According to a new report from LinkedIn, emotional intelligence is a new priority for leaders. The social media platform’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, says that C-suite professionals who are eager to learn and lead in different functions, industries, and companies will be the most successful. Raman’s advice for current and aspiring execs includes developing people skills and nurturing personal curiosity.
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00:00If you think about the history of work for tens of thousands of years, humans were in a goods economy where physical labor was at the center of work.
00:07But as you look at what's coming with robotics in terms of physical labor and what's coming with generative AI in terms of intellectual labor, and you wonder then what's coming next for humans at work, it becomes really easy to see that our social abilities are about to become the core of work.
00:21Those are all going to be the skills now.
00:23So if you just look at where work is going and what humans will be doing at work, it's pretty easy to see why emotional intelligence is going to become core to not just leaders, but everyone at every level.
00:35The percentage of women leaders in business is up 10% in the last five years.
00:40Leaders focus on soft skills like presentations, strategy, and storytelling are up over 30% in the last five years.
00:46And despite the hype around AI, focus on AI literacy among leaders has grown less than 1% in the last year, a drastic difference compared to 28% growth for the rest of the workforce.
00:56This and so many more findings were recently released in a report from LinkedIn.
01:00Fortune's Emma Burley sat down with LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Rahman, to learn more about what they found.
01:07I'm really interested in talking with you about some findings from the new report that's coming out and looking into what are people looking for in C-suite?
01:17What are they looking for in CEOs?
01:19And I think a big part of that data that I found super interesting was the emotional intelligence aspect.
01:26Why are we seeing an increase in emotional intelligence skills needed from CEOs?
01:32We are seeing an increase in emotional intelligence and the need for that in leaders because we are moving to a new era for our economy.
01:40We've been in the knowledge economy for a few decades now, where judgment and intellectual abilities have been at the center.
01:47We're moving to a knowledge economy where curiosity, compassion, collaboration, and our social abilities are moving to the center of work.
01:56And we're starting to see that become true among leaders.
02:00So we put out data recently that looks at the C-suite executives at S&P 500 and unicorn companies.
02:08And these folks matter because they're the folks that are behind the systems of employment that are really going to shape and change this new era for work.
02:15And we are seeing that those who are becoming leaders have 30 percent more of these people skills than people who became leaders back in 2018.
02:24That is a really good leading indicator that these people skills are going to become more and more core, not just to how someone becomes an executive, but the work of executives and really mobilizing teams and building a company that is human centric.
02:38And why has it become more of a focus in 2024?
02:41What's going on in maybe the macro environment that this emotional intelligence is really needed from leaders?
02:48The short answer for why emotional intelligence is becoming such a conversation is AI.
02:54If you think about the history of work for tens of thousands of years, humans were in a goods economy where physical labor was at the center of work.
03:02But as you look at what's coming with robotics in terms of physical labor and what's coming with generative AI in terms of intellectual labor, and you wonder then what's coming next for humans at work, it becomes really easy to see that our social abilities are about to become the core of work.
03:16We've never really, as humans, indexed on our social abilities at work.
03:20We've spent about a century now building really sophisticated teaching, training and credentialing around IQ.
03:26And that's been the SAT, go to college, get those degrees in technical skills at computer science.
03:32Meantime, we have underinvested in the humanities.
03:35We have not really built proper curriculum around emotional intelligence, aside from maybe early childhood development.
03:41And yet those are all going to be the skills now.
03:44So if you just look at where work is going and what humans will be doing at work, it's pretty easy to see why emotional intelligence is going to become core to not just leaders, but everyone at every level.
03:56What to do about that is everyone needs to start getting smart on that, has to start prioritizing that.
04:01And at a systems level, we've got to now build teaching, training, curriculum, credentialing, assessment around these people skills, which we have not done to date.
04:10And where are some other people skills or soft skills that executives are putting on the resume?
04:16You know, there are a lot of people skills that we're seeing at the top of the list in terms of skills that executives need.
04:22But I will say the one I am most excited about is storytelling.
04:26One of the things that has always helped humans organize is the stories we tell that we all then believe in.
04:32And then it becomes real.
04:33The nation state, the monetary order, any company we're at, it's all a story.
04:38And storytelling has sort of traditionally been seen as something you do for children's books or for nonfiction or maybe, you know, fiction books.
04:46But the art of storytelling is becoming critical for leaders because it's really the art of storytelling that allows you to help your organization know, in the midst of all the change that's happening, what is it that your organization is trying to do?
04:59And how can everyone do that together?
05:02How can everyone be bound by a story of what it means to be of that place?
05:05So that's one that I'm most excited about.
05:08We've also seen communication, problem solving, conflict resolution.
05:12I've got the five C's that I'm calling is the key pillars of people skills that I can help us with, can even mimic, but will not be able to replace because we don't even know how our brain does it when it comes to these five things.
05:26Curiosity, compassion, courage, communication and creativity.
05:31And we've talked a lot about the rise in skills based hiring.
05:36How are people measuring these skills when it comes to hiring CEOs or other executives?
05:42Measuring these people's skills is sort of the next frontier in building a skills first labor market.
05:47For the past decade or so, a lot of us have been advocating to put skills at the foundation of the labor market.
05:54So we have a meritocracy.
05:55So people know what skills they've got, what skills they need.
05:58We see jobs as tasks, not titles, and make it more accessible for people to get those jobs.
06:03That has existed largely in a world where it's been about technical skills.
06:07So you saw coding boot camps popped up for people that couldn't go get a CS degree.
06:11We now have to do that with people skills, and we are still in the very early days.
06:16Remember, we've spent about a century building sophisticated systems of credentialing around technical skills.
06:21I think we'll do it much more quickly with people skills because we have AI as a tool, as a way to start inferring skills.
06:28We've got to build it with intent and responsibility to make sure we're doing that with equity in mind.
06:34But there are simple steps that everyone can take.
06:36There are a lot of organizations that are out there that provide assessments.
06:40But everyone who is sort of like going down this path needs to understand it's new.
06:45And so for everyone who's listening and watching, the most important thing you can do in terms of building credentials around your people skills is by telling the story of your people skills.
06:55The story of self professionally has generally been one that we've outsourced to others based on the job title we got or didn't, the degree we got or didn't, the big name employer we worked at or didn't work at.
07:06When it comes to skills and especially people skills, so much of that right now is just about you owning the skills you've got and articulating why you've got them and why they matter in the story you tell.
07:17I'll give you myself as an example.
07:19My career is super interesting and super confusing.
07:22If you go just by job titles, I was a war correspondent, then a speechwriter for President Obama.
07:26Then I did growth at startups.
07:27Then I worked at Metta.
07:29Then I was with Governor Newsom.
07:30Now I'm at LinkedIn.
07:32Again, it makes no sense.
07:33But as I did the work of skills auditing across my career, I now can tell you I am someone who is really good at explanatory storytelling based on these experiences I've had throughout my career, who then built a skill set around coalition building so that I could tell stories that influence others in order to make the world of work better, in order to increase access to economic opportunity.
07:54So everyone right now can go do that audit and can start to tell their story of self around the skills they've got, and especially around the people skills, because that's actually going to be the best first credential.
08:04Right.
08:04And kind of building off that point, you have a very storied career across many different professions.
08:12And we see from this data that people are also looking for executives that have very varied experience from their careers.
08:19They're not looking for someone anymore or as much that comes from one industry or that comes from one company.
08:26Why is this happening?
08:27Why do they want people that have varied experience?
08:31I think executives are now being looked to to have varied experience for a couple of reasons.
08:36The first is that the world is changing in unprecedented ways at an unprecedented rate.
08:42And the most important thing you want to be able to do in a moment like this is adapt.
08:47And so really, at every level, people are looking for people who can adapt, who have some background in agility, in resilience, in the ability to go in to new environments and take on new challenges, because really what that signals is an ability to learn, unlearn, relearn.
09:02There's a futurist from the 1970s who said of what I think is right now that the illiterate of the future will not be people who cannot read and write.
09:10It will be people who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
09:14So when you have what we call LinkedIn, a squiggly line career, you are sort of proving that at every stage where you could have just sat in place and sort of settled into the comfortability of knowing what you need to know, you pushed yourself to try new things, to learn new things, to take on new challenges.
09:30And it's through that process that you develop a skill set of handling hard wells, of being able to adapt.
09:35So I think that's like a critical thing.
09:37The other thing that's happening and why people want, even like the Gen Z generation, wants to have mobility, wants to take their skills and add to them across different jobs and different functions, is that we're going into a world of work where there's going to be a lot of blurred lines.
09:52Like the lines between what is a salesperson, what is a marketer, what is a data scientist, what is a product manager, all of that is going to start to blur.
10:01And so people want to be able to have skills that are transferable.
10:04They don't want to be wed to a job title or a job function because so much is going to change around that.
10:08So the ability to move around also shows that you're taking certain skills, applying them to new areas, but you're also gaining new skills that you're building on those foundational skills in those new areas.
10:18And I think everyone who is seeking to learn every day will be better suited by a career where they feel like they're challenging themselves.
10:25And that's going to make the squiggly line career, I think, the new norm for leaders in the years to come.
10:31On that note, could you please explain what is the squiggly line path leadership nowadays and how does this look different than it might have 10 years ago?
10:40What's changing about career paths is that they used to be a ladder and now they are a path.
10:45So the old model was you sort of got a degree, which you assume would last you across your career.
10:51You picked a place to work that you generally didn't leave, and then you rose up as far as you could within that place, within that function.
10:58So you just kept trying to get your boss's job at every step.
11:01And that was kind of it.
11:02And it was built on predictability and stability is the sort of like core things that people were looking for.
11:08We're now in a moment where people are looking for and people should be looking for, given the changes happening to work, agility and mobility.
11:15And so you're seeing a lot of people move around from different functions, whether it's starting in sales and going into marketing, it's starting in finance, but going into HR.
11:24And as you think about it in terms of leadership, you know, I talk a lot with CHROs right now, and I'm trying to tell the story about them and to them that CHROs are the new CTOs in terms of the importance of talent right now.
11:36They are the next CEOs because companies are going to win because of talent, not tech in the future.
11:42That's a different path than what CHROs might have signed up for or what CTOs or CEOs think is possible for different parts of the organization.
11:50So I think the key is like, even at a CEO level, even at a C-suite level, it's going to come down to what skills do you have?
11:59What skills do we need for this role?
12:01Because to be CEO is not the same thing in every place.
12:04It means something different in every place based on the size of your company, the growth trajectory of your company.
12:09So what are the skills we need?
12:11What are the skills you have?
12:12And no matter what, the higher up you go, the more adaptability is going to become a required skill.
12:18And so the squiggly line just becomes a sort of badge around adaptability.
12:22Right. And you've talked a lot about having varied experience and then also kind of stepping into different roles and functions that maybe this executive might not have done in the past.
12:32But where do you think the importance or the growing interest in seeking CEOs and executives from who have worked at various companies comes from across not only industries, but companies?
12:44Are they looking for an outsider, someone with a fresh perspective?
12:48Why is this becoming an increasing demand?
12:52I think there's no universal answer anymore when it comes to work.
12:57The labor market is not one thing globally or in any country.
13:01Each sector is going through different moments.
13:04Each company is going through different moments.
13:07And so what it means to be an executive at a company is going to be very nuanced to the reality of that company.
13:14I do think that there will be general skills that all leaders will need to have more and more of, like we have talked about adaptability, these people's skills.
13:23But I also think that there's going to be a need for expertise.
13:27And so one of the things I'm really sort of counseling people on is develop this set of people skills, but start to find and feed your curiosity.
13:37What is the area that you wake up every day wanting to get better at, wanting to learn more about?
13:41For me, it's economic opportunity.
13:43It's the systems around the labor market all day, every day.
13:46I'm thinking about it. I'm reading about it.
13:48That is a valuable curiosity to a place that is worried about that, like LinkedIn.
13:53And so you've got to find your curiosity so that as you become a leader, you're able to both lead in a way that is anchored around your people skills.
14:02But you're able to bring that expertise around that issue area or that type of company or that sector that is going to be highly valuable.
14:09The sort of experience that compounds over time, because the more you are learning about it, the smarter you get, but at an increased rate.
14:16So I think it's really going to be important for people who are entering into leadership or aspiring for leadership to know what are the basics of being a leader and how is that different going forward?
14:26More about curiosity than judgment, more about compassion than having all the answers and being a listener more than just here's what the answer is.
14:34But then also starting to find and feed your curiosity and then sort of building your squiggly line career path with that in mind.
14:42And why is internal hiring of leaders going down?
14:46What do companies hope to gain by finding leaders who might be coming from other companies?
14:52I think internal mobility is going to be one of the big benefits of this new world of work that we're going into.
14:59And so what's important right now is that we have two worlds at once.
15:03We're still in the old economy as we are starting to exist within the new economy.
15:08Usually there's more of an orderly transition when a disruption hits between the old and the new.
15:13It happens over years, sometimes decades.
15:16It's orderly because the change comes top down.
15:18And by the time the new technology hits you, it's just already been figured out for you.
15:22This is not orderly, but in good ways, because it's happening kind of middle out, bottom up.
15:27People are using AI.
15:28Seventy five percent of knowledge workers are using AI at work, even though only thirty nine percent have been trained at work.
15:34So it's actually the leaders that are lagging in moving into this new world of work.
15:38So in terms of what is true, one of the things we have to look at every data point is what is true because of the way things were or what is going to stay true given the way things are changing.
15:49I think that you're going to probably see an increase over time in leaders that rise up from within, who have sort of squiggly line careers within an organization, but also have that sort of compounding expertise about that organization,
16:03about that company, about what it's trying to be and do, which is as much about the business lines of that company as it is the culture of that company and how to preserve and protect that or adapt it and adjust it.
16:14And so I think internal mobility, especially as we look at leaders, is going to be a really interesting signal.
16:19I think there is always benefit to new thinking.
16:22And so there will always be a sort of like thought about when do we bring in new people?
16:28When do we build from within?
16:29How do we think about goals we might have set around upping representation?
16:33One of the data points I'm most excited about in our recent data report is that we're seeing an increase in women in leadership positions of 10 percent from 2018.
16:43I think one of the biggest signals for me that we are in this new relationship economy will be a spike, not an increase, but a spike in women CEOs because we know women over index on all these core skills that leaders now need.
16:54We're also seeing an increase in leaders without a four year degree, which is an encouraging sign because we want college to remain a valuable option for those who can afford it and for whom it makes sense, but not be the only path, not just into the labor market, but into leadership.
17:09Those are the more interesting signals I'm seeing, I think, in terms of each company and are they working outside and inside?
17:15I think it's going to depend on each company, but also there's going to be no one story and it's going to probably change as we get into this new world of work.
17:21And one of the points that you had mentioned was the fact that they might be looking externally because maybe they weren't developing their leadership.
17:29Do you think that a part of this, a part of this equation of why more companies are looking externally for leaders is that there hasn't been enough emphasis on leadership, coaching and development?
17:41The one job that is going to change the most as we enter this new relationship economy, and this is true at every company at every level in every country is the job of manager.
17:52And I was talking to IBM CHRO about this last week.
17:56The job of the manager, and this extends really all the way up to executives, has largely been to manage the tasks of the people they manage the job of manager in this new economy is going to be managing the people.
18:09And that's a whole different exercise that is about understanding people, understanding human capability, indexing on human energy and thinking about work, not as hours work, but as energy use and how to seed energy, shore up energy, create collaboration and really camaraderie on a team set of vision that people rally behind that they feel connected to.
18:31The vast majority of managers don't get that sort of training because it hasn't really been asked of them in terms of the way the old work works.
18:39But new work is going to require managers to do that.
18:41And so I think companies that invest in their managers at every level will see then more ability to pull from within into leadership.
18:49And why are we seeing an increase in job postings for CEOs, an increase in hiring for CEOs?
18:55Are there simply more CEOs in the world or is something else going on?
18:59I think that right now, any increase we're seeing, we really have to look at it in the long arc.
19:05And so no one signal is telling us the everything.
19:08I think that we are going to have more companies emerge as we enter this new economy in every moment where technology has sort of disrupted the ways of work and we've moved to a new era.
19:20There have been four phases.
19:21The first phase is a disruption hits with AI.
19:24We're in that 75 percent of global knowledge workers are using AI.
19:28The second phase is that our jobs change.
19:30And so we're in that to 70 percent of the skills, around 70 percent of the skills for the average job will have changed by 2030, according to LinkedIn data.
19:37So all of us are in that mode of jobs are changing.
19:41The third phase is a new categories of jobs emerge.
19:44LinkedIn every year we do a list of the jobs on the rise.
19:4770 percent of the jobs this year did not exist 20 years ago.
19:50So if you're coming out of college trying to do a 10 year plan, don't because you don't even know what jobs are going to be there that you're going to go for.
19:57And then the fourth phase is that we are in a new economy, which I think is going to be a relationship economy, anchored on social abilities, people skills, people to people collaboration.
20:06As we sort of are in one and two, but move to three and four, we're going to see a lot of new companies emerge that are building on this new technology.
20:14They're going to try and disrupt a lot of the sectors and industries.
20:17You're going to see a lot more leaders, especially in smaller companies emerge.
20:21I think small businesses are going to benefit a lot from the tools of AI.
20:24They're going to be able to grow in ways they couldn't before because it's going to help them close gaps that otherwise they would have to have brought on personnel to be able to do.
20:32It's going to be able to help them build technology in a way they couldn't before.
20:35So I think you're going to see actually an increase in leadership roles because there's going to be more places to go.
20:42And I think that's going to be a really interesting question for the bigger companies who have the most established leaders, the most established leadership roles, how they think about disrupting themselves from within the innovators dilemma and making sure they've
20:54got that sort of adaptive mindset in their leadership group.
20:57But also like leaders are going to move around.
20:59We've seen a lot of leaders recently moving from bigger companies to some of the startups.
21:04So I think tracking kind of where leaders are going in the rise of leadership roles is going to be one of the more interesting parts of this new economy.
21:11And why are CEOs jumping ship for maybe larger companies and going to startups?
21:17What's the appeal there?
21:18I think this is a moment where if you are asking what's left for humans, you're sort of being driven by fear, which is an understandable human response to a moment of big change.
21:29And you're hunkering down, you're sort of holding back.
21:32If you're asking what's possible for humans in this new era, and I do that every day, it's almost overwhelming the opportunities that are about to get created.
21:44And so I think everyone who is asking what's possible is right now trying to figure out where can they go that gives them the best shot of having the biggest possibility emerge for themselves and their work.
21:57Work is asked very little of humans today.
21:59It's asked us physical ability, intellectual ability, but for most white collar work, it's just meetings and emails.
22:06No person, everyone's in a job smaller than the bigness of their potential.
22:10Where we're going is a world of work that is anchored around human capability, and that is more accessible to more humans than ever before.
22:18And when you put those two things together, you could see an era coming soon where we see feats of human achievement and human innovation at levels we've never seen before, because all the sort of tenacity and talent that's been out there that work has never really given full room to grow is going to have full room to grow.
22:37And so I think where people are shifting, a lot of it is because they're imagining what's possible and trying to go be part of that, because that's, I think, the most exciting question to ask right now, what's possible for humans in this next era for our economy?