AI-First Leadership: Embracing the Future of Work

Gregg Kober

January 24, 2025

In the era of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), leaders across industries are realizing that the ability to harness this technology’s power could provide meaningful competitive advantages. Organizations need more than just cutting-edge technology to do it—they need leadership that can reimagine how humans and AI collaborate.

Why AI-First Leadership Matters

As Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani puts it, “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.”¹ AI is already being integrated into organizational strategies, operations, and workflows. The role of leaders goes far beyond facilitating AI implementation. They must fully appreciate AI’s potential and be able to bridge the gap between technological capabilities and strategic goals. They also need to foster a culture that embraces AI’s potential to complement human creativity, decision making, and innovation.

The Essential Role of Midlevel Leaders

While senior leaders shape how Gen AI can support their firms’ strategies, midlevel leaders play a pivotal role in both driving strategy execution and enabling transformational change. Positioned between strategic directives and frontline operations, these leaders are instrumental in embedding AI into personal practices, team workflows, and cross-functional processes. They act as translators of high-level goals into actionable tasks, educators who support AI-related upskilling of their teams, and advocates who build trust and confidence in AI’s transformative potential.

Midlevel leaders are also in a unique position to identify opportunities for AI-driven improvements that leaders at higher levels might overlook. Yet many organizations under-resource their midlevel leaders. A recent survey found that only 48% of midlevel leaders believe their creativity and ingenuity are effectively leveraged for transformation efforts. Closing this gap by empowering midlevel leaders is a strategic imperative for organizations that want to embrace Gen AI’s step-change potential for their enterprises.

Developing AI-First Leadership Capabilities

To prepare leaders for the AI-first future, organizations must invest in a deliberate developmental journey based on an AI maturity model that outlines the stages of development. The progression throughout the maturity model involves building foundational AI knowledge, cultivating an AI-first mindset, honing specific AI-related skills, and, ultimately, integrating AI for real-time adoption while also anticipating continued disruption. This structured approach helps leaders move from apprehension to mastery and equips them to lead their teams through this next digital transformation with confidence.

1. Building Foundational AI Knowledge

Leaders at all levels need a basic understanding of AI concepts, including data analytics, machine learning, and cybersecurity. This foundation fosters an awareness of available tools, routine use cases, and ethical parameters. This stage emphasizes broad access and updates by individuals.

2. Cultivating an AI-First Mindset

Cultivating an AI-first mindset means viewing AI not as a tool but as an integral element for improving the productivity of personal practices. Leaders must let go of fears about AI replacing jobs and instead embrace its potential to augment human capabilities. Encouraging experimentation with AI tools helps leaders and teams become more comfortable and proficient over time, enabling them to discover opportunities to modify day-to-day work. This stage is characterized by high levels of team experimentation, learning from failure, and disseminating lessons learned to the wider organization.

3. Honing AI-Specific Skills

Beyond experimenting with Gen AI, leaders need the skills to scale AI projects, troubleshoot challenges, and model effective AI use across functions. This involves both technical competencies and the ability to promote collaboration between large numbers of colleagues in diverse disciplines to address resource-worthy business priorities and challenges. Scaling Gen AI across large swathes of customer- or employee-facing operations is the focus of this stage.

4. Leading with Confidence

At the pinnacle of the AI maturity model are leaders using insights from Gen AI to do three things: think strategically about the forces outside the “four walls” of their firms, pivot the business models nimbly, and anticipate likely disruptions. This stage is characterized by leaders paying attention to emerging trends likely to impact the operational or business model and harnessing those trends to create value, even if that means disrupting themselves.

Overcoming Challenges in AI Adoption

While the potential of AI is immense, so are some of the challenges to its adoption. Beyond the technology itself, resistance to change stemming from distrust, uncertainty, and fear of job displacement is common. Lack of technical expertise, which often leaves people feeling unprepared and unwilling to engage with new technologies, is another. These barriers can stall progress and negatively impact the transformative potential of AI.

To overcome these challenges, leaders must take a proactive and empathetic approach. Open and transparent communication is key. Employees need a compelling vision for AI’s role in the organization and accessible, role-specific training to build confidence and competence in applying AI tools to practices and processes. Leaders must also cultivate a culture of psychological safety and intellectual candor. Teams should feel empowered to explore and even fail in controlled experiments that integrate AI into their workflows. Just as importantly, leaders need to showcase early wins—real-world examples of how AI drives value—so that teams can see its tangible benefits.

The Bottom Line: Preparing for an AI-Driven Future

It’s already clear that organizations that master AI-first leadership will outpace their competitors. Success isn’t just about adopting AI technology—it’s also about fully integrating it into the core of an organization’s operations, supported by a culture that effectively unites human creativity with AI capabilities. Developing leadership at all levels to navigate this complex transformation is imperative for achieving this.

By investing in the development of AI-first leaders—particularly midlevel leaders who direct the difficult day-to-day work of transformation—organizations can unlock AI’s full potential and position themselves for sustained success in a rapidly changing world. To explore how your organization can develop AI-first leadership capabilities and thrive in the digital age, download our report “Succeeding in the Digital Age: Why AI-First Leadership Is Essential”.

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Succeeding in the Digital Age: Why AI-First Leadership Is Essential

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1. Lakhani, Karim. “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI”, HBR.org. August 4^th, 2023 ︎

The post AI-First Leadership: Embracing the Future of Work appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

How to Define Impactful Leadership Development Goals

Gregg Kober

April 2, 2024

When organizations come to Harvard Business Impact, they are usually in the process of transformation. They know that although transformation sounds lofty, its success is largely determined by day-to-day actions. A recent McKinsey study concurs: “Organizations with successful transformations are more likely than others to embed transformation disciplines into ‘business as usual’ processes.”

Our partners see the most success when their learning programs target specific leadership development goals, but it can be challenging to align on the right ones when the stakes are high and everyone brings different priorities and anxieties to the table. We use a proven process to guide our partners from an ambitious goal to the learning experience that will make it happen. Here’s how we do it—and how you can, too.

Focus on a key business priority

Clarity should be established from the top down, starting with the most urgent business priority. Get alignment here, and all the decisions—target behaviors, tangible goals, program design—will flow from it. If your organization lacks strategic alignment, start by asking this simple question: Where does the organization need to go, and how can leadership development support it?

Broadly speaking, organizations aim to increase profits, cut costs, and mitigate risks—factors directly connected to their survival. This might mean maintaining a competitive edge, unifying a company post-acquisition, or becoming more inclusive. 

Connecting the learning initiative to key business priorities makes the program feel more urgent for participants and demonstrates relevance to executive leaders.

In some cases, the key business priority might be obvious. Even if that’s the case, it’s good to validate that stakeholders are on the same page before getting started. This will be the filter you return to again and again while making a host of decisions throughout the initiative, so make sure you are surfacing conflicting priorities and perspectives among participants during alignment conversations. Tactics like real-time polling and candor breaks can help create a psychologically safe environment for these conversations. Still, it can be challenging for L&D leaders to manage conflict constructively among senior leaders, especially when there’s no official decision-maker.

The goal is to leave with agreement about the key priority at the heart of the leadership development effort. After that, there’s a critical step that’s often overlooked: evaluating internal systems. If internal systems, processes, and culture are not supportive, research shows that training will fail. Assessing systems and allowing time to revamp them is a critical precursor for turning training into performance.

• Key Question: Where does the organization need to go, and how can leadership development support it?
  

Identify supportive performance outcomes

If the key business priority is the “what,” performance outcomes are the “how”—the visible leadership behaviors that will make it happen. Think deeply about what behaviors will really move the needle, and save the “nice-to-haves” for the next initiative. It can be tempting to pursue sweeping changes, which makes sense—learning initiatives are an investment, and organizations want to maximize the value of that investment. However, decades of experience have taught us that highly focused programs yield the most impressive results.

This is a place to dig deep, because the most impactful behaviors aren’t always the obvious ones. For example, our partnership with Atos focused broadly on digital transformation. Digital competency was an obvious focus, but it was equally important that leaders could deliver on strategic initiatives by strengthening collaboration and team management.

Performance outcomes vary based on organizational need, but typically fall into two categories: “Driving everyday performance” or “Preparing for the future.” We recommend choosing just two or three to focus on.

DRIVING EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE		PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE
Contending with Continuous Disruption Beyond the C-Suite	Leading the Hybrid Work Strategy	Building the Tech-Savviness of All Leaders	Humanizing Leadership in the Digital Age

When choosing which leadership behaviors to focus on, make sure you’re hearing from the program audience. Innovation experts point to the need to develop a deep, intimate understanding of what customers are trying to accomplish in specific situations—the essential “jobs to be done.” The same goes for leadership development programs. To make sure the program is highly relevant, ask leaders what “jobs” they need to get done well on a regular basis and which they struggle with. Some of their answers may surprise you.

Rushing this part of the process is the single biggest mistake we see in leadership development today. Get feedback from as many people as you can, and make sure you’re not just talking to people who already agree with you about the value of leadership development. These programs are a wasted investment if employees don’t think they’re applicable.

To make sure the program is highly relevant, ask leaders in your target population about what “jobs” they need to get done well on a regular basis and which they struggle with.

Global technology company Leidos offers a great example of how to do it. When they were developing a signature leadership development program for midlevel leaders, they sought input from those leaders on their essential “jobs to be done.” This informed target behaviors, content, and other program elements. The learning experience respected the busy schedules of midlevel leaders, with integrated learning built into the flow of work. Learning cohorts addressed the need for connection, discussion, and executive perspective, and the program culminated with a capstone project designed to bring learning into real business contexts. The resulting projects directly increased revenue, improved retention, and had a tangible effect on customer satisfaction.

The learning audience can share a practical perspective on the everyday habits that will impact the key business priority, while senior leaders may focus more on medium-term behaviors. An effective program will consider both.

• Key Question: How will leaders act differently when the program is over?

Define success

Once you understand the “jobs to be done” by your target audience, it’s time to get tactical and define the concrete impacts that will demonstrate behavior change and support the key business priority.

We often hear that it’s hard to quantify the impact of leadership development, but it’s often a matter of choosing the right yardstick. The learning experience that we designed with Coca-Cola focused on innovation and adaptation. Those concepts can seem abstract, but their program delivered on tangible indicators: employee engagement, productivity, revenue, and operating income. Another client targeted more effective customer service—their success indicator was fewer repeat service calls.

Leadership Development Program Goals Example

Make sure the success indicators that you choose are measurable. Your measurement plan will be your roadmap for impact, so make sure that you can collect the data you need before committing. For each success indicator, you should have a metric, a plan for collecting data, and the current baseline. To get that baseline, you’ll probably need to do an assessment so you can compare “apples to apples” at the end of the program. A defined measurement plan doesn’t just determine impact after the program. It can also include metrics you can monitor during the program, allowing for enrichment or course correction of the learning experience.

• Key Question: What concrete indicators will have an impact on the key business priority?

Celebrate your progress toward leadership development goals

It might take a while to find out if you’ve hit a goal like revenue increase, but others, like behavior change, can and should be celebrated in real-time. At the end of their program, an energy company that we worked with asked participants to record informal videos about what new leadership behaviors they were trying. The response was overwhelming: every participant cited something new they were doing, and many had advice for the next cohort about how to change their own leadership behaviors upon entering the program.

A tried-and-true method has always been to encourage managers to highlight successful applications of learning goals during the workday. Share success stories and engagement stats to keep participants feeling validated and motivated. Creating “accountability buddies” or groups can also provide encouragement and motivation. After all, peers can offer developmental coaching, know the key concepts and frameworks from the program to reinforce, and often have a deeper appreciation of the nuances of leading at a specific level of an organization.  Peer recognition is a powerful catalyst and sustainer of on-the-job behavior change.

If the leadership development program didn’t realize some of its goals, don’t be discouraged. Use that data to explore further. Get curious and seek out feedback from all levels to understand what levers can be pulled to improve future outcomes. You can bring that learning to your stakeholders to inform your approach to the next initiative and the next big, ambitious goal.

Have a question about leadership development programs? Get in touch with one of our learning design specialists. For a complete guide to learning initiatives, check out our series on How to Create a Successful Leadership Development Program.

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This is a joint blog by Deanna Foster, Senior Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing, and Dr. Gregg Kober, Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing.

The post How to Define Impactful Leadership Development Goals appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.