Redefiners
The Truth About Talent, AI, and Why Some Leaders Get It Wrong with RRA Chief Science Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
14 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Call them changemakers.
Call them rule breakers.
We call them redefiners. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Redefiners. I hope you all had a great holiday break. I'm Marla Oates, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. Before we get started, just a quick reminder to all our listeners that you can find all the episodes of Redefiners and Leadership Lounge on YouTube.
If you're watching on YouTube, just hit that subscribe button below so you don't miss an episode. And for our audio listeners, don't forget to rate Redefiners. We'd love to see your feedback. Today, we have a very special surprise in store for you to help us kick off season six of Redefiners. We're teaming up with our sister podcast, Leadership Lounge, to talk with a very special guest.
Chapter 2: What insights does Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic share about talent management?
For listeners not familiar with Leadership Lounge, each episode features insights from our leadership advisors as they lift the curtain on how great leaders think, act, and lead. Joining me in this bold Redefiners adventure is my incredible colleague and dear friend Emma Coombe, host of the Leadership Lounge.
Hello Marla and hi everyone. It is great to be here with you on Redefiners. We're so happy to have you.
How fun for us both to be together today. Our guest today brings a cornucopia of leadership and talent insights collected over a very impressive career as a CEO, university professor, and executive. Along his journey, he's written 15 books and over 250 scientific papers on the psychology of talent, leadership, innovation, and AI.
That's right, Marla. Our guest is an international authority in several areas leaders spend a lot of time dealing with. People analytics, talent management, leadership development, and the human AI interface. This is someone I followed over the years through his books, media appearances, and his TED Talks.
And we're thrilled to share that he recently joined Russell Reynolds Associates as our new Chief Science Officer. In this role, he'll lead our research and development and innovation initiatives and drive the firm's data strategy.
Our guest today is Tomás Chamorro-Premuzic. In addition to those books and TED Talks you mentioned, Emma, Tomás' work focuses on the creation of science-based tools that improve organizations' ability to predict performance and help people understand themselves better. Before joining us, Tomas was chief innovation officer at Manpower Group and co-founder of Deeper Signals and MyTruty.
He was also the CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, which we use here at the firm. It's our proprietary leadership span model. Outside of his corporate leadership roles, Tomas is a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University. Tomas, we are so thrilled to have you here today. Welcome to Redefiner's.
Thank you. Thank you. It's great to see you. And so good to be here. Let me start by saying that I've been listening to both of you for a while. So it's sort of like being starstruck and also, you know, nice. And I have butterflies in my stomach for being here with you. It's great to be here.
We're also so happy and we have so many questions for you. Before we get into the thick of things, we wanted to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners. So why don't you take a few minutes, if that's okay, to share a bit about your background, where you're from, career highlights, anything you'd like to share to help our listeners get to know you a bit better.
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Chapter 3: How can leaders use negative thinking as a positive force?
Now, there's no way to know whether that perception that other people have of you is accurate or not. But what's interesting, if you look at the research, is that the people who are seen as authentic actually are really good at impression management. They have high emotional intelligence, they know how to self edit.
And most most important of all, they know where the right to be themselves ends, and their obligation to others begins. And what makes you trust somebody, whether they're a leader, a coworker, or I would even say a spouse, is not whether they are brutally honest, but whether they are safe, reliable, and predictable. In the end, we have to read between the lines and we have to
care about others, and then you still have a lot of leeway and room to be you. And you're always going to be you and not other people. But to demonstrate that you have empathy and you care about others and have the capacity to self-edit in a way that helps the team and the organization is a fundamental accolade or leadership skill.
I'm going to take that quote with me, where your right to be yourself ends and your commitment to others begins. That is gold dust in my view. Let's shift gears a little bit.
So you wrote this book titled Human, AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. So as we're interacting more and more with AI at work, at home, it's tougher and tougher to distinguish, are we talking with AI versus are we talking with a human? Did that email come from a human? Is it from AI?
And so there's a growing call from some leaders, including AI and tech experts, for companies to just take a step back in this effort to create superintelligence. This kind of makes me think about that conversation we had with Brad Smith, and he talked about how every technology can either be a tool or a weapon. How can people adapt and stand out in the sea of technology?
Yeah, God, there's so much going on. And you know, I always feel like uncomfortable trying to predict what comes next. Most of the times our predictions are off. But if time stopped now, and AI development and technological development stopped, we would still need quite a while to kind of absorb it and make sense of it. Like, let's start with very, very concrete and simple examples.
So we may have some human listeners, but probably a lot of people are feeding this podcast to their large language model, the Gen-AI model, and getting a summary of it, right? And, you know,
and that might be fed into another ai and also you know we could have made this podcast not being ourselves but having our agents or a deep fakes or a digital clones doing it i think ai is incredible you know to some degree
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Chapter 4: What strategies can new leaders implement to gain competence and confidence?
Logically, I think there will be more pressure to kind of show that you're developing and increasing job related skills or employability, you know, as opposed to kind of knowledge because knowledge is kind of obsolete right now.
Those are great themes. We're excited for 2026. Okay. Well, we've reached the time in our show called rapid fire questions. And so this is designed really for us to just get to know you better for our listeners to hear more about you. So Emma and I are going to take turns asking you questions and you need to respond in one sentence or less. Are you ready?
I am. Was that the first question?
Okay, question one. As we begin 2026, did you make a New Year's resolution? And if so, what was it?
No, and nothing. I can add a sentence. 85% of New Year's resolutions are broken within the first three months.
I'm with you there. Are you a morning person or a night owl?
Oh, I'm now a morning person. I used to be a night owl, but, you know, I've hit my middle age kind of right now, hopefully. And, you know, now I'm up early and I go to sleep, you know, very early.
I'm the same. Look, you've traveled and lived all over the world. What's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten?
Various forms of insects in Mexico.
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