People have always been at the heart of HR’s work—which is why some HR leaders are feeling especially challenged in the age of AI, says Kelly Jones, chief people officer of Cisco.
The pressure is on for HR to move far and move fast with AI. And that urgency is creating a divide.
On one hand, there are HR leaders who are leaning so hard into tech strategy that they “completely lose the room,” Jones says.
They’re so hyper-focused on the tech that their people may feel like they’re just an afterthought in a technology project.
And conversely, there are leaders who are so zeroed in on the protection of their people from disruption that they slow down transformation.
“Neither of those works, as you can imagine,” Jones recently told HR Executive. The leaders who can effectively balance both sides of that coin and ultimately who will move the needle on AI transformation are what Jones calls “integrated leaders.”
What is an integrated leader?
“In my mind, integrated leadership is: How do you hold the technology and the human side of this at the same time without letting either one win?” she says.
Integrated leaders need to be grounded in tech fluency—having the capacity to talk about and genuinely understand agentic systems and workforce architecture. They need a technical underpinning that enables them to speak the language of data to the C-suite to drive real business outcomes.
“But at the same time,” Jones says, “they need to be able to sit with an employee who’s genuinely concerned about their future and make them feel seen and heard,” she says. “And that’s a hard range.”
Keeping one foot on both sides of the tech and human equation involves staying genuinely curious about the technology, while investing in creating a culture of psychological safety; employees aren’t going to speak up about tech projects that aren’t working if they don’t trust leaders to listen, Jones adds.
In that vein, ethics needs to be in sharp focus through any tech transformation to ensure the investment pays off for the organization and its people.
“Things are moving so fast, but if we’re not grounding our decisions in long-term human impacts, you can do real harm at real scale before you even notice that it’s happening,” she says.
Integrated leaders, which Jones says she personally is striving to be, also need to hone their resilience.
“People thought (AI transformation) was going to go really fast, and I would argue that it is going to go faster than some of the historical workforce transformations, but it’s also going to feel long because it is difficult,” she says. “How we show up in that—our people are going to take cues from. So, we all have opportunities to build our resilience when it comes to being change leaders.”
Hear more from Kelly Jones during her opening keynote Oct. 20 at HR Tech Conference in Las Vegas. To register, click here.
Credit: Source link
