Rethinking “soft skills”

As AI begins to take over many tasks, which leaders will remain relevant and which will become redundant?

The best answer involves leaders who invest in the leadership skills that are uniquely human and therefore indispensable. Described by many as “soft skills,” these are in fact the hardest but most critical skills to develop – those that require emotional intelligence.

For many years in western culture, high value has been placed on cognitive intelligence. We may even believe that good leadership involves ignoring emotions, especially when it comes to decision-making. We typically aim for rational over emotional, as if it’s a clear dichotomy – head over heart.

We tend to want to ignore emotional input in decision-making, believing it taints a decision. And with AI tools doing more of our thinking and analyzing, it’s easy to believe that even leadership decision-making can be done by a program that’s fast, logical, and data-driven.

But this would miss the human nature of decisions entirely. Contrary to popular belief, the brain’s intelligence is not separate from our body and emotions.

Emotions as brain-body intelligence

The brain constantly uses the body and emotions to inform our decisions and guide us.

Neuroscience research shows that feelings arise when the brain connects meaning to changes in the body. The brain becomes aware of the body’s reactions to stimuli (a rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms), and makes meaning from them using pre-existing “neural maps” built from prior experience.

Similar research suggests that the brain first becomes aware of generalized feelings (pleasant or unpleasant) based on bodily sensations, then scans for pre-existing concepts that help categorize and give meaning to those feelings. (Check this post for more on how the brain makes emotions.)

For instance, if a client walks into your office and your heart beats faster, whether the emotion is fear or excitement depends on your existing neural maps of this person (or someone like them). A prior positive experience leads the brain to interpret the rapid heartbeat as pleasurable — something like excitement, a signal to expect a good interaction. A prior negative experience leads to anxiety or annoyance — a signal to protect yourself from potential pain.

(Note of caution: prior neural maps can be based on flawed assumptions or beliefs, such as implicit bias; so remain curious about the accuracy and relevance to the current situation.)

While AI has maps full of data and information, it has no sensory input and no capacity to feel as humans do. All the volumes of data cannot lead to feelings and emotional predictions without somatic experience for context and meaning.

Emotional intelligence and decision-making

The brain is constantly assessing our feelings to help predict possible outcomes, in pursuit of pleasure and avoiding pain.

When we weigh options, we imagine ourselves in each situation and get a good or bad feeling that helps filter out possibilities. In this way, feelings are always part of our decisions, whether we acknowledge them or not.

This is precisely the capacity AI cannot replicate. AI can crunch data and surface patterns at a scale no human can match, and that’s genuinely valuable. But when a decision touches people — how to deliver hard feedback, whether to trust a new hire, how to navigate a team through conflict — our somatic experience and emotional intelligence does the hard work that AI cannot.

As more routine analysis gets handed off to AI, the judgment calls that remain are increasingly the ones that depend on the hard skills – not “soft skills” – of emotional intelligence. Leaders who improve those skills will be the ones that thrive, as they will improve their communications, predications, negotiations and decision-making.

3 ways to improve emotional intelligence

While there are many ways to improve the hard skills of emotional intelligence, here are a few tips to begin:

1. Lose the “heart vs. head” concept. Logic and feeling are both useful information, and both affect our predictions and decision-making. Recognizing this relieves the pressure of trying to choose one and ignore the other, and means you can’t fully outsource decisions to an AI system that cannot consider the essential information from human emotions.
2. Pay attention to your body. Improving attention to your body’s sensations increases your somatic awareness and understanding of your feelings. Pause, turn attention inward, get curious about what’s happening in the body, and take note of the context (e.g. my heart is racing, and I’m holding my breath in response to certain stimuli). This clarifies the somatic experience and builds clearer neural maps for the brain to draw on later.
3. Label your emotions as they are useful information. Instead of dismissing a feeling, get curious about it. All emotions carry information. The more specifically you can name an emotion, the more you sharpen your understanding and neural mapping of it — and the better your brain gets at predicting whether a potential outcome moves you toward pleasure or pain.

With practice, your brain gets better at predicting outcomes and making decisions using all the information available in your emotions, body and brain – something AI can never do.

The leaders who invest in the hard skills of emotional intelligence will be the ones AI can’t replace.