Why the Best Tech Teams Get Comfortable With Discomfort — Claudia Barriga-Larriviere, Top 100 HR Leader
Most teams try to avoid friction. Claudia Barriga-Larriviere has spent close to 20 years arguing the opposite — and it might be the one trait that actually predicts whether a team performs.
In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Claudia Barriga-Larriviere — globally recognised as one of the top 100 HR directors, with close to two decades working across startups, scale-ups and enterprise people functions. They get into why difficult conversations are a skill and not a personality trait, why “protecting the plan” is one of the most dangerous habits a leader can have, why every team needs a mix of “glue” and “grease,” and whether AI is quietly making managers redundant.
It’s a wide-ranging conversation that runs from an Indiana Jones analogy for leadership to a searingly honest story about a scary vet visit with her dog — all in service of one argument: the core people skills matter more, not less, as everything else about the job changes.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere is a People & Culture leader with close to 20 years’ experience across startups, scale-ups and enterprise — including roles at BlueChilli, AMP and Sendle, and currently Chief People Officer at Good On You.
Building Tech Teams is produced by DayOne.
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Transcript
Auto-transcribed with AI.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [0:00]: And I have this rule of, I always praise the individual and critique the work. There’s different leaders that take different stances around praising people in public and giving feedback in private. I think there’s benefits to either.
In order for you to be a really effective member of a team, you have to be either an agent of glue or an agent of grease. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. So if you’re an agent of glue — and this doesn’t have to do with care, but glue in terms of cohesion, right, unity. Is there anybody on your team that is worried about this? Does everybody understand where we’re going? Does everybody have the right information? Are the right people on this, not only on this team, but in this meeting right now? And the other one is grease, which is an agent of motion. How quickly are we getting there? What is the source of this distance between not doing this and doing this? Or how fast can we get to this goal? And there’s this really great creative tension between these two things. If your team is very greasy, you should be over-optimising for glue. If your team is very gluey, you should be optimising for speed.
One of the first questions I ask hiring managers, team leads, whatever, is, does your team need to be moving faster? Does your team need to be more cohesive? They have almost never thought about it, but then they have an answer. So that’s where you should start hiring.
James MacDonald [1:13]: Welcome to another episode of Building Tech Teams. On today’s episode we’re taking a slightly different take. We’re talking about building tech teams from the people side of things, and we’re talking to somebody that’s worked within startups, scale-ups and in enterprise in people functions — Claudia Barriga-Larriviere, globally recognised as one of the top 100 HR directors.
We talk about the people function. We talk about whilst AI is changing some things within technology and technology teams, many things still stay the same. What are the challenges for technology leaders, leaders in general, in building teams, having those difficult conversations, and why these core functions — whilst technology changes, trends change — the core functions still stay the same. Really interesting take. Claudia has strong opinions on HR, strong opinions on people functions, and also AI’s effect on both technology teams and the more global environment. Hope you enjoy this episode.
Welcome to another episode of Building Tech Teams, and on today’s episode we have Claudia Barriga-Larriviere.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [2:11]: Perfect. I want to congratulate people who take the time to say my name.
James MacDonald [2:15]: I did a lot of practising on the street, talking out loud by myself before this podcast. I must have looked like a proper weirdo.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [2:21]: What a way to look like a weirdo. Thank you for doing that for me.
James MacDonald [2:24]: No problem. I appreciate it. Globally recognised HR leader — thanks for spending the time and coming on the podcast today.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [2:30]: Pleasure.
James MacDonald [2:30]: You’ve worked in a lot of people teams, a lot of companies, from startup level right through to global enterprise level companies. If we just start — what is one trait that brings all really high-quality technology teams across the board?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [2:50]: I would even go as far as to say non-technology teams — just teams in general — is being comfortable with discomfort. I think we’re going to talk a lot about that today.
Actually, I would say two things. One is self-awareness. Individual self-awareness of, these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, and this is how we complement each other. I think that’s a really, really key thing at all levels, and at all longevity of teams, which is really interesting. But yeah, that discomfort of being able to have difficult conversations, challenging things, saying, actually, I don’t think that’s a good idea, or, man, I have a better thing that we should do. Those two things, I think, across all levels that I’ve seen. And it’s not a hard thing to spot from a distance nowadays.
James MacDonald [3:44]: On that point — self-awareness, easier said than done.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [3:48]: For sure.
James MacDonald [3:49]: Do you think it’s something that can be trained? Do you think it’s something that people can learn and get better at over time? Do you think it’s something that people innately have? How have you seen the people that are best self-aware, that highest degree of awareness — is it something that they continually work on?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [4:08]: I think all of those things, but I think there’s a level of temperament. You’re born with temperament, and then you acquire personality, and you have all of these environmental things.
I find it really fascinating, the idea of self-awareness as a skill, but also as a muscle. It’s something that you can definitely develop. There are people who have this innate quality to it, but it also comes hand in hand with empathy, which is something we also have to develop. There are all these Piaget models about when and how kids develop empathy, and are iPads good for them or not, and how are we actually sheltering our kids from discomfort. I’m very child-free — I have a dog who’s not feeling well today, which is why I was late. But this is how we form all of these muscles, and this is how we end up with them as adults.
One of the things that’s the Venn diagram in there is that emotional intelligence that allows you to actually exercise those things in the real world. You can have self-awareness but actually not demonstrate it in any way. Being in the right environment to do it, having the right psychological safety to do it, but also having the courage to do it, is probably even more important than the self-awareness.
James MacDonald [5:29]: I think the courage piece you mentioned there ties back into what you mentioned before about having difficult conversations as well. As a business owner, it’s challenging. You know you need to do it. It’s a very easy thing to put to the side and hope things go away, as opposed to really directly having those hard conversations. It’s happened in a lot of the teams I’ve worked with as well. Again, I think it’s a skill that a lot of leaders have to lean into or learn, because it’s not something most people want to take on.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [6:00]: No. And I made a career out of having difficult conversations, which is interesting. That’s how I got into people and culture work.
Back when I was in advertising, I kind of cut my teeth during the financial crisis — this is how old I am. This is in the first Obama administration. And I worked in advertising and most of my team was made redundant. I remember it being a Tuesday night here when it all happened. And a lot of my team was made redundant and I got called in by the group. So I worked with a huge communications group, Y&R and WPP. And the practice leader called me in for HR. And he was like, hey, we can keep you on longer if you can help us have difficult conversations and effectively let people go — because I had a comfort doing it.
I largely credited it to, one, the psychological safety that I felt as a child, just growing up. I had really supportive parents who had really high standards for us, but we had a really loving, supportive home. I know that’s a privilege and not everybody has that. But also, you might be able to tell by my accent, I have an American education. There’s a lot of directness in an American, and international American, education. You have this hunger for feedback. You have these feedback loops with teachers, and there are a lot of roads for excellence in those programs. So I’ve just had that baked into me the whole time. So I’ve never had to learn it as a skill.
I do have a theory about it, if you want to hear it, in terms of why this discomfort seems so unapproachable to a lot of people. I think it comes with self-awareness and all of that. But I think we also have this permeated culture in Australia. We value, or seem to at least value, harmony above all else.
James MacDonald [8:02]: I agree.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [8:03]: Which I find, again, with an American education and a Latin American upbringing, really interesting.
James MacDonald [8:10]: And that’s where that direct feedback — people, A, don’t like giving it, B, don’t like receiving it.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [8:15]: There’s an avoidance to it. Like, beyond not liking it, right? I don’t like eating protein bars. I do it all the time. I have to do it. I have an insulin disorder. It’s important for me to do it, right?
James MacDonald [8:26]: On that point, you also mentioned just before, the relationship between that direct feedback and excellence.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [8:31]: Yes.
James MacDonald [8:33]: Can you break that down a little bit further for me? Because I think you mentioned it there quite loosely, but I think it’s a big part of those high-performing cultures.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [8:41]: Yeah, but also understanding what high performance means, right? So we have all these vibes of what high performance means. I’ve worked in teams — not only in teams, in entire companies — who are just like, this is a high-performing company. And it just means that everyone’s stressed out. I’ve also worked in very harmonious companies that are actually high performance, but nobody refers to it like that, because no one’s running around, right?
So it’s just understanding, are we all running fast in the same direction, but we’re just running off a cliff at the end of it? So just understanding that and having a feedback loop.
And going to a conversation we started having earlier, it’s the idea of what are we happy and comfortable outsourcing — it’s those things that make us uncomfortable. My partner and I, we met, we’re both startup people, and he used to run these huge teams of customer success and customer happiness. AI, that’s the first thing that’s gone out the window. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable. Why? Because it’s a complaints department, right? And we’re like, hey, let’s take all of this to places we don’t have to see it. Let’s put it in the Philippines, let’s put it in Vietnam, let’s put it wherever it is, and it has to live in this office and it’s cheaper.
Guess what? We would never dream to do that for a marketing department. You wouldn’t really dream to do that for the sales department necessarily. Those are the people you reward the most. But what is that? That is your feedback loop to the customer. Why are you shortcutting that? Why are you giving that away?
And in the same way — and again, I’m biased because I’m a P&C person — we’re also really happy to outsource those P&C things. Let’s just get a platform that tells us how people feel, what to do about it. Let’s get some perks in here. Can we make better sandwiches? Do we have nice snacks?
So if you’re not comfortable with the discomfort of feedback — constructive feedback, bad feedback, uncomfortable feedback, whatever it is — then how are you going to be comfortable having those conversations with the people who are going to inform the way you should be running your business and the decisions you should be making? Because, one, going back to self-awareness, it might not be what you want to hear. But also, it might make you change your plans. And that’s a really dangerous thing when you’ve made a lot of promises, right? To investors, to founders, to whoever it is. And all of a sudden it’s like, oh my God, the plan should change. Well, let’s protect the plan above all else.
James MacDonald [11:10]: That’s not the information I want to hear.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [11:11]: That’s not information I want to hear. And I keep having this conversation with leaders, especially first-time leaders, around the idea of feedback and changing as you go and the discomfort. And I apologise in advance, because I use a lot of analogies in my methodologies.
James MacDonald [11:30]: I like it.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [11:31]: But for first-time leaders, particularly leaders who have this feedback and flexibility — let’s call them issues — I always ask them to watch any of the Indiana Jones movies. And I only recognise the first three. I don’t know how familiar you are with the canon.
James MacDonald [11:47]: I’ve watched Raiders a number of times.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [11:50]: Perfect movie. I’m Last Crusade, because it’s Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. Forget it. That’s how I grew up.
Any Indiana Jones movie — he’ll go in and has a plan. He’s like, these are the Nazis, right? Very clear-cut bad guys. They’ve done something crazy, and we have to fix it. So he summons a bunch of people he trusts that we’re going to do this. And then five minutes in, it all falls apart. Literally every movie is that. And then he has to figure out how to pivot. But there’s one enemy, right? And we have to figure that out, and there’s a thing to do.
And the way that I talk to leaders about it is, Indiana Jones doesn’t get flustered about the “let’s protect this plan above all else”. It’s like, there’s Nazis out there. We need to figure that out. And they’re doing something crazy. Let’s stop them from doing that crazy thing, or let’s fix them doing that crazy thing.
So there is that focus of where you are as a leader. If your job is to protect this plan above all else, you’re not going to let any of those external things that are getting in the way inform things, surprise you, or even change it for the better. And I think that’s a really dangerous thing in how quickly we want things to move.
James MacDonald [13:09]: How do you go about coaching people to be better at that? If a leader’s out there listening to it and they’re challenged by these situations, what’s your advice for them in improving that skill set?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [13:21]: I’m just going to sound a little weird, but I would say read. Read a lot. Read fiction.
James MacDonald [13:26]: For what reason?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [13:28]: Because it’s important to put yourself in other people’s shoes. I have read a lot of Russian literature — not by choice — and I have no idea what it feels like to be a Russian housewife and why anybody would end up flinging themselves in front of a train. But that’s helped me practise putting myself in other people’s shoes.
And again, going back to my need for analogy, I think that’s how we connect with the world. And not only through fiction, but through story. I truly believe that’s how we’re wired.
James MacDonald [14:00]: That’s how we make change. I think storytelling is actually one of the biggest and greatest skills people can learn.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [14:06]: I mean, this is how the world turns. And this is how change happens. This is how revolutions ignite. This is how I truly feel that we connect as people.
James MacDonald [14:15]: And on a much smaller scale, how startups grow. That’s how you attract people to your team. That’s how you attract investment. That’s how you attract customers. Storytelling is a significant skill.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [14:26]: That’s how you align people. And again, at the atomic level, we’re pack animals. That’s our language, quite literally.
So I would say read, and read with intention. I use a lot of literature, movies, pop culture and all of that, largely to depersonalise, also, working with leaders. If you can be like, well, this is what you’re doing, and this is why it’s wrong, and this is the feedback — it can be very confrontational, again, when you’re not comfortable with discomfort.
And I work with leaders across the world. I remember, I think this was at Sendle, because we had the Philippines contingent, we had the American contingent that was fairly new, and there was the Australian contingent. And when we started putting in our feedback program and performance reviews and all of that, there’s a huge difference between how each of these cultures — obviously at the individual level, but how these cultures — would take into consideration what feedback was.
Whereas again, my American vernacular would be like, actually, that doesn’t look right, can you do it again? Or, can you bring it back to me when it’s ready? And then I find myself in an Australian context, often going like, hi, so thank you for giving this to me on time, but I think it needs another pass. Do you mind if I give you feedback? So now I’m five sentences into what should be three or four words.
So there are elements of how you take the cultural context of it, not only the leadership, but also meeting people where they are. And I think storytelling and that analogy piece is really helpful.
James MacDonald [16:20]: I think the depersonalisation you mentioned there is probably the most important part. Because especially with constructive feedback, people can take it personally — and if you can remove that personalisation, we’re talking about something that happened, or a task, or something that hasn’t gone to plan.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [16:36]: And I have this rule of, I always praise the individual and critique the work. And that has worked really great for me. There’s different leaders that take different stances around praising people in public and giving feedback in private. I think there’s benefits to either.
One of the questions that I love asking founders when I start working with them directly is, do you want me to give you — when you say something crazy, so it’s not feedback about everything, but inevitably we’re all going to say something crazy, sometimes it can be insensitive, sometimes it can be not politically whatever it is — do you want me to call it out in public? Like, maybe you say something at an all-hands. Or do you want me to save it and bring it up in private in our one-on-one?
And there’s a difference — and there’s no right or wrong, I’m just saying there is a difference — between a founder who will say, oh no, no, call it out at the time, because I want people to use it as a learning opportunity, and a founder or a CEO who might say, actually, I would like to explore that further later, so let’s keep it between us for now until I get more fluent in it. And either of those are fine. But you have to count on their own self-awareness to understand which one’s going to work for them.
And I think a lot of leaders in general overestimate their own emotional intelligence, often. And again, that’s not a bad thing — we’re all learning, we’re all on this mortal coil figuring it out — but a lot of them would have gotten a lot of confirmation bias about how good they are at culture and all of these things, and not necessarily have examined it for themselves.
James MacDonald [18:16]: Do you think there would be a high percentage of those people as startup founders? Because I think it does take a level of confidence, a level of charisma potentially, but definitely a confidence thing from a startup founder to actually go out and say, I’m going to build something that people are willing to pay for. You have to have a level of self-assurance or confidence.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [18:35]: Thank goodness for overconfident people — I wouldn’t have a job otherwise. But there is a yin and yang to it. And I’m a huge advocate for balanced teams. I say that 20 times a day.
So there has to be a yin and yang. There is that — I wouldn’t say overconfidence, but just confidence altogether — to be able to get up in the morning and be like, there isn’t this thing, there’s going to be this thing, I’m going to be the one to make it. I don’t have that. I just don’t have that. That’s not in me. I’m a good yin to a yang.
So you can definitely develop it, but I think there’s also a very deep need for a lot of people to go, actually, I need to be checked on this confidence. Or, I need to have a counterbalance. And there’s a lot of theories around, do startups do better, or do companies do better, with co-founders rather than founders? Please check me on this — it’s in the Pollenizer book somewhere. I come from the Pollenizer School of Startups. I owe my entire methodology to that.
And at the time — I think at least for a while while I was there — Phil and Mick only took startups that had co-founders, or they would then find a co-founder for them. Because there was that balance, so it can’t just be one person going, this is how it’s going to be. And I think that was true at least while I was there. There is that duality.
There’s a wonderful book actually called Powers of Two. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.
James MacDonald [20:21]: I haven’t read it.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [20:22]: Oh my God, it’s my favourite book of all time.
James MacDonald [20:24]: Okay, I’ll put it on my list.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [20:24]: Please put it on your list. And it’s a really complementary book to any other team-building book. And it’s a narrative book. It’s very much about partnerships.
There’s this author called Joshua Wolf Shenk. He does biographies. And he has a seminal biography about Abraham Lincoln — again, my American education. I love presidents. I love The West Wing, if anybody needs a show to binge-watch.
He wrote this really in-depth biography about all of Lincoln’s accomplishments. He was in the middle of a civil war, and he emancipated enslaved people and did all of these amazing things, including inventing a whole way of debating, the Lincoln–Douglas debates and all of that. And what Shenk did was he mapped out all of these accomplishments. It turns out that every single one of them coincided with Lincoln’s bipolar bouts. He was undiagnosed bipolar. Back then, I can’t imagine there was a diagnosis. There was no DSM, I don’t think. So he was untreated.
I remember reading it — he would go into the woods and friends would have to go find him because he might have unalived himself. Like, it was really crazy. The situation was crazy. So he was like, well, how did he manage to do all of these things in one lifetime while dealing with all of that stuff?
And the reason he could do it is because at each of these inflection points, he had what Joshua Wolf Shenk calls a creative partner. There was his wife, who also turned out to be mentally challenged. There’s his vice president. He famously also — fantastic book, Team of Rivals — put together his cabinet, the team of rivals, people who didn’t agree with him, which also is a really great theory for balanced teams.
But it’s those creative partnerships. So he started this theory and this methodology about the most atomic version of creativity and disruption and innovation being a partnership. And it’s a partnership that is complementary to each other. So he started writing this other book called Powers of Two, and he puts them in buckets. It’s a fascinating book. The organising principle around it is to debunk the idea of a lone genius. The idea that there is this Steve Jobs — no, actually it’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and we just didn’t hear about it, right?
This common thread that runs across the book, which is really beautiful — I’m in love with musicians, so this spoke really deeply to me — is the partnership between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who are wonderful, wonderful on their own, but never as good as they were with each other. And how those partnerships work, and how even conflict in partnership is really, really good.
So whether you find that in a co-founder, or you find that in your board, or you find it in your partner, or in your friendship group — there is a vulnerability that you need to have, like people coming through the cracks. And often that confidence doesn’t let those cracks be visible.
James MacDonald [23:41]: Yeah, definitely not early on.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [23:43]: It’s used as armour. Especially if it’s overconfidence, and it kind of hermetically seals you from finding that partnership and that thing that is going to actually unearth that innovation and disruption, or even success and joy, just at a very atomic level, right? So yeah, I highly, highly, highly recommend that book. It’s such a fascinating read.
James MacDonald [24:13]: Comes back to your storytelling though, right? It’s actually getting a point through by actually sharing other people’s experiences.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [24:17]: It’s so powerful, because you know the seminal tech story, the origins of Apple, right? And then you have Balanchine reinventing ballet in New York, and he had to find a very courageous dancer who was willing to break that with him.
James MacDonald [25:13]: So for people building their teams — whether they’re looking for a co-founder, or in a bigger organisation — you mentioned that yin and yang, finding that person. How do you go about finding that person? Because it’s very easy to go and find somebody that looks very similar to you, thinks very similar to you, feels like it’ll be easy. Whereas quite often it’s that person that is willing to challenge you, willing to have that yin and yang.
How do people go about that? How do you coach people around building their teams for that? I know you’ve mentioned hiring for change, not hiring for somebody that’s going to fit in. I’d love you to break that part down, because I think it’s a real challenge. At bigger companies it’s a challenge; it’s a challenge for founders trying to find their co-founder, that first hire, which is so critical to their actual success. How do you go about coaching that?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [25:30]: I mean, the thing it comes back to — so I largely come from incubators, so we had to develop a methodology. It’s not only, how do you have your first hire, but, what is the mathematics of your founding team? And when are you ready to actually be in charge of a full person?
And it’s interesting, because again, it depends on the maturity of the person actually doing it, right, and how much help you need. One, I would say you shouldn’t do it on your own. You should find somebody to help you do it. It doesn’t have to be me, but it has to be somebody who understands — I’m constantly talking about team chemistry, and it’s beyond yin and yang, right?
There’s another fantastic book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, by the IDEO guys. They have these ten archetypes of what makes an amazing team. You’re not going to have ten of these exact different people in it, but there is this really magical alchemy that comes from having different people on the team and different perspectives on it.
But the ingredients largely are three. So at any point in a startup — in any team, but in a startup as a human collective — you should be building. So you should have a builder, an organiser and a learner, right? Somebody who’s making the thing. Somebody who’s learning from the market, learning from your users, learning from how the politics works within your industry and the sector.
James MacDonald [27:02]: That’s going to be the person that’s probably selling it as well, I imagine.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [27:05]: Largely, often, the person selling it. And then the organiser. So somebody who knows how to run things. And again, that doesn’t have to be the person in charge necessarily, or the CEO, but somebody who understands politics and process and compliance and all of that. So you’re not just — going back to one of the things I think we’re now living with the consequences of — “move fast and break things”. An organiser will be like, how about let’s break less things, right? How do we navigate the world and still do things and still comply with the law and figure all of these things out?
So there are ways to find out whether you have those right elements in the team. The corresponding piece, I think, to what we’re talking about in terms of dynamic partnerships and creative partnerships — there’s also a really great precept called glue and grease. It’s a Harvard Business School idea that you can all Google, but it’s really, really amazing.
It sounds so simple, but ultimately is such a powerful, just turnkey thing. So in order for you to be a really effective member of a team, you have to be either an agent of glue or an agent of grease. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but this is the question I always ask.
So if you’re an agent of glue — and this doesn’t have to do with care, but glue in terms of cohesion, right, unity. Is there anybody on your team that is worried about this? Does everybody understand where we’re going? Does everybody have the right information? Are the right people on this, not only on this team, but in this meeting right now? Are we following this up correctly? That type of default setting.
And the other one is grease, which is an agent of motion. How quickly are we getting there? And it’s in charge of being like, what is the source of distance between not doing this and doing this? Or, how fast can we get to this goal, and how do we get there?
And there’s this really great creative tension between these two things. If your team is very greasy, you should be over-optimising for glue. If your team is very gluey, you should be optimising for speed. So one of the first questions I ask hiring managers, team leads, whatever, is, does your team need to be moving faster? Does your team need to be more cohesive? And they have almost never thought about it. And then they go — but then they have an answer. So that’s where you should start hiring.
James MacDonald [29:46]: I think it’s a really good point on actually challenging a hiring manager or challenging a company on what are you trying to achieve with this next role, as opposed to, I need another engineer because we’ve got to build quicker.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [30:01]: Yeah. And that comes to, is this a project, or is this a person? Right? And there’s a difference. You’re acquiring a person. And that’s a person’s livelihood and hopes and dreams, and people are going to have to be invested in this.
And you’re also adding — we’re going to introduce another word that I use all the time, which is metabolism. You’re adding another person into the metabolism of a team and a company. So you’re adding somebody else’s motivations and bad days and good days, and how they affect other people. So there’s more than a list of skills that a person has. It’s, how are they actually going to — and this should be, everyone’s job description should have this as a header — change this company for the better. Are they going to do that? If not, hire a contractor, figure out this project, get it out of the way.
James MacDonald [30:53]: Very good point.
I’m very interested in the space of AI at the moment, how it’s changing some things and also how much remains the same. When you’re talking about that, you just mentioned before, project or person. I think AI is allowing people to build a lot quicker at the moment. It’s allowing companies to move a lot quicker.
How do you actually coach people, or actually ask them the right questions, to decide at the moment, do you need to be hiring another person, or is this a project and can you outsource it? A lot of people are struggling at the moment with, I don’t have AI talent within my team, or we want to build this, or we want to move quicker. Do I go to an external agency who might be able to actually do it for me? Do I upskill internally? Do I hire the new person with that skill? There are three ways I think a lot of companies are looking at it. Do you think AI has changed anything, or do you think it very much is the same on what are we trying to achieve — person, project?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [31:48]: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, because there are a lot of levels to it in terms of, it would depend on the size of things, the type of company you’re in, all of that.
But I don’t know. I’m always a very enthusiastic early adopter of technologies. I’m finding it really — and not that I don’t use it, I use it quite a bit — I’m finding it hard to connect with AI as a “well, we think of the world like this, we should think about the world like this instead”. Because if we think about how people are talking about AI right now — and I hope I change my mind about this — people talk about it like it’s weather. Like it’s coming. It’s like Hurricane Andrew, everybody get your windows ready.
And I could also be naive. There are people who are making decisions to make it seem inevitable. You could change it. People are making it. This isn’t actually weather.
But to your question — should we think about it in terms of, has that changed the way that we would approach a project or a hire, because there’s AI here? I think AI is kind of like email in a way. Email changed a lot of things. It accelerated a lot of things. We don’t have to write letters, we don’t have to do phone calls and all of that. So if we think about it in terms of it being an instrument —
James MacDonald [33:12]: It’s a tool, yeah.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [33:14]: It’s a tool. And rather than it being an authority, or the weather that you have to get ready for — then it becomes largely dependent on what you’re directing that tool to do.
Like email, I think it does accelerate things. So for example, you can test — and again, I’m an MVP girl from the Pollenizer school of test something before you do something. So it gives you an environment in which you can test the smallest thing to prove your point, which is the golden rule of MVPs and lean startups. And then you can decide what to do with that information. I think it’s useful for that as a tool. But I don’t think it’s the thing that you go — you shouldn’t make it an authority in terms of helping you decide whether to do the other three things.
James MacDonald [34:03]: As much as things change, a lot stays the same. The core underlying principle is really, are we looking at this like a project, or is this the long-term investment from a people side of things? What are we trying to achieve longer term?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [34:15]: Yeah, and it should be part of an education and training and all of that. Particularly, it’s a huge responsibility, right? Because it really has two levels, which I’m trying to get myself educated and trained on too, because I get a lot of these questions a lot. The idea that there’s a narrative, and then there’s the technology.
So the technology is one thing, and it has a lot of potential, but it also has attached to it a lot of crazy, scary things, right? We have the data centres and the water pollution — all these things we should stop and figure out.
But even on the narrative stuff, there is that, well, this can be quicker with less people and save you money. And then the next question is, to what end? I was having this conversation with somebody the other day, and all I could think about is — again, this is how old I am — back when I was a little kid, there was the frenzy about Tickle Me Elmo. Do you remember that?
James MacDonald [35:20]: Yeah.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [35:20]: And everybody wanted a Tickle Me Elmo. I don’t think kids wanted a Tickle Me Elmo. I think parents were crazy about the Tickle Me Elmo. And then I remember thinking about it and I’m just like, if you get a Tickle Me Elmo, I think you’d get it, and it’ll be the novelty, and you can tickle it. And then how do you play with it?
James MacDonald [35:39]: What does that look like?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [35:40]: Do you play with it with my Barbie Dreamhouse? How does it live with the rest of my life as a seven, eight-year-old? Or whatever old, however old you are — why would you want a Tickle Me Elmo?
So I think there is the longevity of it. If we don’t understand why we’re getting it, and what are we going to use it for, and how it lives with the rest of the things that you’re doing, then what is the point? I have yet to meet a lot of people in my daily life — not only in terms of the work that I do, but in just the life I’ve had — I have yet to meet anybody who’s like, you know, my most treasured possession is my old Tickle Me Elmo from when I was six years old.
James MacDonald [36:18]: It’s the first time I’ve heard the analogy between Tickle Me Elmo and AI.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [36:22]: I feel like the hype, right? And also the fact that I truly think the parents were really disconnected as to how their children play.
James MacDonald [36:31]: I agree.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [36:31]: And I think there are a lot — not all of them, but a lot of CEOs and leaders that are like, we should get it. And they’re disconnected as to how their teams are going to use it.
James MacDonald [36:41]: I think that’s the biggest challenge I’ve seen. I talk to plenty of companies every week where there’s a board or a CEO who hears the hype and runs it down the chain. What are we doing with AI? We need AI — without actually understanding, or trying to take that one step back. What is the problem we’re trying to solve with this? It’s a very powerful tool and it’s getting more and more powerful. But what are we trying to do? Are we just throwing technology at a problem? Or are we just throwing technology without actually even knowing what the problem is we’re trying to solve? And it’s just, we need it, we need it.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [37:16]: We need it. It’s interesting. And maybe this comes from my jaded people-and-culture perspective — I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now, and working almost exclusively with founder CEOs. It does have the same flavour.
I remember, there’s 10 years ago, almost exactly, I started in a company with somebody I trusted really a lot. And I’m just going to tell the full story, because I don’t think he would mind.
James MacDonald [37:46]: You’ve got storytelling, so let’s go.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [37:49]: Hopefully. So I started at BlueChilli. It was a startup incubator, and they were very — I mean, I do wonder what it would be like now, because you can just build anything with AI at the moment, right? So they would make your MVP and get your first investment, help put together your first team. And I was their head of people. I was there for almost four years and my God, was that an education. It was amazing.
So Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin was the founder. He and I had at that point been friends for many, many, many years. And they were at that point ready to have a head of people. We were about 40 people. And I think because we had that shorthand and we’d been friends for a long time, it was really comfortable giving me suggestions about how we should form P&C. And obviously you want that input from the founder.
But it was really funny — one day, I think it was my first or second week, he dropped this book on my desk. We used to sit next to each other. It’s How Google Works. And I went, thank you. And he’s like, well, I just finished it, I think we should do everything that’s in this book. Like, okay, do you have a time machine? Are we just going to be a search engine now? I just don’t understand how this translates. This is an incubator. There’s no consumer product attached. What’s the translation here? And also, this is written by the people it’s about. So there’s not going to be a mistake in this book. They’ve done everything perfectly, because they’re Google, right?
So I do find that — and then we talked about it. And he’s like, well, I mean, just read it to see if there’s anything useful. And I did. And there were a couple of things that we could take away from it. But ultimately, it wasn’t the same linear story. We’re not going to all of a sudden go back to 1997 and found a search engine, call it Google, and do all of the rest of it, right? So you have to understand the context that you’re in.
And I think with AI we’re missing that. What I have yet to see — and I really, really want somebody to point me to a success story on this — all I keep hearing about is how people are trying to regress into the before times. I want to be wrong about it. I like to think of myself as a progressive person who wants progress in all directions. And I largely joined tech as a sector and as an industry because I used to think that as an innovation engine, it was also a socially progressive force. And I still want to think that.
But we haven’t really connected that to — okay, we keep hearing the story about, we’d better get ready for AI. But ready for it to do what exactly? Kneecapping the economy, and getting rid of these entry-level jobs, and giving people excuses to fire people, and all of these layoffs. Even talking about the difference between the narrative and the technology — it is a technology, and it’s a little strange, but we could fix that. I’m pretty sure we can. We’re really smart people. We were ready to put somebody on the moon. This other thing can’t be that hard.
But what is the real narrative around it? And what is it that we’re trying to run so fast towards, or trying to prepare against? I think we haven’t figured that out yet. And yet we’re running as fast as we can.
James MacDonald [41:19]: Yeah, I think there’s a dual narrative going on at the moment. Because there is the hype and the fear of missing out — so everyone’s running quick, and how, I need to do it, I’m behind. You wake up every morning, there’s a new product, a new company raising billions of dollars, valuations going through the roof, the hype around that, and the feeling that if we don’t move now we’re going to miss out.
And then we’ve got the other narrative around, we’re going to remove everyone’s jobs. If you remove people’s jobs, you remove their reason for life, the meaning around life. And we end up at a spot where universal basic income is our only opportunity. So we’re running the two narratives at the moment. And I think we’re still in this very much sorting-out stage.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [41:59]: It’s strange. And I wish we would slow down so that we could speed up. And the slowing down, I think, is hard, because a lot of the most powerful narratives are happening at the level that you mentioned — which is that a CEO handing me a book about, can we run the company like this, is the same as an investor or somebody that’s like, AI seems to be the thing that’s going to get us our money back.
James MacDonald [42:25]: Correct. At the moment, our valuation is going down because we’re currently sitting in SaaS and AI has got high valuations, so we need to become an AI company.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [42:32]: We need to figure it out. But there’s also, what is the market rewarding? And you see — not in every single case, but as somebody who follows the stock market and uses it for a bunch of things — you see, not every time, but many of the times, where companies that have gone public and they announce layoffs, their stock goes up.
That’s scary. They’re celebrating — the market is rewarding destruction. Destruction of livelihoods. And it’s a strange formulation, right? Which is, to what end, again.
James MacDonald [43:17]: I agree.
If I dig into that a little bit — if you’re in a chief people officer role at the moment, you’re sitting within a company, you have a responsibility to the board, a responsibility to shareholders. AI’s come in and is affecting roles at the moment. People are becoming more productive within their current role. Maybe you don’t need to hire as many people.
How do you operate in that type of environment at the moment? Is it upskilling of the existing team into different roles within their companies? Because the way I look at it, we’ve got two sort of options. You’ve got some companies that are laying off staff to save money. Other companies that are actually doubling down and saying, hey, we’ve got this new tooling, our team are even more productive than they used to be, let’s hire more of them. How do you see it? Because I think there are a lot of CPOs, heads of people at the moment that are sitting in these roles and are quite challenged.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [44:12]: I go to a lot of these HR community events, and a lot of them are now starting to be about AI, hiring and AI, and restructuring, and all that stuff. We hear a lot of horror stories about it.
Right now, I think there isn’t a cohesive narrative yet, because I don’t think there’s a cohesive narrative internally within a lot of these companies. Because the CFO might think one thing, and the CEO thinks something else, and then the board might be really enthusiastic about it. I think it’s early, particularly in Australia, because we tend to adopt things a little bit later. There are a lot of companies that haven’t necessarily made up their minds, and they’re testing — is it true that we’re productive? Often my question is, are they more productive, or are they just faster? I just don’t know if it’s the same thing.
James MacDonald [45:01]: I completely agree. I think a lot of companies — the vast majority of companies — are still using AI in some form of proof of concept. They’re not actually showing an ROI at the moment. They might be doing a small product somewhere, but has it really got to production? Is it really affecting the bottom line? Is it really affecting customers? What does that actually look like? And the vast majority are still in this figuring-things-out stage.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [45:24]: Yeah. And I think those are really smart questions to ask. And again, I’m not an AI sceptic. I’m a sceptic of the people trying to steamroll past the important questions. That’s what makes me crazy.
One of the last conversations I had — I’m going to shout out Shai Haim. He’s the CPTO at eClub at the moment. One of the strongest, most prepared leaders I’ve ever met. Just still waters, amazing brain. It was this long conversation about, how do we get ready for this? I have very rarely felt so aligned with a leader right away. I had very little to do with him coming into the organisation — I’m not going to take any credit for that. But we were very, very aligned really right away.
And he has maybe the most sophisticated competency matrix I’ve ever seen, because it very specifically separates the growth path for individual contributors and the growth path for managers. And I very rarely see that in a tech function done as elegantly and as humanly as that.
And we were having this conversation about, how do we prepare for this? How are we going to think about it? What are the principles that we’re going to think about it with? And what would be the levers by which we are going to affect this change? But also the idea of — when people think about risk a lot, a lot of it is just recklessness. But also, vibes. Does this feel dangerous and therefore risky, and therefore I’m being a really brave leader? It’s like, okay, so when is the risk no longer worth it? So, when we’re paying by token, which is happening now.
James MacDonald [47:14]: I completely agree.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [47:15]: Right? So, when does it stop being worth even exploring this as an organising principle, and not just like email?
James MacDonald [47:24]: Yeah. And if you’re running an agent and the agent’s tokens cost more than a human being at their equivalent output.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [47:31]: Yeah. And also — my favourite definition of a startup is that a startup is a human organism that operates in great uncertainty. That’s an Eric Ries definition, the lean startup guy. So it’s like, you’re just removing the humanity just for the vibes of it. I just don’t understand that as an end game of it, right?
But this was a really illuminating conversation that I had with Shai, coming from somebody who has had a lot of experience, a lot of permutations of what a tech team and an excellent tech team should be. And what I love is that he was asking questions, as opposed to being like, well, this is how it’s going to be, and these are the rules, and this is how we’re going to do it, and this is the change that we need to make — hi, HR lady, go ahead and do it. It was, okay, so how do we figure it out, and how are people going to feel about it? And how do we get the early adopters to it? And how do we also give people permission?
And this is a conversation that should happen in every organisation — separate and apart from AI, all organisations change, right? Particularly a startup: its entire job is to change and grow. There are people who love and thrive in an eight-person organisation who hate being in a 50-person organisation, who super hate being in a 200-person organisation. And there should be off-ramps that are kind and human to those cycles.
James MacDonald [49:04]: I completely agree. I have this conversation in recruitment all the time. Just because you were in a role for 18 months and have moved on doesn’t mean it was a bad role. It was the right role for you for that period of time. And sometimes you outgrow the company, sometimes the company outgrows you. Just because it’s not a 10-year job doesn’t mean it’s not a success. There’s a right place at the right time — right company, right size, right trajectory, at the right time.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [49:28]: And the impact as well. Because I’ve seen people come in and make a huge impact and build something really great in six months and move on, or three months and move on, because that’s what they do. They’re a big hammer — come in, figure it out, leave. And then there are people who hang around for 20 years doing nothing. I come from advertising. I’ve seen people being in an industry for 40 years and not only do a bad job, but bring the whole industry with them.
So I don’t think there’s — the idea of retention for me is always like, having that retention number as your bragging rights, this vanity metric. You just have to understand internally what your metabolism actually is. As opposed to, are we just keeping people chained to a radiator in this company? Or have we made them feel so horrible about themselves that they feel, who else is going to want me? And now you’re in an abusive relationship with your workplace. But yeah, the idea of longevity, I don’t think, has anything to do with impact or contribution.
James MacDonald [50:35]: I agree. If we’re talking about impact and contribution — you mentioned before individual contributor versus manager. I think there’s a lot of conversation. Again, we’re early days, so things are changing and every organisation is doing things differently, but there’s a lot of conversation and talk around AI flattening organisational structures, and there’ll be less need for managers. There might be managers of agents, or managers of more people because those people are more productive. That manager title is changing. That manager role is changing.
And I know you’ve got opinions on — is AI making the role of a manager more redundant? Is it making it more challenging? Is it making it easier? I’d love to get your opinion on that, because I think there are a lot of people in bigger organisations at the moment in that manager title, reading a lot of different information out there.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [51:21]: Yeah. I mean, I think the answer to that question, regardless of who you ask, is going to be a very hypothetical answer. And I think it’s going to be a very philosophical answer by definition, because we, as you said, are early days at the macro level. If we think about AI, it’s been around since — technically 2022, but really now we’re having it as part of our daily conversation and transformation, and even earlier than that, right?
James MacDonald [51:46]: Yeah. It’s the last eight months, maybe, that things really started to heat up. And I think the models changed to the point where you can actually see it getting some form of significant output.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [51:57]: Yeah. I think that means there are a few layers again to what we can unpack with this question. And a lot of the layers have to do with human behaviour and connection, and what the job actually is, and how defined it is, and how you’re rewarded for that job. There’s all of this stuff, and also the type of organisation it is.
So it’s, okay, why are you flattening your organisation? Is that helpful? Or is that just saving you money? And I should preface this by the fact that I think the people in an organisation — in particular people who are leaders, and maybe even the investors — should be in the business that the business is in, right? That is to say, if the only reason you’re doing this is to make money, you’re in the finance business. You’re not in the hospitality business or in fintech. You’re not actually in the business that that company is in. If it’s just for you to extract monetary value, then of course you’re not going to think twice if you have to make a fundamentally destructive decision, because if it’s going to make you money, then that’s cute for you, but not for anybody else.
And so, down to, what is the purpose of flattening an organisation and redefining what a manager is and all of that? I have been thinking about this in terms of — going back to the analogy part of it — how do I want to explain it so that we can explore it as leaders?
And it made me think of, my partner and I spent three weeks in Adelaide, which is where he’s from. And we spent New Year’s in Goolwa. His best friend has a family summer house there, and they have all of these dogs, the whole family comes together. And have you seen those automatic ball throwers, where the dog puts the ball in and it throws the ball? And we have a dog, we have a little spoodle, Charlie, who loves playing with the ball. And when you’re working from home, she can be a little eager to play with the ball while you’re busy. And whenever we’re in Goolwa, we’re like, we should get one of these automatic ball throwers.
And I guess if we’re looking at it from the automation part of it, which is the AI part of it — you’re in charge of this dog, and every now and then you’re going to need to turn this thing on to give you 10 minutes while you have a conversation, or you need focus time and all of that stuff.
James MacDonald [54:21]: It’s the equivalent of my kids and the iPad.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [54:23]: You know, but if all you’re doing is waking up in the morning and turning that thing on, and turning that thing off when the dog goes to sleep, then what is the point of having a dog?
But also, going back to why I was late today — my dog wasn’t feeling well. She’s been up all night trying to eat grass and trying to do all this thing. We had a little scary moment this morning where I had to call the vet and figure some stuff out. She’s going to be fine. She’s actually fine. But if I didn’t have the relationship with my dog by playing with her and spending time with her and actually doing that, and instead having this automation on all the time, one, I wouldn’t have been able to answer any of the questions the vet asked me on the phone — she’s been doing this, blah, blah, blah.
But the other one is, I think I wouldn’t have developed connection enough for when, if I had to make a decision — I’m going to spend money and time tomorrow taking her to the vet and doing all these things and probably buying some medication and all of that. I think fundamentally I would make a different decision if I didn’t have a connection with this dog.
And I think it’s very similar to what we’re trying to figure out with what is the role of a manager. If we are really, really, really good as people, as humans, at designing around discomfort — because that’s how I always started this conversation, right? We are very comfortable outsourcing and automating the things that make us the least comfortable, one of which is that connection piece.
So if all you’re doing is whatever the manager equivalent of this ball thrower is, you’re going to do it. I’ve had these live conversations at the last couple of companies that I worked with — and again, not every leader, but the leaders who are prone to do this can now do it faster. Because they go, okay, so I don’t even need to have my one-on-one this week, because I already know this, I have a dashboard that tells me that the person has done their task. Well, is there any other utility to your one-on-one? Are you going to develop a relationship with this person, understand what their motivation is, understand if they’re going through something that they need support with, if they’re getting along with the team, if they’re participating in it, if they understand what the team goals are?
James MacDonald [56:37]: Yeah — if the results are doing really well, but they’re about to face burnout. Or if the results are poor and they’re going through a tough time at home.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [56:44]: Literally anything else other than the thing that you’ve automated into your dashboard.
So I think it’s that, and that idea also that if you’re just automating this thing — whether it’s through AI or whatever it is — similar to the decisions that had to do with Charlie today, if you have to make a difficult decision at some point and you don’t have that connection, those decisions are going to be not informed by connection and care and knowledge about this individual that you’ve just automated your relationship with.
I would even take it a step further, which is, what if there was this automated ball thrower to a fake dog — one of those robot dogs — as opposed to an actual real dog? And the only real thing is the ball. Now we’re really in crazy territory, but this is the actual logical conclusion of it. Which is, now we have agents. So you’re going to have to talk to a person.
James MacDonald [58:05]: The point that you made just there is really interesting — the relationship between the willingness to have a difficult conversation and the willingness to go deep down AI and hire agents as opposed to human beings. Because having a difficult conversation with a human being is obviously challenging. If I don’t want to do that, instead of hiring a human, I’m just going to automate more and more. And I’ll have my AI — I can swear at my AI if I need to, because it’s not going to call back to me, or it’s going to agree with me.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [58:05]: Yeah. Have you ever gone into a bank app or the Iconic or whatever it is, and been like, oh, thank God, this is a chatbot? That’s never happened to me. I’m like, yes, I’d like a person to help me with this. Unless it’s like —
James MacDonald [58:24]: The automated response, where I have to wait for seven minutes to press nine and then it goes through the four layers of that. I will talk to a chatbot over that every day of the week. And I’ll take a human over the chatbot.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [58:35]: Yeah. But there is a role for these things. I think the danger comes when we go, okay, we can eliminate discomfort altogether — and therefore human connection altogether. And then, to what end again? I feel like I say that about AI seven times. I don’t have a problem with the technology itself. Again, I want progress. Let’s get to a better place, let’s figure it out. But let’s figure out what the better place actually means and what the consequences are.
James MacDonald [59:07]: And a lot of what you’ve spoken about is the cohesion of a team and the importance of different personalities within the team, and that creating the great culture. If you add this tool on top, which is super powerful, and you add that to an already great team, you become more powerful.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [59:24]: And it’s understanding that if this is an augmenting tool, then it should augment great policies and great processes and a great team. You have to have that first. And I think we’re skipping that step, right? Of thinking that through, and then going, oh, we have this thing that’s going to make us a great team, or going to make us a great policy. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily true all the time.
James MacDonald [59:50]: If we’re going to give parting advice for somebody sitting either as a technology leader or a head of people at the moment, and the company’s having conversations around AI — you may talk about people becoming more efficient, and it might talk to job losses. Where do I start? Where do I start as a leader? Where do I start as a head of people? What are the conversations I need to be having internally to set ourselves up so we’re attacking this in the right way?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [60:13]: Oh my God. Very big question, James. I don’t know if I have a perfect answer. I think it’s about continuing to ask questions.
And I would say — I mean, I give this advice for most things, and when it comes to strategic and structural things, which seems to be what AI wants to be, right, if we’re going to personify it — let’s play the tape to the end. Let’s play the whole movie. Where do we actually want to land? Because right now we’re really getting bogged down by the ingredients. What are we actually trying to feed people? What are we making? I think that’s one of the things.
And also, listen to your people. They’re not going to be shy to tell you how they’re going to be affected by it. But more than anything, I would encourage people, just be in the business that you’re in. You can’t just be there to extract value from your workers.
Coming back to the reading and history and understanding behaviour and people and consequences — are we just barrelling through to the next French Revolution? We’re living through a cost-of-living crisis and we’re living through all of this loneliness and pandemics and all of these things, and all we want to do is have less human connection. I just don’t — I think it’s hard for me to square those circles.
There is a really, really great opportunity for us to have these internal conversations about: are we just isolating our people more? Are we making our people resentful? Are we choosing to care about the people who have taken this journey with us? Particularly for startups — those organisations that are under 200 people, those are your first believers, and those are the ones that are going to carry your story, for better or worse, through however long that startup journey is going to be, whether they stay in your company or not. Because they’re going to be ambassadors to that story whether they’re there or not.
James MacDonald [62:24]: They’ll continue to share the story whether they’re inside the walls or not.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [62:27]: Yeah. And now we have things like Glassdoor — there are infinite ways for people to share those stories, right?
So I would say you have to consider the human in it, as a human organisation. Because again, you can just have the robot and the ball thrower, and if you want to be that, go ahead. But then you can’t complain that there’s no economy to hold on to, or there are no customers to buy your nonsense. So I think there is that human responsibility that’s falling through the cracks a little bit.
I keep listening to interviews and things in the news about the big AI barons at the moment, and I’m like, I wish they hadn’t dropped out of school. I’m very lucky to have had a very privileged education, but a large part of my communications and journalism degree was around ethics and history and human behaviour, as well as methodologies and frameworks and all of that. I think there’s a lot of value in the humanities, because there’s a lot of value in being human and having that connectivity.
So I think it’s our responsibility as leaders to reach out to that, and not only share stories, but try to be agents of correcting this crazy race that we’re in, and to give it purpose — and not just to be who gets there first.
James MacDonald [64:01]: Yeah, I love it. Purpose, loneliness, ethics. This conversation could have gone on, and we might have to do another episode at some point.
For any of the listeners that are interested in talking to you more, finding out more about you, what’s the easiest way for them to get in touch with you?
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [64:16]: The easiest way is [email protected]. And yeah, if you think I can help your organisation navigate any of these questions, I’ll be happy to have a chat. But I would say, go out, touch some grass, connect with people. This is what we’re here for.
James MacDonald [64:33]: Appreciate it. Thanks again for your time today.
Claudia Barriga-Larriviere [64:35]: Pleasure, James.
James MacDonald [64:36]: Thank you. Cheers.
My best learning from the conversation with Claudia is that we are still so early on in this AI journey. People are still figuring things out. There’s no one best way to do everything. But the core people functions, the core team building, leadership functions and leadership practices still remain the same.
I think people leaning into best practice when it comes to having hard conversations, building culture within the team, actually looking at the type of people you need within your team — whether you’re looking for that glue person or you’re looking for the grease person — those questions, rather than the actual technical capability, can be the core and the success in building a strong technology team.
Hope you enjoyed the episode. This was the Building Tech Teams podcast. We release new episodes every Tuesday. Really keen for feedback on guests you’d like to see, more topics you’d like to see in depth. If you’d love to provide any form of feedback to me, find me on LinkedIn, forward slash James MacDonald AU. You won’t miss me. This episode was produced by Day One.