The AI revolution is bringing out the extremes in both camps. I’ve seen it play out personally at work. Fear and giddy excitement are present in equal portion, driving employees’ daily decisions around AI adoption. Both reactions are dangerous for different reasons, but I want to focus on fear in this post for one simple reason: fear is what slams the door shut on AI adoption.
AI usage mandates won’t fix fear. Your employees will stop at compliance; what you need is transformation. Replacing uncooperative employees doesn’t fix it either; the fear becomes infectious, spreading through the rest of the organization. CEOs aren’t immune to the fear either. The saying I have heard from our own CEO this year is “every day you’re late to AI is 2 days you fall behind”.
The antidote to AI fear is transformational leadership.
Tod Bolsinger’s definition of transformational leadership is
“Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world” source
This is from his book “Canoeing the Mountains”, written in 2015. I have found it to be the most relevant leadership book to the AI moment. During a period of redefining the very essence of how our software team works, the principles in this book guided our team to become explorers of a new way of working and find our value in the outsized impact we were able to have on the mission of the organization.
What is holding your team back?
Identity & Worth
Our American culture prioritizes work. “What do you do?” is the first question many people are asked during an introduction. And until the AI revolution, for knowledge workers, the answer to that question most often revolved around the mechanical processes that the person performs on a day to day basis:
- I’m a computer programmer
- I’m a tax preparer
- I’m a business analyst
It’s interesting to note how that compares to how executives often see themselves:
- I find new opportunities through technology strategy (CTO)
- I grow new revenue opportunities (CRO)
- I enable new ventures through capital allocation (CFO)
Executives are focused on how they contribute to the shared mission of the organization while most white-collar workers are focused on the function they perform. Is it no wonder then that when the function is changing the workers feel threatened?
Redefine where you find your identity
Transformational leadership sits at the intersection of Adaptive Capacity, Technical Competence, and Relational Congruence. Relational congruence means being fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, circumstance, and especially amid crisis (Bolsinger, “Canoeing the Mountains”).
Do your employees see you that way? Or are you letting your fear of being left behind drive your leadership? If you aren’t projecting that congruence through what they percieve to be a stormy season, you need to reconsider where you are finding your own identity.
As Christians, our worth is not defined by what but by who. Our value is fixed at the price paid by Christ on the cross to purchase us from our sin:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 2:4-7
When you internalize this fact, you can approach your subordinates with the humility necessary to empathize with them and yet be confident in your mission when fear abounds.
Redefine your company’s cultural value emphasis
A friend of mine is an accountant. He used to have a team of preparers. His company implemented an AI system and laid off the preparers. Not only does he feel like he’s doing extra work correcting the AI’s mistakes, he also feels like he got a demotion. The company unfortunately approached AI implementation from a cost-cutting perspective rather than a revenue growth perspective, and didn’t reorient their team to a shared mission. The employees continue to feel like a replaceable cog in the machine.
This is a company culture problem that can’t be solved with carrots and sticks. It’s the responsibility of the leader to shape the company culture into one that values the unique contributions of the people in pursuit of the shared mission. That is, a culture that celebrates the value of the human as a co-contributor to a shared mission rather than a mechanistic translator of inputs into outputs. Each individual’s position needs to be redefined to no longer be based on the specific function they perform but the way they contribute to the mission of the organization. Aligning incentives is critical to this, but even more so is the encouragement and demeanor of their direct-report manager.
If you haven’t effectively communicated your mission to your entire organization, start at the top. Is your executive team bought in? Are their direct reports incentivized to buy in? And their direct reports? You must do this continually - culture leaks.
Building a Spirit of Adventure
What is your company mission? Is it clearly articulated and reinforced regularly? Do your employees feel like they’re part of the mission? A defense contractor’s mission may be to “support the warfighter”. Do the shift leads on the factory floor feel like they are daily contributing to the front-line warfighters?
A mission statement simply articulates a north star, a compass point to move towards. Do your team members want to go with you? Can you articulate why they should follow you through dangerous territory? And do they want to go at the pace you’re going?
Incentives Matter
There’s a reason sales teams are the most excited about AI. Their incentives are aligned - if they can create more top-line revenue they get paid more. This isn’t true of the comptroller in finance, or the assistant counsel in legal, or the backend developer responsible for the Nth subsystem of the job processing microservice. When AI transforms their jobs, they don’t get excited about the increased productivity. Or if they do, it’s not because it contributes to your shared mission.
If AI makes everyone more productive, and you’ve found and fixed the bottlenecks so that increased productivity translates into more earnings, how can you then incentivize your team to leverage these tools for the shared mission? Tokenmaxxing isn’t it, and neither are AI mandates. Employees then use AI grudgingly, rather than with the spirit of experimentation that is required in this moment.
It’s time to reevaluate how you can best incentivize your entire team down to the lowest level when their AI usage contributes to the mission.
Understand the emotional processes at work
Humans are emotional decision makers, and emotional processes are at work slowing down or speeding up AI adoption:
Fear Unfortunately there’s no way around the fact that some jobs are going to be utterly transformed. This is a scary proposition. The fear must be addressed and the person must be shepherded through to their own transformation. This is best done by those with the best relationship to that person - their peers and direct supervisor.
I’ve seen an AI initiative fail because the person in the seat being transformed was too fearful to relinquish control and trust the system.
Power (and Hubris) When people really embrace AI, there’s a feeling of power that energizes them. “I feel so productive” can be a trap, if the productivity is not aligned to the mission. It can also be a trap when it encourages non-experts to override experts, especially in a controlled environment.
Check on your senior leaders: are they listening to the concerns of those around them (and “underneath” them)?
Energy The productivity boost gained from AI sparks innovation and a reevaluation of prior constraints. When software is cheap, the build vs buy calculation changes.
Are you reevaluating your constraints in light of this creative energy? Can you unleash your team by removing or revising outdated processes?
Harmony We have seen wild swings just this year in what’s gone around as AI best practices. To take one perspective, token use leaderboards gave way to cost controls almost overnight. These wild swings give a sense of instability to your team.
Can you produce a sensible AI recommendation that takes into account the technology’s power without going overboard?
Liberation AI can automate the mundane, boring day to day processes that make people feel stuck. When IKEA automated their customer support, they retrained their call center workers as interior designers. By liberating their team to do higher-value work, they saw increased revenue.
What higher-value work can you liberate your team to do? Are you creative enough to find it?
Be Transformed
When your employees see themselves no longer as a cog in a machine but participants in a shared mission, transformation has started. When they find themselves judged not on productivity and output but on contribution to the mission, they are energized. When they are trusted by their leaders to innovate and explore new solutions to old problems, they become champions of this transformed way of working and energize the rest of your team towards that mission.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2
If you’re struggling with the last mile of AI adoption, let’s talk