How AI Will Change How You Lead

Today we're going to talk about how AI will impact how you lead going forward. AI is poised to have a significant impact on leadership and the way it is practiced. AI empowers leaders with advanced tools and capabilities to drive innovation, efficiency, and growth in your business. While AI should be designed to augment human capabilities, user experiences, and deliver value to customers and stakeholders, it's important for leaders to understand the limitations and ethical implications of AI and strike the balance between human judgment and AI-driven insights. Today we'll discuss how AI will affect decision-making, talent development, enhance efficiency and productivity, and impact privacy, bias, and accountability. If you have questioned how AI will change your role as a leader, then stay with us. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shading the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms female corporate executives into powerhouse leaders by showing them how to shed the challenges and overwhelm along with any fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negativity holding them back. I'm your host, Bernadette Boas of Fall of Fire Coaching, bringing you powerhouse discussions each week to share tips, advice, and sometimes tough love so you create the riches in your work and life you deserve. Let's do this! AI. Unless you've been living under a rock, over the last number of months you have heard and seen how AI has just gone viral out in the, uh, in the world, but also in businesses. And if you've been paying attention at all to even the actors and writers strike, you will see the implication and the impact AI has already had within that space, within the content creation space, in regards to stealing, so to speak, the likeliness— likeness of actors and performers, creative content of all kinds. And therefore, as leaders, we all need to understand not only the benefits of it, but also the implications of it. And the ethical considerations of it. And that's what I would really want to get into with you today, because whether you like it or not, whether you support it or not, whether you even use it or not, AI is here. AI is here to stay, and it's only going to get more and more saturated and penetrated into your day in and day out. And yet I would really want to focus on not AI, the technical capability, But I want to focus on what AI is going to do to you as a leader and what you could be doing now in order to get ahead of the curve, so to speak, and really kind of embrace it and realize the benefits it could bring to you and your teams and to the business, as much as you need to understand all of the other implications and considerations. So let's break it down into 10 areas that will definitely alter you as a leader as you move forward. The first one will be the fact around reshaping leadership roles and responsibilities. First off, you really, as a leader today, need to get on board and start studying and understanding what AI is. What is its capabilities? What is its benefits? What is its downsides? Downsides, and you need to start having conversations with your people around that as well. So you can kind of mitigate, if not eliminate, but mitigate any type of concerns or any type of fears or risks that you and your people may feel toward AI. All right. At the same time, you have to recognize the— within the space of capabilities of AI, just how it will augment and complement your strategic thinking and strategic planning that is going on today. Actually, it's going to enhance and enrich it and provide you a space where you can really focus on creativity and you can focus on emotional intelligence and your personal connections and inner personal relationships with your team members, with your peers, with your, with your bosses. And at the same time, really kind of consider the adaptation that it's going to make to you and your team. And we're going to talk about more about adaptation in a minute. So that would be the first thing. The second thing would be adaptation to change. This is going to move very quickly. It's going to penetrate your day in and day out at home and at work. You know, if it hasn't already, it's going to very quickly. And therefore, it's going to test the leader's ability to adapt. Ability to change, ability to kind of do the due diligence, research, work to understand, challenge, debate, have your own views and opinions of it, but also really consider how it is you can be leveraging it within your day in and day out. So adaptation to change is a huge element where AI is concerned. At the same time, what's really exciting— I think what's really exciting is on the people side as well. It is definitely going to enhance your ability to recruit, to onboard, to evaluate, and to recognize your people because it's going to give you the means not only faster but also deeper. It's going to be able to allow you to really look into who— what makes the perfect candidate, who makes the perfect leader, who makes the perfect person for the next position or for an opening you already have, who is having challenges, who could be a risk to fitting into your culture. And using AI will allow you to really leverage it in order to do a much, much better job and thorough job at finding the right people for the right job that has the right fit with your culture that will increase your retention and your success with your employees. So there's so much around talent management, talent development that'll allow you to leverage AI even from a training, coaching, mentoring, and development perspective. Another area where it helps the employees but also will help customers. Now, those customers could be internal customers within your organization. It could be third parties. It could be your— literally your customer. It could be vendors, strategic partners. But AI is going to allow you to kind of build a more personal relationship, understand them deeper as a result of the research and the the due diligence and the data that you can discover and uncover around your employees and your customers to where then you could be tailoring specifically for them. So for instance, your employees, it could be tailoring training, it could be tailoring constructive feedback, it could be tailoring development plans, succession plans. For not only that individual, but for your team. And on the customer side, you'll definitely have faster and deeper and richer insights to what it is that your customer is looking for. What do they want? What do they not want? And therefore you can get more personalized even around the messaging that you use with those individuals, both on the employees and the customer side, because of the capabilities within AI that's going to be available to you if you should embrace it and get on board with it. All right. The other area, and one that many of us definitely need to kind of consider and get knee-deep in, especially leaders, especially leaders who say, I don't have time to be with my people. I wish I did, but I just don't have time. I have I have so much on my to-do list. I have so many meetings on my calendar. I just am underwater to begin with, let alone having to open up white space to really ensure that I am spending quality time with my people, whether that is just oversight, just attaboys, recognition, making sure that they are seen and heard and appreciated. But even more so from the coaching, development, training, and growth perspective. So it's definitely going to help when it comes to making you and your team members, making you more efficient and more productive. It's going to provide you automated ways to really take your mundane tasks that you have to do that soak up a lot of time. Even if you're one of those people that, oh, it's only going to take me 5 minutes, it just takes 5 minutes. Well, 5 minutes times around 10 or 20 tasks is a lot of minutes that could then be put into more strategic, creative, people-connecting type of activities. And so the excuses of I don't have time, I don't have that white space to, to, to, you know, go out and spend time with my people. Well, one, you need to find mechanisms and capabilities like AI to open up that space because your people need it. But that's for another discussion. At the same time, you would just be kind of driving yourself crazy and kind of doing things very inefficiently if you just ignore what AI can help you with when it comes to automating or making— streamlining your routine tasks, your mundane tasks. Your everyday practices that you, that you put into place. There's ways for you to make them a lot more efficient so you're a lot more productive. All right. Now, of course, because AI is all about the depth and quality of data. And so, of course, it's going to help with improving forecasting and planning. And so if you feel that you never have enough information or you don't have quality information or even the, the specific type of information that you need in order to have more accurate and more predictable forecasts and plans. Well, AI is a great partner and a great tool for you to be able to augment what you're doing today and enrich it. So you do have better forecasts, better plans that will ensure your productivity and the success and the growth of the business as you move forward. All right. The next one would be it definitely helps you in your decision-making. You know, and it's not even those decisions that require you to kind of, you know, look up some data points to make a case. But it, it, even the simplest of decisions, you could just instead of kind of making them, you know, off the cuff to where you're not really putting any degree of consideration into that decision. You could take a pause. That's just even a pause, let alone some intentional time. But you can take a pause to really spend time and get, you know, more of the data-driven decision-making done as opposed to just the you know, just the assumptions, you know, or, or, um, just not deep, rich, um, data analytical backup to the decisions that you're making. You can definitely build a much stronger and more influential business case for whatever decision that is, um, by leveraging AI. Okay, and then of course we kind of touched on this before, But, you know, one huge value to your leadership role and how it's going to change your leadership role is also around continuous learning and development. And so as you as a leader, as an individual, but also your team members and then the collective team, you could also be leveraging all that data that you may be collecting in regards to what are those skill maps, or what are those ladders, or what are those career paths that have been defined? What are the different ratings and different parameters that you've put on a particular job description, a particular role, particular position, to where then you can use all that information to build training plans, to build development plans, I mentioned the eval— performance evaluations earlier. It can certainly help in regards to leveraging all that information and putting it in such a way that provides some very powerful and relevant, relevant learning plans or development plans for yourself as well as for individuals, just based on everything you're already collecting. But yet now you're able to kind of use AI to pull all that data that might even be in disparate locations across your business and really get strategic, but also get very relevant in regards to the plans that you're putting into place. All right. Of course, then there is which many people will argue, especially at this early, early stage. But there is this value to AI to where it helps even the collaboration between individuals or people and AI. And you say to yourself, how is that? Well, because AI, leveraging it in the right way, right? And then we're going to talk about the ethical considerations. Next, because those also, you know, get into the privacy and accountability elements of using AI. But it helps you really do the research and gain the understanding and gain data points or, or talking points to where you can build better relationships and have, have better collaboration together, whether that's in a boardroom. And I mentioned building a business case on a project or something you're trying to influence, you know, the decision makers to, to approve, as well as basic just getting to know your people and really wanting to connect with them on a more personal level. AI can help you do all that because— so let me give you an example. So AI, being that it will pull across so many data data resources that it will help you understand kind of by doing just a simple query, pulling in from all the different social media sites, from all the different resources out there about me. Who's Bernadette Boas? Well, you know, it'll pull in all this information different than Google. You know, Google will pull up different you know, kind of disparate pieces of information about me. AI will help you kind of get the whole picture around a person, around yourself. And so therefore you can kind of see the, the, you know, the complete picture of an individual versus having to kind of pull from different places and spend time on different sites to kind of then compile manually, you know, a complete picture or profile about an individual. This goes back to even talent development, how it can be used for that. So, you know, it does help to improve the collaboration between yourself and people and the tool or the capability of AI as well. Lastly is the ethical considerations. That as a leader are not only going to change your role, but it's going to elevate your responsibility to really ensuring you understand the implications, the limitations, and even those things around the legalities, privacy, bias, accountability. AI will both help you with all of those things while at the same time you definitely need to consider those things as you're building your new culture, your new way of doing business, even amongst your team, let alone the whole organization as a result of AI. Because again, like I mentioned at the very beginning, if you even look at examples like the actors and writers strike, AI will, just absolutely potentially take over how you do business and how you operate and how your culture is structured. If you don't get on board at the beginning and, and early to really see what those implications, considerations, legalities are, you know, privacy. Well, like I said, AI allows you to get deep into people's lives. AI allows you to manipulate people's lives, as the Actors and Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA, is dealing with. At the same time, you really want to ensure, you know, to keep the bias out of decision-making. We talked about talent management and development and performance evaluations, and AI will allow you to see things, you know, in that total profile we talked about, that you weren't seeing before or you weren't looking for before. And now all of a sudden things will come into, you know, some of this research, some of these data-driven decisions you're making, some of this collaboration, and all of a sudden you're learning, you know, things that are much deeper than you typically would. And therefore you really have to understand how to maintain being unbiased toward what it is you might be learning. And then, of course, there's the accountability element of it. You know, AI certainly allows and elevates the ability to hold yourself and hold others accountable to how even AI is being used and how the culture is changing as a result of it. And you know what the pros and cons are around it. What you need as a leader to do is to really understand kind of the ins and outs, the ups and the downs, all aspects of it from both your own personal perspective, from your team members' perspective, and from the business's perspective. So then you can ensure that as a leader, especially if you're part of the company's leadership team, you can also be strategizing on how you need to kind of confine AI and put in those regulations, put in those guidelines, put in those boundaries, put in those policies and processes that will ensure that AI should just be a complement to how you do business, how you lead. It should not all of a sudden strip and manipulate and take over. Everything that you, that you've already built and embedded into your team or your organization. But you as a leader need to ensure that you're doing the work upfront individually and with others to really fully understand how AI is and will continue to impact you as a leader. All right. So what we talked about, let me just highlight the, you know, the talking points around the impact of AI on leadership. We talked about it, that it is going to reshape leadership roles and responsibilities. It is. It already has. You may not recognize it and maybe you haven't kind of gotten on board with it, but it already has. And then, of course, that goes to adaptation. To change. It already is changing the way we do business, we lead, we see the world. We then talked about how it will enhance talent management, talent development, continuous learning and development. It will allow you to get more efficient and more productive when it comes to your daily tasks and activities and to-dos as well as your teams. It'll improve your forecasting and your planning, obviously allow you to, to be and spend time more strategic planning, strategic thinking, getting more accurate in those plans that you're putting together. It helps you really make more accurate, more precise decisions, being data-driven decision-making, because you'll have so much more richer information to make those decisions off of. And then, you know, the collaboration between yourself, others, and even AI, and how they all can kind of live together without intrusion. And then lastly, we talked about the fact that you as a leader for yourself, for your team, and for the business needs to understand the ethical considerations of privacy and bias and accountability and legality and a number of other things. So AI is here to stay. AI is impacting you. And I trust as a powerhouse leader that you are going to get on board. But if you do have any questions or you need to talk about anything when it comes to how AI is affecting you as a leader today and in the future, then feel free and be sure, be sure to book a call with me at coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall and let's have a conversation about it. All right, and I am so thrilled that you were here with us this week, and I look forward to having you right back here next week for another episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Take care, bye!