Rethinking Leadership, Work, and Human Connection in the Age of AI

0:00Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns the chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon.

0:37But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required,$15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high-performance loving.

1:05Iconic spaces that inspire. Personal training backed by real data. Unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and Pilates to strength and conditioning. Elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, and more. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

1:29Welcome to The Curiosity Shop, a show from the Fox Media Podcast Network.

1:38Hey everyone, welcome back to The Curiosity Shop. I finished my intensive teaching and I'm excited to do an Ask Me Anything. I posted just an open, what do you want to know? What do you want to hear me talk about? On a couple different social media platforms and pulled some of my favorite themes and questions. We've got a series of questions about leadership and careers. We have some about AI. Got a bunch of questions about rethinking and some questions about personal writing practices and productivity habits as well. So I'll tackle as many as I can. I'm gonna spend more time on some questions on others because they're more complicated.

2:14And I hope this is interesting for you as I think out loud in real time. I reserve the right to rethink anything I say today, as always. And if I do, I think that will be a sign of growth. And if I don't, I'll be glad that I didn't completely miss the mark on everything. So let's dive in. Here we go. All right. The majority of the questions were about leadership. So let's begin there. There's a great question from Mycola that I want to kick off with. The question is, how can leaders restore a credible connection between speaking up and being heard without creating the expectation that every suggestion will be adopted?

2:52I love this question. I think it's such an important question, both from a leadership perspective, but also from an employee perspective around how you can speak up without losing faith or becoming cynical. I first started thinking about this question years ago when I had a PhD student, John Sumanth, who did his dissertation on the question of whether it's possible to be too inclusive as a leader. And what he found was that, as you would expect, there are many benefits to seeking out ideas from other people to being a great listener. But leaders who are seen as receptive to all of the ideas all the time really struggled to prioritize what they wanted to act on and ultimately ended up getting less done.

3:33And since then, I've seen this dynamic over and over again in organizations. I think leaders bend over backward to tell people they have a voice, and then they can't possibly put all of the suggestions they get into practice. And at that point, people start to get discouraged. I think the mistake that many leaders are making in those situations is they're not being clear about what it means to have a voice. There's some classic research on this by McFarlane and Sweeney that has really stuck with me, where they point out that people want to have a say, even if they don't get their way. And I think that's the missing message that more leaders need to emphasize.

4:08To say, look, I'm going to consider every suggestion that gets raised. Ultimately, I am not going to be able to implement all of them. I've got to apply a filter, which is number one, what's most relevant to our mission and our values? Number two, what's strategically doable? Number three, what's actually affordable for us? And I think that conversation is a critical one to have. I think once you collect ideas and suggestions, the next step then is to clarify what criteria you're actually using to evaluate them. Ideally, this is done upfront, but it's not always feasible to do that or you're not always sure what you're looking for.

4:44at the beginning of the conversation. But once you've, whether you're doing a poll or a survey or a series of speed dates with your employees, once you've done that, the next step for leaders is really to sit down and say, okay, here's the screen that I applied. Here's what I'm looking for. And here's why I adopted some ideas and not others. And for those of you whose ideas were not adopted, that doesn't mean I don't like you. It doesn't mean that your idea wasn't good. It meant that I ran into a roadblock around whether it was feasible or whether it was a top priority right now. And please keep the ideas coming.

5:18And I'm going to keep looking for opportunities to apply as many of them as I can. I think that's a really valuable conversation. It's possible for leaders to be quote unquote too inclusive. But what I worry about much more is leaders who aren't inclusive enough, who end up silencing voice as opposed to welcoming it, who shut down ideas and dissent instead of taking it seriously. Those are leaders who are choosing not to learn, they're also leaders who leave their employees feeling devalued. And guess what groups are most likely to be silenced, ignored, and shut down? They are groups of people who lack power and status.

5:53It may be because they're not in the gender majority or the racial majority of the organization. It may be because they're not in the functional majority of an organization. I've seen this, for example, in workplaces that are engineering dominated. Often the salespeople are seen as second-class citizens. It may be just because they are the most junior person in the room. And I think the basics of leader inclusion, this is some work that was done by Kathy Phillips and Robert Livingston, start with just making eye contact with everyone on your team. What they show is that people who lack power or status in the team, when the leader just even glances at them, they're more likely to speak up and be heard because they literally feel seen.

6:35This is obviously harder to do in a virtual environment. But one of the ways that I like to navigate that personally is I'll use the chat window and say, hey, I noticed you've been a little quiet. Or I think it would be really important for the team to hear from you. Or I, you know, I'd actually I'm working on making sure we hear from people whose voices often go overlooked. And so here's a preview of where I'm going. Or my personal favorite. I don't think we have enough productive disagreement and challenge in this team. So can I just invite you to object to a point that I'm making and challenge me on it?

7:11And not only do I want to learn from your point of view, but I think it'll be a great opportunity to model for the rest of the team what a healthy challenge or confrontation actually looks like. All right, our next leadership question came from Andrew. The question is, what have you found separates leaders who successfully change an organization's culture from those who introduce good ideas but never get the organization to truly adopt them? It's almost like Andrew anticipated the previous question because it is the natural follow-up. What does it take to speak up and actually get your idea acted upon?

7:43I think there are probably three things that I would highlight here from both evidence and experience. The first one is that people who speak up effectively have enough passion to raise their idea and persist in getting it pursued, but also enough discipline and patience to wait for the right time and the right path. This is something I first saw when I was studying emotional intelligence in organizations. I published a paper years ago on the role of emotion regulation in speaking up. What I found was that people who experienced strong emotions were more likely to speak up and less likely to get hurt because oftentimes the very emotion that spurred them to act and speak up clouded their judgment about what's the right time, who's the right audience, and what's the most effective way to deliver the message.

8:32So let's break down the three key skills here. Number one is deciding to translate your emotion into action. And that requires some ability to say, okay, I've got to connect my emotions to my values and understand why is this important to me in the long run? Not just am I fired up about this now, but why does it matter? What principle of mine as being threatened that led me to feel righteous indignation or moral outrage or fiery passion and say, I've got to do something about this problem, or I've got to get this solution considered. That's the first step. Okay, so once you've clarified why this matters, the next step is to figure out when is the right moment to raise it.

9:13You probably don't want to do it during quarterly performance reviews. You may not want to do it when everybody's headed out for the holidays. Look for a moment when the organization has a little bit of breathing room or when the leader who has the most power to do something about your issue actually has some bandwidth and flexibility. And then I think the third piece, which is probably the most important one, is figuring out how to deliver the message in a way that's going to get heard. I think the most underutilized strategy for having upward influence is seeking the advice of the people above you.

9:46There's some great research on this by Katie Lillianquist, where she shows that when you seek advice, if you're genuine about it and you actually wanna learn from the people above you, three things tend to happen. The first one is you flatter that boss and they just, they think, wow, you're a genius. You knew to come to me. Secondly, when you seek their advice, you invite them to take your perspective and walk in your shoes. And that activates cognitive empathy and makes it more likely that they see the value of what you're proposing. And then number three, when they start to give you suggestions, they're taking some ownership over them.

10:22And together, those effects mean that somebody who might've been your adversary is more likely to become your advocate. So what does that look like concretely? It might be a conversation where you say, hey, I've got this idea. I'd love to make sure that it gets the attention it deserves, but I know people are busy and distracted or it might even be threatening to the way we've always done it in some people's eyes. I know you're great at making change happen around here. A lot of people look up to you. Can I maybe get a little bit of your guidance on how to bring this up and maybe what the right audience and the right moment would be?

10:55Best case scenario, that person actually joins you as a champion for your idea. Worst case scenario, you learn something that makes you more effective in your next pitch. The next leadership question came from Christina, who wants to know, looking at people who eventually become transformational leaders, what's the habit they develop years before they're ready for the role? Christina, this is such an important question. I was actually just talking with our students about it at Wharton. My biggest frustration in the work that I do with leaders is when they say, oh, wow, I wish I paid attention to this stuff when I was in business school or earlier in my career.

11:29And I think that's kind of the cardinal error of developing leadership skills is saying, you know what, what I need to do to build my career is I need to work on my technical skills, my functional skills. I need to get better at operations or marketing or finance and overlooking the fact that leadership development is a lifelong practice. The earlier you commit to it, the better your trajectory of growth becomes. I think one of the best examples of this was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. If you look at his I Have a Dream speech, he's 34 years old when he delivers that speech. And every time I watch it, I'm both moved and daunted, thinking, what am I doing with my life?

12:08And knowing I will never be that good, no matter how many decades of practice I get at public speaking. But if you actually roll back time, what you see is that MLK started practicing his public speaking skills when he was 15 years old, entering competitions, joining debates. The year that he gave the speech at the March on Washington, he gave over 300 talks. And so he was constantly riffing, practicing, and developing his ability to both deliver an urgent message and also inject the right emotion into it. And I think that's something that too few leaders do, right? Actually thinking about leadership as a skill that we should work on long before we assume the mantle or have the responsibility and authority to have people following us.

12:53I think that's a skill we can start working on from the very beginning of our careers. I don't think leadership improves in a vacuum. I think we need to practice the skills in places where we get feedback, where we have small groups of people following us and let us know what's working and where we can grow. And so in an ideal world, I would say starting from the day you finish school and get your first job, maybe even earlier during school, you've got a challenge at work, a core group of people who are letting you know when you're at your best and maybe what areas you need to consider developing further.

13:28We know that practice is not effective in a vacuum. We need feedback to know whether we're actually making productive changes. So I think the key habit to develop if you want to become a more transformational leader is actively seeking feedback. One of my mentors, Sue, asked for her to spend her whole career studying feedback-seeking as a form of proactivity. And she finds that the people who grow the most are the ones who are most consistently asking, what's the one thing I can do better? I think anytime somebody follows you, they're a potential coach, they're a potential teacher, they're a potential source of feedback.

14:02And committing to the regular practice of asking every single week that you work with other people, even if they're your peers and you're leading them informally, even if there are people above you and you're trying to influence them. If you commit to the weekly habit of asking, what is the one thing I can do better? And then maybe even inviting those people to hold you accountable for continuing to adopt that habit. I think that is a big step in the right direction and probably a headstart when it comes to becoming more transformational. Support for the show comes from Shopify. As the kids head back to school and everything slows down in the fall, it might seem like a strange time to want to start your own business.

14:40But every entrepreneur knows that you don't always wait for the right time. You can create the right time. Shopify can help you get things up and running. It's the e-commerce platform responsible for millions of sales worldwide. It has everything you need to break out of the brainstorming phase and create your first successful sale. Shopify's templates and AI tools can help you build a great looking website fast, no coding needed. There's also Shopify checkout, which helps more customers actually buy, and returning ones can do so in a single click. If questions come up, Shopify's built-in AI assistant sidekick can help you build, troubleshoot, and keep things moving.

15:19If you're ready to hear the sound of your first sale today, then head over to shopify.com slash curiosity to start your free trial today. That's right. You can start your free trial at shopify.com slash curiosity. Shopify.com slash curiosity.

16:03you can even bring your current device and phone number when you switch. To get your new wireless plan for just$15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash the shop. That's mintmobile.com slash the shop. Cut your wireless bill to$15 a month at mintmobile.com slash the shop. That's it. There's no catch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies.

16:40See mintmobile.com. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results. At Equinox, that's high performance loving. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com. Okay, our next set of questions is about rethinking, questioning assumptions, evolving beliefs, maybe even reversing course. And I think Rothy set the tone for this perfectly with the question, I would love to hear from you examples of where you haven't followed your own suggestions. Hypocrisy alert, I have never, ever been inconsistent. Okay, maybe I have. Maybe I'm even doing it right now.

17:22My career and my life is full of moments when I haven't followed my own suggestions. And often I don't discover it until I'm teaching or writing or podcasting. And I realized that I'm in the moment, not adopting the very thing I've been advising others on. But one of the moments that's just burned into my brain was early in my career. I was an avid student of organizational psychology. I'd read extensive evidence. I'd done an undergraduate thesis. I'd worked on multiple research projects. and I was working part-time as a manager. My job was to hire salespeople and there was a job that needed to be filled immediately.

17:58So I basically interviewed everyone who applied and there was one resume that just did not fit. It didn't make any sense at all. The guy was a math major and he built robots in his spare time. And I took one look at that resume and I said, yeah, not a fit for sales. There's no way this is gonna work. But we were desperate to hire. So I brought him in for an interview. And sure enough, just completely unqualified. And I had a weekly meeting with our president where I had to review all the candidates. And I got to that one and said, there is no way, no way that this guy is ever going to be a successful salesperson.

18:35We had a 45-minute interview, and he didn't make eye contact once. Now, this was long before I knew anything about neurodivergence. But our president looked at me and said, you know this is a phone sales job, right? And the embarrassment was overwhelming. Here I was judging somebody on a cue that was literally irrelevant to the job, and I had no awareness of it whatsoever. I had failed to follow the very practices that I'd already been studying, which involved identifying the criteria before looking at the candidates, figuring out what are the capabilities, values, and motivations that are most important for success in the job, and then assessing all the candidates on those.

19:21I had utterly failed at that. So I knew what I had to do. I had to go back to the drawing board and change the way that I was vetting candidates. A colleague and I ended up sitting down and saying, look, we've got to gather a work sample. Instead of having people talk about how they do the job, we're going to give them a chance to show how they can do the job. We decided to make it fun, and we also wanted to level the playing field so that people who had more experience in a given industry didn't have an advantage over anyone else. So we invited every candidate to sell us a rotten apple, figuring if you could sell that, you could sell anything.

19:54And I will never forget one candidate who came in and said, without even skipping a beat, look, this may look like a rotten apple, but it's actually an aged antique apple. You know the saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away? Well, because of the nutrients in the aging process, you only have to eat one of these a week. And then you can plant the seeds in your backyard and grow an apple tree. Now, I had some concerns about ethics and honesty after that, but I ended up hiring him, and he was the top performing salesperson in our company. And he was a math major who built robots for fun. I learned a great lesson from that experience.

20:33Not only did I need to follow the evidence that I'd already been studying, But I needed to give candidates a do-over. I didn't know this at the time because the data didn't exist, but there's brand new research from the U.S. Army showing that if you want to predict somebody's trajectory of performance and growth on a job, it's not how they do in the first interview that matters. It's the progress they make from the first interview to the second interview, the distance that they travel. That reveals not just their ability, but also their agility, their motivation and capacity to learn. And I think we live in a world where that's increasingly important.

21:07So how great would it be if every single job candidate got a do-over? I know in some ways a do-over sounds impractical. You're not gonna call back every candidate you've rejected and say, hey, just kidding, we wanna give you a second chance. I've found that it's actually efficient and effective to do that in the middle of an interview, to just pause and say, okay, we're halfway through the interview. Is there anything you'd like to retake? Or is there anything you did that you felt didn't represent you best? Let's give you another shot at that and see how it goes. Okay, here's another rethinking question from Karina.

21:39The question is, what's a belief you've reversed on and what changed your mind? I've actually completely reversed in my stance on tradition. I was for a long time, and I still am, a big fan of the saying, tradition is peer pressure from dead people. What I love about that meme is I find it so frustrating to see people and organizations cling to the way we've always done it just because it's a tradition, not because it actually serves a purpose. And I think that's one way that we get stuck in the past and end up having best practices that were built for a world that no longer exists. And if we're not careful, if we cling to tradition for tradition's sake, our knowledge, our skills, our habits can quickly become obsolete.

22:25What shifted my thinking on this was writing my new book, Vibe. I wanted to look at what makes family strong. How do you build collective solidarity? Not just a core family unit, but also in an extended family or a chosen family. I came away from that research, reading, and writing with a very different view. I think traditions are vital. I don't think they're just peer pressure from dead people. I think that mindless routines are maybe peer pressure from dead people. But I think that a well-defined tradition is what allows us to both symbolize and strengthen our values. It tells us what we stand for together.

23:03It's how we build cultures, not just in families, but in teams, in workplaces, even in friend groups. And so I think I've become a fan of thoughtful tradition and an ongoing critic of tradition for its own sake. All right, one more rethinking question. This one comes from Jay Nolt. The question is, why do people make their political allegiance so much a part of them that they aren't willing to rethink the decisions of a party? They make their political ideology so important that they can't criticize party decisions. So I originally wrote about this and think again, and I've learned a lot since the book came out five years ago.

23:38I think there are three core reasons why people tend to internalize political ideologies to the point where they struggle to question them. One is discomfort with uncertainty. We've talked about this a lot on the Curiosity Shop. Brene has spoken eloquently about the challenges people face wrestling with uncertainty. In times of turbulence, people cling to stability. They search for coherence. And a political ideology is a very, very robust source of that. Second is belonging. People want to feel like they're part of a group. and given the energy and the polarization that exists around politics, it often seems that if you're not with your own side, you're actually against them.