Why Recognition Data Is the New Leadership Signal for Future Leaders
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast On The Road, we sit down with Eric Mosley, Founder and CEO at Workhuman to explore how recognition data, AI, and human insight are changing the way organizations identify their future leaders.
Eric shares how Workhuman’s new Future Leaders capability uses recognition data, performance data, and AI to identify the people most likely to rise into senior leadership roles years before they are officially promoted.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
Eric says the strongest signals are not coming from a traditional succession planning form. They are coming from the language people use about each other, the recognition moments that describe how work actually gets done, and the patterns that emerge across billions of human interactions.
🎓 In this episode, we get into:
Why succession planning often feels too slow and bureaucratic
How recognition data can reveal hidden leadership potential
Why deep, specific recognition creates better signals than surface-level praise
How AI can identify future leaders two, three, or even five years early
Why companies need to retain and develop these people before competitors do
Why making work human still sits at the center of the entire strategy
What if the future of work wasn’t more artificial?
What if it was more human?
On May 20, Workhuman Forum London brings the UK and Europe’s most forward-thinking CHROs, CPOs, and people leaders together at the London Hilton Park Lane for one defining day on trust, recognition, psychological safety, and leadership in the age of AI.
Because as AI accelerates, the real competitive edge is not just better technology.
It’s stronger cultures.
It’s leaders who can build trust when pressure rises.
It’s recognition that connects people to strategy.
It’s psychological safety that helps teams speak up, adapt faster, and perform through uncertainty.
And it’s human intelligence that gives leaders a clearer view of what is really happening inside their organisation.
You’ll hear from world-class thinkers and senior HR leaders including Rachel Botsman, Eric Mosley, Susan David, Ph.D., Tom Lee, and more, unpacking the practical strategies people leaders need now.
This is not another conference.
It’s a reset moment for HR leaders who know the next era of work cannot be built on automation alone.
00:11
How you been? I've been great. I've been great. Yeah, the conference, this is a conference we all in WorkHuman look forward to every year because it gives us like energy for the rest of the year because you come here, you get infected with the energy of the attendees and the attendees, as I said, They're kind of, you know, they're people, they're like-minded people. They're people who care about, you know, humanity in the workplace and making work human. And that's why they come here. And then when they come here, they find they're in a room with thousands of other people who care about that. And then they key off each other. that energy and positivity is evident to everyone. And you just feel it in the place, you know, and then we go home because, you know, we're working like everyone else. You work from your home office or you're going into the office.
00:57
But then to be in an environment where with thousands of people who care about human beings, it's kind of infectious. Because sometimes when you're in the office or home, you don't you don't really sometimes have to see the impact. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with me with the podcast. I'm in the studio. Yeah. I already see the ripple effect of the work that we do, but you can feel it and experience it. Yeah, yeah. And I talk to people in the corridors. People stop me everywhere and they tell me about how their, for example, their recognition programs are affecting their employees and making them feel joy in work, lifting them and what that means for the culture and productivity and all that thing. It's great. It's great. Yeah. I wish I could get a dose of that every morning with my coffee. Energize every day. Yeah. And I know you've had some huge announcements, which some of your customers have already filled me in on the show. Tell us about Future Leaders, which has already come up many times on the show, actually.
01:49
Yeah, really, yeah. The last two days. Yeah, so we announced in my keynote yesterday, I announced Future Leaders. So Future Leaders is basically, we have... decades of data, recognition data, performance data with some of the world's largest companies. We're talking billions of recognition moments. So we were able to train AI models on that data and see if we could find insights. Would that come up? What could we learn from all of that corpus of positivity, if you will? And what we've been able to cultivate is some models that will predict who a company will promote in the future. Now, that sounds like, oh, that's kind of succession management or, you know, that sounds like you're finding hidden talent. But it's actually a bit more profound than that. It's actually going to tell you who you are actually going to promote two years, three years, even five years before you actually promote them, before you've even decided that you need to promote somebody.
02:48
This model is pointing to people in each department and saying that person will be a VP in three years.
02:54
Honestly, it sounds too good to be true. It does, yeah. Is that a fair comment to say? No, it is. And if you saw my keynote, you might have noticed I went into the science a little bit more than I normally would. And the reason I do that at the start is because people are a bit cynical if they just hear the result. Sure, sounds amazing. So the only way I get them to not be cynical is to actually explain how it works. And when you explain how it works and what the signals are, what the AI is looking for in the data, and how it gets to a statistical probability, then people go, oh yeah, I see how it works, and then they're blown away.
03:33
So Future Leaders is a profound addition to the HCM world of products.
03:38
And at the end of the day, it produces this like accelerate group, like a grouping of your employees. And in that group, nearly 80% of them will be promoted to the C-suite or VPs over the next three or four years. How are you building trust with HR leaders and businesses to trust the AI in these decisions?
04:00
They're also innately typically human decisions, right? Well yeah, typically human decisions is a great, that opens up a lot of different kind of interpretations and effects.
04:13
Because it's built off human data. You know, it's built off the language that people use about each other, which is pure. That's all it is. It's human opinion. And so what Future Leaders does and what all of our AI tools do, it kind of
04:29
It tries to get the knowledge out of people's brains in the company about all the work that's being done and all the people in the company. And so it's human opinions that you put into AI. The AI is kind of just this great averaging function over massive amounts of text, which is people's narrative about how work is happening in the company. And because of that, it really is just exposing human opinion before the humans have synthesized it themselves. Because you couldn't do that at scale. It would take years. Yeah. Manually. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. To do that manually would take... And so for me, it's, you know, it's a great addition to any succession planning processes that people have. Yeah. Of which most companies find they're overwrought. You know, they're really bureaucratic, high work processes. And they feel like things are moving so fast.
05:23
We had, you know, there was a research report from Wharton that said that
05:27
um most business leaders feel that their succession management is futile because the world is changing so fast i mean no you can keep up you can't keep up with what happened yesterday never mind so yeah it's um it's profound every company defines the leadership differently yeah so how do you work with the different companies you have different different definitions yeah leadership yeah well that's that's one of the ways that it works the first thing that it does is this ascend model that we have the first thing it does is it takes your company and it looks at all the data and it builds a basically a behavioral taxonomy of how work gets done okay all of the behaviors all of the attributes all of the work contributions all of the people all of the opinions It builds this kind of behavior taxonomy for what the C-suite and the VP is, how they work.
06:22
And then it takes that and it applies it to everyone to see, is there matches? And that's under the covers. That's what it's doing. And some people basically present in the workplace as if their VP is, but there may be only managers or director level. And they tend to gravitate towards those positions. Yeah. So the first thing it does is it analyzes your company, because what might happen in Cisco in terms of how leadership works is different to Johnson & Johnson, it's different to Dell, it's different to others. So it has to learn the company first, and that's what the Ascend model does. And then you can build on top of that, then you can make predictions.
07:00
Are people surprised that you can pull this level of detail from recognition data? Yeah. Right? Because it has to go beyond that. These have to be pretty detailed recognition moments, right? Like intentional. Well, just good job, right? Yeah, yeah. That is a key point. There's a lot of recognition programs out there where this wouldn't work.
07:20
And they're intentionally, these recognition programs are intentionally created to be surface level and quick, where you go into Slack and you hit a heart emoji. In some ways, that is recognition. But in the most important way, it's stopping the creation of data because there's no depth to it. There's no information density in hitting an emoji. Whereas if you can get somebody to sit down for, you know, five minutes and write a paragraph as to why they're saying thank you. Well, that paragraph is gold dust and AI is uniquely capable of parsing text to find the nuggets and the breadcrumbs that are in that text. So, yeah, this style of recognition dictates the accuracy and the effectiveness. Yeah. And then now you'll also be able to gather that from multiple sources, right? Yeah, exactly. Multiple members of the team, multiple parts of the organization.
08:14
So you get kind of a bigger picture. It's never one person's opinion. That's not statistically relevant. And there's also bias there. And there's bias there, yeah. So it has to rise above one person and get enough... inputs that smooths out bias and hits a statistical probability of being correct. And it doesn't make any pronouncements until it does.
08:38
So if you have a lack of data, then it just won't tell you anything. You have to hit its critical mass of data to help it get there. Nice. Are you seeing this surface sort of hidden talent in organizations that perhaps may be overlooked? Yeah, definitely. That's something that's nearly, even before the world of AI, we've had tools to show the hidden talent in each department. Also, in a world of working from home and being a little bit more disconnected from your colleagues than would have been the case pre-pandemic, talent can sometimes go under the radar. But if you have enough volume of commentary, which comes from the recognition programs that are adopted, then you can rise to the surface those people. And people are sometimes they go, oh, yeah, well, we all knew that person was amazing.
09:32
But then sometimes it's like, oh, my God, I didn't realize. And now that I know, well, I better keep that person.
09:39
From your conversation with CHROs and also last couple of days, what kind of reaction are you seeing?
09:45
to future leaders. Really amazing, actually. Yeah, people are stopping me in the corridors. Really, it's blowing their minds. And it's being able to just cut to the chase and find out who you're going to actually care about being in leadership positions in the future. It's not a contract. You don't have to then promote them the next day.
10:09
It might be that it's three years later. But the fact that you know who this cohort of people are means now they can act. I always say the first thing they need to do is make sure they retain them because the last thing you want is your very best people going to your competitor. That is like a double whammy. You lose them and now they're working against you. But then also, if you know that somebody's on a track that is generally gonna be promoted to VP, well then you can make them a better VP by giving them more experience, by exposing them to different parts of the business. You can make them a better leader in the future. As you look ahead, what are you most excited about?
10:50
I'm really excited to get some of these tools out into the world, get a year of them under our belts, get them really adopted. So you currently have customers already rolling this out already? We have customers that we are doing trials with and then it'll go kind of mass in the middle of the year and then into next year and then of course this is v1 there's a v2 coming there's a v3 coming you know so i'm i'm excited about it i get i get juiced with the innovation stuff like you know when we're breaking new ground that gets me up in the morning i think this completely like changes the conversation around recognition Yeah, it does. Yeah, yeah. It's fuel now for a lot of different returns. There's the bread and butter returns, which is like, you know, engagement and energy and culture. And now there's like, you know, talent management stuff, which is just a whole other level.
11:43
Be honest, when you started this, did you think that we'd get where we are now? Could you see us getting to this point? Or even for you, is this a surprise?
11:52
um well i suppose i look at work human as a series of chapters you know uh in in a book that's not fully written yet hopefully and the chapter each chapter is different you go into a new phase it's like you know working for a different company every two years you know and so no i wouldn't be able to have skipped forward numerous chapters to see what we are now but But I kind of did always see what the next chapter was, because I knew where we were going. And what happens is the world intervenes in your plans, you know? And things happen, like the AI revolutions. No one can see that coming. 20 years ago, when I founded the company, that wasn't the case, you know? I actually did, before WorkHuman, I did work in AI back in the early days as a software guy, you know? So I've always been keeping track of that stuff.
12:45
But with ChatGPT and the kind of mainstreaming of the LLMs. And you're like, we have all of this data. And it's like, oh my God, we're sitting on a gold mine. Yeah, it's true, right? It's like we struck oil. Because the data is so uniquely capable in an AI world because it's so textually rich. How important are your customers in helping driving cars? The customers are the ultimate judge of what's useful and what's not. And that's why one of the things we announced yesterday is our deskless initiative. So offline workers, which is not AI. It doesn't have that kind of sexy AI, LLM stuff going on. It's pure, you have deskless employees, you have frontline employees. How do you get positive reinforcement to them? and that's customer driven you know uh customers employ a ton of offline work and they've always been underserved and they've always been underserved yeah and neglected always yeah you know what they're human beings like they you know so you have to you have to um you know cater to their needs as well so that's the kind of that's an example of where customers drive us in all sorts of directions um and then they ultimately say whether something wins or loses and so we they're a big input
14:01
But they don't necessarily know where things are going to be in two years' time either. So you have to be the innovator, the instigator of the change. And then it has to be customer tested. But that's the work, yeah. And not every test is going to continue to roll out, right? Exactly, yeah. The things that fail, you've got to prune. It's like a bonsai tree. You've got to prune the ones that are not fit for purpose or that don't work or don't have a great response, and then nurture the ones that do. yeah well listen i know you're gonna go back to the event and we've got some amazing things coming up next days any parting advice for everyone listening before we say goodbye no i would still say lean in to making work human for your employees that is when you'll have an unleash of energy in the workplace and that is what propels companies forward amazing energy always a pleasure my friend thank you for having us absolutely thanks a lot yeah
Eric Mosley, Founder and CEO at Workhuman