Why Leading Well With AI Starts With Your Emotions
21 Oct 2026
I would start with emotions. Not with AI skills.
I would start with emotions. Not with AI skills.
Harvard Business Review asked more than 100 HR and talent leaders this month if their leaders can lead well with AI. Only 25% said yes.
The weakest spot is emotional intelligence. Only 12% of leaders rate their own as high. Their employees say 10%.
HBR suggests three shifts:
→ From certainty to clarity
→ From expertise to exploration
→ From emotional control to emotional insight
I agree with all three. The third is the one I would work on first. It is the hardest to fake, and people notice straight away when it is missing.
One company in the article shows why. People were worried about AI and their jobs. The leaders stayed silent, because they had no answer that would make the fear go away.
Then a senior executive opened a town hall on exactly that. No full answers, no comfort. He said out loud that people were anxious. And people started talking.
I call this a courageous conversation. You go in without the answer and you have it anyway.
One more finding: a leader's emotional intelligence had no link to how often they use AI. Using AI more will not build it.
Which shift would you start with?
PS. The full HBR article is here: https://hbr.org/2026/10/the-mindsets-leaders-need-as-ai-accelerates-the-pace-of-business
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What a courageous conversation actually sounds like
The town hall story from the HBR article is the part I keep coming back to. The executive did not have an answer. He said the fear was real and then stood there while people talked. That is a harder thing to do than most leadership training prepares anyone for.
In my own coaching conversations, this is where most senior leaders get stuck. Not with the AI tool itself, with the conversation about it. They wait until they have a clean answer before they open the topic, and because AI keeps changing, that clean answer never quite arrives. So the conversation keeps getting postponed, and the team notices the silence more than they would notice an honest "I don't know yet."
Three patterns I see with the leaders I coach on this:
→ They rehearse the answer instead of the question.
→ They open the topic only in a one-to-one, never with the full team.
→ They treat "I don't know" as a weakness instead of the opening line.
I wrote more about this kind of conversation in how leaders build high-trust teams in times of change. The pattern holds for AI the same way it holds for any other change: the team trusts the leader who names the uncertainty, not the one who hides it.
If you want a simple structure for a conversation like this, I have a free 5 Tips for Courageous Conversations guide, a one-page framework for exactly these moments. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources