From Hi-Tech to Hi-Touch - Leadership Lessons for budding Business Practitioners

If u asked any of the world’s most prominent business leaders to share one word to describe the state of business today, there’s a good chance that most of them would say “Change”.

One factor that’s spurring many leaders towards the new paradigm is technology. We are using technology more than ever in new ways than even a few years ago would have seemed impossible.

On average an adult spends 4 hours a day on their phone, leaving a digital trail that enables Amazon to predict what they will buy, Facebook to know their mental state and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to know their likes and dislikes.

However decision making structures in large organizations have changed so little since the industrial revolution. Leaders still base decisions on retrospective data that has percolated up thru layers of filtering and consolidation. Decisions are then handed down through progressive layers of management, where they are adjusted to practical realities.

Such a system might have been adequate for large stable organizations, but is quite dysfunctional for disruptive change.

Technology can change all that. What if leaders knew as much about their organization as Google knows about them.

In an age when management of most work processes can be automated, leaders can be freed to focus more of their energies where their judgement and experience truly add value. AI could give managers half of their time back. But they must first embrace new organizational models based on accountability, transparency and collaboration.

Being a leader no longer means “bossing” someone or telling them what to do, but modelling what needs to be done and explaining the purpose. Much of this stems from generational differences. Millennials have grown up with technology and understand its capabilities and applications better than any generation before. They don’t just want to be told what to do; but to know why they are doing it.

AI will supplant many aspects of the “hard elements” of leadership – parts responsible for the raw cognitive processing of facts and information.

Meta Analytics reviewing 50 years of research suggest that personality traits such as curiosity, collaboration and emotional stability are twice as important as IQ – the benchmark of reasoning capability.

In an AI age characterised by immense disruption and rapid ambiguous change, the essence of effective leadership is changing. Certain qualities such as deep domain expertise, decisiveness, authority are losing their cachet, and in its place new ones are likely to play a key role in more agile types of leadership.  These are: humility, adaptability, vision, and constant engagement. 

As the old saying goes, "If you wish to start something new, you need to stop doing something old."

(This is the essence of my talk on the above subject delivered at IMI on January 9, 2019 to MBA Students. Author: Sidharath Tuli, CEO & Founder, People Sculptors)