People Intelligence at Cisco & The Importance of Trust - Roxanne Bisby Davis - #189

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Check out this episode of the #1 people intelligence podcast with special guest, Roxanne Bisby Davis, Head of People Intelligence at Cisco!

Cole Napper talks with Roxanne about a title they almost share, how people intelligence gets built inside a large technology company, and why trust has to sit at the center of listening and analytics. Roxanne has been at Cisco more than twenty-six years. She arrived in 2000 as a contingent worker, converted to full time later that year, and did not set out to run this function. She started in recruiting, was pulled into HR marketing because she knew PowerPoint, learned to simplify executive messages so people across the company could understand the intent, covered a leave and inherited early meeting surveys, and stayed as Cisco invested in listening, research, data science, and storytelling. People intelligence stuck as the name because the work outgrew an annual census or a narrow analytics shop. Her team now includes researchers, data scientists, and storytellers looking at the full depth of humans at work, not just the average. She keeps coming back to Todd Rose’s point that nobody is an average. Leaders need the range if decisions are going to serve more than the middle. Storytelling starts with listening more than speaking, asking questions that pull color and context, reading the room, and answering the “what’s in it for me” so people feel seen. Trust has followed her for years because it is so individualized and so fragile when teams and leaders keep moving. Psychological safety was a major finding in Cisco’s 2016 best-team research. Reciprocal trust matters: employees trusting the institution, and the institution extending trust back instead of treating listening as one-way extraction. She welcomes skeptics because skepticism sharpens transparency. Cisco tested survey load before a full census in 2006, ran annual surveys into the mid-2010s, then moved to quarterly plus continuous listening so they would not have to ask every day. Daily thumbs-up surveys can work in cultures that close the loop fast. In a company of Cisco’s size, the cost of attention can make daily asks feel like asking for asking’s sake. Cole compares that to Buffett’s weighing machine versus voting machine: a snapshot is not the same as a relationship that changes behavior. Roxanne also traces ITSG, the IT Survey Group that spun from the old Mayflower consortium so tech companies could share norms and get practical help without cold-calling peers. She still values consortiums that pull you out of your own echo chamber. She has always tried to make order out of chaos and treat messy organizational problems as pattern puzzles. If she were not doing this work she would be a professional organizer. She most wants to visit New Zealand and she would be Mary Poppins, walking around with a bag of tricks to connect people and make things better. Looking ahead, she argues the field only grows where capability is paired with radical transparency. New tools make surveillance cheap. That is why informed consent, employee choice, and the human premium matter more, not less. Psychology in the loop is not the same as a vague human-in-the-loop slogan. AI slop flattens people toward the average. Automation works when you design human-automation-human chains instead of sprinkling potential onto isolated tasks. Skills inference only works if employees keep voice and agency, because a skill you can do but hate will not produce engagement. People intelligence is synthesis across individual motivation, team conditions, process, and business outcomes, not a single data layer pretending to be the whole story. If you like this episode, you’d also love exploring prior episodes—visit colenapper.com for the full archive and show links.