Leading AI Is Still A Human Problem

Before I make the case for AI-EI Leadership, it helps to explain why this issue has become personal to me.

For more than two decades, I had the privilege of leading in public education. I served as a school principal, district administrator, and ultimately superintendent of Campbell County Schools in Kentucky, an organization serving more than 5,000 students, employing roughly 900 people, and operating with an annual budget exceeding $60 million.

Throughout that career, including the years following my doctoral research, I became fascinated by a question that would eventually shape the work I do today: Why do some capable leaders successfully move people and organizations through difficult situations, while others, often equally intelligent and experienced, struggle? A significant part of the answer, I came to believe, is emotional intelligence.

I studied EI as part of my doctoral dissertation, but I also watched it play out every day: the way self-awareness, empathy, flexibility, judgment, relationships, impulse control, communication, and the ability to see through another person's eyes shape leadership decisions and organizational outcomes. Occasionally, I learned those lessons the hard way myself.

A Lesson I Carried With Me

Near the end of my superintendency, I found myself in an extended disagreement with members of my Board of Education over several investments I believed were important for our district, among them improving compensation for our lowest-paid employees, expanding academic opportunities for students, addressing serious facility needs, and meeting the staffing needs of a middle school serving more than 1,200 students.

I believed strongly in what I was advocating. Looking back, though, I recognize that believing strongly in the merits of a decision did not relieve me of the responsibility to understand the perspectives of people who saw things differently. I could have exercised greater patience, more flexibility, better impulse control, and perhaps most importantly, more empathy in trying to understand where individual board members were coming from.

Through several impasses, the Board and I eventually recognized that it was probably time for a change. After two terms as superintendent, I retired from public education at age 51. But I carried an important lesson with me: good analysis, experience, and even good intentions do not guarantee good leadership outcomes. Leaders operate in a human system. How well we understand ourselves, read that system, listen to others, adapt, communicate, and anticipate how our decisions will affect people often determines whether an otherwise sound decision succeeds or fails.

That lesson became part of the foundation for EQLead. I've always been a coach at heart. After leaving public education, I wanted to take what I'd learned about leadership and emotional intelligence and help other leaders use it more intentionally. I became certified as an EQ-i 2.0 emotional intelligence assessor and coach, and since founding EQLead in 2022, I've had the opportunity to work with leaders and organizations across private industry, nonprofits, government, and public service.

A New Question Started Pulling at Me

Over the past several years, another leadership issue has increasingly captured my attention: artificial intelligence. As an avid morning reader of The New York Times, I've followed its coverage of AI investment, automation, data centers, workforce disruption, and the pace at which organizations are moving toward this technology. But I noticed my attention kept drifting away from the technology itself and toward the people.

What happens to employees whose jobs are redesigned around AI? What happens to the employee who wonders whether the technology being introduced will eventually eliminate his or her position? What happens when an organization discovers an opportunity to automate work before it has considered how that decision will affect trust, motivation, identity, institutional knowledge, customers, or culture? What happens when leaders come to rely more heavily on AI-generated recommendations, and on the technology experts around them, than on their own judgment? What happens when organizations move faster than their people can reasonably follow?

Those questions became difficult for me to ignore.

Then I read David De Cremer's The AI-Savvy Leader (2024). His argument that leaders cannot treat AI primarily as a technical matter, or simply hand responsibility for AI decisions to technical specialists, directly echoed concerns I had already begun forming through my own reading, research, and work with leaders. More than that, it helped crystallize my thinking.

What had begun as a growing concern became a much stronger conviction: many of the leadership capabilities I had spent years studying, practicing, sometimes getting wrong, and eventually coaching through the lens of emotional intelligence are not peripheral to successful AI implementation. They may be essential to it.

AI is creating new capabilities.

The human challenges of leadership remain remarkably familiar.

Trust. Fear. Judgment. Resistance. Communication. Adaptability. Ego. Motivation. Relationships. Accountability. And the ability to understand how a decision that looks perfectly rational from the executive office may feel very different to the employee, customer, or stakeholder living with its consequences.

In my consulting work, I've watched organizations invest substantially in new technology and still underestimate what implementation requires. Leaders understandably want results quickly, but too little time may be allowed for the temporary performance dip that often accompanies meaningful change. Stakeholder feedback arrives too late, or is not fully considered. Staffing and support fall short during rollout.

The technology may be capable.

The implementation still struggles. And people become frustrated.

That is not simply a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.

AI-EI Leadership

I use the term AI-EI Leadership to describe the intentional integration of artificial intelligence capability with emotionally intelligent leadership.

My premise is straightforward: emotional intelligence is becoming an organizational non-negotiable for anyone responsible for implementing, deploying, or managing AI.

That does not mean every leader needs to become a technologist. Technology specialists, data scientists, engineers, and AI professionals will remain enormously important.

“Technical expertise can be delegated.

Leadership responsibility cannot.”

The executive, business owner, HR leader, operational leader, public-sector administrator, or manager responsible for an AI initiative still has to ask questions technology alone cannot answer: How will this affect our people? Who hasn't been heard? What assumptions are we making? What happens to customers? What uncertainty are employees experiencing? Are we moving faster because the technology allows it, or because moving this quickly actually serves the organization? What are we failing to see because we're excited about the opportunity? What happens if the recommendation is wrong? How will we explain this decision?

And ultimately, who is accountable for what happens next?

Those are leadership questions. Many of them require emotional intelligence.

I am not leaving emotional intelligence behind to become an AI consultant. Quite the opposite. I'm moving EI into one of the places where I believe it will matter most over the next decade.

My goal is to help leaders make better AI decisions without losing sight of the employees, customers, communities, and other stakeholders who will live with the consequences of those decisions. I want to help them capture AI's extraordinary potential while avoiding preventable mistakes caused by poor communication, insufficient listening, unexamined assumptions, weak change leadership, misplaced trust, or a failure to reckon with the human consequences of technological decisions.

What's Ahead

Over the next 10 weeks, I'm going to make the case for AI-EI Leadership, not as an argument against AI, but as an argument for leading it well.

Each week, I'll explore a different intersection between artificial intelligence and emotionally intelligent leadership: judgment, trust, decision-making, communication, employee motivation, organizational change, accountability, human-AI collaboration, and the increasingly complicated responsibility of leading organizations in an AI-enabled world.

I'll begin where many AI conversations begin: the business case. ROI matters. Efficiency matters. Productivity matters. But they are not the entire ledger.

Week 1: The AI Business Case Is Missing the Human Ledger

AI is changing the environment in which leaders operate. My contention over the next 10 weeks is that emotional intelligence equips leaders to interpret that environment, anticipate its human consequences, and apply AI more responsibly.

That is AI-EI Leadership. And it may be the difference between organizations that implement AI well and those that only think they have.

Works Cited

De Cremer, D. (2024). The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work. Harvard Business Review Press.