In almost every leadership conversation I have been part of over the last two years, AI comes up within the first ten minutes. Sometimes it is the whole conversation. Executives want to know how to use it, how to talk about it, how to signal that they are not behind on it. There is a palpable anxiety in the room—a fear of being the person who doesn’t get it, who gets left behind, who bets on the wrong tools or moves too slowly while everyone else races ahead.
I understand that anxiety. And I want to offer a reframe that I think will be more useful than any AI fluency course. The leaders I see boards choosing right now—the ones rising fastest, the ones being tapped for bigger roles, the ones whose names keep coming up in succession conversations—are almost never the ones who talk most fluently about AI. They are the ones who have spent the last two years doing something much harder and much slower. They have been building trust.
Not as a soft skill. Not as a personality trait. As a deliberate, practiced, strategic capability. And it is compounding in ways that no technology adoption ever will.
The FOMO is actually costing you
Here is what I observe from where I sit as the leader of Egon Zehnder’s FinTech practice. Leaders at every level are devoting enormous energy right now to AI literacy: attending workshops, experimenting with tools, building it into their team workflows, making sure they are seen to be doing all of the above. This is not wrong. AI fluency matters and will continue to matter.
But it is acquirable. It can be learned in months. It will be commoditized. And in the succession conversations I am part of, I have never once heard a board say: “The reason we chose her over the other candidates is that she understood AI better.” I have, however, heard boards say things like: “People bring him their real problems.” “Her team would walk through walls for her.” “He is the person in the room everyone wants to be honest with.” “She sees things coming before anyone else because her people tell her the truth.” Those qualities are not acquired at a workshop. They are built over years, in hundreds of small interactions, through habits that most leaders have never been explicitly taught and are not currently developing because they are busy worrying about something else.
That is the leadership skills that are in high demand that no one is talking about.
What boards are actually evaluating
When I am advising boards on CEO succession, the final conversation almost always comes down to one question that is harder to answer than any scorecard item: does this person create an environment where truth travels? Not: do they have AI fluency. But: when things go wrong inside their organization and things always go wrong—do people tell them? Quickly, directly, without softening the edges?
That question matters because the higher you rise, the more people manage what they say to you. The instinct to tell the boss what they want to hear is almost universal, and it intensifies as the stakes increase. Leaders who have built genuine trust—the kind where people feel safe enough to be direct—get better information, make faster decisions, and catch problems before they become crises. Leaders who haven’t built it are often the last to know when something is going wrong.
This is not a CEO-level concern. A VP who creates that environment outperforms peers who don’t, not because they are smarter or more experienced, but because they are working with reality while everyone else is working with a curated version of it. A director who has earned that kind of trust from their team is already operating at a level above their title.
What the leaders who build this actually do differently
I have watched leaders develop this quality deliberately, and I have watched others assume they already have it. The gap between those two groups is significant and almost always visible before they are aware of it themselves. The leaders who build genuine trust share four habits that are worth naming—and more importantly, worth practicing.
1. They are curious about people in a way that doesn’t feel transactional.
There is a real difference between learning about your colleagues because you genuinely want to understand them and doing it because you know it is good practice to seem interested. People feel this distinction clearly, even when they cannot name it. The leaders who build real trust are interested in the person in front of them independent of what that person can do for them.
Try this: before your next one-on-one, set aside the agenda for the first five minutes and ask one question that has nothing to do with work status. Not “how is the project going?” but “what is feeling hard for you right now?” Then listen without redirecting. It will feel unusual at first. That is usually a sign it is working.
2. They say the uncomfortable thing before they are forced to.
One of the most trust-building behaviors I observe in senior leaders is the willingness to surface a difficult truth early, when it is still uncomfortable but not yet urgent. This requires a specific kind of confidence: the kind that does not need to be liked in every moment. Leaders who do it consistently become the people their organizations rely on when things get difficult, which is the only time leadership truly matters.
Identify one conversation you have been putting off because the timing doesn’t feel quite right. It almost certainly is right. Have it this week, before it becomes a crisis. Name the thing you have been reluctant to say, plainly and with care. The relief on the other side of that conversation, for both of you, will tell you everything about why this habit matters.
3. They know what they don’t know, and they say so out loud.
In a moment when AI can produce a confident answer to almost any question in seconds, the leaders who stand out are often the ones willing to say: “I’m not sure. Let me think about that.” Intellectual honesty at the top of a team creates permission for it everywhere. And teams where people are genuinely honest about uncertainty make better decisions than those where they perform certainty they don’t have.
For the next two weeks, notice every time you feel the impulse to answer before you have fully thought something through. Sit with that impulse for ten seconds before you speak. This is a small practice with a larger cumulative effect than it sounds.
4. They treat their own reactions as data, not directives.
The leaders I have seen build the deepest trust are those who notice when they feel defensive, when feedback lands badly, when they want to dismiss an idea before it has been heard, and who pause before they act on any of it. That pause, small as it sounds, is where the quality of a leader’s judgment is actually formed. After any meeting where you felt reactive, take two minutes and write down what you felt and what triggered it. You do not need to share it with anyone. You just need to see it clearly enough to choose your next move rather than simply react to it. Over time this changes how you show up in difficult conversations in ways that others will notice before you do.
A question worth sitting with this week
When people walk out of a conversation with you, what do they feel? Do they feel like they told you the truth, or the version of the truth they thought you wanted to hear? Do they leave with more clarity than they arrived with, or less?
You can find out. Ask two or three people you work closely with for something specific—not general feedback, but this: “Is there something you have been hesitant to tell me? And is there anything I do that makes it harder to be direct with me?” Ask it in person, not over email. Give them time to answer. Do not explain or defend anything you hear. Just thank them and sit with it. The answers will tell you more about where you actually stand as a leader than any AI tool assessment ever will.
AI literacy matters; a really great deal. I am not arguing otherwise. But it is a table stake, not a differentiator—and it is increasingly being treated as a proxy for leadership capability that it was never meant to be. The leaders I see rising are not the ones who have mastered the most tools. They are the ones who have built something that takes years and has no shortcut: the kind of trust that makes people want to tell them the truth. That work was valuable before AI arrived on the scene. It is more valuable now. And the leaders investing in it while everyone else is distracted are the ones I expect to still be rising long after the current moment of AI anxiety has passed.
The question is not whether you are keeping up with AI. The question is what you are building while everyone else is busy worrying about it.
