This is about me being worried. It’s about what we expect our leaders and managers not only to do but to be that requires new learning in the age of AI.
We’re automating! A while back I had a client who was automating multiple complex financial functions in her office. Transactions that took her 30-plus-person team a week to execute end-to-end and to the penny would now take just a few hours on a Thursday afternoon. Her message to staff? “This change is great! It will free us up to be more strategic.” She said this with a smile because she genuinely felt she was liberating her workforce. She was a well-liked and trusted leader, having worked her way up in the organization and knew her stuff — and her people — over the years. Yet …
Is she kidding? More strategic? I was on client site, tucked away down on a lower level of the building with no place for anyone to sit and visit. But boy, even absent a chair to plop down in, here were people lining up, leaning over my cube. Nervous. Angry. In a veritable snit. Asking in loud whispers: “What the hell does she mean, ‘more strategic?’ What am I actually going to be doing? I don’t see it. Am I going to lose my job? This isn’t what I was hired for. I’ve been here 12-plus years …” Well, you get the picture.
Oh, and we’re restructuring too … Automating meant roles and responsibilities were shifting around, too. Some teams were being re-blended. New ones were stood up. “Supervisors” were upset because they weren’t going to be called “supervisors” anymore. Same GS levels. Same pay. New title: now, they were Team Leads. What exactly did that mean? And their bosses, the Branch Chiefs? They had to meet and talk about how they were going to, ahem, work together. Work together? Yes, because now business strategies, performance metrics, outcomes and resources were to be shared concerns they’d manage across branches — not branch by branch. Gone were the days of unilateral decision-making. You had to be consultative. Consultative?
Change-ready? There is widespread discussion about how AI will free managers to focus on strategy, succession planning, coaching, mentoring, and stakeholder relationships. But no mention — and here’s my worry — about how proficient or prepared they are to coach or mentor. Or to be a systems thinker? Or to lead strategy work and relationship-building? My question is, what are we doing about this gap?
Agile and remote meant change too. Countless managers have attained their current positions as SMEs — subject matter experts — not necessarily because they were great managers. Remember when agile teams became “the thing?” While agile teams adapted quickly, many managers struggled because it was hard for them to “see” that leading an effective agile team meant the way they showed up as a leader had to change, too. We saw the same phenomenon when we went remote and managers had to learn how to lead remote teams. AI brings a similar challenge. As we learn how to use AI, what should leaders be learning about leading? How are we equipping them to help their teams anticipate and navigate the organizational and human implications of AI?
Doing vs being: Who needs to learn what? It is easy to focus on AI learning and be seduced away from the reality that the way to lead in the AI age needs to change also. What are the new leadership imperatives? What does leading look like that’s different from even 3-5 years ago? What is at risk if don’t manage the behavioral side of growing an AI-infused organization?
What our client did. When my client said her team could now be more strategic, they were embarking on new ways of managing their work and leading their people. Here’s some of what we did to tilt them in a new direction:
- We engaged teams, multi-functionally and at all levels, to define what the “new” organization would be like, how to structure it, and the impact of new titles.
- We debated how people would work together and talk with each other.
- We explored what it’d mean for people to acclimate to working differently and doing different work.
- We convened work session upon work session and asked people to build scenarios, construct dilemmas: Here are things that go wrong, that fall through the cracks, and things we always wished we could do but didn’t think were possible. Here’s the “old” way we “used” to deal with problems and how we will deal with them going forward.
- We had lots of meetings, took lots of notes, and made lots of revisions.
- We reported progress, asked for input, tested outcomes, and kept everybody in the loop.
- We led a series of whole-org meetings (all hands!) to develop performance metrics together! Never done before.
Perfect? Hardly! We saw resistance. A few people left of their own accord because they didn’t like the changes they saw. There were missteps we had to correct. We took the feedback and adjusted course. But, over the course of a summer, the organization began to transform. You could see it happening.
Play to where the puck is going to be. Leading means playing to where your organization will be. That happens when leaders listen to people and “get” where they aspire and where they worry, where they’re succeeding and where they’re innovating. It is time to put building this capability at the top of our learning priorities right up there with AI skill-building. Being leaderly requires a skill set just as being a SME requires its own skill set. It’s not about “where you sit” anymore. It’s how you show up, how you make way for others to grow, and how you model observable behaviors that inspire people to work together, support each other, and — yes — thrive in the land of AI.
Nina Kern is principal of InterrogativesWork, LLC, a change advisory service dedicated to helping clients and consultants plan and implement organizational change. She has supported a wide variety of organizational change efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, PMOs, performance improvement initiatives, org-wide policy and culture change, and more. She has an MS in Organization Development, an MA in Communications, graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP), and is ProSci trained. More of Nina’s writings on organizational change can be found on GovLoop, Change Management Review, and Government Executive.
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