The Five Superpowers of HR in 2026

AI is moving faster than most org charts, and that speed is exposing a hard truth: buying tools is easy, but keeping culture intact is the real work. We dig into a framework created by The Predictive Index™ that names five “superpowers” HR already has to guide AI adoption without fragmenting teams, commoditizing talent, or quietly eroding trust. If you lead people, manage change, or influence strategy, this is your reminder that the human side of work is now the competitive edge.

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Transcript

People First Meets AI

Sara Best 0:08

Hey everybody, welcome back to The Boss hole Chronicles. This is Sara Best. If you're like me, at least five times a day, you're seeing an email with an article or reading a headline on the internet that has to do with AI. AI and people. And of course, we love people. We love to champion the people part of business. This episode combines both. People and AI. You won't want to miss it. Let's dig in.

Announcer 0:40

The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

Sara Best 1:02

Well, hello, Karen. Welcome back to The Boss hole Chronicles. It's great to be with you and do another episode together.

Karen Shulman 1:10

And it's great being with you too. I'm very happy to be here. What are we talking about today?

Why HR Becomes The Architect

Sara Best 1:16

Our subject matter today, although not exclusive of leaders and managers and supervisors, is geared toward those who specialize in HR. And we have a whole lot to say about HR, but the Predictive Index uh produced a great little piece most recently called The Five Superpowers That Make HR the Guiding Force of 2026. And it probably will not surprise our listeners that in this subject matter today, we will be talking about AI. I mean, everyone's talking about AI, even Brene Brown and others. We don't claim to be experts in the world of artificial intelligence, but what we are supremely interested in is the human aspects of AI adoption and things like that. We recently had Erica Ashida from AI 23 as a guest on the podcast. So in that spirit, this article talks about five capabilities HR leaders already have and basically highlights that this is the year to use them as AI adoption increases. How's that sound so far, Karen?

Karen Shulman 2:23

It sounds great. And I, you know, I know we probably have some listeners out there that are not really in HR, but I would ask that they stay tuned because this is going to provide them, I think, with some insights in how HR folks may shift the way they're doing some of their work and can partner with leaders in the organization to make a bigger impact.

Superpower One Electromagnetism

Sara Best 2:47

Yeah. Good call out, Karen. So if 2026 is the year the HR moves from what we'll call executor to architect, you know, what are they actually architecting? It's all about how AI is accelerating change. And it's it's been touted, and we're hearing this, we're seeing this in many articles. The true competitive advantage becomes the human side of work. And HR is the only function trained to protect and scale the human side of work as we now are in this um ambient change related to AI. In the article, there's kind of a crossroads identified. Organizations will either let AI fragment their culture and commoditize their talent. We could see where it becomes a box we're going to check and we're going to systematize things and we're going to build it in. Or, or second path, organizations can use behavioral science to amplify human capability. And it's no surprise to anyone who listens to the podcast that we are big fans of behavioral science. So HR in this day and age, Karen, gets to decide which path wins. And I think this is really critical. So we have these five superpowers. Karen, I'll talk about the first one and then you can tee up the next one. How's that? Yeah, that sounds great. Good. So the first superpower that HR leaders and professionals already have is called electromagnetism. It's this idea that HR is what holds people together. So anytime there's rapid amounts of change or um you know change at a large scale, which many of our organizations have been encountering for years, especially the last five to six years. But there are some organizations that um now are feeling for the first time this ramping up of rapid-paced change. So the things that kind of make it difficult for that human connection to be sustained, remote work, asynchronous communication, and certainly AI tools, not only AI tools, but AI teams now being developed. So as if we didn't have enough working against us in terms of maintaining and sort of fostering that human connection, we now appreciate that AI is going to make that more difficult. 67% of the people in a survey that PI recently conducted believe that AI can strengthen culture, but poor rollout creates disconnection. And all we have to do is look at any kind of change initiative or change management process we've deployed in our organizations to test out, hey, how are we going to do with AI? If we haven't done so well in the past, and it's not because of lack of effort, Karen, would you agree that change management and change initiative success is abysmal, but it's not because people aren't trying to do the right things.

Karen Shulman 5:57

And that's where things can falter sometimes.

Sara Best 6:00

Yeah. Well, and I think this electromagnetism is really about creating a culture where there's vulnerability, humility, and transparency. Uh, vulnerability to say, you know, I don't know all the answers. I'm new to this too, just like you are. And the humility to say, we're gonna figure this out together. Like we have never encountered this before. And then the transparency part. For some reason, it seems that people have to decide in a room. They have a conversation somewhere, several conversations, and then they come out and announce and tell and decide. You know, they decided and they tell the rest of the organization how something's gonna go and why it's gonna be beneficial. And I think in the in the time that we're in right now, this intentional communication, transparency, and effective leadership of that communication can prevent what would likely be the erosion of trust and a breakdown of relationships because of things like AI. Karen, any thoughts you want to share on that?

Karen Shulman 7:04

I think you're you're right on target. I think the article is right on target for calling that out.

Sara Best 7:09

Yeah. So electromagnetism, AI should bond teams, not scatter them. And it's up to our HR superpower people, superheroes, to make sure that we're we're using a people-first approach. Okay, Karen, what's the second superpower?

Karen Shulman 7:27

So the second superpower is X-ray vision. And if you think about it, especially when we when we focus on behavioral science, what we know drives performance is how someone thinks, how they're able to work with other people in in collaboration, how they solve problems, whether it be during normal times, whether it be during stressful times, lots of pressure. And HR folks are trained to see these things uh in the personnel that they have. Here's where there are some potential misses. 44% of employees in the survey they PIA conducted actually feel that they've been passed over because their skills were misinterpreted. And I'm sure HR folks listening to this call uh understand when people do not get jobs that they apply for, especially internal candidates, you hear back from those folks and trying to make a case for why they should have gone farther, why they should have been selected. And so, you know, that that's certainly a problem area that we see.

Sara Best 8:38

Um I think about how often it is that hiring managers and leaders look around at their talent pool and they really don't see one internally. Uh that is actually a great subject for another episode of our podcast, Karen.

Karen Shulman 8:55

That's right. Because yeah, and it in there they're really it's very deflating for people when they really feel that they have the skill set to do a job. They know they can do a job and they get passed over. And sometimes it's not just once, sometimes it's multiple times. And that can be really uh detrimental to the the mindset of the you know the folks in the workplace. Because if you're constantly hiring outside of the organization and bringing people in, people will see that there's there may not be much in terms of a career path for them.

Sara Best 9:28

Well, Karen, this makes me think about head, heart, briefcase. And when we are either hiring candidates or promoting internal candidates or considering internal candidates, head, heart briefcase, the idea that, you know, oftentimes we look pretty exclusively at the briefcase or the resume, which is the least effective predictor of success in a role, we might consider uh some behavioral interviewing, but what we don't take advantage of is what I like to think of like the money ball effect. You know, if you are a Billy Bean fan and you uh watched the movie Moneyball, it's really about being able to capitalize on the talent that you have by using behavioral insights. And so in the Moneyball situation, we got statistics and, you know, candidates or players are fit according to the likelihood of their success. And the behavioral insights we talk about when hiring or selecting or promoting people are much the same way. And you could look at the talent that you have, absent the titles and the sort of tracks that they've been on, and kind of look to see who else could do this work, who else could fit here. Um, and and you might have to train them up, you might have to upskill them, you might have to give them briefcase credentials so they can actually do that work. But if they're wired in the right way to be successful at doing that work, you're missing some talent right there. Absolutely.

Karen Shulman 11:04

And that, you know, that is the the the x-ray vision piece is when you as an HR person are armed with behavioral insights, you can see those things that that other people are gonna miss. And interestingly enough, when the first this statistic that I shared was that 44% of employees feel passed over because their skills were misinterpreted for Gen Z, and those are the people that are born between 1997 and 2012, although I don't think we have 14-year-olds in our workplaces right now, but that that number actually jumps from 44% to 62%. And that's that's an alarming statistic.

Sara Best 11:45

It is an alarming statistic, but it's also an opportunity because if you're the kind of workplace that's hiring Gen Z and an increasing number of Gen Z colleagues and team members, there's a specific need you can meet there.

Karen Shulman 11:59

You know, it's interesting where AI can kind of sometimes uh help us focus, maybe sometimes on not the total picture. You know, AI can amplify measurable outputs just like just like we do. We focus on results. But when we focus only on results, we miss behavioral strengths. And I think that's what you were alluding to before, Sarah, that there's an opportunity to really uh use AI to help us evaluate what are the skills and the abilities and the behavioral tendencies uh that are going to be beneficial in certain roles and look at that to help us understand that if we get the right people in the right seats, we'll have better performance. So here's another thing that we think that the HR people can see that others might miss is that risking hiring, uh, and we've talked about it, hiring externally, because really you probably have an awful lot of folks that are high potential people in your organizations, and sometimes they sit on the sidelines. They're just they're just not really noticed. And so HR's role is really um to use the behavioral insights that uh that AI can provide, and that can really help us have x-ray vision on what are the hill and hidden talents that our that our employees have and how can we best utilize them.

Sara Best 13:27

Yeah. Gosh, I listened to a great uh Harvard Business Review webinar yesterday morning about the octopus organization. You know, we've talked in the past about the the traffic light and the roundabout as as sort of uh parallels to our operating systems and our organizations. This book uh compares the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz to an octopus. But I'm not kidding. And and uh what strikes me there is the agility needed to operate effectively, efficiently, uh, speed to market. You know, we we are not in the climate anymore where projects can take 18 to 24 months to come to life. So the octopus, you know, has many moving tentacles. Each tentacle has its own sensory skill set, uh, can operate actually independent of all the others. So there's so many different analogies. But what came out, you know, what really stuck out for me, Karen, when I heard that was it requires an understanding of who you have, a deep understanding of who you have and how they do the work, because the work is gonna be changing. So if we can continue to train and develop the the competence in the work, it's how people do the work that's gonna make the difference.

Karen Shulman 14:47

Totally agree with that. And and on top of that, I think in addition to that, if we help people, if we help our employees and our especially our top performers feel like they are being seen, yes, that they're being heard and that they're being understood, we have uh some success in in helping them stay and and retaining them.

Superpower Three Amplification

Sara Best 15:08

Yeah. And and you know, when we're diagnosing underperformance or poor performance, the behavioral insights, and and you alluded to this, Karen, they create a lens that we don't often think about. Generally, it's uh it's the fundamental attribution error. You know, when someone isn't doing what we think they should be doing in the way they we think they should be doing it, at the speed with which we think they should be doing it, we tend to blame that on their character. Our human nature is to look at the person and and maybe identify character defects. Whereas if it were our own situation and we were underperforming, we would naturally think about the circumstances. So to avoid that challenge, we have to really think about what behavioral insights can help us diagnose. You know, that misalignment of strengths that you talked about. You know, is there a motivational gap? We can more deeply understand people's motivations when we can look at how they're wired, expectations, other things like social friction. But this leads us into our third superpower, Karen, which is amplification. And I love this idea that when people grow, business grows. So amplifying your skills and abilities that are uh available in the organization. Do you know that 68% of employees want AI training more than job security guarantees?

Karen Shulman 16:38

That's interesting.

Sara Best 16:39

Yeah.

Karen Shulman 16:40

Yeah.

Sara Best 16:40

AI training. So we cannot uh for those organizations who may be as of today still kind of going, yeah, we're we're gonna work around this AI thing until it goes away, uh, you might want to catch up because your employees are interested in understanding the relationship they can have with AI more so than they want job security, which by the way, wouldn't be that hard to achieve because we really don't have a lot of job security in this day and age. It continues to be a very challenging time. So, what's important about amplification, upskilling? Are we giving people skills and abilities? Because in this new era, that's the currency of trust, is equipping people to better understand, to better succeed. And we got to do it side by side. HR leaders have the means, the methodology, especially if they use behavioral insights to tailor the education and training to the individual. I mean, we could do a whole episode just on that alone. We don't learn the same way, we don't think the same way, we have different needs in terms of how we digest information. So behavioral insights equip our training and development leaders and our HR superpowers, superheroes to customize training. You know, it's not the one size fits all. Anything you want to add to that, Karen?

Karen Shulman 18:08

Yeah, I mean, having uh a bit of a training background, we we used to focus on self-directed training. And I think that, and I always felt that it kind of felt a little short because what it what it really meant to me was people were supposed to come to HR and say, this is what I want training in. That's kind of what it became. And I do think that AI provides an opportunity for human resources to make that self-directed learning and training much more customized because once you understand somebody's behavioral insights, the training can be more customized and presented in ways that are much more meaningful and understood based on somebody's behavioral needs.

Sara Best 18:56

So I think building on that, Karen, what would make adoption stick? You know, if if HR superheroes are trying to partner with chief leaders to roll out and and implement AI strategies, we know historically when change happens, resistance, fear, and confusion take place. So those are only going to be more significant in this day and age. And I think that behavioral insights can protect those normal responses or at least uh mitigate some of the challenge that they create because we would better understand. So when we're communicating with people, who needs uh certainty and structure? Who needs the step-by-step approach? Who gets overwhelmed by that? Who needs uh just the basics with an opportunity to explore further? And I don't want to, you know, minimize any of that, but when we when we communicate intentionally based on the understanding of who we have and how they need to hear that message and how they need to be enrolled in that message, resest resistance will drop. Certainly, curiosity increases. Who doesn't want more of that? People want to explore, training becomes easy and more tailored. And here's the big one psychological safety is increased. Uh there is a climate that's created that says, hey, we're all learning this together. And if if we're not intentionally, you know, amplifying the behavioral sciences and the things that will make that happen more effectively, we're wasting our dollars and our time because the resistance will sustain, adoption will not be effective. When it comes to AI, you know, we're hearing all this talk about it's replacing people. It may be replacing people, but in the cases where AI will support and take away the the menial tasks that allow that don't allow people to tap into their pure, pure brain power, then we would say adoption accelerates because people feel seen and not replaced. I think the other important piece when we think about amplification, human collaboration is going to remain incredibly important in this world of AI. You know, behavioral sciences make teams stronger. We know who we have, we know how we operate, we know what our strengths are, what our gaps are. I think the last thing here, Karen, is that it scales empathy through the system. So amplification, when championed by HR superheroes, can take what feels really impersonal, like AI and mechanical and scary, and make it hyper personal. So AI that adjusts communication tone based on behavioral drives. We could actually, you know, equip our AI systems to understand the unique needs, the behavioral needs of our employees, of our population.

Karen Shulman 21:54

You know, people really want to be competent in the work that they do and and they really, you know. Most people want to be better than competent. And how can AI help with that? It's the amplification piece for sure.

Sara Best 22:08

Karen, we have two more.

Superpower Four The Multiplier

Karen Shulman 22:09

What's the fourth one? The fourth superpower is the multiplier. And that's really uh it's it it kind of plays very well with what we just talked about in um the amplification superpower, but this is personalization at a at a superhuman scale. And it's making sure that you are really tailoring and giving every employee what they need. And so you you're you're gonna personalize at scale. Here's some really interesting statistics. Another statistics uh that that PI uh found was that 80% of Gen Z believe that behavioral tools will would help them succeed. And I think that this is really interesting. I'm gonna share a kind of a personal example from uh some training classes that I recently did, where I will tell you presented the same the same coursework. Uh the first class was honestly a little bit older, they were beyond Gen Z. Second class was Gen Z. And the uh adoption of PI, the understanding of PI, the strong need for behavioral data on people's employees and themselves was was much greater with those that fit into that Gen Z generation, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Sara Best 23:33

Yeah. Well, I mean, any any uh hypothesis about why that would be, Karen? Any theory?

Karen Shulman 23:39

Oh, I think that they're just quite quite a bit more used to technology uh than uh somebody of my age, for example, that's like, oh, this stuff makes sense, and it's telling me what I need to know about the people that I work with that I don't really have access to. It's spelling it out for me in plain English, and it's actually usable. It's actually something that that is tangibly useful to me uh and can help me be, you know, a better manager. I love this. Yeah. I'll give you another aspect of the multiplier. You know, what we've done in the past often is one size fits all when it comes to training, when it comes to communicating, etc. And in those one size fits fits all types of uh uh approaches, it actually creates friction because you, you know, some people are it the one size fits all might be perfectly geared for them, but for an awful lot of of employees, the one size fits all doesn't work for them. There's there's going to be some misses there.

Sara Best 24:47

I think that's a really relevant notion, Karen. And I'm I'm guessing there are listeners out there going, yeah, but how do you know what sizes you need? Like how do you know how to tailor or how to address the communication? And what would our answer be, Karen?

Karen Shulman 25:04

I think you need behavioral science tools to to help with that.

Sara Best 25:09

Yeah. You need to know who you have and how they work, uh, what they need, how they listen. And the other thought they our listeners might be having is, but that's so much work though. You mean I have to have six different messages and you know, look at people in six different ways. How would you respond to that, Karen?

Karen Shulman 25:29

Well, isn't that the beauty of AI? Because you can basically put in the uh types of behavioral profiles that your six different groups of people have, yeah. And and uh and put in the message that you want to communicate, and AI can spit that out pretty, pretty fast, much faster than you and I could. Well, okay, you could probably do it faster than me, Sarah.

Superpower Five The Architect

Sara Best 25:55

I doubt that. I I don't know about that, Karen, but you you make a good point. So we have tools to support this, including the predictive index platform, which also has a really unique internal AI component. Well, the fifth superpower for our HR superheroes out there, remember, these are things that HR leaders already have. I'm I'm gonna speak for a moment to the executives, the CEOs that are listening to say if your HR leader doesn't have a seat at your table to help inform and cultivate this behavioral, you know, sort of empathy-driven, connection-driven um element to your AI adoption and strategy, you are missing the boat. We want you, uh, we want you to really think differently about this. The fifth superpower is the architect. So I think we started with that uh at the beginning of our conversation. We talked about how we're moving from executor, you know, like the person who does the stuff, to the designer, the architect. And would you know that 61% of workers want transparent communication about AI adoption? Okay, that should not surprise us. We would offer that the real dystopia is not that AI will replace jobs. It's actually that AI, if not implemented appropriately and, you know, cautiously and ethically, will erode trust, belonging, and growth. So remember, growing people means growing your business. HR's role as architect is about shaping the AI strategy, informing, um, helping to develop and design the AI strategy, building human systems first, or at least together with these AI systems. And and also, and we would advocate for this all day, if you have the right HR leader, that HR leader needs to have a strategic seat at your leadership table. If you're for some reason old school, I know some CEOs that are like that. You know, HR is is a value add, it's over here to the right. We we tap into the HR skills when we're in trouble. You know, this is a new day, new day and age. Would you agree, Karen?

Karen Shulman 28:10

I I do agree. And I and I'd like to go back to what you said of that statistic about 61% of workers want transparent communication about AI adoption. If people do not understand what you're using the AI tools for, they will fill in the gaps and they will assume that it's for nefarious reasons or reasons that are not going to be pro-employee. So I think part of that transparent communication absolutely must explain what it's used for, how it's going to help the organization, how it's going to help the employee. Uh, that's those are the types of details that will probably need to be shared for people to understand. Oh, it's going to be used for me, not against me.

Key Takeaways And Closing

Sara Best 28:56

Yeah, and I'm hoping in all cases that that is how organizations are going to be delving into AI and utilizing it, we would say that AI is not the differentiator. It's actually the human systems and the humans engaging with AI. Gosh, I listened to a really cool presentation a couple months back by the organization AI23. And they gave a case example. Uh, I won't go into a lot of detail about it, but as a pandemic-stricken, very public-facing enterprise hit the wall because people on a dime stopped attending events and going places, you know, they took time in that organization to have AI redesign and create very strategic efficiency in their um, in the access points for customers attending their events. But what they discovered is yeah, AI could, you know, read the rule book and the playbook and understand the processes and and design that out. They didn't have the human piece to it, the nuances, uh, the things that we know to be true about how people work or how people come to our product in the market. So it needed to be coached. It needed to be coached up by humans. So human systems are required. So, Karen, there's a couple of key takeaways. Um, we want to make sure all our listeners, the CEOs, the managers, the supervisors, the HR superheroes kind of hear what you would say are some just key takeaways from this conversation today.

Karen Shulman 30:30

I would say that uh upskilling, making sure that we're we're we're training uh our employees and making sure that they have the skills they need for the future. Uh when we upskill, we build trust more than uh what the job itself guarantees.

Sara Best 30:46

Yeah, I love that. Internal mobility is cheaper than external recruiting. You know, we got to be thinking about how could we do a better job of growing the people that we have.

Karen Shulman 30:57

And I think generic AI adoption can can erode culture. Customized AI uh can be extremely beneficial.

Sara Best 31:07

Well, in this one, that behavioral intelligence must be embedded into AI strategy. Heck yes. But behavioral intelligence should be embedded in anything you do related to your people. Hiring, promoting, developing, uh solving for challenges, um, diagnosing performance, finding best fit, all those things. Um, yeah. And how about one more, Karen? You got one more for us?

Karen Shulman 31:30

Yeah, the last one, I I think um HR is an opportunity for HR to move from being an uh in an implement implementer role to being more strategic.

Sara Best 31:41

And I think some of our organizations may recognize that they don't have a strategic person in their HR role. And that may be something to address that uh that voice and that perspective, that architect and the person who can really um bring the human element to transformation like this is essential. So that might be an important decision/slash hire for the future. Yeah. I love this last piece. Behavioral science is the moat, human capability is the edge, and HR is the keeper of both. Hmm. That's a nice little mic drop there for the end. Anything else for the good of the cause today?

Karen Shulman 32:25

I I think we crushed it, Sarah.

Sara Best 32:27

So yeah, well, we hope this was valuable. And hey, uh friends, we will have a link to this nice little superpower articles. We'll have a link to that in our show notes for you. And um, thanks for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles.

Announcer 32:48

Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here. And if you have your own Bosshole story that you want to share with the Bosshole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at mystory at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. Again, my story at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. We'll see you next time.