Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Stewart, along with my brother, Peter Stewart. And today we have an amazing guest. All of you who are wondering about how to lead in the age of AI, you have come to the right place, frankly. So please, let's welcome here, Gena Hoxha, to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. Gena, welcome. Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure to be here. Wonderful. So as we dive into this topic of leading in the age of AI and what's that relationship, let me briefly share a brief bio for Gena. So Gena Hoxha is the Chief People Officer and AI Officer at Ignitium. And we'll talk about this, Chief People Officer and Chief AI Officer at the same time. This is fantastic. Originally from Albania and now based in San Francisco, Gena holds a PhD in leadership studies and has developed leadership and AI development programs, AI governance frameworks, and executive bootcamps, all rooted in one mission, to help leaders lead AI with foresight, not fear, and to make AI transformation human first, not tool first. And I love that language, putting humans first instead of tools. Sometimes we get sucked in to the tool-based notion. So Gena, as we start off, talk to us in terms of even the title that you have. To be able to... the Chief People Officer, as well as this Chief AI Officer, suggests already this connection between the two. Tell us that connection as we start off here. Absolutely. It's funny you say that because I very recently posted on LinkedIn about my new title, which is Chief People and AI Officer. And it went kind of like mini-viral, and there are two very distinct groups of people in my comments. There were people who thought this is the future. And it was people and AI. It makes sense. If you're in AI operations, your goal is to create the conditions for people to work well together with, now we have machines, work well with machines. And then I had another camp of people who thought that people and AI should be living in completely opposite corners. And I'll tell you about how I evolved into this role, because it's not mainstream. It's not very common. I went into Ignitium doing organizational development. And because we're kind of a startup and scaling growth, growth scale up, then I moved... you wear a lot of hats, right? And I moved into people strategy and people operations. And about a year and a half ago, our executive team, we bought a bunch of AI tools. But they were just kind of sitting there collecting dust. No one was using them. And that's quite an investment. This is what we see a lot of companies do today, right? They buy a bunch of tools because they think this is a new tech. So I'm going to treat this as another tech upgrade. I'm going to buy the tools. And I find that no one is actually using them. And even though it's not in my purview, one of the things that I'm allergic to is problems in my organization, and they do not have to be in my orbit. I just do not want to see issues or problems in my organization. And I approached my CEO and I said, what if I approached this as I would any other organizational change, right? As a scale up, we're constantly going through a lot of change. I mean, every six months, our company looks differently. And we handle that in a completely different way than we do just a tech upgrade. And I said, I asked her three months, I can do this as a pilot. And if it doesn't work, we really have nothing to lose. So that's how I approached it as I would approach any big cultural organizational shift. And I said, we need to create a strategy for the entire company that has a big why. And it's also in needs because this is new. And I'm a very evidence based person. I will... I don't know about you two, but I will always go like Google Scholar. I will always go and see, like, what have other people done? What are the best practices? And at the time, nothing existed. There was no data. It was so new. So what I had to rely on was these like anchors for myself and for my people, right? Our company values. Those aren't going anywhere. Those aren't changing. Our identity as a company, just because there's a new technology out there, we're not changing that. My own identity as a leader, right, I have always been very people first, very human first. And I think that makes sense for me as a leader. But it also makes sense for any company's bottom line. I mean, there's there's so much data, so many studies out there. So I was very clear with my team. We approached it. We framed it based on these kind of anchors. So people knew why we were even adopting AI. And the first sentence, I was looking through my slides when I presented it. And the first sentence on there is we are not adopting AI for the sake of adopting AI and checking it off the list. And we're adopting it to make our people's lives easier and better. And this is one of the things that we now see a lot. And I do being in the tech industry, being in San Francisco is millions of dollars are being spent on AI tools. But we're not considering the biggest factor, which is the people. How do the people feel about it? Do they trust it? Do they understand it? Do they see themselves in this future that you're creating? Do they see themselves that they're like co-creating, they're building this with you? And for us, that has been really, really successful. I see it as like my own operating principle. I'm sure you two, like, you two will resonate with this, but the leadership has always been at least to me being a steward of your people. Right? And just because there's a new technology out there and it's amazing, it's fantastic. It can do so many things. That... that hasn't changed the fact that that's what we are, right? We are still stewards of our people. So it's... like I this is my foundational belief. And it also helps that it helps with AI implementation. And will also... eventually you'll see it on your ROI and on your bottom line. Gena, this is fascinating as you're sharing your... the evolution of your title. It then launched into very much what we could even dig deeper into here if we'd like to a very much a case study on successful OD efforts and adoptions and how you can substitute the technology or whatever that change that's trying to be implemented for some of these core foundational principles. And you highlighted them so well of establishing what are those anchors? You know, what are those principles that we're holding to tightly that these are the unchangeable and then helping very clearly early on to disseminate the why. Not just the why for the organization, but the why for each individual. So when you look at it that way, that's why leadership is such a natural bridge for adoption into these. Oh, absolutely. When we... Peter, you're... remind me, you're in psychology, right? Correct. Human mind, human brain, right? So you're seeing it from that perspective, too, which to me is fascinating. And it's people don't resist it because it's technical or because it's difficult. Right. They're resisting the ambiguity it creates. They're resisting it because it threatens this sense of reality that we have about who we are as employees, how we feel about our work, about our status. How we show up at work. It's... it's so much more nuanced than just “I'm using this new tool.” And this identity component that you're referencing is so key. And it's so important as as a leader to be able to understand who you are and how you want to show up, how you lead others, how you role model what you say can then set a sense of priority for others as well. And so with your studies, as well as with your experience now, what are comments around this identity as a leader as they look at AI? Because AI seemingly has this extra, this almost extraterrestrial out of this world that's going to come in like, you know, like take a bit of our soul out of us or something like this. And, you know, part of it is due to the unknown and fear and possibility. All of this stuff. How do we view, what's the framework through which we view our own identities as leaders, how we respond, how we think of ourselves as we think of AI today and in the future? I love that because it is truly fundamentally redesigning what leadership looks like, because it's it's redefining how we create value, how we create value as a company, how we create value as a team. And also how you create value as a leader. I think... I really think that the future is not going to look good for any leader who has a big ego, who has a fragile ego and who thrives on command and control. I don't think that's any of your listeners because they know better by now. But the future is not looking good for those people. Because to me in the past being, you know, a student of leadership and a practitioner of leadership, in the past, we've seen that being a leader meant you had all the answers. And that's what your leadership was grounded on, is guiding your team through answers, through information that other people did not have access to, but you did. And now that's completely changing because information is everywhere and it's it's accessible at a pace that wasn't possible before. And it's also accessible at a pace that we can't really process with our human brain. So I see us shifting to being sense makers, to being people who are now interpreting, they're providing context, they're providing purpose for our teams. I've been saying this recently and it's AI might know more than you, but it doesn't know better than you. So that is where now your value is as a leader. It's not necessarily you're going to know more because your entire team has access to that same information. But you understand the context of your business. You have this big picture. You have, you know, your pulse on the market, what it looks like. And you're able to take this information and make sense to it to your team. I also have another prediction, which I know in like five years we're going to come back and listen to this episode and I could be completely right, be like, “Daniel Stewart, I was right.” Or I could be completely wrong. But I really think that AI is going to democratize leadership. When we think about it, we now have... we're removing barriers to access of information. Now everyone can access it at their fingertips. We are automating any like administration drag, any manual drag. And we are now giving people tools where they can test ideas. They can learn how to present them, how to pitch them with the right narrative, how to model them to the right audience, how to model different outcomes, right? So you're really unlocking leadership capabilities for people that are not just like holding the titles. I... I was reading this article on LinkedIn and it talked about how we might be moving from like a pyramid shape to a diamond shape. And for anyone who's been a student of leadership and knows that like in theory, leadership is a distributed practice, right? It's something that you don't need a title to lead. You don't need tenure. You don't need technical expertise. And I think that our dreams are going to come true. I really think that leadership is going to become a distributed practice. It's something that we are going to come to expect and empower in every role, in every team, in every function. So in addition to being sense makers, our role now is raising a big new generation of leaders, like cultivating leadership in others. How do we teach them to design cultures and systems and expectations where leadership is completely normalized and it's supported and it's rewarded at every single level? Yeah, as you're elaborating on that and so many points as you look at the distribution, you know, just that distributive nature of ideal leadership and how everybody can find their role. They can find their voice. They can share that. And how AI may really be a mechanism to help bring that to pass. And I think as we reflect on, well, what does that mean for the role of the leader moving forward? And we touched on a couple of points and, you know, egos aren't going to be as welcome as far as the ego blockers and those who hoard information. And I'm the leader because I know everything. OK, AI is, you know, making that much more of an even playing field. What would you say are additional blind spots that AI may be manifesting more for leaders or lessons that leaders can do to be to be more prepared, be ready to lead in this era of AI? I kind of see AI as both a mirror and a magnifying glass. So if you are looking at yourself as a leader and your business in the mirror and you don't like what you see, if you see that your data is all disorganized, you don't have a good data culture. If you see that your leadership team is constantly fighting and backstabbing each other, if you see that your processes and your workflows are full of bottlenecks, your people aren't communicating well, your culture leaves a lot to be desired. And you're seeing all this in the mirror. AI is not going to fix any of that for you. You have to do kind of this like almost like foundational. And sometimes in this day and age, it feels like it's boring work, right? Because as Daniel said, you have this like fantastical technology that you think is going to fix all of it. But it's not. It is also going to magnify all of those problems, it'll magnify all of those cracks. Like even if you've slapped on AI on your processes, your team is still not going to communicate with each other. Your leadership is going to be completely scattered. Your culture is still going to be the same as it is today. So the biggest blind spot is seeing AI as this like a magic pill that's going to fix everything. And then there's this fallacy that AI is what is going to transform our organizations. And as someone in the trenches of AI implementation, I'm here to tell you that AI is not going to transform anything. You as a leader, you are going to be the transformation catalyst. It doesn't do anything on its own. But there's some other blind spots too. One of the more interesting ones is we are starting to over index on data and analytics now because it's so accessible. I mean, you can just do a quick search on Perplexity and you have all of this information, all of these journals and studies, right? But what happens there is that you start to lose sight of the human experience and the context behind the data that has so much richness to it. So that would be kind of a cautionary tale for leaders is take the data and take the analytics. But also you need to be the one who's providing the context and the human experience. You have to be the one who goes and talks to that employee in person or you're the one who has to go and check on that team, kind of see for yourself how the work is getting done. And since we're talking about cautionary tales, I would say please don't delegate without discernment. AI speaks so confidently and our human brain sometimes can interpret that as this is correct information because you're saying it to me in such a concise and such a confident way. But I caution leaders against outsourcing your thinking, especially your strategic thinking to AI. It can certainly be your partner and it can help you get there, but you still need to be in the driver's seat. One of the analogies that I make to my team about how they should be using AI is treating it as an intern. And it's you would never copy and paste something that your intern gives you, right? No, you would give them the task, you would take that output, you would review it, you would add your own thoughts to it, you would give it feedback. So if you see it as an intern, it is going to completely change how you interact with it. Of course, it's a really smart intern, doesn't need to sleep, stays on for 24-7, but it's still an intern. I love it. And so let's build on this because there's been another way of kind of conceptualizing AI as thinking of it as a new member of your team. Now, admittedly, that might create kind of a monolithic view of AI and you might have lots of AIs for various reasons, but it's almost like picturing some family dinner moment, some Thanksgiving moment, you know, something. And there's an empty chair and the place setting says “AI” or “AIs”, you know, and they're all to sit together and they are represented by that robot or that entity. And you're now part of the team. Talk to us in terms of how do you react to that kind of metaphorical thinking? What's the benefit? What's the challenge? Because so many leaders are trying to conceptualize, how do I even involve this, whether it's Copilot or Perplexity, you know, Gemini, whatever the AI is right now that they're using, how do they involve it? Do they equate it as a member of the team? In what way? What does it look like? I currently am not equating it as a member of our team, but I think it will get there because when you equate something as a member of your team, members of your team understand the context in which you work. You have a shared experience, you have camaraderie. You trust what you're, for the most part, right, you trust what your colleagues are saying to you. And to me, taking those human traits and putting them on a machine that doesn't understand any of that can be really risky and can be dangerous as well. For me, I currently treat it as a tool and I tell my team that it is a tool and it is a tool that is only taking the most frustrating parts of our job away. There's something about, I've been reading a lot about the soul of work. Like I am very enamored with work. I love the work that I get to do. I'm constantly reading about leadership. I don't see it as like a punch in, punch out. It's a calling. And I feel the same way. I work in San Francisco. People here love work, right? They're constantly talking about building their businesses and scaling their businesses. There's something about the soul of work, that purpose, that like spark that makes you get up in the morning. And I think it's important to keep that because work is not just about getting stuff done fast.-Mm hmm. And I think we must not lose sight of that. Work is also about having like a wonderful conversation with your colleague. It's being vulnerable with your team where you maybe show your emotion with your team and you kind of level set with them. It's these like organic conversations that spark these like great innovative ideas that you end up then selling to your clients. It's communicating with clients in a way that they know that you care about them. All of these, none of these things have stopped being important. So to me, I now see AI as a tool. You know, Daniel, Peter, in a year, I might be back and I'll be like,“forget everything that I said last year.”“It's now a team member because now it has emotional intelligence.” I'm kidding. It could be. I mean, the thing is, as we've highlighted several times over this conversation and other conversations we've had on AI is that the playbook is fresh. I mean, the ink hasn't even dried. There's still a lot of blank pages as we're trying to figure this whole thing out and navigate it. And it really is. We're trying to do the best we can as leaders and organizations with this new technology that has such power and capability. I must say, I'm still stuck, Daniel, on that dinner analogy and that open seat. And I think and this is where the psychology mind, I'm like, what a powerful exercise to have that. And have people draw what that entity looks like and what emotion is it, like, and how they're projecting their opinion on what AI is going to do. Are they, “oh, great collaborator!” Or is this the, you know, the beacon of death for their role or who knows what it might be? There's a whole range of things. But that might be an interesting little thought exercise people can do of, yeah, how would you, you know, draw or how would you create that entity? And what does that mean to you in terms of your opinions on what AI is doing? Yeah. Think of your like your rituals, right? As a company, for instance, for like Halloween, we have like “spirits week.” Like each week we get to dress up. We have our Christmas party. We have awards and we give out for values. How would... how would AI as a teammate participate in any of these in a meaningful way?-Yeah.-Right.-I don't think AI really would be able to share that. But you're reminding us we're having that conversation about how AI can be used as a tool. But then you throw out all these characteristics of really good, powerful leadership attributes and team attributes of understanding the context of valuing those human relationships. Of doing all those things. So how can leaders continue to remind themselves of some of those core foundational human interaction skills, a time when everybody's just talking about what the latest technology can bring? You know, it's it can feel like some dissonance, but you can use AI to get better at those skills. You can use it to amplify your leadership skills. And there's many ways to do that. Some of the ways that I like to I like to use it as my strategic thought partner. I'm... I feel like efficiency is not a universally compelling reason for using AI. If you could see my desk, I still have like a bunch of like notebooks and pen and paper. I'm very much like I love like analog tools. I love AI too. AI is fantastic. But I feel like any time I shave, any time of my day, of my tasks, I still end up filling that time with something else, right? So to me, the best way to use it is how do I get better at the things that I want to be best at? How can I be a better leader? How can I be a better teammate? How can I use it to learn these human skills in a way that is easier? And it's highly personalized to me. For instance, I don't do well with like listening to books or listening to podcasts. Again, I need to be like a pen and paper person. So I love that you now at your fingertips, you have highly personalized learning experiences. I can take those transcripts. I can take a PDF and I can put it into a tool and I can say, hey, can you can you take this transcript? Can you tell me... can you listen to this podcast? Can you watch this video and then tell me what the transcript is? It's highly personalized. So you— it's at your fingertips. I love to use it as my strategic thought partner. Again,it's an intern that has access to all of the information, I'm still in the driver's seat. I'm still in charge. But I love to think out loud to kind of loop back to refine my messaging to I have a lot of ideas and not all of them are great. So this is a great way to stress test them in real time before I bring them back to the team. I use it to like sharpen my vision, to get to the right language, to the right audience. Like how would someone in finance interpret this over someone in marketing? In my role I do a lot of change management, a lot of influencing. So I use it to kind of help me understand what my blind spots are, because I don't know what I don't know, right? And I think there's great ways to use it to even amplify your empathy. I have had it if employees are having conflicts or they're only seeing their perspective and not other people's perspective. I'll have it right, like a very creative visual story from the other perspective and have an employer read it. And it completely changes their mind. It opens up ideas to, oh, it's not just my perspective because I'm reading this beautifully written, coherent, confidently sounding perspective from, quote unquote, another person. So it's a tool and it depends on how you want to use it as a leader. We, you know, we cannot ignore that there's a lot of companies that are using it as a reason to lay off a lot of their staff only to bring them back because they realize AI is not going to work on its own. Or you can be a wise, discerning leader and you can use it as your co-pilot for better judgment, to have deeper perspectives and to get more meaningful work without losing the soul of work that we talked about. It's such a practical viewpoint. So let's go to the next step. Let's insert a frequent, a realistic kind of scenario. So imagine that a CEO or president of a company goes to a workshop or talks to another CEO or reads an article in the Wall Street Journal or, you know, about AI and how it can make his company or her company better, faster, cheaper. And the CEO then comes into their executive team and says,“I don't know exactly what we need to do, but I know we need to do something.” And I want—-“We need to do AI!”-Yeah, “we need to do AI.” And each of you figure that out. And I'm sure we can cut, you know, at least 10 percent in terms of expenses and get more on time delivery and improve the— Just figure it out. Go do it. And so how do you how do you react to that, Gena? Because in some ways, OK, that's a perspective. That's a starting point where you don't have anything else. And yet the expectations from that president or CEO can be so sky high. And it's hard to then level set in the process. But yet there are definite things AI can be used for. How do you address that pressure from a leader who is who has been given that directive? I do not blame any leader who has been seduced or bamboozled by many fear mongering headlines. There are so many billboards here in San Francisco about 10X-ing your team, 10X-ing your revenue. That's one thing that you forgot in your story, Daniel, 10X-ing.-The 10X-ing everything.-It's the multiplier.-Yes. For quite some time here, there were some billboards that literally said in giant blocks of font, ”stop hiring humans.” And truly, and all I could do is just is shake my head. So I do not blame leaders. It's very seductive to fall into this like hype. And as I said, I'm a very low hype person. I get very excited. I'm very entrepreneurial. I love getting creative with AI, but I do not get carried away by the hype. So if if you're familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle, it's this cycle that all new technologies, AI is not special. All new technologies go through this cycle. And if you kind of see where AI is in the cycle, it's very much at the very top of hype and it's being overhyped. I told you I go on Google Scholar and I'm like, can you tell me case studies where AI has 10X-ed anything? And it's one, not very many. Two, it's incredibly narrow pieces of a task, of a process that was highly manual, that simply needed super organized documentation that already existed. At the very best, we are seeing 0.5, we're... nobody is seeing 10X, but it is seductive to fall into into this idea. And it creates these really inflated expectations. So when you're thinking about evaluating AI, it's not about just whether your model works or not. For me right now, it's do the intended users, the domain experts for whom this tool was built, are they using it? Are they communicating feedback back to the data team? And do they trust it? To me, that's what it is. You're not going to go and build a perfect model immediately. There's no playbook for doing that. Your business context is going to change. But that is really the crux of it is, are the intended users using it? Are they engaging with it? Do they trust it? And are they taking that feedback back to your data team? And the data team is putting it back in that loop. To me, that is really the most important thing. It's just like we need to do AI, we need to adopt AI. It's really funny to me, because I see a lot of leaders just want to check that box and say, okay, we've adopted AI. We have deployed all the AI tools without addressing these like deeper cultural and organizational readiness that is needed to sustain them. But we have the tools because we need to slap AI first on our website, on our product, on our services. And to me, it's like, if you install this like a brand new, perfect, like, engine, but you didn't teach anyone how to drive, right? No one's driving that Porsche because they do not know how to drive it. So that is a very good kind of metaphor for me. It's you, do you want to have a shiny engine? Okay, you can have a shiny engine, and you can look at it. Or do you want your people to be driving? To be driving forward your goals. To be driving forward the mission, the vision that you have, your revenue. That is really the most important thing. And kind of going back to what Peter was saying, is have these grounding anchors, too. Don't lose yourself. Don't lose who you are, both as a leader and as a company in this like pursuit of scale with AI. I like scaling as much as the next executive. Okay, don't get me wrong. But to me, what really moves me is to create a great company at every single stage of that growth. That is the most important thing. It's not getting there, but it's like, how do you get there with your people?-Yeah.-You're gonna have so much more fun doing that anyway. I love it. So here's the final question for you, Gena. And so as you think of all that we've talked about, what's the one thing that leaders need to keep in mind as they interact and embrace and manage through AI? Just one? Just one.(laughing) Yeah, this is so hard. If it would be just one is, don't forget that you are first and foremost a steward of your people. Kind of going back to how we started and everything that you do, whether it's adopt a new technology, you implement AI, you implement the next wave of technology that is inevitably going to come to market is do not forget about your people. And also tell your people that. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of ambiguity out there. And we... like our brains, Peter, you know, this, obviously, our brains, they just, they're so amazing at coming up with the worst case scenarios. We are so creative at doing that. And that's what our employees are doing. If you're not leading with clarity, they're thinking, I'm going to lose my job tomorrow. My job is, it's going to completely change. It's not the work, how we show up. It's completely going to be different. And it's your job as a leader to fill these gaps for your employees, to provide that clarity, to be honest, even if it is, I do not have all the answers, but this is how we're going to approach the problems. Here is how we're going to approach the answers. So be a steward of your people.-Yeah, well said. Gena, thank you so much for joining us today on the Leadership Growth Podcast.-Thank you to both of you. This was really fun. What a great conversation.-Great conversation. And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us as well. Please listen and take in some of these tools and ideas will help you as you strengthen and build your ability to lead others. Please like and subscribe in the future. And we look forward to having you at a future episode. Take care, everyone. All the best. 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