Five principles for AI-powered leadership

How can managers supercharge their leadership and teams through AI, especially amid anxiety over AI’s impact on future job prospects? 

Here are five things we learned when this question was considered in a recent CMI web event.

Watch now – AI-Powered Leadership: Driving Change in High-Performance Teams

1. Make AI part of the team

AI is here to stay. While there is anxiety about what impact this will have on jobs, there is an opportunity for managers to shape the future. 

“We don’t know what the future looks like, but we know it’s going to be different,” said Professor Phil Hanna, dean of education at Queen’s University Belfast. 

“AI inside teams, as supported by team leaders, is not going to be an easy journey, but it’s certainly one that we can do.” 

Managers need to “redesign roles, not just workflow”, said tech industry executive Maggie Buggie CMgr CCMI. 

“Implementing AI is not just a technology project; it’s a human capital strategy. Focusing only on the processes misses the opportunity to evolve the capabilities of your team.” 

As AI automates repeatable, entry-level tasks, managers should shift their focus from hiring entry-level employees to upskilling their workforce and accelerating the promotion of existing talent. 

“Our job as leaders and managers is to reframe the conversation from one of job replacement to career acceleration and preparing for the future,” Maggie said. “This is how you turn anxiety into motivation.”

2. Remain close to the real-world workflow

If AI initiatives are too high up, they will often “fail to align with real-world workflows”, said Maggie. Instead, keep the transformation close to those who work on the front line. That way, there is a deep understanding of the problems that these systems need to solve. 

But organisations do not need to start big. It’s about choosing what works for the organisation – and avoiding a huge explosion in AI tools, which can end up wasting time (the opposite of what AI promises). 

To get started with AI, Maggie says to pick one task in your personal or professional workflow and use AI to augment it over a 30-day trial period. Then expand this to the team, and finally consider laying the foundations for scaling it. 

“It’s not just about saving time, it’s about building the intuition that you will need to lead and manage others within your team,” she said. “You cannot lead or manage where you will not go yourself.” 

3. Buy, don’t build

There can be an instinct to build your own AI tools to fit your organisation. But Maggie says the data shows that this is a mistake.