Stop Collecting Dead Birds (And Build the Relationships AI Can Never Replace)

A mentor once told Kim Pollok to stop collecting dead birds. Kim had no idea what that meant. Then it clicked, and she hasn’t stopped using it since.

Here’s the idea: when someone walks into your office and drops a problem on your desk, they’ve just handed you a dead bird. You can’t do anything with it. You can’t revive it. You can’t make it useful. You’ve just inherited something that weighs you down and goes nowhere. Do that enough times, and you’re buried in dead birds, everybody else’s problems, all the weight and none of the solutions.

The fix is simple: don’t let people give you just the problem. Require the solution too. At least a direction. At least an attempt. Otherwise you’ve trained your team to be problem-reporters instead of problem-solvers, and you’ve made yourself the bottleneck for everything.

I heard this story when I sat down with Kim Pollok, CEO of SWBC Payroll + HR, for this episode of Rock Solid. Kim’s mentor Susan Stewart, who ran SWBC’s mortgage division, passed that lesson to her four years ago. Kim was scared to ask Susan to be her mentor. She had never met her. She came to that first meeting with a binder full of questions. None of that worked. What worked was just showing up and building a real relationship over time.

That, right there, is what I want to talk about. Because the dead birds story is good. But the bigger story is what it took to receive it, and what that means now, when half the business world is trying to get AI to do that work for them.

The Path That Nobody Plans

Kim’s career was not a plan. She wanted to be a neuropsychologist. That dream ended when she calculated how many years of school it would require. She stumbled into HR, spent 12 years at a company she believed in, and ended up managing their HR department for a 2,000-person call center.

Then the company announced it was closing. Everyone had to leave unless they wanted to move to El Paso. Most didn’t. Kim spent her final weeks helping every single one of those 2,000 people find somewhere to go. That afternoon, December 31st, SWBC called. They had an entry-level benefits coordinator role. Ten thousand dollars less than her current salary. She had two young kids, no college degree, and no better option. She took it that day without hesitating.

That is not a remarkable decision by a strategic career-planner. That’s a human decision by someone who trusted people over circumstances. She had built a relationship with SWBC through the job fair they ran for her employees. They called her because they knew her. She said yes because she needed certainty and the only certainty she had was the people on the other end of the phone.

From that entry-level role, she said yes to everything she didn’t know how to do. She volunteered for the PEO acquisition when nobody knew what a PEO was. She faked it until she figured it out in real time. She asked Susan Stewart to mentor her even though they had never spoken. She’s been CEO now long enough that clients call her a friend.

That is a career built entirely on relationships. Not strategy. Not credentials. Not a perfect LinkedIn profile. People who knew her, trusted her, took a chance on her, and stayed.

What AI Actually Can’t Do

I asked Kim what stays the same no matter how much the business world changes. She didn’t pause. She said one word: people. Then she said the line that stuck with me most:

“You’re not going to build a relationship with AI.”

She meant it practically, not philosophically. SWBC uses AI. They have a private instance for research and email drafting, with security guardrails that keep any sensitive employee or client data out of it entirely. Kim is not opposed to AI. She just understands its limits better than most people do.

You can prompt ChatGPT to be warmer. You can tell it to sound more human, use more personal tone, mirror the other person’s language. It will comply. And then the moment the conversation gets complicated, the moment a client is upset or a referral partner goes cold or someone on your team is struggling, that’s where the difference lives. Warmth without history isn’t warmth. Attentiveness without memory isn’t care. The relationship that keeps a client for a decade and turns them into someone you actually call a friend, that wasn’t built by a chatbot.

Kim’s company has high client retention. She said it directly: “A lot of my clients I can honestly call my friends.” That is not a scalability metric. That is what happens when a business decides it is not transactional, not just as a value statement on a website, but as an operating principle that shows up in how they hire, how they show up to events, how Kim personally networks at the Round Rock Chamber and the Women Who Mean Business event and anywhere else she can be present in the community.

I’ve been saying for years that the companies who ignored the early internet aren’t around anymore. The same is coming for AI. But the flip side is also true: the companies who think AI solves the relationship problem are going to wake up surprised. It solves a lot. That isn’t one of them.

The Dead Birds Problem Is Everywhere

Here’s why the dead birds lesson hit me so hard. We are living through a dead birds epidemic in business right now.

Every Slack message that ends with a problem and no proposed solution. Every meeting that surfaces an issue and adjourns without an owner. Every report that identifies a gap and waits for someone above to figure it out. Dead birds, dead birds, dead birds. Leadership teams drowning in them.

And here’s the thing, AI is the most efficient dead bird generator in history. It is extraordinarily good at surfacing problems: here are your risks, here are your gaps, here are the things going wrong. What it is not good at is the relationship context that helps you know which problems actually matter, which ones your team can solve with a nudge versus a restructure, which client is frustrated but recoverable versus actually leaving. That discernment comes from knowing people.

Susan Stewart didn’t just hand Kim a leadership principle. She handed her a way of thinking about what’s worth carrying and what isn’t. That is not something you can download. It came from a relationship that Kim had the courage to ask for.

The Binder Full of Questions Didn’t Work

I love this detail in Kim’s story. She came to her first meeting with Susan Stewart with a binder full of questions. She had prepared. She was ready. None of it worked. Susan didn’t want to go through a structured agenda. She wanted to get to know Kim. The mentorship that followed wasn’t about information transfer. It was about two people building enough trust that one of them could tell the other something real.

The binder is the AI version of relationship-building. It looks like preparation. It optimizes the surface. But the thing that made the relationship work was not the questions, it was the willingness to put down the binder and just be a person in the room.

I’ve spent a lot of my career helping companies understand how their customers make decisions. One of the things we’ve always found: people don’t buy from the best option, they buy from the option they trust. And trust is not built by being comprehensive or thorough or well-organized. Trust is built by being present. By showing up. By asking something and actually listening. By remembering what someone said the last time you talked. By doing the thing you said you’d do.

Kim Pollok took a $10,000 pay cut to join a company she trusted because they showed up for her employees when the doors were closing. That’s what trust that compounds looks like.

What This Means If You’re Running a Business Right Now

Two things you can do today that no AI tool will do for you.

The first: stop collecting dead birds. Tell your team, explicitly, that you don’t want problems without at least an attempted solution. Give them permission to be wrong about the solution, that’s fine. What you don’t want is learned helplessness, a team that surfaces issues and waits. The more you take dead birds, the more they’ll bring you. Train them to think before they drop.

The second: ask for the relationship you need. Kim was scared to ask Susan Stewart. She asked anyway. I’ve been a mentor for years and I’ll tell you, the ask is almost never as scary for the person being asked as it is for the person asking. Most people are flattered. Most people want to help. The question is just: do you have the courage to ask?

What dead birds are you holding right now that belong to someone else? And what relationship are you not in yet because you’re waiting to be ready before you ask?

Listen to the Full Conversation

Kim’s full story, from the day 2,000 people lost their jobs to the day she became the CEO of the company that hired her for $10K less, is on Rock Solid. Catch the full episode here, or watch it below. And if you’re a small or mid-size business owner in the Round Rock area trying to figure out payroll, HR, or compliance without having to become an expert in all three, Kim’s team at SWBC Payroll + HR is exactly what you’re looking for. You can also connect with Kim directly on LinkedIn, she means it when she says her door is open.