S1|Ep61 Leading with Heart: Essential Human Skills to Balance the Power of AI Advancements

In today’s episode of Digital Transformation & AI for Humans, we explore what it really means to lead with heart in a world transformed by Artificial Intelligence and Automation.

Join me, Emi Olausson Fourounjieva, in a powerful conversation with Malcolm Larri – an Australian thought leader living in Stockholm. Malcolm is the founder of Brave Personal Development, a TEDx Host and Conference Host, a Course Director at Berghs School of Communication and IHM Business School, and a sought-after Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant.

🔑 Key Discussion Points:

• Why empathy, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness are becoming non-negotiable skills in AI-powered organizations
• The invisible shift from reactive management to visionary leadership
• How leaders can stay human while embracing AI, avoiding disconnection in tech-driven environments
• The true power of vulnerability and authenticity in modern leadership
• How to balance high performance with human connection, even in fast-scaling companies
• A real story of heart-centered leadership in action - and its ripple effect
• One powerful advice to leaders who want to stay ahead - not just by adopting AI and adapting to AI, but by amplifying their humanity as their superpower

💡 Whether you're a CEO, founder, people leader, or future-focused innovator, this episode will challenge you to reframe success and rediscover your humanity as your greatest leadership edge.

🔗 Connect with Malcolm on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malcolmlarri/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Leadership with Malcolm
• 9:44 Evolution of Leadership Through History
• 18:34 Human Skills in the AI Era
• 28:32 Visionary Leadership vs. Management
• 35:20 Human-Centric Culture in Tech Environments
• 42:19 Career Shifts and Changing Priorities
• 47:11 Vulnerability and Authenticity in Leadership
• 51:51 AI as Leadership Amplifier
• 57:34 Final Advice and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, emi. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. This episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. In today's episode, we dive into leading with heart and focus on the essential human skills to balance the power of AI advancements with my fantastic Australian guest living in Stockholm, sweden, malcolm Lari. Malcolm is the founder of Brave Personal Development, a TEDx host and conference host, a course director at Burs School of Communication and IHM Business School, and a sought-after leadership and culture transformation consultant. Welcome, malcolm, it's a great pleasure to have you here in the studio.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Hey, it's nice to be back in the studio with you. Thanks for having me back.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Amazing. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description below. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. I would also love to invite you to get your copy of the AI Leadership Compass Unlocking Business, growth and Innovation. Find the Amazon link in the description below. Malcolm, to start with, I would love to hear about your life story, about your journey. What brought you into the space of leadership and transformation?

Speaker 2: 1:50

yeah, well, it's actually been a long, long journey, many, many years.

Speaker 2: 1:54

It started back in 1997 when I started studying NLP neuro linguistic programming and that led me into a coaching career, and then I was coaching individuals, doing life coaching, and then I started to attract more people in business and the business world, and so, over a few years, I really started to move into working with a lot of leaders, working with leadership teams, helping to motivate them, helping them to get clarity, helping them understand the power of language to actually, you know, communicate more powerfully, ask better questions, and so that led to a very long career working with thousands and thousands of leaders at this point, both in workshops, online, in person, doing workshops in something like 27 countries, four continents, keeping busy during this journey.

Speaker 2: 2:49

And one of the things that I've really seen over the course of that time is just a huge evolution in leadership in terms of what people expect from their leaders, what leaders want to experience as leaders. And I think there's been a really, really, really big evolution of leadership from simply being management of tasks and outcomes to being a much more human, focused endeavor where it's really about empowering people and building people up. So, yeah, it's been a long journey. Now it's been 27-something years that I've been working with leaders and it just gets more and more exciting every year on that journey.

Speaker 1: 3:38

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing. It sounds like a truly long and beautiful journey. It sounds like a truly long and beautiful journey and very impactful journey. As you mentioned the evolution in the area of leadership, I would like to ask you a Yais reshaping the way we work, we lead, we behave, we live, but what does it truly mean to lead with heart in this new era? Why does it matter now more than ever, and do you think, overall, that today it's more meaningful, more important to discuss these topics than before, and we have to lift up this conversation to the next level yeah, really good.

Speaker 2: 4:24

And you know, one of the things that I think is uh been really interesting is how technology, you know, really reshapes different roles over time.

Speaker 2: 4:37

And you know, I think we, if we're going to talk about how ai is going to affect leadership, we need to do a little bit of historical reference.

Speaker 2: 4:44

Because if you think about how leadership happened in the modern business world, it all came out of the Industrial Revolution. So traditionally people worked on the land 95% of people worked in agriculture in the 1700s or something like that and then this industrial revolution happened which brought people out of the countryside and into cities and into factories, and there we had sort of the birth of modern leadership in terms of business. And if you were to track leadership styles over different eras, you know basically the people who are managing people in factories and when the industrial revolution happened were more or less kind of slave drivers. You know they weren't very empathetic. They were just like come in, do your work, you might die at your machine, that's fine, we'll get another person to replace you. And then after, let's say, the second world war, a lot of leadership that happened in the birth of the corporate era was very sort of militaristic was a very hierarchical and militaristic style of leadership.

Speaker 1: 5:51

And then as it developed.

Speaker 2: 5:53

Over time, the hierarchies in business started to flatten out and leaders were much more spending time with their people, becoming more empathetic. And then, when digitalization happened, it sort of flattened out the hierarchy again and that meant leaders could be interacting with their people all the time lots of quick chats, quick messages. Teams tended to get smaller and more agile as businesses became more digital, and one of the things that we can see now is that we're at a point of time, this inflection point, where AI is going to come in and take over a lot of tasks for both people in their teams, but also for the leaders themselves. And one of the things that I see is really interesting is that you know leaders are going to have much, much more information about what's happening in their teams in real time, where projects are up to. They'll have dashboards for every project which is giving real-time updates. You know a lot of meeting scheduling will be handled.

Speaker 2: 7:04

Some of your email will start answering itself, and this is going to lead to a very interesting thing, because one of the things that I work with leaders a lot is the fact that a lot of leaders spend a lot of time managing a lot of time, like when I sit with a group of leaders, they can say well, I'm spending at least 50% of my time managing things and the other 50% sort of leading people, developing them.

Speaker 2: 7:34

And what's going to happen is that there's going to be a shift where leaders will have much more time to spend time on the human side of the equation. And I think that you know leaders are not going to get replaced by AI, but leaders who use AI to be more human are going to be the ones that are actually going to thrive in the next era. And for leaders who are making this transition now and I've actually just been running a workshop called Leading in the Age of AI we're really looking at how do you maximize your knowledge, wisdom and experience in this next era to empower this next set of workers that are coming into the workforce. And something for people just to ponder is that you know a lot of university students in Sweden, where I'm living, will graduate after the summer.

Speaker 2: 8:31

You know right, it's like August, I think when they graduate and those students that are leaving university this year, in 2025, will basically have means that they're spending their whole life in an AI empowered workplace era, and so it's really the beginning of like a new wave of leaders, like coming in in a way and just like remote working was really in inflection point during the pandemic and sort of broke the normal norms of how business ran. Ai is going to do the same thing over the next 24 months huge shifts, huge transformations. But, most importantly, leaders are going to have to move away from being addicted to getting credit and, you know, a sort of status through managing a lot of tasks and becoming much more strategic and much more human-focused.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Exciting times. It is great that you are pointing out this shift, because it's exactly now that we are getting the first generation of AI-driven leaders who are going to reshape the space of leadership and how we work, how we communicate and how we develop business. But still, malcolm, in a world obsessed with performance, productivity and artificial intelligence in all forms, shapes and applications, what human skills are being quietly undervalued? Yet what are those which are becoming mission critical for leaders?

Speaker 2: 10:15

Yeah. So I think that two things really are going to be incredibly important. So when technology comes into any area, it shifts the value of the things that are in the playing field that it comes into. So, in terms of leadership, a lot of things that leaders used to do like really, let's just take something basic like scheduling people managing meetings, like a lot of sort of just basic things that leaders probably spend a percentage of their time doing, whether they're high-end leaders or low-end leaders but basically all of the productivity stuff is going to get managed by machines much better and it's going to take away a lot of that noise that it's in people's day. And so then what becomes more valuable is the things that the machines can't do, the things that technology can't do.

Speaker 2: 11:15

So human connection, empathy, human communication skills are going to become incredibly more valuable in leadership, and so leaders that have poor communication, are not empathetic, are not good at coaching people one on one, are not good at empowering people through, you know, language and one on one meetings, those kinds of things.

Speaker 2: 11:40

They're going to be the ones that really struggle with this change, because once you manage the logistical part of your job, the practical part, the human part, will become so much more valuable, and you know I actually teach you know speaking skills and communication skills at different business schools, and one of the things that I'm really excited about is that the ability to speak and communicate really well as a leader, or even anyone as a professional, is going to become much, much more valuable over time.

Speaker 2: 12:16

And it's really interesting to me because you know I was just before we came on here I was looking at a few LinkedIn posts and I can already tell the ones that are written by ChatG, can already tell the ones that are written by ChatGPT and the ones that have been written by a person who's really thought about something they want to say. And I think that written communication in value will go down because you know a lot of AI assistance can come in there. But your ability to communicate and connect with people and have good conversations and understand their life and their context, that's going to be really something that will increase in value and something that all leaders should be working on right now.

Speaker 1: 12:57

I couldn't agree more, and I also thought that it is truly difficult to empower others unless you are empowered yourself. So working on ourselves, on our individual development, is important as never before as well.

Speaker 2: 13:16

I also think that having a vision of the kind of legacy you want to leave as a leader is actually more important now, rather than because I think that a lot of the career ladders around leadership are going to shift and change as well, and the impact you can have as a leader at any level of the ladder has always been available to everybody. But I think the level of influence you can have as a leader now is going to expand really radically much, much bigger, and so that also means that, while there's a lot of challenge built into this AI shift, there's also an incredible amount of opportunity. But it does, like you said, you know, take some self-awareness. You have to empower yourself, and this is why I created the you know, leading in the Age of AI workshop, which I'm currently running around different cities in Sweden, because I want leaders to be thinking now about the legacy they want to leave, so they can begin thinking about how AI can actually accelerate that journey.

Speaker 1: 14:27

Wonderful. I totally agree. It is important and it is going to be increasingly more impactful and that influence is going to just keep growing. You've worked closely with leaders navigating transformation for so many years. What are some inner shifts in mindset, in presence or emotional intelligence that separate those reactive managers from visionary leaders today?

Speaker 2: 15:00

yeah, good question.

Speaker 2: 15:01

And you, one of the things that I have seen is that, when it comes to being a visionary leader, I often do a process, you know, in my workshops, which I call hustle and serve. And hustle is really like really help helping leaders understand the difference between management and leadership. And so, you know, I'll ask leaders, you know I'll write hustle on one you know poster and then I'll say what do you do all day, what are the things you're busy with? And they'll say things like I have emails, I do meetings, I do admin, I do planning, I write strategy documents, I make PowerPoints. You know they write all these tasks that they're doing now. And then on another sheet I write the word serve that they're doing now. And then on another sheet, I write the word serve. And I say so tell me, when you think of a great leader, what are the qualities that make a great leader? And then they come up with all these things like empathy, listening, they coached me, they encouraged me, they were brave, they were kind, they. You know all of these different qualities. And then when I put the two posters next to each other, it becomes really, really obvious that management is really being task focused and leadership is much more on the serve side of helping and empowering other peoples to do their work and have their life be the best professional experience possible.

Speaker 2: 16:25

And so when you talk about a visionary leader, a visionary leader is able to attach, you know like, lead people towards a very, very big vision for the company, for the team, a big business outcome by empowering the people rather than pushing the people and forcing them to do it. It's really leading, you know, in the true sense of the word, of helping people move towards that vision and overcome the obstacles that are in place. And you know, one of my other workshops is called Managing People, managing Change, and we really look at what is the psychology and strategy that people have when it comes to managing change. And visionary leaders are really able to navigate different personality types very, very well, because some people are much more resistant to change than others. And that's not necessarily a negative thing, because some people are just naturally more cautious in their decision making. And we need both people who move quickly and move slowly in companies to make sure that we have a good balance between entrepreneurship and moving forward ethically and safely.

Speaker 2: 17:46

But for me, a visionary leader is one that's able to really show people why this is an exciting why that we need to move towards it and then lifting all the people up in terms of their abilities, their skills, their belief about themselves so the team can continue to move towards that strategic vision. And we we talk about visionary leaders a lot, some of these really big leaders like steve jobs and bill gates and all these people who've built mega companies being very visionary, all these unicorn startups. But I think a visionary leader is any leader that can really empower a team to move towards a challenging goal and, in the process, grow themselves as a leader and grow their team until they hit that goal and then be excited for the next step. So I think it's.

Speaker 2: 18:42

You know, being visionary is available to leaders at all levels of the ladder, and I would hate for any leader that's listening to this to think, well, I have to be a C-level leader before I get to do that. You know, I've seen visionary leaders working with small teams in really small parts of a business, in really small parts of a business, but they do their job so well and they leverage their reputation as a team so well that everybody in the team is excited to participate. Everyone in the team feels proud of what they do. Everyone in the team feels proud of their contribution to making that piece of the puzzle happen. So, yeah, I really encourage all leaders who are listening to this to have an ambition, to be visionary and to push their teams forward.

Speaker 1: 19:34

Absolutely brilliant, and I also feel that now, when we are really going through such a powerful transformation on so many levels, it is about time. You mentioned a few leaders who have been role models for quite a long time, but I personally feel that it's about time to review our values and probably find new role models as well, so that we can shift and transform towards how we want to see the future and who we want to refer to when we are creating that new reality for ourselves and for those we care about, while we are working on developing the legacy we are going to leave behind. So how can leaders develop a more human-centric culture, even in tech-driven, fast-scaling environments where speed often overshadows sensitivity and performance is front and center?

Speaker 2: 20:40

Yeah. Well, one thing that AI will definitely do is speed up business, and I think that with speed, we often become less human, and that one of the challenges is that AI will come and take off a certain set of pressures and challenges on us and will create another set of challenges. I want to show you something. Just hang on a second. Yes, I'm just getting a little prop here so when I was growing up, telephones look like this.

Speaker 2: 21:10

And for the people who are listening and not watching, I'm holding up an old 1970s telephone that you, you know, was plugged into a wall and when I first started my working life, I had the next version of this. And the next version of this, of course, was, instead of having this rotary dial, it just had buttons, and you know so for me to call research and call 100 customers, as a young salesman, you know, 18 years old, my first sales job working in an office, I sat at a desk with this push button phone and a set of yellow pages, phone books, and I called 100 customers and that might take me a week because I had to find them and it was like slow and there was no answering service and all of this other stuff, right. So business moves slowly and the pressure there was. There was a lot of friction in the system your ability to find a customer, get to to a customer, serve a customer. It was a lot of friction in the system.

Speaker 2: 22:08

Technology comes along and allows me to search the web, sort through things, find those hundred customers that I could call, but the thing is, is that customer's probably getting a hundred other calls that day from people because the search engines took friction out of the system, but move the pressure to another place, and so I think that one of the things that we need to be thinking about as leaders now is to start to think about a couple of things. If we want to have a human-centered culture, we need to think about what is the new pressures and stresses that are going to come on to our teams when AI hits. So one of the things that I think that will happen in terms of leadership and leading people is that there'll be a lot more expectation for teams inside business ecosystems to deliver things faster to other team members and in the value chain that they work in. So if you're in the marketing department, people used to think you wait a week to get an answer or something from the marketing department, and that'll become like why didn't the marketing department create this whole thing for us today? Right, it'll just be new pressures, and so one of the things to recognize as a leader is to notice where the pressure in your system is moving from and moving to. So people are no longer stressed about their inbox, because their inboxes are very automated, but now they have more pressure on delivery and they have more pressure to know what's the right decision and what's the wrong decision.

Speaker 2: 23:51

And so I think, when it comes to being a really human-centered leader, having a human-centered culture, one of the things that I think is really, really important is to recognize that in professional life there are always stresses and also risks, and for a lot of people in teams, risk is a lot about reputation. When visionary leaders ask people to do something, one of the biggest resistances people have is what will people think if I make a wrong decision or if I fail at this task? And what I think will happen is that the things that people used to be afraid of they won't be afraid of anymore because they'll have a lot of technological help, but then that risk and that reputational stress will just move somewhere else in the value chain. It'll move to a new thing, and so having a human-centered culture is, I think, about really having discussions about this, and I really encourage the leaders that I work with to talk to their teams about what are your stresses now and where do you think it's going to be in six months, and preempt this. And part of part of having a really human-centered culture is also recognizing that post-pandemic people's lives and work have merged in a more fluid way and the sort of idea of when people are working and what productivity is has really shifted. And so again back when I started work. You came to work at 8.30 in the morning and you left five o'clock in the afternoon and you worked your 40 hours and your boss was there and they could see you doing it. And now work is a much more fluid thing. I mean, work can happen wherever the internet is. You can be sitting in a cafe in Spain and writing a report just as well as you writing it in the office next to your colleagues.

Speaker 2: 25:56

So for me, one of the other things about human-centred culture in modern leadership is to say people have all these tools, they have all this autonomy. Are they doing well with it? Where do they need help? And to also not to impose boundaries that are very traditional on teams simply because it's how you did it before and I think that you know, as we move forward, you know a lot of the as I said before, a lot of the stresses are going to move from one place to another.

Speaker 2: 26:29

But it's also about, as a leader, giving your team enough freedom to sort of build and create their own way of working and managing their tasks, using this new technology and being brave enough as a leader to let them, because I think the way leaders moving forward will have more overview of what their teams are doing, because they'll be able to see who's doing what who's you know, productivity dashboards and everything. But the people that work for them will have much, much more autonomy about how they solve tasks and get things done where they work. When they work, it's going to be quite radically different. So leaders now need to be much more focused just on outcomes and and relationship with their people, and I think productivity as a metric is going to be, I won't say less important, but less of a focus for leaders. Yeah, yeah, because I think a lot of the best productivity ideas are not going to come from the leaders. That's going to come from the tech.

Speaker 1: 27:41

That's for sure I totally agree and I really appreciate your take on the fact that there is a trend, that the pressure points are going to move and it is up to each and every leader to understand how is it going to evolve and what can they do to prepare to that shift already today. And of course, the definitions of success itself, of productivity and many other key performance indicators we are used to apply to our business growth evaluation are going to shift, change, transform or probably just be removed out of our evaluation just because they don't fit in in the new reality anymore.

Speaker 2: 28:32

Yeah, and let me tell you a quick story that happened. This is a really good example of like changing priorities and shifting priorities. I was part of a consulting project that was happening with one of the big four accounting companies I won't mention which one, but what happened after the pandemic was suddenly they had much, much less women in their organization. And this was a really big organization, 25 000 people plus really big. They had much less women applying to move up the ladder into the C-suite or into the very senior levels. Why is this happening? Why are we suddenly getting this sort of stagnation? We did a survey of female leaders in the company about whether they wanted to be promoted, where they felt, and what happened after the pandemic was that a lot of women felt that they would actually rather prioritize other parts of their life than their career. I conducted a few interviews for this company with some of their female leaders, and they said one of the things that they really felt was that if they went up the ladder further, that their professional life would be better but the quality of their life would be lower, and so it was a really interesting kind of revelation to me that how the pandemic and remote working sort of had shifted people's prioritization. And one lady said to me earning another $20,000 a year but losing much more of my time, having to travel more, not being at home as much, she said, for me that's just not a win. I'd rather earn less money, have higher quality of life. Example from just one project but it sort of showed me that the technology of remote working, which kind of really evolved really rapidly, you know, with zoom and all these mentimeter and mirror and all these tools that people have to remote work like that technology shifted people's outcomes and shifted people's vision of what their professional life could look like. And of course, the pandemic is now four years ago, sort of let's say four or five years since the pandemic dropped. And I can now see that people who entered the workplace young, like university age students that I teach at business schools, now have a very different vision of what they want their life to look like. They want their work life balance to be, you know, really really good, and they've never worked before. They're coming into a world of work and it's like no, I want my career to look like this. And they've never worked, so they don't have any anything else to measure against. So I think it's a really good example the ones that I just gave of how technology shifts people's priorities. It changes their vision of what their professional life should look like. And also one other thing I'll just drop, jump in and say is that I think that people are going to be much more mobile in their careers in the sense of rather than and this was also something that came out of working with these big four companies, which are very much a hierarchical pyramid is that, you know, people don't see themselves doing one job the rest of their lives anymore. They see themselves having a career here and then doing a pivot to something over there.

Speaker 2: 32:16

And I meet people all the time who have really interesting career pivots now. And I'll meet a leader and I'll say how did you end up working in product development? And it was like I was a nurse and it's like you were a nurse. It's like, yeah, I was a nurse and then I decided I wanted to work, you know, and then I did a pivot into selling medical products and now I'm in product design because I could see, as a nurse, that these products could be better and more usable, and so people can have really interesting career transitions, you know.

Speaker 2: 32:50

I mean, look at my own life. I went from being a salesman to a professional musician, to a coach, to working in event management, to going back to coaching and then you know doing what I'm doing now. And I was actually having sauna with one of my neighbors the other day because in, you know, sweden, everyone's like all about the sauna and being healthy, and I was telling you he was he's much, he's like 20 years younger than me, 25 years younger than me, and I was telling him all the things he's done, it's like wow, it's so amazing how many careers you've had, right, and I think in the future that's going to really accelerate. So that's another thing just to really think about is that people's mobility in the workplace has radically changed and on average, people stay in a position an average of two years and with a company an average of 3.5 years right now in the Nordics. So very, very mobile workplace as well.

Speaker 1: 33:53

I absolutely love your examples and I must admit it resonates with me because that's my take on the evaluation of what is worth to do and what is not worth to do, and how important the life quality overall is and the values changed. We've seen so many different things during the last five years that of course you can't unsee what you have seen and it impacts us on a daily basis in our choices, in our preferences, in our way of planning our future. And I also see the same trend that those career transitions. Sometimes they're absolutely incredible and I couldn't even imagine that somebody can shift from the one to another one. Those two are not even always logically connected in my world, but in fact it looks like if it works really well and I think it is also enriching for many verticals and for many roles when people get the chance to come with new, fresh energy, with that excitement and engagement and really do the best of what they have to offer.

Speaker 2: 35:13

Yeah, and I think as well like there used to be this big fear of what if CV looked like and people really scared about having a CV that made sense to a recruiter, and I really see that that is really going away and I'm really excited about that because I used to tell people please don't live your life based on a piece of paper that a recruiter reads once every five years.

Speaker 2: 35:35

You know that's not a good way to make career decisions, but I really see people moving away from that. I have to have CV value and people worried about having a gap of a year in their CV. I feel like a lot of that fear is now really dropping away and even companies being actually much more excited to have somebody that has a lot of mobility in their career. I read this morning over breakfast that Deloitte they're hiring people who don't have university degrees and it was sort of talking about they're looking for different skills and so you're like even, whereas having a lot change on your cv 10 years ago might have been a negative, suddenly it's a positive right so it's like this person's really changeable and adaptable.

Speaker 2: 36:25

That's good.

Speaker 1: 36:25

We need that exactly, and we also need to live our life to get that life experience, the wisdom we might get, and also get a chance to do what we feel we would like to do, to not gather and collect all those regrets by the end of the life.

Speaker 1: 36:45

That we could try and do that and that was a huge dream of mine and I never got a chance to do it just because of and that, because of the reason it wasn't worth it, it wasn't worth stopping and not trying and not living who you really feel you are and what you want to do.

Speaker 1: 37:05

So I'm also like you, a person who tried many different things, lived many different lives, you can say. But at the same time, all that is just adding up to your personal value, to a personal experience and wisdom, and you're just getting better, like the wine which is getting better the longer it waits for somebody to come in touch with it. I feel that it is really a beautiful shift and I'm looking forward to see how the world is going to react to those transformational moves and steps in a few years of time from now, because everything is shifting so incredibly fast. I see many leaders are frustrated and stressed and they don't catch up and that's understandable, but certain qualities are really needed and they need to be developed. By the way, I can't not ask you about what are the qualities Deloitte is preferring now. What are those skills?

Speaker 2: 38:15

it was in the article that I read it was, uh which was a sort of harvard business review article, I think, if you want to look at it, but it was, you know, really looking at, they want adaptable and changeable people, but also they're recognizing that a lot of things that were really critical skills or pieces of knowledge to know, ai is going to know. So, for example, if you're a management consultant and you're going to write a report about importing goods to Paraguay, you know maybe you needed an expert on business in Paraguay and the United States or something for that consultant to be valuable, but AI is going to know most of that stuff anyway. So then you need a different set of skills, which is, you know, relationship building with the client, your ability to sort out insights. So I think that one of the shifts that those big four companies are seeing and trying to navigate is what happens if all our domain expertise is online and available to everybody and can be sorted intelligently by an AI, then our value as consultants is going to shift, and so, therefore, we need people who are really good at communicating, really good at sharing insights, not necessarily gathering them and communicating them.

Speaker 2: 39:40

So, yeah, they're looking for a bunch of different skills and a lot of the skills they used to need, maybe an MBA or an accounting degree. Maybe not everybody in their team needs to have that. Some people will need to have it, but not everybody. And so, yeah, really big shift, really big shift, and I think that this really talks to the shift that ai will bring, where having wisdom and life experience can be much more value than than having just a specific knowledge in a specific area in a lot of jobs. It's going to be a really exciting time.

Speaker 1: 40:23

Exactly. I just thought about the fact that yesterday night, just before our interview, I had a conversation with Chad GPT and that was exactly the take on the values that your wisdom, you have your life wisdom. I can't have that and that's a huge difference and that is such a huge advantage for you. It said to me so you know really that value, it is something we as human beings have and have to appreciate it as well in a completely different way and position it as a true value.

Speaker 2: 41:03

And I think this is a time where being older is actually going to be really valuable in a technological change. Before, being older used to kind of be a negative when it came to technology changes, but AI, I think, is going to be one where having a lot of life and work experience is going to be really, really, really valuable. So you know, for instance, you know AI could come up with really good suggestions that are ethically not great. Come up with really good suggestions that are ethically not great and your ability as an older person to say yes, that's good, but potential brand damage, or I've seen this before. Having a lot of business and life experience combined with AI, I think is actually going to really advantage people who are a little bit older and more experienced in the workplace when it comes to leading in this age of AI, for sure.

Speaker 1: 42:01

I feel that in today's interview we are sharing so many good news and positive shifts that everybody is going to be empowered and look at the reality and at the future in a new way, more positive way. What's your take on vulnerability and authenticity in leadership? Can being too human ever be a risk, or is it now a requirement for the true influence?

Speaker 2: 42:32

Look, I think you have to be professionally appropriate with vulnerability. So I've seen some leaders kind of take the vulnerability narrative quite far and into their personal lives and I think that you need to really think about when you're being vulnerable. In a professional setting, I think it's good to be vulnerable at some level setting. I think it's good to be vulnerable at some level but at the same time, like I also think that you should also keep some professional distance. And I think that I've seen some young leaders maybe even make their teams a little bit nervous about their ability to lead them because the leader's sort of showing too much vulnerability and not enough grit and determination. And it's like if the leaders they're going, this is really hard and I feel stressed and I I can't cope and I feel like I'm on the edge of burnout. If the leader's saying that to their team, it's yes, it's yes, it's vulnerable, but is it helpful? So I think when we talk about vulnerability and leadership, we need to think about who we're vulnerable with. Like if you're a leader and you're telling your team that you're stressed and on the edge of burnout and these things, probably good to tell that to someone at your level or above rather than down to them. I think a really good way to be vulnerable in a professional way is to talk about your past failures, things that you tried and didn't work, and how you rebounded from those things. It's okay to show your team you're under stress as well, but not all the time. Be appropriate with it, you know. But also, for instance, you could say to your team I once had a boss that was going through a really difficult divorce. At one stage the person told us look, I'm going through a difficult divorce right now. I'm probably not going to be as available to you and I'm probably going to be a little more just direct because I just need to. I'm just trying going to be as available to you and I'm probably going to be a little more just direct because I just need to. I'm just trying to manage myself a lot. So I think that was really appropriate for that person to do at that moment.

Speaker 2: 44:45

But, yeah, let's just really think about, as professionals, as leaders, what vulnerability we're showing to who. Yeah, if you're falling apart, tell that to somebody above and get help. But also, if you're if with your team, show them that you've made mistakes. If you do make a mistake, say, hey, I was completely wrong about this decision. I thought I was right, I was wrong. You know, be vulnerable in that way, admit your mistakes and liabilities. But I also think that this idea of a leader being vulnerable all the time is more of a linkedin meme than a practical reality, and I see a lot of things on linkedin that really make my eyes roll, because it's like some levels of vulnerability are just downright inappropriate, number one but also not effective in leadership. So professional vulnerability is very contextual. Think about why you're doing it, who you're doing it to. What is your outcome for being vulnerable with this group at this time and is the vulnerability and this is the key takeaway, emi is the vulnerability that I'm showing to my team building trust or breaking trust, because vulnerability can do both.

Speaker 1: 46:07

So spot on those two words context and relevance. They were with me while I was listening to you and I totally agree. You also have to keep in mind how is it going to impact others, those who are seeing you as a role model. Is it going to be something constructive for them or is it going to put them into a place where they won't know how to handle their situation anymore because of your vulnerability? But once again, now we are down to the level of wisdom and deeper understanding and professionalism which is oftentimes coming with experience life experience as well. Can you share a story of a leader who embraced heart-centered leadership in the age of artificial intelligence and what kind of transformation or impact that led to?

Speaker 2: 47:07

Yeah, one leader that I'm working with has really decided to go very deep into AI and they actually hired an ai expert to create a ai avatar of themselves. So they've actually decided to go all in and their mission is to have their ai avatar. That they're building with this AI consultant who's really helping them do it in a good and safe way is to double her capacity. So, as a CEO, she really wants to be in the last five years of her career, wants to be really, really effective and create a really, really really effective and create a really really big win for her organization and her people. And so I think that she's been very clever because she's realized if the AI can do a lot of my lowest value tasks, yeah, in a good way, like even replying to emails, you know, and doing these things if the AI suggests a really good reply, that she can take her company to a completely different level in the last five years of her working life before she exits. So she's really looking at turning the five years of her career into 10 years of performance and I think that's incredibly exciting.

Speaker 2: 48:54

When you think about AI in that way, how much impact.

Speaker 2: 49:01

Imagine the long-term impact of having 10 years of productivity instead of five, and how many more leaders she can empower. How many more leaders she can enhance empower, how many more leaders she can enhance. How, if her company grows the way she expects it to grow, she will end up employing hundreds more people, creating hundreds more career paths, like I mean, at the end of the day, the impact that she can have because of AI. It's incredibly phenomenal. So, for me, this is just a great example of someone, of a leader, who's seen a really powerful vision for their career as a leader and impact they can have, and is using AI to do something that previously would not have been possible or, if it was was possible, it would probably be very hard, difficult, exhausting and painful, right, but for me, it's a very exciting example of a leader taking a technology and using it to create an outcome that's extremely exciting. It's really made them incredibly excited about the next five years, which is probably the final five years of their career.

Speaker 2: 50:22

But the question is then does it become more heart-centered when she replaces herself with an avatar and focuses on what she recognizes is that every leader, no matter what level you're at, you know there's a group of things that you do that are just productivity and task focused, that you don't need to put your heart into. You need to put your intellect into, your experience into but it's not really that much human focus. And so she's decided to take that part of the business so she can actually spend much more time on the heart-focused, human-facing parts of the business.

Speaker 2: 51:07

That is about prioritization and what really matters, what we worked on together was really looking at what are the things that you do like? You know, really pulling her like. It took quite a few months of really looking at her, getting her to track what she spent time on and for us to prioritise those things, but once she prioritised them it was really really clear that she could get back. You know she could give half of her tasks away to an ai and even if the ai creates, let's say, 30 productivity increase, you know that is an enormous amount of time over five years that she can put back into people and developing people and leaders and also developing someone to take her role as long as heart centricity is a part of that equation, it is absolutely beautiful and it becomes so much more powerful and impactful.

Speaker 1: 52:09

Thank you for sharing this example. I believe that there will be more such examples around us and we're going to recognize how fast everything is moving, and hopefully it is also moving in a controlled way and in the right direction. Malcolm, what is the most powerful advice you would offer to leaders who want to stay ahead, not just by adopting AI and adapting to AI, but by amplifying their humanity as their superpower?

Speaker 2: 52:43

Yeah, I mean this is a great question to end on, because I think that the real takeaway here is build a vision for the next 10 years of your leadership that is not based on the technology, but thinking about how technology could accelerate that vision, because, at the end of the day, ai is just a tool. That telephone that I held up before it was just a tool. It was compared to riding a horse between villages. The telephone's incredibly much more efficient right than riding a horse from one village to another to send a message, and the telephone revolutionized communication, just like television and film and the internet. I mean the internet has just transformed business and life and work so much. But at the end of the day, if you look at the history of leadership the things that made people go into battle in the Middle Ages, in the Crusades it's still the same thing that makes somebody follow a leader now, which is trust, makes somebody follow a leader now, which is trust. You have to think about building a vision for yourself as a leader, the impact you want to make, and then think about how you can build trust with people, with your teams, with the organization. That is still the number one thing that you do, and then you add in how could AI empower that journey and accelerate that journey? Because, at the end of the day, great leadership is always going to be about heart, soul, trust, human connection, human communication. They're the things that are going to make you a really exceptional leader, and I don't think that AI is going to disrupt any of that. But we do have a very unique opportunity to let AI accelerate that and make it even more compelling.

Speaker 2: 54:49

And really simple example. I want to give you a really, really simple example. If you manage a team of 50 people, imagine being able to have AI tell you a report. When was the last time I had a contact with each person in my team and to just realize, oh, I haven't spoken to Emmy for 30 days. 30 days. It felt like yesterday, but it was actually 30 days ago that I had a call with her. She was in a meeting with me and AI will be able to just give me a report instantly on something like that. You know, three years from now, five years from now, and I can quickly say I haven't been in contact with Demi for 30 days. I need to call her, I need to catch up, make sure she's doing okay. Make sure she feels valued, not isolated. Check what her stresses are. So, yeah, please build a vision for the leader. You want to be the impact you want to make, because now I think it's more important than ever to have a really clear vision, a north star to work towards and being able to use AI to accelerate that journey.

Speaker 2: 56:02

That is the exciting opportunity of this moment and if you don't take it, I can't make you. But wow, people will say to you in your older age what was it like when AI was coming on? But you were there during that gold rush of opportunity. What did you do? And you don't want to say I waited to see what happened. That would be a really bad answer to give your grandchildren or your great grandchildren. Instead, tell them yeah, it was amazing and I did this and this happened. And because I did that, these people, their lives were changed. It's an incredible opportunity. Let's take it and run with it.

Speaker 1: 56:43

Beautiful. I absolutely love your advice and, malcolm, I so appreciate our today's conversation. Thank you so much for being here, for sharing this inspiration, this value and experience and all those insights which can be applied in practice today, tomorrow and in the future. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 2: 57:08

Thank you, remy. Thanks for having me, and if anyone has any questions, reach out, I'm happy to answer them. Take care me. And if anyone has any questions, reach out, I'm happy to happy to answer them, take care thank you for joining us on digital transformation and ai for humans.

Speaker 1: 57:21

I am amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing the winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.