In this interview, Speaker B discusses the future of leadership amid rapid technological change, emphasizing the importance of heart‑centered, intentional leadership. They argue that employee engagement directly drives EBITDA, yet many companies overlook this metric. While acknowledging the optimism that purposeful leadership can thrive, Speaker B warns about the dangers of over‑reliance on AI, citing the loss of over 75,000 tech jobs and stressing that people—through their institutional and contextual knowledge—are irreplaceable. The conversation balances hopeful advocacy for people‑first leadership with caution about dehumanizing organizations, urging leaders to measure engagement and retain the human element as the core of business success.
One of the first things that jumped out at me that I wanted to ask you about is what do you see to be the future of leadership as a result of everything that's going on and piling up on top of leaders today?
There are two things that are coming to mind, and I feel like I have the two different angels on my— I have the devil, I have the good angel, the bad one on my shoulders. Because I'd like to believe that the more opportunities that I have to spend time with people like you, where we continue to evangelize the importance of heart-centered leadership and the importance of being very intentional and the fact that engagement equals EBITDA, I'd like to believe that the future of leadership is very bright. But I will tell you, it seems like the human race is a hard-headed bunch. It seems like we have to mess up quite a bit and we over-index, and then we have to go back to the fundamentals because at present, and I, I haven't looked in the last few days, but just in the tech sector alone, we were at over 75,000 jobs that have been lost because miraculously AI seems to be this wonderful elixir. And I am all for progress. I am all for using technology, but I think we are using using technology, more broadly speaking, to our peril if we believe that we can completely strip our organizations of people because it's people that make the organizations go. It's people that have the institutional knowledge and the contextualized knowledge that machines don't. And so I have some concerns, but part of the reason that I'm optimistic is because I get a chance to sit down and have conversations like this with you and your audience. So hopefully we can carry the torch of strong leadership, intentional leadership, and the fact that We are still in the people business, and the first client that we have are those that are closest to us.
And yet some companies are really missing that equation. Like you mentioned, engagement equals EBITDA. I don't know. And I, like you, talk with a lot of business leaders, and there's so few that really even make that a metric. That they, that they track, measure, and report on. What do you see the trends being when it comes to making sure that they're aware that there is a metric behind the fact that engagement does equal EBITDA?
