What a Productivity Company's People Strategy Can Teach the Rest of Us with Mandy Mekhail
Release Date: 05/19/2026
What Is Actually Behind Your Inability to Delegate with Susan Drumm
Transform Your Workplace
Most leaders who cannot delegate assume it is a process problem. Susan Drumm has studied both sides of it, and her answer is that the skill gap is real but it is rarely the whole story. Underneath it is usually a belief you have been carrying since long before you managed anyone. Susan has spent two decades coaching C-suite executives, and her work centers on pattern recognition and pattern disruption. In this conversation she explains how she spots those patterns in a leadership team, why leaders resist looking at them, and what it takes to change one in the moment. She shares the story of a...
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Why Your Labels Are Your Limits with Nir Eyal
Transform Your Workplace
Most managers already know what good management looks like. Give real feedback. Delegate. Have the hard conversation. Knowing it has never been the problem. Nir Eyal spent years asking why people who have the right answer still don't act on it. His conclusion is that the gap is not motivation or discipline. It's belief. And beliefs are harder to spot than habits, because from the inside they feel like facts. In this conversation, Nir walks through what a belief actually is, why confirmation bias quietly hardens a manager's read on an employee until it stops being reviewable, and what to do...
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Unpacking the 2026 Human Capital Trends Report with David Mallon
Transform Your Workplace
Deloitte's David Mallon on the Culture Debt AI Is Building Most organizations are treating AI like the last big tech rollout. Buy the licenses, run some training, expect results. The data says that approach is backfiring. David Mallon leads the research behind Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends report, now in its 15th year. In this conversation, he explains why 59% of organizations taking a tech-first approach to AI are 1.6 times more likely to miss the return, and what changes when you redesign the work instead of layering tools on top of it. Brandon and David get into the human side of...
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Why Your Sunday Night Mood Is Not Lying to You with Amy Leneker
Transform Your Workplace
How you feel on Sunday night tells you something real about your relationship with work. Amy Leneker, the author of Cheers to Monday, calls it one of the most honest assessments we have, and she would know. Seven weeks into medical leave after a panic attack, she sat in a doctor's office, got handed a questionnaire, and could not answer a question about what she did for fun. In this conversation, Amy walks through what she learned from that unraveling and the research that followed. She explains the difference between the stress that helps you perform and the stress that wears you...
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The Space Between Communicating and Being Understood with Lee Caraher
Transform Your Workplace
You wrote the announcement, rehearsed it, sent it, and a week later the questions rolled in anyway. In this episode, communication strategist Lee Caraher explains why most workplace communication fails on delivery, not message, and what to do about it. She shares a practical three-send formula for making any announcement stick, a protocol for deciding which messages belong in email, Slack, or a meeting, and a test for knowing whether your message actually landed. Silence and nodding, it turns out, are the clearest signs it didn't. Lee also makes the case for retiring the feedback sandwich for...
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What Being Always On Is Costing You with Justin Hai
Transform Your Workplace
Stress has become so normal at work that plenty of people wear it like a badge. Justin Hai wants that to change. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rebalance Health and the author of Stress Nation, and he studies what our always-on habits do to our stress, our sleep, and our health. Justin breaks down cortisol, the hormone he calls the body's alarm system, and explains why it gets stuck in the on position when we never put the phone down. He makes the case that sleep is the first thing to protect, not the last, and that most of the shortcuts people reach for are treating symptoms instead of the...
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Why Knowing Your Blind Spots Is Not Enough with Cam Yenokida
Transform Your Workplace
Most leaders think self-awareness means understanding their patterns. Cam Yenokida sees where that falls short. The executive coach and founder of Achieve Excellence explains why intellectual self-awareness alone never changes anything, and what it takes to turn insight into new behavior. Cam and Brandon get into the quiet reality of senior leadership, where the higher you climb, the less room you have to think out loud. They talk about what actually makes a leader coachable, why assessments are a starting point and not an answer, and how a simple look at your calendar can reveal where your...
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Why Waiting Is the Most Expensive Decision You Can Make
Transform Your Workplace
Most leaders treat their technology problems as technology problems. Richard Tarity has spent 26 years watching companies prove otherwise. In this episode, Brandon Laws talks with Richard, the founder of truCX and author of The Intelligence Within, about why how an organization decides matters more than the tools it buys. They get into how slow discovery quietly kills good projects, why sitting on the sidelines costs more than picking the wrong tool, and how some teams gather more insight in one week than others do in ten months. Richard shares real stories, including a...
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The Job Market Is Not Broken the Way You Think with Bonnie Dilber
Transform Your Workplace
The job market feels broken to a lot of people right now. Bonnie Dilber has a different read on it. As Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Zapier, she looks at hiring data for fun, and she says the problem is not that the jobs disappeared. It is that more people are competing for a pool of roles that has stayed flat, while plenty of work in trades, healthcare, and education goes unfilled. In this conversation, Bonnie and Brandon Laws get honest about what is actually happening in hiring. They cover the myths job seekers still believe, why AI-written resumes are making recruiters work...
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We're Not Aliens. We're People - A Case for Belonging at Work with Zhou Fang
Transform Your Workplace
What does it mean to truly see your employees? In this episode, Brandon Laws sits down with Zhou Fang, founder of Intersectional Group LLC, to explore how an intersectional lens can transform the way leaders support their teams. Zhou draws on her experience as an immigrant, multilingual professional, and DEI consultant to unpack what most organizations get wrong about inclusion, how to hold people accountable with warmth and compassion, and why your people are your most important business decision. Whether you're leading a team of five or five hundred, this conversation will challenge you to...
info_outlineWhat does it take to build a thriving, high-performance culture inside one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world, without ever requiring a college degree to get in the door? Mandy Mekhail, Chief of Staff of People at ClickUp, went from teaching in a classroom to leading the people function at a 1,200-person global company, and her journey is anything but conventional. In this episode, Mandy pulls back the curtain on ClickUp's non-traditional hiring philosophy, their obsession with onboarding excellence, and how they're turning AI agents into literal coworkers on the org chart. Whether you're an HR professional, a people leader, or simply curious about where work is headed, this conversation will challenge the way you think about hiring, culture, and the role of AI in your organization. Don't miss it.
Key Timestamps
[00:00:00] — Introduction: Mandy's Unconventional Path to People Leadership From educator to customer support to Chief of Staff of People at ClickUp, Mandy shares the leap of faith that started it all and the mindset that carried her through.
[00:03:00] — Joining ClickUp at Employee #110 Mandy reflects on what it was like to join ClickUp when it had fewer than 100 functional employees and what it's meant to watch it scale to 1,200 people globally.
[00:04:00] — The Role That Shaped Everything: Building the Quality Team Six months into ClickUp, Mandy was tasked with building the customer support quality function — and it became the role that fused her education background with her passion for people impact.
[00:05:00] — Recruiting Power Users: ClickUp's Unconventional Hiring Strategy Forget job boards. ClickUp finds top talent by recruiting passionate product users from online forums and communities — and it's still a core part of their strategy today.
[00:07:00] — Why ClickUp Dropped the Degree Requirement From Day One CEO Zeb Evans made a deliberate call early on: if a bachelor's degree isn't the real signal of capability, don't require it. Mandy explains how skills, integrity, and passion took its place.
[00:09:00] — The Interview Question That Reveals Everything One question ClickUp asks every candidate regardless of role: "Give me an example of when you showed fortitude." Mandy explains why resilience is the great equalizer in hiring.
[00:10:00] — Onboarding 500 Employees with a 99% KPI Success Rate Within 90 Days Mandy breaks down the layered, outcome-first onboarding framework that got new hires fully productive in weeks — by embedding them in the product from day one.
[00:13:00] — Maintaining Culture Across Time Zones, Countries, and Hub Offices With teams spanning San Diego, Dublin, Sydney, Manila, and beyond, Mandy shares how a shared mission and core values become the unifying force across global subcultures.
[00:15:00] — Preventing Burnout in a High-Growth, Fast-Shipping Environment High expectations don't have to mean burnout. Mandy explains why clear communication and respectful manager relationships are the real guardrails — not just PTO policies.
[00:17:00] — Practical Boundaries in a Always-On World Mandy shares her personal rule: the ClickUp mobile app gets turned off at 5 PM. A small habit with a big message about modeling the boundaries you want your team to keep.
[00:18:00] — Inclusion at Scale: How ClickUp Runs Global All-Hands Meetings Rotating time zones, recorded sessions, and a commitment to giving every employee the opportunity to attend live — Mandy breaks down what operational inclusion actually looks like.
[00:19:00] — Why Every Single Communication at ClickUp Lives Inside ClickUp No side channels. No email threads. Every conversation, every message, every decision — all in ClickUp. Here's why that radical commitment powers both inclusion and AI at scale.
[00:22:00] — The AI Agent Hour: One Hour a Week That's Changing Everything ClickUp gives employees one dedicated hour per week to play with AI Super Agents — no agenda, no expectations. Mandy explains how this structured playtime is dismantling fear and unlocking innovation.
[00:27:00] — Advice for HR Leaders Who Are Afraid of AI Mandy's message to people leaders sitting on the fence: don't let your own fear set the tone for the rest of your organization. Start by understanding it yourself — and lean into your compliance and legal superpowers along the way.
[00:29:00] — Where AI Has Made the Biggest Impact in the People Function Tier-one operational tasks are the obvious win, but Mandy points to something most HR teams are still missing: using AI for sentiment analysis of HR processes — and why that's the next frontier.
[00:31:00] — AI as a Multiplier, Not a Replacement On the noise around AI layoffs, Mandy is clear: ClickUp treats AI agents as coworkers, not substitutes. They even appear on the org chart with the same data architecture as human employees.
[00:33:00] — 5,000 AI Agents for 1,200 Employees Inside ClickUp's internal "agent wins" channel and Help Wanted Board — a grassroots knowledge-sharing system that has resulted in more AI agents than people at the company.
[00:36:00] — Closing Thoughts: Don't Be Afraid to Try Something for the First Time Mandy's parting challenge to every listener — whether you're in tech or not: dive in, explore, and trust that understanding AI will transform how you see your role, your team, and your future.
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About Xenium HR
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