark creativity within the team?

Sam Valentine: So I think there's specific training on creativity. It's much more how everything is set up for creativity. So some of our company rituals like hackathons, which are really fundamental to kind of identity. Like that's all about creativity, the way that we make decisions and document decisions and move at pace. And the gates you move to, that's all about creativity. And I think culturally the way we manage performance, expectations, the way that we work as a company and demo things in public to each other is all about iteration, learning and moving. And that's very deeply structural and cultural rather than just through training, I think.

Ksenia Izotova: Can I say that it means that creativity cannot be trained, but it has to become a part of corporate culture in those little everyday things?

Sam Valentine: I think it can be trained. I think there is a kind of mechanistic creativity that you can train people for. You have to unleash creativity. You have to really make it psychologically safe to be creative. You have to make sure that there is a general understanding of people around you that you are creating and you are iterating, developing. So I think it sort of can be trained, but it's 90% structure and culture, 10% training. And the training is like, how do you communicate your ideas effectively? How do you brainstorm? How do you use tool X or tool Y?

I think the mindset is super important. You have to have that kind of bias for creativity. And that can come up as a cost as well. Like if you have 1500 people all creating, you might lose sight of the foundations and the things you really need to keep stable. So you have to keep that balance as well.

Ksenia Izotova: And speaking about trainings, what internal trainings do you think make Miro special apart from the company culture?

Sam Valentine: I think the ways of working is very unique. So we have a very defined ways of working sort of process. So start with bad version and label your work the first version bad version. Encourage input, encourage feedback. Get reviewed and feedback before you sort of iterate to the next level.

So the training is more again, like how do we structure that work? How do we sort of follow the same ways of working?

We do a lot with psychological safety and what it means to be psychologically safe and support each other and raise ideas. Give feedback but also receive good feedback. That's really important. How we listen. So we do a lot with how we listen to each other, how we listen to customers, how we listen to the market. Again, that sort of all fuels creativity because you need to create based on something or based towards something.

So from my point of view, I do a lot of training around performance management, how to set expectations, update expectations, pivot to pivot performance. So manage through change, understanding where change is coming from. So it's kind of that macro big level training and enablement, I think, which again creates the conditions. And something we've really invested a lot of time in over the last few years is manager support and manager training. And we do the our CEO and kind of lead manager trainer to walk the talk sessions on how managers translate mirror mindset and behaviors into the actions that happen day to day.

And again, the aim behind that is not to make everyone exactly the same, but to empower managers to give them autonomy so that they're reflecting the mindset rather than just delivering a policy, for example.

Ksenia Izotova: And speaking about listening to employees, do you have a special tool that analyzes what employees didn't say during the NPS survey? So how does it work technically?

Sam Valentine: Yeah, so that's the fact. So we do quarterly surveys. We use culture and for surveys. So we on a quarterly basis, and it's really tied into our performance management system. So the questions we ask are very focused around company confidence, engagement, relationships with managers, relationships with leaders, all those sorts of things.

I think any survey tool is really, really good at providing the quantitative analysis so we can look at that, you know, percentages, favorability, all that sort of stuff. I think the quantitative analysis, as always, in my experience, have tended to be an HR team or a manager or leader reading through as many comments as possible. And I think obviously that that can lead to strong bias. It's hard work to read through quite hard emotional work.

And then I think the risk of like missing themes or missing subtext or missing context is really high. And like also the brands are getting much, much better at AI sort of qualitative answers, but it's still really rooted in specific answers to questions. So I think that again, Miro is really based on qualitative data. We do a lot of listening to customers like the quant is always really important, but what people are saying and experiencing a feeling.

So I wanted to go really deep into that. So basically made a Claude agent, like an AI agent, which takes all of our survey comments as one data set. And so basically what we can do is interrogate the survey comments as one data set.

And so type in how are people feeling about AI? How has that changed since March? How are people, what are the most commonly used words about leadership? Again, how has that changed over the last year?

So we can start to analyze all these themes and sort of drill into things. And part of the rationale behind that was, yeah, we go back with numbers and say our confidence in leadership is 70 percent. But it's very difficult to then go, why is it 70 percent? Why not 80 percent? Why not 60 percent?

So we wanted to kind of find a solution to that. And then within that as well, I wanted to sort of start to ask based on what we would typically see from, you know, doing like the agent doing the research, what are people not talking about that we should be concerned about?

So when it comes to AI, for example, we had a case study with AI, a lot of excitement about AI, a lot of kind of positive feedback about tooling. A lot of anxiety that comes with it as well. I think these are sort of very typical. What we weren't seeing is references to ethics, references to customers.

And again, like that sort of the other takeaway from that is like, is the bigger excitement about the tooling maybe not translating into the strategy of how we apply that to customer outcomes? Or the anxiety around whether AI is going to take jobs or change the job landscape. Is that masking actually are we really thinking about the ethical considerations and the legal considerations of AI?

And so being able to surface this means that we can then get back and actually do something with it. And then when we do our all hands or when we do our division sort of readouts and AI focus areas, we can be very explicit about this is how we translate to customer value, for example. And then we see things like career progression, which is always a really big topic. I think in the most recent survey, this has always been a big topic, but it's not really present in the most recent survey. And hypothesis A, we've solved it, but career progression is no longer a problem for people or no longer a concern. Or we haven't solved it and it's gone underground a little bit because people flagged it in three consecutive surveys and no longer are talking about it because something else has come along.

And I think being able to understand what's not that really helps contextualize what is there, but also gives us an indication like what do we need to double down on from a communication point of view or what is okay. We're just happy with the disappearance of this topic, for example.

Ksenia Izotova: That's an incredibly interesting perspective, I guess. How has the company in general changed during these three and a half years?

Sam Valentine: I think the obvious thing, when I joined three and a half years ago, AI was coming. It was something we were talking about, something we were thinking about. The transformation that's driven has been absolutely huge. And I think transformation from a product perspective, transformation. And Miro, when I joined Miro now, is night and day. It was an incredible product when I joined. I loved it. Now it blows my mind every time I use it.

So that journey has been incredible. How we've really optimized for that internally as well. And that sort of, we were maturing, coming to the end of scaling, I would say, when I joined, into a much more mature company now. Much more sort of clearly defined behaviors, cultural expectations, rituals. And with that comes probably a change in the demographic profile of the company, which has pros and cons. I think that companies need to go through that change in evolution, but it's not easy. If you joined a scrappy startup and you've become a sort of slightly more regulated, bigger, mature company, that identity shift can feel quite conflicting.

How we sort of structure ourselves around productivity and performance has really changed as well. We've sort of moved from that very product-led to sort of value-led kind of approach and really selling the value of the product. And again, that comes with big identity changes and structural changes. So it's all a sort of maturity growth story. But I want to be really empathetic to people who've been through that, but it doesn't always feel like a very comfortable, neat story along the way as well. So those changes have been huge.

Ksenia Izotova: And how do you support people through this change?

Sam Valentine: Yeah, I think I have a strong point of view on this. I think we see the narrative managing through change or navigating change. And I've used that a lot myself. I think that always comes with sort of implications. You just have to cope with it. It's something that's done to you. You have to find ways to cope with it, which I think is sort of, yeah, it's true. And since I'm level, I think that really successful companies use change as the fuel to thrive thing.

And I think, yeah, like in the startup world, no one joins a scrappy startup because they want absolute clarity and stability.

Ksenia Izotova: And stability, yes.

Sam Valentine: You need confidence and ambition, but a real tolerance of ambiguity. And so I think those sort of principles are really important. So for me, and I have a heavy bias, obviously, because of my job. There's a lot that goes into this. But how we manage performance and talk about performance is, I think, really, really crucial to this. And I sort of see it as a kind of four stage process.

This is my mental model on this. I think it all starts with orientation. And so knowing the direction we're focused on, knowing that might change month to month, quarter to quarter. And that is the leadership responsibility on a quarterly basis or a monthly basis to say, this is our direction. This is what's dropping. This is where the priorities are changing. These are the opportunities. These are the challenges. And that's where the empathy comes in. We know it's frustrating, but we know it's exciting at the same time.

Then commitment. So this is, yeah, people allowing people to make their choices about what they own, what they prioritize. And that's where autonomy and we have to give people really high autonomy and really high support. But what am I going to commit to this quarter? What am I going to drop this quarter?

And I think we sort of, yeah, we express that as expectations in performance management terms. So on a quarterly basis, my expectations will change. Some will drop, some will evolve. But my leader, my manager will help me orient. I will then commit and take ownership of what I can own. Then the delivery of that, that's how that work gets done. What are we accelerating? What's blocking? How are we identifying the moments of value within that? And again, that's the kind of manager role there to be able to coach and guide feedback.

And then the impact of that, how do we recognize and reward and make visible the impact of that work? And that might be we've helped a team improve or we've delivered something to a customer that they've been asking for, or we've weathered this storm over here.
But I think that's how change becomes the fuel for performance rather than the thing that just needs to be coped with.

Ksenia Izotova: A quick note from UnifyHub. Language isn't the whole story when it comes to remote engagement, but it can make it harder to speak up at work. UnifyHub is a corporate language learning platform for tech teams. We combine assessment, role-specific programs, platform access, live practice with international educators, and progress reporting for HR and L&D. The learning is built around real work, from meetings and written updates to feedback and client conversations. You'll find more in the show notes.

Thank you, Sam. And you've mentioned coaching, how leaders coach their employees. Can you unwrap that a little more and speak about how coaching has helped leaders in Miro drive their teams through change?

Sam Valentine: So our manager framework basically, all managers do three things. They coach, they communicate, and they drive. So they coach their teams, and that is feedback. Giving feedback, recognition, steering, helping people unlock, identifying blockers. But it's also coaching.

Again, I think this gets lost a lot of the time. Like coaching is hugely listening as well. Like a good coach is primarily a good listener. And so managers who are able to listen to what their teams are telling them and understanding where the blockers are, where there's opportunities to accelerate, that's a huge kind of manager unlock. And so, yeah, we, again, to cope with change, to manage change, to thrive in change, we need constant feedback, constant reorientation, and those conversations are really what drives that.

So we do a lot with training managers to be coaches, training our people, business partners to be coaches. Our leaders are constantly coaching people as well. Every organization's got a hierarchy. They think these are always going to exist, but it's not a hierarchy sort of, you must do this. This is autocracy. It's much more of a hierarchy for decision making and autonomy purposes, but it really thrives on the ability to have good conversations, good, honest, impactful conversations with each other, which is potentially coaching.

Ksenia Izotova: What I hear is a lot of proper communication, right? Being very transparent to your teams, coaching sessions, communicating every single change. So this is something that is a part of the culture, is it right?

Sam Valentine: Yeah, yeah. So communication is incredibly important. Without communication, there is no orientation, there is no commitment, there is no feedback on delivery, and there is no visibility of impact. So everything really hinges on quality of communication.

Ksenia Izotova: Is this the key to retention or there is something else?

Sam Valentine: Yeah, it is. I think it is the key to retention. I think we know from research, we know internally, money is not a long-term retention lever. You can attract someone with a good salary, you can keep someone for a couple of months with a retention bonus. But people, and again, speaking on Mira's behalf, I'm not saying this is every company I suspect.

People join because they are ambitious and have big ideas and want to work in an inspiring environment and want to see the impact of their work and want to feel valued. And that value, as a high-performing, you could be a high-performing salesperson, you could be a high-performing engineer, or you could be a high-performing colleague who is doing the hidden work, the invisible work, but everyone wants to high-perform in their own way.

And it is very, very hard to perform at your best if you don't know what the future looks like or what you are performing towards, or if you are not getting the feedback on the impact you are making. And so communication is what are we aiming for, how are we getting there, how do we know we are successful, how do you know that you are successful within that.
And it's really hard for leaders, it's really hard for managers to always have that clarity in transparency of communication. It's definitely not an easy thing to do. But it creates the conditions for people to thrive, and people thriving means high-performing is performing really highly, and ideally everyone in the company should be a high-performer. And that's really sort of based on absolute clarity. And so, yeah, that's what retains people, I think.

Ksenia Izotova: During our conversation, I've been thinking a lot about why it's so difficult to communicate changes, even positive ones. A big company, as Miro, is doing really simple things in terms of communication.

Sam Valentine: Well, I think communication, at the most fundamental level, SMR, sender, message, receiver. And yeah, within that is a huge degree of complexity, because as a message sender, as a leader, the lens, the context, the knowledge is wildly different to receiver. The number of people receiving is the number of possible ways for that message to go wrong. And so, I think, yeah, the big communication mistake that I've seen throughout my career is people telling people what they know, rather than telling people what they need to know. So, if I'm talking to you, I'll happily tell you everything that I know, or everything that I want you to know. But actually, if I start from the sink, what is it that you need to know that shapes the message accordingly? So, that's a very difficult balance to get right as well.

And then the noise that comes into the system, people are busy, people are conflicted, people have different personality types, people have different life stages, people have different priorities at home. There are always messages that can get shaped and get reshaped and sort of be understood.

And so, I think, yeah, from a communication point of view, the gold standard is always going to be a one-to-one, and that's where a coaching conversation is super important. To say there's a big leadership announcement, yeah, that needs to be translated into a sort of divisional leader layer, into a manager conversation, but then really into a, how are you understanding it and what can I do as a manager to reorient you in this conversation?

And again, it really comes back to listening. So, you can only truly know if a message has landed by listening to the response to it.

Ksenia Izotova: I'm curious, and let's talk personal a little. I know that you are a parent as well, right? How do you teach effective communication to your son?

Sam Valentine: I wish I had a great answer. I wish I had it right. I think the thing I find myself saying most often to my son is, what do you think he meant by that, or what do you think she meant by that? And when you said that, like, this is what you meant, how do you think it could have been received?

So, I'll give you a recent example. He got into trouble in an English lesson for saying something to an English teacher, and got told off, and he was outraged about being told off by his English teacher. He was like, he was just trying to help. Like, I was just trying to be helpful. But when you said it, like, you said it in this particular way, which we know very well. We know it comes across as quite helpful. But if someone doesn't know you, can you see that that might have sounded sarcastic?

I think, yeah, just trying to open up the empathy, how do you think that might have been received by someone else. So, I think it's much less about, again, like, what you're saying, and much more about what the person hears, because those two things are always going to be very different, or often going to be very, very different.

So, yeah, from my point of view, it's much more around the kind of listening skills and understanding skills. And that sort of thing, yeah, I know it's a bit of a cliche. You never know what's going on in other people's heads. Like, yeah, this thing that I'm saying could be the most important thing in the world to me. But I'm talking to someone who's, you know, worried about a parent, or got bills to pay, or is hungry.

Ksenia Izotova: Yes.

Sam Valentine: What are the ways that messages can get lost? And I think, yeah, so I try and spend a lot of time having that conversation. I don't know if that's successful, but I try. I think at 12, it's not a problem of, like, having the right words. It's maybe a sort of, yeah, developing of empathy or awareness of how things can come across. I don't know if that resonates with you and your son...

Ksenia Izotova: Yeah, yes, it absolutely does resonate. I always inspire him to read the room, to read between the lines. What did the person really mean? Especially in a challenging situation when someone is being rude or, you know, I always try to focus him on the most positive aspects and think about what made the person do that. But yeah, it's about empathy and about first processing the emotion of another person rather than expressing selfishly your own emotions.

Sam Valentine: Yeah, I use the phrase, read the room very often.

Ksenia Izotova: Yes, that's right. And what about AI in schools in general? Is there a policy in the schools? How do they work with that at the moment?

Sam Valentine: I don't fully know, actually. I don't think there is a policy that I'm aware of at the moment. And I think, yeah, responsible AI use. And that's something that I know so much. So I'm talking about how do you use AI responsibly, ethically and for the right reason? In the same way that you have to use calculators in maths.

Ksenia Izotova: Yes.

Sam Valentine: Yeah, I think it'll be a very similar kind of conversation there. I'm not really aware of anything too much, to be honest. I think it's just, yeah, it's teaching the skills to navigate AI. And it's teaching the critical awareness, which is always, no matter what stage of technology, the ability to critically appraise what you're reading in your sources, I think is always going to be a skill.

But like the education sector always has to keep pace with societal changes that happen as well. And I think now more than ever, the ability to kind of express yourself verbally and empathetically and human to human is required skills again. It maybe wasn't a few years ago.

Ksenia Izotova: Yes, that's true.

Sam Valentine: Yeah.

Ksenia Izotova: So for 2027, the next year is coming, what are your main focuses, main highlights that you're going to work on in the L&D sphere. And in performance management.

Sam Valentine: For me personally, the things that I really want to build on and the things I'm really passionate about, really effective performance management systems. I think, yeah, performance management should be the fuel for growth and the fuel for good performance, not the measure of it. So how do we create performance management systems which are really fueling great work and autonomy for people?

And I think we can get that. I think AI can really support on that. And I think it comes down to that sort of model of orientation, commitment, regular feedback, but also making sure that all the hidden work and invisible work that keeps things running is recognized effectively and that it's not just about the heroic effort that we've rewarded.

I think the integration of listening, again, it's something I'm really passionate about, is how we listen to people as part of performance management. Performance management is all my personal performance, my team's performance, but also the company's performance. So through listening, how do we understand the accelerators, the blockers, what we need to change, and how we can respond much more quickly.

So I say like my KPI with listening, like the surveys, I want kind of actions to happen in hours rather than weeks. So we survey, we listen to people, we should be able to take an action within a few hours. So I want to kind of pick up that pace.

And then talent management as well, like how we really integrate talent management into all our processes. So really recognizing where there's a development need or a succession plan or where there's an opportunity to stretch someone or an opportunity for someone to step back and rest, recover, rebuild that performance. So integrating that feels like a big priority as well.

And then AI usage, how we get very, very deeply strategic with AI. I think we've sort of swung the pendulum a little bit with AI and like every company is kind of adopting AI. And we've got this big breadth of kind of AI solutions. I think the companies that are going to succeed are super deep with a strategic pillar that's AI enabled. And that's going to be unique companies, companies. So that's something I really want to focus on as well.

Ksenia Izotova: Sam, thank you for sharing your experience and ideas. I'm taking away a simple but very important reminder, listening to employees matters when leaders act on what they hear and clear communication and empathy help people move through change. Thank you for listening to HR Unwritten by UnifyHub. Follow the show for more candid conversations about the people's side of work. See you next time. Bye.

UnifyHub is a Corporate Language Learning Platform for Tech Teams. It helps international IT and technology teams develop workplace English through assessment, role-specific programmes, platform-based learning, live practice with international educators and progress reporting for HR and L&D.

The learning focuses on communication people use at work, including meetings, written updates, feedback and client conversations.

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