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The predominant model, I would describe it as a consumptive naval-gazing model. So what we mean by consumptive is we act as if we could just pour or leaders can drink in new knowledge about how to lead, new tools, new ideas, and somehow that’s going to enable them to be better leaders. It’s the equivalent of me watching Bruce Lee do kung fu and then suddenly you throw me into MMA and I’m going to be able to do it. Knowing is not the same thing as doing, and I’m sure you’ve all heard of the knowing-doing gap. But the field persists on this, partially because it’s quite lucrative. We can do our next book, The New, Hot, Fashionable Idea. People will buy it, we’ll do another cool seminar, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. TikTok, $60 billion later, every single year.
The other part is naval-gazing. How many believe self-awareness in our leaders is important? Just a quick show of hands. Okay. I’m noticing I’m sounding quite controversial up here, so I hope I’m not offending anyone, because I’m not saying there hasn’t been a lot of good to what we’ve done. I do think it’s tremendously important to share good ideas with leaders about what good leadership looks like in their context. It’s invaluable. I also think my pejorative way of referring to self-awareness as naval-gazing, I do think it’s tremendously important for leaders to become aware of their strengths, of their weaknesses, of their opportunities, of their particular habits. What helps them exercise leadership, what hinders them? It’s all tremendously important. It’s just insufficient. Right? I mean, just because you’re aware of some gap in your own behavior, doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to change it. Of course, if you’re not aware, you have no hope of changing it.
So this has been the predominant model. I drink in new stuff. I look down and ask myself, “Where are my gaps and opportunities?” It’s a start, but it’s not enough, because no matter how well-informed you are about what good looks like or yourself and how you operate in the world, information is not the same thing as transformation. And the reason I used the word transformation is our leadership programs and the interventions and the work we do to coach and develop our leaders can only have an impact on the business, can only improve organizational effectiveness if it actually changes leader’s behavior. This is the name of the game, and changing behavior is one of the hardest things in the world to do. And I think AI is uniquely suited to changing leader’s behavior, leveraging the lessons of the tens of thousands of leaders behavior whom we have changed at Holzman Leadership across the world.
And so, if you’re going to leverage AI to change behavior, it’s important to understand the conditions under which people’s behavior changes. And the thing about us as human beings is change comes hard to us. How many of you have ever tried to change some behavior, and you really put your mind to it and you struggle to do it, despite being highly motivated to do so? Yeah. Well, welcome to human family, me included. I mean, I know carbs are bad for me. I have a little illness where carbs don’t like me, but I love them and it’s very hard to stop eating them. So under what conditions do human beings change? Human beings and leaders change their behavior when they have to. When there is a problem that they care about addressing and their default way of behaving will be insufficient to addressing that problem.
