Todd Davis
speaker
423 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Todd Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are talking about leadership, trust, and why AI still can do what humans do best.
My guest is Todd Davis, former chief people officer at Franklin Covey, a properly listed leadership training company. Todd is the expert behind the bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I spent 30 years coaching leaders and managers on how to actually work well with people. In this two-part series, we get into the real stuff.
Why most leaders think they are clear in communicating and giving instructions, but they aren't. How trust is built like a bank account. and why human intelligence is still the biggest competitive advantage. Oh, there's a wild story about these seven habits changing someone's life in the prison. Let's dive right in. A lot of what you talk about in your book, you call them skills, human skills.
I like to call them human intelligence. We live in a world where AI drives the conversation every day. It's about artificial intelligence. But what I've noticed over the past 10 to 15 years is a huge decline in human intelligence. I don't just mean things like empathy or resilience. I'm talking about basic skills such as speaking, writing, listening. We have ears, we have eyes, we have a mouth.
Yet, so many people don't even know how to communicate like real human beings. Some don't even know when to say thank you or sorry. And now people are outsourcing their thinking to AI. Writing, which is so deeply connected to thought, analysis, and expression, is being handed over to tools like ChatGPT. I worry that if we continue down this path, we'll start losing the art of being human.
What do you think? Is this a real risk? And if so, how do we stop it?
I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, we just, I was just trying to find it here. We just used, ran and used a study. It was done here in the US of 290 organizations that use AI at least once a week. So they're high users of AI and their leaders were given a survey of what skills are most important for their success of the organization.
And there were, they have 25, I wish I could find, they have 25 skills laid out there, but the top three skills were creativity, interpersonal skills that you're just talking about, and creativity, interpersonal skills, and I think it had empathy, so which is one of the interpersonal skills. But their point was they, these leaders were saying, AI is wonderful.
It's doing a lot of things for us, but it cannot replace these interpersonal skills. This very basic, like you said, this very basic thing that I learned growing up from my parents as far as just respect and thank you. And would you have a few minutes and, and the way that we not just nice things, but things to really connect with other human beings.
And maybe I'll be wrong, but I don't see AI ever replacing that. Even now, I've used AI to put together, I had to do a keynote for a couple of hours with an organization on generational leadership. And I worked in that field and I've done that, but I still, I use ChatGPT and I said, hey, here's the elements I'd like to include. And it put a straw model together for me.
I had to apply my piece to that, but I think AI can be a very useful tool. But I think that human connection It's a principle. It's always going to be needed. Even if I ask ChatDBT to write me a letter or something, I'm going to want to go over it and make sure it has my tone and saying the things in the way that I want it to come across to the other person.
I am a Gen X. I'm 52, so I did not grow up in the digital world. I grew up analog. I was taught to write letters with pen and paper. If I didn't know a word, I look it up in a real dictionary, a thick one. That's how I learned English. No Google, no smartphone. Of course, as technology evolved, I adapted. I learned to use a calculator, then a PC, then Google when I went to business school.
But the difference is, people like you and me had that analog foundation. We embraced new technology, but we already have those roles and core skills built in. So even now, when I use AI, I'm very mindful of how I use it. I still write my own emails. I don't just say, hey, generate this for me. I don't want AI replacing my skills. It's really just a tool, no different from a hammer.
But I worry about those who never had that training, who never built those basic skills to begin with. If they're not careful and mindful, they will outsource everything to AI without realizing they're missing out on actual self-development. And that's a real problem in the workplace. We keep hearing how CEOs want employees with strong interpersonal skills.
There was even an article the other day about HR leaders saying that they don't want to hire Gen Z because they lack social skills. So Todd, if you were still a chief people officer today and you saw this trend happening, where younger employees aren't developing and refining core human skills because they over relied on AI tools, what would you do? How would you approach this issue?
What can companies do to mitigate this before it becomes an even bigger problem?
Again, my style, I would just call it out with people. I would talk, we would do some mass training on it. You got me thinking about, there was a person that I coached a while ago. This happened to be a woman and she was, she had, I believe, I know she had her PhD. I think she had two PhDs, very intelligent, very intelligent.
And she had been with the organization for a long time, with our organization for a long time, but nobody wanted to work with her. And they found, and she was super organized, like one of the most organized people I'd ever met. But because she was so organized, our strength becomes our weakness, right? And when things didn't go as planned, she had a really hard time adjusting.
And things never go as planned. And so she was quite unpleasant to work with. And this is a really good person. And they couldn't see it. They were passed over for another job and another job. And they came to me and said, I just don't get it. I applied for this job and I wasn't selected. And I have way more qualifications, you know, from an educational standpoint.
And I finally got the courage to talk to her. I didn't want to offend her. And I said, you know, I think I have an idea of what I see going on here. And they said, please, don't hold back. I need to know. So we started talking about these things. And it's so basic, but yet there are many really smart people who don't realize they're lacking.
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