Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Episode Content:

10 Characteristics Business Leaders Will Need In The Age Of AI

Maureen Metcalf, CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, provided this article as a companion to her podcast with James Ritchie-Dunham, David Dinwoodie, and Suzie Lewis, Back to the Future…of Work.

Most of us interact with AI in some way during our daily tasks. With all the discussions about artificial intelligence, one of the biggest questions is what leaders must do to prepare. To answer this question, I used my personal experience experimenting with ChatGPT-4; read the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs 2023 report; read the Harvard Business Review article draft “Navigating Complexity and Learning with Agility: Keys for the Future of Work” by David Dinwoodie, Suzie Lewis, and Jim Ritchie-Dunham (currently only available in Spanish); and interviewed Neil Sahoto, AI advisor to the U.N., on my company podcast (read his accompanying article here).

Here is my top ten list of items leaders will need to do well in the AI-powered future. Most are skills leaders already need to have mastered. From that vantage point, part of the question becomes: what should we stop doing so that we can delegate tasks to AI while refining the skills that require human wisdom and contact?

1. Communication

Leaders must continue to focus on basic leadership skills involving relating to others—communication, collaboration, negotiation, facilitation, social influence, and active listening.

2. Growth Mindset

During the massive opportunities created by change, we must continue cultivating our growth mindset, curiosity, lifelong learning, and ability to unlearn and stop doing things that no longer serve our mission.

3. Adaptiveness

Using what we learn through our learning and growth mindset, we need to enhance our ability to anticipate change and proactively initiate aligned change initiatives. To do this, we need to build our adaptiveness, resilience, and business agility.

4. Emotional Intelligence

Because we will ask our teams to make changes that often feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, we need to amplify our emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-management, relationship awareness, empathy, building trust and psychological safety, and other skills that help us relate to and inspire others.

5. Abundance Mindset

It is easy for each of us to struggle with uncertainty and fall into fear during uncertain times. Developing an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset allows us to reframe uncomfortable situations into opportunities. Collectively, we have the knowledge, wisdom, resources, skills, and attitude to meet the challenges ahead.

6. Domain Expertise

We continue to need to excel in our areas of domain expertise and understand the latest technological developments in those areas. We must remain current in our domains, whether that is finance, HR, or medicine.

7. AI Skills

As we move from focusing solely on human skills to requiring the ability to leverage AI successfully, we need to know what questions to ask AI to get the results we want. Leaders will need to know (and have teams who know) how to leverage AI to get useful information and get work done. The better we are at asking the right questions, the better our AI assistants will be at providing useful information.

8. Analytical Skills

We will need to leverage what we learn in partnership with AI-generated information. To do this, we will need strong analytical and problem-solving skills, as well as systems thinking ability and the associated mindset, 360-degree thinking.

9. Creativity

Take a creative perspective to identify areas AI will not consider or to create solutions AI would not come up with. Know where to experiment with possible solutions.

10. Risk Awareness

Understand the risks AI presents and continually evolve governance processes to address these risks.

Final Thoughts: Unlearn And Delegate

In addition to these skills, we will need to develop the ability to unlearn and delegate. AI can now do many analytical tasks people have been doing. We are currently in the early stages of AI usage, and I like to frame AI digital workers as interns. We are responsible for the actions of our interns. Likewise, with AI, we are responsible for the accuracy of our work.

AI can process data much faster than humans. When prompted properly, AI programs produce reliable information much more quickly and efficiently than humans. The results are reliable for specific applications when the AI has been programmed with specific tasks and tested.

With that in mind, ChatGPT-4 can “hallucinate” (state false facts and cite false sources). It is crucial to set parameters around assigning and checking the AI’s work. I conducted several experiments, specifically with ChatGPT-4. It provided a strong starting point for writing. But in every instance, I asked it to cite and verify sources. In other words, I treated it like an intern; I knew I needed to verify its work until it had proven itself.

My company is currently experimenting with an AI “digital twin” that our team uses for teaching videos and social media. I encourage other leaders to look into ways they can use AI to increase their productivity and enhance their impact. At the same time, there are inherent risks with any new technology. Leaders who understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and prepare themselves and their workforces have the greatest opportunity to smartly mitigate risks while still experimenting and learning in the process.