AI Can Do Many Things. It Still Can't Lead.

A few days ago, I was on a conference call with colleagues discussing a leadership program we will soon be teaching to executives in the pharmaceutical industry.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to AI. Several colleagues spoke enthusiastically about how artificial intelligence will transform the pharmaceutical industry and why understanding AI should therefore become an important part of what we teach future leaders.

I found myself somewhat less enthusiastic. Not because I doubt AI's potential. I use it myself, and it is difficult to imagine an area of the pharmaceutical industry that will remain untouched by it: from drug discovery and clinical development to manufacturing and commercial decision-making, the possibilities are extraordinary.

What made me uncomfortable was something else: the increasingly common assumption that because AI will transform what leaders do, it will necessarily transform what it means to lead.

I am not sure those are the same thing.

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Intelligence is not leadership

Much of what executives do today can already be supported by AI, and some of it may eventually be done better by AI than by humans. It can analyze information, identify patterns, compare alternatives, prepare presentations, challenge assumptions and help us think through difficult decisions. That is enormously valuable.

But leadership has never been only about reaching the analytically correct answer. A leader has to make decisions when the answer is unclear and then accept responsibility for the consequences. A leader has to understand when someone needs encouragement and when that same person needs to be challenged. A leader has to recognize ambition, fear, disappointment and potential, often before they are explicitly expressed.And perhaps most importantly, a leader has to make other human beings want to follow.

AI may give me excellent advice. I may increasingly trust its recommendations, but, is trusting an answer the same as trusting a leader?

 

Our fascination with artificial intelligence

At its most extreme, the language surrounding AI has begun to sound almost messianic. Some of its most enthusiastic advocates speak not simply about a powerful technology, but about an intelligence capable of transforming civilization, solving problems humans have been unable to solve and perhaps eventually surpassing human intelligence itself.

Perhaps they are right. I am in no position to predict what AI will be capable of ten or twenty years from now. But I wonder whether our fascination with artificial intelligence is causing us to undervalue another form of intelligence that organizations desperately need: human intelligence about other human beings.

 

Years before the current AI explosion, I became interested in what I called conscious leadership: the ability to understand not only the people we lead, but also ourselves—our motivations, fears, biases, ambitions and the effect our behavior has on others. Technology has changed dramatically since then.

Human beings, perhaps, somewhat less.

 

What makes someone want to stay?

That distinction became even more apparent to me years later when I researched why internationally mobile executives stay with or leave organizations. Leadership quality emerged as one of the strongest factors associated with staying. That finding had little to do with whether leaders possessed more information than their executives. It had much more to do with the environment they created around them and the future executives could imagine within the organization.

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AI can help a leader prepare for a career conversation. It can analyze an executive's experience, identify possible career paths and perhaps even suggest what questions to ask. But, can it make that executive feel genuinely understood? Can it make someone believe that another person sees potential in them?

Can it create the trust that allows someone to admit uncertainty, ambition or fear without calculating the consequences? And can it make someone think: I want to keep working with this person?

 

Perhaps someday it can. I would be foolish to claim certainty about the limits of a technology evolving this quickly. But today, I remain skeptical. Perhaps leaders should become more human, not less

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Organizations already reward leaders for many of the things machines are becoming extraordinarily good at: processing information, measuring performance, predicting outcomes, optimizing decisions and increasing efficiency. If leaders increasingly define their own value in those terms, they may eventually find themselves competing with AI on precisely the terrain where AI has the greatest advantage.

 

Perhaps we should do the opposite.

Let AI analyze more of the data. Let it identify patterns, summarize information and model alternatives. Let it make organizations—and certainly the pharmaceutical industry—more intelligent and effective.

And let leaders devote more attention to the things that leadership has always required: judgment, courage, empathy, self-awareness, responsibility, trust and the ability to give other people a reason to believe in a shared future.

 

Perhaps AI should not make leaders more like AI. It should free leaders to become more human.

Which leaves me with a question I would like to ask my colleagues when we next discuss what future leaders need to learn:

 

If AI can eventually do much of what leaders currently do, what will remain in a human leader that makes someone worth following?