The Art of Modern Management in the World of AI
AI is disrupting the workplace, but the technology itself is not the issue. The problem is that the senior management team is struggling to operate and manage in the new world of AI, causing confusion and failing to provide leadership and clear direction to its employees. The result is that the AI is not being utilised to its full potential, and employees feel adrift, not knowing what the AI is for and who does what.
Businesses are discovering that AI is exacerbating the disconnect among managers, teams, and operational processes, creating an abyss of confusion due to a lack of ownership, accountability, and decision-making.
Rigid Structures and Thinking
They are realising that implementing an AI solution is not a fast ‘plug-and-play’ and requires a considered approach, including redesigning management structures, commercial and operational strategies and processes.
Businesses that have rushed to deploy AI to beat FOMO and quickly roll out the solution are causing confusion and chaos because a rigid legacy structure and restricted thinking will not work, resulting in disconnected workflows, operational fragmentation, and failure to achieve the results you hoped for. AI requires a flexible, growth mindset and joined-up thinking for it to be a success.
Some businesses assume that deploying an AI solution will analyse, produce results, and manage that part of the business by itself. AI cannot be left alone to do its thing and needs to be directed and managed by a human with oversight to reap the benefits and proceed with caution, not the other way round. Ownership, accountability and amending the decision-making framework must be adapted accordingly. Managers and employees will need to skill up to learn how to work with AI and how to use soft skills such as judgment and critical thinking.
Owning Up
An AI project should have an owner assigned to it, be responsible for its design, including setting the objectives and success criteria. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked and addressed – who is the main owner of the project, who will own elements of it such as setting the use cases, ensuring the data is up to date, correct, meets regulations and compliance, ethical, and who will interpret the data so it can be turned into business intelligence and actioned.
Many businesses are drowning in unused data and are not realising the full value of their AI solutions, which could make all the difference and transform their businesses. The irony is that the intelligence is often sitting on a dashboard, not being used to gain a competitive advantage, which is not intelligent!
Slicker Decision Making
The decision-making processes need to be reviewed and redesigned with AI, as mentioned above because they involve new scenarios that require questioning and the assignment of owners for the process to work. Questions include – who will pass on the data intelligence and to which areas of the business? Who will then follow this up to ensure it has been actioned? Etc.
By redesigning the decision-making process, you ensure that decisions are made quickly and carried out promptly. If you fail to do this, AI will create confusion and not be successful because no one will know what to do or who is doing it.
Increase Your Speed
This is imperative because agility and speed are today’s key competitive advantage. If you have invested in an AI solution and have access to vast amounts of data, it is critical that you use it as business intelligence. Companies should analyse the data to identify trends and patterns and then use the intelligence to make strategic business decisions to improve products, services or the customer experience. Then, the most important step, it is turned into actions and even more importantly they act upon them – fast. This is what makes the difference, the execution of speed.
Free your dormant data from the dashboard and redesign your operational processes, assigning owners for the above, ensuring that you don’t include too many approval bottlenecks that delay decisions and suppress your agility. It is also vital to ensure that the analysis and interpretation are thorough but not to the point of ‘analysis paralysis’ that will hold you back.
A Flatter Hierarchy
People’s job roles will change with AI and the role of the middle manager has certainly been questioned. Managers will be relieved from the daily repetitive tasks of reporting and analysing and need to turn their attention to managing their teams.
Invest in training and development for middle managers so they can focus on strategic and critical and contextual thinking. Allowing them to empower, motivate and manage their team more effectively and achieve better results.
Your middle managers will need to be a peoples’ person to manage their team effectively and care about the team. This could potentially change the dynamics of who you currently employ, as your middle managers may lack these qualities. Middle managers should be motivators, inspiring their team to perform well. They will require ‘soft skills’ such as emotional intelligence, to be a good listener, motivator, good communicator and empathetic.
The Art of Modern Management
Business is an art, and those who will succeed with AI are those who redesign themselves for the modern workplace and management. AI is a disruptive technology, but we mustn’t forget that it is a tool we direct, not the other way around. It is a game-changer and therefore cannot be deployed quickly with little thought. It is worth taking time to understand why you need it, what challenges you want to address, and what improvements you want to make. Then redesign your strategy, management approach, and operational strategies to include ownership, accountability, and a new or adapted decision-making framework. Then you will be ready to reap the results of AI with clear management and direction.
