Leading Among Knowledge Equals

In the AI era, leadership will require navigating a changing landscape with emotional Intelligence and empathy.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human thought processes by machines, especially computer systems. People have applied AI successfully in numerous areas, including continuous speech recognition, optical character and handwriting recognition, automated language translation, object recognition, text generation, game playing (chess, Go) and automated driving.

Although AI has been with us for more than seven decades, a steady cycle of over-promises and under-delivery by researchers characterized much of the history of AI between 1950 and 2000. Consequently, progress went through a few “AI winters,” during which government research funding dried up.

In stark contrast, the past two decades have witnessed giant leaps in AI to yield genuinely useful applications that have found their way into the daily lives of most people. Most recently, ChatGPT — a chatbot that generates human-like responses to questions — has captivated the public. In fact, I used ChatGPT as a reference tool for this article!

Naturally, we wonder how all this will affect our lives. Many people worry that AI will take away jobs. Will it take away one class of jobs and open opportunities for others? Will it dumb down society by reducing the need for people to think for themselves? Or will it increase creativity and innovation by taking care of routine thinking tasks and free us up to be more creative?

Will people slowly lose basic skills like writing? One could argue that people do not need to be taught to write as AI tools can complete that step. All we need is to be able to ask the right questions of AI systems.

Will AI reduce the need for teachers? After all, people can learn a lot just by chatting with a bot. Or will it free up teachers to provide more personalized education for those who need it, while letting it take care of the first or early levels of teaching?

Foreseeing which way the impact will go is challenging. The great American philosopher Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Many visionary leaders got it all wrong when predicting the impact of new technologies on society.

• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, an iconic computer hardware and software company in the 1980s and 1990s.
• “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. There now are more than 2 billion personal computers in use worldwide.
• “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” Mary Somerville, pioneering radio broadcaster, 1948.
• “The internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.” Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and inventor of ethernet, in 1995.
• When the World Wide Web arrived, people only thought about it as an infrastructure to facilitate information sharing. Nobody predicted the staggering impact that it would have on commerce.
• When social media platforms took shape initially, people only saw their benefits. Their potential for spreading misinformation and the impact this would have on society flew safely under the radar.

Why do we seem to be so bad at foreseeing the societal impacts of technological changes? Invariably, people make forecasts based on initial versions of new technologies. Almost always, scientists and engineers quickly enhance the technologies and iron out flaws to make the technologies much more widely usable.

Even more significantly, though, when many creative minds encounter new technologies, they try to apply them to problems quite different from the original purpose envisioned by the creators, and the innovation starts having impacts in many unanticipated areas.

Inevitably, the people who try to assess the societal impacts of new technologies fall woefully short because they cannot possibly imagine where creative minds could take them. These improvements in many areas then interact with each other to produce second, third and higher order impacts as the original innovation produces waves of change.

To complicate matters even more, consider that multiple technological advances occur concurrently, and their impacts interact with each other as well.

With potential path-breaking applications in many domains, we should expect AI to have far-reaching impacts on many aspects of society. The constant stream of improvements in computing and communication technologies will only serve to amplify this impact.

One could almost say that only fools will venture to make definitive predictions on the societal impacts of new technologies. Nevertheless, however incomplete our analysis is, we must make the effort to look at least at possible first order effects.

Even before the emergence of AI, the imperatives and characteristics of leadership had evolved in response to the evolution of human values of equality.

Starting with leadership flowing from birthright, power and force in traditional societies, early industrial societies saw the emergence of hierarchical structures characterized by mostly centralized decision-making. This suited a relentless focus on efficiency and productivity.

Based on research findings of the era, the post-war practice of leadership gave importance to psychological and social factors. Rewards and punishments served as prominent levers of leadership.

Later, leadership styles that motivated people to exceed their own performance goals for the greater good of the organization started to gather momentum. The latter part of the 20th century heralded democratic and participative styles of leadership. The idea of servant leadership — prioritizing the needs of the team much more than those of the leader — also gained currency.

The new century, with its rapid technological advances and globalization, has led to the emergence of diverse, dispersed and digital teams.

At a very broad level, we have seen a shift away from the primacy of the leader as the wisdom of team members began to be trusted more. From a model where the leader was assumed to possess all the knowledge and the team members were to simply obey orders, leadership models that recognize that melding the diverse views of team members can lead to greater team performance now thrive.

When a leader possesses vastly more knowledge and experience than team members, then the imperative of educating team members on the basics of the task or setting up mechanisms and practices to ensure that team members blindly obey rigid instructions will consume much of a leader’s time and energy. Consequently, the leader will not be able to devote time and energy to other nontangible aspects.

Historically, with the increasing quality of education and widespread availability of information, the knowledge gap between the leader and the team members has constantly decreased. This has freed up leaders’ time to focus on other — mostly psychological — aspects not directly related to the team’s task, but crucial to its success.

Like the information revolution fostered by the internet, AI will empower individuals, but to a much greater extent. As a result, we can expect the knowledge gap between leaders and team members to shrink even further and even more rapidly than before. To be successful, leaders in the AI era need to excel in managing the psychological and social aspects of leadership.

We often tend to consider decision making and strategizing as the prominent strengths of a good leader. These will continue to be important. However, successful leaders also play the roles of coach, mentor, communicator and role model. We can expect the importance of the following skills to increase as AI becomes more and more pervasive.

While being thoroughly knowledgeable in the kinds of things that AI can and cannot do well, aspiring leaders should focus on improving their skills in these areas:

Motivating and Inspiring
Creating a compelling vision and generating shared ownership for that vision. Motivating team members to exceed their own expectations and to feel a sense of accomplishment from the team’s achievements rather than only from their individual achievements.

Emotional Mastery
Leaders need to be able to manage their own emotions and help team members manage theirs. They need to foster a positive work environment and help the team navigate challenges.

Empathy
As leadership practice involves managing the needs of the whole team more and more, good leaders show empathy and understanding and display a sharp awareness of the feelings and perspectives of team members to build trust, resolve and/or minimize conflicts, and earn the legitimacy to lead.

Building Relationships
Strong relationships play a key role in a team’s success. Leaders need to build strong relationships with team members and facilitate the creation of strong relationships among them. This requires networking, collaboration, negotiation and conflict-resolution skills.

Self-Awareness 
Responsible leaders are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. They seek feedback and learn from personal experience to constantly grow and develop.

Develop Team Members 
Good leaders cultivate new leaders. They identify and nurture the skills of team members through mentoring and coaching and providing feedback.

Conclusion
Artificial intelligence is set to explode and transform many aspects of our lives, and we can expect AI to induce dramatic changes in leadership as well. Very broadly speaking, AI will continually shrink the knowledge gap between leaders and team members, and the ability of leaders to handle the various psychological and social aspects of leadership will rise in prominence. Aspiring leaders should strive to enhance their ability to inspire and motivate team members. In addition, they should work on developing emotional mastery and empathy, being self-aware, building relationships with team members, helping team members build strong bonds among themselves and developing team members.

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This article originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of In the Lead magazine, from Buccino Leadership Institute. The bi-annual magazine focuses on leadership perspectives from the field of health care, with content that is curated from leaders across the industry who share lessons learned from real-world experiences.

Categories: Business, Science and Technology