The pace of change in Silicon Valley is relentless. New AI tools and large language models seem to drop every week, and many workers are feeling the pressure to constantly reskill just to avoid falling behind.
But according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, the people who rise to the top aren’t the ones who are obsessing over every new release. Instead, they tend to share three traits that focus more on getting back to basics.
“The people who are wildly successful have this incredible combination: They understand the technology, have high EQ [emotional intelligence], and really care about the mission of the team,” he said on the TBPN podcast earlier this month.
As competition intensifies in the AI era, Robbins believes collaboration—not individual heroics—is what separates standout employees in particular from everyone else.
“Anybody that says they don’t care about their own success is lying to you. But [you need to] figure out that when the team succeeds, I’m going to succeed, so it’s easy for me to focus on the team.”
This mantra of teamwork has been something long embraced by Cisco, even before Robbins was in the corner office. John Chambers, who served as CEO from 1995 to 2015, recently said team culture can matter just as much as strategy or vision.
He pointed to Cisco’s track record during the 1990s, when the company helped create an estimated 10,000 employee millionaires, as proof that shared success can be a powerful motivator.
“There’s good cultures. There are tough cultures. They all work as long as you’re consistent,” Chambers said on the Thirty Minute Mentors podcast. “For me, I’m a team player in culture, and you win as a team, and you lose as a team, and we don’t expect to lose very often, so we share the success of my companies with all the employees more generously than anybody’s done.”
Tech leaders are betting big on emotional intelligence
A LinkedIn analysis from 2024 found that among executives at S&P 500 businesses and unicorns with over $1 billion in valuation, there was a 31% increase in leaders featuring soft skills on their pages since 2018. The top five most popular include conducting effective presentations, strategic thinking, communication, strategic vision, and conflict resolution.
Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, pointed to five key pillars of emotional skills that businesses are looking for in business: curiosity, compassion, courage, communication, and creativity.
“These people skills are going to become more and more core to not just how someone becomes an executive, but the work of executives: mobilizing teams, and building a company that is human-centric,” he told Fortune at the time.
And Robbins has used his own career as an example of the power of high emotional intelligence. Before being named CEO in 2015, he climbed the ranks from account manager all the way up the leadership chain. One of his secrets wasn’t asking for a promotion—but rather letting his skills speak for himself—and being honest with reality.
“I always believed my job everyday was an interview,” Robbins said on the How Leaders Lead podcast. “What I did in my role everyday was showing them I was the right candidate for the next job.”
Execs like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Amazon’s Andy Jassy are embracers of soft skills
Robbins isn’t alone in viewing human skills as increasingly important.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said recently that while AI will reshape the workforce, employees who build critical thinking and interpersonal skills will remain in demand.
“My advice to people would be critical thinking, learn skills, learn your EQ, learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You’ll have plenty of jobs,” Dimon said on Fox News.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has voiced a similar view, arguing that curiosity and the habit of asking “why” are essential to breaking down problems and unlocking innovation.
“We ask why, and why not, constantly,” he wrote in his letter to shareholders last year. “It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable.”
