How to lead change when you don’t have all the answers

When Emily Goligoski set out to discover how employers were integrating AI into their workplaces, she assumed she'd find lots of organizations with well-established policies and procedures in place. 

What she found instead was companies with a lot of questions and few obvious answers.

As former research director at Charter, a media and research company covering workplace innovation, Goligoski and her reporting partner Jacob Clemente spent months interviewing leaders and workers at some of the largest companies in the world. Their report, "AI in the workplace: How companies and workers are getting it right," documents six successful strategies for implementing generative AI tools. 

But finding organizations in a position to share strategies wasn't easy. Many are still in the experimental phase of their AI journeys.

"Looking back, I think we were a bit naive," she says. "When we started our research, we thought we'd find companies with well-developed workflows that were in round three of their trial and error process. We thought they'd have tons of information about what worked and what hadn't. What we found was that most companies were barely at round one."

When it comes to integrating AI, nobody has all the answers, and many organizations are only starting to figure out the right questions to ask. Yet seven out of ten workers are worried about how AI will impact their job security, while nearly 40 percent of business leaders lack confidence that their organizations will implement AI in a responsible and trustworthy way. 

Every day HR leaders are deluged with questions about how their organizations will use AI, what jobs will become obsolete, and what happens to the people who get caught in the middle. Unfortunately, the answer for many of these questions is, we don't know yet. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The age of uncertainty requires transparency and unity

For nearly half a decade, HR leaders have been asked to operate with limited visibility into what's coming down the road. A global pandemic, followed by the 'great resignation,' massive supply chain disruption, hyperinflation, dramatic workforce reductions, and the rapid emergence of transformative technologies like AI have created a perpetual state of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) for many large enterprises.

And the only way to fight VUCA is with VUCA, notes Dr. Catherine Rymsha, a visiting lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and author of The Leadership Decision.

"In times of volatility, HR leaders should encourage visibility," she says. "To address uncertainty, HR should find ways to unify people across the organization. To tackle complexity, they should provide clarity. To remove ambiguity, HR should promote and demonstrate agility."

Earlier in her career, Rymsha was a learning/development and talent management leader for a software company that was then acquired by a larger organization. This led to increased levels of uncertainty within the company's workforce. The acquisition was unfolding at the same time employee performance reviews were due, so the HR department had to rapidly adapt its software to continue to serve legacy employees while onboarding newly merged ones.

"It was a really volatile time," she says. "We nearly doubled the size of our workforce, while our relatively small HR team remained the same. But our CEO was able to share the vision driving the acquisition, which helped reassure our employees there was a plan and a direction in place. And our HR leaders were able to present a united front; by sharing the same message across the entire organization, using the same words and in the same tone, they helped to ensure there were no misunderstandings or mixed messages."

The VUCA approach originated with the US military; Rymsha's company hired former army personnel to teach its top leadership the basic principles, which can apply across virtually any situation where circumstances are in flux and information is limited or unavailable. The key is to help employees to see the bigger picture, even if the puzzle is still missing some of the larger pieces, adds Rymsha. 

"When people understand the mission – what needs to happen and why – that helps to unite them," she says. "It's not enough to say 'We need this report by Friday.' You need to explain why you need the report. It helps people feel like they're a part of something bigger, that their work has purpose. That really resonated with our executives, senior leaders, and employees." 

Experiment and collaborate, early and often

Sometimes, the best thing to do when you don't have all the answers is to admit it and ask for help. Goligoski says the companies she spoke to who've progressed furthest in implementing AI began by giving their workers a voice in how the technology is used, then experimenting with different approaches until they found ones that clicked. 

Instead of top-down mandates to deploy a particular technology, companies like Accenture and Cisco are partnering with employees on how to apply AI to workflows, and rewarding them when their ideas are implemented. They're experimenting together, figuring out what works, and moving forward with pilot projects. 

"I think HR has a major role to play around telegraphing the idea that they don't have all of the answers, that AI is an active work in progress," says Goligoski. "That includes pointing out opportunities for employees to get formal or employee-led training around AI, and transparency about how HR teams are using these technologies."

The fact is that HR leaders shouldn't be expected to have all the answers, argues Daniel Space, a former HR business partner at Spotify and Electronic Arts who now creates HR-related podcasts and videos as DanFromHR. But he adds that most HR leaders tend to take on too much responsibility, which only contributes to burnout. They need to set the right expectations for their own managers, be honest when questions are outside their core areas of expertise, and ask colleagues for help. 

"It's OK to say 'We're learning about this too'," he says. "As HR people, it's our job to help managers become better leaders, not be the source of all information. We should be working with our leads in marketing, sales, finance, and tech to figure out how it's working together."

About Dan Tynan

Dan is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about technology since long before we all started carrying a computer in our pockets. Along the way he's been an investigative reporter, feature writer, copy editor, columnist, executive editor, and editor-in-chief for several national publications.