Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning everybody. I'm podcasting from the Unleashed conference in Europe and where of course there will be dozens and dozens of new AI discussions here with many, many companies.
[00:00:12] And we're launching the rise of the Super Manager research and we're going to explain what a super manager is. So let me take a few minutes and explain why this concept is important and then what the concept is and what you should do. So going back to the AI transformation topic, which is the number one topic on everybody's at the moment, the implementations of AI around companies take place in multiple forms. There's corporate wide AI engines within the applications we have. So your financial system, your HR system, your recruiting system, your performance management system suddenly has an AI feature to generate a job description, generate a performance review, analyze some data, correlate some data. And all of the companies that we do business with, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, all of the recruiting applications that we use, our CRM, the Microsoft Copilot, is basically all of your desktop productivity all of a sudden has AI enablement. And each of those vendors builds things that they think are important in various priorities. And so you don't have to be an AI guru or really know what AI is to use them because they just appear.
[00:01:28] And even Siri will become smarter, your photo app will become smarter, Google Photos is incredibly smart and so forth.
[00:01:36] And we'll see some productivity benefits for those from those not huge, but parts of our digital life will suddenly become more personalized, more integrated and more, you know, hopefully more valuable. The second use of AI or application is a corporate wide program.
[00:01:54] So now that many of you have AI steering committees and your IT departments are building AI standards and people are getting very focused on AI architectures at the moment because, you know, not all of these systems are able to talk to each other. And so it isn't anymore just a question of which tool do you like, but really how do the tools work with each other? If you use Joule from SAP, how does Joule interact with the Microsoft Copilot? If you use Galileo from us, how does Galileo interact with ServiceNow or another tool that you're using for recruiting? And those agent. Agent interfaces are being built out now using a protocol called mcp. And we've seen and used MCP with our own system and it's really pretty cool. So it's kind of a client server architecture which is, you know, the concept that's been used for years when computers talk to each other. So within a year there's going to be a lot of integrated architectures that make it easier for these things things to work together. And so big companies and small companies can build agent applications in a sense that solve major problems. A wealth management application for a bank, a scheduling agent for a retailer, a supply chain optimization agent for a manufacturer, et cetera, et cetera. A big onboarding agent that's being built over at Standard Charter for global onboarding, which then turns into global talent management. And those corporate developed applications are usually developed by IT IT departments with help from business people like HR and others. And they will be maintained and managed by the corporate teams, not by vendors. But that'll be a massive part of the market because these corporate wide AI applications either stitch together or replace a lot of the packaged applications we bought in the past, because packaged applications are kind of getting decomposed. But the third use case, which I think is the biggest of all by far, is the individuals and teams in your companies building things. Now, I don't mean building things like a software engineer, I mean building things like an Excel spreadsheet. The best analogy that I can come up with is the 1980s introduction of, originally it was called MultiPlan, then Lotus 1, 2, 3, then Excel of the spreadsheet. When we first learned about and saw spreadsheets, we didn't even know what they were. They were more or less blank screens. And we quickly learned that we could build formulas, tables, and then later macros with all sorts of capabilities that turn the spreadsheet into our personal tool, our personal development tool. I know you don't think about it like that, but that's basically what it is. And you can share a template or a spreadsheet with others. So that if I built a spreadsheet that works for my budgeting, I can give it to you and you can extend it. And especially if I put in little tables and menus, you can kind of use it as an application. So Excel is a, is an application development system that anybody can use. You don't have to be a software engineer or a mathematician. Well, that's exactly what these AI agents are. And there's a whole bunch of tool development apps that make it easier that are being built on top. So all of your employees in all forms of the company are not only going to be users of these packaged apps that I mentioned earlier, but they're going to be able to change them. So if you're a doctor using the clinical scheduling app or the clinical data input app, and you don't like the way the screen is laid out, the doctor will be able to Move things around or maybe hide some screens that are getting in his way. If he decides to do that, a retail worker could presumably change the interface that he or she uses to order or configure coffee. Anybody in HR could change any part of the experience we use to input data about our employees or our candidates and all of the underlying logic underneath it. And we've been beginning to run into companies that have built things like this from the front line, not from it.
[00:05:58] You can build an A GPT or a complex prompt in Galileo or many of these other tools from the front line. You don't have to go to IT to do it, as long as it gives you a good infrastructure or platform. So we're now entering a world where certainly in white collar work, the teams that we lead in sales, marketing, product management, engineering support, customer service, HR recruiting, learning and development, et cetera, each one of us are now leading a team of developers, not just a team of users or execution people who do work. So all of our employees in our teams, those of us that are managers, are suddenly empowered or democratized with the ability to use AI the way they decide it works them. That's a different team management challenge. Now, for people that have started companies or worked in engineering and product groups, you've done this before. You've managed developers, you've managed creators. You understand what it's like. But most of us have not. Most managers in most companies have never even had the opportunity to manage a team that builds things. They've managed teams that do things and they're being held accountable towards customer service or revenue or other goals.
[00:07:20] So the management approaches and the management techniques and the management philosophies of supermanagers are different. And by the way, the reason we call this the super manager is that if you don't do this and your managers don't facilitate this, your AI transformation will go very slowly because you'll be waiting for the corporate groups or the vendors to give you what you need. And that's going to take a long, long time. Because we're moving to a world where, where AI use cases in AI applications are being very customized to each company and each person. So this is the ultimate empowerment system here that we're getting our hands on for superworkers. But the managers have to be part of this. Now, so far, what we've discovered in the companies that we've been working with and in the research we've done in our own company is that super managers have to have a couple of things. First, they have to understand this technology themselves. They have to understand the basics of how to use it, how it works, where the training is, what tools are available and so forth.
[00:08:23] That can usually be done with the help of IT or the help of hr. But you know, this is a problem of training, of sharing, of hands on experience. As I talk about in a lot of my speeches in the early days of Excel and the PC, we had a lot of customers when I was at IBM where managers decided they didn't want to learn how to use a PC, they were going to delegate that to their secretaries and there aren't any secretaries left. But you know, that idea isn't going to work here. This is going to be a daily part of your life using these tools. So you as a leader, manager, supervisor have to kind of know how they work and what they do. The second thing is you have to feel comfortable empowering and engaging and supporting the people in your team as they experiment. Now experimentation gets in the way of execution. Somebody who's playing around building something new isn't delivering on your product or service that you're responsible for. So if you're in a retail store or you're a nurse or a nursing supervisor, or you're in a manufacturing plant and your employees start playing around building things, you're not going to be happy because stuff isn't getting done. So but if you're not willing to do that, you're going to wait to get the value you want. So there's this set of skills in enabling experimentation that vary by group, vary by function, vary by company, where you allow or find people that want to experiment and innovate. Maybe there's a couple of people in your group that are just the ones that do this and they help everybody else. Third is this issue of support and growth. Most of the research that's coming out, I just got a new study from Perceptics I'll link to, shows that about 75% of workers are worried, they're afraid, they're intimidated, they're not ready. I don't think that happened in the days of the PC, although I think it did a bit because there wasn't so much threat from it. But this is threatening technology. It's been positioned as a job killer. We've been talking about productivity and workforce reduction now a lot the last year. So you have to create an environment that's a supportive environment for your people. And as a manager you're probably going to have to find a process or work with it to manage the ideas that people Have. Now, as we've talked about to a lot of companies, the best approach for this is to have some form of a steering committee where these flowers, we call them the flowers that bloom, are taken forward to more senior people so that if some of the stuff that people are doing is really important and valuable and scalable, we want other people to share it. And then we might want it or other teams to work on it too, too. That's another part of being a super manager. And then of course, there's the human capital or human centered leadership parts of developing people, supporting people, giving people freedom, giving them information, giving them time, giving them flexibility to learn how to use and innovate in these areas. Now, there's lots of other skills as well, and you can read about it in the research we're publishing. But what you're going to find, and we're seeing this already, is that some companies are very good at this and some companies are not. And it goes back to culture, it goes back to empowerment, it goes back to whether the management model is there or not. A lot of companies don't have mature management models. So people get promoted into managers for a variety of political reasons or execution reasons. But if you're not thinking about this as a management enablement issue, you're not going to get on this wave as fast as your competitors. Because the super worker company is a company where individuals have much, much more power. I don't mean political power, I mean execution power, development power, customer service power, sales power. And anything that you do that gets in the way of that at the management level is going to possibly hold your company back from a competitor that has more ability to leverage this. Now, just to give you an example of our company, which I am obviously very close to, we have 40, 45 people. And because we built Galileo, everybody uses it, everybody has it, everybody takes advantage of it. We all use the digital twin, which I'll talk more about later, that was launched this week. And so we have the ability as individuals to get information about our company, about each other, about customers that are really outstanding, really, of any business I've ever been in. I mean, we've created an environment here where people can really, really do amazing things. But we need to facilitate that. We need to support it. We have meetings every Thursday where we share what other people are working on, and we kind of work on our tools internally to make sure we have the right infrastructure in place. And it's an ongoing process. And, you know, maybe it's because a lot of us are engineers and we kind of like, you know, playing with new tools. But other companies are going to be more creative on this and other companies are going to be more empowering on this and everybody's going to take it differently. But within every operational team, this little dynamic is going to take place. Okay, so that's a little bit about the super manager. Now. What do you do about it? You know, I've been doing management development and management education and research for, you know, 30 years. What most of you probably do and what you really should do is you should have a management framework. And the management framework is a high level picture visual document page that describes the values and the behaviors that are most either revered or important or used in your company. And the purpose of that management framework is, is two things. One is it's to assess and to select managers to see who's ready. And the second is it's to align and develop managers. So managers don't just wing it and do anything. They want to drive the company forward. And they deal with issues with of culture and leadership and performance, but also issues of how are we going to decide who to pay more money, how are we going to do performance management, how are we going to develop people?
[00:14:22] What is the manager's role in internal mobility? What is the manager's role in selecting and developing other leaders? You know, all of the research we've done in most of the academics shows that management frameworks that focus on growth and employee development and other things like innovation or customer service or value or time to market or cost are the ones that create long term enduring organizations. And you can read Irresistible my book if you really want to get into this, because I've covered, you know, many, many, and if not most of the models. For those of you that are very senior executives, you know that your management culture at the senior level is the one that is manifested at the mid level too. So you're in some ways very senior. Executive level is the same. I would not recommend for those of you that haven't done this before, that you copy this out of a book. There are 10,000 books on management. There are 10,000 models, there are 10,000 competency mod.
[00:15:20] We use in Galileo, the Heydrich model and the SHL model. You can browse through those in Galileo. Galileo will tell you what the best management capability models are for different industries. It's very smart on that. But you have to decide what fits your culture. And a lot of the value of leadership development is having those conversations with other leaders to decide what are the differentiating Things that we do as a company that sustain us over time. Because any two companies in the same industry differentiate their products and services in different ways. One company's a fast innovator. One company's focus on customer service. One company's focus on execution. One company's focused on cost. One company's focused on breadth and completion of solution. One company's focus on ecosystem. One company's focused on product excellence. You can't do all of that stuff. You need to pick your spaces. And a lot of that is related to the management philosophies that you have. And this never ends because as new managers enter the company, they bring ideas with them and histories of other companies. So having management meetings, doing management development. And by the way, one of the reasons we built Galileo for Managers is Galileo for Managers is one of the most scalable tools you're ever going to find for this issue. Because you can take your management model and put it into Galileo for Managers and voila, you now have a management coach and essentially management platform for every supervisor and leader in your company that allows them to learn and take advantage of the model that you are promoting. So we're more than happy to talk to you about this. This topic has come up all over the world in every meeting I've had. It is instrumental in your ability to scale. Here you're going to find out that if you ignore the topic of managers, a lot of your AI projects are going to stall at the line, at the front line or at the mid because the management teams won't understand their role. And in some sense it's the opposite. This is a fueling acceleration point for you that if you take the time to build a management supermanager program for your company, you will see your AI transformation rocket ahead. And I know this because I've talked to a lot of companies that are doing it. We have in Galileo learn a massive library of management development, including the irresistible leadership program. And we're launching a course on super management this week with the supermanager research. So we have a lot of tools to help you with this if you'd like to work with us. I'm sure most of the management development and leadership development vendors in the market are going to go in this direction over time, although some of them will probably go faster than others. And it's a really high impact part of hr. In fact, you know, when we studied the impact of various HR capabilities on business growth, the number one area of HR that is most correlated to growth is management development and leadership development. So don't put this on the side and say, we'll worry about it later. This is fundamental to your AI transformation. Okay, Lots more stuff to talk about. That's it for this particular podcast. I'll see you guys, those of you that are here in Europe, and then we'll tell you much more about the conference in a couple more days. That's it. Bye for now.
