Leading With an AI Heart (Part 4)
For 20 years, my work has made businesses stronger. And sometimes, it costs a good person their job.
AI is about to hand that same dilemma to every leader.
If you lead people, this one's for you.
Over the past three posts, I've followed a real client through one of the hardest calls a CFO leading a team makes: restructuring their finance function, knowing it would affect a Finance Officer everyone valued.
In Part 3, I admitted something I don't often say out loud. Our work helps businesses survive tough trading conditions, and that protects jobs. But sometimes someone loses a role they're good at.
Both things are true. And after two decades, I've stopped trying to make that discomfort go away.
Here's why that matters now.
AI is going to create this dissonance at a scale we haven't seen before. Tasks that took a team a week will take an afternoon. Some roles will change. Some will go. Most leaders will face a version of my dilemma for the first time. And many will try to resolve the discomfort the fastest way possible: by telling themselves it's just business, or by avoiding the decision altogether.
Neither works.
Here's what I've learned about leading with heart and still making the hard calls.
1/ Hold both truths at once. You can believe a decision is right for the business and feel the weight of what it costs a person. Those aren't in conflict. The moment you lose either one, you lose something as a leader.
2/ Don't let efficiency become the whole story. AI, outsourcing, restructuring: these are tools. The question isn't whether they make you more efficient. It's what you do with what you gain. Reinvest some of it in your people. Upskill them. Move them towards the work that machines can't do.
3/ Don't hide behind the decision. The worst redundancies I've seen weren't the ones that happened. They were the ones where people found out last, or second-hand. If change is coming, say so early and honestly. Your people can handle the truth far better than the silence.
4/ Measure yourself by how people land. Not by whether you avoided the decision. By whether the person affected walked out with their dignity, their confidence and a real path to what's next. That's why we offer outplacement support. It's the part of the work I'm proudest of.
5/ Stay a little uncomfortable. The day these decisions stop costing you something is the day you'll start making them carelessly. That discomfort isn't weakness. It's your conscience doing its job.
Heart-led leadership was never about avoiding hard decisions. It's about making them clearly, early and kindly, and owning what follows.
AI won't change that. It will just make it matter more.
So I'd love to ask you to contemplate something...
How are you preparing your people, and yourself, for the changes AI will bring?
I'll keep writing about leading finance teams through AI change: the practical side and the human side. Part of this very personal experience is creating conversations that I want to be part of.
