How is AI Affecting Leadership?

AI is already starting to revolutionize the way we work, but how will it affect your job as a leader and manager? Here is how the revolution will unfold and how you can be on the winning side.

The leadership revolution

AI is accelerating a leadership revolution that has been decades in the making. Traditionally, managers were viewed as the most knowledgeable people in the room. However, the role of a manager has evolved; it’s not about being the most knowledgeable anymore, but rather about assembling a team capable of devising the smartest solutions. Now, with the advent of AI, the ‘most knowledgeable’ might not even be a human. This can be a significant opportunity if you can understand and harness the power of AI, just as you understand and harness the power of your team.

The power of pattern recognition

AI’s intelligence mirrors that of managers and leaders, excelling in pattern recognition - the secret ingredient behind successful leaders. Leaders often attribute their skill development to personal and observed experience, a testament to the value of pattern recognition. You slowly work out what works in different situations and do more of it.

Pattern recognition is an invaluable skill that most experts develop over time. It’s like watching a movie that you’ve seen many times before and can predict the ending. When you are skilled in a particular area, you begin to anticipate outcomes based on past experiences, which enables more effective decision-making.

AI’s proficiency in pattern recognition offers both opportunities and challenges. It has the capability to streamline leaders’ workflow by automating routine tasks like CV screening, allowing them focus on more demanding and interpersonal tasks. However, leaders need to also recognize how AI raises the bar across the board, demanding new level of adaptability and strategic thinking.

Where human leaders make a difference

As advanced as AI is becoming, there are some key situations where human qualities simply outweigh its capabilities. These situations are those that are the most challenging, but are ultimately the ones where you can really make a difference and stand out as a leader.

The types of situations where this applies are:

1. Emotional and political. Organizations are messy because of their member’s hidden agendas. As an effective leader you will learn to ‘read the air’ and over time you will understand how colleagues think and react. You will find a way of navigating all these competing agendas and differing styles to reach a successful outcome. That is incredibly hard to do for a human and impossible for AI because it has no way of understanding unspoken nuances.
2. Real time. AI can show you the consensus solution to most management challenges. That is fine if you have time on your side. It is useless in the middle of a meeting when the tension is rising, your agenda is being sabotaged and you need to act quickly to save the day.
3. Volatile. What worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow, simply because the world keeps on changing – new information arrives, teams change, agendas change, the unexpected happens. AI can give you an answer for now, but not for tomorrow. As an effective leader, you must anticipate what will happen, not react to what has happened. You should have enough deep knowledge of your organization to predict events, or at least have a good guess, whereas AI’s predictions for the future are about as reliable as Mystic Meg’s crystal ball.
4. Ambiguous. The more information AI has, the better it performs. Just like humans. The difference is that you will learn to make decisions in uncertainty and with incomplete information. You must be able to use judgement and build your understanding from similar situations in the past. Ambiguity confuses AI which has been known to “hallucinate” or simply make up answers.
5. Unusual or unique. AI depends on volumes of repetitive data to draw conclusions. The world of leadership is not always like that. You will keep on encountering situations which are unusual or nearly unique. With AI, you must take the consensus and theoretical solution which it provides and adapt it to your own unique culture and context rather than straightforward applying it.

All of this is very good news for you as a leader or manager. AI can help you with many of the routine and predictable aspects of management, but it cannot do the difficult stuff.

This means you can, and have to, focus on the essence of leadership as defined by the late Henry Kissinger: “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been”. This is the challenge of change which you as a leader have to master. Change is like kryptonite to AI because it has each of the five characteristics above: it is political, emotional, real time, ambiguous, volatile and each change programme is unique.

AI means you not only have to raise your game: you have to change your game. You have to reskill as well as upskill. AI-proof skills are becoming more essential and are all about dealing with change, challenge, people, politics and emotion.

Inevitably, many mediocre managers will struggle to rise to the challenge of leading with AI. They will be on the wrong side of the revolution. This is your chance to shine. Rise to the challenge of true leadership in an AI world and you will find yourself on the right side of the revolution. Welcome to a brave new world.