Episode 858 - Congratulations, You're an AI Manager Now

0:04 Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goal achieving. This is the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast with your host, Paul Falavolito.

0:16 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode 858. You may not have anyone reporting to you. You may not have a management title. You may not conduct performance reviews, approve vacation requests, or even sit through management meetings. But if you're assigning work to AI, reviewing its performance, correcting its mistakes, and deciding whether its work is acceptable, congratulations, you're managing something. And I think This is one of the biggest changes happening in the workplace right now. For years, we've defined management around people. Managers assign work to people. They set expectations. They review performance.

1:13 They correct mistakes. They provide additional information. When somebody doesn't understand the assignment, they decide whether the finished product meets the standard. Think about what happens when you use AI. You give AI an assignment. You explain what you want. It gives you something back. You review it. Maybe you say, no, that's not what I meant. You give it more context.

1:41 It tries again. You review the new version. Maybe you correct something. Maybe you reject the entire thing and start over. And eventually you decide, okay, this meets the standard. Tell me that doesn't sound a little bit like management. The workplace is quietly creating an entirely new type of manager, the AI manager, and you might already be one. IBM recently released research involving 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees, and one number really jumped out at me. 71% of those CHROs believed supervising, validating, and overriding AI output is becoming an essential workforce skill. Think about those words, supervising, validating, overriding.

2:37 Those aren't technology words. Those are management words. And there's another piece of this research that I find even more interesting. 80% of the CHROs said AI is creating what they describe as invisible work. People are checking AI recommendations. They're correcting mistakes. They're adding missing context. They're handling expectations. The computer may have generated the answer in 10 seconds and then somebody spends the next 15 minutes figuring out whether that answer is actually any good. That's work. More importantly, that's responsibility because AI doesn't carry responsibility for the final decision.

3:21 You do. And this is where I think some organizations are going to get themselves into trouble. We've spent a lot of time teaching people how to use AI, how to write prompts, how to summarize documents, how to generate ideas, how to analyze information, how to automate repetitive work. Those skills matter. The next skill is bigger. Can you manage AI?

3:48 Can you recognize when the answer looks impressive, but it's wrong? Can you identify when important context is missing? Can you recognize when AI has wandered outside of its lane? And can you decide when the machine needs to be overridden by a human being? That's no longer AI literacy. That's AI supervision. And AI supervision requires judgment. That's the part that we need to pay attention to. And according to the IBM research, only 29% of employees rank judgment as important.

4:26 That gap should get the attention of every leader listening to this episode. Organizations are saying, we need people who can exercise judgment over AI. Employees may be thinking, I need to learn how to use AI. Those are two very different skills. Knowing how to operate something doesn't automatically mean you know how to supervise it. I can teach somebody how to use a piece of equipment. That doesn't mean they're qualified to determine whether the equipment is producing a safe or accurate result. And the same thing applies here.

5:03 Imagine an employee asks AI to analyze a financial report. AI gives them an answer. The numbers look professional. The explanation sounds intelligent, the formatting looks beautiful, and it's wrong. What happens next? If that employee blindly copies the information into a presentation and sends it upstairs, AI didn't fail the organization alone, the human verification process failed. Somebody accepted the work without properly inspecting it. That's a management failure.

5:40 Now imagine an employee uses AI to draft a policy. The policy looks great. And then somebody who understands the organization reads it and realizes the AI didn't understand a regulation, missed an operational reality, or created a requirement that nobody can actually follow. Again, the issue isn't whether AI can write.

6:06 The issue is whether the human supervising the AI is knows enough to catch the problem. And this creates an interesting leadership question. What happens when AI becomes smarter than the person supervising it in certain areas? Because that's going to happen. AI might know more facts. It might process information faster. It might find patterns that you missed. It might produce something in 30 seconds that would have taken you two hours. And you're still responsible for deciding whether the result should be used. Welcome to management. Sometimes you manage people who are better than you at something. Great leaders don't need to be the smartest person in every room.

6:53 They need enough knowledge, judgment, awareness, and discipline to know when something isn't right. The same principle applies to AI. And I believe companies need to start establishing rules around this. What AI-generated work requires human verification? What information can never be accepted without checking another source? What decision requires human approval?

7:19 What should an employee stop working with AI and escalate the issue to somebody with greater expertise? Who owns the final decision? Because AI told me cannot become the workplace version of that's what the other guy told me. Ownership doesn't disappear because a machine was involved. If your name is on the report, you own it. If you approve the recommendation, you own it. If you send the email, you own it. If you make the decision, you own it.

7:51 AI can assist you. AI can challenge you. AI can dramatically increase what you're capable of accomplishing. Accountability stays human. This also changes how we should think about leadership development. We may be entering a workplace where someone becomes a manager before they ever supervise another human being. A 22-year-old employee could be given access to powerful AI systems on their first day of work. By lunchtime, they're delegating tasks, evaluating output, correcting performance, establishing expectations. in making decisions based on the work produced. They've become an AI manager without anybody ever telling them that that's what they're doing. So maybe the next generation of leadership training begins earlier than

8:44 we thought. Maybe we teach employees how to establish standards, how to verify information, how to recognize uncertainty, how to challenge an answer that sounds confident. how to know when they don't know enough to make the call. Those are leadership skills. Those are management skills, and they're becoming everyday workforce skills. And there's also something else leaders need to understand.

9:11 AI management is going to expose weak thinkers. If your entire relationship with AI is asking a question and copying the answer, you're not managing AI. You're taking orders from it. Managing AI means questioning it. It means pushing back. It means checking the work. It means understanding that confidence isn't accuracy.

9:36 And sometimes it means looking at a beautifully written answer and saying, no, that's wrong. That takes judgment. That takes experience. That takes critical thinking. And occasionally, it takes the courage to override the machine because The future workplace isn't going to be humans versus AI. It's going to be humans responsible for what AI helps them produce. That's a much bigger responsibility than learning how to write a clever prompt.

10:06 So the next time you open ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, or whatever AI system your organization uses, think differently about what you're doing. You're assigning work. You're establishing expectations. You're reviewing performance. You're correcting mistakes. You're approving the final product. Congratulations, you're an AI manager now. The question isn't whether you know how to use AI. The question is whether you're good enough to manage it. So the leaders who succeed in the AI workplace won't blindly trust the machine, and they won't ignore it either. They'll know how to direct it, question it, verify its work, and take responsibility for the final decision. AI may become one of the most capable

11:06 workers you've ever managed. Just make sure you're becoming the kind of leader capable of managing it. This has been the 7-Minute Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening.

11:19 For more Paul Falavelito podcasts, visit paulfalavelito.com.