Summary: What happens to leadership when artificial intelligence can analyze faster, process more information, and produce answers in seconds? Perhaps the answer is surprisingly simple: We have to become more human, not less. Microsoft’s CEO has something to teach us about empathy, self-awareness, and human leadership in the age of AI.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, has spent years talking about something that sounds almost out of place in the hard-driving world of technology: empathy.
He has described empathy not as a soft skill, but as one of the hardest skills human beings can learn. I think he’s pointing toward something even bigger, because as AI becomes extraordinarily good at knowing, the competitive advantage for leaders may no longer be knowing more.
‘Noticing’ is a Skill We Need Now More Than Ever
The ability to notice what is energetically happening in the room, what isn’t being said, and when trust begins to disappear is uniquely human. More importantly, noticing what is happening inside yourself before an automatic reaction becomes a regrettable decision is key.
That is where Satya Nadella’s approach to leadership intersects with something I have studied for decades: Pattern Awareness.
From Know-It-All to Learn-It-All
When Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited one of the world’s most successful technology companies. But success has a shadow side; people protect territory, departments compete, experts become attached to being right, and leaders defend old ways of thinking instead of being curious about future possibilities.
Nadella understood that Microsoft needed more than a new strategy. It needed a different culture. I consulted at Microsoft before Nadella was there, and the culture was very different. I was amazed at how he has been able to make change happen with one of his best-known ideas: to move Microsoft from a culture of know-it-alls to learn-it-alls.
There is an important leadership lesson hidden inside those two phrases. Know-it-alls must defend what they already know. Learn-it-alls have enough confidence and humility to remain curious about what they don’t know. Curiosity becomes very difficult when we feel threatened, and that’s when our patterns show up(opens in new tab).
The Patterns We Bring to Work
Someone questions a decision you made in the workplace, and suddenly your inner Super-Achiever needs to prove that you’re right. A colleague criticizes your proposal, and the Persecutor/Bully inside prepares for an office-wide battle. Then an Avoider quietly whispers, “Let’s deal with this next week,” while the Pleaser says ‘yes’ while every cell in their body is screaming NO.
These patterns don’t suddenly appear when we become managers. Most were learned much earlier. Our first organization, after all, was the family. That was where we first learned about authority, conflict, competition, approval, belonging, silence, loyalty, and power. And those early patterns don’t politely stay home when we leave for work; we bring them with us, especially under stress.
This is why telling someone to “communicate better,” “be more collaborative,” or “show more empathy” often produces only temporary change. Behavior is what we see. The pattern is what drives it.
Empathy Begins Before We Look at Someone Else
Nadella’s understanding of empathy became deeply personal when his son, Zain, was born with cerebral palsy and quadriplegia. Nadella has spoken about how that experience changed him. He learned to shift his attention away from how difficult circumstances were for him and toward understanding his son’s experience. That lesson eventually influenced the way he thought about leadership, customers, innovation, and human connection.
But here’s where I would take the conversation about empathy one step further. We usually think empathy begins with the other person: What is she feeling? Why is he reacting that way? What does my team need from me?
Those are important questions, but there is another question that needs to come first: What is happening inside me right now? Because if we can’t recognize our own reactions, an old pattern may hijack our ability to understand others. That is Pattern Awareness, and it may be one of the most important leadership capabilities we can develop in the age of AI.
AI Finds Patterns in Data, Can You Find the Patterns in Yourself?
AI can process enormous amounts of information and identify patterns in data much faster than humans. It can summarize reports, compare scenarios, uncover risks, generate strategies, and help leaders make increasingly complex decisions. And it will only get better.
So perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we ask, “What can AI do better than humans?” The more important leadership question is, “What must humans become better at because of AI?” My answer is awareness.
Awareness is the ability to sense that something isn’t right even when the numbers look fine, the curiosity to ask one more question, the courage to question your assumptions, and the emotional intelligence to hear what someone isn’t saying. It is also the self-awareness to recognize when we’re being triggered before blindly reacting to it.
AI can identify patterns in data; great leaders learn to identify patterns in themselves.
From TRIGGER to GLIMMER: Where Leadership Actually Changes
Most experienced leaders already know what good leadership is supposed to look like:
- Listen
- Communicate
- Collaborate
- Delegate
- Build trust
- Show empathy
Then somebody challenges them in a meeting, and twenty years of leadership training can disappear in twenty seconds. Why? Because strategy is logical, and stress is biological. Under pressure, we return to what is familiar. The real work of self-aware leadership is learning to interrupt that automatic response.
I describe that journey in five steps: TRIGGER → PATTERN → PAUSE → UGLY MIDDLE → CHOICE
TRIGGER: Something happens that creates an immediate emotional or physical reaction.
PATTERN: Your familiar response appears. You may control, attack, avoid, please, blame, rescue, prove yourself, or shut down. Check the thirteen patterns to find the one that belongs to you (and yes, there may be more than one).
PAUSE: Instead of immediately reacting, you create enough space to notice what is happening.
And then comes the part most leadership models conveniently skip.
UGLY MIDDLE: This is where change gets uncomfortable. You recognize the old pattern, but the new response doesn’t feel natural yet. Part of you wants to do what you’ve always done: attack, withdraw, fix it, prove you’re right, or keep everyone happy. The other part of you knows that repeating the old behavior will probably create the same old result. Welcome to the Ugly Middle. It is awkward and uncertain, but it is where real transformation happens. Because if you can stay in that discomfort long enough, something becomes possible that wasn’t available when the pattern was running the show.
CHOICE: You can repeat the familiar response, or you can choose something different, and that different choice activates the GLIMMER.
What Exactly is a GLIMMER?
First, what it is not: A GLIMMER isn’t positive thinking, nor a pleasant little moment. And it isn’t pretending everything is fine. A GLIMMER is the signal that you have interrupted an outdated pattern and opened the door to a different possibility. The disagreement may still exist; pressure may still be there. You may still feel uncomfortable, but something fundamental has changed.
You are now in charge. That is the GLIMMERS Effect™.(opens in new tab) One GLIMMER may seem small, but repeated choices create new behaviors, and new behaviors change relationships. Relationships change teams. Teams change cultures. That is how leadership transformation actually happens.
The Leadership Advantage AI Can’t Give You
Nadella has described effective leaders as people who can create clarity when there is confusion, generate energy, and create success even when circumstances are constrained. I would place one capability underneath all three: self-awareness.
Clarity is difficult when our own patterns distort what we see. Energy disappears when people don’t feel heard. Trust deteriorates when leaders repeatedly react rather than respond. And innovation suffers when being right becomes more important than being curious. This is why Nadella’s emphasis on empathy feels so relevant right now.
We are entering a world in which machines will become extraordinarily good at knowing. Our opportunity is to become extraordinarily good at noticing: noticing ourselves, noticing each other, and noticing how we interact. Notice the old pattern getting ready to take over, have the courage to enter the Ugly Middle rather than escaping it, and then make a different choice.
Choice Activates The GLIMMER
Perhaps the leadership question of the AI era isn’t how smart technology can become, but how self-aware can we become while using it? Satya Nadella’s leadership offers an important reminder: technology will keep changing, AI will keep learning, and the workplace will keep evolving, but the most difficult (and most valuable) leadership work happens in those few seconds between being triggered and deciding what to do next.
AI recognizes the patterns in our data. Great leaders recognize the patterns in themselves. And when they make a different choice, that’s when the GLIMMER begins.
To your success,
Sylvia Lafair
P.S. Learn to recognize the hidden patterns shaping your behavior under pressure with a 1:1 complimentary strategy session — get in touch with our team of executive leadership coaches here.(opens in new tab)
