What is AI doing to leadership?
Two months ago, I left the corporate environment. One of the biggest reasons? Like many, I was disillusioned and dissapointed in the way my organization’s leadership was navigating the AI craze.
For more than two years, my organization’s leadership had been trying to hype up what the adoption of AI would do for our customers, and for its employees. It’s all they could talk about in any and all forums of communication. The problem was, they were totally disconncted from what was happening for the average employee in the company.
Though talked about incessantly, the way the organization was utilizing AI was hardly transformational. In fact, most employees began to roll their eyes whenever an executive got up and talked about AI, because they seemed completely disconnected from reality.
Couple this disconnected perspective with large layoffs so that the organization could “reinvest into AI”, and the result was a complete deterioration of trust between executive leadership and the vast majority of the company.
I have reflected on this a lot in the past few months. AI is certainly very exciting, and we are seeing ways that AI is changing the world for good. We can certainly imagine the potential it will have to change life and work in so many areas. I can understand why the executives in my organization and countless others have spoken up about their hopes and vision for how AI will transform their businesses.
I think the problem that I experienced, and many others that I have since talked to have shared similar sentiment, is that many leaders seem to have allowed their focus on AI to completely remove their focus on humans.
What do I mean by this?
Humans are emotional and nuanced. They require tact, sensitivity, and an appeal to both logic and emotion when trying to get through to them. Most leaders talk about AI through concepts like productivity, efficiency, and savings. Most employees are conditioned to be put into fight or flight mode when they hear terms like that. What they really hear is, “we’re asking you to do more, with less, and for the same amount of money”.
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What human is inspired by this kind of rhetoric? What group of people feel excited to come to work when they hear these terms? Most aren’t.
And then there’s the actual day to day implications of executives pushing hard on AI adoption. For so many, what this has actually meant is more time cleaning up AI slop that others are putting out around them rather than doing impactful work for their customers.
I recently spoke to a manager who told me that they are spending hours of every week combing through all the AI output from their team and partners that is hallucinating and making all kinds of mistakes that have real implications to the business if they go through to production. AI, in the context their organization is pushing for use, has made life significantly harder for this manager. All while they hear their executive team talk about the great things AI is doing for their business, and the structural incentives keep putting more and more pressure on teams to use more and more AI.
If leaders want to really inspire their teams and increase the adoption of AI, there’s a few things I think they need to start doing:
First, they need to focus back on their people. At the end of the day, good as AI is, the need for great people still remains the main priority for companies. AI cannot replace the work that most skilled workers are doing. So, leaders need to prioritize understanding how their people feel, what they are thinking, and what needs to be true in order to set these people up to succeed in the context of delivering for the business.
Second, leaders need a more thoughtful approach to AI adoption. Go talk to the people in your organization and you’ll quickly learn that AI adoption means something very vague. This means everyone is feeling pressure to adopt something they can’t understand and articulate, which leads to a mess. Leaders need to give clarity on the outcomes they are looking for regarding AI adoption so that people can anchor their adoption to driving those outcomes.
Finally, leaders need to be better at measuring what actually matters. We’ve all seen leaders getting caught up in the number of agents being built, the reports that have been automated, the alleged hours that have been saved. But honestly, from my experience, so much of it is meaningless and self serving. We’re incentivizing people to make it appear as if they are doing meaningful things with AI, instead of actually doing meaningful things with AI. Know what really actually matters for your customers, your employees, and your business. Measure those things, and test how AI is helping enable greater effectiveness for those things, and cut away all the endless possibilities for noise in the system.
I admit, I’m no AI expert. I don’t lead a large company. I probably have a lot of ignorance to the difficulties for these senior leaders trying to lead through this age of AI. But I have been in a unique position to understand how people really feel about how AI is rolling out in their company. As an HR practioner and then leadership coach, I have been the confidant to many people across all levels of organizations. Admittedly, some places seem to be getting it right. Many however, are losing the trust and respect of their people and seem unable to understand how or why.
I hope to see things shift in the next year or two. I hope to see leaders recognize the loss of focus on people as they have over emphasized AI. I want nothing more than to see the future workplace be better than any that has existed previously. My personal belief is that this will happen not as leaders place less emphasis on humans, but more.
