Jamie Dimon says 2 letters matter more than anything else for having a great career: EQ

In his nearly two decades running 摩根大通 , Jamie Dimon has shepherded the company through the 2008 financial crisis, grown it into the largest bank in the U.S., with $2.6 trillion dollars in assets and over 240,000 employees, and is now thinking about his legacy. It’s clear that — as he plans his transition — he wants to leave behind not just an expanded financial system, but an expanded system for people everywhere to land meaningful jobs.

For the latest This is Working, I talked to Jamie about the strategies he’s employing to reshape the workforce, how AI factors into that, his thoughts on finding the right successor —?and, finally, what he learned from Ted Lasso.?

Here are some highlights:

He thinks how and where we hire has to change — and that employers are screwing up by not expanding their field of view.

Jamie has championed finding new talent pools for JP Morgan, which means culling old beliefs about who is right for jobs and where they need to be located. In the last few years, the bank established virtual customer service centers in Detroit and Baltimore, axed a rule that you had to have a clean criminal record to get a job, and started looking for people with hunger vs people with prized degrees.

“Things have changed over time,” Jamie said. “For a lot of jobs, we got rid of college degree requirements. Skills are far more important than the college degree, and a lot of people are doing more very specific skills training for very specific jobs. You mentioned Detroit. You can hire people in Detroit, they work from home. But they're very happy, they used to be in kind of low paying jobs. They can't believe they're working at a bank. They like working in a bank. They found it fun, which they didn't expect.?

“We used to recruit at four HBCUs, we now recruit at 27. If you go to Europe, in London, we used to recruit at Oxford and Cambridge, now we recruit at schools that have far more minorities and breadth of talent, et cetera. So we reach out everywhere.

“There's a lot of talent out there, people who want to work hard, who care… We also look for things like curiosity and heart. Do you give a damn? Do you want to put the jersey on every day? Are you going to fight every day? We don't want lazy people. You don't want people who don't want to pay attention to something.?

“And so you've got to look broader than just what someone's GPA is. I read recently some of these elite universities, the average GPA is now 3.85. Come on, this has become ridiculous.”

He says business leaders have to be directly involved in bringing AI into their companies vs outsourcing it to their CIO

With JPMorgan increasingly making use of AI across its business — from customer service to marketing to risk analysis and beyond —?I asked Jamie how he thinks about the overall impact of AI on his workforce. “Will it eliminate jobs? Yeah, because we already see it. Answering questions when people send us emails or call in, it's already handling that. So, it'll drive down certain types of jobs, improve customer satisfaction. It'll add jobs too. So the net-net, I don't know, but we're not going to stick our head in the sand,” he told me.?

The key with making AI work for you vs having it work on you is decentralized control, Jamie says. He has a direct report leading all AI efforts within the company and estimates that the current team of 2,000 working on AI functions will expand to 5,000 in a few years. That’s crucial because, when all of the AI work resides with the internal tech team, “people think it's a technology issue, where it's not. It's a management issue.”

If you make it a management issue, then everyone thinks about how AI can transform their orgs. He explained how he’s made AI everyone’s job: “So when we have business reviews now, we want you coming in saying, ‘Hey, I have these five AI projects, can I do them? And I have a rough feeling about how machine learning works, how generative AI works, or how data gets used.’”

He gave the example of the teams responsible for “know your customer” requirements, the legal rules that require banks to know whose money it is they’re managing. “We torture clients sometimes with know your customer, anti-money laundering. That's being automated, and so that not only is the cost coming down, but the speed is much faster, and we're pissing off a lot less clients. But the managers have to be thinking, ‘My god, I can do the next level. Why can't it automatically do X?’ And then you have [AI] agents where it actually doesn't just tell the manager something, it actually takes action… There'll be a million things like that, which just taking actions on behalf of the company, and were comfortable is better than what a human being would be doing.”

Currently, JPMorgan is running 400 AI projects. Jamie forecasts that that will be 800 a year from now and 1,200 in two years.

He’s got his plan for leaving the company — but he’s not sharing it just yet

Jamie thinks success planning is critical for any company, and he’s walking the talk. “The most? important thing I'm going to do, my last final full measure of devotion in this company is getting the right person in that job. I think we have several choices, by the way, which is very good…? I care how you deal with our tellers, our guards, and our receptionists as much as I care how you deal with CEOs. It's those 300,000 people that matter, and we have to set up right for everybody.”

Finally, he thinks two letters are critical for your career: EQ

I love ending these interviews with career advice and Jamie’s wasn’t about developing skills or chasing your passion. It was about how you carry yourself with others. “I always say work smart,” he say. “So many people are so inefficient, and I just think you can develop that, work smart skills, develop your EQ. A lot of people have plenty of brains, but EQ is: Do you trust me? Do I communicate well? When you walk in a room, do people feel good you're there? Can you lay something out? Can you communicate really clearly? Are you responsive to people? Do people know you have a heart?

I'm on the road a lot. When people here sometimes they are having a little bit of peer problems, but they don't try to fix them. But what a good person can do is sit down, not just with the boss… go see your peers and say, ‘Hey, here's some things I need you to do for me. Tell me what's not working for you, either with me or parts of the company I'm responsible for.’

And so you see people doing that, they'll make it better. And it doesn't matter whether you and I are friends. If you go to the best sports team, they work well. They may not be the best friends, but they work well together. They know their jobs, they get it done, they trust each other.?

It's Ted Lasso: Develop the team, develop the people, create a system of trust, and it works over time.”

How have you developed your EQ or found new markets for employees? Tell me how — and why — in the comments.?

Join the conversation on LinkedIn and subscribe to the This is Working newsletter. You can also hear my interview with Jamie on the latest This is Working podcast. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving difficult problems. See more from Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, CVS CEO Karen Lynch, PwC’s Bob Moritz, Merck KGaA CEO Belén Garijo, Athletic Brewing CEO Bill Shufelt, AI leader Fei-Fei Li, former US President Barack Obama, filmmaker Spike Lee, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, cosmetics legend Bobbi Brown, F1’s Toto Wolff, and many more.