The Ghost Of Fear In Technology: Why Human-Centered Leadership Matters More Than Ever

Dr. Irene Thong is CIO of Oglethorpe Power Corporation, with 25+ years leading enterprise transformation in manufacturing and energy.

gettyAs technology leaders, we lead change, navigate uncertainty and make decisions about what comes next. But consider a different question: What does our change feel like to the people living with it every day?

We tell people a new system will improve their work. Automation will make them more efficient. AI will help them accomplish more. They need to adapt, learn and evolve. Yet every technology transformation is followed by a ghost that rarely appears on a project plan, risk register or executive dashboard.

This ghost is fear: the fear of not knowing how to use the technology, of no longer being the expert, that skills developed over decades may suddenly be worth less and, increasingly, fear of being replaced by this technology.​

Leaders often interpret these reactions as resistance, but what if people are not resisting the technology? What if they are afraid of what our technology decision means for them?

The pace matters. Gallup reported in 2024 that 70% of U.S. employees had experienced disruptive organizational change during the preceding year. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that 81% of surveyed leaders expected AI agents to become moderately or extensively integrated into their organizations’ AI strategies within the following 12 to 18 months.

Employees are already experiencing significant change, with more ahead. We measure adoption, productivity, cost, performance, risk and return on investment, but perhaps our dashboards need another question: How are our people experiencing the change?

The same technology can mean something different at every career stage. An experienced employee may wonder whether decades of knowledge still matter. A mid-career leader may fear having to rebuild hard-earned expertise. An emerging leader may question whether the career path ahead has changed, while someone entering the workforce may wonder what expertise is still worth developing.

Rather than making assumptions about who may adapt easily or struggle, leaders should ask employees what the changes mean for their roles, skills and sense of professional value.​​

When someone challenges a technology initiative, our instinct may be to explain the benefits again, provide more training, recruit champions or increase communication. But if the underlying concern is relevance, job security or the loss of hard-earned expertise, they will not necessarily create trust. Another training module or productivity presentation cannot resolve the fear that someone’s experience or role may no longer be valued.

The Gallup research mentioned earlier found that among employees experiencing significant organizational disruption, those who strongly trusted organizational leadership were 4.5 times as likely to be engaged and 62% less likely to report frequent burnout.

Trust alone may not cause those outcomes, but the findings should make leaders pay attention. Perhaps the question isn’t simply, “How do we overcome resistance?” but “Have we earned enough trust for people to move forward with us even when we cannot tell them exactly what the future will look like?”​

Human-centered leadership does not mean slowing innovation or shielding people from uncomfortable realities. Jobs and skills will change. Some work will disappear, and new work will emerge. We owe people honesty about that. But before asking people to adopt the next technology, leaders should ask five questions of their workers:​

Don’t confuse an announcement with understanding. Explain what is changing, why it matters, what has been decided and what remains unknown. “We don’t know yet” can build more credibility than pretending every answer is settled.

Listen before trying to convince. Ask what excites or concerns people and what leadership may be overlooking. The person challenging the project may see something we don’t.

Expertise? Status? Autonomy? Opportunity? Job security? We don’t have to agree with every fear or make promises we cannot keep, but we can acknowledge what is real for the person experiencing it.

Training matters, but training alone isn’t agency. Invite people into pilots, let them identify use cases and give them opportunities to shape how technology changes their work.

This is especially important for employees with decades of institutional knowledge. We often tell them, “We need you to learn AI” when we should perhaps be saying, “We need AI to learn from what you know.”

Technology can preserve knowledge about why a process exists, what happened when something failed and which work-around keeps an operation running, but only if we invite the people who possess that knowledge into the process.

Make transformation tangible. Improve one repetitive task, rethink one process, preserve one piece of institutional knowledge or create one safe experiment.​ Transformation becomes less threatening when people participate in it rather than simply having it happen to them.​

CIOs were once expected to make technology work and then have that technology enable the business. Today, our responsibility is broader. We need to make technology work for people.

That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult decisions or waiting until everyone is comfortable. It means recognizing that people aren’t implementation dependencies on a project plan. They are the organization.

Before your next technology announcement, ask what people understand, feel, fear losing and need from you. Then do something technology leaders aren’t always trained to do: listen. Not to formulate a response or prove the decision was right, but because employees may know something we don’t. Their answers might change our communication, training, implementation or even the technology decision itself.

That isn’t resistance slowing transformation. That is leadership making transformation better.

Our responsibility isn’t to make people fearless, but to create enough understanding, agency and trust that fear doesn’t prevent them from moving forward. Successful transformation isn’t just about whether people use the technology we implement. It is whether they can see themselves in the future we are asking them to help create.​

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