Why AI Could Expose Bad 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. 

A new report addresses the pervasive fear that over half of all workers will be displaced by artificial intelligence. The research reveals a gap in the narrative: while AI might automate about 57% of U.S. work hours, this figure doesn't linearly translate to job loss. Instead, the report emphasizes a key factor in the AI revolution: the quality of human guidance and organizational redesign will determine whether AI helps us achieve the value we hope it does.

For leaders, this means AI will make your leadership more visible than ever. The emerging story is not one of machines taking over human jobs, but one of AI revealing the strengths and gaps in leadership that already exist.

For decades, many leaders succeeded through expertise and execution. As AI advances, it gets better at generating facts, solving problems, and laying out decisions in nanoseconds. But what it cannot do is replicate the deeper things that make people willing to follow a leader in the first place: influence, inspiration, emotional balance, empathy, coaching, and conflict resolution—the emotional intelligence skills critical to gaining followership.

Leaders who listen closely, stay connected to purpose, and attune to the feelings and motivations of others are best positioned to help people move through anxiety, uncertainty, and loss of control. These leaders uphold a culture of trust while helping people locate themselves in the future of the organization. They create a climate where AI becomes a partner in progress rather than a trigger for fear, helping people see change not as a threat to their identity but as an invitation to grow their capabilities and expand their impact.

What is increasingly clear is that people do not resist technology, they resist the feelings that come with change. What makes this moment particularly demanding is that AI doesn't just change the work — it accelerates the emotional dynamics already at play. This means that whatever relational patterns exist get amplified. When people feel supported and clear, AI multiplies their momentum. When they feel anxious or disconnected, AI accelerates the downward spiral.

Here, a leader's own emotional steadiness becomes imperative. Calm stabilizes a team under pressure while stress destabilizes it faster than ever before.

One of the report’s striking findings is that almost three-quarters of the skills employers value are used in both automatable and non-automatable work. This underscores why emotional intelligence matters so much. Technical skills remain relevant, but the way leaders help people apply them in shifting contexts becomes the true differentiator.

A coaching mindset illustrates this well. A coach or mentor can help an individual adjust to AI and use it to their advantage. The interpersonal skills essential to coaching—attunement to nuance, contextual understanding, and awareness of how a person’s history or circumstances shape their experience—remain uniquely human.

Influence offers another example. When used in service of shared goals, it helps people adapt to AI and align its use with both personal and organizational purpose. Influence grounded in empathy and ethics builds trust, which is the foundation of any successful transformation.

AI isn't just taking jobs, it's revealing what leadership actually requires. As AI absorbs routine execution, leadership becomes less about delivering answers and more about shaping the conditions in which people can adapt and thrive. It requires sensing morale, reading the room, acknowledging what is unspoken, and aligning people around shared purpose even as the ground shifts beneath them.

For leaders willing to grow—to expand their emotional intelligence, deepen their relationships, and lead with both competence and humanity—this moment is an invitation. The more emotional intelligence a leader develops, the greater their capacity to help shape the future of work itself.

Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon

Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.