Episode 24: People-Forward Leadership™ in the Age of AI: 4 Skills That Can't Be Automated
Welcome, welcome to The People-Forward Leadership™ Podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me.
Today I want to talk about leadership and AI. If you've been watching the news, following business reports, or keeping on top of tech reports you know the conversation of the day is AI. How to use it, harness it, get ahead of it, not be afraid of it, leverage it in your work and industry, and what to watch out for. Like Skynet and Terminator level watch out. People are worried about being replaced by it and even in my own industry, coaching, training, and consulting, we've ramped up our conversation on the impact of AI. As someone whose practice is certified as AI-powered, I'm an advocate of using artificial intelligence as a virtual assistant allowing for scalable and efficient support for professional and personal development. But while the use of AI isn't really new, from smartphones, Siri, and even Google searches, its advancing intelligence is. So what does that mean for leadership? As an academic and practitioner I start with curiosity which has led me to have random conversations with my clients, CEOs and executive leaders, really smart, capable people to get their perspective and they too are having the same conversations and wondering if there's a risk of outsourcing some of these skills.
27% of white-collar employees are now using AI frequently at work and that's nearly double what it was just two years ago. The adoption in all facets of the workplace is happening faster than most of us expected. And yet, when you look behind the curtain, under the hood, at what results AI is actually delivering, there's this disconnect.
Harvard Business Review recently analyzed S&P 500 company filings and found that while nearly 90% of companies described AI in glowing terms on their earnings calls, but when pressed for specifics on why it's so great, most leaders fell back on vague promises about "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized yet.
So what's really going on? Why is there this gap between the promise of AI and the reality of its impact?
Well I believe it's not a technology problem. It's a leadership problem. The promise of AI is amazing, but leaders haven't figured out how to lead through this transformation or how to lead with AI. We focus too much on the ways it can replace tasks and responsibilities (and maybe ultimately us) instead of how to use it as an augmentation tool. McKinsey found that employees are actually three times more likely to be using AI than their leaders even realize. There's a massive awareness gap. And that's where trust breaks down, where fear takes root, and where the promise of AI turns into just another initiative that didn't quite land.
So today, we're going to talk about leadership and AI. There are certain leadership skills that AI simply can't automate like self-awareness, judgment and decision-making, meaning and purpose, emotional regulation, connection, and empathy, and curiosity and innovation, skills that actually become even more important and critical as we dive deeper into the age of AI, and as AI does become more capable of handling more of the tactical work on your plate. And of course we're going to connect each of these back to our People-Forward Leadership™ framework, because that's the scaffolding that makes all of this work.
The World Economic Forum tells us that 39% of existing skill sets will transform or become outdated by 2030. That's massive. But the skills that I just mentioned are deeply human and can't be replaced anytime soon. In other words, leaders will need to lean into skills that honestly may not be the skills that made them successful or got them into their leadership position to begin with. So it's not about replacement it's about partnership, where you're intentional about strengthening those critical leadership capabilities that make effective leadership and using AI to amplify what you do.
So let's get into it.
I want to try pull these essential leadership skills into 4 categories and the first is…Humanizing Change Through Presence. AI can not Show Up in the Moment.
And I want to start here because honestly, this is where I see leaders struggling most right now. Communication. Clarity. Connection. Trust.
Listen, yes, AI can help you draft messages. It can tailor language for different audiences. It can even suggest empathetic phrasing. But here's what it absolutely cannot do: it cannot show up in the moment. It cannot read the room. It cannot hold tension with empathy. It cannot build trust through presence.
Humanizing through presence, showing up in the moment, is a quintessential aspect of the first pillar of people-forward leadership™, which is leader awareness.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Presence isn't just about being physically in the room, it’s about noticing what's happening inside you, regulating it, and then placing your full attention on the person and problem in front of you. And that starts with self-awareness. You can't lead others well if you aren't aware of, and in charge of, yourself first.
Think about it this way: when you give someone your undivided attention, they feel seen rather than managed. That single act of just being fully present can convert a “human resource" back into a human being. Only one in three employees strongly agrees that they trust the leadership of their organization. One in three. And 79% of employees don't trust AI to understand emotions or human behavior as well as their leaders can.
Also, you can't read the room if you're hijacked by your own stress or anxiety. Presence slows down your reactivity, opens up curiosity, and creates space for you to actually hear what's being said. Not what you think is being said, but what's actually happening.
And this matters more than most leaders realize because your state affects your team's state. I always say, the pace, culture, effectiveness, joy of the team is ALWAYS set by the pace, tone, effectiveness, and joy of the leader. When you're calm and grounded, you help stabilize others. When you're anxious and scattered, that transmits too. Presence is how your values and intent are actually felt by others, not just heard in your words, but experienced in how you show up.
This is also where bias reduction happens. Being present helps you catch yourself making mental shortcuts, like ”I've already decided how this conversation will go,”and instead choose a different response. That's self-awareness in action.
And all of this feeds better judgment and decision-making. Presence clears the internal noise so you can frame problems accurately, weigh tradeoffs clearly, and make decisions that are actually aligned with your values.
What does this look like practically? It's pausing before you respond. It's breathing and naming what's happening like, ”I notice I'm rushing right now, let me slow down so I can really hear you." It's mirroring back what you heard before jumping to solutions. It's asking one clarifying question before you recommend a path. It's matching your tone and pace to the moment and not to your overflowing inbox.
Listen, AI can draft messages, summarize meetings, polish emails, give you neutral phrasing, and even predict (and not necessarily accurate) outcomes. But it cannot be present. Only a self-aware leader can regulate their own state, attune to what's actually happening, and humanize a moment so people feel safe enough to tell the truth, align around meaning, and move forward together.
Only you can sense discomfort, confusion, or resistance in the moment and respond with nuance, humor, or reassurance.
Only you can create emotional connection. AI can suggest empathetic phrasing, but it cannot build genuine relationships where shared values, lived experience, and authentic emotion come through.
Only you can model vulnerability and trust. Whether it's owning a mistake or sharing a personal story, these are the moments that build credibility and they absolutely cannot be outsourced.
And only you can align communication with values and culture. Great leaders don't just explain what's happening, they reinforce why it matters, anchoring their message in the team's purpose.
The next leadership skill is…Owning the Hard Calls. AI can not Carry Responsibility.
Alright, let's talk about judgment and decision-making. About making the hard calls. About making and owning your decisions when there's no perfect option. This is another key aspect of Leader Awareness.
So what does it mean to own the hard calls? It's the practice of making consequential decisions when you don't have perfect information, when the path isn't clear, when every option has downsides. It's explicitly naming those trade-offs, committing to a path anyway, and accepting responsibility for the outcome without hiding behind tools, committees, or waiting for certainty that's never going to come. These are traits I’ve seen evident in my interviews with CEO’s on this podcast.
While AI can simulate dozens of scenarios for you, which actually can be very valuable, it’s your decision-making abilities and judgment that allows you to select one, and your leadership presence that lets you carries it.
Again, this sits squarely in Leader Awareness because of the need for self-knowledge. When you're self-aware, you've already translated your values into your decision matrix before you're in the heat of the moment, the heat of the decision. You know your biases. You know your risk tolerance, whether you tend to over-correct or under-correct, how to separate what’s suggested from what your deciding, all while owning the consequences either way.
So I want to be really clear about what this is and what it isn't. Owning the call is naming your constraints clearly, selecting the least-wrong option given what you know now, and closing the loop by following up. It isn't blaming "the data" when things go sideways. It isn't deferring endlessly because you're hoping for more clarity. And it definitely isn't outsourcing responsibility to an algorithm or a committee so you don't have to carry the weight of the decision.
So what does this look like in practice? It's stating clearly who owns the decision, what criteria you're using, and what trade-offs you're making in plain language, not corporate speak. It's setting a review date and being explicit about what would make you reverse course. It's communicating the why behind your decision, taking the heat from above, protecting your team below, and sharing credit broadly when things work out.
And then, and this is where the learning happens, it’s running brief after-action reviews to figure out what you'd do differently next time. Not to litigate who was wrong, but to actually learn.
Here's why AI can't do this: AI can propose options all day long. But only leaders can decide, and carry the moral and relational weight of that decision and stand in front of their teams and own the consequences. Models don't have values but they don't have a duty of care. They don't have social accountability. Responsibility isn't computational, it’s human.
So you might use AI to help you think through scenarios, summarize research at scale, distill reports and information into digestible takeaways in seconds, and even simulate options and forecast scenarios based on past data or hypothetical planning, and that's smart. But at the end of the day, you have to have enough understanding about the situation to frame the question, and provide the input. AI, after all, doesn’t drive itself.
Only you can decide what matters, where to look, what's worth asking.
Only you can weigh the implications, especially when logic alone isn't enough, like when there are ethical considerations, human costs, or risks that can't be quantified.
Only you can consider context.
And only you can own the outcome when the stakes are high.
The third skill is…Anchoring Teams to Purpose. AI cannot Give Work Meaning
The second pillar of People-Forward Leadership™ is Empowered Ecosystems, and this is really about how you motivate and empower your team members to be genuine partners in the work and critical thinkers who can solve problems without you. This only happens when you anchor them to purpose, when they can find meaning in their work and connect what they're doing to your mission and vision. Empowerment thrives when there’s a clear “why” and meaning and that’s not something AI can do.
Recent research shows that 85% of leaders agree that emotional intelligence and human connection are becoming essential to leading effectively in today's workplace. People don't just want to know what they're doing, they want to understand why it matters. And that meaning-making? That's deeply human work.
That's what anchoring to purpose does. It transforms how you help to connect their work to outcomes and not just tasks. You’re able to articulate, ”Here's what success looks like, here's why it matters, here's who it serves, here's how it connects to our mission, and here's the decision rights you have to figure out the best path forward.”
Now, AI can help with some of this. It can analyze data to show you what's resonating. It can help structure communication plans. It can draft purpose statements or help simplify complex ideas.
But here's what it can't do, and why you're irreplaceable in building this ecosystem, AI doesn't have an imagination. It can only remix what exists. It cannot paint a picture of a future that doesn't exist yet and show people why that future matters enough to commit to it.
AI doesn't know your people. It doesn't understand what motivates them, what their strengths are, what challenges they're facing, or how this work connects to what they care about. As a leader you can make purpose personal and specific, AI can’t.
Only you can rally belief across teams and stakeholders. Buy-in isn't just about clear messaging, it’s about trust, timing, and emotional resonance. Those are skills only humans bring to the table.
AI can polish the words, but only you can infuse work with purpose that inspires people to bring their best thinking and problem-solving to the table.
AI can draft purpose statements and create task plans and project templates. But it can't confer legitimacy. It can't grant decision rights. It can't model values under pressure when things get messy.
Only you can make the vision specific to real people and real problems. As a leader you can bring in customer pain points, employee hopes, and lived realities. AI doesn't know these things the way you do.
And only you can lead with conviction, choosing a path, anchoring people to the why behind that choice, connecting it to your mission and vision, and then granting them real autonomy to own the how. That's what creates partners, not subordinates.
When leaders don't do this work, teams drift. They execute tasks efficiently, sure. But they lose sight of purpose. They lose heart. And AI definitely can't fix that disconnect.
But when leaders do this well, when they anchor teams to a clear purpose and then empower them with real decision rights, people become critical thinkers and problem solvers. They don't just wait to be told what to do. They see a problem, they understand how it connects to the mission, and they solve it. That's an Empowered Ecosystem.
The bottom line is AI can help you articulate purpose, but only you can anchor people to it in a way that transforms them from task-completers into empowered partners and problem solvers which is at the heart of the second pillar of People-Forward Leadership™.
The fourth leaders shill is…Championing Curiosity and Growth. AI can not Create a Learning Culture.
Innovation can only thrive in an Adaptive Continuous Learning workplace culture, the 3rd pillar of the framework. This is about creating the conditions where curiosity thrives and growth becomes the norm.
The Center for Creative Leadership shows that leaders who exhibit high learning agility are 18 times more likely to be recognized as high-potential leaders. Eighteen times! And yet, only 16% of employers actively invest in adaptability programs. But when adaptability is embedded in organizations, employee engagement and reported innovation jump six times.
AI can widen your field of view and present you with ideas you haven’t considered. It can actually give you access to more information, more options, more perspectives than we've ever had before. But only you as the leader can create the conditions for learning in the workplace. You set the culture that says it's okay to ask questions, challenge assumptions, experiment, and even fail.
Like I said earlier, 27% of white-collar employees are now using AI frequently at work and that's nearly double what it was just two years ago, but as a leader how are you harnessing and guiding that usage to build an adaptive learning culture?
The edge isn't just having information, I mean we’re drowning in information. The edge is pairing curiosity with action. It's asking better questions and then actually experimenting to find answers.
A Harvard Business Review article I read suggested a way leaders can do this is by spanning organizational boundaries and building relationships across industries because learning happens in conversation, in experimentation, in cross-pollination with people who see things differently than you do.
While AI can generate ideas quickly, help teams overcome blank-page paralysis, suggest different approaches, and jumpstart brainstorming, it can’t connect the dots. Humans blend insights across domains, disciplines, and lived experience in ways AI simply cannot replicate.
Only you can challenge assumptions and question what's missing. AI can only work within the parameters you give it, but you’re the one who has to question the parameters themselves.
Only you can lead imaginative risk-taking and decide when it's time to take a leap and how to rally people behind bold ideas.
And only you can infuse ideas with meaning and give ideas emotional resonance and strategic relevance. Only you as the leader can connect the creative spark to the mission, to the people, to what matters.
And that’s it.
Now, to be clear I don’t want you to get the impression with all of this that I'm anti-AI. I’m not. My practice uses AI. I think these tools are extraordinary, and we should absolutely be using them strategically. But we need to be intentional about the leadership skills we’re strengthening as leaders because of AI and not in spite of it. AI won't deliver value simply because organizations spend money on tools and infrastructure. It delivers value when leaders develop the competencies needed to actually transform how their teams work so they can make full use of the technology's strategic potential.
The tools are not what creates the value, it’s your leadership.
Your leadership as you show up with presence, humanizing change through genuine connection and trust, not just polished messaging. That's Leader Awareness in action.
Your leadership in owning the hard calls by framing the right questions, setting ethical guardrails, and carrying the responsibility that comes with leadership instead of hiding behind data or algorithms. That's also Leader Awareness.
It’s your leadership that anchors teams to purpose by creating meaning that transforms people from task-completers into critical thinkers and problem solvers who own their work. That's building Empowered Ecosystems.
And it means your leadership as you champion curiosity and growth by creating the conditions where adaptive learning thrives, innovation flourishes, and experimentation is celebrated. That's Adaptive Continuous Learning.
LinkedIn's 2024 Workplace Learning Report found that 91% of learning and development professionals agree that human skills are more important than ever. That’s 91%. That means we know what’s important, the question is are we acting on it?
People Forward Leadership™is grounded in deeply human capabilities and when you understand that, you can introduce AI an accelerant, but never a replacement. AI can be used to extend your reach as a leader. To amplify your output as a leader. But never as a replacement to your leadership, your judgment, your meaning-making, your presence, your ability to create learning cultures.
So as you move through this week, I want you to pay attention and notice where you're leaning on AI in ways that strengthen your leadership, and where you might be outsourcing those leadership capabilities that you need to own. Notice where and how your presence is making a difference. Notice where clarity of purpose is transforming how your team shows up. Just notice. That awareness is where change starts.
And if you found value in today's episode, I’d love for you to take a moment to give the show a five-star rating and write a quick review. Also feel free to share a link to this episode to your colleagues and friends. This helps other leaders find us and helps us grow this movement of people-forward leadership together.
Until next time. keep leading people-forward in this age of AI.
See you soon!
