Doug Conant, Founder & CEO of ConantLeadership
Introducing the 3rd edition of Doug Conant’s limited leadership series: EQ Answers to AI Questions.
To My Fellow Leaders and Learners in the ConantLeadership Community,
Welcome to the third edition of my new limited series, “EQ Answers to AI Questions,” in which I offer thoughtful, human answers to pressing leadership questions that have been generated by AI.
In our first edition, I went into great detail about our responsibility as leaders in the age of AI, and detailed some of my foundational beliefs about leadership.
In the second edition, I talked about some of the most common mistakes leaders make when driving change.
You can read the full introductory post to get a deeper sense of my point of view and the thinking behind this series—but I’ve also summarized some of the key points from the first edition below as a reference to help you engage with this third edition.
About this Series
1.This limited series references AI, but it is not primarily about AI. Like all of my writing and teaching, it is about the craft of leadership first and foremost.
2. No matter what the futures holds, this rings true: The more omnipresent machines become in our lives, the more differentiating it will be for us to lean into our humanity as we engage with the world as leaders, teachers, friends, and family members.
3. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, we have a dual responsibility:
- We must tap into AI’s power to provide knowledge, spark dialogues, and improve our study of our craft. We can’t be technophobes in the face of innovation.
- Simultaneously, we must acknowledge that AI is not a panacea. We should lean into the vitality of real, authentic self-reflection and interpersonal interaction—to be as humanistic as possible in our leadership life.
4. We cannot be “artificial” in any way in our leadership; we must be authentic, true to ourselves, and true to the people with whom we live and work.
5. At ConantLeadership, my boutique leadership agency which empowers modern leaders with the tenets of “leadership that works,” we define leadership as: The art and science of influencing others in a specific direction.
- The “science” of leadership is primarily about input: Learning what works, studying other leaders, staying up-to-date with best practices, and gaining and honing knowledge in your specific area of expertise etc. AI can help with this part.
- The “art” of leadership is primarily about output: How you uniquely metabolize your knowledge, experience, and values, and apply them to your interactions with the people with whom you live and work. This part is up to you. The “art” is where the magic lies: It’s how you, and only you, show up for other people in a nuanced way, leveraging your unique relationships and skills to connect interpersonally with the people on your team and in your organization.
6. AI has great capacity to deepen our conversation around the “science” of leadership. As Greg Satell recently wrote in his blog, we should think of AI as “a tool to create dialogues for ourselves.” AI can help us ask better questions, and it can help us improve our leadership. But it’s still up to us to answer the call.
To progress from good to extraordinary, we must use our emotional intelligence (EQ), in combination with our functional (FQ) and intellectual intelligence (IQ), to lead people, make decisions, act on our knowledge, synthesize our wisdom, and build relationships.
And so it’s within that spirit that I’m writing this limited series to communicate more directly with you, the people in the ConantLeadership community.
EQ Answers to AI Questions #3
You may have noticed a feature called “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn. These articles prompt users to answer questions generated by AI, based on pertinent topics to LinkedIn users. The AI helps formulate the questions but it’s the human users who write the answers.
In the interest of using AI as a tool to spark dialogue, we’ve chosen some of the most relevant AI-generated leadership questions on LinkedIn to answer.
In the first edition, I answered the AI question “What are some innovative ways to recognize and celebrate team strengths?” In the second edition, I answered the AI question “What are the most common mistakes leaders make when driving change?”
This edition’s AI question is: ‘How can you promote self-reflection and growth in your team?’
And here’s my EQ Answer.
To promote anything in your team or organization, it must start with you. Change starts with you. Whether the question is about driving self-reflection, growth, accountability, performance, work-life balance, or any other desired behavior (and they all tend to overlap organically)—my answer will always start with, “You first.”
The leader goes first and shows the way: “Walk the talk,” lead from in front, and model the desired behavior or initiative.
For example, I created a simple six-step approach to lifting your leadership profile, called The Blueprint, with reflection explicitly baked into the process.
- Step 1: Reach High – Envision
- Step 2: Dig Deep – Reflect
- Step 3: Lay the Groundwork – Study
- Step 4: Design – Plan
- Step 5: Build – Practice
- Step 6: Reinforce – Improve
The Blueprint provides a framework that helps me practice what I preach. It shows that I champion reflection, not as a “nice-to-have,” but as one of six essential steps in lifting your leadership. I don’t wait for others to come around to the idea; I bring the idea of reflection to the fore and take the initiative to advance it.
Consistently, I talk about self-reflection, celebrate its importance, integrate it into all of our leadership development training and resources, and make explicit that I expect the same from my employees and colleagues.
Invariably, this approach fosters a virtuous circle. The more employees see me celebrating and advocating for the power of reflection and continuous growth, the more they adopt the behaviors in their own right, and we all improve together.
Reflection → Results
Next, it helps to tie the behavior to a specific outcome(s).
The idea is: We are not self-reflecting merely for reflection’s sake (although looking inward does confer benefits to our well-being). Rather, we are dedicating time to deep thinking in order to seek clarity, expand our understanding of ourselves and our work, and to then apply that reflection to take meaningful action.
Through reflection, we can probe three evergreen questions about both our life and leadership:
- What’s working?
- What’s not?
- How can I/we do better?
And then we can make a plan to build upon our successes, address or manage our shortcomings, and forge a path towards better outcomes. As leaders we have to paint the picture—to draw the line between reflection and results.
“The leader goes first and shows the way.”
For example, earlier in my career, when I was President at Nabisco Foods during a challenging time in the years after the hostile takeover by the leveraged buyout firm KKR, I felt it was crucial to promote learning and growth among my team.
As an avid reader, I knew that books helped stimulate a spirit of curiosity that could apply to thinking critically about the business. It would have been one thing to suggest to my team that they read more and hope they follow my advice. But mere suggestions are far too easy to ignore.
Instead, I took the initiative, started a book club, and gave everyone books they were encouraged to read—first monthly, and then quarterly. Then I followed up, asked questions, listened to team members’ reflections, and used it as an opportunity to make progress on three fronts.
1. It was a tangible and approachable action that was hard, if not impossible, to miss or ignore.
2. It was an easy way to explicitly connect the value of learning to our growth agenda as a company.
3. These conversations were a welcome opportunity to deepen our professional relationships and learn more about one another.
Win, win, win.
Push and Pull
When leading by example, it is useful to apply a push/pull principle (and this idea is further developed in The Blueprint in the “’Grow or Die’ Mindset” chapter on pages 257-270).
To Push: Make expectations around self-reflection and continuous improvement clear to the entire team. Hold them accountable and explain how their adherence will be measured. Be specific. Articulate that you expect members of your organization to embody the desired values and that you want them to also be championing them with their own reports.
- Perhaps you would include these expectations in their evaluations
- Or you might add them to the company scorecard
- Maybe you would establish specific reflection and growth benchmarks
Whatever the criteria, this part is a “push” because it challenges people to change their behavior in a way that is aligned with organization expectations.
To Pull: Celebrate reflection and growth so that people are inspired to pursue it and want to do it. You can entice people by creating positive consequences for success and celebrating those who do it right. There are many ways to pursue this creatively.
- For example, to embark on a learning and growth initiative that expressly includes self-reflection, you might announce you will be teaching a development course and invite members of the team to participate
- Or you might create room in the budget for team members to spearhead their own learning initiatives
- Or you might share your own positive experience with self-reflection through personal stories and ask the team to share in kind
The sky’s the limit. First, show the positive value of the desired behavior with your own actions. Then, publicly recognize those who are doing the same. This all amounts to a “pull” because it beckons people towards the desired behavior with positive reinforcement, leading by example, and recognition.
“The more we honor others’ humanity, the better we all do—together. “
Make It Real
When I was turnaround CEO of Campbell Soup Company, we established five core strategies to improve the company. One of them was “Build New Business.”
On its face, “build new business” is straightforward but it made explicit the prevailing spirit we were trying to cultivate. The message was: We’re committed to creating new products and generating new ideas, and ultimately, as an enterprise, we will either grow or we will die. Innovation was non-negotiable.
The ”push” part was simple: It’s easy to issue an edict from on high that the leadership team expects innovation. But leaders have a responsibility to take ideas from the abstract into the material world.
The “pull” part of the equation is how we made it real. On our company portal, we celebrated every single win, every single day: Each new piece of business, new account, new product, new idea got a shout-out. I also wrote personal, handwritten notes to people all over the world, thanking them for specific contributions in support of our core strategies. And we didn’t stop there. We held a “Proud Performance” awards ceremony where we honored extraordinary achievements in front of the entire company.
Importantly, we also publicly celebrated the lessons from things that didn’t go well, making it clear that we valued both performance and learning from our mistakes.
Repeatedly, we intentionally created ways to emphasize our strategy through the magic of positive reinforcement and human connection. This is how you take desired behavior out of the theoretical realm of PowerPoint presentations into the physical realm of real people and real performance.
This all connects back to the theme of AI.
Technology tools can help us generate brilliant plans. But we still need people to execute those plans. And it’s our job as leaders to inspire the individuals in our organization, to give them the energy and direction to succeed. Machines can’t do it for us. It’s about managing the human spirit in the enterprise. The more we honor others’ humanity, the better we all do—together.
So remember: Change starts with you. Tie self-reflection to results. Push and pull people towards growth. And find unique ways to make it real. Leadership is all about people.
Sincerely,
__
Do you have an insight to add to the EQ answer to this AI question?
We want to hear from you. Drop us a line with your thoughts and we may feature your response in a future ‘EQ Answers to AI Questions’ letter.
About the Author: 
Doug Conant is Founder and CEO of ConantLeadership, Chairman Emeritus of CECP, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, former Chairman of Avon Products, and co-author of two bestselling leadership books, TouchPoints, and The Blueprint.
This limited series is written in partnership with Amy Federman, Editor in Chief and Director of Content at ConantLeadership.
(Header photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash)
