Research from McKinsey shows that demand for social and emotional skills will grow by 26% by 2030. As AI transforms our workplace, the most important career development shift of our time is the need for today’s workforce to rapidly build the Self-Leadership skills that technology cannot replace. The big question every employee should be asking is:
How can I prepare myself to succeed in a work environment that is being disrupted by AI?
The answer lies in strengthening our unique human skills that enable us to bring our best selves to our most important, complex and relational situations. These key skills include self-awareness, emotional competence, empathy, social intelligence, influence, adaptability, agility and relationship-building. Self-Leadership is the key.
In the book, Getting It Right When It Matters Most (Gambill & Carbonara, 2021), we introduce the SOAR Self-Leadership Model. This model takes the fewest, most important knowledge and skills from each of these important concepts and places them in a practical, replicable and research-backed roadmap for effectively navigating your most difficult situations.
The four phases of the model are Self, Outlook, Action and Reflection (SOAR).
Why Self-Leadership Is Essential in the Age of AI
Despite an emerging agreement about the importance of developing Self-Leadership for success within a world of work being transformed by AI, these skill sets remain underdeveloped and under-supported in our educational systems and organizations. Organizations and educational institutions continue to struggle developing Self-Leadership skills for the following reasons.
- Too Much Content, Too Little Clarity – The volume of literature on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, social intelligence, and agility is overwhelming and much of it overlaps.
- Difficult to Measure – These capabilities are hard to quantify, making them less likely to be prioritized.
- Requires Vulnerability and Time – Emotional and social skills like self-reflection and feedback take time to develop and depend on psychological safety making them harder to build than technical skills.
So how do we develop these critical human skills in a way that is both practical and sustainable? That’s where the SOAR Self-Leadership Model comes in. To simplify what can feel like an overwhelming development process this model provides a clear structure for assessing and developing the behaviors and mindsets that drive long-term career success in a complex and fast-changing world of work.
In the sections below, you will find a definition for each phase of the SOAR Self-Leadership Model, why it matters in the age of AI, and three essential skills for each phase.
1) SELF: Building Clarity and Resilience for an AI-Driven Workplace
Understanding the unique you that has evolved based on your one-of-a-kind combination of personality, physical traits, intelligence, habits, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses. The foundational skill sets for the Self phase are clarity of purpose, strengths, weaknesses and practices for maintaining self-care.
Why This Matters in the Age of AI
- Clarity in a Changing World – AI accelerates change; leaders need self-awareness to anchor decisions and values when everything else is shifting.
- Strategic Career Navigation – Knowing strengths and weaknesses allows you to double down where humans add unique value.
- Resilience During Uncertainty – AI disruption creates stress and ambiguity; addressing our self-care needs helps leaders sustain performance and avoid burnout.
Essential Skills for the Self Phase:
1. Clarify Your Purpose
When your daily actions align with your core values and long-term goals, you don’t just inspire others, you create lasting impact. Yet, too many people fail to define or refine their core purpose. And that’s a costly mistake. Because purpose-driven employees unlock the following game-changing benefits:
2. Understanding Our Place of Most Potential
We have all witnessed the magic that can occur when a capable person is in a role that aligns with their core purpose, strengths, and values. Progress towards meaningful work acts as a magnet for maximizing our effort, intellect, emotional and social intelligence.
Being strategic about navigating your career is not manipulative or inauthentic. Being deliberate about selecting the right environment and demonstrating the right behaviors is essential for achieving your professional aspirations. Research shows that employees who find meaning and purpose in their work are happier, healthier and more productive. Focusing on these three environmental and three behavioral factors can help you find your place of greatest potential for career success in a world being changed by AI.
3. Healthy Habits for Self-Care
We must first fill their cups before they can pour into others. When we neglect self-care, we compromise our ability to accurately perceive situations, build relationships, make informed decisions and manage stress effectively.
Here is the surprising truth: when managed well, stress can actually make you stronger and more resilient. In today’s fast-paced, uncertain world, leaders and employees alike face mounting pressures. Below are four practices for practicing self-care.
2) OUTLOOK: Emotional Competence for an AI World
Building awareness of how our biases and emotions impact how we view situations and the ability to regain balance before Action.
Why This Matters in the Age of AI
- Empathy Beyond Algorithms – Emotional competence ensures thoughtful, ethical responses that promote fairness, inclusion and responsible AI adoption.
- Pause Before Reacting – The ability to slow down, regain composure, and choose responses aligned with values rather than reacting out of fear or stress from rapid change.
- Trust & Psychological Safety – People who manage their emotions foster environments where people feel safe, engaged and more open to embracing AI-driven change.
Essential Skill Sets for the Outlook Phase:
1. Recognizing Perception Biases
When we engage in important, complex, and challenging situations, our emotions become triggered, and our perception biases become heightened. Understanding how perception biases impact our view of certain situations enables us to cultivate humility and curiosity, allowing us to ask questions, listen and update our perspectives as needed.
2. Learning To Pause Before Reacting
How we respond in our most challenging moments defines our success. The ability to PAUSE when triggered by difficult emotions helps us regain composure, think clearly and act in alignment with our values and long-term goals. The image below provides three tips for learning to pause when feeling triggered by challenging emotions.
3. Building Emotional Competence
We have all had moments we regret when stress, frustration or anger took control. In these challenging situations, our ability to think strategically, build trust and lead with empathy shuts down. Instead, our instincts tell us to fight, flee or freeze, which often lead to reactions we wish we could take back. But here’s the good news: emotional competence is a skill you can develop. Bringing your best self to difficult moments isn’t about suppressing emotions; it’s about using them wisely.
3) ACTION: Leading Conversations AI Can’t Replicate
Engaging in effective high-stakes conversations that successfully advance our most important, complex and relational situations.
Why This Matters in the Age of AI
- Empathy Beyond Algorithms – AI can mimic empathy, but real understanding of emotions and context is uniquely human.
- Clear Communication of AI – Employees must interpret and explain AI results clearly, ensuring shared understanding and building trust.
- Navigating Challenging Conversations – As AI shifts roles and responsibilities, tensions will rise; effective negotiation and relational skills are critical.
Essential Skills for the Action Phase:
1. Asking Higher-Quality Questions
The quality of our conversations directly impacts the quality of our results and relationships. Asking high-quality questions shows humility, curiosity, and respect. By seeking others’ perspectives, we build trust, uncover new insights and create the foundation for meaningful collaboration and better decision making.
2. Leading Through Higher-Quality Conversations
It is the ability to engage others in productive, high-quality conversations that will eventually define our success or failure. A high-quality conversation is when people walk away feeling that the time was well spent and with a deeper understanding of other perspectives. Leading with questions provides the advantage of uncovering insights, perspectives and challenges before deciding what is needed from us to serve the situation best.
3. Managing Others’ Defensive Reactions
With the speed, complexity and different perspective on how to leverage AI, difficult conversations are unavoidable. Whether it’s giving feedback, aligning with stakeholders, or repairing a strained relationship, these moments shape your career success. One of the biggest challenges: Knowing what to do when someone becomes defensive. The 4 A’s for Managing Others’ Defensive Reactions provide a proven approach to de-escalating tension and turning difficult discussions into productive ones.
4) REFLECTION: Turning AI Disruption into Personal Growth
Reflection is the process of critically evaluating your behaviors, perspectives, habits and communication from previous actions to gain insights to adapt to future challenges. This process accelerates our ability to learn and evolve through intentional practice, feedback and reflection.
Why This Matters in the Age of AI
- Accelerating Agility – Reflection turns AI experiences into lasting growth and new habits.
- Resilience Through Adaptability – Regular reflection builds flexibility to pivot as roles, tools, and workflows shift.
- Better Decision-Making – Reflection strengthens judgment, helping people balance human values with AI-driven insights.
Essential Skills for the REFLECTION Phase:
The 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 is a simple yet powerful roadmap to accelerate your ability to learn, adapt, and evolve through a holistic practice of reflection.
1. Deliberate Practice
Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.
—Anonymous
Setting a goal is easy. Achieving it? That’s the hard part. The biggest challenge employees face isn’t learning new knowledge and skills; it’s translating that knowledge into successful habits amidst the speed and complexity of their daily work.
Our most meaningful lessons are not acquired through participation in a training program or from reading a book; our most impactful growth comes to us through experience. See why practice matters with the 70/20/10 model in the image below.
2. Seek Feedback
When employees actively seek honest feedback, they create a vulnerability and authenticity that demonstrates that everyone is a work in progress (Growth Mindset).
Honest feedback helps us address blind spots and evolve our behaviors to achieve desired goals, but giving feedback to someone is often risky. The practices within the image below will help minimize potential threats while encouraging others to provide honest feedback.
3. Practice of Reflection
Reflection is a humbling yet powerful tool that helps us improve our performance. A regular practice of reflection is proven to increase our capacity to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social skills and learning agility. Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model is one of the simplest reflective models because it centers around asking the three simple questions in the image below.
The Future of Work and Self-Leadership
As AI continues to evolve the nature of work, Self-Leadership will become even more crucial for employee success. The skills in demand will be those that technology can’t replace. Fortunately, Self-Leadership is not a fixed trait: it can be cultivated and developed through practice, feedback and reflection.
The people who thrive in the age of AI will be the ones who start developing their Self-Leadership abilities today. Which of these skill sets will you focus on this week to strengthen your Self-Leadership abilities?