A Psychological Today article highlights the importance of soft skills today as the only primary differentiator against AI.
Most high achievers systematically compressed everything that felt “soft,” often because those things—presence, feeling, relationships—didn’t show up in measurable outcomes.
Zack Kass, who led go-to-market strategy at OpenAI, puts it bluntly: “Human skills are the moat that AI can’t build.” Trust, adaptability, empathy, courage, wisdom—these aren’t the soft skills anymore. They’re the only skills that still differentiate.
This is confirmed by the World Economic Forum’s research on fastest-rising skills for 2030. The focus is on building resilience, flexibility, agility, curiosity, and creative thinking. Notice what’s absent? Technical expertise. Rather than a differentiator, AI literacy is now table stakes.
The skills that differentiate are fundamentally regulatory and human. They require a nervous system calm enough to stay present under pressure, tolerate ambiguity without forcing resolution, and hold complexity without collapsing it into false simplicity.
What may not be evident about this article though (even though it is communicating it in a subversive manner) is that they are describing leaders with Self-Transforming Minds (as per Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey’s work on the plateaus of adult development). The key statement about tolerating ambiguity without forcing resolution is an important characteristic of this mindset, as it is something that I am struggle to embrace and grasp myself.
In other words, just as employees need to level up for this newer, more complex world, so too do leaders need to level up as well. In effect, they need to embrace and be comfortable with uncertainty in this newly emerging VUCA world.
Time and again, this is where high achievers get stuck. The developments they need most—to build trust, emotional range, authentic presence, and the ability to sit in uncertainty—require exactly what they’ve spent careers avoiding: being uncomfortable. Feeling something and not having the answer.
Each of these asks your nervous system to do something counterintuitive: Slow down when everything screams speed up. That’s why it’s hard. That’s also why it works.
It’s all inside-out work. The kind that doesn’t show up on a performance review but shows up in every room you walk into, every decision you make, every person who chooses to follow you because they actually trust you.
What if AI isn’t making you obsolete, but forcing you to remember what actually makes you valuable? What if it is your invitation to live in a way that’s more real?
The leaders who will thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones processing the most information. They’re the ones who can sit in a room full of uncertainty and make people feel safe enough to do their best work; who make decisions that account for complexity rather than compress it; and who have enough internal capacity to lead through what’s actually happening, not what they wish were happening. That capacity isn’t a skill you add. It’s something you reclaim.
Yes, this is all inside-out work, more commonly known as vertical development. Yet the mention that this doesn’t show up on performance reviews is more telling for organizations than anything else.
Effectively what this means is that even though most organizations today are not focus on your inner growth and “vertical” development, but just your outer technical “horizontal” development, you have to take the lead with it as an individual on your own time, otherwise you will suffer the consequences.
This is the number one reason why most organizations are failing today and getting stuck with their economic growth. It’s because inner psychological growth and vertical development isn’t an integral part of the organization and thus it isn’t focused on within performance reviews in turn.
In other words, leader nor organizations can’t manage and change what they are effectively blind to.
So until vertical development becomes an important focus for organizations, not much will change within them…unless individuals initiate their own transformational changes themselves.
Actually most important of all as to why these vertical development needs to be integrated into the daily operations of the organization is that soft skills can’t be expedited like hard, technical skills can. In effect, soft skills can’t be learnt by taking a weekend course so as to fast track your learning of it. Soft skills can only be learnt by daily practice.