Gen AI, Leadership and New Beginnings

Hello world. It's been a minute...

The last couple of years have been a bit of a whirlwind - not just for me, but for the world at large. I'm not sure if you noticed, but Covid took a final bow and headed off stage-left to make way for some serious acts by the geopolitical climate, the global economy and the technosphere in particular. These tectonic movements have somewhat altered the state of play for pretty much everything - but particularly business and the world of work. I feel it's worth discussing some of these, given the purpose of this blog.

Before we begin though, I have to be honest with you. It's taken a while for me personally to get back to a place where I felt like I could add value with this blog again - hence the extended hiatus. Of course, I've had a lot on my mind over the last couple of years - but haven't felt comfortable expressing any of it. Now though, I'm not going to take such a structured approach as before, with the hope that this unleashes more creativity and enables us to explore a wider range of topics more loosely and learn what we really think about them together. The problem I've found with having a blog is that it makes permanent thoughts which simply aren't - and as long as we understand that this is a safe space where we're able to express ourselves AND change our minds about topics given access to new information in the future without repercussions, then we're all Gucci Stanley Tucci.

Firstly, I wanted to talk a little bit about leadership. All of us have experienced leadership in some form or another - and recently, it's been quite a hot topic for discussion amongst my peers and friendship groups. The stereotypical leader or "boss" architype if you will is the one most "meme'd" about. Controlling and overbearing, this boss is an instrument of discipline, concerned only with compliance and command. The worker's primary directive then under this boss is to simply to appease these sensibilities. This boss is to be feared, to be disliked - but most importantly, to be thwarted. Seen as the enemy, the most satisfying thing for the worker to do is to undermine or take advantage of their boss and his/her directives. A successfully concealed lack of arbitrarily mandated hours worked, for example. The worker spends more time and energy working out how to fulfil mandates with the least amount of effort possible than they do focussing on delivering any sort of value in their role.

This is always the result when a leader acts as a "boss". As it turns out, the majority of people do not perform at their best when they are subject to a command and control regime, often acting out in defiance of it. As a leader, it's important to understand what your true role is. Whilst you may now be accountable for a number of "critical metrics" and it's very tempting to lay out control measures by which to directly manage and monitor these as this seems like the most efficient approach, often this is precisely the worst way to go about achieving success. Achieving results requires the entire team to function effectively and efficiently. This means each individual on the team must contribute, and maximal results are achieved only when each individual functions at their best. The role of the leader is to be accountable to the team's results - and therefore the best way to ensure optimum results is for the leader to extract the best from each member of their team. This is where the energy of the leader should be spent - not on managing arbitrary metrics and disciplining those who don't meet them, since this is a reactive and counterproductive approach.

Instead, it's important for leaders to reframe their responsibilities as motivators, mentors and ultimately, enablers. Leadership roles require fundamentally different skillsets to the ones often built-up by those moving into them - superior technical knowledge of a domain often drives decisions about leadership suitability and so senior techno/functional specialists are the ones promoted into leadership roles. Whilst this is an important factor and some domain knowledge is of course essential for your success as a leader, it is arguably not the most important. This is because as a leader, you are no longer directly responsible for completing the work yourself - that's the job of your team. As a domain specialist with deep technical expertise, you are more than capable of doing the work - but critically, and where this differs from all of the work you've done leading up to becoming a leader, this is no longer the most valuable use of your time. It's far more valuable for you to bring others up to and even enable them to surpass your level of technical competency, to the benefit of everyone involved.

The core skillset that's required of leaders therefore centres around enablement, relationship management, project management and communication. It is vital for leaders to be clear about where they are, and more importantly, are not subject matter experts across the breadth of their domains. Acknowledging their limits and empowering the right people only strengthens a leader's brand, rather than as they might fear, weakening it. It helps to build trust amongst team members. It reduces unintentional bias, and improves the quality of their output. It enables learning and development opportunities. In fact, the primary objective of the leader should always be to provide the highest level of enablement and empowerment to their teams as possible. This means letting go of personal responsibility in defining all of the team's strategy and work, rather collaborating with the team to understand what the true pain points and opportunities are from those on the front line, and empowering them to deliver value in addressing issues themselves. They can do this by focusing instead on removing relevant bureaucratic or political barriers through managing upwards or by working to build effective internal strategic alliances on behalf of their teams. 

As a leader, I always try to keep this forefront of mind, and encourage other leaders to do so. This way, we can collectively work to eliminate the "boss" in the workplace, and replace them with true leaders to be revered, rather than bosses to be resented.

Of course, leadership is a nuanced topic - and I don't claim that this is all there is to it. Let's move on however to briefly discuss something that's been stealing headlines for the past 6 months or so - Generative AI.

I won't bore you with yet another overview/hot take on what exactly Gen AI is and what it can do - there's plenty of existing content out there if you want it. What I'm interested in is the application of it in the workplace. More explicitly perhaps, the application of Generative AI within the Employee Experience space. 

The applications of Gen AI feel pretty limitless. It's clear that we have barely scratched the surface - and in fact, this is precisely the job market that's now growing within the space, calling for a new category of "prompt engineers" to figure out how to interface with Generative AI tools and get the most value out of them. Such is the scale of the leap forwards that Generative AI represents, there are those who have claimed it to be a smartphone, or even internet level event. I'm inclined to agree - but perhaps the use-cases will be slower to emerge, the benefits initially less obvious or well understood. 

I'd like to consider some of the implications from a Workplace, and particularly Employee Experience lens. Firstly, generative AI has the potential to transform how work is done. Akin to how robotic automation transformed manufacturing industries, Generative AI provides vast automation potential across now far broader workstreams. For the first time, white-collar creative, administrative and operational work can be automated. No longer need it take 100s of hours and numerous revisions to produce a PowerPoint presentation for the transmission of ideas, concepts and propositions - the majority of which often seem to be taken up by aligning boxes on a slide... Generative AI can not only produce the content based on simple natural language input and descriptors, but it can format it visually into powerful, multi-media communications. Tools such as Microsoft's Copilot make it possible to produce sales pitches, bids, training courses and even data charts within moments, directly within the tools that workers are already using.

Across the enterprise, the possibilities are more valuable still. Imagine being able to not only access, but manipulate at will, all using basic English, every resource available within your organisation. No longer are you limited by your knowledge of what exists where and how to access it. No longer are you limited by your understanding of system architecture or data analytics techniques. All you now need to do is simply identify your problem statement and AI will do the heavy lifting. Want to access a particular policy or process? Done. Need your laptop fixed or access to a particular piece of software? Done. Want to understand whether there has been any prior work done or examples to copy from in your workstream? Done. Need to know the current state of the IT inventory? Done. Want the latest hiring and attrition figures or a suggestion for what roles you might need to open and what to pay for them? Done. All through a single, easy to access, natural language interface.

What's going to be critical then on the path to long-term value realisation of this technology within the enterprise is both building it out comprehensively to a consumer grade-level and architecting it for a future that's frankly very tough to predict. The war for talent rages on - and working in an environment where the quality and capability of these tools could mean a difference in output quantity/quality and ease of experience of several orders of magnitude, will start becoming a deciding factor in choosing where to work. Employees value purpose more and more, and so the scale of impact that they are able to make in the workplace becomes critical. Building these solutions out in such a way as to maximise their accessibility and usefulness will be key to unlocking this value for your employees. Also, we've had the relative long-term stability of Cloud infrastructure for a few decades now - but it took a huge amount of pain, some of it still ongoing, to transition into this sphere from where we were before. Building an AI platform that's robust, secure, maintainable, scalable and upgradable as a first generation solution will be absolutely critical to ensuring that we don't fall into the same traps as we did before the Cloud. Otherwise, the value proposition of a companies enterprise Generative AI offering acquires a shelf-life - and ultimately, those companies will be left far short of their competition in the long run, such is the size of impact these tools will have on how businesses are able to run and provide services to their customers.

The landscape of current solutions and tools is extremely diverse and rapidly evolving - not to mention growing at an alarming rate. Organisations should work to lay out a core strategy for navigating this landscape ASAP, aiming to ensure that they acquire tools sensibly and holistically. This is where IT and other business functions will really earn their keep over the next few years - ensuring the business can mobilise this technology without incurring adverse technical debt or hidden costs in the medium to long-term timeframe.

In summary, it's a very exciting time to be in work right now. At every level and in every industry, there is the potential to revolutionise how much value each individual is able to contribute - to the benefit of themselves and the organisations that they work for. Yes, some roles may no longer exist as we know them today - but I and many other thought leaders in the industry don't for a minute think that this will equate to less work opportunities, just more valuable ones, possibly even with lower barriers to entry. We'll leave it there for this week. As always, would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

MSR