It’s easy to be nice to each other.  I grew up in the Midwest, and my mama taught me to be a nice girl. That was one of the things that was held very dear in my heart, and it was one of the things that I valued.  As I became an executive, I realized I needed to learn how to call people tight on their behaviors when they weren’t in alignment. I needed to be able to bring up tough subjects like “Hey, this strategy isn’t working, we may need to change something.”

These are skills we have to learn as executives, it’s not something that comes naturally to human beings. These kinds of skills can be learned, but only when we bring consciousness, awareness, and a commitment to learning these kinds of things do we create the opening for that to be possible.

I believe that in the future the executive teams that pull ahead will be not the ones which have the smartest people, because smart people are now being replaced by artificial intelligence, and so much of that kind of thinking is not as important.  It will be those executive teams who will allow themselves—and commit themselves—to growing their emotional intelligence and their ability to hear and listen and stand in the heat of difficult conversations.