The Power of Posture

This week I have been thinking a lot about the impact and power of the posture we take when everything around us is changing.

In my experience, when we're walking through uncertainty and change, people read our posture long before they process our words. Posture is the stance we walk in with, the energy we bring into a room, how steady we look, how much we claim to know, and how we treat the people closest to the work. The pieces I'm sharing landed in the same place for me, so I'm going to follow it from the inside out, starting with how we hold ourselves and ending with how we work alongside each other.

Let's start with the inside job...because honestly, most of the work is an inside job. In Sydney Lake's Fortune piece, Brene Brown says the key to surviving AI is rejecting Jack Welch's advice and embracing humanity. She says we are wired for certainty, not sustained stress, which is a rough fit for a moment like this one, and that leaders need self-awareness, the ability to regulate their own nervous systems, and the discipline to slow decisions down. She also takes on Welch's forced-ranking "vitality curve," which she says breeds fear and weakens collaboration. "Fear has a short shelf life" (YES!) A leader running on fear sets the tone for everyone else, and it does not last.

From there, Jacqueline Carter, Robert Hoppe, and Paula Kelley give that inner work some shape in The Mindsets Leaders Need as AI Accelerates the Pace of Business, published in Harvard Business Review on October 2. They name three shifts, from certainty to clarity, from expertise to exploration, and from emotional control to emotional insight, plus a four-step practice of pause, perceive, pivot, and practice. The first shift is the one that resonated with me most, and it is the same thread Brené was pulling. Leaders feel pressure to walk in with every answer, and nobody has every answer right now (hot take from me: nobody actually knows what they're doing). Clarity sounds like "here is where we are headed, here is what I know, and here is what I don't know yet." Certainty sounds like "here is the plan, any questions?" Here's a fun experiment, run your next change conversation both ways in your head and notice which one you would rather be on the receiving end of. The first invites people to help you build it. The second invites them to quietly polish their resumes. I know which one I would trust and be inspired by.

The second shift, from expertise to exploration, is a tough one for those of us who got promoted for knowing things. Expertise is often what gets us into leadership, and exploration asks us to hold it a little more loosely. Expertise says "here is how this works." Exploration says "here is what I think, and here is what I would like to test." You still bring everything you know, you just stop treating it as the final answer.

The third shift, from emotional control to emotional insight, is the one I think often gets misunderstood. The authors describe it as treating our feelings as information to understand, not only something to manage. That does not mean you stop managing yourself in front of your team. It means your reaction becomes a personal data point. Control says "I'm fine, let's move on." Insight says "I notice I'm anxious about this timeline, so what is that telling me?" It is the same inside job Brené was talking about, self-awareness and regulating your own nervous system.

The authors also offer a four-step practice to help leaders notice their automatic reactions and change them, pause, perceive, pivot, and practice. Here is how I would translate them for a Monday morning meeting. Pause means letting the first reaction go by before you answer, which is Brené's "slow decisions down" in real life. Perceive means asking what you are actually reacting to, the facts in front of you or the fear underneath them. Pivot means choosing the response you want to give instead of the one that showed up on its own, and sometimes that response is "I don't know yet, here is how we will find out." Practice means doing it again tomorrow, in low-stakes moments first, building that muscle, so it is there when the stakes are high. None of us do this perfectly, but I would argue the trying is where the trust gets built. (Those are my translations, so go read the authors for their version.)

Allie K. Miller (if you're not following Allie in the AI space, run, don't walk) takes the exploration piece outward. She sat down with host Molly Wood on Microsoft's WorkLab podcast for Find your "weirdos" and let them lead. The episode highlights that breakthroughs happen when leaders give unconventional thinkers room to experiment, rapid iteration can matter more than polish, and that a leader's job is to move ideas from the fringes into real business results. It can start with a simple question. Who on your team is already poking around with the tools? They likely know more about where AI helps than anyone, and I would argue we should sit down with them before we turn to a dashboard.

Here is where I landed this week. Steady on the inside, clear on the outside, curious about who knows more than you, honest about what you don't know, and careful with the fear that is already in the room. That is a posture, not a technique, and the impact of that is greater than any words you say.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things.

1. 01Write down one honest sentence that starts with "here is what I don't know yet." Say it out loud once this weekend, and notice how it feels to hear yourself say it.
2. 02Who on your team is already experimenting with new tools, even quietly? Pick one person and plan to ask what they have figured out before your next meeting.
3. 03Think of one moment this week when your first reaction showed up before you did. Run it back through pause and perceive. What were you actually reacting to, the facts in front of you or the fear underneath them?

"AI is changing not only what leaders need to know, but how they need to think."

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

Full transparency, I’m not the source of these ideas. Every week I pull together what I’m reading, listening to, and learning from some of the smartest voices in leadership and AI, and I tag every one so you can go to the source (please do). What I like to do is connect the dots on what I’m seeing out in the world.