Author Brené Brown on why human skills will keep people relevant in the AI era—even though we aren’t good at being human right now

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Transcript:

Brené Brown: I think the most incredible skill that we’re going to need right now as leaders is the ability to create time where none exists.

Diane Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…

Kristin Stoller: …and trends…

Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.

Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.

Brady: And this week we have one of my favorite thought leaders, Kristin. It’s Brené Brown.

Stoller: Yes, we had a great conversation with her at our Most Powerful Women Summit on stage in Washington, D.C., and it was really cool, because I’d never gotten a chance to meet her before. And you have, right Diane?

Brady: I have. She’s a transformational leader, really. The book that really put her on the map was called The Gifts of Imperfection. It was all about being vulnerable, the power of empathy, which is something we maybe take for granted now. But I would say she was a real pioneer in putting that as a core leadership quality. 

Stoller: Speaking of core, the new book is about core. It’s called Strong Ground. She based it on—she had a pickleball injury, needed to get a trainer to work on her physical core, [and] used that as a metaphor for CEOs and organizations building up their own core in this time of fear, uncertainty, and—hard time to tell the truth, as she’s recently said.

Brady: And a hard time to be vulnerable. She really has not been out there speaking a lot in the past year, she does talk about why it’s so hard to be human in this environment. Part of it is the politics of AI and a multiplicity of other factors. I find it fascinating, because she really reminds us what good leadership looks like, and what it looks like right now. 

Stoller: She does. I think it was a great conversation, let’s hear it.

Brady: As technology and AI continue to reshape industries, hiring for technical skills remains important. But fostering creativity, curiosity, and empathy are also essential for organizations to remain competitive and resilient. We’re here with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US and the sponsor of this podcast. Jason, always good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Jason Girzadas: Thank you for having me, Diane.

Brady: So Jason, how can organizations balance the development of human skills and technical skills to drive innovation?

Girzadas: It is a tech-driven world, but still human skills matter. And I think it comes down to being intentional for leading organizations to still invest and have very directed strategies around building human skills. Curiosity, imagination, how-to-team. These are still critical ingredients to creating differentiation and competitive advantage. You know, at Deloitte, we’ve committed to building those skills and have, over time, evolved our programming.

Stoller: Jason could you say, at Deloitte, what role does apprenticeship play in fostering a culture of continuous learning and development?

Girzadas: It’s interesting. There was some time when people thought that apprenticeship and mentorship could maybe be digitized or entirely done remotely. And I think what we’ve learned is that that’s not the case. That apprenticeship and mentorship need to continue to be a formal part of our culture, a part of our learning environment.

Stoller: Absolutely. Well, great insights, Jason. Thank you so much for sharing them with us.

Brady: Brené, obviously you consult with leaders around the world. One of the things I am fascinated with is, backstage, you said we’re not neurobiologically wired for this moment. I love that. What do you mean by that? And, hello and welcome.

Brown: Hi, thanks. I’m super excited to be here. Hi y’all. I just think we are wired for certainty, and we’re wired to get to certainty as soon as possible. The more uncertainty that we’re in, the more really hard feedback we get from our bodies. And so, we’re not wired for the kind of leadership I think we need right now. And I think there are—I get to work with a lot of great leaders, and there are leaders who are really working on building that core strength to navigate this level of uncertainty. And there are those who believe they can plow through it with old skills, which I don’t think is going to be effective.

 Stoller: What do we need then? What is needed?

Brown: I’m a solid C-minus at this skill set. I was really surprised, I wrote this—it was probably the hardest chapter I’ve ever written in a book. I wanted to understand, what is the collection of skill sets and mindsets that I think are going to future-ready us? And it took me—first of all, one of the fastest crashes in Random House history. I turned this book in two and a half months ago. 

Stoller: Wow, quick turnaround. 

Brown: Yeah. And because of the relevance, I think, for the world right now, they were like, let’s crash it. I would not recommend that at all. But this chapter was very hard, and I was very surprised to see—I don’t know why I was surprised—but I was surprised to see the role that self-awareness plays, the role that nervous system management plays, the role that metacognition plays, and understanding how we think and how we learn. Leaders with high levels of metacognition are much less vulnerable to cognitive biases, which are really ruling the business world right now. So I think, and then there’s a unique set of skills that—I am a big sports person, so there are a lot of sports analogies in the new book. 

One of the, I think, most incredible skills that we’re going to need right now, as leaders, is the ability to create time where none exists. The ability to slow down our thinking and slow down our decision-making, and get really tethered to mission, strategy, and values before we make decisions. And that collection of skill sets are really not researched in management like they’re researched in sports. So this is the analogy that I’m using right now. How many of you have ever watched five-year-olds play soccer? How many of you ever thought it was a good idea to sign your five-year-old up for soccer? So if you’ve ever watched it, you get a really fast ball coming in at kind of head height, and what a five-year-old will do is respond by putting their foot up this high and kicking the ball, usually into another field, where another group of five-year-olds are playing. My daughter will be sitting criss-cross-applesauce, building daisy chains. That’s how leaders are behaving right now. Fast, hard balls are coming in very high, and what a seasoned soccer player will do (any Liverpool fans?) is take a high ball into the chest, let the ball drop to the ground, and keep her foot on the ball to maintain possession, because winning is all about possession. Then look down the pitch, read the pitch, and kick the ball—not to where the striker is standing, but where they know, operationally, in three seconds, where the striker will be. And that is a set of skills, if you look at them, that includes self-awareness, first of all, anticipatory thinking, situational awareness, and temporal awareness. We think about athletes’ ability to seemingly slow down play, but they’re not slowing down play. Serena Williams is not slowing down a serve when she’s receiving. What she’s doing is drawing on a set of very sophisticated skills where she can prepare a split second earlier than her competitor. And that’s what it’s going to take to lead today. It’s going to take skills that I don’t hear being discussed very often, but I witness people who are winning right now absolutely have a ton of.

Brady: Can I follow up? I think about the work you’ve done with empathy and vulnerability. Going back to Women & Shame and just all of the bestsellers that you’ve done. Do you feel that those skill sets—are they still as important, or are they somehow under threat? Because to be vulnerable today is also to put a target on your back, isn’t it?

Brown: It depends. Because let’s get very clear about what the definition of vulnerability is from the data. So vulnerability is the emotion you experience in uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Is there anyone in this room that goes through a day at work without experiencing any uncertainty, risk, or exposure? 

Stoller: No one.

Brown: And I spent a lot of time in my career trying to convince people what vulnerability was and wasn’t until a very singular day at Fort Bragg, where I was working with special forces. And I asked the troops a simple question: Give me an example of courage in your life that you’ve witnessed, or in someone else’s life that you’ve seen. Give me a singular example of courage that did not require uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Heads went down. People got quiet. Troops got teary and still. One kid stood up and said, Three tours, there is no courage without vulnerability. So it is extraordinarily difficult to be brave right now, for a lot of different reasons. Politics is one. Radically changing markets. A workforce that is—I’m going to tell you right now, people are not okay. If you’re leading people, you probably know people are not okay. I mean, folks are still going into Costco with an automatic weapon because they’re out of Cheese Whiz. People are emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, and disconnected. So you’re leading a workforce that is increasingly struggling. You’ve got really massive instability: geopolitically, changing markets, and AI and tech. And I’ll give you an example of what I see: I’ve never seen sales functions in organizations under pressure like they’re under pressure right now. No one is calling sales functions and saying, Give me three of SKU 4425, and I’m going to compare your prices with your competitors, and when can you deliver it? People are calling and saying, Shit, I don’t know what we need. I’m not looking for a product. I’m looking for a thought partnership from you. I’m looking for you to set up a team that works with my team. Now we’re talking about cross-company collaboration. So you’ve got teams collaborating across companies—what is the very first thing that emerges in a cross-company collaboration? The very first issue that emerges: data governance, IP ownership. If you don’t have people skills, the first day of that first meeting, saying, We’re excited to sit down with you. This is going to be great. Let’s talk about what trust and distrust looks like for us. Let’s talk about how we’re going to work together, and talk about how we’re not going to work together. Those are vulnerability skills. Those are trust skills. Those are empathy skills. So, when you talk about the core of a leadership team, a core of any team, you’re talking about self-awareness, metacognition, emotional granularity, mindfulness, and then, one that I think is so lacking today that it’s shocking, which is deep, complex understanding of systems theory. If you don’t understand that the world that we’re operating in today is built of systems inextricably connected to other systems, and that if you move one Lego piece an inch over here, you’ve got fallout over here, you’re not going to be able to win.

Stoller: I want to ask about two themes in your book that I found, honestly, the most interesting. One was power, and the other was leading by fear and the theory of how some people, that I won’t name, do that. But you wrote one sentence which I really like, that said, “leaders who are unwilling to talk about power are either actively abusing it or prefer to preserve the option of misusing it in the future,” which I think is really interesting at this current time.

Brown: I was so pissed off that day. I don’t take it back. Zero regrets. 

Stoller: But how are you advising CEOs right now? How do you say to people, I think you should speak out on X but not on Y. What is the threshold for that?

Brown: I think CEOs have very complex jobs and need to get very clear about what their jobs and responsibilities are, and what their jobs and responsibilities are not. And short-term dodging a bullet does not equal long-term win for any of us sitting in this room. The thing about power—when we go in and do Dare to Lead transformations with organizations, we’re looking very specifically at a couple of things. We’re looking at building skills around courage, and building some of the skill sets that we’ve been talking about: situational awareness, critical awareness, systems thinking. We probably say yes to about 30% of the people interested in working with us, because right off the bat…

Brady: How do you say no to the rest?

Brown: Like, “no.” I mean, how many of you are leading an organization in transformation right now? I think the word is overused. If you’re looking for incremental change, if you’re looking for small, strategic change, that’s not the work we do. So if you want to break some things, break systems that are no longer serving growth, no longer serving revenue, no longer serving mission, and you’re willing to look rigorously at what is happening, we might be a good fit. But the power question is something we ask all the time, which is, power is important. And to feel powerless is the worst human experience, I think, that exists. But power is neutral. It’s how power is used. I like MLK Jr.’s definition: Power is the ability to affect change and achieve purpose. There’s not a person sitting in this room that doesn’t want power. The question is, what kind of power are you using? Are you using power with? Power to? Power within? Great. Are you using power over? That’s very complicated. That’s not something we’re going to do. Because the thing about “power over,” and I’m going back to Mary Parker Follett’s work, early mother of leadership and organizational development work in the early 1900s. “Power over” operates from the belief that power is finite, and in order to share it, you lose it. It’s like pizza: I have eight slices, I give you one, I have seven. And take this for what it is, but this has been in the literature for, you know, 90 years. So it’s not a current reflection on anything, but if the shoe fits. In order to maintain “power over” without exception, you must occasionally engage in very serious acts of cruelty toward vulnerable populations for a very simple reason. Fear has a short shelf life. You cannot keep us afraid for long periods of time. It’s not how our biology works. If we’re afraid, one of two things will happen. We’ll either kind of become numb to it, or we’ll hyper-normalize the feeling. So there has to be a periodic reminder of capacity for cruelty in order to maintain “power over.” If we go into an organization and I’m meeting with the C-suite, and I say, Look, we’re interested in doing this work. We think you’re a great candidate. We think we can help you win. Because we measure our work, firstly, by performance, and secondly, by culture change, I want to talk to people in your organization about how power is used and what their experiences are, for a very simple reason: The greatest barrier to courageous leadership is not fear. We’re all afraid every day. How many of you wake up afraid, deal with fear, go to bed afraid? We’re afraid all of the time. That’s human, and if you’re not afraid, go outside, watch the news. So it’s not fear that keeps us from being courageous in our decision-making. It’s armor. It’s how we choose to self-protect when we’re in fear. So for me, I know my armor. When I’m afraid, I micromanage my team, I get perfectionistic, and I get overly decisive. I mean, this is a real example. I can sit down, you’re my team, and I’ll say, We’re not doing that shit. Pull that. We’re not doing it. No. Move that funding. She needs to move. This is what’s going to happen here. She’ll need to lead this team. And this is the performance metric. There’s a KPI here. And then I’ll go…

Brady: …oh my God, you just became your own worst nightmare.

Brown: Well, yeah, I’m like, I think I’m under the line. Let me just take a step back. Forget everything I just said. And to which, literally, two weeks ago, someone on my team said, We don’t ever write anything down when you’re acting like this.

Brady: There you go, that’s good advice. 

Stoller: Good for them. But not many people do that, especially in this current climate.

Brady: I’ve heard a number of people say, The more complex the external environment, the more the need for simplicity internally. And I want to get to something that I’ve heard you talk about in terms of the number of core values and decisions that leaders should focus on to get things done. You’ve said, when it comes to great leaders, it’s maybe one, maybe two, that they’re pursuing. Is that right? Maybe explain a bit more about that, because there are so many decisions we have to make right now, I think that move towards simplicity is actually a powerful one.

Brown: Yeah, Adam Grant and I are doing this six-series podcast right now, and, man, it has been such tough sledding. It’s like he’s my little brother. I just want to, like, punch him in the throat sometimes.

Brady: Adam Grant’s your little brother and you want to punch him in the face.

Brown: Sometimes. I think we feel this way about each other. If you’ve ever watched Phineas and Ferb, I’m like, Candace, yeah. I’m like, Mom, Adam’s messing with my values exercise. We did find our research early on that some of the most—I love the James March quote, Leadership is plumbing and poetry. A good leader is poetic enough to set a vision that people want to follow, but they can also build the systems to deliver against that. The most poetic plumbers, in our research, really talk specifically about one or two core values. Not five or 10, but one or two. And so we’ve reverse-engineered that into an exercise where people can start by circling all the ones they want, which is usually about 15, but then we get to a place where we say, if you look at these 15 values, which are the one or two where all of them are forged. So a great example for me, personally, is family. It’s the most important thing in my life. My kids, Steve, my husband. But it’s not one of my top two values, because for my whole career, what it took for me to be the partner and mother that I wanted to be while having a really big job was courage. It took courage to say no to some things, to say yes to some things, to miss some things, to be at other things that I thought were important. So I do think clarity of values, mission clarity. I love this story: I was at St. Jude’s, I don’t know, a decade ago, and I went early because I was meeting with the leadership, and they said, Do you want to come early and get a tour? And I said, Sure. So I got there an hour early, and I got in the elevator to go to the second floor to meet the docent who was going to show me around. And there was a 60-year-old woman pushing a double decker trolley filled with desserts wrapped in cellophane. And I said, What do you do here at St. Jude’s? And she said, I cure cancer. And I said, Tell me more. And she said, Physicians, nurses, families, patients, don’t eat, we can’t cure cancer. It’s really tough work. I get upstairs, I meet the docent. I said, How long have you been here? And she said, Man, I think I’ve been curing cancer for maybe 18 months. And it always stuck to me, because especially during this level of uncertainty, where I have not met with a CEO in the last nine months that was not concerned about a waning sense of agency in their employees, the question I have is, how much mission clarity does every employee have about what they do every day and how that’s connected to a bigger strategy? Can your junior social media manager say, oh, I’m the Social Media Manager for this thing, and that’s connected to our larger mission, because this is our mission, and this is how we can’t achieve that without what I’m doing every day. And so we want a sense of agency in our employees, values clarity, mission clarity. Super critical, especially right now.

Stoller: That makes a lot of sense, Brené. You mentioned AI earlier. I wanted to go back to that, because I thought it was so interesting. In your book, you have this critique about AI and the pace of change, and you say, what makes us human will ensure our relevance. But you say, we aren’t really good at being human right now. How? How do we fix this? How do we become humans again?

Brown: Yeah, it’s my least favorite platitude about AI: Our deeply human skills will keep us relevant. We’re shit at being deeply human right now. We can’t stand each other. There are so many skills that are not replicable. And I’m a tech optimist, but there are so many skills that are so inherently human—pursuit of mastery, sense of purpose and meaning, the skill sets that we’re talking about: emotional granularity, trust-building, connection. But we’re not good at them, and we’re not good at them for a very serious reason. Welchian management taught us that everything…

Brady: …that being Jack Welch?

Brown: Jack Welch. That whole approach to leadership basically taught us that what makes us human makes us a liability to performance. And that’s not true right now. And I will tell you that when we were writing this book, I had a research team and an AI team. We did a literature review through AI for the whole book, and [through] an academic research team. When we were done, we compared. We actually hired college interns, we called them the “hallucination hunters.” Seventy percent of the entries in the literature review were non-existent. Seventy percent. Have you seen the new research on work slop? Seventy percent. It was serious, too. It would say, Brown, B. Grant, A. 2023, HBR, MIT, Sloan. This was the name of the article. Non-existent. That’s God saying, She’s right. Don’t give up on people. You’re all you really have.

Brady: It’s funny, because it felt like that was coming from my body, and that’s very exciting. You know, my kids can reach me anytime, including biologically, I’m sure. When I first became familiar with your work, so much of it was focused on women and leadership and the powers that we have and how we apply them in the workplace. This is a gathering about business for women. I’d like to give you some final thoughts you may have for this particular audience in this particular time that we’re in right now.

Brown: I think our job—I think we have an advantage, to be honest with you. I am not, just to be very frank, I’m not someone who’s ever distinguished between women leadership and male leadership. I don’t know that I understand that completely or necessarily subscribe to it. What I do believe is, if there’s a group of people on the Earth that have had to make time where no time existed, who had to stop and settle the ball and look down the pitch and be very anticipatory, it’s the women in my life. And I think we need urgency, but we need productive urgency. What we’re seeing right now is very reactive. Action over impact. The ability to take a deep breath, settle the ball—I think again, the women in my life have taught me how to do that. I think we need risk-taking, but I think we need strategic risk-taking. What I don’t like, in fact, I was just interviewing someone, and she said, I’ve got a lot of GSD energy. Get Shit Done. And I said, I don’t need that. I need GSSD energy, Get Strategic Shit Done. I need you to think, take a deep breath, play the movie to the end, think about what you’re doing in terms of systems within our organizations and systems outside of our organizations. And I think, because we have a long history of both paid and unpaid labor, we have had to do some very heroic work, which I’m not a fan of, but I think it makes us ready for this moment in unique ways. I don’t think women will be the only ones, but I think we have to contort ourselves to fit at tables that were not built for us. This is a time when all bets are off about what tables are going to work and not work. And I think we have some really good insight about how to—I’ll close with this quote: Don’t email me about the attribution. We’ve spent two years trying to find it.

Stoller: Or ask AI, maybe see if they’re right.

Brown: No, don’t ask AI. But there’s that quote [from] Viktor Frankl. We’ve talked to everybody on their teams, it doesn’t come from either one, but it is an amazing quote. I have a tattoo here. There is a space between stimulus and response, and in that space is the freedom of choice, and in our choice is our liberation and our growth. I think our job as leaders is to run like hell for that elevator when it’s closing and put our really great boot in there and create space between stimulus and response where it doesn’t exist. And to try to really quiet the voices that are saying—I’m working with a CEO right now who has not had an AI strategy, thank God. They weren’t ready. And when you see the results now of folks who had early AI strategies, if you see the MIT study, 90% of the AI strategies that were funded by companies internally in Q4 of 2023, or the first couple of quarters of 2024—90% failure rate. But she’s saying to me all the time, we’re building a strategy. It’s strategic. It’s intentional. And every day I’m like, we have to go faster, and I have to fight that. We know how to do that, because it’s been our survival, unfortunately. Create the space between stimulus and response, move with intention, and know yourself. I mean, I think that’s it. Again, I don’t think it’s an easy ask, but I think we have an advantage.

Stoller: Great words.

Brady: Love that. I’m going to attribute that quote to Brené Brown.

Brown: No, don’t attribute, not my quote! Thank y’all. 

Stoller: Thank you.

Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Hélène Estèves.

Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.

Brady: Our head of video is Adam Banicki.

Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.

Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.