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As we wrote a few months ago, a perfect storm of expanding workloads, untrustworthy agents, and withering social skills could be fueling a new leadership crisis.
Current AI models take the blame for creating this risk, which means it’s up to organizations to build cultures that can make the most of AI’s capabilities while resisting the unhelpful outcomes.
At NLI, that means anchoring on building a set of core cognitive skills that help employees in any environment work more effectively. When it comes to leadership, that model is GPA: the trio of growth mindset, psychological safety, and accountability.
Teams that embed these three skills in their cultures are shown to be more resilient, collaborative, and productive — and especially in our volatile AI era, they create stability right as organizations need it most.
Growth mindset helps teams stay agile and adaptable
Growth mindset is the belief that one’s skills can be improved with persistent effort; they aren’t set at birth, as described by a fixed mindset. Rather than focusing on being perfect or knowing everything on Day 1, people with a growth mindset focus on getting better over time. Decades of research have shown that a growth mindset promotes greater achievement far more than fixed-mindset thinking.
The wisdom for leaders in the era of AI is to help their teams build a growth mindset whenever possible. Employees don’t need to master AI right away, nor does AI pose immediate threats to their livelihoods. It’s okay to make mistakes; in fact, experimental failures are signs of a growth mindset at work.
In general, the growth-mindset view of AI is that it can be learned over time, and we can all adapt to a new world of work that is increasingly reliant on AI. Even if a person struggles with a new workflow, it’s okay for them to say, “I don’t understand this yet.” With growth mindset, we aren’t fighting a new technology; we are growing alongside it.
Psychological safety helps teams take smart risks
If growth mindset helps individual people start relating to their work better, psychological safety helps whole teams relate to each other more effectively. “Interpersonal risk-taking” is the name of the game. Teams with high psychological safety feel comfortable challenging one another’s ideas and speaking up to share crucial information — behaviors that otherwise may feel risky if psychological safety is low.
AI creates the conditions for low psychological safety because it brings change, and change feels inherently threatening. When teams feel threatened, they take fewer interpersonal risks. Collaboration weakens as people speak up less, more likely to withhold information than share it freely.
Leaders should focus on building psychological safety in their teams to ensure AI doesn’t accidentally have a chilling effect. They can start by managing people’s sense of threat in meetings, such as by admitting they don’t have all the answers and actively requesting people’s input so the team can arrive at the best outcomes.
Accountability helps teams stay effective and undistracted
The third and final piece of the leadership GPA is accountability, the sense of ownership one feels over their work and the commitment they bring to delivering the right outcome. Accountability is difficult enough to embed in cultures, without AI as a looming presence, but it becomes even more important as AI offers chances to go down rabbit holes of distraction and derail important projects.
In many cases, AI also acts as employees’ second manager, offering its own thoughts on how to complete a project separate from the employee’s direct supervisor. It’s up to leaders to articulate even more clearly than before what they expect of people — on one hand so employees can hold themselves accountable, and also to ensure manager-employee alignment.
Without this crucial element of “neural synchrony,” it’s far less likely the employee will have the clarity or sense of purpose to own the project and deliver it as intended. Meanwhile, if leaders can align on expectations and give people a strong “Why” behind the work, employees will have clearer guardrails for how AI can be helpful and where its input isn’t as relevant.
Together, these three habits create a leadership model that produces coachable team players who get things done. The emerging AI era is already defined by uncertainty and threat, so any efforts to increase a team’s leadership GPA will help offset those negative effects. With enough practice, AI can become a force solely for good within organizations, helping strong cultures become even stronger to weather the perfect storm AI has brought.
To learn more, check out the Your Brain at Work podcast series on Leadership GPA and take the free, five-minute assessment to calculate your organization’s GPA today.
