The Future of Leadership: Adapting to AI and Innovation

What is leadership?

A simple yet burning question at the heart of every organisation today.

It’s a concept that’s transforming quickly – rising out of the foundations of traditional management defined predominantly by principles around offering guidance and defining both team and individual direction. But that’s not enough in this era of disruption and complexity; that’s not enough at a time when customers are finding ever new and innovative ways to engage with their favourite brands through the advances of technology. In short, the once established management playbook has reached its limitations. Brands must be agile and nimble now to meet the demands of their customers. They need to embrace new technology and new strategies. And that calls for a new style of leadership.

Here, CCW Europe’s Industry Analyst Simon Hall sat down with renowned thinker, global keynote speaker, and best-selling author Terence Mauri to discuss the pillars of successful leadership in modern business. Together they explore the concept of unlearning, how to foster an innovative mindset, how to move quickly (yet safely) with AI, and much more.

Let’s jump in.

Simon Hall: As the world of customer management evolves, so, too, must the role of the industry’s leaders. The days of merely looking after bottom line growth have gone – replaced by a mandate that involves managing a hybrid working model, navigating constant tech disruption, meeting changes in customer values, driving business culture, and placing a sharper focus on employee wellbeing. What does leadership look like against this evolving landscape?

Terence Mauri: It's a great question. Every leader in customer management right now is thinking about the hallmarks of good leadership – effective leadership – in a post-AI world. In most of our careers, most of our lives, we've been over-managed and under-led, and leadership is broken in many organisations. One in three people say they’re scared to go to work. One in two meetings is considered a complete waste of time. And most people are checking, instead of coaching.

My call to action, and call to reflection, and call to mobilisation, would be that we need to move from protectors of the status quo to challengers of the status quo; we need to move from command-and-control mindsets and behaviours to care and co-creation. And we need to move from a fixed mindset to an iterative mindset. Specifically, this is about the curiosity to learn, but also the courage to unlearn.

Let's face it: we're drowning in data. We're drowning in legacy. We're drowning in inertia. This is a great inflexion point for leaders in customer management not just to optimise, but to reimagine and rethink their first principles for a post-AI world. Is that scary? Yes, it is. But is that exciting? Yes, it is as well. We have changing workforce ecosystems and talent marketplaces. We have hybrid and remote work. We have four or five different generations in the workplace all with different expectations of what great leadership is. So, let's not waste this reframing moment. Let's use it to make difficult choices and face consequences, because the future isn't just about technology, or AI, or trends. It's about mindset. It's about capabilities. And it's about leadership.

SH: In your keynote addresses and in your new book The Upside of Disruption, you talk about how truly great leaders need to be engaged in a constant cycle of unlearning, something you just alluded to. Can you take a deep dive into the meaning of this concept? What impact does unlearning have on leadership and, therefore in turn, on the wider business?

TM: Here's a scary truth: Good leaders learn, but great leaders unlearn.

That may sound counterintuitive, so let me give some background context. Our brains have a bias against elimination, against subtraction. We're very good at adding complexity to complexity.

The numbers tell the story.

I was in San Francisco recently, at City Hall. It takes an average of 200 days for the city to organise a first-round interview for an open position.

If you go into Starbucks, you've got over 170,000 different, customised beverage options.

The UK tax code has gone from 400,000 words to 4,000,000 words in the last 10 years.

And every day, over four billion pieces of paper pass hands around the world.

Despite what we may think, we're at record levels of bureaucracy, or BMI. Not body mass index; bureaucratic misery index. And when you have excess bureaucracy, or too many protocols, or too many processes, or duplicated processes that are no longer working or atrophied, that's a tax. A leadership tax on speed. It's a tax on agility. It's a tax on your ability to learn at the speed of the customer.

Unlearning is a call to reflection: Look at what you're doing across your culture, your capabilities, your processes, your performance management, and ask what you need to eliminate. What do you need to replace, or update, or augment, or say goodbye to?

Elimination – unlearning – is one of the finest forms of optimisation. Why? It gives you more energy, more cognitive bandwidth to focus on your highest value outcomes, your highest value return on investments. Unlearning is a big deal. It's a collective blind spot for most of us as leaders, as organisations, as a wider customer management industry.

A very simple way to get started would be to do a 24-hour hackathon. Involve your people, involve your teams, and look at the top barriers or pain points preventing you from doing high performing, high value, intelligent work – not bureaucratic work. Get everybody to think about that and vote democratically on the biggest examples. It could be too many meetings. It could be a process that's been duplicated or not updated for years. It could be doing work that should be augmented or automated because it's very manual, low value, or repetitive – shallow work. These would be great examples to take and then unlearn in a deliberate way, sharing why you need to unlearn it, what steps you're going to take to do so, and then celebrating milestones and measuring the outcomes of the initiative.

It's a great way to release untapped energy, but also ROI – not return on investment. We know that's important. But return on intelligence.

SH: One of the biggest challenges for customer management leaders is to ensure their brand is constantly innovating – pushing the boundaries of traditional customer care to keep their brand relevant to their audience. How can they effectively foster and articulate that innovation mindset across their teams?

TM: I love this question.

Innovation does not happen by accident. Everybody in customer management is an innovator. It's not a department, it's not a status, it's not a job title. We should all be responsible for innovating in a very practical way on a daily basis.

Look around you – start with your role, start with the protocols and processes around you, start with a customer's problem and question what you can iterate. What can you do differently? Really think about learning and working at the speed of the market, and the speed of the customer.

Innovation is absolutely non-negotiable. Incentivising it is important as well. Celebrating innovation at work, celebrating meaningful change. A great way to get started today is to ask questions. Most of the time we don't ask questions – we just run or rush for answers. The next time you want to be more innovative on a collective scale, get your team together and ask some questions. Pick one or two obstacles or barriers that are getting in the way of you being productive or innovative and frame some questions around that. Spend 10 minutes generating questions: Questions that don't just make you feel good, but make you think hard. At the end of those 10 minutes, you’ll likely surface one or two new questions that perhaps haven't been asked before – that force you to rethink assumptions, that force you to rethink that problem, that force you to think differently.

That's a great source code; a great platform for unlocking innovation DNA.

SH: Disruption is everywhere in customer management right now. It’s unavoidable for business leaders as consumers find new ways to shop and engage with their favourite brands. So, how should they approach disruption? How can they embrace it and shape it to their advantage?

TM: When we hear the word disruption, often we feel fear. Disruption does have an implied negative undertone, but I want everybody to challenge this notion of disruption.

What is disruption?

It's change. It’s opportunity. It's learning. It's transformation. It’s adaptability. Disruption always presents two options.

Option one: If we embrace disruption as a tailwind, we can unlock laser like focus and strategic courage – that's finding the upside of disruption.

Option two: If we avoid disruption, adopt a head in the sand mentality, then that can lead to inertia, stagnation.

Jeff Bezos has a great saying: “Are you a day one thinker, or a day two thinker?” Day one is about disrupting from the inside. It means every day is a new day; a new day to learn, a new day to grow, a new day to learn at the speed of the customer.

If you're a day two company or a day two leader, it means that every day is the same and you assume that your existing model will be future fit for the long-term, and we know that's not going to happen.

Why do companies fall away? Why do processes atrophy? Why do we stagnate? It's unhappy customers. It's broken business models. It's obsolete ways of working. It's legacy mindsets. It's an assumption that we don't need to adapt or change.

Disruption is ultimately a really great call to mobilisation: To be a learner, not a knower. To seek vitality and to really put yourself in the shoes, not just of today's customers, but tomorrow's customers, and the day after tomorrow's customers as well.

SH: Honing in on the AI conversation. It’s one that continues to dominate conference airtime and news columns as the risks of not getting on board this technology train become clearer. How can customer management leaders navigate their organisations through the AI ecosystem? How can they move quickly with AI adoption while de-risking the process at the same time?

TM: AI is a structural systemic megatrend that's not going away.

An important first step with AI is to explore. For example, I've been working with clients who have created sandboxes – AI sandboxes – so that they can experiment in a very safe, ethical way and start looking at the potential benefits of the technology.

I have two reflections.

Reflection one: Develop a point of view on how AI can help you in the short-term, over the next 12 months. Let's face it – most of us spend too much time on shallow, routine, low-value tasks. These are great examples of what we can start automating, or augmenting, with the help of AI. Get a strategy in place for experimenting with AI to enhance savings, enhance efficiency gains, enhance productivity gains, and also cut down costs. And this is a team sport – involve people around you with this.

Reflection two: Think about the next 18 months and beyond – think about how you can use AI at a strategic level to reinvent your business model and reinvent how you connect and build communities with your customers. That could be utilising shorter-term AI sandboxes, or getting people to experiment with ChatGPT or a similar platform. Encourage your teams to really build up their confidence around how they can use this tool to augment what they do.

This is the age of co-intelligence. A longer-term goal might be to think about how you can start utilising AI to become an AI-centric organisation and an AI-first leader. These will be two calls to action. And a final call to caution. Let's be aware of artificial idiocy, artificial interactions, artificial intimacy. This should not replace what customers desire, which is connectivity, trust, ethics, personalisation, and of course great value.

Using AI intelligently in a humane way, in a human centric way, is the way to take AI forward.

SH: An essential component of leadership is building and showcasing trust. Can you talk to us about the building blocks of trust in leadership? What does trust in leadership look like?

TM: Money is the currency of transactions. Trust is the currency of relationships.

What do customers want? Typically, three things. They want truth, they want trust, and they want transparency in their experiences, in their products, and in their services. The writer George Orwell, famous for the novels 1984 and Animal Farm, would have relished these times.

We have record levels of cybercrime, for example. Cybercrime will cost the global economy over $11 trillion over the next five years. We have deep fake technology. Every organisation is one step away, even accidentally, from a major trust breach. And so, for leaders today reading this conversation, the message here is around the need to unbundle and rebundle trust. How are you thinking about scaling robust, resilient ecosystems of trust, ecosystems of resiliency? How are you measuring, amplifying, protecting, and sustaining trust across your organisation, internally and externally? How are you prioritising trust alongside growth and scale, because often stability happens at the expense of trust?

Also, when we're thinking about the rise of AI and becoming an AI-centric organisation, where does the support end and surveillance begin?

I'm working with many organisations that are rushing with AI and neglecting the narrative of support, enablement, and augmentation. Because there is a fine line between AI as an enabler and AI as surveillance – AI as an enforcer. These are big questions and the story of trust is continually written every day by what we choose to do, or not do, through our trust-based actions. Trust is a major leadership mandate. We cannot ignore it – we need to prioritise it alongside profitability, growth, and scalability. We need to start creating new post-AI measures to evaluate our trust across the ecosystem with our customers on the outside, and with our colleagues on the inside. And when you can do that, it's your north star and it's a major advantage because what customers want more than anything is a deep, trust-based relationship.

SH: Research from your company Hack Future Lab reveals that 68% of leaders, either themselves or their teams, are at risk of overload and overwhelm. What practices can leaders adopt to prevent that from happening in the first instance?

TM: I attended a festival recently and had the opportunity to listen to Esther Perel. A great thinker and psychotherapist. She's done some great TED talks as well. She talks about a loneliness epidemic around the world – over 300 million people globally have no friends and that's set to go to maybe 1 billion people in the next 15 years. It's a loneliness epidemic.

Alongside that, we have burnout, overload, overwhelm, and whilst I'm a tech optimist – I love technology – I would also say that we have to be careful. Technology is very good at making the trivial seem urgent. On average, 10 years ago, we were dealing with 5,000 emails a year individually, then it was 20,000. This year it's projected to be over 30,000 emails per person. You can't keep up with the machines and that's creating burnout, but also the opposite of burnout.

I recently came across an organisation in Paris where employees successfully sued their company for bore out. Underload. We have to be careful around both. What your teams want, what your employees want across all demographics, all generations, is three things: they want belonging, they want to feel part of something, and they want to believe in something – believing that their work matters, that the mission matters. That means learning and growing. So, to come back to the heart of your question: Wellbeing should not be a buzzword.

We've got too many buzzwords right now. There's too much fake empowerment in the world, and we need to ensure wellbeing is not a buzzword. It’s important that wellbeing is a central pillar of your workforce strategy, and that means bringing it to life in a visceral way. In a measurable way. In a way that's personalised. And in a way where it's not just a shiny new thing, another tick box exercise, but where it actually makes a difference to people's lives.

Is that easy to do? No, it isn't. It takes conviction and commitment to make that happen, but it's worth it because if your team are burnt out, or bored out, that affects the customer experience on the outside and ultimately impacts the bottom line as well.

A healthy, happy workforce is a happy balance sheet, but also a happy customer community.

SH: Pivoting now on to workforce strategy. And the dynamics here are interesting. Workers are completely rethinking and reimagining their relationship with their employers on both a financial and indeed existential level – there's been a psychology shift that must be met with new, bold, empathetic leadership. Can you share two or three practices leaders can apply when it comes to meeting the demands of employees today?

TM: The pandemic was a catalyst and accelerant for many things. It was an accelerant for digitisation, ecommerce, automation, remote work, new business models, new ways of working – hybrid, remote, augmented. Then the war in Ukraine started. That was an accelerant for decarbonisation. We've had two major megatrends converging to create overlapping disruption, risk, and opportunity.

Alongside that, the fundamental contract between an employee and an employer has changed. Now we've got a few different phrases out there: The Great Resignation, The Great Rebundling, The Great Attrition – there's so many different ones out there, but what it means at a practical level is that two out of three of your workforce are in perpetual job search mode. That’s my first reflection.

Secondly: The number one reason why people leave the door, after money, is a lack of internal growth opportunity. An important point to reiterate: The number one reason why people leave, after money, is a lack of internal growth opportunity. And the bad news is around 76% of those interviewed at Hack Future Lab said they believed other organisations had more opportunities than the existing organisation they were in. We need to think about how we move talent closer to value.

I’m talking about skills pixelisation. Using talent marketplaces to horizontally hire across the organisation. Don’t adhere to just traditional linear career ladders, but horizontal fluid portfolios, projects where you're aligning the individual with the skills and the talent to the project horizontally across the organisation.

Alongside that we have talent scarcity. Eighty percent of organisations are reporting a major talent shortage – and this is very extreme across the customer management industry. We must rethink how we hire, retrain, and retain talent. Simply focusing on external hiring is not a good strategy anymore. You now need to think how you retrain and grow and sustain your existing talent: Using horizontal hiring talent marketplaces, workforce ecosystems, coaching cultures – these would be some practical steps for people to think about today within the customer management industry. Are you mapping out the skills of the talent you need today, and indeed tomorrow? Do you have a strong internal growth management system so that your talent is growing internally? What are the skills gaps across your departments, and do you have a race to reskill strategy in place?

These would be some fundamental questions for people to start thinking about today because the war for talent is over. Talent won.

SH: Looking ahead at what’s to come – what work can customer management leaders do now to shore up their future and ensure their business is still unlocking new value for customers three, four, five years from here?

TM: An important point here is doing the basics brilliantly.

We're drowning in information and overload. We love the shiny new thing, and AI is the shiny new thing on steroids. But what we're missing right now, this year in the debate, is that AI is sucking up all the oxygen, all the attention – and culture is suffering as a result. Doing the basics is suffering. What I mean by doing the basics brilliantly is this: think about in your own life when you had a great boss – what did they do? They probably communicated with clarity. There was trust. There was feedback. There was a coaching rather than a checking ethos. That's what I mean by doing the basics brilliantly and that's not easy to do when we're distracted, overloaded, or just chasing the shiny new thing. So, number one would be what does it mean to do the basics brilliantly in customer management? And are you exceeding, meeting, or falling behind on that imperative?

Number two would be asking yourselves what are you doing for tomorrow's world?

Build a point of view on what your competition are doing. What are your competition doing that excites you, that you should be doing, but also what are they doing that is a good example of what you should not be doing?

We can learn from our industry in a positive way and in a developmental way, but go further than that. Go outside of your industry as well. We've experienced the Amazonification of the world, the Teslafication of the world. These companies are setting new benchmarks in terms of customer intimacy, customer trust, moving from transactional relationships to transformational relationships – immediacy, personalisation, experience, community. So, think about what you need to do for tomorrow's world and work back from there. Have an eye on today, executing for today, but also an eye on the future, reimagining for tomorrow's world as well. There’s a duality to that – it's not easy to do.

This is an exciting time to be alive. So much is happening and that creates a lot of opportunity. But that also means that “yes” and “no” are both superpowers. Say “yes” to things, but also this ability to say “no” will allow you to have laser focus and protect what really matters.

Don’t underestimate the power of “no”, as well as “yes”.