It’s not a reach to say that AI is and likely will remain, the most important technological innovation of our times. While the internet laid the groundwork for how we interact and operate, both professionally and socially, AI is the technology that has the potential to revolutionise every single industry, from agriculture to education.
Innovation, of course, never comes without a few growing pains and a fair dose of initial fear and scepticism. While we may be past the point of overtly fearing AI and recognising its immense potential in aiding humanity on both a micro and macro level, we also need to be mindful of its limitations and the dangers of relying too heavily on it.
Leadership is no exception to these benefits and potential dangers of overreliance on AI. In a field as people-centric as leadership, it can be particularly detrimental for leaders to rely on AI to do their emotional heavy lifting. As AI continues to proliferate across industries, including leadership in business, it’s arguably become even more crucial to hone and refine your emotional intelligence as a leader.
A Closer Look at AI’s Impact on Leadership
How has AI affected leadership, from development and branding to people management and strategy execution? In short, it’s helped in the same way it’s helped every other industry – by processing vast amounts of big data in seconds and generating contextually appropriate responses, be they suggestions, ideas, summaries, or insights.
Let me be clear, this is fantastic. AI is not the antagonist to any growth-minded leader, or any working professional in any industry for that matter. AI is not our enemy or ally, it’s just a tool. And, as with any tool, it all comes down to how we choose to use it.
“AI-augmented leadership” is a term that’s recently entered our shared cultural lexicon in more think tank pieces and thought leadership articles. It’s a (somewhat lofty) term that describes leadership as a practice being supported and improved by AI capabilities.
A leader who wants to develop their leadership brand can use AI to provide the framework by reverse engineering leadership values and actions based on the user’s prompt. A longstanding leader might want to refine and finesse their identity to stand out more. Again, AI can help by analysing their current leadership style and comparing it against vast datasets of other well-known leaders within their space, identifying gaps and opportunities.
In more action-oriented strategies, leaders and managers can use an AI tool to analyse data surrounding employee satisfaction in the workplace, focusing on sentiment analysis to devise strategies for improving employee engagement and performance.
But, as with all wonderful use cases for novel technologies, there’s a flip side. What happens when all of your insights and wisdom shared online are autogenerated by ML algorithms at the expense of your unique take? How do you solve a problem or challenge in the workplace that requires a level of EQ that AI cannot replicate?
AI-augmented leadership is more than harnessing software and machine learning in your processes. It’s a marriage of technology and emotional intelligence working together.
Emotional Intelligence is Needed Now More Than Ever
Technology, not even AI, cannot replicate or replace human-derived emotional intelligence. It’s important that we recognise this because, in doing so, we recognise its limitations and the crucial role leaders’ EQ plays in effective leadership. An AI tool can help to generate ideas for crafting your brand or a focused leadership strategy, but it can’t build your brand for you or solve a people problem in your organisation.
We still need to bring our human intelligence, sensitivity and emotional nuance to every task. That’s what being an AI-augmented leader is about. The Harvard Business Review describes an effective leadership mindset as consisting of three qualities: awareness, wisdom and compassion.
Awareness is our perceptual capacity to accurately observe external and internal experiences, enabling us to develop perspectives based on perception. Wisdom is the ability to form accurate judgements and assessments based on reality. Compassion is the ability to leverage empathy and understanding when necessary, to ensure fairness in all evaluations before action is taken.
These qualities form the foundation of emotional intelligence and provide the necessary resources for leaders to be discerning, perceptive, self-aware and capable of bigger-picture thinking. While AI can produce quick, insightful answers and focused suggestions, it cannot act as a stand-in or replacement for a leader, in thought or action.
We need to guard ourselves against relying too heavily on technologies like AI to inform us, correct us, and guide us. We need to use our best judgements to take action based on awareness, wisdom and compassion because leadership is about understanding other people – something that can (and should) only be done by people.