How to be More Human in the World of AI

Rachel Cossar: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode on conversations in the future of work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar, and today we’re talking about a subject that I find to be so relevant and fascinating and that is, you know, how can we be more human in a world that seemingly is driven by AI. And today on the show, we have an expert in many fields but I’m very pleased to introduce Jean Ann Nichols who will be speaking with us about her opinions and her experiences as a leadership coach and executive coach in some of these intersecting spaces. Jeanette, and over to you to introduce yourself. Thanks so much, Rachel.

JeanAnn Nichols: I’m really delighted to be here and Thanks everybody for for listening in. I started my career as an engineer on the factory floor wearing a bunny suit and creating computer chips. And, progressed, through many different functions to be a vice president and general manager at Intel Corporation. But there was a turning point there where I decided to leverage my people skills, which is a bit unusual as an engineer, in helping other people develop their own leadership. And so I pivoted from technology into executive coaching. And I coach, I teach at Stanford, and I’ve just authored a book called intentional power. So you can, learn more about me at the website. Rachel, I’m sure we’ll put a link in the notes. Yes. Absolutely. And we’ll circle back at the end too, Jeanette, to just get what whatever the the takeaways are for people in terms of getting in touch with you.

Rachel Cossar: So, let’s let’s start with this first question. I, Jean Ann, when we first connected, you shared a really interesting story about your own experience with truly impactful coaching, and how that inspired you a little bit to to kinda course or change your your own course. So I’d love to hear if you wanna share with the audience a little bit that personal experience you had? Absolutely.

JeanAnn Nichols: And I think this is, was really a key turning point in my career. There was a person who left the company suddenly, and he was running a large part of, business. He was a man. He was a vice president. He was over six and a half feet tall. And they came and said, Hey, Jean Ann. Would you move over and take on this business? It was more than twice the size of the business I had been running. And I was really worried about the execs just kind of getting rolled over. It was just a little old me, and the guy who was leaving was just so much larger than life. So I asked for an executive coach. Because I wanted to show up in a way, you know, vice presidentially, you know, as as you would need to do. And I had this coach. I probably wrote the best development plan I’d written in my career, I revitalized the team. We grew the business by a $1,000,000,000 a year from $5,000,000,000 to $8,000,000,000 over 3 years. And it really changed the way I showed up. It changed the way I saw myself as a leader. It changed even physical things about the way I move and speak. And, certainly changed the way others saw me. And, of course, I was promoted to vice president and, you know, continued to have great success through my corporate career. But it was really remarkable to me. And I thought, when I get done running business? I wanna learn how that magic happened because that executive coaching just seemed so unusual to me. I just didn’t understand it. So I went and got coaching certification in, you know, for individuals and for teams. And so I’ve been practicing as an coach since then. And it is so rewarding. It’s kind of that move from success to significance for me where now I get to help others, especially women in the tech industries or or technical fields to to live up to their full potential. Right.

Rachel Cossar: And you said something that I think really interesting and important in this kind of transformational change that it sounds like you went through as a leader, but there’s there’s so much in the actual, like, the way you actually show up. Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: Like, like, that physical expression of who you’re becoming as a leader.

Rachel Cossar: Like, can you share maybe a little more about, like, what that actually felt like? Yeah.

JeanAnn Nichols: I think there there are kind of three things to it. It’s like, what are you saying and how are you saying it? Mhmm. Being really attentive to the fact that you’re playing a role in someone else’s story. Right? It’s really not about me anymore. And what that does is it shifts you off of sort of that imposter syndrome, they’re gonna figure out I’m not good enough or, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing. When you realize you’re playing a role, and you need to show up in a certain way. It it changes how you think about things. And then physically thinking about where am I placing myself in the room, almost like an actress on a stage, right, where where do I need to be to have the impact I wanna have with this conversation? I can tell a couple of little stories. I used to when I knew I was going into a staff meeting, my boss always sat in the same place in the room. If I knew someone was coming in with an attack against my team, I was sitting next to my boss. So we were, you know, shoulder to shoulder on the same side of the table. So when that attack came across, It was almost like it was coming at both of us, not at me directly. Right?

Rachel Cossar: We’re on the same team. We’re shared here. Right.

JeanAnn Nichols: And when I knew someone was gonna propose something that might be detrimental to my team, I would say directly across from my boss. So that when the topic came up, he couldn’t help but see me saying, wait. Let me raise a concern here. Yep. Right? If I’ve been beside him, he might have been able to overlook me, but when I was directly in his view. And so there are physical things you can do in a room. That I know from your background that, you know, can really change how you show up and just those placements actually improves your posture. And that improves your voice. Right? And so there that’s just a small story about how you can use, your physicality in the way you show up. Yeah. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: I I love that story. I think like table positioning and table power is is not talked about enough but it’s really like you can change something into something into a feeling that’s more confrontational or allied or, you know, same team opposite team, like, and and it really does make a difference. The interesting thing of course now that we have to figure out is Like, how do those dynamics translate over video? And in some ways, video is a bit of an equalizer. Yes. Because every you everyone has the same kind of square rectangle real estate, right? But then, you know, there are other things like if you’re talking and, you know, squares move around as a result. So there’s still some strategy behind it, I think. But it’s a little different.

JeanAnn Nichols: It’s interesting if I can share one other small thing.

Rachel Cossar: Globally.

JeanAnn Nichols: Certainly, the coaching that I went through really helped me in a lot of different cultures. So when you think about, being the boss when I would travel, and this works also on video, when I would travel, and I was the boss’s boss’s boss showing up. My natural inclination, I’m really a people person now, and I would really enjoy meeting the people on the ground, and I’m very independent. So I would just grab my bag, you know, and walk to the hotel or, you know, and my people say, time hotji NAN. In China, for example, we really respect hierarchy. You cannot be seen slapping your bag down the street. You’ll take a car from the airport to the hotel, and you can’t just walk in and glad hand everybody. You need to, be still and create some distance. And, again, that physicality comes in, and it works on video. You know, I I heard one time when you think about, expressing that presence and a little bit of distance because that’s what is going to let people trust you. They trust you’re in charge, and then they can do their work more easily. Yeah. So on video, then I might imagine I have a crown on my head It creates stillness and stillness conveys power. Yep.

Rachel Cossar: Right. Absolutely. I mean, the composure of being grounded and not fit right? Like a nervous energy can really come come out in these interesting ways, non verbally, and can really influence other people’s perception of your authority. Absolutely. Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: So, yeah, absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: It’s fascinating. Alright, let’s let’s let’s move on to the next one. So as technology becomes more and more human like, right? I mean, so many people are flored by the advances in the past few months. Like, how do we invest in developing ourselves as leaders and communicators? Like, kind of tapping into our own humanity.

JeanAnn Nichols: I love this question. And I agree with the, generative AI and a lot of the tools are getting better and better. And we’re investing a lot in those. But we also have to invest in being better human. One of my clients recently told me, technology is easy. It’s the people that are hard. Right? And one of the reasons people can be hard is we haven’t had 5 generations in the work environment at the same time. And they’re very different. Right? Millennials and gen zs are the most diverse, generations that we’ve ever had on the earth. And they have to work together with boomers and and everyone else. So getting greater skill at people’s skills and, and I call them power skills can help you be an exceptional leader. There’s an HR analyst, Josh Berson, and he says, hard skills are soft and soft skills are hard. Mhmm.

Rachel Cossar: So when I say hard skills, technologies, subject matter expertise, The hard skills, they change all the time.

JeanAnn Nichols: There are new innovations that appear and obsolete other things. So they’re actually soft because they’re changing, and they’re actually relatively easy to learn. But soft skills, people skills, they’re actually hard. They’re difficult to build and maintain. They’re really hard to master. They’re really critical for success, and they’re enduring. Right?

Rachel Cossar: Modern work is done by teams.

JeanAnn Nichols: And so these soft skills are really our power skills. They let us express our humanity with intention, include other people and really achieve greater results. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: I do, I do love that. I’ve heard that before.

JeanAnn Nichols: Like that translation from soft skills, which can sometimes be perceived as less than or not as important as to power skills. Right?

Rachel Cossar: Because if you also look at the way people are promoted, right, oftentimes the ability to communicate and articulate and inspire and influence. Those are all things that can really help you move to a different place than the organization. But I think and and I also do think that this is where great coaching comes into play because it’s really not like a one size fits all approach, right? Like not everyone’s going to communicate in the exact same way. You have to find that authentic voice to then be compelling as as a leader or as a communicator. And that I think is what is also like so interesting about the difference between the AI and the human Right? Like that humans always gonna have their own unique set of experiences to draw from whereas the AI will have been trained across know, whatever subset of data. So it’s just kind of an interesting thing to think about.

JeanAnn Nichols: Well, it’s interesting to see how these, large language models their predictability improves. Like, in situational awareness, we call it, you know, our situational leadership, how how good do they get at Adaptic? Mhmm. And and predicting to what could happen next based on the signals that they’re getting. I think human to human We have a great deal of intuition.

Rachel Cossar: And as efficient as we make our models and as many calculations as they can do, I think it’s gonna be a long time before we really get to the sort of empathy and humility that’s required to have the human interactions.

JeanAnn Nichols: Yeah. Right.

Rachel Cossar: Definitely. I also wonder if there’s, so with virtual sapiens, we just included some generative AI, like feedback for for content, right? So, like, give us some suggested rewrite to make this sound more empathetic or give us some suggested re rewrites to make this more concise.

JeanAnn Nichols: And one thing I noticed, you know, before we started really refining the prompts was that the answers they were giving were very similar from one situation to the next, you know, valid answers in general. Right.

Rachel Cossar: But not valuable enough initially, right, to Have it be all that meaningful?

JeanAnn Nichols: And I think it’s interesting the interplay of these different things. So when I was, teaching a class at Stanford and writing this book, we came up with a modern leadership model we called Hardy, h e a r t I. And it’s humility empathy, accountability, resiliency, transparency, and inclusivity. So There are a lot of facets. And I think some of our large learning models have sort of gaps, right? They’re not even across Right. That sort of picture of what are the core power skills that humans have to engage with each other? Right.

Rachel Cossar: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So continuing to just tap into those power skills, I think, is a very, like, a it’s critical. Right. And I think it’s it’s not just because of Gen AI, but the whole world is changing. Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: We have leaders that that kind of our tyrants. Right? They’re all about getting the work done.

Rachel Cossar: They don’t demonstrate any humility or empathy to their people.

JeanAnn Nichols: And what happens is they burn themselves out. They bring their teams out. They might get the results, but, you know, there’s a lot of consequences on the negative side. Yeah. And we have other leaders on the other end of the spectrum. I call them cupcakes and kisses leaders who, are all about caring and sharing and encouraging. But they don’t hold their people accountable. Right? And so then it negatively impacts the performance of the whole team and and maybe the company. Alright.

Rachel Cossar: So This is not this comes back to the genai and that, flexibility that it needs to be able to show, because the situation doesn’t work the same every time. Totally. Absolutely. The others are such great examples. So what advice do you share kind of following on that thread with leaders who are faced with this constant world of change and and disruption.

JeanAnn Nichols: Well, I think there there are 2 kinds of disruption. One hand, there is, these shifts in the people environment as leaders, expectations of leaders are changing. And the employee base is changing. And on the other hand, there’s a lot of environmental shift. Right? That’s technology and politics and, a lot of conflicting demands from employees or investors communities, consumers. Right? There’s just a lot more of that stakeholder management that needs to get done. Yep. So on one hand, I think this intention of pursuing, 3 ps, people planet and prophets. If you don’t take care of your people, You’re not gonna grow your business. If you don’t manage the planet, your impact on the planet, your costs are gonna rise. And if you don’t have profits, you’re not gonna be an ongoing entity.

Rachel Cossar: Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: So I think on one hand, that change is like, I need to now pay attention to a lot more things than I did in the past. Right. You might add a 4th p, which is purpose. It’s like, why am I doing this? Is really essential. Right. But when we come back to how do we deal with the constant change? I have a a little game that I came up with and then wrote a blog on this. It’s called the What if game. Right? It’s, kind of there’s research that shows if we plan how to prevent or mitigate, a disaster or a stressful scenario. By thinking through the decisions we would make when the disaster happens even if it’s not the thing we predicted, our brain is actually wired to cope without stressing and without stopping, right, the fight flight freeze. You don’t get the amygdala hijack. Yep. And so I met at this game with my kids. But it really works in a business situation. Mhmm. It’s called what if, right, is a pre mortem. So imagine we have, you know, a big IT systems, you know, modernization going on and what could go wrong. Like, imagine it failed. Right? And so we literally did this with my team. What if someone can’t log on in the new system we were doing in an access and entitlement upgrade? And they’re like, oh, well, we’ve trained customer service. Right? Okay. Okay. What if a thousand people can’t log on? Mhmm. Oh, well, we’ve got a contract with an outside vendor. Right, to bring in more customer service agents. But, you know, like, what if a hundred thousand people can’t log on?

Rachel Cossar: Okay.

JeanAnn Nichols: Now we realized we need to invest in, you know, a software bridge because once we moved to the new system, we couldn’t fail back. You know?

Rachel Cossar: And but this idea of going through what could go wrong, what else what else what else could go wrong, is a way of building resilience.

JeanAnn Nichols: Right? And that increases your confidence that you have some kind of a backup plan that’s gonna enable you. To, you know, survive some kind of stressor. It also works for things that are really positive for things that are really good. So when we think about, you know, all that change, you don’t wanna only think about the negative consequences of chain. What about the positive con what could go incredibly right.

Rachel Cossar: Right. Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: And then and what else? And what else? And how am I ready? You know, if my CFO walks in with a $100,000 for me and says it’s you know, can you spend this? I wanna have a plan on something that’s gonna bring value to the company. Yep. I don’t wanna, in the moment, have to think of something And so I think when we think about geni genai and AI in general, we can think about what are the negative consequences to our modes modes of operation, but we can also think of it. What are some opportunities that we need to take advantage of? Right. Right.

Rachel Cossar: Yeah. No. I like that. Like, it’s it’s like developing muscle. Yeah.

JeanAnn Nichols: Right?

Rachel Cossar: Yeah. That’s really, that’s really interesting. I I I had heard of the post you said sorry. Pre mortem. Yeah. And then would you also then, like, pair that with, like, a post mortem of, like, already we launched and then, like, what actually happened. Right. What should we do again?

JeanAnn Nichols: Yeah. Right.

Rachel Cossar: Right. What would we no. That one didn’t work so well. And Yeah.

JeanAnn Nichols: You know, on this IT thing, the great news is the the conversion happened, and we didn’t I’d spent, I don’t know, $70,000 on a software patch.

Rachel Cossar: We didn’t have to use it. Okay. Let’s look at that and say Right.

JeanAnn Nichols: Was there a different way of doing that that it wouldn’t have cost me quite so much money? But, you know, in the moment, it was the right thing to do. Because it gives us the confidence to go forward with that shift. Right. Right.

Rachel Cossar: Yeah. Right. And then it’s just a constantly iterating process wherein you have the structure to meet the constantly changing kind of disruptive forces. That’s right. And that was your question here.

JeanAnn Nichols: It’s like the this is ongoing all the time. Right. Right. And so can I do a micro version of this? Yeah. You know, for what’s gonna happen this week? Mhmm.

Rachel Cossar: Right. Yeah. I know. I I I love that. That’s, like, that’s such a great, such a great thing to think about. Right.

JeanAnn Nichols: And if I’m from a micro situation, think about, you know, as you if you have to drive to work or you’re walking down the hall to work, what could come up this week that I wanna be prepared in a positive way for? Right. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: No. For sure. I think, I think again, like developing that kind of muscle around, like what do I know is going to happen?

JeanAnn Nichols: In terms of like a next step or a project product launch or whatever, and then how do I then consider the unknown that is sure to face us Right? Is the world so complex?

Rachel Cossar: Yeah. Totally. Great. So, to close-up the last question, what are some of the best practices for leaders to consider embracing AI specifically without losing, you know, the the full potential of their human workforce.

JeanAnn Nichols: So I kind of have a a couple of things here. The first one is I encourage everybody to start experimenting. With NAI, whether you are doing it with, written work, like chatgpt4 or Claude or Bard or, you know, any of the tools Bing has a GPT4 built in. Experience it for yourself, and you’ll see. And I think it will, like, level set you or ground you on where the technology is today. Mhmm. But it’s changing. Every week it’s getting back. There are certain tools that I didn’t like for the way that they were helping me, rewrite, and now they’re getting much better. So so first is, like, get some personal experience with it. It’s really not too hard. There’s a ton of videos up on how to get started, but just just learn about that. Now embracing AI without losing your humanity. I think the foundation is starting with responsible AI. Right, of having fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security. Mhmm. And and then inclusivity, trust, transparency, accountability. Right? There there are actually a lot of elements of of this leadership model we were just talking about in responsible. Bay eye. Because when you build those traits into your leaders and your culture, then the products that you develop are much more likely to incorporate those traits as well. Right? Mhmm. And so when I think about embracing AI, foundational. Let’s think about responsibly. I how do I make it inclusive? How do I make it transparent? How do I make it, accountable?

Rachel Cossar: How am I accountable for its results? So that that’s kind of on the product side and the culture side.

JeanAnn Nichols: And then I think, a couple tools that we use without losing your humanity, one is on accountability, can you practice 300 percent accountability? So not only am I accountable for my work, for my own self, but am I accountable for my systems and my systems impact on society. So helping your employees think about how their work impacts more than themselves and their own career. Is a great step in saying, how do I embrace this as a AI without losing humanity without, losing the impact on my people because people wanna know that they’re making a difference in the world and and not causing harm, and they wanna grow their careers. So putting those 2 together. So 300 percent accountability, I think, is 1. Yeah. I think the transparency piece is really important. Yeah. Being able to identify where things come from, how they were developed. We have a little model. It’s the 3 step. It’s like, start with why, why it matters. What you think. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: And move to what?

JeanAnn Nichols: Here’s what we know, and here’s what we don’t know. Mhmm. And and with how. Here’s what you can count on from me, and here’s what I need from you. That transparency in communication and transparency in products you’re developing is gonna be really important. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: So it’s like there’s embedded 2nd and third, degree kind of questioning and and thinking there. Right?

JeanAnn Nichols: Or or 2nd and third order thinking. Right.

Rachel Cossar: It’s similar to, going to the source Right? Going to that primary source and just confirming that, like, oh, that’s to your point of transparency. Like, that’s where that came from, that, you know, not taking everything at face value. Is, also And being accountable. You can’t just, like, generate something and just put up there and assume that it’s, you know, all good. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. But no, I love I love the emphasis on like just get out there and play around with stuff and try things, you know, I’ve heard some some people, earlier on the show mentioned, like, creating these smaller kind of nimble task forces within a larger organization just to help people experiment and, you know, see see what’s actually interesting and relevant. Yeah. And I think you’ll see over time, sort of curated, large language models are much more effective. Right? Did they reflect your audience?

JeanAnn Nichols: We we have not very much inclusivity because the web has just a lot of bias in the content in the way it’s been put up. And so sometimes if you curate, where your models are learning, you’re gonna wind up with better outcomes for your people and better outcomes in your products. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Jean Ann, thank you so much for sharing so many fantastic takeaways. And if our audience would like to get access to your book, your website, your blog, you know, to to your your thought leadership in general, what’s the best way for them to do that?

JeanAnn Nichols: So you can visit my website, gnedichols.com, and we’ll we’ll type it out for you. The book intentional power is for sale on all the, electronic book sellers in airports and book shops is available in print. In, audio and in ereader. So whatever format you’d like, from a myriad of sellers. That’s really helpful. And if you’re interested in taking classes, you can look at the Stanford continuing studies catalog and and join us because we really enjoy the engagement of live class. Awesome.

Rachel Cossar: Great. Well, thank you so much and thanks, of course, to our audience for joining us for another conversation in the future of work. Thanks, Rachel.

JeanAnn Nichols: Appreciate you having me.