AI, Empathy, and Leadership
Best-selling author Dan Goleman says that technological progress is only possible when people trust their leaders.
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.
Last month, a CEO announced that his institution would replace "low-value human capital" with artificial intelligence. The backlash was swift—public outrage, union condemnation, regulatory scrutiny, and an apology that landed as badly as the original comment. He joins a growing list of CEOs who simply cannot get their AI messaging right.
But this isn't really a messaging problem. It's an emotional-intelligence problem. As any brilliant influencer or speech writer will tell you, the key to successful or influential communication is heart – being able to speak in a way that resonates with your audience.
Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher describes what happened as "moral disengagement," the unconscious process by which our brains justify morally difficult decisions while protecting our sense of ourselves as good people. Framing layoffs as “resource adjustments,” or referring to employees as "low-value capital," are ways leaders can use abstraction to try and create distance from the human cost of their decisions. The language makes the call easier. It also reveals exactly what they think of the people being asked to carry out their AI ambitions.
This matters beyond the headlines. Empathy and organizational awareness are foundational leadership competencies — not because they are nice to have, but because without them, leaders consistently misread their audiences, underestimate consequences, and lose the trust they need to actually lead. The executive wasn't just talking to investors, he was talking to every employee in the building. The distance between those two audiences is precisely what emotional intelligence is designed to navigate.
There's a deeper irony here. We are in a moment of extraordinary technological advancement, and, by every account, this will only accelerate. But the leaders driving that advancement seem to be forgetting something essential: Technological progress is only possible with very human communication. AI adoption doesn't happen because a strategy deck says it will. It happens because people trust their leaders enough to move through fear and uncertainty and try something new. Every time a CEO uses language that dehumanizes people or fails to understand their experience, they are eroding the exact trust that any transformation requires.
Jensen Huang, CEO of the world's most valuable company and one of the architects of the AI era, said something worth sitting with: “All that I’ve learned is that the purpose is not in advancing technology alone. The purpose is not building successful companies and becoming wealthy,” he said. “The purpose is ultimately your family and the people that you love. It is for them that we do this.”
That's not a soft sentiment from one of the hardest-charging leaders in tech. It's a recognition that the human dimension isn't a footnote to the AI story. It’s actually the whole point.
Leaders who understand this don't just communicate more carefully. They have the self-awareness to grapple with their own moral dilemmas and the empathy to understand—even if only cognitively—what their teams might be grappling with too. They also have the organizational awareness to understand that their words travel further, and land harder, than they imagine.
The AI era will reward leaders who can think fast and build boldly. But it will also expose, quickly and publicly, those who have forgotten that the humans they lead are not capital, low value or otherwise.
The contrast is already visible. When one tech CEO announced a layoff of 4,000 employees earlier this year—a cut of nearly half his company—he wrote directly to his people. He opened by laying out exactly what affected employees would receive, thereby speaking to their core needs for survival. He explained his reasoning, named the difficulty, and kept communication channels open so people could say goodbye properly and have time to grieve all that will be lost. "I'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold," he wrote.
His communication isn't without its gaps. But it is an example of emotional intelligence in action and, as such, a useful signal of what the AI era demands. Emotional intelligence isn't about being nice, it's about being effective. People don't follow leaders who see them as capital, they follow leaders who see them as people. In the AI era, that distinction is everything, because it's what makes transformation actually possible.
Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon
Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.
