The Missing Ingredient Holding Up AI's Acceptance at Work
Best-selling author Dan Goleman highlights a key element that many leaders are overlooking.
Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry.
In a recent piece on AI adoption, Michael Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work, boiled it down to a simple statement: "If adoption is slow, it's not an AI problem. It's a leadership problem."
His comments are backed by data. While over 80% of executives believe they're supportive of AI adoption, only 33% of frontline employees feel encouraged to use the tools. Most leaders point to employee readiness as the problem with AI adoption. But Great Place to Work's research tells a different story: Employees who have received no AI training are still enthusiastic about the technology so long as they trust their leaders.
As Bush puts it: "We want our people to be agile, innovative, and ready to meet the moment. But while we're looking at them, they're looking at us—for clarity, confidence, direction, and care."
That trust deficit is, at its core, an emotional-intelligence problem. Take self-awareness, the foundational competency of EI. While 83% of executives believe they are communicating clearly about AI, only 37% of frontline workers agree. That 46-point gap points to a significant difference in perception. These gaps are what happen when leaders stop seeking honest feedback from the people around them, particularly those furthest down the organizational hierarchy. This often leads leaders to bang their head against the wall. They think they are doing things the “right way” but failing to check that way with the people most qualified to assess it.
What’s true about leadership is that the higher you go, the fewer people tell you the truth. Power has a way of instilling fear. But instead of an excuse, leaders need to see that as a call to action. Recent research on feedback-seeking behavior shows that people with higher emotional intelligence don't wait for feedback to come to them, they go out and get it. In this way, they are active learners, ever-motivated to become wiser and more effective. Then, when critical feedback arrives—even feedback that challenges their self-image—emotionally intelligent leaders are the ones who manage their emotions well enough to actually take it in and put it to good use.
These skills mirror what leaders are asking of their workforce right now: when it comes to AI, leaders want their people to pursue mastery with a tool that might reshape their role, manage the fear that comes with it, and stay open to iterative learning.
The question for these leaders becomes: are you modeling what you’re asking for?
On this front, the best companies on Great Place to Work's 100 Best seem to be successful. Edward Jones built five guiding principles around AI and created "Decisions Unpacked" sessions and town halls — not to broadcast, but to listen to people’s real time concerns. Synchrony, No. 1 on this year's list, found that employees are nine times more likely to embrace AI when leaders connect it to growth conversations, and four times more likely when they understand how the tools create new opportunities for the organization. The message isn't, "Here's our AI strategy." It's "Here's how this affects you, and I want to hear what you think."
As Bush so plainly states: “Employees aren't lacking tools. They're lacking trust, clarity, and support."
Emotional intelligence—from knowing how you are actually landing (not how you intend to land) to being able to hear hard truths—is the difference between leaders who build that trust and those who broadcast into a void. Even more importantly, when people trust their leaders, they trust how AI will be used. They trust that their leaders are genuinely invested in their future—even enough to treat layoffs as a last resort, not a first response to technological change.
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.
