Today’s world is full of volatility, uncertainty, and accelerating change. In times like these, it’s tempting for leaders to default toward traditional command-and-control certainty. Projecting strength and confidence while offering clear direction is the best way to rally a team and create alignment that is an essential precursor to success. Right? Well, no. This old-school leadership sensibility isn’t just out of touch with today’s business environment; it’s also ineffective.
The dirty little secret of leading with certainty is that it’s often a game of make-believe. Today, that style of leadership is melting down, as AI and day-to-day events have created a perpetual atmosphere of uncertainty. What’s becoming clear is that great leaders who pretend to have all the answers are struggling, while those who succeed listen, approach situations with genuine curiosity, and adjust as conditions change.
On this episode of the Whole Brain® at Work podcast, hosts Karim Nehdi and Ann Herrmann-Nehdi speak with Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst on Forrester’s Future of Work team and one of HRExecutive’s top 100 HR Tech Influencers for 2025.
Vision-setting leaders are paralyzed while servant leaders flourish, and Betsy has seen this pattern repeatedly in her work with organizations navigating AI transformation. “Being a good leader doesn’t necessitate having the answer,” she tells us. “Those leaders are in crisis mode right now because there is no answer. We don't know what the future is going to bring, and even if we did we can't make big decisions towards something.”
Join us as we explore why performative workplace initiatives collapse under pressure, what trust-building behaviors actually matter during transformation, and how AI could help us understand cognitive diversity better if we're humble enough to let it.
There’s a difference between leadership rooted in strategy and on based on untethered confidence. Bold, confident leadership feels strategic because it's loud, decisive, and delivers big statements and shiny programs. Consider DEIB initiatives: they dominated 2021 boardrooms, then dropped to bottom-five priorities by 2024. Employee perks vanished overnight. Programs vanished. Corporate websites were scrubbed of any trace.
What happened?
“If it can be quickly undone in a day, then maybe it wasn’t as real a strategy as we thought,” Betsy says. Truly strategic initiative have both structure and durability. It understands that there are tradeoffs, which means you keep doing it even when it becomes inconvenient. True strategy is embedded.
Initiatives based on untethered confidence are heavy on slogans and branding but lack real backbone. There’s a lot of “just trust us.”
AI has become the latest pressure test.
The leaders struggling most right now are those who built their identity on setting a steadfast direction. Betsy describes what they need as a sailing approach, what she calls, “tacking and jibing given the direction of the wind.” For leaders whose strength has always been making the big strategic calls, it feels destabilizing. They’re used to sending the email that lays out the timeline and the plan.
Servant leaders have a completely different experience. Their job was never about having answers. It was about supporting their teams through whatever came next. That foundation remains steady while others scramble to reestablish credibility.
A leadership model based on projecting certainty and having everyone fall in line behind that direction will always be fragile. It unravels at the first sign of pushback or friction before posting a LinkedIn apology later. Real leadership is different. It lays a foundation for a culture of trust with curiosity and iteration.
"The most important thing is for people to see you as someone who will listen to them," Betsy explains. "And so you have to ask questions, and you have to listen to them. And then you have to act based on their feedback."
Betsy references research from an AI coach who works with leaders on the autism spectrum, noting that what matters isn't empathy in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s asking someone their story, then believing them. "The believing is really hard for people," Betsy adds. We filter everything through our own experience and want to fix problems before we've really heard them.
One leader Betsy worked with thought her team didn’t trust her because they stayed quiet in meetings. But she only left space for questions at the end, a format that worked for her thinking preferences but created no real opening for others.
Trust requires creating genuine opportunities to be heard. Model vulnerability first. Say what you’re learning and what questions you’re bringing back to leadership. Most importantly, don’t wait. “You will never have the perfect answer,” she says. “You have to ask questions and you have to listen to them and then you have to act based on their feedback.”
Close the loop even when you can’t act on every request. Demonstrating accountability matters as much as listening.
AI is the latest and perhaps greatest of leadership in our time. Leaders are forced to confront, new models, new workflows, new policies, new risks and new competitors. Searching for the “right” answer is a fool’s errand because the half-life of certainty is perilously short. The age of AI rewards adaptive thinking and curiosity.
In this way, Betsy believes that AI can help us be more human.
Curiosity means questions, and answers require data. She points to AI’s potential to surface data about thinking preferences, work styles, and what people actually need from their leaders. This is information that exists but rarely gets synthesized in useful ways.
But there's a caveat. “Over-rotating towards data and logic is not the answer,” Betsy warns. “It’s bringing everything into the picture.”
Betsy invokes a version of Pascal's wager. You might as well believe AI will transform work, because even if it doesn't, you'll have built for a better future by questioning rigid institutions and creating flexibility. The future is ultimately shaped by whether leaders have the curiosity, trust, and cognitive flexibility to build the work world they actually want.
Leadership in the AI era demands what it always should have: The courage to admit uncertainty, the curiosity to ask better questions, and the trust to let your team shape the path forward. The leaders who embrace that reality are already building the future that the rest are still trying to predict.
Betsy Summers:
One thing I think AI can at least help with is collecting more of that data and helping it be more accessible. Bringing in different talent assessments, employee experience assessments, skills assessments, lots of data about what people want to do and how they think and how they operate and putting it together in a way that people can actually ingest it and help kind of make sense of other folks for them. AI to help us be more human.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Welcome to The Whole Brain at Work podcast. I'm Karim Morgan Nehdi, CEO, entrepreneur, and management and organizational scientist, and in my work leading Herrmann and now developing a new AI startup, ned.ai, I’ve become deeply invested in understanding how we think, how we work together, and how emerging forces, technological, generational and structural are shaping both.
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:
And I'm Ann Herrmann-Nehdi. Our work at Herrmann has always centered on helping people and organizations unlock their best thinking and collaboration, and in the moment of massive change that we're going through right now, that's more important than ever. When we talk about the future of work, we’re not just talking about technology or job roles. We’re talking about human beings and how we find meaning in our work, how we learn and adapt, and how we thrive together across differences.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
So our guest today has been at the forefront of understanding this transformation. Betsy Summers is the principal analyst on Forrester's Future of Work team and was recently named one of the top 100 HR tech influencers for 2025. Bravo!
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:
Today, we’re digging into what leaders are actually struggling with right now: the swing from employee power to employer power, the uncertainty created by AI, and why trust, curiosity, and Whole Brain leadership matter more than ever.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Betsy, welcome to The Whole Brain at Work podcast.
Betsy Summers:
Thank you for having me.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
So, Betsy, you’re an industry analyst now, and for those who don’t know what that actually entails day to day, can you walk us through a little bit of what your job looks like, what you’re researching, who you’re talking to, and what kinds of challenges you’re helping organizations work through?
Betsy Summers:
Yeah, happy to. Industry analyst is a funny job. I sometimes make the analogy that being an industry analyst is kind of like being a model in some ways, and I guess, stay with me, it is highly kind of revered, or it's kind of exotic in a way, ooh, they're an industry analyst, I wonder what that means. Kind of admired, but also a little bit objectified as well.
Part of being an industry analyst is about knowing that people are listening closely to the words I use and what I say about particular vendors or particular strategies and trends, data, surveys, studies in the market, and I really have to be careful about the conclusions and the judgment that I might be carrying from my own experience and what I'm interpreting or reading into that data and those surveys and studies.
I love keeping an eye on the market, kind of what’s going on, talking to leaders about their challenges and certain opportunities, helping them maybe see around some corners a little bit by sharing what other leaders are doing, but also just trying to deeply listen to what's holding them back or what’s getting them stuck a little bit with what they're trying to accomplish because at the end of the day, even if they’re trying to do a whole AI implementation strategy or trying to do a huge change management project, at the end of the day it’s just them and how they feel about their personal work.
Can they do it? What's holding them back? Do they have the trust they need? Do they have the people on the team whom they can trust to do their jobs? Are they influencing well within the organization? Are they communicating well? Do they really understand what their teams actually need from them? Are they doing enough listening and soliciting feedback?
So even the biggest projects that I help people make progress on, it all comes back down to these very human conversations. And so I find that incredibly rewarding. That's my favorite part of the job is just talking to people and helping them get a little bit unstuck.
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:
What's surprising you about the conversations that you're having now with leaders? Because it just really does seem like we've gone from one extreme to the other to a certain degree, and I'd love to hear what you're hearing and what surprises you.
Betsy Summers:
Yes. When I started at Forrester, it was 2021, and pretty quickly, we fell into the great resignation trend. Employee power was high. Organizations were falling all over themselves to offer signing bonuses and sometimes comp bonuses, 200% with their competitors. People were really focusing on how to attract and retain their workforce, and me, with my background in kind of the talent and learning, and having gone through professional coaching training in 2018, I was in heaven. I love that conversation, like, "Let’s talk about how to help you attract and retain employees and talent."
What surprised me, especially given the harsh swing back and in more reactionary swing back to employer power is how performative a lot of that has turned out to be. Now reflecting on all of the campaigns and all of the employee value proposition work and all of the employee benefits and employee perks and investment and employee experiences, all of that suddenly and very quickly going away.
I mean, even just using DEI as the example of those words now, in our surveys during 2021, 2022, though DEIB was a higher priority for leaders, it was certainly in the top 10 of organizational priorities to attract and retain the workforce, and now it's in the bottom five. I think we survey around 30 different factors, and it’s in the bottom five.
And so that to me signals, okay, well, you either weren't doing it right or well, or you don't really understand what it is. And it's a shame that a lot of this has become so politicized as well, because we know that diversity and especially diversity and inclusion initiatives that help build belonging and help build equity within the organization, they do lead to better business results, and so it's unfortunate that those have now become bad words.
So that has definitely surprised me of how quickly we're able to just undo a lot of that, but also as a signal of how maybe performative much of it was. If it can be quickly undone in a day, then maybe it wasn't as real a strategy as we thought.
I think the other surprise has been how difficult managing this change, this kind of coming AI disruption to work has been for some leaders. When I was working at Herrmann, we talked about this or just the leadership styles and just the differences in leadership styles, and I'm seeing it come out to play.
I don't know how it translates from a whole brain perspective, but I see on one hand, leaders who maybe felt like their strength was knowing the direction to go in, making a choice and setting a vision, and that's how they defined leadership for themselves, and that's the strength that they felt like they could give to their team, they are in crisis mode right now because there is no answer.
We don't know. We don't know what the future is going to bring, and even if we did we can't make big decisions towards something.
We have to take a sailing-type approach where you're tacking and jibing and tacking and jibing, given the direction of the wind. We have to take a more iterative approach, making smaller decisions along the way rather than a big call to say, "We are going there, to the Canary Islands," or whatever. All that we can say is, "Let's head east. Let's go that way."
On the other hand, those leaders who had really seen themselves as more of that servant leadership style, kind of supporting from beneath, enabling the success of their team really no matter what, of just like, "How can I help you be successful in your role? What do you need to be successful? What's in your way? How can we work through it? What ideas do you have?"
While that style... both styles are good and both styles are necessary, but people who are more in the supportive or the kind of servant leadership style, they tend to feel a little bit more okay in this moment because their job has not changed. Their job is still supporting their team, and now they're leaning in a little bit more even because of the disruption, whereas the folks who felt really good about setting a vision are sometimes on their back foot a little bit because they're not super confident on what that vision is.
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:
And they keep having to adapt and change to the reality that's around them, right? So absolutely true.
Betsy Summers:
Yes, and so that big email that they put out about here's where we're going, here's what we're doing, here's the plan, this is our timeline, they got to blow that up, and also if they're not in control.
So I work a lot with the federal government too, and those leaders, if they set a plan in motion, they set a vision, they're trying to create some structure and clarity for their team, and then they get an executive order on a Friday afternoon that blows it all up, then they're just like, "What do I even do with that?"
And so getting them to reorient the way that they can feel successful as a leader has been one of the more, I would say surprising ways that just as an industry analyst, I can help to just show them different ways of working and different examples of what success could look like.
Ann Herrmann-Nehdi:
So conceivably, with AI, making all these things happen, we would see leaders freed up to do what you mentioned earlier is so important, be that servant leader, being there for their team, building those relationships, creating trust, but it's a different kind of time now. So are there specific leadership behaviors that you're seeing either really build or erode that trust during all of these changing times and transformations?
Betsy Summers:
Reflecting on those behaviors, I think they are what they've always been where when I talk to leaders who are willing to ask questions and willing to co-create things with their teams, they are typically walking into any situation with a lot more trust built up than the leader who maybe for very good intentions wants to have an answer to deliver to the team.
And so they isolate themselves and they think, "Oh, my team needs me to find an answer or wants me to have an answer," but in the meantime, they have totally cut off any conversation with their team, and without any information we make up stories and interpretations about what's happening.
And so sometimes I talk to leaders who maybe they’ve gone through a recent restructure or maybe there's a pending restructure, and they have to think about the change communication. How do I talk to my team about it, and what do I do, what do I do with this new team that I've inherited, and I'm bringing two cultures together?
My first advice is always don't wait. Don't wait for a perfect time. You will never have the perfect answer. The most important thing is for people to see you as someone who will listen to them.
And so you have to ask questions and you have to listen to them and then you have to act based on their feedback, and you can disagree. You can say, "You told me this, I'm not able to do that right now, and I'm sorry or it just won't work right now. I just wanted to close the loop with you." it's kind of like that accountability. You always have to model it first.
So I find that even in times of massive disruption like AI, you can still pull out some of those very fundamental leadership skills for coaching and asking questions and co-creation as much as possible and modeling the behavior yourself to show your vulnerability and to also sometimes, as appropriate, thinking out loud to say, "I don't know all the answers yet. Our leadership team hasn't told me the plan. Here's what I've learned so far. Here's what I can share based on what I know and what questions do you want me to bring back to them?" things like that.
So being a good leader doesn't necessitate having the answer. That has been one of the bigger things that I've tried to help leaders through.
I was working with a leader recently who was running a customer experience, like a CX team, and had recently gone through a restructure and she said, "I have people on my team who really don't trust me." And I said, "Okay, tell me about that. How can you tell? What's your evidence for that?" And she said, "Oh, they're just really quiet in meetings."
And I said, "Well, what opportunities have they had to speak?" And she says, "Well, I just, I leave time for questions at the end."
And so that's just an example of, okay, maybe your preference is that when you're in a meeting, someone leaves time for questions at the end, you feel like that's your time. You might need to intentionally ask someone a question in a meeting or give them a little bit more direction or be a little bit more vulnerable so they feel comfortable speaking up in a meeting.
So I try to help people at least establish a little bit more cognitive empathy so they can kind of just like imagine what other people might be feeling, even if they don't have access to some of the kind of more relational or reading people's expressions, intuiting how they feel.
I was talking to an AI coach researcher. She is an entrepreneur. She has an AI coaching tool, but she also researches AI in employee experience adoption use cases. She was saying that empathy is one of the most overrated skills for coaches, and I said, "Ooh, that's really interesting. Tell me about that. Tell me more about what you mean by that."
And she said, "Well, I work with a lot of people who are on the autism spectrum who don't have access to empathy as just a natural skill." And she says, "The way that I like to look at it is just curiosity, just asking questions," which aligns to what Brené Brown has kind of evolved her thinking on empathy to be.
it's no longer trying to imagine yourself in someone's shoes because you're making all these assumptions about their life that you don't know and assumptions are no bueno. And so rather she says, "Be curious about someone, ask them their story, and then believe them."
The believing is really hard for people to just not judge but ask someone their story and then believe them, and that's one of the things that Rebecca, the AI coach researcher was talking about. She just said, "You have to be curious about people." That is one thing I think AI can at least help with is collecting more of that data and helping it be more accessible, bringing in different talent assessments, employee experience assessments, skills assessments, lots of data about what people want to do and how they think and how they operate and putting it together in a way that people can actually ingest it and help kind of make sense of other folks for them. AI to help us be more human, that would be my platform for tech president.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
I love it because that's exactly what we're trying to build ned.ai to do. I mean, you went and you touched on so many important points there, right? Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, showing that leaders need to do three specific things during change.
One, frame it as a learning problem, two, acknowledge their own fallibility, and three, to your last point, model that curiosity. Those sound really simple, but are actually remarkably rare.
I also reflect on the interview that Adam Grant did with Sam Altman talking about empathy is actually something that you don't necessarily think of as something that AI can do, but in many ways AI can be more empathetic than a human because humans are always contextualizing what they're hearing in their own lived experience, and AI, of course, has no lived experience, right? it's only just got this compendium of knowledge that it's trying to find probabilistic matches in, right?
So I think it's really interesting to think about how do you create AI that ultimately helps those managers, those leaders tap into the humanity that we share across an organization to really amplify that humanity, and I'm delighted to hear your endorsement for that approach because it's so central to what we're trying to build.
Betsy Summers:
Yes.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
We've talked about how AI is the number one topic on so many leaders' minds. Let's tackle it head-on. You've written about this. I know you have strong views. Where do you land on the spectrum of AI is going to kill us all and take our jobs versus AI's going to create amazing new opportunities in the absurd hype cycle that we seem to be in? Where are you on all this?
Betsy Summers:
There is, from a market perspective, definitely a lot of hype or kind of an AI bubble. Who knows what will happen with it? We are certainly seeing the majority, at least, the leaders who respond to our surveys are investing in AI. They are actively using it. I see data from our surveys that say a majority of leaders expect that it's going to increase employment over the next two years.
And then on the other hand, I see other prognostications in the media about how it's going to decimate jobs, and certainly for different segments, like I was talking about the graduates coming in, the early career folks, am very much a believer in it should be up to us. We are building for the future that we want, and if you see the future going in a way that you don't like, you got to then lean in and build more towards the future that you want.
I think for any organizational leader, they need to think very thoughtfully about the problems that they want AI to solve and also that people who last year were complaining about how much they hated their jobs, suddenly that AI is threatening their jobs they suddenly love their jobs. They're clinging to something that was never really working for them.
And so this could be an opportunity to rethink your employment model, rethink how you have a livelihood and take opportunities where you can. I'm very much an optimist from a humanity and individual and community perspective.
I'm not so much an optimist in our institutions, government and the small group of people having lots of money and not yet redistributing it or redistributing it. I'm not so much confident that we will have a full egalitarian society with AI being here, but I do believe that it will create a lot of opportunities for people.
I do wish in the U.S,. at least, there were more of a social safety net to help people do that, and yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's what I'll say.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Yeah. No, fair enough.
Betsy Summers:
There are a lot of haters right now with AI and that it won't return as much value as being forecasted and that could be true, but I also think that incremental improvement is good as well as we look at declining birth rates is one thing where we're going to have to get ready for fewer workers in the future and AI could help fill some of that gap.
I do think that we will continue to see more organizations, any of those organizations that had preemptively fired or laid off folks because they were going to be replaced by AI, most of those people will be rehired.
But we will start to see a knowledge work offshoring, just like we did with manufacturing work offshoring, that because remote work is more possible we will start to see knowledge workers being hired in countries where it's cheaper to hire them, cheaper labor. And so we might see kind of white-collar offshoring occur within the next five years. So that will definitely spice up our labor market. But yeah, that's what I'd say there.
it's hard to make me pessimistic about what people can be capable of because I mean, we all in coaching... at least something that I've learned from coaching training is you gain awareness of something, you then have to accept that it's true, which is sometimes an experience, and then you make a conscious choice about it.
Individuals, we can always make a choice. It can sometimes be a difficult one and one that we don't necessarily see that one outcome is significantly better than the other, but we can make a choice. I'm hoping that we can still see the choices ahead through the fear of AI.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Thinking about the future of work, I'm curious how you think about the role that diverse thinking styles play in that future, right? Are there specific ways of thinking that will be more or less important or will change in the years to...
Betsy Summers:
On one hand, I believe all thinking styles are crucial and needed, especially just reflecting on my own experience at Herrmann and seeing the power of... and the kind of unlocking, the realizations when a team is able to see that, oh wow, they did have some blind spots or the reason why maybe we weren't getting along so well is because we just approach this problem differently or approach this question differently or we prioritize different questions, and seeing the team cohesion really improve after that self-awareness, that, we need more of that.
We need more kind of coming together with our differences in hand, not hiding the differences or trying to cover or trying to pretend that they're not there or keeping our reservations for ourselves, but environments where, bringing up psychological safety again, we are kind of safe to express because psychological safety, the highest levels of psychological safety are the most creative environments because people feel safe to raise their hand and challenge each other and we only get better.
it's kind of like that sharpening the ax. You have to have friction to get better.
I think in this moment there are two things that I want to see more of is more of the licit reckoning or discussions about the different ways that people think and then making sure, because we seem to be dominated by a lot of data-driven arguments right now, to make sure that we are giving enough real estate to the other quadrants as well.
A lot of the CIO conversations I have are basically, "Our board has told us that they want to see 20% efficiency gains or 20% productivity gains. I don't know how to do that or I don't know how to deliver that and I feel like they're missing a lot of information. They have this one data point or they've heard from their friends or they hear from the media or their peers that they're getting this data from somewhere, I don't know where they're getting it from, I need to build a business case to help them be more thoughtful about what they're doing or about the choice that they want us to make."
So I see more of this opportunity for making sure that we have more of that kind of whole-brain conversation around AI readiness and adoption and safety, helping people feel confident in it, helping them feel competent in it, but over-rotating towards data and logic is not the answer. it's bringing everything into the picture.
So I do wish and I hope that there will be more opportunity for people to talk about their differences and different ideas and different ways of thinking through things, and then also making sure that they are not over-rotating towards the data and the logic and the research, sometimes research rabbit holes of the just because we can doesn't mean we should.
Lots of stuff is cool, yes, but also what's the impact that it's going to have on our other stuff and how confident people feel and their vision of the future and how actually it will impact people and how they feel about it. So I do think it's a huge opportunity for more self-awareness and more collaboration with that kind of more explicit.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Mm-hmm. I think you know that we completely agree that the more awareness of our own thinking and the more awareness of the thinking of others and how to best harness that is valuable in any situation and any transformation, certainly now and in the future.
I guess that's kind of a nice segue because this has been hugely valuable, Betsy. Thank you. What I'm taking away from the conversation is that the future of work isn't just about technology, it's about whether we have the truly human traits, things like trust and wisdom and courage and the cognitive flexibility to build the work world that we actually want to live in rather than just accepting what technology makes possible, right?
So I think that's going to require all of us, leaders, people in HR and L&D, individual contributors, managers, team members to all be incredibly intentional and bring our whole brains to the challenge.
So thank you for inspiring that. Thank you for giving us both the data and the human perspective on what's ahead. For listeners who want to follow you, follow your work, where can they find you?
Betsy Summers:
I'm on LinkedIn. That's where I am. Of course, if you're a Forrester client, there’s lots of reports and things like that. But I blog a lot, and when I'm not overwhelmed by social media I'm on LinkedIn and sharing some hot takes and having conversations in the kind of HR learning and HR tech corner of LinkedIn.
But yeah, I'm happy to connect with anyone and have a conversation, and thank you for this.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
Thanks, Betsy.
Betsy Summers:
It was delightful to see you again.
Karim Morgan Nehdi:
So much fun. Of course. Thanks, Ann, and thanks to all of you for listening. If you found this valuable, share it with someone who's leading through this transformation that we're all going through together, and we're having these conversations every two weeks exploring how diversity of thought shapes the future of work.
I'm Karim Morgan Nehdi, and this is The Whole Brain at Work podcast. Thanks.