Leading with Emotional Intelligence: The Human Edge in an AI-Driven World
I’ll start by sharing a story.
A few years ago I and a group of engineering leaders were asked to back an organisational change that we had questions about. I did it. I knew in the moment that I had not come across as authentic. Afterwards, someone on my team told me directly: you came across as fake in that meeting.
They were right. People sense it.
Change is felt before it can be managed.
I shared that story at the opening of my talk at CTO Craft Con: Europe in Amsterdam this week.
I think it captures something important about what we are dealing with in right now with AI. Many leaders are genuinely excited about what it makes possible. Many - at the same time - are quietly anxious about what it means for their future, their role, their team, and what makes them good at what they do. There is a pressure to be visibly on board and to project confidence they may not always feel.
Tech is not the hard part
70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives. AI transformation is 70% people - 30% technology. The irony is that most organisations spend 80% of their AI budget on the 30%.
As BCG put it in their 2026 report How Change Really Works: "Change doesn't fail because people resist. It fails because leaders misunderstand how people really change."
The human factor is treated as an afterthought. A training programme. A change management work-stream. Too often the human factor is not given enough focus.
Emotions are the engine, not the obstacle
We have been told for decades to leave our emotions at the door. Be professional. Stay rational. But research by Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill published in the Harvard Business Review is clear: emotions influence employees' commitment, creativity, decision making, work quality, and likelihood of staying. Recognising emotional dynamics allows organisations to tap into hidden levers for productivity and innovation. Emotional Intelligence - the ability to understand yourself, understand your impact on others, regulate your responses, and build effective relationships - is not a soft skill. It is the core of great leadership. And as AI takes over more of the execution layer, it becomes even more important.
The world your team is living in
We have been talking for several years about how we have been leading in a VUCA world - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. Jamais Cascio argues we need a new framework. BANI. Brittle. Anxious. Non-linear. Incomprehensible.
And within that context, something specific is happening with AI that industrial psychologist Fred Guest shared in a post having attended the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology conference in 2026: the Proximity Paradox. With every previous technology cycle - the internet, mobile, cloud - the more people used the technology, the more comfortable they became. AI is the opposite. The closer people get to it, the more fear grows.
When you think about what AI targets, it makes sense. Judgment and creativity - what people identify with most. This is a culture challenge more so than a technology one.
Change is felt before it can be managed
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman established in 1984 that people do not respond to change itself. They respond to their appraisal of what it means for them. And they build that appraisal by watching the people above them.
As Kevin Novak writes "By the time resistance is visible enough to manage, it has usually already been decided."
The emotional weather of your AI transformation was set by signals you were sending without knowing it.
Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson established in 1993 that we automatically synchronise with the emotional states of the people around us. Christakis and Fowler extended that finding: emotions such as happiness or anxiety cascade through social networks to three degrees of separation.
If you have not processed your own response to AI adoption, restructuring, layoffs, or whatever is happening in your organisation, that unprocessed feeling travels. Unprocessed emotion does not disappear. It leaks. And your team can tell the difference between genuine calm and performed calm. We established this in my story at the start.
And this is not a one-time thing. Every shift, every new wave of change, needs another round of processing. The leaders who navigate this well build a practice of staying present with what is changing - for themselves and for their people.
The identity threats we are not talking about
Blake Ashforth's research on role transitions gives us a powerful lens: "When expertise fuses with identity, any change that threatens the expertise threatens the person."
The most successful people can be the least psychologically flexible during organisational change. Not because they are difficult. Because they have the most invested and have the most to lose.
Drawing on Ashforth's research, Kevin Novak identifies five identity threats that show up consistently in transformation. They are often felt simultaneously, and they explain much of what leaders might read as resistance.
Competence Threat: "Can I do this new thing?" The more expertise you have built, the more your identity depends on it - and the more threatened you feel when transformation requires you to become a beginner again. You have built your identity by being competent - this is about preserving your sense of self.
Relevance Threat: "Will anyone need what I do?" People are reacting to what they fear no one will need anymore.
Status Threat: Senior experts have status because of what they know. Their opinion is valued. Change flattens knowledge hierarchies. People will actively resist even beneficial change when their status is threatened.
Narrative Threat: "Did I follow the wrong career path?" We all have a story about the path we have taken. Transformation can invalidate that story. These are existential questions about whether your work has meaning.
Community Threat: We define ourselves through the communities we belong to - networks built around common knowledge. Change can dissolve communities of practice. You lose your professional tribe.
It is worth remembering that all five threats can be felt simultaneously. When loss is ignored, resistance intensifies. When loss is acknowledged, adaptation can begin.
"I need to get closer to the code"
I asked for a show of hands in the room. Many went up.
Feeling a need to get closer to the code can come from two very different places. Strategic clarity - gaining a deeper understanding, improving decision making, better supporting your team. Or identity anxiety - reaching for familiar competence, performing expertise.
Leaders I speak with are often driven by both. The question is not which one - it is what is in the driving seat. Because if identity anxiety is driving, it can tip into micromanaging, displacing team members who know more than you, and performing expertise rather than creating the conditions for your team to use theirs.
“The most effective leaders are no longer the ones with the best answers. They are the ones who host the best conversations” - Jennifer Garvey Berger
Sense-making: The process by which we structure the unknown so we can act on it. Org psychologist Karl Weick through his pioneering research on sensemaking demonstrated that humans don't simply process information; they actively construct meaning from ambiguous cues, and the sense-making process is fundamentally social. We have come from a time where leaders were expected to have all the answers to a place where meaning needs to be co-created by leaders and followers together. That requires a degree of vulnerability that does not come naturally in cultures that reward certainty.
The middle manager bottleneck
Engineering managers are carrying a weight that rarely gets acknowledged. They are translating and implementing strategy from above while processing their own identity threat - and simultaneously being expected to champion the change to their teams with confidence and positivity.
Quy Huy at INSEAD calls this the emotional balancing act of middle management. Robert Kahn's 1964 research on role conflict found that chronic role conflict causes measurable psychological harm.
With organisational change, the executive team has often been thinking about it for some time before they announce it. By the time they share it, they have processed it. They expect everyone to catch up quickly. If people don’t seem to ‘get’ it, they may overcommunicate. And paradoxically, nothing lands - not because people are resistant, but because they are cognitively overwhelmed before they have had time to feel anything.
A question to consider: Are you creating space for your engineering managers to process before you ask them to champion?
The Leadership Shadow
"All leaders cast a shadow. The question is whether yours is blocking the sun, or inspiring others with its silhouette to strive for more" - Brad Smith, former CEO Intuit
Your leadership shadow is the unconscious influence you have on your team and organisation - for better or worse. It goes beyond your personal reputation. It is the culture you create through your actions, decisions, and communications, captured across four dimensions: what you say, how you act, what you prioritise, and how you measure.
During a period of organisational change, your shadow is longer than usual. Your teams are not just listening to your words about AI. They are reading everything. The meeting you cancelled. The project you quietly deprioritised. The question you did not answer directly. All of it is data.
Leaders who are visibly anxious about their own future make that anxiety contagious. Leaders who model curiosity and psychological safety make that contagious too. Understanding your shadow - and leading with intention - is one of the most powerful and underused tools in leadership development.
What your team needs from you
Gallup's February 2025 research across 52 countries found that what people most need from their leaders comes down to four things: Hope, Trust, Compassion, and Stability.
None of these are about technical expertise.
Hope is not certainty. It is the belief - credible, grounded, honest - that you and the team will navigate this together. Lack of certainty may be seen as a positive thing - the future is not yet created. This is exciting and hopeful. Trust was the second thing that followers need now from leaders. It is built through consistency between what you say and what you do - and transparency when you do not have the answer.
What the research says about trust
For my MSc in Work and Organisational Behaviour at DCU, I conducted semi-structured interviews with technology leaders across remote and hybrid organisations in Ireland. A key finding was that leaders who start with trust - who extend it before it is earned - create a self-reinforcing positive dynamic. Trust begets trust. The opposite is also true.
From my research, six practices of tech leaders who built high trust relationships were: transparency, autonomy and flexibility, communication for clarity of vision, deliberate social connection, visibility and recognition, and active trust development to build inclusion.
AI adoption is a team sport
Most AI training focuses on the individual. But adoption stalls at the individual level.
Teams that learn and experiment with AI together achieve double the adoption rate of those who go it alone.
Atlassian saw an 82% improvement in team understanding after building AI agreements together.
Udemy's embedded AI champions model led to a fivefold increase in active users.
The multigenerational workforce and AI
Due to greater longevity, we have more generations working together in organisations than at any previous point in history. And AI is adding a new layer of complexity to those dynamics.
Multi-generational teams have always had assumptions running in both directions. Senior engineers may question the commitment or depth of those coming up. Junior engineers may see senior colleagues as out of touch or resistant to change. AI is accelerating assumptions - and creating new ones. However the research tells us that every generation believes the next generation doesn’t work as hard.
The research also shows that the differences within generations are greater than the differences between them. The responses we see from junior engineers - questioning whether loyalty is a good idea is a natural psychological responses to the world they are operating in. Not unlike the identity threats we explored earlier.
Where age differences overlap with other status differences - seniority, gender, background there is a compounding impact.
AI is also disrupting the knowledge exchange that has always existed between experienced and emerging engineers. If organisations stop hiring junior talent because AI appears to cover their function, they lose that exchange. And with it, the pipeline for the leaders of the future.
I am a fan of reverse mentoring, and a progression of this is reciprocal mentoring. People at different career stages or with different experience can benefit greatly from reciprocal mentoring. When we value those different perspectives and work with them deliberately, everyone benefits.
Who builds AI shapes AI
Women make up 50% of new hires into non-AI roles. But only 26% of new hires into AI roles. Workers most at risk from AI disruption: 57% women, 43% men. And 12% of AI researchers worldwide are women.
As Laura Bates wrote in the Financial Times in February 2026: "We are not the ones building this new world. But we will have no choice about living in it."
Susan Colantuono's research documents over 16 career decision points where AI systems work against women - in hiring, promotions, salary benchmarking, performance reviews. The same tools being pushed for adoption across organisations. When someone questions a tool that is documented to work against them, that is not resistance. That is judgment. It deserves to be heard.
As Carissa Veliz argues in her book Prophecy: the narrative that AI development is inevitable and unstoppable is not a fact. It is a tool of power. The people with the most to gain from us believing that narrative are the ones building and selling these systems.
The people on your teams who are asking hard questions about AI are not the problem. They may be your most valuable critical thinkers. The question is whether you are creating the conditions where those questions can actually be heard.
Supporting yourself so you can lead others
It is hard to co-regulate others if you are dysregulated yourself.
AI is organically extending working hours rather than reducing them. Without deliberate redirection, the time saved fills with more output, not more leadership. Signs of AI-era leadership burnout: constant reactive mode, decision fatigue from being the go-to on every AI question, loss of the reflective time that made you effective.
What helps: audit your own signals - anxiety and calm both travel. Manage your energy, not just your time. And protect thinking time. Model it visibly.
Many of the leaders in the room when I asked about thinking time said they know it is vital - but most do not have it right now. That is both a warning and a starting point.
From the roundtable: what came up in the room
After the talk I facilitated a roundtable on How I Like to Work - a tool I created to explore communication and work preferences. It surfaces what rarely comes up in onboarding or 1:1s: and is a short-cut to building strong working relationships.
A few things that emerged in the conversations:
The friction between servant leadership and directional leadership. Many leaders in the room lean toward servant leadership but recognise that is not always what the moment requires. Finding that balance is an ongoing practice, not a resolved question.
Understanding what gives you energy - and what depletes it - came up as something people know is important but have been slow to act on. The paired activity - speaking with someone you had just met about your strengths was an interesting experience. The workshop served as a reminder to one attendee of things already known, but not always actioned.
Non-negotiables sparked interesting conversation. Some found it hard to identify them without linking them to values. But the simplest frame is this: what do you not negotiate on if you are to show up at your best? It may be concrete - a break, food, uninterrupted thinking time. It is about understanding what gets in the way of doing your best work.
One insight that landed: being self-critical transfers to others. If you hold yourself to an unforgiving standard, that tends to show up in how you give feedback to your team. Positive psychology and balance matter - not just for your own wellbeing, but for the environment you create.
Where to start
Leading with EI is not a transformation programme. It is a daily decision.
Trust - start with it. Be transparent. Be vulnerable. Admit what you do not know.
Identity - name and discuss the threats. Create space to acknowledge the loss.
Think critically - not just how to adopt AI, but what should remain human. Who is not getting to shape the future?
Listen - ask before you assume. Curiosity over judgement.
Emotional Intelligence - know yourself. Know your people. And let them know you.
None of this is possible without a degree of vulnerability. Admitting you do not have all the answers is not weakness. It is the foundation of psychological safety.
“Transformation is not an event. It is a practice. It is patience, repeated.” - Tom Serena
References & Links:
BCG, How Change Really Works, May 2026 https://www.bcg.com/press/19may2026-most-business-transformations-fail-what-leaders-do-differently
BCG, Why AI Change Is Actually a People Change, 2026 https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/why-ai-change-is-actually-a-people-change
BCG, Are You Generating Value from AI? The Widening Gap, 2025 https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/are-you-generating-value-from-ai-the-widening-gap
Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill, Manage Your Emotional Culture, HBR 2016 https://hbr.org/2016/01/manage-your-emotional-culture
Jamais Cascio, Facing the Age of Chaos, 2020 https://medium.com/@cascio/facing-the-age-of-chaos-b00687b1f51d
Susan Colantuono, What AI Is Actually Doing to Women, Be Business Savvy, 2026 https://www.bebusinesssavvy.com/p/what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-women
Gallup, What People Need Most From Leaders, February 2025
Fred Guest, SIOP 2026 - Five themes from the conference including the Proximity Paradox
Laura Bates, How Tech Turned Against Women, Financial Times, 21 February 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/60e2a900-8999-46cc-8107-4f468f442aae
Kevin Novak, Patience Repeated, Issue 272, Human Factor Podcast Season 2, 2026 https://novakkevin.medium.com/patience-repeated-issue-272-68bc094b8753
Tom Serena, Human Factor Podcast Season 2 Finale https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/
Carissa Veliz, TED Talk: Beware the Power of Prediction https://www.ted.com/talks/carissa_veliz_beware_the_power_of_prediction
LinkedIn Economic Graph / World Economic Forum, Women in AI hiring and disruption data, 2025 https://www.weforum.org/stories/equity-diversity-and-inclusion/womens-leadership-is-missing-in-the-jobs-shaping-tomorrows-economy-leaving-economic-opportunity-off-the-table
Brian Elliott, "Why Your AI Adoption Strategy Is Stalling - And What to Do Instead", Charter Works, 2026
https://www.charterworks.com/why-your-ai-adoption-strategy-is-stalling-and-what-to-do-instead/
