To deal with AI you've got to have some understanding of the world

The days when people joined organisations without questioning their inefficiencies and hierarchies are long gone, along with loyalty by default to a person and company you might not even like. But there are still plenty of bad bosses out there, and workplaces described as “toxic” in the Glassdoor reviews.

Rob Goffee’s books Why Would Anyone Be Led By You? What It Takes To Create an Authentic Leader (2015) and Why Should Anyone Work Here? What It Takes to Create An Authentic Organisation (2019) – were instant management classics for good reason. Co-authored with Gareth Jones, they explored obvious questions that are even more relevant now, in the age of AI.

They address simple human wants and needs that remain unaffected by the rise of AI: “I want to work somewhere where I can be myself, where I can believe what's being said, where I develop, where I know what the organisation stands for and how what I do connects to the overall purpose.”

Rob and Gareth came up with a useful mnemonic for leaders thinking about what people want from their work: DREAMS. This stands for:

• Difference – “I want to work in a place where I can be myself, where I can express the ways in which I’m different and how I see things differently.”

• Radical honesty – “I want to know what’s really going on.”

• Extra value – “I want to work in an organisation that magnifies my strengths and adds extra value for me and my personal development.”

• Authenticity – “I want to work in an organisation I’m proud of, one that truly stands for something.”

• Meaning – “I want my day-to-day work to be meaningful.”

• Simple rules – “I don’t want to be hindered by stupid rules or rules that apply to some people but not others.”

“The areas where organisations struggled most or felt there were the biggest challenges were D, R and S,” Rob (now Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour) says now. “When we talked about difference, we were going beyond conventional notions of diversity. We were interested in different mindsets. Large, complex organisations still struggle with that.”

We tend to celebrate strong corporate cultures, but they have a flipside, he says. “The danger of strong corporate cultures is that you end up with people that all think the same way. That persists as a real danger.” And as a leader, your influence only goes so far. “You can influence the culture but you can’t manage it, because actually significant chunks of it are unmanageable. Cultures evolve whether you like it or not.”

As for radical honesty, many organisations are still reluctant to open up about mistakes they have made or ways they have failed. But things are likely to come out anyway, especially with social media.

“Tell the truth before someone else tells it for you” is the maxim. “Organisations need to be proactive in this. That limits the damage.” In the age of fake news, it’s even more important. “That ups the requirement for organisations to get the real truths out there before they get distorted.”

Large organisations tend to become bureaucratic, despite all the things organisations do to try and mitigate that. This brings us to the S in the acronym: Simple rules.

“Companies still struggle with it,” says Rob. “They can chop themselves up into smaller units and give those as much autonomy as they can. But there's still a real problem with becoming rule-bound, where rules become complex and imposed rather than simple and agreed.”

Then there’s all the uncertainty around AI. Rob agrees with Professor of Organisational Behaviour Herminia Ibarra that AI is a leadership issue. There's a huge variation in terms of understanding of what AI might mean in different contexts, and people are seriously worried as to what the implications might be. A leader's task is to help them make sense of what is going on. And there are no easy generalisations here, because what it means varies according to the context, the job, the task and the industry.”

Rob and Gareth identified three essential axioms of good leadership – it is contextual, relational, non-hierarchical. Situation-sensing has never been more important, he says. “Understanding context is the foundational skill of leadership. If you haven't got that, you can't do anything else well because you don't know where you are. The task of a leader is to articulate that situation and to transform it by their actions.”

Relational leadership is especially vital with reference to AI, Rob suggests. Leaders need to strike a balance between closeness and distance. “There are moments when I need to empathise with your position. And there are moments where I need to step back and give you space. To deal with AI you've got to have some understanding of the world. You've got to get perspective and not get lost in the detail.”

Non-hierarchical leadership has also gained a new kind of resonance. People want to be led by a person, not a role holder. Back when Why Should Anyone Be Led By You was written, they were contrasting a real person with a faceless suit, a bureaucrat. Now, in a workplace which may become increasingly artificial, we want humanity.

Some readers misunderstood the books’ emphasis on authenticity as meaning people should just be themselves, whatever that looked like. We can all think of confidently authentic leaders who are tyrannical and downright bad.

That wasn’t what they meant at all, Rob says. “We were saying: use what you've got more knowingly, and with skill. And what that means for some people, frankly, is, ‘Be yourself less’. Sometimes it is about reining yourself in.”

So what does a successfully authentic organisation look like? In their own research Rob and Gareth found that they were often foundations, trusts, partnerships or family firms, or places such as mutual insurance companies that were less susceptible than listed companies to short term pressures.

They cite, for example, Arup and New York Life as organisations with a strong sense of what they are about - which gives reason for hope. But both of them have peculiar ownership structures, he says. “So I think that tells you something. We may need to rethink rather radically what ownership looks like.”

Rob and Gareths’ work on how to lead your brightest people is also particularly pertinent now, when a lot of brilliant minds are turned off by traditional firms. “The world is increasingly full of people who are smarter than you, especially with regard to AI, and they feel they don't want to be led – at least in the conventional sense.” This threatens the future of organisations, he claims. Some of your cleverest people may only be there because they want to use your resources or your contacts, or to use you as a platform to get known.

The “clevers” tend to prefer organisations where they have a lot of autonomy and can work on their own for long periods of time uninterrupted. For example, in education or research-based organisations. Or they’re attracted to the organisations like Apple, “which are almost religious in their belief that they can impact the way things are”.

“They basically like to work where they can be really independent and work for themselves, or they’re going to change the world. They need to be led in a way that they don't notice it, where they feel they're doing it all themselves.”

Post-Covid, he worries about the loss of sociability in some workplaces. It’s not just about making friends, he points out. The great benefit is “unarticulated reciprocity”. You help someone out, you pass on useful knowledge for “free” – you don’t expect anything immediately back in return (he likens this to giving blood).

“That’s a source of added value in organisations, and it’s one of the reasons many organisations are trying hard to get people back into the office. It’s very difficult to build proper relationships and creativity and innovation otherwise. Generally, people work better together once they’ve met each other face to face first.”