"Hello, My AI Colleague!"
It's hard to create hand-in-hand AI and human team dynamics in the workplace while employees are scared and worried about their jobs. Hence, The Human Element offers some Leadership steps to ease the transition.
"As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership."
— Amit Ray
Empathy: The transition cannot be smooth without leaders empathizing with workers. According to The Human Element (THE), leaders need to acknowledge their fears and their right to feel frightened. After all, everyone faces the threat of being redundant. No one still knows whether this will happen in a few years or soon enough. Therefore, Empathy 1becomes they key that will help for building trustful relationships.
Openness: Openness is one of the main concepts of The Human Element Concept. Acknowledging employees' emotions through Empathy is the first step towards this transition as it will create the necessary base of trust to voice their feelings and thoughts. When employees express their emotions, it is easier for leaders to handle them and deal with them by answering their questions and doing the necessary clarifications. Without openness, employees have loads of worries and thoughts lurking below the surface without an outlet. Hence, it leaves lots of room for delusions and decisions that might not benefit either the employee or the organization.
Self-Awareness: According to The Human Element, Self-awareness is one of the main cornerstones of being. Leaders need to encourage employees to have enough self-awareness to understand what's happening within themselves. Not only through self-reflection but through structured processes that allow them to get in touch with their thoughts hence their feelings. Once aware, leaders need to promote acceptance. Therefore it's normal if they're frightened and it's accepted
Accepting Change: Once employees feel they're empathized with and that they’ve seen, and acknowledged, it then becomes easier to promote accepting change. Leaders need to carry out change initiatives. They need to understand employees' anger and that moving from anger and denial will take time. Leaders need to manage the change process and help employees do the transition.
More about the Change management, check our article: "Managing the Change Gap"
Choice: Based on The Human Element, we all have a choice. The choice is based on self-awareness. Being Self-aware is the first step for understanding your own thoughts and feelings. That step will then help you feel accountable for your own life and therefore make the right choices and decisions for yourself. In the case of AI, it is the choice of the leader, the employee, and the human in general either to resist or to adapt and accept the change. There's no suitable time to leverage your adaptability skills, for it's during this era, the rate of change is extremely high due to the fast-paced information technology development.
(Read more about "Adaptability")
AI is rapidly developing and taking over. It's either we adapt and leverage our skills, see the situation and manage ourselves, or we drop off the wagon. Unfortunately, falling off the wagon in such a fast-paced era, means it runs us down.
1 https://thehumanelement.bconglobal.com/resources/moving-from-employees-to-people-1
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