Why Your Next Promotion Might Depend on How Well You Read a Room
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Everyone’s worried that AI will out-think leaders. The more interesting question is whether it can out-feel them and what that means for the people hoping to become leaders next.
🤖 What leaders are actually afraid of
Renita Kalhorn coaches people making high-stakes decisions: Fortune 500 executives, startup founders, and even U.S. military Special Forces.
She joined us at GoTech World 2025 and later continued the conversation in a written interview. When we asked whether AI would replace leaders, she immediately reframed the question: “It’s people who decide to use AI that may be taking your jobs.”
The risk isn’t simply that technology becomes more capable, it’s that someone decides technology can replace the judgment you bring to the table.
📊 The numbers behind the nerves
By 2030, employers expect 39% of workers’ existing skills to change or become outdated (WEF, 2025). At the same time, trust in leadership is already fragile: 68% of people worry that business leaders deliberately mislead them (Edelman, 2025).
In other words, leaders are being asked to adapt faster at exactly the moment people trust them less. And as AI takes over more of the analytical work, weaknesses in the human side of leadership will become much harder to ignore.
🪑 The meeting that changed the conversation
On stage, Renita told the story of a founder who had scaled his company to hundreds of millions in revenue using what he described as a “bulldozer” leadership style.
Then his 360-degree reviews came in, and the message was hard to ignore: while the business was growing, his team was quietly disengaging. The turning point didn’t come from a new strategy, but from a single meeting in which he put his notes aside and asked one simple question: What isn’t working?
Instead of pushing back or defending his decisions, he simply listened. Some people told him afterward that they had been on the verge of quitting before that conversation.
Renita connects this to what she calls the “Jane Goodall technique”: observing your own team the way an anthropologist would study a group, instead of immediately reacting to every behaviour you notice.
🧠 Three things AI can’t decide for you
Kalhorn isn’t dismissing AI, and she isn’t romanticising human leadership either. Her point is narrower: there are parts of leadership that technology can support, but not take responsibility for.
Judgment when there is no clean answer
Leadership often means navigating competing priorities: pragmatism versus disruption, speed versus caution, short-term results versus long-term trust.
As Renita puts it, “We have paradoxes that don’t have a right answer.” Data can inform the decision but it can’t take responsibility for making it.
Reading a room in real time
In her interview, Renita describes something she calls energetic communication: noticing what is happening between people, even when no one says it out loud.
In her words: “Technology will likely never be able to replicate our ability to communicate at an energetic level, which goes beyond words and body language.”
It’s the hesitation before someone answers, the sudden silence after an idea is proposed, the colleague who agrees with the plan but has already mentally left the conversation.
Intuition sharpened by experience
Not gut feeling used as an excuse, but pattern recognition built over years of seeing decisions play out.
It’s knowing that a hesitation matters before anyone can explain exactly why. Or recognising that the most logical option on paper may not be the one people are ready to follow.
AI can help you identify patterns in the data, experience helps you notice the patterns that never make it into the spreadsheet.
🔍 What this actually means for your career
None of this is an argument for avoiding AI. Renita’s advice to leaders is to let it handle more of the repetitive analytical work, creating space for the parts of the job that still require a person: judgment, presence, intuition, and trust.
The people moving into leadership roles may not necessarily be the ones who use AI the most. They may be the ones who know when to trust the data, when to challenge it, and when to notice that everyone in the room has stopped talking.
AI can give you more information. It still can’t guarantee that people will trust what you do with it. What are you doing to become better at the human part of the job?
Sources
World Economic Forum (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Edelman (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.
GoTech World 2025 - Renita Kalhorn, Founder Coach, Founder EQ. Conference session and written interview.