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10 Traits of Leaders to Thrive in the AI Driven World: With special reference to the leadership role of Independent Directors
The unprecedented geopolitical turbulence faced by the whole world during the past couple of months has challenged resilience and has disturbed the business strategies of most business corporations. Today when the AI and its innovative tools are fast emerging as drivers of not only operational excellence but are significantly helping in strategic decisions and in building competitive advantage, leadership roles in the entire context of corporate governance are required to be revisited and transformed. The global AI standards are experiencing alarming fragmentation due to this geopolitical turmoil and the hopes of having universally useful standards and norms for the framework of AI governance are fading out. Leading in the AI driven world and that too in the volatile and unpredictable environment appears to be very challenging but carries lot of excitement of the prospects of building stronger resilience and of creating sustainable value. AI has potential to help us have geopolitical intelligence also.
The AI driven governance must shift from passive compliance to visionary intelligence. Corporate leaders including the independent directors, must be vibrant to the symptoms and happenings in the geopolitical environment and at the same time take responsibility of the AI driven corporate governance which ensures that AI systems are trustworthy, responsible and maintain high ethical standards.
This article, after deep research, identifies 10 traits of corporate leaders including the non-executive independent directors and hopes that these traits will help them in achieving distinguished excellence in their role of corporate leadership:
1. Mindset for Excellence: Responsible for steering the company into a promising future, corporate leaders cannot afford to tolerate mediocrity in their role. Independent directors, enjoying the greatness of independence, must always strive for a better than the best in terms of their perception, belief system, thoughts and values that help them to rise above passive compliance and to persevere to raise the standards of governance. Mindset for excellence helps leaders in prioritizing continuous improvement and in empowering people to take on challenges to explore new possibilities.
2. Environmental Vibrance: Future focused leaders are sensitive to the symptoms of the metamorphosis happening in the external environment. They are prompt to guide their teams to draw the best strategies through the various perspectives emerging from the changes. They build trust, promote a culture of innovation and infuse energy for speedy execution. Corporate leaders are sensitive to the sustainability crises including fast depletion of natural resources, pollution, water shortage, loss of biodiversity and rapid climate change. The tremendous prospects offered by the AI revolution can transform into reality only when the leaders take care of addressing all issues of sustainability.
3. Emotional Resilience: Artificial Intelligence is heavily dependent on big data which is created by very fast and massive generation of information. Emotional resilience empowers the leaders with the inner strength to question and evaluate the tools for the best suitability for the company without being emotionally carried away by success stories of others. Emotional resilience is the ability to stand with moral principles even in stressful circumstances and powerful influences. Corporate leaders function under the complex interplay of various factors that influence their thought process and conduct. Emotional resilience is the capacity to roll with the punches of biased arguments and manipulated facts.
4. Valuing Intuition and Passion: Human intuition or inner voice or gut feeling is a uniquely powerful natural process. This process guides to understand complex situations and take tougher decisions under intense pressure. Leaders need to intuitively recognize, activate and leverage human instincts in pursuit of the corporate mission. Experience of navigating through complex situations builds intuition. Passion is an emotional strength to chase your robust vision. Since the planning and operations dimensions of business are getting amazingly automated by AI tools, the major differentiating factor of leadership is going to be the passion to fight out all environmental obstacles and to move on.
5. Ethical Standards: Trust and accountability are foundations of ethical leadership. Ethical standards are so important in organizational leadership because AI systems follow opaque reasoning, since the internal factors determining a response or recommendation are hidden due to extreme computational complexity. Ethical standards drive leaders to transform high-risk AI tools into a trustworthy support system. Board leaders focus on building stakeholder trust and on mitigating regulatory and reputational risks. While AI is fast automating, even critical decision making, ethical standards will ensure that decisions are aligned with human values and transparency.
6. Vision Infinite: Vision infinite is long term passionate thinking for all stakeholders. It represents a leadership mindset which strives to create enduring value for shareholders, employees, suppliers and customers. Leveraging collaboration, infinite vision promotes transparency and builds trust of all stakeholders which in turn creates sustainable value. Leaders like JRD Tata, Henry Ford, Aditya Vikram Birla and Ingvar Kamprad who built strong corporate sustainability to lead the business world for centuries, had vision infinite. In the AI driven world which is characterized by accelerated data-driven decision making, leaders need to have infinite vision to ensure the continuation of long-term value creation.
7. Human Sensitivity: Working on big historical data, patterns and sensitivity to prompted human needs, quite often the AI tools may lack deeper sensitivity to new and emotionally ambiguous situations. Human sensitivity helps the leaders in managing biases, fairness to specific human situations and the ethical dilemmas. Great leaders pick up the non-verbal cues, empathize with their people and foster trust for better collaborative endeavors. The trait of human sensitivity has gained greater importance in the current environment where the noise of the momentum of information overflow may occupy the executive attention.
8. Digital Curiosity: Digital Curiosity is all about asking and remaining inquisitive about the latest innovations and changes happening in the world of AI. Leaders who aspire to shape the future must continue to explore new AI tools and emerging possibilities created by AI technologies. There is intense competition in the speed of adaptation of new tools while ensuring compatibility. All corporate leaders, including the independent directors, need to appreciate the urgency of developing digital curiosity to strengthen their relevance and demand in times to come.
9. Learning Leaders: Artificial Intelligence, though a mesmerizing creation of human mind itself, is thriving on a huge flow of multidimensional knowledge. Our new world dominated by AI needs learning leaders who are continuously learning and helping their people to learn fast. Being learned and having rich experience, no longer guarantees success and sustainability simply because of unprecedented changes in the environment. Learning leaders will have the intellectual authority to influence. To lead the machine intelligence, our own intelligence has got to be much deeper and more driven by our vision.
10. Mission Driven: In the AI driven world, there is a flood of knowledge that may sometimes divert the attention. AI has emerged as a great facilitator through pervasive automation of routine tasks. But leaders are driven by the broader purpose of their life and their mission in respective roles. AI can give lot of logical and relevant inputs but leaders will have to continue to ensure that their strategies are driven by the mission which ensures sustainable value addition to their company’s existence and growth.
CONCLUSION:
As AI is automating almost every routine task and offers strong data support for decision making, it exposes its users to new competitive challenges. Future oriented leaders, for their continued acceptance must empower their leadership to ride on this wave of AI for distinguished growth with a robust vision and conscious resilience. These 10 traits, when developed passionately shall strengthen the corporate leaders’ personalities to shape the future of their companies with optimism and renewed wisdom.
The tremendous prospects offered by the AI revolution can transform into reality only when the leaders take care of addressing all issues of sustainability.
AI can give lot of logical and relevant inputs but leaders will have to continue to ensure that their strategies are driven by the mission which ensures sustainable value addition to their company’s existence and growth.
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Prof. Rajendra P Bharti
Prof. Rajendra Bharti freelance Facilitator of Excellence. He was Professor & Director (CEO) of a Management Institute for two decades. An alumnus of IIMA, trained by WWQN London and Harvard University, Prof. Bharti is a thought leader, author, executive coach and a transformational leader. He has trained corporate leaders from approx. fifty countries.
Owned by: Institute of Directors, India
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