The Real Job Of A Leader, With Dave Ulrich
Career Sessions
J.R. Lowry interviews leadership expert Dave Ulrich to explore the changing landscape of management in an era of rapid technological advance
Key takeaways
- Dave Ulrich defines leadership not as telling your own story, but as helping those you lead create their own.
- The formula for modern success is Human Ingenuity (HI) multiplied by Artificial Intelligence (AI), where AI provides capacity and human ingenuity provides capability.
Main topics
- Leadership evolution
- AI and Human Ingenuity
Notable quotes
Leadership is not about what I know and do. It's how what I know and do helps you know and do what you need to do better.
Conclusion
The episode serves as a guide for professionals to remain indispensabl
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Whether you're a first-time manager trying to lead a team, a seasoned executive navigating constant change, or simply someone wondering how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world, leadership has arguably never been more challenging or more important. And my guest today has spent more than four decades helping answer a simple but fundamental question, what makes leaders, organizations, and careers successful? Dave Ulrich is widely regarded as the father of modern human resources, but that title doesn't begin to capture the impact of his work. He's advised many CEOs, worked with organizations around the globe, authored more than 30 books, and helped shape how businesses think about leadership and talent, organizational capability, and value creation. His ideas have influenced not just HR leaders, but executives across virtually every industry. In our conversation today, we're going to explore how leadership is evolving in the era of AI, why experience is no longer enough to sustain a successful career, what separates people who continue to grow from those who plateau, and what Dave's learned from a lifetime spent in the boardrooms and the C-suites of some of the world's most successful companies. Whether you're leading a team today or simply trying to build a career that remains valuable tomorrow, I think you'll come away with some practical insights and perhaps a different way of thinking about what it really means to create value. I'm J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions, and my conversation with Dave starts now. Dave, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show. It's a real pleasure to have you with me today. Speaker 1 (1:30) J.R., what a privilege. Honored, honored, honored to be with you and our guest. Speaker 2 (1:35) Honored to have you as a guest, so let's get rolling. So you have had a very distinguished career working with a number of companies and CEOs. If you think about leadership today relative to when you first started back in the 80s or 90s, what do you think has fundamentally changed and what is different from the way it used Speaker 1 (1:55) to be? You know, sometimes, JR, we have experiences that really shape the way we think. I listened to Peter Drucker once, and Peter Drucker said, the greatest leadership ever was the pyramids. And I thought, whoa, we haven't changed anything since whenever that was in the Egyptian history. My sense is, as I take away that experience, a lot of the leadership principles are timeless. And his comment was, look what they did in the pyramids. With no technology, no operational machinery, they built these incredible monuments to their legacy. And so a lot of the fundamental principles are the same. But the practices and timely stuff do change. We're not the same as we were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Five years ago, we were all obsessed about COVID. And how do you manage remote workers? Today, we're obsessed about AI. Five years ago, AI was just a dream. And we'll talk about that. Some of those timeless principles are so important. The one I'll just highlight, because I want to make it a setting for our discussion today. One of the things I find among the best leaders is every leader has a good story to tell. JR, you have a great story. I've looked at your background, your life, your story is great. But leaders don't tell their story. They help those they lead create their own story. Leadership is not about what I know and do. It's how what I know and do helps you know and do what you need to do better. And so today's podcast is not about, Dave, let's tell your story. Here's your research. Here's your ideas. Your job as a leader is to help others build their story. I hope that's the theme today. We're here to help those who listen create their story based on our experience. Speaker 2 (3:24) Absolutely. And we're certainly going to get into some topics aimed to help people think about how to think about their careers and how to think about leadership. You mentioned AI. I'm going to go right there because it's so prevalent right now. It's dominating conversations at the board level, C-suite, all the way down to the front line. What do you think that means, just given what you just said about leadership and what changes and what doesn't change? How is AI affecting leadership? What becomes more important in this new AI era and what maybe becomes less important? Speaker 1 (3:54) And we could spend the next 45 minutes on it. So let me just add a couple of things. One of the things, and I'll try to highlight just two or three, AI is not the goal. It's a means. It's access to information that we never had before. I was doing a talk last night at a university and I said, oh, I'm really interested about how does Plato compare with Thomas More's utopian society? Boom, I had a polished report in less than 30 seconds. And I thought, when I was a graduate student, I would have been paid a semester to go create that. We have ubiquitous access to information. In fact, I think it's interesting. AI give you polished reports, information data that we've never seen before. So as a leader, I can get information quickly. What's missing is the human ingenuity to turn that information into productive knowledge. So I'll put that in a formula, HI, human ingenuity, times AI, artificial intelligence. How do I navigate the balance between those? AI gives me capacity, human ingenuity gives me capability. I've got to manage both. If I avoid the AI, I'm not going to have the information I need. But if all I've got is the algorithm and the AI and not the human ingenuity, I'm not going to differentiate myself. So quick tips, use AI. Don't become dependent on it. There's some amazing research coming out about cognitive decline, cognitive replacement, cognitive surrender. Be really careful to not get seduced into AI as a solution. It's a set of ideas, a set of knowledge. it will give you a polished report. It will not give you guidance on how you have the confidence to make that report happen. Speaker 2 (5:25) Yeah, and to me, I mean, certainly one of the things that I hear coming up in conversation, Dave, is that human judgment, critical thinking, the ability to collaborate, those are some of the things that AI is going to have a harder time replacing. And those are the things that become more important. But to your point, if you abdicate responsibility for... doing your critical thinking to an AI tool and have it doing all of it for you, your critical thinking skills are bound to diminish over time. And that's what the research is starting to show. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:55) By the way, my background, JR, is taxonomy. I love to take complex things and simplify. And let me give you a way to think about what you just said. What is human ingenuity? I've got AI, which is an algorithm, which gives me information and data and ubiquitous access to knowledge. What does human ingenuity mean that I uniquely bring? I'm Speaker 2 (6:12) going Speaker 1 (6:12) to suggest four things. That's my taxonomy. Vision of the future. If somebody says to you, what do you bring that complements the AI work going on? AI can't create the future. It only summarizes the past. Vision of the future. Innovation in the present. What's that beautiful human element where you get at the back of your head, your hair goes up, you get a nudge. Wow, that's really cool. Peter Drucker saying the Egyptians were the most powerful leader. Vision, innovation, emotion in relationships. And you just said it. AI is not emotion. It's an algorithm. It's fake emotion. Yeah. And then the one that you highlighted, and I'm going to call it wisdom, critical thinking, judgment, wisdom in decision making. So vision, innovation, emotion, and wisdom. View. Human ingenuity gives me a view. I'm saying, wow, we're doing a lot with AI. Don't get seduced. What's the vision of the future? Look forward, not backward. What's the innovation? What's new here that its system didn't give? Emotion, empathy, relationships, and then judgment, critical thinking. So I hope those things are helpful. I know I miss a lot. I'm not naive about that. But to me, that's the complement to the AI agenda that the algorithms give. And my final tip, I've gotten into discussions on social media with an algorithm. Don't get into a debate with an algorithm. It's not going to be a very good debate. Because they'll just keep flowing and flowing and flowing. And I want to build a relationship. I want to look at somebody. I want to feel somebody with that emotion. Debating an algorithm is not going to be a very successful outcome. Speaker 2 (7:43) One of the things, I guess, that relates somewhat to AI, but more generally that I'm thinking a lot about, and I want to get your perspective on, a lot of managers that I talk to are saying that their jobs are becoming harder. expectations are rising, they're being asked to manage more people, the pace of change is getting faster. And now we have AI taking away some of the things that their individual contributor team members used to do, and frankly, that they used to do. And so what's left for them, I'm hearing a lot of them say feels genuinely harder. Are you hearing that in your own travels as well? I would love to get your thoughts on it. You Speaker 1 (8:19) know, I have two responses. The first is no question. But AI does, it doesn't replace jobs, it replaced tasks. And so if you look at any process, let's say staffing process, hiring someone, there's 10 steps in hiring someone, defining the skills, getting the