Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
3 days, 3 Vistage CEO groups, all in California, all of them over Zoom. I want to start there with the Zoom part because it matters a lot for this conversation. I’m Bernie Borges, CEO of Fulfilled at Work Academy. I’m glad you’re here. I recently completed my first 3 required presentations as a certified Vistage speaker. Now, this has been on my career bucket list for quite a while, and I am stoked about it. And yes, it does give me a sense of fulfillment. Now, if you’re not familiar with Vistage, it’s a global company more than 60 years old.
Bernie Borges [00:00:47]:
They provide CEOs a venue to meet in small groups in their local cities. About 10 to 15 at a time with other CEOs, and they grow professionally and personally. In fact, Vistage member CEOs grow their business 2.2 times faster than average small and mid-sized businesses, according to Dun& Bradstreet. Now, my topic was The Human Dividend: A Leader’s Guide to AI Transformation. And because all 3 groups were meeting in California and I was presenting remotely, I lost something that I usually rely on when I speak or lead a workshop. I couldn’t read the room. I couldn’t catch the shift in somebody’s posture when a point landed or the flicker of their skepticism on somebody’s face before they even said a word out loud. And that’s a big deal for a speaker or a trainer.
Bernie Borges [00:01:47]:
Now, for a topic that’s fundamentally about reducing fear, building trust, and improving how people respond to change, presenting without that feedback loop felt like working with one sense turned off. So I leaned harder into the one thing that I could still use. At the end of each session, The group’s chair, Danielle Baldwin, ran a round robin. Thank goodness for that. Danielle went around the room and asked every person for their biggest takeaway. That round robin became my window into what actually landed. And across 3 different rooms of executives, something happened that I didn’t expect. The same idea kept showing up.
Bernie Borges [00:02:36]:
Unprompted in every single group. That’s what this episode is about. Now, here’s a quick bit of context before I get into what they said. The Human Dividend is the framework that I built around a simple idea: when AI takes work off somebody’s plate, that freed-up time and energy doesn’t automatically become something good. Because if it’s left alone, it just gets filled back in with more tasks. The human dividend is what happens when a leader is intentional instead and redirects that capacity toward the work that only a human can do: discernment, relational intelligence, judgment that’s rooted in purpose, not just output. That’s the human dividend idea in one paragraph. Now, I’m not going to walk you through the whole framework here.
Bernie Borges [00:03:35]:
I have a 12-minute video that explains it and also a white paper if you want to go deeper. Both are linked up below. What I do want to do today is tell you what happened when I put this framework in front of 3 rooms of executives and let them react to it. Here’s the thing that stopped me. In each of the 3 groups, without any of them hearing what the others said, at least one leader landed on some version of the same sentence. And that is, this isn’t an AI strategy, it’s a business strategy. Nobody prompted that line. It just kept surfacing.
Bernie Borges [00:04:19]:
And I thought about why. And it made sense. The leaders in each room aren’t struggling with the technology. They’re struggling with what the technology does to trust, to fear, and to how their people show up every day. That’s a leadership problem that’s wearing a technology costume. And once a room sees that, the whole conversation changes. Now, one part of what I teach in the Human Dividend Method is a short framework called the AI Trust Audit. 5 questions a leader can ask their team to surface what people are actually afraid of instead of guessing.
Bernie Borges [00:05:02]:
I’m not going to walk through all 5 here. They’re in the video and also the white paper that I mentioned earlier. What I want to tell you, though, is what happened after I taught it. In more than one room, a leader told the group that they were going to use those questions the following week. Not someday. Monday. One moment stayed with me longer than any of the framework talk. A leader in one of the groups admitted in front of his peers that he has his own fear about leading through this.
Bernie Borges [00:05:37]:
Now, he wasn’t performing for the room. That was obvious. He said it plainly. And he said something that told me that he’d actually heard the material, not just nodded along to it. He said he wanted to run the trust audit questions on himself first before he ever took it to his team. That’s a leader being honest about where he actually is. And I think that honesty is worth more than any slide that I can put in front of them. In another room, a leader told me that she was already in the middle of an AI rollout with her team with no framework guiding it at all.
Bernie Borges [00:06:17]:
She said the trust audit questions would be genuinely useful for her in her one-on-ones once the rollout finished. Now, this wasn’t a critique of what she’d already done. It was just a real starting point For where there had only been guesswork before. Now, there was another moment, a quieter one, but it showed up in more than one room. See, part of what I talk about is what I call the C scale, which is really just a reminder that leaders are good at recognizing high complexity work. Things like closing the big deal, landing a new client, resolving a customer complaint. But leaders consistently overlook low-complexity work— meeting logistics, coordination of details, you know, the unglamorous stuff that holds everything together. More than one leader called that out as a blind spot that they hadn’t considered before.
Bernie Borges [00:07:19]:
Not because it’s a complicated idea, just the opposite. It’s simple enough that it’s easy to overlook every day. Sometimes the thing that changes how someone leads isn’t a new idea. It’s a familiar idea said out loud in a room where someone’s actually paying attention. And that kind of recognition doesn’t just boost performance. It’s one of those more direct paths to fulfillment. Fulfillment, because being seen for the work that you actually do hits different than a generic thank you. Now, here’s where the data backed up what I was hearing anecdotally.
Bernie Borges [00:08:01]:
And honestly, it surprised me more than anything in the round robins. In each session, I ran the same anonymous poll question: Do your employees believe AI is being introduced to help them, Or replace them? Group 1 came in at 85% yes. Group 2 came in at 50% yes, with 43% unsure. And unsure when the alternative is trust is really just a soft no. Group 3 came in at 100% yes. Same material, same framework. Same guy standing in front of a camera saying the same words. 3 completely different trust baselines.
Bernie Borges [00:08:50]:
That gap makes the whole argument for the trust audit better than I ever could have in a slide. You can’t lead a team through this transformation if you don’t know which of those 3 rooms you’re actually standing in. Now, I want to be honest about something else. Because not everything that I heard was agreement. And I think the pushback made the material even better. One leader pushed back on the idea of freed-up capacity. He pointed out fairly that in his world, freeing up a sales rep’s time doesn’t mean that that rep gets to relax. In fact, it means the expectations on that rep go up.
Bernie Borges [00:09:33]:
And that tension is real. I don’t think you can talk about AI and freed-up capacity honestly without acknowledging it directly. And he was right to push back. The goal was never to eliminate fear. It’s to reduce it. And those are different goals. And treating them as the same thing is how a leader ends up promising something that they can’t deliver in the human dividend approach. Now, something came up more than once, and I think it’s worth calling out on its own.
Bernie Borges [00:10:05]:
A few of the leaders pointed out that fear isn’t limited to the front line. Leaders feel it too. They’re just less likely to say it out loud. In fact, one leader put it this way. He said he doesn’t actually know if his own team realizes how much he personally relies on AI in his day-to-day work. And he connected that straight back to the trust audit. If leaders want their people to be transparent about their fear, the leader has to go first and be transparent about their own use of the technology. Trust doesn’t flow in one direction.
Bernie Borges [00:10:44]:
It has to start somewhere, and it might as well start with the leader. Of everything that happened across those 3 days, One moment sticks with me more than the rest, and it has almost nothing to do with AI. One person in the group told me that the conversation changed how he was going to handle an employee situation that had nothing to do with technology at all. He connected an idea about discernment, about the importance of adding your own judgment to AI output, instead of just passing it along to a completely different habit that he needed to correct in how he led his people. And that’s really the whole point of freeing up capacity in the first place. It’s not just about being more productive. It’s about getting to do the parts of your job that actually feel like you instead of a checklist that someone else could run. That’s the tell for me that this framework, the human dividend framework, is actually working.
Bernie Borges [00:11:51]:
Not when someone says that it was, hey, great talk, Bernie. It’s when someone takes an idea built for one problem and then applies it somewhere that you never intended it to go. That’s not me being a good speaker. That’s a leader doing the real work of translation On his or her own because something in the material was true enough to be repurposed. So here’s what I want to leave with you. Whether you ever run a formal trust audit in your own business or not, the behavior underneath all of this doesn’t require AI to be relevant. Acknowledge fear directly instead of hoping that it goes away on its own. Be transparent when you don’t have all the answers yet, because your people would rather have your honesty than your polish.
Bernie Borges [00:12:45]:
And recognize the work that’s happening at every level, not just the work that closes the big deal. AI just happens to be the thing making that leadership test visible right now, today. Next year, it might be something else. The leaders who did well in those 3 rooms weren’t the ones with the most sophisticated AI rollout. They were the ones willing to be honest in front of their peers about where they actually stood. There’s a data point that’s behind all of this that I’m going to mention once and then leave it alone. Gallup has found that employee engagement jumps from 31% in the US to 53% when there’s a clear plan for AI that’s actually communicated and supported by management. And companies with engaged employees are 23% more profitable.
Bernie Borges [00:13:43]:
But honestly, you don’t need a statistic to know that. You felt what it’s like on a team where nobody’s willing to address the thing that everybody’s already thinking. That feeling is what I call the fear tax, and it doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet until long after it’s already cost you something. Address it in earnest and you get more than better performance. You get people who feel like their work is actually theirs again. And that’s what fulfillment at work has always meant to be. I want to thank Danielle Baldwin, the Vistage Chair of all 3 groups, for the invitation to facilitate a discussion about the human dividend approach to AI adoption. And for creating 3 rooms where this conversation could happen honestly, even through a screen.
Bernie Borges [00:14:37]:
If this resonated with you and you want to go deeper on the Human Dividend Framework itself, grab the white paper that walks through the whole thing. You’ll find the link below in the show notes for this episode. That’s it for this one. Thanks for being here. I’m Bernie Borges. Stay fulfilled. Stay fulfilled.
