Why C-Suite Leaders Must Embrace Open-Ended Change in the Workplace

• Chris Deri leads Weber Shandwick’s corporate advisory business and is a member of BI’s Workforce Innovation council.
• As an advisor to executives, he believes that addressing the most pressing issues in the workplace is a work in progress.
• This article is part of ‘Workforce Innovation’, a series exploring the forces shaping corporate transformation.

Business Insider’s “Workforce Innovation” series brings together perspectives from a wide range of industry verticals and business functions to discuss the forces driving change in businesses, specifically artificial intelligence, diversity, equity and inclusion, employee well-being, and C-suite transformation.

Chris Deri, chairman of Weber Shandwick Collective’s corporate advisory practice, advises chief communications officers, chief marketing officers and other executives on policy, governance, crisis management and other management topics.

The company’s research shows that CEOs are prioritizing AI, even though they don’t yet know how to get started, according to Deri.

“Earlier this year, we asked CEOs, ‘What’s the one action you want to take this year with respect to AI?’” Deri said. “The most cited action was, ‘Engage an AI and technology vendor.’”

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Is AI really as much on the minds of business leaders as we think?

For everyone, artificial intelligence is on the radar and a priority. We surveyed CEOs and other C-suite executives on the four megatrends we believe will impact business: Generative AI, Green Transition, Geopolitics, and Misinformation and Disinformation.

What was interesting about all of these aspects, and generative AI in particular, was that executives expressed limited personal confidence in their own ability to lead their organizations through these transformations. Only 13% of the executives we spoke to felt very capable of leading their own organizations through the AI ​​transformation.

There was also little confidence among managers in the ability of their own organization to retrain their employees.

There’s an incredible amount of hype and speculation in the ecosystem and in the media. But I feel like executives are taking a kind of run-before-they-run perspective, and I sense a lot of caution.

What leadership qualities are needed to manage the pace of innovation today?

One thing we think about in terms of technology, particularly AI — and this is probably true for a lot of things: executives need to be hands-on, and they need to adopt the ethos of technologists. They need to be careful, but they also need to adopt some of the principles in the technology world, like, “We’re going to test and learn, and we’re going to fail fast.”

This is not an age where you can guarantee results. You can try things out in a way that protects IT systems, but there has to be a different ethos than many leaders have, which is to look around the corner and see what’s there. We’re just not all in that position. This is an age of complexity, and we really have to embrace complexity and openness.

How do you advise companies to deal with the polarization and politicization of diversity, equality and inclusion?

DEI and ESG have been hijacked by our politically polarized times. From a communications standpoint, we often advise our clients to ignore the outside noise and make decisions on these matters based on data and what is best for the business.

We do a lot of analysis to track the discussions and the stakeholder groups that are driving the whole “antiwoke” movement. There are people who subscribe to antiwokeism, but we’ve been able to show that the size, speed and volume of the antiwoke movement online is confounded, largely because the movement is just so engaged. There’s no inference per se, just the sheer numbers.

So what happens is that these online conversations jump into the mainstream media and get reported as mega-movements. We use AI-powered analytics to track this.

There are people on both sides who have passionate opinions about DEI, but for a lot of reasons we really try to advise our clients not to get too caught up in those discussions because they can be incredibly distracting.

Why are return obligations still a difficult issue for many companies?

Redefining workplace wellbeing and employee-company contracts post-COVID is still a work in progress. In a hundred years, historians will tell us what this phase was about, but it really feels like we’re still figuring it out.

I worry that the hybrid nature of work, and the fact that we’re still trying to define the hybrid nature of work, is holding us back from a learning and cultural perspective.

Employees are also confused by a lot of the messaging in the workplace. If you look at the CEOs who get the most attention, whether it’s Amazon or Jamie Dimon, the ones who are really black and white about it are the exceptions. Everyone is really loose with the messaging. A few years ago, everyone was terrified that if you forced a return to the office, people would jump.

I also think that the lifestyles of even the most senior executives have changed due to hybrid work, and this is affecting the policies they implement across the organization.

What is a concrete example of how you integrate AI into your workplace?

This is a little mundane, but it’s had the most impact. We just did a training for a couple hundred people in the corporate advisory business. We were talking about how you can use generative AI to do what we call red teaming, which is basically a way to test ideas, concepts, and messages with AI personas of different stakeholders, whether it’s a senator, an investor, or a customer.

We showed them the technical aspects of how to do that. We talked about the right prompting. But what we had to make clear to them is that this doesn’t mean that you should outsource the work that you do as a practitioner to AI.

The AI ​​is supposed to improve it a little bit, speed things up. But this is not to hand over your tasks as a thinker and as a member of the knowledge economy — and in our case as an advisor to your customers who understands the business — to an AI bot. That is a nuanced message about how you can embrace clearly revolutionary technology.