AI in Leadership Development: Focus on Leading, Not Speeding

Is it just me, or does AI (Artificial Intelligence) seem to be everywhere and nowhere all at the same time?

On the one hand, CEOs can’t stop talking about AI, and billions of dollars in AI investment are pouring into the economy, arguably, boosting it in ways that obscure fundamental weaknesses.

On the other hand, many of the AI investments made by big companies are going unused by employees and failing to produce productivity. From my clients’ first-hand accounts over the last year, employee reticence is a multi-dimensional function of confusion (“Which AI should I use for what purpose and why won’t anyone train me on this?”), frustration (“Fact-checking the damn thing takes more time than doing it myself!”), and anxiety (“I worry my boss plans to fire me once I’ve trained the AI to do my job.”)

There’s no question that AI is disrupting and revolutionizing the workplace. With good reason, many people are concerned for their jobs. Leading thinkers believe that human leadership will always have a place in the age of AI. While I believe it’s true that humans can bring empathy and nuanced communication to the workplace that machines can’t and learn to work with AI to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, I also think there are a few fundamentals that AI in leadership development must focus on so leaders can stay relevant in an AI-flooded world. 

In short, the most important function of human leaders going forward will be to define the game that AI is playing. Leaders must decide where we’re going (less about how to get there) and stay attuned to the humans on the journey.

Key Takeaways

• Forget the “Superworker” hype—you can’t keep up with AI. Trying to work faster or harder just to compete with AI’s inhuman speed is a recipe for burnout and failure. As I learned with the ‘Superwoman’ craze, being “Superhuman” is never the solution.
• Your new job is deciding where to go, not how to get there. AI is great at execution and finding the “how,” but it needs human leaders to define the “what” and the “why.” Focus your energy on establishing and managing the desired outcomes and the ultimate purpose of the work.
• Your value lies in building and guiding human alliances. Since ultimate success is judged by human stakeholders, your essential role wil focus on aligning people, understanding power dynamics, and ensuring the AI’s output truly meets users’ (often changing) needs from start to finish.
• Passion is your greatest non-AI superpower. When AI can accelerate and improve the routine parts of your job, the human element that remains is heart. Finding work you truly enjoy gives you the drive to evolve and stay relevant, adding something to the process that no machine can replicate.

Take It From A Superwoman, Burnout Hides Behind “Super” Anything

One of the leading thinkers in the corporate culture space, Josh Bersin, has dubbed the new strategy for surviving and thriving in the AI era as “Superworking.” According to Josh, a Superworker must reengineer their job to keep it: “Superworker: An employee empowered and supported by AI. In a world where AI agents support every employee, a Superworker can step up their value, productivity, and output by learning to optimize their use of AI systems.” He marries this concept with the idea that Supermanagers will become experts at change and innovation. (Like this is a new concept?)

I believe that many employees and managers will need to learn how to partner with AI. But I have a real concern that, following this logic, to keep our jobs in the future, we’ll have to learn to “keep up” with AI. 

This is a recipe for failure, because we can’t “keep up” with AI.

AI operates at inhuman speeds. When AI isn’t making your project run late because it hates the prompt you put in, AI is collapsing time completely. It’s transforming the task that used to take you weeks into an invisible, mechanized process that runs in seconds. It’s becoming the true “Superemployee” that every boss salivates over: fast, cheap, and non-whiny.

So if you’re going to try to compete by being “super,” you’re going to lose.

The last “Super” employee craze I remember was Superwoman. Women went into the workplace against the doubts of a society predicting their families would fall apart and their husbands would go hungry (being unable to feed themselves). The solution? To become Superwoman! Working twice as hard by day and being the perfect lover/wife/mother/daughter by all-the-other-times-of-day-and-night. 

This was the deal I made with myself and society when I entered the workforce in the 1980’s and for a long time, I believed it could work. Until it didn’t. Until I found success and realized the price was too high.

Trust me, being Superhuman is not a solution to anything.

Don’t Try To Beat AI At Its Own Game, Change Your Game

Productivity is the holy grail of organizational success. And productivity matters! It’s the underpinning of profit and impact. Unfortunately, global productivity is growing at a very slow rate. What this macroeconomic reality means for us as workers is that the pressure is increasing exponentially for investors, stakeholders, and CFOs to squeeze every ounce of productivity and efficiency they can out of their businesses–mostly from the ranks of their most expensive assets–human employees.

Even when AI isn’t working well, we’ll continue to see more layoffs attributed to it, as recently seen at Amazon. 

But to keep your job, don’t try to compete with AI. As I mentioned above, you can’t win. You can’t be faster or smarter than AI. What you can do is use it to be sure it’s getting the right things done with its speed and smarts. Here are three ways to think about using AI to make a human difference that will help you stay employed.

1. Define Success for AI

Shape your work around answering this question: What outcome should AI help produce? Why is this important?

AI is really good at doing stuff, but who decides what it does and why it does it? Imagine AI is a work crew, really good at bulldozing through barriers and uprooting weeds to transform a chaotic, messy, and disorganized abandoned building into a new structure. But to what end? Does that neighborhood block need a park or a high-rise? A community center or grocery store? Lean on AI to figure out HOW you’re going to succeed, and focus your own efforts on WHAT the AI investment is designed to produce, WHO it benefits and WHY it’s worth doing.

As tempting as it is to ask AI what the best outcome would be, the actual value of the outcome is a judgment call. The ultimate judges will be the stakeholders. Stakeholders are human. No matter how good AI is, it can’t get into a human’s head. It can look at data, and it can predict what humans might do with the data, but it can’t know the actual humans who will value the park versus the grocery store. That’s a human’s job to do: to know the humans who will be affected, to listen to their needs and concerns, to weigh the data, and to advocate and persuade decision-makers into action.

Think this is something your boss doesn’t understand? Oh, she does! CEOs are collaborating with AI all the time as “thought partners,” so you should, too. Get ahead of it (to stay ahead of it) by helping to determine the endgame and using AI to steer everyone toward achieving it.

2. Build Human Alliances

It’s a logical follow-on from the strategy above. Humans will be the ones who determine whether you and your work are successful, so get plugged into the humans! Work on aligning with them and aligning them to each other. Understand people’s priorities, where the axes of power lie, where the faults in relationships threaten to bring down important agreements, and engage them in winning strategies they’ll credit to you.

A traditional software developer could focus on executing a business requirements document to be successful. Now, AI will assemble half of the requirements and construct half of the solution to meet them. In the future, to realize the promise of greater quality and quantity of output, an AI-assisted software development leader will need to become an expert at ensuring that requirements effectively meet users’ (ever-changing) needs throughout the end-to-end process. They’ll have to spend time with the users on the back end of the process to ensure the output is optimized for maximum adoption. Yes, others have that responsibility, too, but a good technical leader will have more opportunity to build alliances with them, too!  

Can AI help you with this? Absolutely. Can it do it for you? Absolutely not!

3. Find And Mine Your Passion

This one has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with human success. AI is coming to take what it can from human labor and accelerate it. If what you can do can be sped up and improved by AI, then you’re going to be out of luck, unless you add something other than speed to the process. 

What you can add that no machine ever can is heart.

It sounds silly, but it’s true. When you do work you really enjoy, you gain a legit* superpower to find a way to keep doing it, even when the world tries to take it away. 

* “Legitimate” superpowers are the magical abilities humans have to use creativity, imagination, and enthusiasm to overcome obstacles, see around corners, and enroll others in complex efforts. The “work twice as hard” superpowers only look “super” until they burn you out.

For example, I know someone who did writing and editing for years. She was good at it. She got paid a lot of money to do it. 

AI took her job away.

A few months of soul-searching showed her that her passion wasn’t really the writing and editing, but the creative process itself. She used this understanding to dig deep and focus on her perfect job. A few months later, she has a new job working for a successful theatre company. Her new job also involves writing and editing (supported by AI), but she didn’t get the job because she was a good writer or editor, she got it because her passion is creativity and expression. She’s spent the last twenty years volunteering for theaters, museums, and other institutions of creative expression. She knows the people who create–and those they create for–inside and out because she is one of them. Her passion got her the job of her dreams building on her core skillset, and she’ll use AI to help her do it even better from now on.

I’m sure that as we all work more with AI we’ll find ways to evolve these strategies, but for now, this is how I see my clients learning to succeed as AI comes into their lives and careers. 

Note: For the curious, I did use AI to write this article. Mostly for research, to summarize the takeaways and find a title. What do you think? Was it a good partnering effort? Let me know your thoughts!