Want to Outrun AI Competitors? How to Perform and Lead Change at the Same Time
There is a profound conundrum at the heart of business.
To compete today, you need reliability. Customers expect the product to work, operations need to run properly, promises have to be kept and margins protected. Much of organisational life is therefore designed to reduce variation and make performance more predictable.
But to remain competitive tomorrow, you also need to change. Often significantly. Most markets are awash with well enough funded, super agile startups using AI to nibble away at the most profitable sections of your marketplace. Even a highly successful business cannot assume that doing today’s work increasingly efficiently will be enough to protect tomorrow’s position.
So organisations find themselves being asked to do two things that feel as though they pull in different directions:
Run the business reliably, while changing the business. At the same time.
This is one of the key challenges senior leaders face today.
Reliability matters. It just isn’t enough anymore.
In many conventional businesses, senior leaders have built successful careers on the skill of management: creating consistency, reducing variation and making sure the organisation delivers what it promised, over and over again. For a long time, that was enough to sustain a strong business model.
It is no longer enough on its own.
Performance can still look healthy while smaller competitors take profitable parts of the market, customer expectations move faster than internal product cycles, or AI enables someone else to deliver part of your proposition faster and at lower cost.
The difficulty is that the very behaviours that protect reliability can also make change harder.
Imagine someone in a team meeting suggests a significant improvement to a product or process. The idea may be valuable, but it also brings uncertainty, extra work and potential disruption. It may cut across existing targets, require unplanned investment or challenge a system someone senior has spent years putting in place.
The response is easily: “That’s interesting, but now isn’t the time.”
Sometimes that is exactly the right call. But if it becomes the default response, the organisation gradually learns that protecting what already exists matters more than improving or reinventing it. The result? If all you are doing is managing reliability, you may also be managing decline.
Why separating innovation from the core business only gets you so far
One common response to this tension is to separate the two.
The core business runs the operation. An innovation team is given permission to explore the future.
There can be very good reasons to do this. New ideas sometimes need protection from the processes designed to run mature ones. The difficulty appears when the innovation eventually needs to come home.
The new idea then has to be adopted by an organisation whose systems, incentives and behaviours remain optimised for predictability. The innovation team finds itself trying to “sell” change back into the business, while operational leaders quite reasonably worry about what that change will do to delivery.
We end up creating two organisations with different operating assumptions and asking one to persuade the other.
There is another possibility.
Instead of separating reliability and adaptability entirely, we can develop the capability to hold both at a much smaller scale: within the individual themselves.
The Same Person Needs to Know When to Manage, Lead and Follow
Management and leadership are not different levels on an organisation chart. They are different skills, and senior leaders need to move between them depending on what the situation requires. There are moments when management is exactly right.
But there are also moments when doing the existing thing more efficiently will not solve the problem because the context itself has changed.
That is when leadership is required.
Leadership requires the ability to vision, prioritise, organise and decide, to inspire and recruit followers to solve problems and operationalise well selected innovations as fast as possible.
Three Ways to Create Capacity for Management and Leadership
1. Delegate To Create Strategic Bandwidth
If you spend your days putting out operational fires, there will never be room for leadership. Set explicit guardrails (limits, risk thresholds and non-negotiable standards), then give your team full ownership to deliver work and solve problems within them. You then buy yourself the time, energy and mental headspace to think about the bigger and longer-term picture.
Ask yourself: What am I still holding onto that someone else could own well and what would I do with the bandwidth that creates?
2. Develop The Inner Capacity For Leadership
Unlike management, which is often supported by precedent and established standards, leadership asks people to make a stand for something that does not yet exist. That inevitably involves uncertainty and a degree of vulnerability. That inner capacity is built through practice: noticing your own reactions under pressure, creating space before responding, getting more comfortable with ambiguity and deliberately exposing your thinking to challenge. A good coach can be particularly valuable here, providing a safe space to build this capacity.
Ask yourself: How do I tend to respond when uncertainty increases? What could I practice, change or get support with to increase my inner capacity for leadership?
3. Make It Safe For Leadership To Emerge Around You
Leadership cannot remain concentrated at the top. Individuals at all levels of the organisation need to be able to exercise judgement without waiting for permission every time. That depends heavily on what happens when they do. If challenge is met with defensiveness and mistakes with blame, people quickly learn to play safe. Psychological safety does not mean lowering standards; it means making it possible for people to take responsible ownership and risk while remaining accountable for the outcome. Knowing when to follow is ironically a key characteristic of successful leadership.
Ask yourself: What could I do differently to make it safer for people around me to take ownership and lead?
Developing leaders who can perform and adapt
No one delivers world class performance on their own. All world class performers have a coach and other support structures to help them to be at their very best as much of the time as possible. If we want our senior people to operate like corporate athletes we might gain more by investing in coaching and leadership development.
At Holos, we develop senior leaders from the inside out, building both the practical skills and the personal capacity to deliver reliably, lead transformation and create greater ownership throughout the organisation.
If this is something your working on, let’s explore what developing the capability to perform and transform could look like in your organisation.
Author: Neil Crofts