Summary: As we move from working around the AI wave to working with it, changes are required not just in how employees upskill themselves, but also how employers recognize the shift required to integrate the emergent AI ethos into management and leadership practices that leverage the value extracted from the AI capabilities throughout an organization and the ecosystem in which it operates. This is a One-way street!
The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) across growing business use cases has created a paradigm shift in how leaders manage and how managers lead to fully exploit the benefits of this new technology. Although the technology itself is not new, the explosive applications and possibilities that are now emerging are challenging the conventional management paradigms and creating new ones. This shift is also reminding us that rather than creating yet another layer of complexity in how we lead and manage, going back to the basics is going to be our salvation; invoking first principles whenever things get out of our hands or seem too complex.
What makes this viewpoint more urgent is that until recently many companies and executives got away with working around AI capabilities. Now they must learn to work with it!
AI systems write, design, code, and complete “routine” tasks at blinding speeds. It can help lawyers submit well-researched briefs, business leaders draft emails, create agendas, and quickly prepare for difficult discussions and critical negotiations.
It can do all of that with just a few, right voice commands—and yet it can’t do the hard work of leadership itself, especially at the boundaries, where siloed organizations adopting AI workflows and agents can run into problems.
Why?
Focus on the Boundaries: Mostly because when crossing functional boundaries AI often fails to bridge across them in a seamless way as most humans can do. Additionally, generative AI cannot build visionary ideas, inspire teams, make judgment calls, build trust among stakeholders, provide a feeling of safety, hold team members accountable, or generate original ideas. It fails at building something that only well-integrated teams can do and deliver. This aspects of what we do will continue to remain deeply human.
So, this emerging zeitgeist is challenging the conventional management and leadership thinking. The leaders who will thrive in the AI era will be those who blend human consciousness and their humanity with digital fluency and adaptiveness with first principles’ thinking. They will use AI workflows to collaborate and to augment their abilities. They will leverage their own generative learning and leave the adaptive learning to their AI-infused helpers.
Much of their routine workloads will be absolved by the AI capabilities, freeing them to do the work only humans can do. So, they will treat this AI moment not as a threat to their future but as an opportunity to highlight on those aspects of their leadership that only humans can excel at: judgment, accountability, intuition, empathy, and creativity. The new ethos is going to be work less and create more value.
Further, they can become effective managers and leaders by understanding their work better and doing the work that only they can do at each level, delegating the remaining workload to their teams, commensurate with individual capacity and responsibility. My own experience working with managers and executives at all levels throughout my 25 years in the coaching business is that they are engaged in doing more technical work than the right management work that only they can do.
Of course, no one is totally immune from doing some technical work, but by default most lean in on doing the technical work that is right in front of their noses, that which can be easily delegated to several levels down their own station.
A Shift from Tasks Workflow
Traditionally, work has been done in functional and siloed organizations as tasks that get delivered across these siloes to the next functional organization. Here, the rules of how hand-offs between functional boundaries have been well understood and teams muscled together making this structure work well in most cases in the past. With the emergence of AI, however, many interrelated tasks in these siloed areas are now being seen as a value-delivery stream, which requires workflow mapping for designing automated workflows. So, the focus has now shifted from optimizing individual tasks to making efficient workflows that deliver value to the end point in a seamless way.
This workflow paradigm eliminates the boundaries that previously defined how each functional area added value in discrete work packages within their own areas of work in a command-and-control management structure. In the emerging workflow paradigm, the right design and priority for an effective outcome is context management, where the responsible team manages the end-to-end workflow to deliver the result and value to the intended “customer,” fully aware of the context in which this value makes sense.
This is where the team looks at each boundary crossing (from the legacy design) in the workflow and makes the cross-boundary transition seamless for it to work, eliminating these boundary barriers. The team’s charter now focusses on how to create a single seamless workflow crossing the previously recognized work areas—functional departments—and deliver an AI-powered work package across these boundaries. Soon, these boundaries will disappear, too, and functional organizations will come together in unprecedented ways, managed not under command-and-control, but by previously agreed-to context. Leaders facing this transition must be able to deal with ambiguity, show resilience, and have patience as the new AI regime becomes the norm.
In this emergent structure, leaders will need to give teams a set of guardrails (clear values and decision rights) and establish new definitions of quality while fostering a sense of trust and collaboration as new challenges emerge and business conditions evolve. There are major areas where only humans can provide the type of leadership and guidance required in today’s emerging organizations: Inspiring teams with a compelling vision; allowing for judgment call to preempt AI; creating accountability; establishing a safe environment; and, finally, trust. Yet another reason for a human intervention at a boundary is that AI systems produce deeply vertical responses. To make sense of them in a systems context someone with lateral thinking must intervene to make a judgment call and make that response meaningful or discard it in preference of something that makes sense.
With this rubric senior team members can correct mid-flight, unlike AI, which corrects only after a failure.
A Rubric for the Next Generation of Leaders
If the role of the leader is evolving, then so must organizations’ approach to building their leadership bench. The goal here should not just be to develop leaders who have technical fluency; mastery of the human condition is just as critical in a world where models can draft, reason, act—but cannot lead, inspire, and show empathy.
Key attributes: Make explicit the leadership attributes your company needs right now and the behaviors you will reward. If economic and competitive shocks are particularly frequent or particularly acute in your industry, for instance, you may want to focus on resilience and optimism as the key character attributes to find and build in your high-potential employees.
Create a step-change in learning culture—learn-apply-revise cycle: Establish a culture in which premortems, after-action reviews, and other feedback mechanisms are the norm rather than the exception. This has long been the standard approach in the armed services, airlines, software industry, and the medical community. Here, achievements are celebrated, failures are painstakingly reviewed, and lessons are codified.
Senior leaders can show their commitment to creating learning environments by engaging directly with high-potential employees, in forums or town halls, to share questions and crowdsource answers to some of their biggest management challenges.
Invest in building trust and servant leadership: Organizations must actively cultivate core leadership qualities such as wisdom, empathy, and trust—and they must give the development of these attributes the same attention they do to the development of new IT systems or operating models. That will mean providing time for leaders to do the inner work required to lead others effectively—that is, reflecting, sharing insights with other C-suite leaders, and otherwise considering what success will mean for themselves and the organization. How can they build and sustain organizations that can remain viable long term? Indeed, as a sign that the leadership journey is just as important as the outcomes, organizations should publicly celebrate or promote leaders who demonstrate a commitment to the organization’s broader mission rather than self.
Protect your time/energy for sustained performance: The highest-performing leaders create conditions that allow them to reach their personal best at peak moments; they recognize that, over the course of their leadership tenures, some moments are simply more important than others—so they optimize for those critical inflection points. They fiercely protect their calendars, so they can focus on right leadership tasks that only they can do, and they carve out time explicitly for recovery and regeneration. With AI now taking over the routine part of an executive’s workload, they must free-up their available time to focus on the right priorities.
Acknowledgement: This article is adapted from a January 12 article in McKinsey Weekend Read.
