Leadership Lift-Off: Human Up to Level Up!
Humanity in Age of AI is Needed Now, More Than Ever
Welcome to “Leadership Lift-Off,” my new blog series focused on organizational innovation, growth and transformational leadership…because we could all use a little pick me up in these highly changeable times. My goal is to share learnings from my personal experience in creating and working with high-performing and highly effective teams and of course to help us all get ahead a little faster and a little easier. We’ll unpack the specific qualities that make truly great leaders, the attributes and capabilities of successful modern teams, and share practical, actionable advice for putting these concepts into practice in your own organization.
Let’s face it, the past few years have been volatile for growth-minded organizations and their employees and it’s time to do something different.
The pandemic, politics, inflation, rising rates and the unpredictable performance of our industry have had a massive and disruptive influence on how people work today. Our entire set of assumptions has changed. And although many organizations have returned to “business as usual”— with RTO, hybrid work environments and shifting tech trends —do we really believe that the nature of work will ever fully return to the way it was before our new roaring 20s? And, do we think we have the right strategic approach and skill sets to create the business outcomes we once enjoyed prior to all this transformation?
The emergence of generative AI platforms, cloud-based environments, embedded finance and organizational interdependence has delivered another huge shift and giant opportunity to teams and organizations. According to a March 2023 academic paper, 4 in 5 workers will see at least 10% of their work impacted by Large Language Models (LLM), and nearly 1 in 5 will see half of their tasks impacted, a trend that will disproportionately affect those employees earning higher incomes.
What this means is that, while STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills have been highly coveted by industry for decades, the types of skills that organizations value most are changing rapidly. Today more organizations are valuing so-called “soft” skills like relentless curiosity, creativity, relationship building, communication, leadership, coaching, empathy and the ability to motivate and connect teams – all to modernize the way we work. A respected leader in our industry @Tansley Stearns calls these skills “power skills”. I like the sound of that. This moves us out of hierarchical, waterfalling silos and into sensing, anticipatory and connective teams that move fast.
According to a June 2023 LinkedIn survey, more than 70% of U.S. executives named such “power skills” as more important to their organization than technical, AI-related skills. I would argue you must have one to optimize the other. And another survey from Jobs for the Future found that 78% of the 10 top-employing occupations ranked uniquely “human” skills as “important” or “very important.”
What forward-thinking, growth-oriented organizations are beginning to realize is that while AI can be extremely useful for certain types of tasks, like research, analysis, and the automation of repetitive processes, it is simply a tool accelerating and perfecting the execution of ideas. This tool is lacking critical elements that are, well … human.
“This is what many of us notice about art or prose generated by A.I.,” writes David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed, “In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human.” “It’s often bland and vague. It’s missing a humanistic core. It’s missing an individual person’s passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt personal experiences. It does not spring from a person’s imagination, bursts of insight, anxiety and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity.”
Leveling-up! The future of leadership is trending toward a culture of human-first behaviors
I’ve experienced this among my own amazing team of colleagues. Toward the end of the pandemic in early 2021, I was leading a large team of innovative leaders who due to all the change, were overworked, had to shift everything they did, were disconnected and were frankly fried. We had been putting out fires and focusing on the “ever-shifting urgent” for a sustained period of time. We recognized the world had changed, the way we worked had changed and it was time for us to optimize our approach and do something different, at the most human level.
But first, we needed to find common ground and mutual understanding, so we started with our team charter. We hosted a set of virtual co-creation zooms called “level-up” sessions. Our focus was to determine what it meant to be a leader and discuss what we needed to shift to understand what would make us all more successful, fulfilled and deliver work we were proud of.
My primary goal for this initial session was first, simply to listen from their perspective and then come to an understanding together to create our target state and solve as a team to achieve it.
I learned two things. They all wanted more -- greater empowerment and span of control AND they wanted freedom. For that to happen, we all needed to have strategic clarity and trust – not only with me but with each other. We decided to create a common expectation of what excellence looks like in our organization and then activated that across our respective strengths and held each other accountable. And guess what, we all rose to the challenge and rose fast (and it was way more fun)!
As they shared their ideas and came up with solutions together, I realized that each one of them could do my job…and I was GREAT with that. My intention was to make that available to anyone who wanted the opportunity to grow and learn, and I also intended to open myself up to new opportunities. Together, we crafted our path to show up differently to work, so we can each excel, individually and collectively as a team.
Out of these Level-Up Sessions, we agreed upon five core leadership traits—essential values that are critical to any organization’s growth. In subsequent articles in this Leadership Lift-Off series, I’ll share these five traits, along with eight critical leadership capabilities we devised. My hope for this series is that it will provide you with valuable, actionable insights to help you and your organization grow and thrive in our new modern reality.
3 Steps to Creating a Modern, Collaborative Team Environment
1. Team Empowerment: As leaders, we need to create space that empowers our teams to rise together. It’s about giving people the structure, the permission, and the freedom, to be their best selves. It’s our jobs as leaders to create the framework— complete with the appropriate guardrails—that provides people with a level of certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. That’s step one—to mitigate fear of the unknown.
2. Radical Trust: Step two is to establish trust. Trust is a two-way street, and it begins with listening. This is not always easy for leaders to do. But to establish trust and a culture of honest dialogue, you must allow your people to share their concerns and challenges, without undercutting them or ignoring their pleas.
3. Freedom with Strategic Guardrails: Step three is to provide your team with the freedom to innovate, to share new ideas, and unleash their creativity. You need to give them the freedom to excel—individually, but also collectively. No one wants to be micro-managed because that stifles creativity and reduces motivation. Everyone, regardless of role, wants to feel valued and to have their voice heard.
We are entering a new phase of work where humanity will matter more than ever. Successful leaders and companies need to be more than technocrats. They need to inspire, connect, and bring teams together.
To have a winning management career and effectively lead organizations and teams into the future, leaders need to “human up!” and lead with humanity.
This is what differentiates us from the machines. And it always will.
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