The ‘AI vs Human Skills’ Managers Must Pay Attention to (Ep. 307)

The managers most at risk from AI are of course, the ones who don’t care and completely ignore ai. But there’s also a big chunk of managers who aren’t ignoring it, and they think that kind of keeping up with it and using the tools provided by the company is good enough,

and I believe that is all but the truth. If you are not at the forefront of it, I believe you’re either not gonna be able to keep up with it or you’re not gonna be able to prove the value that you bring to your organization over time.

And so I actually believe there is a split happening. On one side, AI is getting dramatically better at handling tasks, workflows research, data synthesis, meeting prep, drafting communication, and reports entire categories of analytical work that can be done better by ai. And what was interesting, just recently we got a glimpse of what Claude’s Next model will look like. And it’s multiple factors more powerful than what we already have access to. And so that curve of performance improvements will continue to accelerate and it’s again, gonna change the landscape over the next few months.

So while on one side, being on the forefront of AI developments is key. On the other side, there’s a true premium on genuinely skilled. Human leadership and that premium is going to go up, not down. This includes trust, coaching, real feedback, empathy, being able to navigate conflict, creating alignment between people, helping people understand what’s going on, supporting them through change, helping them grow.

None of that will be automated, and in fact, the need for this will become. Even bigger. Now in between these two things of the rapid improvement on AI and its possibility and potential, end the increasing importance on genuine, authentic leadership skills.

If you are in the middle and you think you can outsource your leadership and your management to an AI in a half sloppy or sloppy way use ai. You are not going to continue to bring value to your organization. Because if all you do is outsource your management to the ai, then why wouldn’t AI do it for you entirely?

So if you wanna continue to elevate your value in your organization, it’s being both on the front of the AI developments and how you can leverage this inside your organizations and your job and role. And on the other hand. Diving deeper even into the leadership and the human connection, the human judgment, all of that’s gonna become even more important.

Gallup Research has found that manager’s account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement that number hasn’t changed.

But what has changed is. Everything around the manager, we got faster tools, more data. We have more distributed teams. With AI comes higher expectations. Remember when we started using the calculators in school? It wasn’t that suddenly math was so easy. No. The math problems in our exams just got harder for those of you who were in school during that time. So with that, similarly the leadership skill gap has become more expensive to ignore. If you were providing value so far just by managing schedules and helping people understand a workflow or teaching them something based on your years of experience. Those are things that will be automated and your value that you provide to the organization will diminish as a result of that.

The actual human leadership component that will continue to increase, there’ll be a bigger premium on it. So today we’re gonna talk about both sides of that divide. And I’m going to walk you through five CLO skills, so those skills that you can build inside of clot, which you can find on the clot ai.

Now, I’m not talking about soft skills here, right? This is just a term of. The, skills, like the thing that clot does when you prompt it. And by the end of this episode of video, you will have at least one thing that you can do differently this week to leverage AI to help you lean into your leadership and augment what you do without getting stuck in the middle here, where you continue to just manage, but really where you use AI to augment while honing in on your actual leadership competencies. So it’s a training tool for you to get better.

Now, one more really important thing that has been top of mind for me for a while now, the organizational hierarchy that we grew up in, or most of us, or we sort, used to right, was built on one assumption on several assumptions, but one here is key that you move up through the, hierarchy based on accumulated experience and knowledge, right?

So seniority with that. Meant value, experience, knowledge that you’ve developed over time. And that equation is being completely disrupted because a 22-year-old can walk into a business and automate 10 hours of work off of every employee’s plate, and they don’t have any institutional knowledge, nor really much of a career so far that they’ve built in terms of experience.

They also don’t really have a relationship with anyone. That is key, but they have the ability to change the operating model and add tremendous amount of value in a matter of weeks. Now think about this. How would you rank that person on the org chart?

And by the way, if you think this is farfetched, it is absolutely not. Go on YouTube or Google some of these use cases that is happening every single day, all over the place where young kids who are very tech savvy will completely disrupt small businesses based on the automation that they’re able to.

Incorporate into their workflows. But back to how it changes the org structure. What do you think changes when a senior leader in the organization sits in a meeting with this 22-year-old who just came in and provided massive value to the organization without really knowing much about the industry, having had a career really, or any particular relationships?

Now, the senior leader, of course, super important has the institutional knowledge to even know. What to automate but without the 22-year-old, they can’t do a thing. We’re working here with the assumption that the, more senior leader here isn’t as tech savvy and knows how to do this.

The 22-year-old could probably automate and do something generic but halfway there and they can replicate that across different organizations or just figure out with the help of Claude or other tools who would research organizations. Similar or businesses similar to the business that they’re working in, but they do also depend on that institutional knowledge from a more senior person.

But what that really means is the org structure, that assumption that you rise through experience and knowledge is changing so quickly. Really happening at this moment. And I talked previously, and we’ll link to this in the show notes about horizontal leadership. And I truly believe if you are not familiar with what that means and how that’s gonna affect you, this is the time to understand how organizations change. We do 60 minute presentations in organizations to introduce the concept of horizontal leadership. It’s a bit like a keynote or a lunch and learn session.

So if you’re interested to learn more, check the show notes for more details. But okay, I’m saying that because understanding horizontal leadership here is key.

At the same time as the work model is changing, aI handles more of the cognitive load the work, and people will want more human contact from their leaders, not actually less. They wanna have genuine development, genuine and honest feedback, more real investment in their growth.

We are social species, after all. We’re like. Meant to be in groups, and if we’re already working from home or we’re already isolatedly working with a bot or an AI tool, the need for these typically naturally interwoven social interactions in our day-to-day work of being in meetings, doing things with other people collaboratively.

If you do less of that, then we will want to compensate. Elsewhere, and that’s gonna be on leaders to create that space and create those moments. AI takes over the tasks, the leader job becomes the relationship. I wanna underscore that, right?

Let’s talk about a director really well respected, really sharp, technically excellent. Her team had started using AI tools to speed up their workflows, and within about six months. Output from that team had doubled, and of course she felt great about it.

And then her skip level two levels down told her that the team isn’t engaged and that they’re worried. And that the upcoming engagement survey that the company runs will raise some flax here and alarm bells.

Because people started to feel disconnected, right? They were getting fast answers from ai, but they weren’t getting much direction nor recognition or development from their manager or their skip level manager, their manager’s manager and. At that moment from the director’s perspective, she thought, Hey I thought I was doing everything right.

This is what we were supposed to be doing with incorporating ai, and the numbers look great, but if the numbers look great with the current team existing, and the team is starting to disengage, and not find their work fulfilling anymore and not feel connected to the team anymore. Then obviously

the leadership part is what’s not landing and is what’s failing. So she had defaulted to managing outputs and had stopped leading people. And the two things look similar when the environment is slow, right?

They start to diverge fast. Ito, when the environment accelerates or when we go back to this bifurcation that I mentioned earlier, this split where technology’s taking off and at the same time the need for human connection increases if you manage someone who is questioning your value in an AI heavy environment, or if you are actually starting to question it yourself make sure everyone around you, including you, understands this AI gives you faster answers, faster output, make sure you address this, and you talk to your manager about how you can use this shift of using more AI to go deeper into the things that directly affect retention and performance, the things that tools cannot touch. So again, you wanna be at the forefront of the FAI that now I’m making a stretch here.

And you also wanna lean into the human and the leadership aspect. And what I’m concerned with is that a, there’s too many people in between that are needer leaning into the. Leadership aspect, nor are they taking AI seriously enough, or that managers completely default from pressure from above into the AI integration, and they drop and aren’t paying attention at all, that their true value in the future will come from genuine, authentic human leadership and that actually they need to double down on those just as much as they do on AI because those leadership skills.

Will become the premium going forward. That’s what’s going to protect their role, their position.

And of course, what can quickly happen too, a traffic can fall into is that we use busyness as a substitute for leadership, right? Being able to handle fires is not the same as developing people and doing things proactively.

So that’s really important here to distinguish as well. Now I wanna share something here more practical. At ar cova we’re heavily leaning into, again, both of these sides as well. On one side, fully leaning into the human only the genuine. Relationships that we build through human interactions, team building, team development, executive coaching, one-on-one, human to human leadership programs, where a peer group such as our new manager program, peer group of first time managers come together to share.

Openly what’s actually going on and learn through and with each other through a structured program. Those are all the things that we see more demand, we see more need in the market for people and from organizations. At the same time, we want to leverage AI and understand what’s going on and how we can augment our work.

And of course, especially on the operational side, how we can add more value to our clients. That wasn’t possible before.

Now, with that, we’ve built a system of 15 manager.

Skills. These are cloth skills. To be really specific, I want to walk you through five of them. And these are the ones that our clients most consistently under invest in or want, and the ones that make the biggest difference fast. But those are five out of a total of 15 such competencies, and they’re not intended to take away anything from your leadership, but they’re intended to help you learn, grow, and augment that human aspect.

So the first one is feedback. Feedback is not just a conversation, it is part of a system.

The leadership system, your leadership system that most managers give feedback reactively, right? When something goes wrong. Pretty significantly, or when a review is due. But what effective managers do is they build a feedback rhythm, a cadence that is proactive, specific, and too directional. And we teach that in our leadership accelerator and other leadership programs now, for example, hey, I’d love to give you some observations from this week. This a good time. Okay. Two things that are working and one that I think we should look at to see how we can make this better going forward.

That is the initiation of feedback. It’s proactive and what we encourage our leaders to do this on a regular basis, that’s why it’s part of a routine that builds a system. So if you schedule a 15 minute feedback loop with each direct report every two weeks, it’s not a check-in. It’s deliberately a feedback session.

It’s also separate from one-on-ones, for example. Then you have a cloth skill that helps you prepare for those types of conversations, but you are still the one who has to understand that this is really important. By the way, I’m making an example here that you could do this every other week, 50 minutes with each direct report.

You can of course also add that to your one-on-one or do this at any different cadence. That depends on your work setup and what you deem to be best for you. The point is. Set it in place, build a system, and then use AI tools to help you prepare for those and help you see things you might otherwise miss.

The second clot skill is coaching conversations. Giving someone advice is fast, but it’s also forgettable. People will just hear what you say and do as you said. ’cause they don’t need as much brain power questions. On the other hand, as we get to coaching, when you ask questions, they are slow and they’re sticky.

’cause now you’re activating massively more of their brain cells ’cause they have to give you an answer that originates from their brain. It feels slower in the short term. It seems hard to do, and we are so not used to it. We are all been trained and learned that giving advice is fast and is effective. So that is a bigger mindset shift again. We built a clot skill that can help you develop that skill

and to start, by the way, it can be as simple as this. Hey, before I share what I think, IE give you my advice. I wanna hear your take. What have you tried and what is getting in the way? You’ve asked a question that they first have to do some work before you are giving them the answer. So you personally, wanna train yourself to be curious before being helpful. The third skill in this toolkit is ownership culture specifically around accountability Here. Accountability is not punishment, right?

This is a structure and it’s actually a personal skill to have self accountability. We don’t wanna encourage accountability by others. That’s a weird like parent child relationship. That’s what not we’re looking for. It’s also, by the way, completely against the horizontal leadership mindset vertical would be like, I hold you accountable.

Horizontal is no. We make agreements then we are all have to be self accountable. And managers who struggle here to develop this almost always have the same problem they set. Vague expectations and then there are surprise. Some people don’t follow through, and so ownership starts with crystal clear agreements and expectations.

For example, let’s make sure we are aligned by Friday. You are doing X and I am doing why. I will send you a recap after this. And then you have to track both X and y and the date, which in this case was Friday. You have to track it so that you remember what you promise to do, and you can hold yourself accountable and also encourage self accountability or develop that with your direct reports.

Close every single meaningful conversation with that type of agreement. No more vague commitments.

The fourth one is to ensure that you are delegating work and creating that sense of accountability, the clot skill that we’ve built for you here will help with that. Number four, understanding human motivation. Again, we’re totally leaning into the importance of understanding human behavior, psychology so that you actually know how to work well and employees and human beings. It’s really hard to retain someone.

Whose real motivation for why they’re here, why they’re joined the company, why they’re doing this type of work. You’ve never asked about, like you don’t actually know. AI will never know why someone gets out of bed for work, but that’s really hard to get to. They’ll know a whole lot about every single employee, but

what really drives them is still something that we as humans can get to way easier and way faster than done, right? That intelligence therefore belongs to you as the leader if you are willing to engage in this process and are skilled to do most managers assume that they know what their people care about.

Because they make the assumption that they must be caring about the same, pretty much that I am caring about. Because we do this, we walk around thinking people see things similar to how we see it, but in most cases you are going to be wrong. If you have 10 people on the team, maybe two of those 10 see the same way, the remaining eight will give you a different answer.

For example, a conversation such as, Hey, I wanna make sure I’m giving you work that actually energizes you. What does a great week look like for you? And what drains you, not just the work, but also how we engage. That’s something that you can directly get an answer to without AI having to interpret emails or other communication in order to get to a, hopefully close enough answer.

Building that personal motivation map for every direct report, it’s almost like a one pager to understand what they want to learn, what kind of recognition lands for them, what they’re growing towards, what matters to them, what energizes them, what doesn’t. All of that is really important and something that should be built in your system.

And AI can help you get there. It cannot replace the conversation you have with them and your understanding of it, but it can help you put that into motion.

Scale number five is about decision making. Ambiguity is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be navigated ’cause everything is ambiguous, especially the higher up that ego and leadership. Things just are ambiguous and multiple things can be true at the same time. Now, AI will give you fasted data, but it doesn’t give you better judgment about what actually matters.

If you have context, not just of your team, but also of the work that you do. So managers who struggle here with, the decision making process, either decide too fast, without enough input, and maybe not even leveraging AI to get input, or they don’t decide fast enough and they procrastinate on things that actually should be decided.

Sooner ’cause they’re waiting to feel certain and that certainly will not come because the longer that we wait, the more information is there. And we have to be able to make decisions, even with incomplete information to say, Hey, I have enough to make a call and make a decision here’s what we are going to do now. If anyone sees a critical flaw, I wanna hear it please, share that within the next 48 hours, and then we will move ahead with this decision. So you name the minimum information that you need to decide. You do that for yourself or for your team, and then the latest state that you can afford to wait here too.

AI can help with this to ensure that you are not delaying decisions and that you go about the decision making process in an effective way. So these were the five specific skills that I use to demonstrate here how you can lean into your human leadership also not ignoring ai, but leveraging AI in your workflow, in your own leadership development to a degree.

But remember. Being at the forefront of what AI can do in your field and in your company, as well as leaning into the human behavior, understanding how to lead someone well that cannot be automated and that is going to be the premium that will be set on leaders and employees in organizations.

Who are able to do both. If this was helpful, please share this on to someone else, a coworker, a manager, who would find this valuable as well? Would mean a lot and it will help us spread the message. Thanks so much and I’ll see you next week on our episode of The Manager Track podcast.

So if you have an account with Claude, you can go to the show notes, download the skills, and then upload them into your account so that they are easily accessible to you when you prepare for or debrief certain conversations.

We’ve developed those skills with our proprietary tools and frameworks on how to have coaching conversations, how to give feedback, how to engage in difficult conversations, how to delegate well, and instill accountability plus so much more.

So to make this really practical for you, check the show notes below for the link to download those cloud skills, which you then can easily upload into your cloud account and get started right away.

If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out at our covid.org/masterclass. The second resource is my bestselling book, the Confident and Competent New Manager.

How to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role? Check it out at our cova.org/books, or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there.