The Rise of New 4 Pillars for Corporate Leadership in the AI Age

Artificial intelligence is one of the most fascinating developments that the business world is facing. In the right hands, it could be positive while in the wrong hands, it could be devastating.

By Mostafa Sayyadi | Chartered Managers Canada

In the 1990s, it was tech-savvy people that were in demand, today it is computer espionage people in demand as the world becomes even more complex with the use of artificial intelligence. If you want to succeed today as CEO, you must review the external environment with a very keen eye toward perfection in order to help your organization survive. Executives are facing the need to adapt to the challenge resulting from several disruptions to their style of leading due to the recent emergence of artificial intelligence as a catalyst for transformational change in their organizations. They will have to adapt to these severe disruptions caused by artificial intelligence. But how can executives adapt their leadership in the new world of artificial intelligence to achieve a higher degree of effectiveness and business success? If you are looking for an answer to this critical question, then, this article proposes a new form of leadership for AI for executives to answer this question. We show how CEOs can create an advanced style of leadership to face the new disruption of the century, artificial intelligence. Much of what I share in this article comes from my interviews with 47 senior executives in Australia, Japan and South Korea.

Leadership in the Post-Artificial Intelligence Workplaces

CEOs are dealing with a great deal of unknown disruption in a post-artificial intelligence world. The emergence of artificial intelligence has left multidimensional effects on companies across the globe. Leading corporations in a post-AI world initiate quick learning and exploitation of organizational knowledge as senior managers anticipate future needs and build collective support and understanding to respond to new trends. Continuous learning in organizations breeds intellectual capital and helps organizations acquire an extraordinary approach to adaptability. Stephen Hawking famously said, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” To advance in the artificial intelligence era, organizations need a systemic and integrated perspective in which all business units quickly and accurately recognize environmental changes and effectively interact with each other. This enhances the organization’s ability to provide effective responses to the external environment. This disruption also requires adopting new pillars in leadership. The days of Hercules, leading in ancient times, did not consider analytical power, but physical strength. The movie Encanto portrayed the character Luisa as a powerful and heroic leader. This subtle, yet important change in leading people has transitioned to power and strength, knowledge and power, to an age of artificial intelligence.

Many CEOs consider the success of artificial intelligence as a future competitive advantage to only require investment in the field of technology and deny the importance of leadership. There is a change in the leadership style, followed by the emergence of new conceptual skills that will drastically change business models. Artificial intelligence will enable organizations to predict the future, and this will be, and already has been a competitive advantage. Artificial intelligence has not come to replace humans, but its main purpose is to improve human capabilities. Big and multinational companies such as Google, Apple, Alibaba, Tesla, and Toyota, which happen to be among the most successful companies in the development of artificial intelligence, have increasingly focused on the leadership aspect of artificial intelligence. These companies have realized that the leadership aspect of artificial intelligence cannot be outsourced, and leadership tasks cannot be left to algorithms and robots. The integration of leadership and automation requires abandoning aspects of traditional leadership and moving towards a new leadership style called adaptive intellectual leadership.

4 Key Pillars of Adaptive Intellectual Leadership

Adaptive intellectual leadership is forming as we encounter artificial intelligence. As Denise Rousseau, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the founder of Evidence-Based Management Collaborative teaching and practice, once mentioned in an Academy of Management meeting: If you do not love the goals that you have then love the goals that you are near. The nearest goal for executives today is to embrace the clutches of artificial intelligence. At first, Executives may face fear and insecurity, but accepting this challenge and change is necessary to enter the age of artificial intelligence. Many CEOs set high goals for their organizations and human resource divisions and attempt to motivate them to achieve the goals. Leading in a world of artificial intelligence requires a focus on the integration of AI into those broad technology domains, followed by better training and development. In fact, this leadership style relies heavily on the phrase that Farshad Asl, an internationally acclaimed motivational speaker, bestselling author, and leadership expert mentioned in his book. He argues that our mind is powerful. We need to think bigger. We need to dream bigger. We need to act bigger because we can create a much bigger version of our lives when we embrace artificial intelligence.” This leadership style should include four key pillars below.

• Developing an Inverted Organizational Pyramid

Leading in artificial intelligence requires a contrast from the traditional organizational pyramid hierarchy. Senior executives will have to designate their organizational pyramid in reverse and from the bottom up. CEOs will no longer be identified as the highest-paid executives but also, as servant leaders. Ken Blanchard, one of the best scholarly practitioners of leadership argued that leadership is not something you do to people. It's something you do with people. Al Deming, the post-WWII management consultant to Japan, specified the need for continuous improvement and learning due to the widespread receipt of new information and technological breakthroughs. Leaders in the age of artificial intelligence must be trusted. The CEO of United Airlines took a private jet out of Newark Airport while thousands of people’s flights were compromised due to delays. He later apologized and gave each customer 30,000 flight credit miles with a contrite apology for being insensitive. This is a modern example of authentic leadership. Koenig, Associated Press Airlines Writer reports:

“United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby apologized Friday for hopping on a private plane to get out of the New York area while thousands of United passengers were stranded because the airlines canceled so many flights.”

• Fostering a Learning Culture

The newly equipped leader in the artificial intelligence age will have to expand the culture of learning and trust in the organization and use a trickle-down leadership strategy that reaches everyone in the value chain. In order to do this, the CEO and C-Suite must be fully trained in the nuances of AI, and then provide training workshops for other employees as well as for the customers and suppliers along the value chain. Through these workshops, CEOs will help develop the learning process and trust throughout the organization.

• Building Multidisciplinary Teams

The AI concern is nothing new, robots have been threatening humans for decades. Thus, many employees resist change due to fear of being replaced. The visual disappearance of toll-booth personnel leaves an imprint in workers’ minds that they will be next to be usurped. Does this replacement mean removing humans from the future business model? The answer to this question is "no." The main reason that AI cannot replace humans is the fact that humans have adaptability while AI may be limited in its adaptability. The cooperation between humans and artificial intelligence leads to improved analytics. AI and humans working together can provide better ideas to solve organizational problems when equipped with advanced information synthesizers coupled with multidisciplinary teams. Here, executives need to create extraordinary synergy between humans and artificial intelligence by developing multidisciplinary teamwork skills for their workforce.

• Developing an Artificial Intelligence Strategy

CEOs who seek to develop artificial intelligence skills may become highly capable strategists. Success in the age of artificial intelligence is highly dependent on being continuously engaged with the organization's external environment. CEOs must incorporate artificial intelligence into their organizational strategy and use various digital tools to develop their continuous engagement with the external environment to maximize their agility in response to environmental threats and opportunities. Embracing an artificial intelligence strategy also encourages higher goals that set the precedent of acquiring and storing knowledge in a knowledge-management database.

Figure 1: The Key Pillars of Adaptive Intellectual Leadership

Conclusions

The field of artificial intelligence is growing and there is not enough information available to address its full capacity. However, artificial intelligence will be fully developed soon and its uniqueness will be gone. To address this trend, adaptive intellectual leadership needs to be embraced by CEOs. This new leadership style to build a better workplace that keeps up and continuously improves the use of artificial intelligence, the inverted organizational chart, also addressed as a pyramid, must be initiated so that learning and trust are developed at the lower echelon of the organization. Multidisciplinary teams also need to develop across business units to weaken the mental barriers to innovation and develop and implement strategies for more efficient use of artificial intelligence.

About the Author: 
Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to HR.com, People + Strategy, Consulting Magazine and The Canadian Business Journal and his work has been featured in these top-flight business publications.