Once upon a time, CIOs and their business counterparts meekly and remorsefully apologized for how they had been approaching their roles. “We need leaders!!!” the business pundit class thundered at them, “not you pathetic, sniveling managers.”
The pundit class found Peter Drucker’s formulation clever: “Leadership is doing the right things,” Drucker suggested. “Management is doing them right.” They nodded their heads knowingly when Admiral Hopper advised that, “You manage inventories; people must be led.”
Some even smiled sagely when yours truly pointed out that when others follow you’re leading; otherwise you’re not.
How we got here
The business pundit class wasn’t entirely wrong. But it is becoming, as someone once said, insufficiently right.
While most business-theorist-observers have been busily looking in exactly the wrong direction, the business ecology has been standing on its head. Specifically:
- COVID legitimized the virtual workforce. Before COVID, working remotely was a privilege bestowed by management to the favored few. During COVID it was mandatory, as was competence in the tools that enabled it.
- The virtual workforce rebalanced the employee/management relationship. Pre-virtualization, dealing with one another as human beings was a hallmark of healthy leadership. With a virtualized workforce, the relationship became more transactional. It was about getting tasks done, pure and simple.
- Here’s where it bifurcates. The success of the virtual workforce model led to leaders and managers bemoaning their loss of human contact and ability to promote the desired business culture. It’s a classic case of the need to be cautious about what you ask for. A management class focused on measurability and tangible results discovered their preference for a humanized employee experience.
- But never mind all that, because we’ve entered the next phase, where, with a virtualized workforce, managers can’t in theory even tell whether the worker they’re interacting with is carbon- or silicon-based. It’s hard, that is, to ask for a humanized experience when no humans are involved in creating it.
To summarize, a chain of unintended consequences triggered by COVID inadvertently prepared business leaders for their transformed AI-driven role: Management has returned to the forefront just as the employee-boss relationship has become decreasingly important. Why, after all, should a manager treat an employee with empathy and respect when that employee either is software or can’t be distinguished from it?
Leadership in the AI era
As has been pointed out in this space from time to time, leadership is the result of eight tasks: setting direction, making decisions, staffing, delegating, motivating, managing team dynamics, establishing culture, and communicating.
The equivalent list, which managers must now master, instead includes just three elements: (1) organizing work; (2) assigning tasks; and (3) accepting the results.
That translates to determining what the human or virtual staff member must work on, when they must work on it, when it’s due, and how it fits.
How it fits? Yes. Beware and be aware of workflows, not just the individual tasks. Managers are responsible for organizing work. One way of being responsible is to know when to allow, and even encourage, improvisation and flexibility so that employees don’t paint themselves into a swim lane’s corner. Something you’re likely to lose in the transition from humans to AIs is flexibility — the ability to supersede process specifications when they don’t fit the circumstances.
Redefining what workforce means
Speaking of not fitting the circumstances, you think you have problems figuring out how to integrate the IT workforce? Someone is going to have to not just rename but seriously … can we call it “re-mission?” … human resources.
For the time being, organizations can limp along with AIs and OIs (“organic intelligences?”) managed and governed on separate tracks.
I suspect that model will prove unworkable in the long term, though. The evolution of an integrated organizational solution that deals with all the entities that get work done will be interesting to watch.
This will be fun, and we will be having it.
See also:
Read More from This Article: AI is reducing leadership to simply managing work
Source: News