A pioneering AT&T CEO rejects inclusion and belonging as a soft skills: ‘They’re human skills’

Chow has translated the leadership lessons she learned along the way into her new book, Lead Bigger, which publishes today. 

“I wanted to impart that view of leadership in a very practical way. I’m not a researcher. I’m not an academic,” she told me. “I’m a practitioner.”

Courtesy of Anne Chow

Chow started her career in network engineering and then moved to customer service, where she was quickly put in charge of hundreds of employees. She was younger than the team she was leading and had no managerial experience yet. “[A] group of them bet me early on that I would be gone in six months,” Chow said. They lost that bet. Chow stayed in the role for three years and later moved into sales; she spent around three quarters of her career in customer-facing positions.

“I learned in those formative roles that every business is a people business,” she said. Her “people-centered” leadership style would guide her through the rest of her years at AT&T.

At the core of Chow’s leadership philosophy is inclusion, which she values on both a personal and professional level. “Inclusion wasn’t the word at the time, but I knew what it felt to be different and on the outside, and I knew what it meant to really feel like you belong to something,” says Chow, whose parents were born in Taiwan. 

Inclusion and belonging are often considered “soft skills,” a categorization that Chow rejects. “[T]hose are not soft skills. They’re human skills,” she said. “Leadership is about compelling people to do something and get something done. It’s about compelling people to individually and collectively change their behavior and move in a common direction to get work done. So who doesn’t need human skills for that?” 

Her lengthy tenure at AT&T wasn’t all smooth sailing. In 2005, AT&T was acquired by SBC Communications for $16 billion. “I lost every layer of management above me, every mentor and sponsor that I had built up over 15 years except one,” said Chow. “[I]t was the same industry, but it was a totally different culture.”

Chow now sees the bright side of that upheaval: It kept her job fresh, which played to her strengths. “My Achilles’ heel is boredom,” she said. She prefers environments where she can continuously learn and grow. “I was fortunate in that the company I happened to pick first had an immense amount of opportunity, functionally, cross-functionally.”

Chow, an alum of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, retired from AT&T in 2022 and now sits on the boards of FranklinCovey, 3M, and CSX. She also teaches at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and has two Gen-Z daughters, meaning she spends much of her time with the incoming generation of workers and leaders. When it comes to career planning, Chow warns against looking too far ahead: “[Y]ou definitely want to have goals, and you definitely want to have a plan, but don’t have it be so far out that the world is going to change 16 times before that happens.”

Nina Ajemian
nina.ajemian@fortune.com

The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

“It’s always been a dream of mine. Finally, I got this beautiful trophy.”

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