AI Era Leadership: Be Beth. We Need a Lot More Beths

Before she retired from GE as Vice Chair, Beth Comstock — who Forbes named as one of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, and is a member of Nike’s Board of Trustees — shared the perfect leadership model for the AI Era.

What she called Exponential Leadership has eight guiding principles: Organize Around Information Flows, Embrace Ambiguity, Mashup Minds and Machines (anticipating the AI-driven future), and more. The one principle that matters most in our fourth of seven skillsets for the AI Era — Critical Thinking, Best Questions — is this…

Part of Enhancing Feedback Loops, the one question she constantly asked, and she wants all leaders and managers to ask: “What’s the one thing that is true that you think I don’t want to hear.” That one question is key to freeing all the valuable critical thinking within your team and your organization!

Why? Because there is NO SHORTAGE of brilliant, amazing, unique, valuable critical thinking in our organizations! It’s always been there. Buried, under the company’s scalable efficiencies. As mentioned in our past two posts, here and here, the brilliant ground truths that most employees see, and try to solve through critical thinking, are often not seen or valued through a scalable efficiency lens.

Frank Needed a Beth

I was consulting on a Fortune 100 company’s 10X change plan — ten times improvements in ten key processes — and was doing focus groups in one of their manufacturing facilities. One guy, Frank, sat stubbornly quiet with his arms crossed. I sensed a pissed-off vibe, but also that there was something he really wanted to share. So after the group dispersed, I asked if I could buy him a cup of coffee. “Frank,” I asked, “could you tell me about your job here?”

“You wanna know my job?!,” his frustration apparent from the start. “My job is to keep that guy,” he said pointing to the plant’s General Manager office, “from f**king this place up! That’s my job!”

“Tell me about that,” I pleaded. I was then given the history of this company’s approach to leadership development, which was highly praised throughout the world. Corporate would send its HiPo (high potential) leaders on developmental assignments: A year running a plant, a year or two in HR or Marketing, a couple years in other divisions of the company. A proven approach to developing leaders to run large, complex enterprises.

Problem is, that efficient model of leadership development never accounted for the ground truths that Frank, 17 years with the company, knew and addressed every day. So when he said he was keeping the GM from “f**kng this place up,” he didn’t mean it as a personal attack. He meant that none of these year-in-then-out GMs had any understanding of how things really got done, and what was really needed — only what Corporate mandated.

And Frank was frustrated with me because I was doing the same thing. I was focused on 10X scaled efficiencies with no real understanding of what he and his teammates were already doing to keep the plant running.

Frank and this company needed lots of Beths: All of us needed to ask: “What’s the one thing that is true that you think I don’t want to hear?”

We all need Beths: In all industries in all jobs, all the Franks of the world need all the Beths of the world to be asking that one question. Because it unleashes all the brilliant critical thinking and problem-solving that they are forced to sit on.

We need Beth-like managers and leaders freeing up all the brilliant 24x7 critical thinking that already exists within our organizations.

We Do Not Have a Critical Thinking Problem...

We Have an AI Era Leadership Problem

We need leaders who rethink scalable efficiencies to ALSO rapidly, continuously incorporate all the critical thinking brilliance that’s currently left on corporate floors. We need that wasted critical thinking within organizations to be front-loaded into all AI-driven problem-solving.

As we’ve covered earlier — while there are, of course, amazing exceptions — so far we should fear that today’s leaders are not prepared to lead us into a people-focused AI Era.

We desperately need leaders who see the AI Era as a fantastic opportunity to completely rethink how we build humanness into scaled efficiencies — how the Beths of the world free all the critical-thinking brilliance that already exists inside all of the Franks of the world.?

Bill Jensen is a seasoned strategy and transformation executive, advisor to C-suite execs, globally-known keynote speaker, and author of nine best-selling leadership and change books, including Simplicity, Disrupt, Future Strong, and The Day Tomorrow Said No. Reach him at [email protected].