Last week I wrote about the lasting impression Oprah made on 25,000 SHRM attendees, reminding us that we are all custodians of culture. The day before, Simon Sinek took the stage and in his own way, made the same argument. The conversation opened with artificial intelligence. It ended, as he put it, exactly where it should have. On people.
I went in expecting a lively riff on technology. I came out with a reaffirming belief that leadership will always be about humanity and compassion. While leaders are being supported by AI, at the end of the day, leaders will be valued for the trust they build, the decisions they take and judgement calls they make. Simon framed it this way:
1. In an AI world, before you redesign the work, name the feeling.
SHRM 2026 was largely fixated with one question. How do we redesign roles, workflows, and teams around AI? Sinek stopped and pointed to a step that comes before all of that.
Listen to how we talk about this technology, he said. The words are “anxiety”, “excitement”, “FOMO”, and “overwhelmed”. Every one of them is an emotion. He challenged leaders to channel those very emotions when team members walk in genuinely frightened, asking whether they are about to lose their job. He claimed that leaders often freeze up in these moments because they were never taught how to have those emotion laden conversations.
Simon’s point landed hard as explained that the scarcest skill in the age of AI is not technical. It is human. The ability to sit inside a difficult conversation, to make someone feel safe and cared for, to stay in the room when there are no clean answers. And this is just as true at the top as it is on the front line. The anxiety runs all the way up.
So the question I have started asking myself as I work with leaders is not only what we should do with the technology. It is a deeper one. Have we actually asked people how they are feeling about it, and then prepared ourselves to stay in that conversation without rushing to fix it?
2. Make sure toxic positivity isn’t masquerading as confidence.
Sinek was blunt about the layoff headlines. A company cuts thousands of roles and announces that AI can now do the work. A lot of the time, he said, that story is simply not true. Many companies have overhired, and no executive wants to stand in front of Wall Street and say that. For many, AI has become the go-to cover-up story. He joked that leaders have somehow managed to make a genuinely useful tool less popular than almost anything in the news, and that this is entirely their own doing. He believes that much of our fear has been manufactured hype.
Trust erodes here as people can always tell when they are being handled. Leaders say, “Everything is fine, we’ve got this”. This spin raises anxiety rather than lowering it. But, he cautioned, that swinging the other way and admitting you have no idea how any of this will go is not leadership either. What people are actually looking for is confidence. Not a promise that you have all the answers, but the felt sense that you have their back, that together you’ll come up with new ways to look at the technology and its impact on the organization.
What I took away from this is that transparency does not mean telling everyone everything. It means giving people context. Being up front and saying honestly, this is new, we are experimenting. Some of it will work and some of it will not. Be open and admit that. People will thank you for it. Follow it up by assuring people thatdecisions will be made with their wellbeing in mind. To build more long-lasting trust he suggested faster bringing in the people who will actually use the tools, the ones on the front line, and ask them. They hold information executives never will.
Always have in mind that the only thing running through the mind of every person in the room is the same question: How does this affect me? Answer that first and you lay the foundation for supportive culture.
3. The way you lead ripples past the office door.
Simon’s last story highlighted how a strong culture can make for a more high-performing culture. He told the story of a young barista he met named Noah. He was staying at a Four Seasons, got a coffee, and asked the kid behind the bar if he liked his job. Noah did not say he liked it. He said he loved it. Pressed on why, he explained that managers would walk past all day and ask how he was doing, whether there was anything they could do to make his job better. Not only his own manager. Any manager. Then he mentioned that he worked a second job at another hotel, where the managers only patrolled for mistakes and pushed the numbers. There, he said, he kept his head down and waited for the shift to end. Same young man. Two completely different employees. Only at the Four Seasons, he said, did he feel he could be himself.
The difference was not Noah. It was the leadership environment he was standing in.
Sinek tied this to something I believe deeply. We are the same person at work and at home. The person your family loves and the person your colleagues rely on is one human being, and if you are acting like two different people, something is off. How often do we hear about people who carry their troubles home from work. The feeling you create at work does not stay at work. A person who feels safe and valued goes home lighter. They are a better partner, a better parent, a kinder neighbour, and the ripple keeps going. The reverse is just as true. Fear at work gets carried home and spent on the people who least deserve it.
As you walk out into the hallways and Zoom rooms of your organization, focus on the skills that will create joy and safety: empathy, listening, honest conversation, and giving and taking feedback without flinching. As Simon put it, “A cat does not have to work to be a cat. Being a good human takes real work.” When we work on those skills, empathetic learning becomes boundless. The companies that invest in teaching it, he said, outperform the ones that do not, every single time.
The question I left with
Two very different speakers, on the same stage, arrived at nearly the same place. Oprah said people will never forget how you made them feel. Sinek showed that the feeling does not end at the office door. It follows people home and out into their lives.
The technology will keep updating every few weeks. The big problem for leaders now is that the human skills needed to right now are not keeping pace with technology.
Ask yourself: When people finish their workday, do they walk away feeling more like themselves, or less? Noah could name the difference in a single sentence. Your team should be able to do that too.