Soft Skills & Software

There’s a lot AI can do for businesses. There’s a lot only humans can do. Striking the balance will deliver success.

Workplaces everywhere are adopting and relying on AI. That’s a good thing, says “I Thought I Was A Leader …” author and sociologist Dr. Scott De Long, because there is plenty of good AI can do wherever work is taking place.

Scott De Long

“I was a late adopter of any AI, but once I learned what it could do for me and how to use it properly, it was eye-opening,” De Long told BOSS. “It’s faster way of getting information, and I shouldn’t be afraid of it, nor should I be afraid that it’s going to replace me, because AI can’t do what I can do. And that’s building human relationships.”

Business is still people-centric, and as AI is a great tool for taking over some tasks, leaders and employees would be well-served by developing and honing the soft skills that create and enhance those critical relationships.

Soft Skills

These skills help strike the balance between what AI does and what humans do well that AI can’t. Whereas AI provides the best data it can find when asked a certain question or given a certain prompt, that information is not always accurate. It takes critical thinking to analyze that information, decide whether it makes sense, and fact-check it. AI tends to be black-and-white, lacking the nuance of human interaction. It doesn’t have emotional intelligence, adaptability, or leadership skills. So if AI is taking over part of the job, those who want continued success need to work on these soft skills to provide something the competition doesn’t.

“I’ve never seen a positive human relationship built unless trust has been developed first,” De Long said.

Developing a deep trust quickly entails three soft skills that can be improved. The first is respect, and not the old-school approach of respect needing to be earned, he said.

“I’m talking about a different level of respect, and that’s respect for human dignity, respect for you as a human being, that you have something of value and that I can learn something. That adds to humility in this. I can learn something from everybody.”

The second is listening to understand rather than listening to reply. Listening to understand where someone is coming from and why they have that point of view requires more than just hearing and nodding and paraphrasing and all the active listening skills. Listening to understand involves reading facial expressions and paying attention to emotional cues, which leads to the listener asking better questions.

“This ability to listen with empathy is the strongest indicator that I’ve found on making human connections,” De Long said.

The third skill is to share from your own experience rather than telling someone what to do.

“You’re gonna tell me a story, and I’m gonna say, ‘That’s interesting, I had something similar happened to me and here’s what it was, and here’s what I did and here are the outcomes’ and more importantly, ‘Here’s how it felt,’” De Long said. “I have no idea what you should do. I don’t have your background. I don’t have your experience.”

Do those things, and you’ll build trust. Then, to affirm that trust, deliver on your promises to customers and employees.

“Going through that cycle just three times, you can build a deeper level of respect that leads to trust and therefore relationships.”

Communication Yields Innovation

Learning to ask better questions of people also enables users to get the highest and best use out of AI, which produces better-quality responses from better prompts. Leaders can then use the extra time saved by efficient use of AI on setting a strategic vision with their teams, leaving the tactics to AI.

“Just by myself, I shouldn’t be creating that strategy, I should be creating my team,” De Long said. “I cannot create a team unless I build trust, unless I build relationships, and unless I build around psychological safety so that you are willing to talk to me and talk to my team about the things that are important to us.”

The old command and control leadership style where orders come from the top and are carried out unquestioned is fading away fast, he said, and leaders who cling to it are becoming dinosaurs.

“What I need is teams of people – and diversity matters in this as well, and I’m talking about not just diversity of color and race and religion and all that, but diversity in age and diversity in backgrounds and diversity in experience so that we can get a full picture on what we need to do as an organization – and then we can use the tools that AI provides us to make the task go faster.”

The human and technological components complement each other, adding up to greater than the sum of their parts. Innovation rises out of the whole team exchanging ideas.

“These soft skills allow people to have a different level of communication than they had in the past. Your experiences and my experiences create this synergy that is going to create some innovation,” he said.

Teachable Moments

To encourage their employees to hone these soft skills, leaders must embrace and display them themselves. They need to show the importance of these skills by performing them every day. It’s critical to not just let employees see the skills in action, but to see why they work.

The opportunity to showcase those soft leadership skills comes when assuring employees that their contributions are still valued and that the incorporation of AI into the workplace is not an intent to replace them.

“I think honesty is a big part of that for the leaders to let their people know, ‘Here are the AI tools that are available, and here’s how we are going to use them,’” De Long said. “’Some of these are tasks that you used to do, so what I would encourage you to do is learn the next level up.’”

Show employees that while some aspects of their jobs are being taken over by AI, there remains a pathway for them to learn and grow, if they’re willing. If they’re not, then, yes, they could be replaced.

“In the business world, it’s still people-centric, and we need to learn how to communicate,” he said.

That includes among co-workers in a multi-generational workplace, where digital natives can help older generations see what new technologies are capable of and how to use them, and older employees can show younger ones the value of a face-to-face conversation.

“We all have something we can teach each other,” De Long said, “if we’re humble enough to be open to it.”

That includes the value of blending the old with the new.