Building the leadership team: more than a seat at the table

Photo credit: Jud Mackrill via Unsplash

How inclusive is your leadership team? Hopefully it is inclusive in all the dimensions of diversity, but do you actually include all of your leaders as genuine parts of the team? Or do you think of some parts of your leadership team as ‘core business’ and other parts of your leadership team as ‘support functions’?

Regarding your team in this way creates an implicit hierarchy of leadership positions, even if all leaders enjoy similar grades and reward packages. Metaphorically, the CEO, or head of the business division sits at the head of the leadership table. The people who run revenue generating business divisions are clustered close by. The CFO may sit at the leader’s right hand, depending on the financial position of the organisation. But the head of HR is probably further down the table, while the head of IT is down the corridor fixing the printer, and the head of procurement is out at the shops, haggling over prices.

In complex organisations, it is inevitable that specialisms will emerge, and it is reasonable to ask experts to lead these specialisms. But companies do better when those leaders are regarded as ‘core business’: when everybody is treated as if they have a stake in the company, and when everybody acts as respected equals. This doesn’t just mean that the other leaders should invite the specialists to take their seats at the table: the specialists should act as if they deserve them.

If this seems difficult, it’s worth remembering a phrase used by a CIO I once worked with, who was at pains to remind his business colleagues that they should not expect order-taking behaviour from the IT team, and his team members that they should not offer to take orders: ‘It’s our company too.’

This is especially important for companies attempting to get to grips with the implications of AI. They will not successfully figure out how to manage AI effectively, how to integrate it with their existing technology, how to explain and manage changes to the structures, roles and work of their people, or how to make sense of a volatile and over-heated market, unless they do the hard work on these topics - and on themselves - as a united leadership team.

Let’s imagine that you agree with these assertions, and you do the work to hire world class specialists, you buy a bigger table and squeeze a few more chairs into the board room, you adjust the attendee list for those meetings that used to exclude the ‘support functions’, and you run some team building exercises. Does that mean you are done?

I’m afraid not. In the normal implicit executive hierarchy, the CFO gets to sit near the CEO because everybody understands the importance of money. Executive leaders know that they need to hit their numbers, to meet their revenue targets and stay within their budgets. Similarly, the head of HR is let into the room because those leaders also know that their success depends on their people, and they’d better know how to manage them.

Procurement and technology - perhaps not so much.

If a leadership team aims to be ready for AI-enabled change (or any other sort of change), they need to regard teaching and learning as part of their job. Specialists - including people who specialise in the revenue generating parts of the business - should be generous with their knowledge, and amplify it by imparting it to others. All leaders - including specialists - should be humble and curious, and eager to learn.

AI is sometimes said to have shifted our relationship with knowledge: for leaders this shift should not just be from humans to machines, but from respected colleagues to each other.

As with so much about adaptation to AI, these ideas are not new: they are best practices which leading companies already follow. The emergence of AI simply makes the cost of a divide between ‘core business’ and ‘support functions’ greater, and the case for change more urgent. Building an inclusive, expert, respected, generous, humble and curious leadership team is a step on the way to enterprise AI leadership.