The Real Job Of A Leader, With Dave Ulrich
What’s the real job of a leader?
According to Dave Ulrich, it isn’t having all the answers, building your own reputation, or even telling a compelling story about where you’re going. Great leaders help the people around them build their stories—and create value for others.
In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with Dave, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on leadership, talent, and organizational effectiveness, for a wide-ranging conversation about what great leadership looks like in a rapidly changing world.
They explore why many of the fundamentals of leadership are timeless, even as technology and workplace expectations change dramatically. Dave explains the critical distinction between values—what matters to you—and value—what your actions create for someone else. He also shares a simple question leaders can use to rethink how they spend their time: What will happen in someone else’s life because of what I do today?
Dave and J.R. also discuss the choices and trade-offs that come with ambition, why our definition of success should change at different stages of life, and what Dave learned from deliberately stepping back from his own career while raising his children.
And, inevitably, they tackle AI. Dave argues that AI makes distinctly human capabilities more important, not less. As information becomes ubiquitous, leaders will increasingly differentiate themselves through vision, innovation, emotion, judgment, and wisdom.
The conversation also explores learning agility, navigating uncertainty, admitting when you don’t know the answer, and becoming comfortable figuring things out alongside the people you lead.
Whether you’re a first-time manager or an experienced executive, this episode is a reminder that leadership ultimately isn’t about you. It’s about what becomes possible for other people because you were there.
Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dave-ulrich/.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Real Job Of A Leader, With Dave Ulrich
Whether you’re a first-time manager trying to lead a team, a seasoned executive navigating constant change, or simply someone wondering how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world, leadership has arguably never been more challenging or more important. My guest has spent more than four decades helping answer a simple but fundamental question, what makes leaders, organizations, and careers successful?
Dave Ulrich is widely regarded as the father of modern human resources, but that title doesn’t begin to capture the impact of his work. He’s advised many CEOs, worked with organizations around the globe, authored more than 30 books, and helped shape how businesses think about leadership and talent, organizational capability, and value creation. His ideas have influenced not just HR leaders, but executives across virtually every industry.
In our conversation, we’re going to explore how leadership is evolving in the era of AI, why experience is no longer enough to sustain a successful career, what separates people who continue to grow from those who plateau, and what Dave’s learned from a lifetime spent in the boardrooms and the C-suites of some of the world’s most successful companies. Whether you’re leading a team or simply trying to build a career that remains valuable tomorrow. You’ll come away with some practical insights and perhaps a different way of thinking about what it means to create value. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions, and my conversation with Dave starts now.
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Dave, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show. It’s a real pleasure to have you with me.
What a privilege. I’m honored to be with you and our guest.
Honored to have you as a guest, so let’s get rolling. You have had a very distinguished career working with a number of companies and CEOs. If you think about leadership relative to when you first started back in the ‘80s or ‘90s. What do you think has fundamentally changed and what is different from the way it used to be?
Sometimes, we have experiences that shape the way we think. I listened to Peter Drucker once, and Peter Drucker said, “The greatest leadership ever was the pyramids.” I thought, “We haven’t changed anything since whenever that was in Egyptian history.” My sense as I take away that experience, a lot of the leadership principles are timeless. His comment was, “Look what they did in the pyramids with no technology, and no operational machinery. They built these incredible monuments to their legacy.”
A lot of the fundamental principles are the same but the practices and timely stuff do change. We’re not the same as we were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. A few years ago, we were all obsessed about COVID and how do you manage remote workers? Now, we’re obsessed about AI. A few years ago, AI was just a dream, and we’ll talk about that. Some of those timeless principles are so important. The one I’ll just highlight because I want to make it a setting for our discussion.
Helping Others Build Their Story
One of the things I find among the best leaders is every leader has a good story to tell. JR, you have a great story. I’ve looked at your background. Your life and your story is great. Leaders don’t tell their story. They help those they lead create their own story. Leadership is not about what I know and do. It’s how what I know and do helps and you know and do what you need to do better. This episode is not about, “Dave, let’s tell your story. Here’s your research. Here’s your ideas.” Your job as a leader is to help others build their story. I hope that’s the theme. We’re here to help those reading create their story based on our experience.
Great leaders don't just tell their story. They help the people they lead build their own. Share on XWe’re certainly going to get into some topics aimed to help people think about how to think about their careers and how to think about leadership. You mentioned AI. I’m going to go right there because it’s so prevalent. It’s dominating conversations at the board level, C-suite, all the way down to the front line. What do you think that means? Given what you just said about leadership and what changes and what doesn’t change. How is AI affecting leadership? What becomes more important in this new AI era? What may become less important?
We could spend the next 45 minutes on it. Let me just highlight a couple of things and I’ll try to highlight just two or three. One of the things, AI is not the goal. It’s a means. It’s access to information that we never had before. I was doing a talk at a university and I said, “I’m interested in how Plato compares with Thomas More’s Utopian society.” Boom. I had a polished report in less than 30 seconds. I thought, “When I was a graduate student, I would have been paid a semester to go create that.”
We have ubiquitous access to information. In fact, it’s interesting. AI gives you polished reports, information data that we’ve never seen before. As a leader, I can get information quickly. What’s missing is the human ingenuity to turn that information into productive knowledge. I’ll put that in a formula. HI or human ingenuity times AI or artificial intelligence. How do I navigate the balance between those? AI gives me capacity. Human ingenuity gives me capability. I’ve got to manage both.
If I avoid the AI, I’m not going to have the information I need. If all I’ve got is the algorithm and the AI and not the human ingenuity, I’m not going to differentiate myself. Quick tips, use AI. Don’t become dependent on it. There’s some amazing research coming out about cognitive decline, cognitive replacement, and cognitive surrender. Be careful to not get seduced into AI as a solution. It’s a set of ideas, a set of knowledge. It will give you a polished report. It will not give you guidance on how you have the confidence to make that report happen.
To me, and certainly one of the things that I hear coming up in conversation is that human judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to collaborate are some of the things that AI is going to have a harder time replacing. Those are the things that become more important. To your point, if you abdicate responsibility for doing your critical thinking to an AI tool and have it doing all of it for you, your critical thinking skills are bound to diminish over time. That’s what the research is starting to show.
The VIEW Framework For Human Ingenuity
By the way, my background is taxonomy. I love to take complex things and simplify. Let me give you a way to think about what you just said. What is human ingenuity? I’ve got AI, which is an algorithm, which gives me information, data and ubiquitous access to knowledge. What does human ingenuity mean that I uniquely bring? I’m going to suggest four things. That’s my taxonomy. Vision of the future. If somebody says to you, “What do you bring that complements the AI work going on?” AI can’t create the future. It only summarizes the past. Vision of the future. Innovation in the present.
What’s that beautiful human element where you get at the back of your head, your hair goes up, you get a nudge, like, “That’s cool.” Peter Drucker said the Egyptians were the most powerful leader, vision, innovation, emotion in relationships. You just said it, AI is not emotion. It’s an algorithm. It’s fake emotion. The one that you highlighted, and I’m going to call it wisdom, critical thinking, judgment, wisdom in decision-making. Vision, innovation, emotion, and wisdom view.
Human ingenuity gives me a view. I’m saying, “We’re doing a lot with AI.” Don’t get seduced. What’s the vision of the future? Look forward, not backward. What’s the innovation? What’s new here that its system didn’t give? Emotion, empathy, relationships, and then judgment, critical thinking. I hope those things are helpful. I know I miss a lot. I’m not naive about that. To me, that’s the compliment to the AI agenda that the algorithms give.
My final tip, I’ve gotten into discussions on social media with an algorithm. Don’t get into a debate with an algorithm. It’s not going to be a very good debate because they will keep flowing and flowing. I want to build a relationship. I want to look at somebody. I want to feel somebody with that emotion. Debating an algorithm is not going to be a very successful outcome.
Leadership Value: AI gives you capacity, but human ingenuity gives you capability. Strengthen your vision, innovation, emotion, and wisdom to stand out.
One of the things that relates somewhat to AI, but more generally that I’m thinking a lot about, and I want to get your perspective on. A lot of managers that I talk to are saying that their jobs are becoming harder. Expectations are rising. They’re being asked to manage more people. The pace of change is getting faster. Now, we have AI taking away some of the things that their individual contributor team members used to do, and frankly, that they used to do. What’s left for them, I’m hearing a lot of them say, feels genuinely harder. Are you hearing that in your own travels as well? I would love to get your thoughts on it.
I have two responses. The first is no question. What AI does, it doesn’t replace jobs, it replaces tasks. If you look at any process, let’s say staffing process, hiring someone. There’s ten steps in hiring someone, defining the skills, getting the resume, etc. AI can do four of those ten tasks efficiently. Sometimes leaders like doing those tasks because they are easy and they let us do something. I can’t do the more complicated tasks that require vision, innovation, empathy, and emotion. We’re stuck with those.
At one level, it is tough to be a leader now. At another level, if I went back and talked to some older leaders, they’d say, “It wasn’t all that easy in the ‘60s when we had revolts. It wasn’t that easy in the ‘70s when we had major crises.” Leadership has never been the easiest job in the world. Again, this will be the last time I mention Peter Drucker’s Pyramid. Go back to building the pyramids. I don’t imagine it was easy. They were built through horrible command and control logic, slavery, etc. It probably wasn’t very easy back then either.
Leadership has never been easy. What I’m finding around expectations that I like is people are getting more conscious and intentional about their expectations. Do I want to be a leader? Leader comes with a price. We talk about mid-career. It’s like, “My career is stalled out. Am I comfortable doing what I’m doing now or do I want to pay the price of ambition to move into other leadership positions?” It’s hard to be a leader working twenty hours a week remotely from Montana or from an island South of Boston. It’s hard to lead.
Paying The Price Of Ambition
A lot of people say, “I want the flexibility that comes in the world.” You have every right to that flexibility, but recognize it comes with a consequence. I faced that early in my career. I went off to be a professor at the University of Michigan. We had 2.2 kids. That tells you where we are in that status. My wife started a PhD program. We looked at each other and said, “We are choosing not to outsource our kids. We are going to raise our kids and muddle through parenting.” I can’t believe I’m getting emotional because it was a tough decision. For the next five years, I cut back.
That wasn’t the greatest time of my career to cut back and stay home while my wife did her PhD. I stayed home two days a week. I took the kids to school. I did stuff. I paid an ambition price so that I could do some other things that I chose to do. I’m not advocating that anyone should make those choices, but that was our choice. I ended up not getting tenure. That was a conscious choice. Sometimes, as careers, we say, “I want to have it all. I’m going to be the greatest. I’m going to be the greatest everything in the world.”
I hope leaders are clear about their expectations with intentionality. By the way, I wouldn’t change anything we did because it allowed us to balance. When my wife finished her PhD, we looked at it and said, “Here’s what a psychologist makes. Here’s what a consultant makes. I’m going to go do a little more consulting.” She said, “Go,” but we then still negotiated. Our deal was I would never be gone on weekends. You know what travel is. I’ve looked at your career map. Travel is tough, especially from the United States if you’re in the Gulf States. I love the Gulf States.
You can’t travel and not be gone on weekends if you’re going to do work in the Gulf States. I didn’t do any work in the Gulf States for fifteen years because that was the deal. Takeaway, we’re helping you create your story. Be conscious. What do I want? Recognize it’s a long career. When our kids left home, my wife looked at me and said, “You could be gone more.” That may not be the best solution and answer, but the decisions we made then were good for them and good for us.
They aren’t good for anybody else, but those decision records may change. I spent 15 or 20 years on the road a lot, and that was a choice. I’d ask leaders the question, “What do you want? How do you define your success?” Recognize that’s not a one-time answer. That may change at 25 when you’re single, at 30 when you’re newlywed, at 35 with kids, at 40 or 45. At my age, it changes again. What do you want? Be intentional about that. Be clear about what determines my definition of success and value? You pay a price. Long answer to a very fair question about expectations.
There’s a lot to take away from what you just said. Probably most important is this point at the end about the fact that what works for you then is what matters. It’s going to change at different stages in your life. Your story highlights that perfectly. As long as you’re intentional and thoughtful about it, it’s hard to look back with regret because you’ve made conscious choices.
Every career choice comes with a price. Be intentional about your priorities so you don't look back with regret. Share on XMay I tell a quick story? This one, I love to tell. I’ve told it before, but it’s a powerful story. This was a CEO. I would not recommend this for almost anybody, but he’s a very successful and very senior CEO in New York. I’ve been coaching him. I go in and he’s down. I say, “What’s going on?” He said, “Work is fine and we’re dealing with all the issues, but my fifteen-year-old son and I aren’t getting along very well.” I said, “That’s never happened before. Tell me about your son.”
He’s like, “My son’s terrific.” I said, “What does he love?” He said, “He loves baseball.” I asked, “Who does he love?” He said, “The New York Yankees.” I looked at the CEO and I said, “They’re in the World Series and it’s going on. Go to a game.” He gave me one of the dumbest answers of a smart executive I’ve ever known, “I don’t have a ticket.” I said, “Your son is You are a total doofus. What do you mean you don’t have a ticket? Get online. Get great seats. Get your son out of school. Get a car. Go eat hot dogs. Get sick. Go to the game.” He said, “Can I do that?” I said, “Are you kidding me?”
He called two days later and said, “You reminded me of what mattered most. My son and I had a great night. We’ll remember that for decades.” I hope at your level, wherever you are in your organization, don’t be afraid to do those kinds of things because they have such meaning and such impact. When I was traveling so much, my mother was retired. We had three kids. I was doing work then around the world. I called mom and I said, “Mom, do you want to see Hong Kong?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Good. Let’s go.”
My mother has traveled with me to some of the greatest spots in the world with my three kids. She watches them during the day, then we have dinner. There’s a lot of ways you can begin to manage the life balance that I hope those who are reading make conscious choices. Now, where did this start? Don’t assume that you can have everything and still be promoted and move up. There’s a price that you pay but the price that you might pay is a good one. There are other people who make another choice. I want to move in my career. I enjoy the status. I enjoy the power. I enjoy the influence through hierarchy. If that’s your choice, we have the right to make that choice.
You’ve talked about defining success and also defining value. You mentioned value in passing, but I know this is a very central concept to the way that you think, this idea of what value are you creating. Talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that, because it’s going to set up this idea of how people can stay relevant over a long and uncertain career journey.
Connecting Values To True Value
Great question. There’s two words, values and value. Values are, what is my identity? What am I known for? When COVID hit, it changed my career. I was traveling. Guess what? You’re not traveling. What’s my core value? What are my values? I want to learn. I’m going to have to discover a new way to learn because I’m not going to learn by flying around. I’m going to learn through webinars, through doing things like this, with podcasts, through social media. I’ve never done social media.
My first question to somebody is, what are my core values? What matters to me? That’s the question we started. What do I want? How do I want to be known? What’s my identity? What’s the story I want? That’s 50%. The other 50% is, how do my values create value for someone else? If my values don’t create value for someone else, it’s not long-term viability. It’s narcissistic. It’s hedonism. Leaders are not hedonists. The leader affirms their success by the ways others behave when the leaders aren’t in the room because their values have created value for someone else.
I love to talk about what you value and how your values create value for somebody else. As a leader, first question. Who am I serving? Is there somebody I can serve and create value for? I got that headset. That’s what senior leaders do in a company. Who are you creating value for? How will my values help them build their story? I’m going to go back to that story metaphor. I’m not here just to create my story and impose it. I’m here to create my story so that you can create yours even better.
Particularly in the frame of a leader, this idea of giving up the self for the other is an important mindset shift that not all leaders remember every day. They start to believe their own hype. They forget that there are many people around them who’ve made them successful over the years. There’s a lot of people who depend on them. That constant, who am I here to serve and how can I create value for them? If you can ask that question of yourself, it will help keep you grounded. That’s something that I take away from what you just said.
The So That Query For Calendars
I love it. By the way, I love simple exercises. That’s the taxonomy PhD. Look at your calendar and say, “Who am I going to meet with? What am I going to do? What’s going to happen in their lives because of what I do?” Teach a class. I won’t go through the class in detail, but I was looking at utopian society and how do you build organizations that are utopian? What do I want those students to leave with? It’s the same question. I want to set a vision for that. I want to manage change so that. Who’s going to benefit because of what I do as a leader?
Leadership Value: Having values is only half the battle. The real question is how your values create tangible value for someone else
I want to engage my people so that those employees feel ownership for the work we do. I want to set a vision so that our customers are more likely to buy our product. I want to be disciplined about making change happen so that an investor gives us a premium in price earnings ratio. The so that for me turns my calendar into outcomes for somebody else. It’s a very simple little query that I have found helpful for me. The so that takes me out of my values into the value that I create for another.
I love it. It’s a very simple framework that’s easy for our audience to take away. Thinking longer term, there’s this idea that you hear a lot about. How do I future-proof my career? I would love to get your thoughts on the fallacies of trying to future-proof your career and what you can do.
Staying Sharp With Learning Agility
Two thoughts. One is in the research that Bob Eichinger and the Center for Creative Leadership have done, they look at skills that leaders have that seem to be predicting long-term success. Learning agility comes out high. When is 50% of what I know out of date? I’ve been a professor. I was a professor in Michigan for 43 years. When I teach that course every year, what percent of my teaching notes are new?
There are some professors you can tell the time of day by their jokes because it’s no longer a course. It’s a Broadway play because the joke is scripted. I never went there. My rule of thumb in my world, and everybody’s got to determine their world, about every 18 to 24 months, I should have 25% to 30% new stuff. Am I learning agile? Am I continually reinventing and experimenting? That, to me, is part of what you do. I’m going to give two tips for reinventing your career. Learning agility, keeping fresh, and try new stuff.
By the way, I share this with students sometimes. One of the worst things about, in order for me to be learning agile, I’m going to teach 125% of what I know. You’re not perfect the first time out. The first batch of cookies is never very good. I’m always going to experiment. I’m going to weave into my sessions new stuff. Leaders, try new things. Go experiment. They go, “That didn’t work. I’m not going to do that one again.” There’s a great insight.
The second tip, learn to navigate paradox and tension. Everybody says, “I’m going to manage the paradox. I’m going to be like this.” We live in a world of inherent paradox. Am I long-term or short-term? Yes. Am I top-down or bottom-up? Yes. Am I focused on individuals or teams? Yes. Am I focused on profit, performance financially or caring for the people? Yes. One of the things I love to see in leaders is they say, “This is an inherent paradox. Do you want to be the servant or the master?” Yes.
I love leaders who can say, “I’m navigating paradox and I’m going to lean a little bit this way, then I’m going to lean a little bit that way. I’m going to constantly navigate.” I don’t know if you’ve ever sailed or flown a plane, but you’re always navigating. You’re moving back and forth. Learning agility and paradox navigation become two of those process skills that you can begin to apply as you go forward.
Have you felt like over the course of your career that there have been things that you’ve had to let go of that were central to your way of thinking as the world continued to adapt?
Many. Let go of, did I have an answer? Let go of, tell me the answer. What do you think? I love that question. I don’t have to have an answer. What do you think? Let’s talk. That I have to be prepared. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten more senior in teaching is a lot of teachers say, “You’ve got a three-hour workshop with executives on pick a topic, like talent or strategy. What are you going to do in 90 minutes? What are you going to do in 120 minutes?”
Lately, I’ve gone into those classes and said, “We’re going to talk about talent. We got 15-20 people here. What’s the biggest talent challenge you face? We make a list on the board. Vote. Good.” We’ve now spent 10-15 minutes. We have three new challenges that are on top of your list. Let’s take the one with the most votes. By the way, I tell people that when I do workshops they freak out. What are you going to do 90 minutes in? I don’t even know the topic 90 minutes in.
Transform your daily schedule by asking who benefits from your work today and what outcome it creates for them. Share on XI have enough confidence that we’re going to co-discover what’s real. I’ve had to learn to have confidence in the process of learning with the people I lead and the people I work with and sometimes you have no clue. I was in one. They said, “How do we manage the mobility of our employees in China who change jobs so often?” That got a top vote. I can tell you a secret. I have no clue. I said, “I have no clue. What do you think?”
We spent twenty or 30 minutes thinking through the principles of mobility and how they may apply in that Chinese context. People said, “That was helpful. You didn’t just share your latest statistics or research.” That’s the piece that has been helpful for me. It’s just trusting the process to get there. It doesn’t always work perfectly. I’m not stupid about that but I love that dialogue. Question and answer is literally a question.
Listening to what you just said, it feels like it touches on a lot of the things we’ve talked about in terms of how more of the world is going to work because we’re all going to have more of these conversations that are about bringing our collective wisdom to bear. It sits on top of all the factual knowledge that we can now get at our fingertips.
I posted a thing with Charles. It used to be that you learn it at the training program, you know, and then you go do. Flip it upside down. AI tells you what to do. Now you got to figure out what you need to know to make it happen. I love your comment about collective wisdom. If nobody knows, let’s talk. Let’s discover. Let’s co-create. To me, that’s exciting because that’s how we also stay fresh, is learning together and we’ll make mistakes.
There’s a great line, “I’m not failing. I’m learning.” It comes from Carol Dweck’s work in Mindset, “Failure is an opportunity to learn.” In fact, I say to leaders, “Tell me about a failure recently. What did you learn? How did you make that better?” Those were the lessons where people at any career stage, early, middle, or late, to stay fresh.
I think the idea of learning agility in particular, just adaptability. Take your example of how we do mobility for employees in China who are switching jobs all the time. These are new problems. Nobody has necessarily figured out the answer to them. The same is true of what the world is going to look like in ten or twenty years because of AI. Nobody has a clue. There’s some perspectives that are better informed than others.
What that means for you as an individual is you need to accept the fact that there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the world will unfold. You need to make sure that you’re giving yourself optionality. You give yourself optionality by being adaptable. You can’t go much further than there. Your workshop analogy probably fits here, too. You’re 90 minutes in, same things. You can’t predict what you’re going to be doing ten years from now.
One of my favorite workshops is when we bring in senior HR leaders, small groups, fifteen, and we say, “What’s on your mind?” Some of those are some of the most creative discussions that I just find delightful because we’re allowed to co-create and get ideas out that will be interesting. I find that fascinating. Let me just pick up on your comment. We live in a world of uncertainty and we love to solve the uncertainty. Let’s do scenario planning.
Anchoring In Certainty Amid Chaos
What I love to do in a world of uncertainty is start with certainty. Don’t chase the uncertainty. Stop. What are you certain about? Let me go back to where we were. In the world of COVID, when’s travel going to open up? Is it going to come back? I have no clue. What am I certain about? What are my values? I am committed to learning. That’s useful. In a world of uncertainty, we don’t know what’s going to happen with interest rates, inflation, tariffs, regulation, elections, and toxicity. We hope we can get over toxicity.
My first question is, what are you certain about? How can you then live your certainty? How can your certainty help others live their lives better? That’s the value in values. I hear people, “The world is uncertain. It’s ambiguous. It’s volatile, uncertain, and complex.” The VUCA world that we’ve talked about and they get all obsessed. Let that go. How can you live that value and make that value a value to somebody else? In that world, I don’t know what your career will look like but if you’re living your life with certainty. I shared that it was spending time with young kids. For a while, it’s been something else. Those things become helpful in navigating certainty in a world of uncertainty.
Leadership Value: Reinvent your career before it stalls. Experiment with new ideas and refresh your knowledge base every eighteen months.
A lot of people reading probably still feel some level of discomfort because we take mortgages that have 30-year paybacks. We’ve got commitments to family and other things that are important to us. Yet the ability to safely say, “Am I going to have a stable income stream for the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or however many years?” It’s hard sometimes. That level of uncertainty is still challenging for people because they’re forced to make some decisions that hopefully won’t go against them.
They may go against them. I didn’t get tenure. That’s not a good thing. Sometimes putting those things in context. The other side is people said, “How did you handle PhDs, muddle and careers?” We simply muddled. We didn’t have a perfect vision. We didn’t have everything laid out. We muddled. Muddling means you try it. It didn’t work. You experiment. It didn’t work. You learn quickly, fail fast. Our kids now have kids. We have grandkids. Our kids are going, “Dad, life is complex. It’s tough. Are you muddling enough?”
Live with the muddle and it’s okay. Again, I empathize. Will I have a career? Can I pay for a mortgage? No question. Those are demands that are so demanding, but muddle. I don’t know where the word muddle comes from, but it captures the feeling of what it’s like to be in the middle of all of these demands and just muddle.
Brené Brown uses a similar concept when she talks about braving. Being willing to be vulnerable and find your way through all of this in spite of the uncertainties and the doubts that you might have.
I like that word, too. Be brave, muddle, try it, and then fail fast. That didn’t work. Good. Here’s a great insight. Guess what? Stop doing that. That’s not always easy. By the way, it’s much easier to look back and say that than it is to be in the middle of it, which I appreciate.
You forget all the pain from the moment. Last question. What gives you the most optimism about the next generation of leaders?
Spending time with them, just listening to them and seeing in their eyes the bright lights, the curiosity, the ambition. I don’t know about you. I’m so glad I’m not 25 again. When I’m around them, the most optimism I ever get is spending time with the next generation. I walk away knowing they’re going to struggle. You’re going to have struggles. You’re going to have difficulties.
I can give you a preamble to that. I can prepare you for some of that, but I can’t take it away. The struggle is part of the healthy thing. What gives me optimism is my granddaughters from two different parents, email me two or three times a week and text me and just say, “Grandpa, what do I do with this?” That just gives me optimism. Our hope is in the next generation. If we can help that next generation discover their story, that won’t be mine at all, that gives me great optimism.
You especially get to do that with grandchildren, and that’s part of the joy of being a grandparent.
I’m not going to end it yet. What gives you optimism? We never get to learn from you. What gives you optimism?
Don't chase uncertainty in chaotic times. Anchor in what you're certain about and let that guide your next step. Share on XIn the scheme of things, it’s easy to get down about all of the things that are going on in the world, and yet the human spirit seems to persevere. If you think about the world we live in, in 2026 and what it was like 100 or 200 or 300 years ago, it was a lot harder back then. It was a lot more uncertain back then. It was a different uncertainty. You were worried about whether your two-year-old child was going to die of the flu.
You were worried about whether you were going to have war with the tribe or the clan or whatever that was five miles away in another village. We don’t have that to the same degree now. We have different issues that affect us, but we find a way to keep carrying on. It’s not always easy, and there are certainly harder times than other times, but we will find our way through this.
Each generation proves we all have doubts. We all look at the teenagers, when we get older, and we say, “They don’t know anything. I can’t believe this generation is the way they are.” That was certainly said by our parents of us and their parents of them, but every generation finds their way eventually. They are the future, so they will be the future leaders too.
Thank you. That’s very helpful.
Thank you as well.
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As we wrap up our conversation with Dave Ulrich, there are a few ideas that I hope you’ll take with you. One is that leadership isn’t becoming less human because of AI. It’s becoming more human. The leaders who succeed in this new era are going to be the ones who understand what gives them uniquely human skills. That human insight and wisdom that Dave talked about in the conversation and how to marry that with artificial intelligence and all of the other tools that we have at our disposal to do good work in service of others, to create value for others. That is the essence of Dave’s message.
That brings us to this notion of how he defined value. Thinking about what your values are, but then how you can use those to deliver value to somebody else. Getting up every day and thinking about that, whether you’re an individual contributor or a frontline manager or a leader who’s moving up through an organization or a CEO. All of us are delivering value in our work environments to support others. Be they our colleagues, the shareholders, vendors, customers, whoever. That’s what the world of work is about, is creating value.
If you’re constantly thinking about that and adapting as the world moves on, you will continue to be able to create value and have continued success. That requires, and this gets to another point Dave made, learning agility, being willing to adapt, to let go of old thoughts, to bring in new thoughts, to bring in new sources of information, and to create new ways of learning. Go into conversations where you don’t know the answer and say, “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together.”
That will become especially important in an era where knowledge is readily available, but wisdom isn’t quite as available. The collective intelligence of bringing people together to solve problems together and to learn from each other will still be a unique part of the human experience and a way that we work even with all of these great AI tools that are coming to bear. A lot to think about from our conversation with Dave.
I hope you found this conversation valuable. If you did, please subscribe or leave us a review. Share this episode with someone who is looking to become a leader or build a stronger career. You can also sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter, PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.
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About Dave Ulrich
