AI and Leadership Styles—A Symbiotic Relationship

AI and Leadership Styles—A Symbiotic Relationship

Would Henry Ford, Vladimir Lenin and Steve Jobs globally or Jawaharlal Nehru, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi, with their very different styles of leadership, have used AI very differently? In our context, your three authors, who have different leadership styles, use AI in different ways even today. Ganesh, with his penchant for leading multiple diverse teams with tremendous delegation and support rather than supervision, uses AI as a reference to get wider perspectives on any topic. Uma, who is much more of a detail manager, uses AI extensively to support her research and predict what could go wrong in situations and contexts. Priyanka uses AI as a support system for her writing and also to do prior research before conducting an interview. We all find AI useful but in various modes and to different degrees.

We have already discussed in an earlier part of this book the views of historian and author Yuval Noah Harari and his concern that AI in the hands of a paranoid leader like Lenin could have led to the targeted destruction of humanity. Whether it is for a dictator of a nation or a leader of a religious group or even a social worker with a large following, there is no doubt that malicious use of AI could have an undesirable impact. The religious group leader could identify members of his flock who have some reservations about his value based on an AI scan of social media posts and make targeted efforts to assuage their misgivings and win them over as total converts. On the other hand, there are also the positive impact of algorithms.

The social worker, for instance, could use AI to identify potentially disenfranchised members of the community and ensure that the service provided by the social enterprise is able to reach that part of the geography or community. Social media algorithms could help connect like-minded people to foster a sense of belonging and build meaningful engagement. Through personalisation, they help people discover or stumble upon subjects and themes that could be of interest.

In terms of leadership styles, each style would find different aspects of AI worth exploring and exploiting in designing their message and adapting their style. A strong, autocratic leader would use AI more as a tool to learn customer preferences and not be really concerned about any negative impact their style has on their team or organisation. A democratic leader might be more inclined to extensively use AI as a copilot and, with the right prompts, let it provide usable guidance to his or her work. A coaching leader would use AI to work with team members and mould the advice to suit individual learning styles. Leaders who are used to practising situational leadership with style flexibility to respond and lead in different ways, depending on the situation, would be able to use AI to predict the response to each style and choose the appropriate response or action for each situation. The use of AI is both a science and an art. How we perceive it and how it is deployed is a matter for much experimentation, learning and future use!

Leading with Dual Intelligence

The ‘human in the loop’ as a necessity for successful deployment of AI has been, in many cases, a defence mechanism against concerns regarding the future sweep of AGI and ASI across business and society and a genuine paranoia about the future of jobs. The potential does exist for all mundane and repetitive jobs, arguably well over half of the current jobs in the services industry, to be taken over by AI and for a larger number of manufacturing jobs to be eliminated by the wide sweep of robotics, automation and AI at the edge. The deployment of AI could accelerate preventive and corrective action in large process plants that could greatly improve plant uptime and throughput. The task of analytics and feeding actionable insights to final decision makers could well be done better, faster and cheaper by predictive and prescriptive analytics enabled by machine learning and AI.

How do leaders design new organisation structures and business processes in a true spirit of dual intelligence that will harness the power of technology and deliver ‘order of magnitude’ superior results? As AI agents take over various tasks and goal achievement by experimentation and simulation, team structures, roles and reporting relationships will have to be thought through. It would be appropriate to focus on the very human capabilities of emotional intelligence, context setting with soft data and use of the experience of decision-making to inform future decisions.

As agents proliferate, humans will also have to be encouraged and trained to evolve, and frameworks will have to be developed for humans to delegate goal achievement to technology and create feedback loops that lead to optimised decisions. There will be inevitable power dynamics, not just between humans and agents but also between AI-enabled humans in the organisation. These again are issues that will need effective leadership to gauge and develop and implement solutions. Teams and individuals will have to be assigned and trained for prompt engineering as well as more complex roles, while agents are assigned all the predictable, standardised analytical and execution tasks.

The style of the leader in a well-designed dual intelligence establishment will also encompass creating new vistas of growth for the human intelligence community. These growth opportunities include developing a new vision for the process and the team and building vision communities empowered with innovation and some clairvoyance.