7 essential leadership traits for a world of AI

You can’t out-robot a robot. Being human is your superpower: hone it.

Are you still spending hours drafting emails, composing reports, generating presentations, perfecting complex spreadsheets, developing detailed plans?

Stop. As a leader none of this is your job. Delegate it – to AI.

We now live in a world where machines are better and quicker at all of that. Let’s leave the tasks to the machines and let’s hone those things that HAL can’t do. The human elements of leadership: collaboration, engaging and motivating your people, giving them purpose, helping them to be curious, creating a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, leading and embracing change.

AI can do pretty much do everything else better and faster than you can.

I have identified 7 essential leadership traits that we all need to hone if we wish to thrive as a leader in a world that will soon be swamped by artificial intelligence. 

“None of you will be replaced by AI. You will be replaced by someone using AI.”

Essential Trait #1: Embrace the change. Lead the change. 
“None of you will be replaced by AI,” I declared to a packed conference room a couple of weeks ago. “You will be replaced by someone using AI.”

Embrace AI, wholeheartedly. Use it to make yourself more productive. Use it to enhance the quality of your work. Embrace the uncertainty. Uncover the opportunities. And engage every single one of your team to do the same.

Essential Trait #2: Soothe the fears about AI 
Many of your people will be worried about the consequences of AI – to them personally. Get these fears out in the open, give them credence and together work out how to mitigate them: how to embrace AI and look for the opportunities. This will require developing a culture of psychological safety – where no-one is afraid to ask the dumb questions, where everyone feels safe to say what they are really feeling, where missteps are opportunities for learning and concerns are discussed openly without blame or shame.

Essential Trait #3: Unleash curiosity. 
AI evolves rapidly, so you and your team need to be constantly curious. Continuously exploring the capabilities, limitations and applicability of AI in all its forms – Large Language Models like Co-Pilot, Bard, Gemini and Grok; AI Agents (of which there are thousands for every foreseeable task), chatbots various, … be curious about them all. Build a culture of learning, an eagerness for continuous improvement.

Essential Trait #4: Champion ‘What If?’ Thinking 
AI opens new frontiers. Carve out time for your team to explore them. Adopt an innovation mindset, exploring ways to make a quantum leap in the products and services you offer, a step-change in the way you do things.

Essential Trait #5: Encourage healthy scepticism 
AI today is limited by its newness. LLMs find it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. They don’t understand nuance. They even lie. (Hmmm, the same can be said for a few politicians I can think of!) While embracing the excitement of AI, we also need to hone our scepticism; implore ourselves and our people to use AI as a starter-for-ten, and to question the results that it delivers. Today’s AI is not an oracle. It is an idiot savant. It doesn’t possess your experience.

Essential Trait #6: Hone your Emotional Intelligence (EQ) 
We can’t compete with machines when it comes to routine tasks and logic. Our superpower is EQ: self-awareness, self-control, empathy, relationship building and motivation. EQ enables leaders to connect with people, lead change and build resilient cultures. AI can help us to determine what we could do. It can help us plan how. But it is up to us to engage and motivate our people to collaborate and do, to deliver. Develop your own EQ and the EQ of every single one of your people. EQ is the secret ingredient of extraordinary leaders in times of extraordinary change.

Essential Trait #7: Adopt Stewardship 
Stewardship is the act of leaving your part of the business in a better state than you found it. It is an ethos that underpins extraordinary leadership – especially during times of change. Yes, this involves engaging your team to embrace continuous improvement and innovation as we have discussed. But, most importantly of all, it involves leaving your people in a better state than you found them – upskilling and developing every single one of them, and creating a cadre of high-EQ, AI-embracing change leaders in the process.

Leaders who develop these uniquely human qualities will thrive in a world of AI.

Leaders who don’t will be replaced.

Organisations who don’t develop emotionally intelligent leaders will be usurped by those who do.

Written by Campbell Macpherson.