What skills do leaders actually need in the age of A.I.? With Vince Sanderson

Think about the people who have had the biggest impact on your mental health, your partner, maybe a therapist, a close friend.

Now, here's a question that should make you feel slightly uncomfortable.

What about your manager?

Research shows that your line manager has more impact on your wellbeing and your life satisfaction than your partner or your therapist, and that's not just impact on your career, that's impact on your life.

Our guest today is Vince Sanderson, management and leadership coach for 14 years.

He's the guy who's got 270,000 followers on TikTok and literally millions of likes, and his mission is to tell you the things your manager never got trained to say.

And that phrase, "The stuff managers very often don't get training on," is exactly the problem.

As AI accelerates, the World Economic Forum has mapped out the skills that will define the next five years, and many at the top of that list are distinctly human.

Things like empathy, active listening, resilience, influence, and those are the things that most managers have never been formally taught.

Today, Vince is gonna tell us what those skills actually look like in practice, not the buzzwords, the actual behaviors, and also why getting this right might be the most important business decision you make this decade.

Like I always say, if you do one thing, train your managers.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

My name is Leanne.

I'm a chartered occupational psychologist.

My name is Al.

I'm a business owner, and we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

Vince Sanderson is back.

This is his third appearance on the show, which officially makes him a close friend of the podcast.

He spent 14 years coaching managers and leaders across organizations of every size, and he has a very specific frustration.

Companies spend billions on technology and almost nothing on the people managing the humans trying to use it.

Today, we're using the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Data as a framework.

It maps out the skills that will matter most between now and 2030.

And what's striking is the top of the human skills list reads less like a training catalog and more like a description of a great therapist: empathy, active listening, resilience, the ability to influence without authority.

So after this quick break, Vince is gonna break every one of those skills down into actual behaviors, i.e., what they look like on a Monday morning, not in some kind of contrived workshop, and he'll tell us which single skill he'd bet everything on as a multiplier for the rest.