Leading with Wisdom: Emotional Intelligence in the AI Era

This transcript has been generated by AI and may contain slight discrepancies from the audio or video recording.

Nichol: Leadership today is more complex than ever in a world driven by rapid innovation and constant change. The leaders who thrive aren't just the ones who understand technology. They're the ones who master the human side of the equation.

Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and the ability to foster connection are no longer just nice to haves. They're power skills for navigating high pressure environments and driving meaningful impact.

Our guest today, Joe Hudson, knows this better than anyone. As a renowned executive coach, Joe has worked with some of the most influential minds in AI, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and executives at all the major labs, including Google, DeepMind, and Anthropic. His work focuses on helping leaders develop the inner skills that technology can't replicate. Skills that unlock better decision making, stronger teams, and greater resilience.

Together we'll explore why these human skills are critical in today's world, experience a live coaching session where Joe will guide us through a real world leadership challenge. And you're in for a treat there because I've seen Joe coach, it's amazing. And wrap up with actionable advice for the future of leadership.

Joe, welcome to the AI+HI project. I am so excited that you were here.

Joe: It's so good to see you again, Nicole. What a pleasure.

Nichol: Oh, it's so good. I love the AI+HI audience, and I appreciate what our members are experiencing as they're helping their organizations transform to this really powerful AI technology. And so I've been, you know, my wishlist, my deep wishlist was to bring you to this audience so that they can benefit from your perspective on this. So thank you for saying yes.

Joe: Of pleasure. Yeah.

Nichol: Joe, so as AI becomes more powerful and pervasive everywhere, why do you believe that emotional intelligence and inner skills are more critical than ever for leaders in teams? Why does it matter?

Joe: Yeah. So, you know, it's kind of like asking at the beginning of the industrial revolution, you know, what would, what makes it that all of a sudden, intelligence is gonna matter. Why did we become an intelligence economy?

And so it used to be more like labor economy, and now it's more intelligence economy that people get paid the most are the ones that are highly intelligent. They can process things, but now that's gonna go away. So, you know, we can get great medical and legal advice from ChatGPT. And so what's left, that's like uniquely human.

And so the way to think about that is, let's say I'm interacting with somebody who's really good at their job, but it's really hard to work with them and they're in the intelligence business they're in and let's say a lawyer or a great accountant, well, why would I work with that if I can now get ChatGPT to do it? Right?

So what's left that matters is our ability to make decisions, our ability to have others work with us that want to work with us. What matters is how well we lead people. What matters is how well we connect with people. Those are the things that begin to matter, and those are all based on wisdom. They're not based on intelligence.

You can be incredibly smart, you know, we all know the people who are just insanely smart, but they have no social skills. They don't have the wisdom to know what kind of activities to do, when to do them. They just really understand how to do their one thing like math or something like that. And that goes away when all of a sudden we've automated all the intellectual workforce.

And so the thing that's gonna set people apart, and it always has, but now it's gonna be even more important, is basically it's gonna be more of a wisdom economy than a knowledge economy.

Nichol: Yeah. And also one of the things that, you know, I think a lot about, job disruption and we, you know, when I go to conferences, people say, you know, like the new jobs are coming. And there's gonna be more jobs, but they don't say what it is or how it is.

And what I believe after, you know, just my own thinking and then also talking to the people at the Stanford HAI and people at Brookings and different places, is that we're gonna have to iterate to those new jobs, which means we're gonna be going into new country. We're gonna have to go new places.

And I think could you speak to the importance of emotional intelligence and these types of, and that type of wisdom in helping humans get to the new places, the new organization structures, the new ways of working.

Joe: Yeah. So there's so much in that question. So one of the things that we can do is we can look at what's happening right now in programming. Because basically the way that AI is working, the first place that's disrupting is computer programmers. Right?

And so what's happening is programmers are no longer being programmers. They're being orchestrators of a group of programmers, right? It's like I have thirty-five agents all working for me simultaneously while I am orchestrating them. So I'm no longer programming, I'm orchestrating.

And one of the companies that I coach, the CEO of, it's named Ona, and that's basically what they do is they allow a CTO to sit down at a computer and do the work of a hundred programmers inside of an hour. They're more like, they're conductors right of a symphony.

And so I think that that kind of thing is gonna happen. And so you're gonna have jobs where there's fewer people doing more meaningful tasks and having to work well together, right? So, and it's that working well together part that's gonna be an extremely important aspect of it.

All of a sudden, the teamwork that happens is gonna be the difference. And so one of the things that I have done going into hundreds of companies at this point, I ask often a common question of what kind of team do you want to be on? And I've never had a team disagree on that, meaning I have sat down with them and I've been like, what's a team you wanna be on?

Somebody says, supportive. And I'm like, okay, everybody who wants a supportive team raise your hand. And everybody raises their hand, one that I can trust. Everybody raises their hand. Occasionally you'll have somebody say something like accountable and somebody else will disagree with accountability. But then once you define accountability, they agree again. Oh yeah, we want things. We want a team where people say what they're gonna do and do what they say, and yet, so few people have that team, but that team is what's gonna make a difference.

When you have these small kind of elite groups, the way that, you know, Navy SEAL teamwork means is really important. And so understanding that is gonna be critical.

It's also gonna be really critical to understand humanity when and how humanity works when every, all the other jobs can be understood for you. So all of a sudden knowing how to interact with people, how to talk to your customer, how to make people feel inspired. How to get the most out of people. All that is gonna be really, really important.

And that's where it comes from as far as iterating to get to the new paradigm. I completely agree with you. I think that we're gonna have lots of iteration, but there's good clues as to how it's gonna work, right?

So if you look at a company that's, say a farming company that's a low margin business. And where there's a lot of people doing rote work and you see how a successful farmer manages their operations, let's say they've got like a hundred thousand acres and they're managing, and it's a, when I was a venture capitalist, I was in that business. So I got to see it firsthand.

And then you see the way, say something like Google or OpenAI operates, one of the main things that you'll see is that the more you're relying on a group of talented people, you have to inspire them because they can work anywhere. They can do whatever they want. They're in demand. It's like they have to want to come and work for you.

And attracting great talent becomes incredibly necessary, and you don't attract great talent unless you can give them a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, feeling like they're getting the job done, that they can pursue their vision. All of that takes wisdom.

And so you can start seeing some of the more modern organizational structures. For instance, the Everyone Culture, Kegan out of Harvard or Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. These books are starting to, are talking about some of the ways that these organizations are gonna be structured. Because it's the kind of organizations that people want to join, that highly talented people want to be a part of where they feel like they become better as people every year.

If like, you can't maintain great AI researchers in a company, no matter how much money you have, because somebody, I mean, I think Zuck just offered somebody half a billion dollars to come and to come and work with him. Like, you can't pay them enough.

So the only thing that you can do is they have to feel like, oh, I'm a better person because I'm here. I feel like I'm more fulfilled because I'm here. And so the company structures have to give that to people, especially as you become more talent dense and less rote stuff that people that anybody can do, which is no longer a body, it's a computer.

Nichol: Yeah. Well, and that reminds me of a couple of pieces of interesting research. One, it was on people who are really good at managing agents. So not prompting, it's the next level. And people who are really good at managing and building agents are people who are really good at managing people. Because it's the type of questions you ask and that sort of thing.

So there is this, when we're thinking about the age of AI and we're thinking about like what are the ways of being that are really going to matter and what are the skills and like these wisdom skills. I think what's really interesting is because like historically. People who are into what we're into. And we've been talking about these things and I think many times companies had it and they said, well, okay, that's great. And then they went back to business as usual.

But now there's starting to be a bleed over between the technology. How one, like how one is, and what one can get out of the technology. So it's like, you know, one of the things I say is that technology is a lot like tofu. You know who you are when you're using it affects how it tastes.

So one, the first example is that people who are good at managing people are better at managing agents than people who are not good at managing people. The second part is that I have found interesting because I'm into teams like you are and some interesting research where basically like AI is like. When you bring AI into an organization or into a team, I joke and say, it's like putting grease on a toddler. You know, it's like whatever's going on just happens faster and it's really hard to get your hands around it.

And so one of the things that happens is that the characteristic of a team goes into how they prompt when they're working together. So one, if you use AI as a group the same way used as individual, it actually chunks you down, slows you down. But also if it's a task, you know, a task team where all they do is work, they get things done together, but they're not able to think together.

They get different output because they prompt in different ways than if you have an actual teaming team. And so how can you use AI to get to that top ten % of new ideas? And so it's, you know, those are two things that reinforce what you're saying.

Joe: Yeah. Like a practical example of what you're saying. So I went into one of the Alphabet companies and I was working with the leader of the org. It was like twelve hundred people or something like that. And we were talking about how, and this org was gonna be completely changed by AI you like. There's nobody who didn't understand that like most of the jobs that the org is currently doing will be done by AI in the next two or three years.

Then the question became like, how do we help this group make that transition? And the thing about stable organizations is that they're stable and they've forgot how to innovate. Like nobody's prompting them to innovate. Nobody's asking them, and nobody's rewarding them for innovation.

And so what do you do to change that? And so one of the things that we did was we put in the KPIs and expectations. We did a whole bunch of ways of quantifying this and institutionalizing it and that there's a lot of work behind that, that everybody's job was to run five experiments every half a year. So they had to try things in a different way and report on how they were trying things a different way.

It didn't matter if it was a person who was a help desk clerk to the executive, the CEO of the company. Everybody had to in a very public way say, here are the experiments that I'm running, and so that iterative quality is gonna be the difference between life and death for a lot of these companies.

How do you get an organization that's been doing it the same way for two decades to all of a sudden change the way that they're doing things. And you can think that it's gonna come from above, like somebody's gonna make the decision. But I'm talking to the people who make those decisions and they're like, I don't know what to do. Like I've never been here before. Nobody, there's no playbook. McKinsey can't tell me. There's no playbook that they have.

And so it's really about how quickly you are iterating to be able to maybe affect the change and see the change that's gonna happen. And that also requires a tremendous amount of teamwork and good communication and collaboration and wisdom.

Nichol: What's the role of emotional clarity in that, like in that, you know, innovation needs to happen, this transformation, like what are the patterns that you've seen around emotional clarity and what you just described? How are they related?

Joe: Yeah, there's two big ways for businesses that they're related. The first one is, if I go into your head right now and I pull out the emotional center of your brain, your IQ stays the same, but your ability to make decisions just almost goes away. It'll take you a half an hour to decide what color pen to use.

As a matter of fact, Ilya, who was one of the founders of OpenAI, was just on a podcast talking about how this is the future of AI, that they need to create something that creates the same thing that emotions create in humans, because AI has a hard time figuring out how to act. So we act through our emotions.

So emotional. We don't ever make a logical decision that's, we might feel like we do, but we don't. And the way to think about that is how many decisions have you made to feel loved or to not feel abandoned, or to feel accepted, or to not feel criticized, or to feel trust, to feel freedom, to not feel sad. So many people make most of their decisions. All of us make all of our decisions basically on how we wanna feel, whether it's a bad habit or whether it's being a great parent, we're making a decision on how do we want to feel?

So without emotional clarity, you make crappy decisions. You just do. And the great decisions are made not from, oh, I have like the great logic. It's saying, oh, I can welcome whatever emotion is coming. I'm happy to feel like a failure, so I can iterate five times this in the next six months. If I'm not happy to feel like a failure, I'm not gonna iterate five times this month, I'm not gonna do five experiments.

Am I happy to feel like I don't know what the heck is happening? It's AI. Then I can sit in that unknown and I can make decisions there. I'm not gonna have to know every step of the way, but if I need to feel like I'm in control and not feel unknowing, then I'm never gonna succeed at AI.

So emotional clarity means great emotional decisions because you can welcome and feel any emotion. That gives you more, a broader, wider, better solution set.

So that's one way in which emotional clarity does that. The other way in, in a podcast that on our podcast, an Art of Accomplishment, I just interviewed a CEO who has been doing like the deep emotional work with his whole team. Just revolutionary in the way that he's doing it. His name's Johannes and he, one of the things that he talks about with the emotional clarity is that at that in times of change, it's about emotional regulation that allows people to be able to deal with massive change quickly.

So if I look at OpenAI and being a part of that and working at the team with the teams there. And I'm working with them for the next four years, right? And I look at the amount of transition that company has gone through. It's ridiculous. The fastest growing company by users of any technology of all time is happening. They have to. It's a new company every six months.

There's constant transitions that creates a lot of emotional charge in people. I feel scared I, what's going on? I don't know. I was doing one job, now I'm doing another job. I had to do one thing to be successful. Now I have to be, do another thing.

The more emotional fluidity that happens, the more that somebody can feel those emotions and process those emotions, not stuff them, if you stuff them, it starts looking really, really bad. You can't compartmentalize at that rate and that level, but the more you can feel, accept, welcome, move those emotions through you quickly, then all of a sudden you're able and able to be very resilient and show up in a way that's on point consistently.

That's another huge part of the emotional resilience or the, what I would call emotional fluidity. Meaning that your emotions move through you without repression quickly. Not in a way that you are out of control, but in a way that you can feel and allow all of that to move quickly.

Nichol: So I'm curious, when you first arrive at a company and there's, you know, a lot of very sort of like analytical, technical people, and you say this. How do you help them? Get it across. Do you start with the mini assignment of just experiments? Or like how do they, how do you get them across the line in under to understand and embrace what you just described about like for them to build the AI they want to build, for them to build the technology they want to build with all of this unknown that embracing their humanness is actually a part of that success.

Joe: Yeah, so I think analysis and being analytical is incredibly useful. So it, they're not opposed to one another. And the way that I do it is I always just go to the problem that everybody's having.

So no matter what organization you walk into, there's a problem that they're having. And so you say, what's happening with that problem? And you start to show them.

So for instance, let's say I walk into a company that is overwhelmed, which is really typical these days, right? Because everything's changing so quickly. And then we will show them, or I'll show them that the overwhelm isn't about how much you have to do. Our brains tell us I'm overwhelmed. It means I have so much to do.

So I went into a company as an example. We did this meeting culture change, and all of a sudden there was thirty % less meetings and they were more effective. All the scores and their zeitgeist went up. Everything went up, less hours. All this stuff occurred. And they were still sitting there complaining that they don't have enough time and how they're so still overwhelmed.

It's like, wait, you just, you just told me literally two hours before that you're saving all this time. How are you still overwhelmed? And so you can start to show them, oh, the overwhelm is really not about not enough time. It's about emotional overwhelm. There's, I'm feeling like I can't deal with all the change. I don't know who I am in this situation. I dunno how to act in this situation. I'm being asked to do something new. That's a lot of the overwhelm is that, and then the other part of the overwhelm that happens is, you know, I know this should be done and I'm not doing it. That creates a lot of overwhelm.

If you think about yourself walking from your car to the house and you're just walking. It should be a really enjoyable experience. But as soon as you think I should also be filling out this form, I should also be responding to this email. I should then it's a very stressful walk to the car, and so when you start showing people that stuff and they want the relief of the overwhelm and they've been trying twenty different things, all the to-do lists, all the time management, all the analytical approaches.

And they get one taste of, oh, wait a second. If I actually can directly look at this thing head on, feel this thing, and all of a sudden my overwhelm is less than immediately. They buy in. So you don't have them buy in intellectually. You have them buy in experientially, give them.

Nichol: So good. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. And so just another example to be, you know, I will tell people, Hey, connection makes for better teams. And this is something that's been known, whether it's from Quakers or NBA forever, right? That, but businesses will forget that mostly because they don't know how to create the connection.

And so we'll do something for like four hours to make everybody feel more connected and then we'll solve a problem that has, that they've been trying to solve for whatever, two, three months, and they solve it within, you know, an hour. And I'll point out notice connection created solution. How is that, how did that happen? Like, look for that. Notice the teams that you've been on, where you felt most connected. What was the solution output? What was your productivity output? You know? And then they just click it together. The experience teaches people, not the intellect.

Nichol: Wow. Well, I wanna give our audience a little bit of a taste. Imagine that I am a senior product manager at a leading AI company and I have a team. There's silos, there's lack of emotional connection, and I'm gonna come to you with my problem and will you coach me?

Joe: Yep.

Nichol: I just started in this new role and I've gotta get the team to come together. We've got a lot of big problems, but it's like they're not connected. And, you know, and they're resistant and I'm getting really frustrated and I know I'm being judged. But I, and I don't really know what to do. So like, how do I, how do I make these people understand that they need to be more human?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I get it. So my question to you is how is trying to make them do something, a form of connection?

Nichol: Not really.

Joe: So what's a way that you can create connection with the people and the team? To lead the example of connection?

Nichol: Well, I could find out, I could ask them what they're really like, what they're hoping for. It's like they're here for a reason. I could find out what that is, you know, not just to do what I need them to do, but like what's their reason to be here? I could start there.

Joe: That's a great start. And how about right now with you, what's required for you to feel more connected to them without doing anything to them? Just like what's required in your system to create deeper connection with them in this, in the next minute.

Nichol: I could share the problem.

Joe: Yeah.

Nichol: You know, like, like right now, I'm, I just think about the way I described it. Like, it was, I'm carrying it like it's my problem alone to solve and to make them solve it. But I could share the problem, so, you know, so I don't feel like I'm carrying it by myself. And then I would feel more connected if it wasn't just my own burden.

Joe: Right. Yeah. Perfect. So we can keep going here, but I want to point to the pattern that we're seeing. The pattern is that the more that you know how to access and access connection with them, the more that the team has opportunities, you're creating more inroads for the team to be connected.

So now let's go even like, even crazier, like how do you, in the next say twenty seconds. Feel more connected to yourself. What's something that can happen internally?

Nichol: I can appreciate that I'm trying really hard to succeed.

Joe: Yeah.

Nichol: You know, and to be like, oh, yeah, I want something. I'm, you know, like, I want us, like I want to be successful on the

Joe: Yeah.

Nichol: I do.

Joe: Yeah. So I have a question for you. How many of the people do you think on your team wake up in the morning, go? I hope that Nicole is really unhappy with my performance this today, this week, this month.

Nichol: None of them.

Joe: Right. So there's, right, so that's happening. You can appreciate that in all of them. Maybe they're scared, maybe they're worried about a result or spending political capital or whatever, but everybody comes in wanting to do a quality job. If they don't, then definitely get rid of them, but like, yeah.

Nichol: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe: So that would be a taste of how the coaching session goes. And it is a great illustration of the point that you made at the beginning of like, how does wisdom, how does, like how as a human characteristic, self-awareness, wisdom, how do they become more important? This is how they become more important because it's the person who can run the successful team when there's knowledge is outsourced to a computer who's gonna be most successful. And that comes from exactly that place of understanding myself, understanding other people.

Nichol: Yeah. Wow. Well, so, you know, I think it's really powerful because even though I, you know, made that, even though it was a scenario, just even from this little bit of reflection. It's like I actually feel, I feel more connected with real Nicole, you know, just even in that little bit. And so I think, you know, people seeing that and sort of like witnessing what are the suggestions?

So someone who's listening to this conversation and they, they hear this, they kind of have something a similar like thing like that. What are the three things they should do with their teams in order or do it themselves before they go into a meeting to be able to be in that place?

Joe: Yeah. So I wanna be a little specific. So if I'm thinking about this audience, the audience of the podcast, it's mostly HR executives, is that right?

Nichol: And they're in a pickle. They're in a pickle. And the pickle is this, there are no, there really are no, from what I've seen, well, I can't say that I, successful AI transformations of organizations requires HR. They are in the room. They're always in the room. In, you know, in a bad company. They're just there for compliance and they're in the room. But in the good companies, they're doing the learning and development. They're the ones who are organizing the companywide AI literacy. They're the ones who are doing the workforce planning, the task force analysis to see and working with the CIOs and the tech teams to see what can be identified and what can't.

So HR is absolutely in the room and simultaneously, because, you know, there's a, people have a wide experience with HR, so you know, for some people HR is the taxi companies and Uber is coming, you know, and so with that,

Joe: For some companies, the HR is the cops.

Nichol: Yeah, so they're in the room, they have to be in the room, and they're in the crosshairs. And so it's a very impossible, it's like, it's a very difficult place to be and so that's one of the experiences that they're having.

Joe: Yeah, so the first thing I think that what I notice is in when people in management are in that kind of a position, the tendency is to let fear rule. Like the questions, they start playing not to lose instead of playing to win. So they start playing, how do I maintain the organization? How do I get a voice in the room? How do I be heard? How, but they're not, they're not playing the game of how do I make AI help everybody in this company have a better life and for this company in itself to transform.

So if you think about moments of great transition, World War Two, the Revolutionary War, Civil War, if you think about divorces, children leaving home, these are moments where humans either have a great transformation in growth. Or they, or they start to dwindle and erode. That seems to be the case for big moments of transition, and so we're in a big moment of transition with AI.

This can solve problems that have been plaguing your company for a decade. This can change the way the culture is. This can take away all those tasks that nobody likes doing and give them more creative stuff to do. All of that is possible. It can change the culture, it can change so much and nobody's, not nobody, but very few people are playing to win. What they are scared of is like, how do we get through it? How do we manage the process? How do we make sure that the work for it? But they're all questions of how do we maintain and there's this great, this great, it's been said a lot of ways by different people, but the best way I've ever heard it said is, this famous cricket player and his career went straight up, straight down, straight up. And somebody asked, what's the difference between the ups and the downs? He said, ups was, I was always thinking about how do I improve? Downs were, I was always thinking about how do I maintain, and so I think that's the biggest thing is to be able to work with your fear.

See the excitement that's in your fear. There's a great phrase that says, fear is excitement without the breath. Right? That like, if you're actually super present in the fear, there's actually a lot of excitement there. And how do you create a vision for what you wanna see in the world and use AI to get there and. Instead of, where I find a lot of HR heads are they, they find themselves into compliance or risk management, whether it's generally risk management or, okay, my job is to make sure the comp package doesn't get a whole bunch of people upset. Instead of, my job is to figure out how to make a comp package that makes everybody twice as successful at this company.

And so I think that's like the biggest opportunity for those folks. And to do that, you actually have to be able to welcome, understand your fear and not constantly be acting in a way to try to get rid of it.

Nichol: Wow. So great. We're at the end of our time, but I really appreciate what you just described because there are a lot of people holding their breath.

Joe: Yeah.

Nichol: You know, and I even, you know, I notice myself holding my breath sometimes too. And I'm in it every day. And so a lot of people are holding their breath and just that reminder for that. I, as we think about how we want our companies and our society to change, there isn't a lot of asking the question of what do we want to create and so I just really appreciate that.

So thank you so much for your time, everyone. The Art of Accomplishment podcast is filled with Joe coaching people and talking about it. And so if you wanna relate to your fear in a better way around AI, definitely check that out. And so thank you so much, Joe, for your time today.

Joe: Thank you for having me. Really

Nichol: Yeah. And so everyone, that's it for this week's episode. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Joe, for sharing your experience and insight with us. And everyone, thanks for joining the conversation and we'll see you next time.