A technology executive recently said to me, “What we’re going through right now is like the industrial revolution. But instead of taking 100 years, it’s going to happen in 10 years.” Another shared that given the rate of change in AI, decisions that used to be made in months are now being made in weeks—or sometimes in a single day.
The scope of the commercial opportunity and the blazing pace of AI development are leading companies to make massive investments and fast pivots. If you are a senior executive, you likely have good visibility into the AI landscape outside your company, so you know how high the stakes are, and how nimble your strategy needs to be.
Further down in your organization, however, many front line employees and middle managers lack the benefit of your full perspective. They simply don’t know as much as you do about what’s happening in the marketplace. For them, just when they think a strategy has been set, the game board shifts and all the work they were teeing up changes. It can be baffling and demotivating.
Deep understanding of your employees can be a competitive advantage for your business. The more you understand their hearts and minds, the better you can calibrate your messages about change. Also, by learning from their knowledge of how things actually work in your organization, you’ll be better positioned to make decisions about how to drive the change. Empathy for your employees is a crucial element of succeeding in your AI transformation.
Listen to employees deep in your organization. I think most executives care about the experience of their employees. But after so many years operating at senior levels, they may have forgotten what life is really like for the front line employees and managers. And it’s quite difficult for senior leaders to get more junior employees to open up to them candidly.
The understanding gap between senior executives and employees can be costly. Lacking a nuanced understanding of their audience, executives sometimes communicate in ways that are tone deaf, confusing, and can lead to reductions in employee productivity. A CEO might communicate passionately with employees about reducing costs, something that looks very different if you are the “cost”.
The gap can also mean that executives make inaccurate assumptions about how their vision might be executed. For example, a hard pivot towards AI and away from legacy systems may encounter huge technical hurdles that aren’t obvious. Those need to be understood and considered as part of the strategy. It’s often people at the bottom or in the middle of companies who truly understand the dimensions of these problems—and who can offer up the best path forward.
The solution? During a major transformation, as one author puts it, you should spend twice as much time listening as you spend talking. Carve out 5-10% of your overall schedule to connect with people on all levels of your organization. One CEO I worked with did this through a series of small group, informal chats. Others used office hours, or a curated series of 1-1 meetings. Design an engagement model for how you will connect with and listen to a broad range of people to inform what you will say, and what you will do. You’ll be a better change leader as a result.
Actively welcome a shift in your perspective. As you go about listening to your organization, consciously increase the flexibility of your viewpoint. Some executives close their minds to the views of their employees, especially if those views are communicated poorly, or when they involve complaints or a feeling of entitlement.
Sift through what you hear and look for nuggets of insight. Be aware when you are bristling at perspectives that are uninformed or immature. Focus on what you are learning. Are employees happy about the changes? Scared? What losses do they perceive? What are they most worried about? Could there be some truth in views you strongly disagree with? Challenging your own perspective with these questions can help you develop greater “viewpoint agility”—the ability to have a confident, well-informed view while also remaining open to new information that could change that view.
Deep listening while welcoming shifts in your thinking will go a long way to helping you reacquaint yourself with life at the bottom and middle of your organization. And it will equip you to better conceive and communicate a strategy that actually gets executed. You don’t have to change your mind. But you’ll get the most value out of these conversations if you strive to be open to such a change.
Feel and communicate compassion. Studies have shown that senior executives become less empathetic the more power they acquire. Perhaps it’s due to the tough business decisions they need to make that can profoundly impact people’s lives: if you empathize too much with employees, it’s harder to make the tough calls.
But felt compassion is a uniquely powerful force in leadership. The most inspiring leaders, the ones who people are excited to follow, deeply care about the experience of those who follow them. Because of their compassion for the employees’ experience, they are more likely to create a culture of high employee engagement. In turn, as has been shown over and over, companies with highly engaged workforces perform substantially better than their less-engaged peers.
To convey compassion to employees, start by feeling it yourself. To do that, put yourself in their shoes. Take a page from the field of design thinking, and conduct an exercise in customer empathy (with your employees being the consumers of your leadership). In addition to actually talking with them, in your quiet moments, reflect on what it would be like to be a front-line engineer, sales person or finance manager in your company.
Imagine what the work is like. Imagine what you are doing throughout the day, how things are at home on your (much lower) salary. Imagine that you don’t have all the extensive insights into the broader marketplace and competitive landscape that your company faces. And now imagine how you might feel about your company’s AI transformation, the speed of change, and the frequency of organizational redesigns or necessary pivots in strategy.
When you’ve done this well, you will experience a noticeable change in your viewpoint. And with that, you may find fresh inspiration for your change effort. Given what you’ve learned, what actions might you take to enable more effective communication about the change? How might you frame the effort differently? What are some crucial building blocks to execution that you may have overlooked? If you find yourself unable to achieve a change in your viewpoint, who might you need to talk with and listen to, to help you more fully understand your employees?
Obviously, there are many actions you’ll need to take in leading a large AI transformation. You must form and over-communicate an inspiring, clear vision of the future with a compelling “why”. You must leverage the entire talent management process and align it with the vision, from hiring choices to evaluation, promotions and incentives. You need to align resources and organizational structures and processes. But the three I mention here—listening deep in your organization, developing greater viewpoint agility, and being a model for compassionate leadership—are ways that you can personally transform yourself. This is important “inner work” for leaders of companies making dramatic transformations. Transform yourself, and you’ll do a better job of transforming your organization.