Working professionals looking to advance their career need to understand how artificial intelligence supports leadership skills and development.
Effective leaders create driven, motivated teams, better project outcomes, and prosperous businesses. But in the era of rapid change and innovation, continuous skill development is vital. By integrating artificial intelligence and leadership development, you can transform the way you train and support current and future business leaders.
In this article, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence supports leadership skills and development and how AI can help curate generations of skilled, adaptable, data-driven leaders.
What Is Leadership Development?
Leadership development is the process of enhancing the skills and abilities of employees–whether those in already-existing leadership roles or those still being trained to assume such roles—to help them excel in executive positions. It encompasses a range of strategies and activities, such as one-on-one coaching, workshops, and continuous training, to help them develop and refine vital skills and abilities.
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For example, a leadership development program might be created to improve essential leadership skills like:
- Critical thinking
- Strategic decision-making
- Delegation
- Coaching and mentoring
- Effective communication
- Agility and adaptability
- Project management
- Talent management
Leadership development plays a crucial role in achieving organizational goals. Through continuous development, upskilling, and refinement, businesses can improve employee performance, drive projects to success, and improve the outcome of critical decisions.
By integrating AI into the process, companies can revolutionize how individuals are trained and empowered to become effective leaders. But before we discuss the relationship between artificial intelligence and leadership development, let’s discuss how AI is transforming organizations on a wider level.
What Is the Role of AI in an Organization?
Across industries, artificial intelligence is being rapidly incorporated into fundamental business operations. From AI-powered chatbots and personalized recommendation engines to fraud detection systems and applicant tracking systems, AI is leaving no business function untouched.
AI is only projected to become even more integrated. A recent survey by Korn Ferry found that over 99% of CEOs and senior leaders believe that AI will fundamentally or significantly reshape competitive business industry dynamics in the next five years:
Image sourced from Kornferry.com
What does AI do? At a fundamental level, AI streamlines and automates tasks, such as data entry, data analysis, content generation, and demand forecasting — just to name a few. Leveraging advanced technologies like natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep learning, it can categorize and analyze complex data, make accurate predictions, mimic human conversations, and much more.
The result of AI adoption can be felt on an organizational level. It optimizes processes at scale, helping teams across businesses meet their goals quickly and efficiently.
How Is AI Supporting Leadership Skills and Development?
The challenges of reskilling workforces in the age of AI are a widely discussed topic. But, we don’t often talk about the integration of artificial intelligence and leadership development — essentially, how AI can support learning and development at scale.
AI has the ability to transform core areas of leadership training. It can personalize learning experiences, aid strategic, high-level decision-making, and hone core skills like agility and responsiveness. This is all alongside automating processes and leveraging real-time analytics to support leadership development at a lower cost and with increased accessibility.
Let’s discuss in detail the ways AI can be applied to leadership skills and development initiatives to help businesses cultivate more effective leaders.
Personalized Learning Experiences
One of the most significant use cases of AI in leadership development is its delivery of tailored learning experiences.
A “one-size-fits-all” approach to leadership development produces generalized training materials. These are fine for teaching individuals core leadership concepts and skills, but they fall short of addressing unique development needs.
Every individual has their own set of strengths and weaknesses, as well as preferred learning styles, different levels of experience, and skills gaps that are relevant to a specific leadership role. Failing to address these factors slows down development progress, widens skills gaps, and de-motivates, negatively impacting teams overall.
It’s why 87% of leaders surveyed in DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast said that they wanted more insight into their personal growth areas.
Image created by writer, data sourced from Ddiworld.com
AI-powered development and coaching platforms personalize learning experiences. Using data analysis, AI can leverage data like performance evaluations, behavioral assessments, and feedback surveys to quickly understand individual development needs and preferences. This could include their knowledge and skills gaps, potential areas for improvement, and preferred learning styles.
From there, the system can tailor learning content to suit individual preferences, paces, and challenges. For example, if a leader or a leadership trainee displayed strong critical thinking and delegation skills but lacked communication and conflict management skills, the AI platform would tailor their development content to directly target these skill gaps.
Ultimately, AI helps learning professionals create unique, hyper-relevant development programs for every current or potential leader. This enhances motivation and accelerates their development for the benefit of the wider workforce.
Virtual Coaching
Thanks to AI-powered platforms, gone are the days leadership training sessions need to be held in-person. AI-powered digital coaching platforms can easily connect leadership mentors and mentees through the Internet even if they’re in different geographical locations.
Because of this, businesses can easily reduce costs.
But companies don’t only get to save the money they’d typically spend for transporting their chosen leadership coach to specified leadership training venues. They get to save on hiring costs, too.
Instead of tapping into an external leadership development coach who is more likely to be available to hold sessions for leadership trainees in-person (they don’t work for the company and therefore have to juggle work-related tasks in between training sessions, after all), businesses can just leverage their internal leaders if they use AI-powered coaching platforms. These tools afford current company executives all the convenience they’re looking for as they deal with their busy schedules. With AI-powered coaching platforms, they can easily coach trainees at a time they’re available. As mentioned earlier, these platforms also empower them to provide the necessary support even if they and their trainees are not in the same physical space.
When businesses tap into their existing executives to serve as leadership mentors, they can save around $250 and $350 per hour usually charged by external leadership coaches for mid-level executive training. According to the IRI company Projections, those savings can increase to around $500 per hour if top executive training is required.
Interactive Simulation-Based Training
AI-powered simulation training technologies are becoming more widely used in business and leadership training, second only to medical training, according to recent research by MDPI.
Image sourced from Mdpi.com
Interactive simulation-based training involves placing current and future leaders in a virtual, true-to-life environment where they can interact with AI avatars to navigate complex, real-world scenarios. This allows them to experiment with different strategies and develop their interpersonal and decision-making skills in an immersive, zero-risk space.
For example, AI-powered simulation tools can place them in an environment where they have to resolve a conflict or make a critical decision. They can engage with the AI avatars as they would a human colleague and the AI avatar will respond appropriately based on the prompts given.
Simulation-based training provides leaders and leadership trainees with dynamic, personalized learning experiences. AI platforms can analyze the choices made by them and use this data to adjust difficulties, alter complexities, and identify areas of weakness. It scales development in skills like critical thinking, crisis management, and conflict resolution in a way that’s more authentic than traditional role-playing methods — all without the risks of real-world experimentation.
Developing AI-powered simulation environments that effectively replicate real-world scenarios can be tricky. You’ll need to consistently fine-tune AI models to ensure that responses remain socially and contextually relevant.
Exactly what is fine tuning? Put simply, it’s the process of adapting a pretrained AI model so that it can meet a specific or specialized task.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Effective leadership relies on agility, responsiveness, and critical analysis, all of which are vital in decision-making. AI empowers leaders and leadership trainees to hone these three skills by delivering actionable insights that can be used to inform decisions.
An AI powered virtual assistant can support executive decision-making by retrieving and analyzing vast amounts of data in real-time with unparalleled levels of accuracy and meticulousness. As a result, it can uncover hidden patterns, trends, and relationships in data that often escape human eyes, and respond to complex requests.
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For example, it can deliver useful insights into employee performance data and project metrics as well as market trends, customer feedback, financial data, and more.
For leaders or those being trained for executive roles, this access to sophisticated data analyses helps them develop agility and responsiveness. As a result, they are able to make strategic, data-backed decisions that align with time-sensitive customer demands, organizational goals, and market climates.
For AI to effectively support data-driven decision-making in leaders or potential leaders, business data needs to be, not just accurate, but also easily accessible. If you have an on-premise data center, consider using a solution like Ardoq to migrate your data to the cloud seamlessly. This helps ensure leaders or leadership trainees can have access to important information for making decisions wherever they are.
Real-Time Performance Analytics
Instead of waiting days or weeks for feedback — at which point, leaders or leadership trainees may have forgotten the details of their decisions and strategies — businesses can access real-time performance analytics with AI.
AI can monitor and analyze leadership effectiveness in real time. They can uncover the immediate impact of leadership decisions and deliver feedback on specific communication patterns, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking approaches.
Some AI technologies can even analyze facial expressions, language, and tone of voice to determine communication styles and disclose how effective — or ineffective — they are.
With increased insight into strengths, weaknesses, and performance outcomes gauged from AI analytics, leaders and those being trained to assume executive roles can set achievable professional goals and work toward developing valuable skills such as enhanced self-awareness, strategic course correction, and accountability.
AI can be integrated into other areas of leadership performance development, such as career performance and succession planning. Using predictive analytics, AI can pinpoint the skills that may be necessary to achieve promotions or land leadership roles. From there, they can analyze the current skills, knowledge, and experience of the individual, and help them map their development path.
Automation
Perhaps the biggest obstacles standing in the way of effective leadership development are the manual, time-intensive tasks that eat into productivity.
More than 50% of workers spend over two hours a day performing repetitive tasks. Through automation, teams can streamline processes like data entry, communication, scheduling, and even decision-making, enhancing productivity.
For example, AI-powered enterprise cloud collaboration solutions streamline large-scale project management and communication. Along with centralizing global communications into a unified virtual environment, they automate scheduling, milestone, and task tracking, and can even translate and transcribe audio.
From AI-based project management and document management to generative AI, there is a host of powerful tools that current leaders and leadership mentees can adopt to automate workflows, support decision-making, and drive productivity at scale. This grants more time for leadership training and skill development.
So, with less time spent on these tasks, they can channel their focus into refining soft skills that require consistent, real-world practice to develop. Along with high-level critical thinking, they can work on soft skills like effective communication, creativity, and relationship-building to foster a positive organizational culture.
As AI continues to automate technical skills and reshape the business environment, soft skills will become a defining factor in effective business leaders of the next generation.
Final Thoughts
AI is here to stay — so why not use it to propel leadership skills and development?
Blending artificial intelligence and leadership development can help you create hyper-personalized and data-driven learning development programs that are accessible to leaders and leadership trainees on demand. Through virtual coaching, interactive simulation-based learning experiences, and data-driven training platforms, you can cultivate skilled, agile, and innovative leaders quickly and cost-effectively.
On a wider level, using AI in leadership can support leaders to hone their skills more effectively. Automation and AI-powered virtual assistants can remove repetitive, unproductive tasks from workflows and support strategic, data-backed leadership decision-making. Knowing how artificial intelligence supports leadership skills and development can help unlock new stages of growth and success.
Embracing AI to support leadership development will grow even more value as its abilities expand. Use it to gain a competitive advantage and shape highly skilled, adaptable leaders.