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EQ Answers to AI Leadership Questions #2: How Can Leaders Drive Change?

by Douglas R. Conant | Aug 28, 2024

Doug Conant, Founder & CEO of ConantLeadership

Introducing the 2nd edition of Doug Conant’s new limited leadership series: EQ Answers to AI Questions.

To My Fellow Leaders and Learners in the ConantLeadership Community,

Welcome to the second edition of my new limited series, “EQ Answers to AI Questions,” in which I offer thoughtful, human answers to pressing leadership questions that have been generated by AI.

In our first edition, I went into great detail about our responsibility as leaders in the age of AI, and detailed some of my foundational beliefs about leadership.

I suggest you read that full post to get a deeper sense of my point of view and the thinking behind this series—but I’ve also summarized some of the key points from that introductory piece below as a reference to help you engage with this second edition.

About this Series

1. This limited series talks about, and leverages AI, but it is not primarily about AI. Like all of my writing and teaching, it is first and foremost, about the craft of leadership.

2. No matter what the futures holds, this rings true: The more omnipresent machines become in our lives, the more differentiating it will be for us to lean into our humanity as we engage with the world as leaders, teachers, friends, and family members.

3. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, we have a dual responsibility:

We must tap into AI’s power to provide knowledge, spark dialogues, and improve our study of our craft. We can’t be technophobes in the face of innovation.
Simultaneously, we must acknowledge that AI is not a panacea. We should lean into the vitality of real, authentic self-reflection and interpersonal interaction—to be as humanistic as possible in our leadership life.

4. We cannot be “artificial” in any way in our leadership; we must be authentic, true to ourselves, and true to the people with whom we live and work.

5. At ConantLeadership, my boutique leadership agency which empowers modern leaders with the tenets of “leadership that works,” we define leadership as: The art and science of influencing others in a specific direction.

The “science” of leadership is primarily about input—learning what works, studying other leaders, staying up-to-date with best practices, and gaining and honing mastery and knowledge in your specific area of expertise etc. AI can help with this part.
The “art” of leadership is primarily about output—how you uniquely metabolize your knowledge, experience, and values, and apply them to your interactions with the people with whom you live and work. This part is up to you. And I believe the “art” is where the magic lies: It’s how you, and only you, show up for other people in a nuanced way, leveraging your unique relationships and skills to connect interpersonally with the people on your team and in your organization.

6. AI has great capacity to deepen our conversation around the “science” of leadership. As Greg Satell recently wrote in his blog Digital Tonto, we should think of AI as “a tool to create dialogues for ourselves.”

At the end of the day, AI can help us ask better questions, and it can undoubtedly help us improve our leadership. But it’s still up to us to answer the call. To progress from good to extraordinary, we must use our emotional intelligence (EQ), in combination with our functional (FQ) and intellectual intelligence (IQ), to lead people, make decisions, act on our knowledge, synthesize our wisdom, and build relationships.

And so it’s within that spirit that I’m writing this letter to communicate more directly with you, the people in the ConantLeadership community, in this new limited series.

EQ Answers to AI Questions #2

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you may have noticed a feature called “collaborative articles.” These articles give users the opportunity to answer prompts that are generated by AI based on topics that are pertinent to LinkedIn users. The AI helps generate the questions but it’s the human users who are prompted to write the answers.

In the interest of using AI as a tool to spark dialogue, we’ve chosen some of the most relevant AI-generated leadership questions on LinkedIn and will provide a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent answer to share with you directly as a gesture of connection and shared learning.

In the first edition, I answered the AI question “What are some innovative ways to recognize and celebrate team strengths?” You can find my answer here.

This edition’s AI question is: ‘What are the most common mistakes leaders make when driving change?’

And here’s my EQ Answer.

There are two big mistakes leaders make when driving change (and they are interconnected): They move too fast, and they expect automatic buy-in from stakeholders.

To avoid these mistakes, there are two ideas to consider.

1: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

A common mistake leaders make is that they expect stakeholders to care about the company agenda without having first sufficiently demonstrated that they care about the stakeholders’ agenda.

Before leaders can earn buy-in on a change initiative, they must first solicit input so that constituents feel heard and valued.

Change is a group effort. People will not care about you until you care about them.

Leaders must set the direction and align the resources but they must also ensure they are listening, earning trust, and continuously securing an enterprise-wide commitment to the shared goals that will drive change.

This directly connects to the second idea.

2: Go slow to go fast

When I talk to leaders about change I always say, “Slow is fast and fast is slow.” Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “measure twice, cut once,” or, “haste makes waste.” Those apply here too.

This comes back to leadership being an art and a science. The “science” component helps you devise smart plans for transformation and innovation but you will always need the “art” component to bring the people along.

Without the people to bring your change strategy to life, even the most brilliant plans are dead in the water.

The key is building an approach that is sustainable regardless of the inevitable changes in the marketplace—rather than merely reacting to changes as they come.

It’s about being intentional rather than incidental.

A big challenge is having the discipline to slow down rather than mirroring the chaotic environment of the world in which you’re operating.

We used to say it was a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). It is still all of those things and more.

Now, some experts describe the world in even more bewildering terms, as BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible). Either terminology captures the scope of the leadership obstacles we face: The only constant is change.

Amidst a sea of rapidly accelerating advances in technology, it can be tempting to speed up your tempo too, demanding more, better, faster. But paradoxically, the more you rush in a chaotic environment, the more you’re at risk of delaying the entire effort in the future because you haven’t taken the time to properly position yourself for success.

Instead, slow down. Establish the right principles and framework that will allow you to be flexible as the world continues to change. Build trust. Get the right people on the bus. Ensure people are aligned with the transformation before it even begins; make sure they have skin in the game so they’re invested in the success of the initiative.

The stronger your foundation is upstream, the more resilient in the face of adversity your enterprise will be downstream.

“A thoughtful response is often better than a quick one.”

Look to the Mission

One powerful way to position yourself for success is by creating a higher ambition for the organization. Look to the mission.

When I became CEO of Campbell Soup Company with a mandate to turn the organization around after a period of tumult and low performance, I knew we would need a mission to anchor the effort. We didn’t rush. We smartly considered all the inputs. We talked to people, listened, learned, built trust, and devised a mission that could withstand the winds of change.

Ultimately, we arrived at these words: “Nourish people’s lives, everywhere, every day.”

Our goal to “nourish” applied to every stakeholder, every employee, every customer, every consumer. Even if things went sideways, our mission of nourishment never changed.

It’s important to remember that the world is evolving so quickly that something about your change-plan is always going to be wrong and you will have to course-correct. So it’s essential to take the time to get the mission right.

There is a poetic idea here of embracing two truths: The twin constants of change and changelessness. Once you’ve taken the time to arrive at the principles that inform your mission, those remain still and enduring, buoying you afloat as the ever-fluctuating tides of the BANI world roil beneath.

“Let’s allow the technology to be fast so we can be slow.”

Find the Space

Viktor Frankly famous said “Between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space, we have the power to choose our response.” This idea applies to almost every area of life and, not surprisingly, it is relevant to leading change too.

When you’re devising a plan for transformation, after you’ve followed all the advice above: You’ve taken time to build trust; you’ve solicited the best ideas using all the resources at your disposal from experts, to AI, to market research and beyond; you’ve established the principles and higher ambition that will drive the effort; you’ve pressure-tested it with key stakeholders and socialized the agenda with everybody involved.

Then: Conceptually, there is a space. Before liftoff. One last chance to sit with the roadmap that you’ve constructed to make sure you know the course intimately. Get so grounded in how you’re going to bring the plan to life that even the most furious storm can’t knock you off course.

This principle applies in small moments as well as big. Yes, it’s wise to find the space before a momentous transformation or launch begins. But it’s also smart to find that space in everyday moments that can have a powerful impact on the people you work with. This is often where the “art” of leadership lies, in how you respond to people in thousands of little interactions.

Consider this your reminder to pause, to challenge your knee-jerk impulses. If an internal alarm is blaring, telling you to hurry, that’s a good sign to take a beat. Find the space. Take the time to choose your response. Slow down to speed up. A thoughtful response is often better than a quick one.

It is in this capacity to regulate our internal rhythms that we once again differentiate ourselves from the machines.

GenAI is rapid and on-demand. It aggregates information and responds to our prompts within fractions of a millisecond.

So, let’s allow the technology to be fast so we can be slow. Let’s be precise with our word, empathetic in our interactions, and generous with our time. That’s how we build relationships, drive change, and create enduring leadership legacies.

Sincerely,

__

Do you have an insight to add to the EQ answer to this AI question?

We want to hear from you. Drop us a line with your thoughts and we may feature your response in a future ‘EQ Answers to AI Questions’ letter.

Suggested Reading

Here are some recent resources we’ve found illuminating on this topic:

Looking for more EQ insights on this topic? Explore these resources from ConantLeadership:

About the Author: Doug Conant is Founder and CEO of ConantLeadership, Chairman Emeritus of CECP, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, former Chairman of Avon Products, and co-author of two bestselling leadership books, TouchPoints, and The Blueprint.