The Shift in Leadership Styles Due to AI

I'm knee deep this week putting the finishing touches on my new Udemy course on "AI for People Managers: Lead with confidence in an AI-enabled workplace". After working with hundreds of managers cautiously navigating AI integration, here's what I've learned: the future belongs to leaders who can thoughtfully blend AI capabilities with genuine human wisdom, connection, and compassion. Your people don't need you to be the AI expert in the room; they need you to be authentic, caring, and completely committed to their success. No technology can replicate that. And no technology SHOULD. The managers who are absolutely thriving aren't necessarily the most tech-savvy ones. They're the leaders who understand how to use AI strategically to amplify their existing strengths while keeping clear boundaries around what must stay authentically human: building trust, navigating emotions, making tough ethical calls, having meaningful conversations, and inspiring people to bring their best work. Here's the most important takeaway: as AI handles more routine tasks, your human leadership skills become MORE valuable, not less. The economic value of emotional intelligence, empathy, and relationship building skyrockets when machines take over the mundane stuff. Here are 7 principles for leading humans in an AI-enabled world: 1. Use AI to create more space for real human connection, not to avoid it 2. Don't let AI handle sensitive emotions, ethical decisions, or trust-building moments 3. Be transparent about your AI experiments while emphasizing that human judgment (that's you, my friend) drives your decisions 4. Help your people develop uniquely human skills that complement rather than compete with technology. (Let me know how I can help. This is my jam.) 5. Own your strategic decisions completely. Don't hide behind AI recommendations when things get tough 6. Build psychological safety so people feel supported through technological change, not threatened by it 7. Remember your core job hasn't changed. You're still in charge of helping people do their best work and grow in their careers AI is just a powerful new tool to help you do that job better, and to help your people do theirs better. Make sure it's the REAL you showing up as the leader you are. #AI #coaching #managers

This report introduces the concept of “intelligent choice architectures”  defined as “dynamic systems that combine generative and predictive artificial intelligence capabilities to create, refine, and present choices for human decision makers, enhancing how organizations use AI.” Based on interviews with leaders at larger companies with robust infrastructure. It's an approach to human-AI collaboration that isn’t just about saving time or autonomous AI agents. It uses AI to create, refine, and present choices.  It is more like having an AI assistant that doesn't just give you information or implement tasks for you, but helps you see and understand better options you might not have considered. It is like a GPS system that doesn't just show you the fastest route, but understands your context and preferences. For example, it may say:  "Given that you're traveling with kids, hate tolls, and it's rush hour, here are three route options: the scenic route through the park (longer but less stressful), the highway with one toll (fastest but expensive), or the back roads (middle ground but requires more attention)." Then it learns from which route you chose and how it worked out to make better suggestions next time. The report suggests some leadership shifts from top-down to distributed leadership:  Instead of a leader making the decision, it creates the environment for decisions to emerge. From Command to Curation: Instead of having all the answers, leaders focus on framing the right questions and structuring good choices. From Fixed Roles to Flexible Context: Decision authority changes based on the situation, data available, and expertise needed—not just job titles. From Ownership to Orchestration: Success comes from coordinating human and AI intelligence effectively, not from being the sole decision-maker. From Rules to Capabilities: Instead of controlling through restrictions, leaders enable better decisions through better AI tools and environments. From Deciding to Designing: Leaders spend more time shaping how choices are presented than making the actual choices themselves. Even though this seems very far away for most nonprofits, it made me wonder what questions to ask about this type of AI-Human collaboration. It made me wonder how to reinforce values-aligned decision-making? Can we track how our most important decisions about clients, programs, and funding are actually made with AI support? Do our AI predictive data systems encourage decisions that optimize for our outcomes? Are we comfortable with AI systems suggesting approaches that might challenge our traditional ways of doing? How do we ensure our AI systems don't perpetuate systemic inequities in how we serve our communities? Can we explain to stakeholders how our AI-enhanced decisions serve our mission? https://lnkd.in/gfDfPH-j

For the last two years, the conversation about AI's impact has been dominated by the visible, the tactical, and the immediate. We are focused on new tools, evolving job descriptions, and the race to upskill our teams to use them. This is the "Surface Wave." It is real, it is important, and it is consuming all of our attention. But the real story, the one that will determine the winners and losers of the next decade, is happening beneath the surface. The "Undercurrent" is the deeper, strategic, and often invisible re-architecting of the organization itself. It's the shift in power structures, the creation of new data ecosystems, and the fundamental change in how decisions are made. This integration of human and machine intelligence is creating a new organizational physics, and most leaders are still using an old map. Think about it: A company builds a strategic intelligence unit designed to be "AI-native". The "Surface Wave" is giving the human analysts a suite of powerful AI tools for market research and data synthesis. But the "Undercurrent" emerges when the AI is integrated not as a tool, but as a de facto member of the team. Suddenly, the org chart is no longer a simple 2D hierarchy. You have a hybrid entity where the AI directly feeds insights to every team member, bypassing the traditional top-down flow of information from a human manager. The AI might even be given a "voice" in strategic meetings, presenting conclusions that directly contradict the team leader's intuition. The challenge is no longer about adopting a tool. It becomes a profound question of organizational design and leadership. What is the role of a human leader when the AI can provide more comprehensive data-driven direction? How do you manage a "team" that is a fluid network of human and machine cognition? And how do you measure performance when the most valuable output is a collaborative insight that is impossible to attribute to any single human or algorithm? This is the real transformation, and it requires leaders to move from being managers of people to being conductors of a complex, hybrid intelligence. I strongly feel that leaders who cannot distinguish between the two waves will be pulled under. But will organizations invest in the foresight this requires? #FutureOfWork #AIStrategy #TwoWaveTransformation

We’re all going to learn a new dual-track leadership style to manage human and digital workers: inspiring human excellence while directing digital efficiency. Inspiring human excellence remains unchanged - the centuries-old playbook of vision, compassion, and more that motivates followership. Where employee engagement scores will remain our north star as we create environments where human creativity and ingenuity flourish. But directing digital efficiency with AI agents, automation tools, and sophisticated digital workers? A playbook we all need to learn quickly. While some human leadership elements overlap - clear vision, precise goals, specific feedback - does "inspiring followership" even apply to digital workers? It's more like optimizing a manufacturing process around task accuracy and output efficiency. Think managing an AI that processes 10,000 customer queries per hour versus inspiring a human team to deliver exceptional service. The hardest part won’t be to master these two distinct modes - it’ll be to weave them together seamlessly. Balancing inspiration and connection with humans while offering extreme clarity to digital workers. And knowing when to entrust work to a human versus a digital colleague. Collaboration between humans and digital workers might actually prove easier than human-to-human - no complex emotions to navigate when humans delegate to AI. But here's where it’ll get tougher: - What happens when digital workers become capable enough to delegate work back to humans? - How do we ensure our human teams feel empowered, not replaced, by their digital colleagues? - How do we design workflows where both strengths are amplified? Leadership in this new type of hybrid world is about to profoundly change. I'm 80% excited, 20% terrified. Which pretty much sums up my entire take on our AI-Forward future. #AIForward #DigitalWorkers