Chris Williams Podcast Transcript
Chris Williams joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Chris Williams. Chris Williams serves as the Chief Operating Officer for Interaction Associates. His background includes more than 10 years in the professional services space and business operations, recruiting, business development, and complex research roles.
Prior work includes strategy consulting for Fortune 500 clients. Interaction Associates is best known for introducing the concepts and practice of group facilitation to the business world in the early 1970s. For over 50 years, Interaction Associates has provided thousands of leaders and teams with practical, simple, and effective programs, tools, and techniques for leading meeting and working better across functions, viewpoints, and geographies.
Well, good afternoon, Chris. Welcome to the show.
Chris Williams: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s great to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time and up early today for a podcast, you and out there in North Carolina, me in Kansas City, just traversing the globe doing a daily podcast. So appreciate that. And Chris, I want to jump right into your first question, if you don’t mind.
As a technology department leader in any corporation or the leader within a technology services or solutions provider company, why do people’s skills matter in an AI powered workplace in 2025?
Chris Williams: You know, Brian, that is a great question. I would say a few things. First, as our workplaces become more AI powered as AI gets more infused into the work process and the tools that people use, we really have to ensure that we also factor in the people component.
My perspective is that workplaces ultimately are successful. For building and commercializing solutions to specific problems and actually building those solutions requires some very human centered skills. We have to have skills such as strong leadership, communication, problem solving the ability to navigate change even help.
People navigate change. We know that AI is going to eliminate a lot of fairly routine jobs. And so we have to, as leaders, we have to help people through that change. And so fundamentally it is about the human centered skills, not necessarily just the AI skills. I’ll give you a quick example. Brian Deloitte recently conducted a global technology leadership study.
And in that study, they asked over a thousand global tech leaders. These are people that are. Chief information officers or CTOs, and they asked these leaders, what skills will be critical for your technology function in the next two years? And so the top two responses were number one was leadership. So the ability to inspire, communicate, have executive presence that came in as number one.
And the number two skill, which I thought was really interesting is problem solving in decision making. So that ability to really like sift through. What’s really happening, how do we absorb lots of different perspectives and data and ultimately, how do we make a wise decision for the business? So when I think about people skills, especially in an AI powered workplace, it’s really critical that for those organizations that want to win for tomorrow, you have to have the right employees in the organization that have the right mindset, skill set and tool set.
And ultimately that those a lot of those come down to human centered skills.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Chris. I appreciate that. You know, everybody is leaning heavily into AI, and some people actually think that AI is just here to replace humans. Not yet, anyway. I appreciate your insights around leadership, and that is so, so important.
We still need to keep Everything human centric at this point. So again, thank you. And Chris, how can tech teams that train for hardcore agility and innovation when it comes to building tech solutions or deploying technology services apply the same continuous improvement model to the development of human skills?
Chris Williams: Yeah, great question, Brian. I would start off by saying it’s really important for leaders to take a skills based approach. So I would say a lot of times they’ve really defined very specific technical skills that they want their team to have. But I would, I would say, step back and say, what are the human centered skills?
What are those soft skills? In your organization that you absolutely need and so for most organizations, you’re going to find some commonalities. You’re going to find things like we need people to be effective communicators. They have to be able to explain concepts both at a technical audience and a non technical audience.
We have to get buy in on our ideas. We may have to gain organizational resources. So that communication piece is really important teamwork and collaboration. I think if more than anything, today’s work really is about people working together effectively. So no longer are people necessarily in these departmental silos.
The new workplace is really about people working together across departments across teams across geography. So we’ve got to have those collaborative skills. Obviously, problem solving and critical thinking that that is critical, especially with AI, because we know that the AI can hallucinate and sometimes information that provides back.
We have to just sift through this and we need the human. So the 1st step I would say is have that skills based approach. Then the 2nd step is I recommend tech team step back and say, let’s map out our current state. Do actually a skills inventory like what shows up on your team. Are there specific gaps in things such as critical thinking, communication, emotional intelligence, you can sit back and you can kind of identify maybe a few very specific things you want to focus on.
And then step 3 really is about putting together some sort of skills based strategy. How am I going to close those skills gaps? And there’s tons of resources on the marketplace now. I have found, Brian, in my personal experience working with a lot of highly technical individuals and highly technical leaders is that those people are often the most hungry for learning and mastering the soft skills they’ve spent 10, sometimes 20 years, really mastering the technical skills and a certain point in their career.
They realize, okay, for me to move up in the organization or me to have a larger impact or to have my team have a larger impact, I need to really learn some of these people skills and human centered skills. And so I find that a lot of very technical people are often very, very hungry for those soft skills.
The last thing I’ll just say, Brian, is, um, I think it’s really important that companies, especially company leadership. They create an environment where learning is allowed, and this doesn’t have to be super formal. An example that comes to mind for me is Google. So Google ever since their founding in the late nineties, they have this what’s known as a 20 percent policy.
So the 20 percent policy essentially is, is allowing employees to dedicate up to 20 percent of their time each week to projects That they’re passionate about. And so the outcome of a lot of the, that work is what ultimately produced services and products such as Gmail, AdSense, Google News. And I think that’s really interesting because in a way, what the Google founders and Google leadership are saying is.
We want to put creativity, risk and innovation back into the business. And so we want to create an environment where we’re having people really lean into those projects. And those projects are really where that human skill is going to come out because you’ve got to work together. You’ve got to work across boundaries and you’ve got to work with a variety of people.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. You highlighted quite a bit there, but I do like some of the things that you went down. And again, just summarizing that skills based approach, skills inventory, and a skills based strategy is so, so important. We need to get back into building on these soft skills, especially after COVID, we’ve got this remote work, hybrid work that’s been very, very challenging.
And you’re right, bringing that creativity, innovation risk back into the organization is where the focus needs to be. Get some excitement and build that culture. So Chris. What are the concrete steps leaders and team members can take to master key human or people skills?
Chris Williams: Yeah, great, great question, Brian.
There’s so many of so many different approaches you can take. And I think this gets a little bit challenging because each person, each human is a little bit unique. I think each of us have a different learning style. Some of us are auditory and we learn from listening to a podcast. Some of us are visual.
Some of us have to learn by actually doing something. So often people are a combination of many different types of learning styles. So there’s no magic formula for mastering human or people skills. But I would offer up to your listeners some very specific steps that I think really work in any environment, any size organization.
So, uh, The first thing that I recommend is really begin with self awareness. In order to master human and people skills, you’ve got to know yourself first. You’ve got to know your strengths, you’ve got to know your weaknesses, and you’ve got to be able to really understand how you show up. Is your communication clear?
How do you resolve conflict beyond just introspectively asking yourself those questions? I also recommend finding a mentor or a colleague who you trust that can really give you honest unvarnished feedback. This is really important to building your self awareness because that person, that external person can almost be like a mirror.
They can reflect back to you some of the ticks or habits or things that maybe you don’t see in yourself, but might actually be holding you back from being a fully human or people oriented leader. So that’s the first thing I would say is building self awareness. The second thing I would say is, is really for leaders to take a balanced view of success.
I think oftentimes leaders are very focused on results. They’re focused on that results dimension. You know, did we get the project completed on time? Was it within budget? And that’s obviously very important as leader. We want to make sure we meet our goals and our targets and our initiatives. But I would say from a mastery perspective with human and people, there’s really two other dimensions that we have to consider as leaders.
The first is the process dimension. You know, is our process clear and efficient and effective on how we work with our team and how we work with others? The second dimension is the relationship dimension. You know, how are we working together? How are we respecting each other? Are we considerate? And so as a leader, it’s really about balancing those three dimensions, the results, the process, and the relationship.
And that’s one way to really elevate and master the human and people side of the equation. And then the final thing I would say, Brian would be that I encourage people to make an investment in themselves. There’s no greater return that you will have than investing in yourself. So find a subject that you’re passionate about.
It could be something very specific such as decision making. Or strategic thinking or public speaking or meeting facilitation, just pick one subject or topic and then challenge yourself to go deep on that subject, find a few books to read, find some blogs where there’s some experts that have something interesting to say, white papers, take a training course and that specific offering.
And then from there, I would challenge yourself. To implement one or two things or behaviors or routines that you might do differently or you might try on in your human people skills journey. And so it’s really about the combination of that self awareness, the balance of you. Finding a specific skill and then it’s about practice.
You cannot master human or people skills without practice. And that, that’s the thing that oftentimes people don’t realize. They think, Oh, once I learn it and know it conceptually, it’s easy, but the soft skills actually are often the hard skills to learn mainly because it just takes time and it takes, it takes real experience.
Brian Thomas: Thank you definitely provided some great nuggets there. You know starting obviously with self awareness having a mentor is absolutely key Especially if you want to grow into a senior leadership role and of course balanced view of success I like how you focused on that right, you know, you talked about the results the process in the relationship Those are so key to again this process we call success and of course investing in yourself.
I love it I think it’s important to find something that you can really work on and challenge yourself in that area. So thank you. And Chris, last question of the day. In a world where any team member at your company or a competitor can generate a powerful AI response that automates the process of analyzing millions of data points to generate an instant answer, why is the person to person dynamic within companies ultimately the greatest competitive differentiator?
Chris Williams: Yeah, it’s a really good question, Brian. I mean, we cannot deny that AI is absolutely a very powerful tool. It’s obviously impressive that it can generate an instant answer, but I would say that answers don’t guarantee alignment. And what I mean by that is fundamentally people are relational creatures.
They’re not machines. And so when we interact with people, we have to do it in a way that people can understand and absorb. It’s almost like people, we, we have our own operating system as people. We want to be respected. We want to have, be clear on what we’re doing. We want to have motivation. And so for ultimate long term success of organizations as they innovate and shift and scale, it’s really depends on the success of people working together to create that alignment and create that direction.
That’s not something that AI can do on its own. It requires the people, the person, the person dynamic and trust. That’s really, really important. I’ll give you some quick data. The Stanford Research Institute recently found that 75 percent of long term job success for somebody depends on the people skills with only 25 percent on the technical knowledge.
75%. Depends on the people skills. And so as we think about people, the greatest advantage of people is really two things that AI can’t bring. Number one is the interpersonal skills. We’ve talked about that, Brian. And number two is that domain expertise, the depth of knowledge and experience that we as people have.
And yes, AI is getting better every day, but if we don’t have that depth of knowledge and experience, and we don’t impart that to our younger workers, we really risk the atrophy. Of knowledge and skill if people don’t know how to do things. And so the analogy I would use a little bit is like 1 of a doctor.
If you were very sick, you might begin by going online and researching and Googling your symptoms. Just like somebody could go into AI and ask a few questions, but you’re going to get a lot of information back. But at the end of the day, if you continue to feel sick, just because you have that information, you probably wouldn’t be satisfied with that.
At the end of the day, ultimately, you would want to work with a person. You would want to work with a doctor. And so I think at the end of the day, as AI is evolving rapidly, and we see these amazing advancements that it can do. We’re generating images and text and doing data analysis. It’s incredible what it can do, but we really have to remind ourselves that it really ultimately is a tool.
It’s a tool that’s ultimately used by people. And so for that reason, the people, the people dimension is really the most critical within an organization.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I would certainly agree with your sentiment there. People are relational characters. They’re relational beings, not machines.
As you mentioned, they do need that care and feeding. So, so important. And I like the stat that you highlighted here, you know, 75 percent to be a successful leader. Obviously is in the people skills area and only 25 in the technical skills. So that’s a big difference. And we need to continue to highlight that and share with folks that takes a lot more work with the soft skills than it does just getting that job done or having a machine come in and try to replace you.
It’s not going to happen. So appreciate that. And Chris, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Chris Williams: Thanks so much, Brian. Appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Chris Williams Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
