Leading People in the Age of AI

SUMMARY

Do you find that getting other people to come along on the journey with you, by inspiring and leading them and all those other great things we get taught to do, is becoming a little more challenging as this world speeds up?

Well, that's the experience of most leaders in the world today. This week, I will show you why that's the case and how to make it much more enjoyable.

As we go into this people leadership area, I want you to bring along with you what you’ve learned about yourself and your ability to put meaning on things: Your identity, those things that are holding you back, those roadblocks and all the things that you’re doing to overcome them because just learning people leadership skills alone is not enough.

You need to keep working on yourself so that you implement the things that you learn in the most resourceful way.

So, why is it different in the age of AI?

Well, things have gotten faster, and there's a lot more uncertainty. There's a different set of things that people are anxious about; we’ve come through a pandemic and all those things, and now, we are looking at how AI is going to be doing things that we did other ways before. And when change happens, it brings a level of uncertainty.

Let's look at these 3 particular areas that I want to work on with you.

The first area is RESILIENCE.

The second area is RELATIONSHIPS.

The third area that we're going to talk about is RESULTS.

So, there you have the 3 elements of people leadership: resilience, relationship skills, and how you get results.

In the coming weeks, we're going to unpack them and go deeper in a lot of areas. We're going to discover the transformational shifts that you need to make in each of those areas.

Well, that's it from me for another week.

Join me again next week as we continue this journey in PEOPLE LEADERSHIP, and I help you get a new definition of RESILIENCE.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you find that getting other people to come along on the journey with you, by inspiring and leading them and all those other great things we get taught to do, is becoming a little more challenging as this world speeds up?

Well, that's the experience of most leaders in the world today. This week, I will show you why that's the case and how to make it much more enjoyable.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to go into that third area of leadership, PEOPLE LEADERSHIP. This is the area where we get other people to go on that journey with us, and it comes with its own set of challenges. So, this week, I want to help you to lead people in the age of AI.

You’ve probably heard me say, “Today's leaders need to be taught to lead in today's world.”

Over the years, there have been so many advancements, not just in technology but in many other things. What we understand about neuroscience and human performance is totally different from what it was years ago, and that's also true of the environment that we are leading in.

We came through the industrial age, the information age, the imagination age, and then we went into the VUCA age.

VUCA is the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous age. It was actually a phrase stolen from the American military, and business took it on when they realised that sounds like what we do as well.

The phrase was originally used to describe the change in the battlefield where, at the end of the Cold War, things were different, so there was a new way to lead people to get the results they wanted.

That's exactly the same for you and me.

As leaders, we’ve talked about leading yourself in your personal leadership. We've talked about your professional leadership, which is about getting a result from your own efforts.

But now, we want to step into the area that most people think leadership is in its entirety: Working with others. Leading them and getting them to go in the same direction as everybody else.

And there's way more to leadership, as we've already learned.

As we go into this people leadership area, I want you to bring along with you what you’ve learned about yourself and your ability to put meaning on things: Your identity, those things that are holding you back, those roadblocks and all the things that you’re doing to overcome them because just learning people leadership skills alone is not enough.

You need to keep working on yourself so that you implement the things that you learn in the most resourceful way.

So, why is it different in the age of AI?

Well, things have gotten faster, and there's a lot more uncertainty. There's a different set of things that people are anxious about; we’ve come through a pandemic and all those things, and now, we are looking at how AI is going to be doing things that we did other ways before. And when change happens, it brings a level of uncertainty.

There's a lot of ambiguity there where people are not sure what's going on, and leaders don't have all the answers, and that's okay.

That's the number one thing that I want you to understand: Leaders do not need to have all the answers. Not even everybody in the team (collectively) needs to have the answers. All they need to do is work together to find the answers, to work in those four key areas (those pillars of teamwork) that I talk about, and that is to communicate well, collaborate, and handle conflict and change in a healthy way.

There are 3 areas that I focus on when I'm helping to develop leaders in the area of people leadership. What I want to do this week is give them to you so that you have an understanding of where we are going. Then, in the coming weeks, I'll unpack them individually. We’ll go deeper and get an understanding of how you can use them in your own context so that you become a different leader: A leader who actually knows how to lead in today’s world.

In today's world, I'm sure if you look in your household, you don't have a black and white television anymore; you've probably got the latest colour, LED, 8K TV or whatever it is. And the reason you've done that is because it gives you a better experience. The same goes with leadership: If you continue to just work the way you used to, then you’ll get an experience that is far less quality.

The first thing that you and I need to do as leaders as we learn these new things is to unlearn some of what you’ve learned in the past.

Command and control leadership does not work, unless it's in the military or the emergency services; it has no place in the workplace.

That industrial age mentality that says: “I’m the manager, and I know everything; you don't need to know everything. I'll just tell you what you need to know as we go along” doesn't cut it anymore — it doesn't work.

You need to have people within your team who are empowered. As I have said before, you need to realise that as a leader, leadership has not taken place until you’ve developed other leaders.

Let's look at these 3 particular areas that I want to work on with you.

The first area is RESILIENCE.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back in the face of adversity.

Here's the thing: Working with people is amazing. However, it can create some stress. It can be a little bit uncomfortable. It's important that as a leader of people, you’ve got a handle on your resilience, your levels of stress, and you're managing them effectively. But when I talk to you about resilience in the coming weeks, you will understand resilience differently. We're not going to talk about the hustle-and-grind mentality and all those things that are actually depleting your ability to get more done. We're going to look at a new definition of resilience. We will look at how you can manage your stress in the current environment.

The second area is RELATIONSHIPS.

Relationships are the backbone of everything we do.

In your identity, I talked to you about the relationship you have with yourself, so what we're going to do now is talk about the relationships that you need to have with others, whether that's people who are in your team, your organisation, your suppliers, your clients, or other people in the community.

Even though we're in the age of AI, we are still a human-centric world.

You need to understand how to communicate well and how to celebrate the diversity within your organisation and team. You need to understand how to navigate conflict together and make sure that you look at each other in a way that's not competitive but collaborative.

When you have great relationships with others, you get better results. Along the way, it's less stressful; it’s more fun and enjoyable.

I don't care how far we go with AI; it's always going to be relationships that build anyone's career.

The third area that we're going to talk about is RESULTS.

In professional leadership, we talked about the results you get through your own efforts. However, as a leader of people, you need to learn how to get results through other people.

It's about passing that baton, developing trust to hand off those things to other people.

It's about learning to give responsibility to others without feeling like it makes you less than because you've given it away.

Being able to get your results through other people as a leader means that you are going to have the energy that you need to develop more leaders, to inspire your team, and to do the things that are in your role now that are perhaps different to what they were before they gave you people to lead.

So, there you have the 3 elements of people leadership: resilience, relationship skills, and how you get results.

In the coming weeks, we're going to unpack them and go deeper in a lot of areas. We're going to discover the transformational shifts that you need to make in each of those areas.

Well, that's it from me for another week.

Join me again next week as we continue this journey in PEOPLE LEADERSHIP, and I help you get a new definition of RESILIENCE.

I'll see you then.