A 2023 report by the World Economic Forum found that 85% of companies thought increased adoption of new and frontier technologies would drive a transformation in their organisations. But what will that transformation look like?
At the very least we will discover that many of the activities we always thought required a human-being, do not. My Dad used to make tape recordings of reports he needed to write on a Dictaphone. The tiny tape would be sent by post to a typing pool.
There’s no typing pool now. Once my Dad and his colleagues got word processors the typing pool was disbanded.
We will see the same with Generative AI. But not only will whole professions disappear, large parts of how we all fill our day won’t be needed either.
Anything that doesn’t benefit from the innate qualities of human beings (our emotion, our creativity and imagination) may be done better by AI. Our humanity actually gets in the way of many of those day-to-day activities. Diary management, prioritising, writing reports, making slide presentations, looking for insights in data, assessing the quality of an employee, doing research, putting a team together, project planning, financial reporting, ordering of supplies…our biases, blind spots and need to go home and have dinner at some point, mean we’re never going to be as good at this stuff as a machine.
However, without a day full of that activity, how would we spend our time? How would we add value? Could we add value?
The answer is that we haven’t even scratched the surface of what human beings could do in our organisations if they weren’t so busy doing what machines should do. What if those innate human qualities could be liberated? How much more value would you be able to get from your people – and yourself – than you do today?
But we’ve spent the last 250 years trying to create organisations that run like machines. And we’ve treated people like machine parts too. We’ve had them clock in and clock out. We’ve greased the wheels with rewards like pay rises, promotions and bonuses. We’ve organised them into teams and hierarchies. We’ve talked about empowerment but we’ve held on to power, just in case people can’t be trusted with it. We’ve talked about mental wellbeing but we’ve simply provided the tools to tackle burnout rather than really accepting that humans have limits and that we often push them beyond those limits. We’ve talked about emotion – about passion, caring, going the extra mile and encouraged people to tell us their values in engagement surveys.
But we also want people to turn that emotion off when it gets in the way of being efficient, predictable and compliant. There are emotions we are afraid of – anger, depression, fear itself. We are even a little afraid of self-esteem. How do you manage someone who believes in themselves more than you believe in yourself?
If our organisations are inevitably going to be transformed by technology, and therefore the value we need from our employees is also transformed, we need a very different organisational culture. That requires a very different style of leadership to the one we have today.
Firstly, we need to learn to trust the motives of our people. They aren’t ‘trying to get away with something’. They aren’t inferior to you. They don’t care less. They all have the capacity to problem-solve, to make decisions, to be courageous and to cope with the truth. We have just never enabled them to do so. We’ve created a parent-child style of leadership which reinforces distrust, self-preservation, and feeling safe and protected.
If people’s emotions are the primary value they bring to their work, we need all emotions, including the ones that make us uncomfortable, to be expressed. And leaders need to develop their own emotional intelligence so they can understand, express and develop their inner world and help others do the same. These are not skills we value in leaders today, or at least not as much as their ability to get stuff done.
And secondly, we need to let go of power. We need to push decision-making authority down as low as we dare, and then push it lower. We need to provide information (even the scary information), wise counsel, coaching support, and access to expertise, so that those individuals who will be delivering the decision, make the decision.
Your job focuses on removing obstacles to other people being able to do their best work. It becomes about waving the beacon of the organisational purpose so that people point towards the same overall mission, but then empowering them to solve the problems they face in getting there. It means getting away from the comfort that your technical expertise gives you and thinking holistically and systemically. Instead of focusing on today’s presenting issue (staff retention, difficult clients, sick leave, customer attrition, personal conflicts, dated systems and processes, or time management) you look for the systemic causes which link all the presenting issues together.
This is human leadership. It requires leaders to take off the mask and reveal who they are. To do that they have to be willing to learn about themselves, and to evolve. This kind of organisation can only be as sophisticated as its leaders. How could you expect anyone else to do this if you can’t? But if we are willing to reject the Victorian notions which still underpin how we run our businesses and how we organise our people, we will be able to create businesses which thrive in this technological world.
Technology will transform how we live and how we work for sure. It is my belief it will also create space for our human qualities to finally thrive.
About the author:
Blaire Palmer is a former BBC journalist turned keynote speaker on the future of leadership and work, who has worked on flagship Radio 4 programmes like Today and Woman’s Hour. For the past 24 years, Blaire has worked with organisations helping to drive real change in their businesses and create places where people can come and do their best work. Currently, Blaire speaks internationally at conferences and events, calling on audiences of senior leaders to rethink what leadership means in the modern era. Her new book Punks in Suits is a call to arms for leaders to embrace change and a practical guide offering clarity on the most pertinent workplace challenges of the modern era.
