"Naughty, Nice or...Trusted" is about to become a performance metric — and AI will be the one keeping score.

When your workflows are automated, the system will quietly know if you're a producer and contributor… or a consumer and drainer of time, energy, and resources.

Performative social-emotional "EQ niceness" won't save you.

But developing the hard abilities of emotional intelligence (EI) to support your decision-making, relationships, and leadership development will. It's the difference between getting stuck in the 'neutral zone' and recovering—or pivoting—from burnout, boreout, and redundancy.

This isn't about whether people like you.

It's about whether your pattern of behavior makes it safer or riskier to trust you with power, access, and responsibility in an AI-enabled world with new governance rules and policies designed to avoid lawsuits, reputational
damage, and organizational chaos.

In today's blog, I explore how we shift our thinking about the future—not through a lens of being naughty or nice, but as trusted, emotionally intelligent professionals (using the hard-ability EI model) navigating a working world that transforms every 5.7 months.