The secret to AI-powered success: the supermanager

Currently, many employees are faced with both the opportunities and threats offered by the AI explosion. Clearly, AI can significantly improve productivity, innovation and performance, enabling every employee to become a ‘superworker’.

 

At the same time, fear-mongering headlines about redundancies have led to many workers who are worried that their jobs are at risk of automation.

 

The question, then, is how can businesses embrace the potential of AI without compromising their existing workforce? How can AI fuel a new revolution in innovation across all departments and a new type of empowered worker, equipped with the skills, tools, and mindset to optimise the new technology? Strong leadership is critical: superworkers need an equally innovative type of people leader - a supermanager.

 

 

What is a ‘supermanager’?

Our research shows that the role of manager will continue to be important with AI, but it will evolve. Traditional tasks, such as supervising work, sharing status updates, and writing performance reviews are becoming less important for managers. Instead, AI-powered management focuses on redesigning work, driving frontline innovation and unlocking the potential of superworkers.

 

The supermanager is both a human-centric leader and a technology enabler, who nurtures staff capability, confidence and curiosity, making AI work for them. They blend a people-first mindset with advanced technological skills and a readiness for transformation, cultivating environments where superworkers excel.

 

Their impact extends beyond simply adopting and championing AI tools – they shape organisational culture and elevate the employee experience. As stewards of manager and leadership development, HR will play a pivotal role in equipping supermanagers for success and guiding the evolution of management practices across the organisation.

 

 

Making AI a fundamental pillar

There is little in corporate life more likely to sow seeds of dissent than the suspicion that a faceless algorithm is making key decisions behind closed doors. That’s why trust and transparency are key when it comes to AI and why companies, including ASOS, Microsoft and Clifford Chance, are making AI transparency a central pillar of their transformation initiatives. Tools such as Microsoft Viva create spaces where companies can provide AI-related resources and guidance, while employees can share ideas, highlight AI experiments, and help foster a more open culture around AI.

 

Supermanagers play a crucial part in the trust-building process, putting corporate policies into practice, creating guardrails, and ensuring innovation is welcomed and nurtured. They must demonstrate how AI enables the business mission, listen to employee concerns and connect the two.

 

Thus, an open, two-way dialogue is important. Annual surveys and irregular check-ins are no longer sufficient. Thankfully, AI already enables improved listening platforms, allowing workers to provide continuous, real-time feedback, then analysing the sentiment to help managers make the best decisions.

 

 

Leading by example

While listening to employees is paramount when it comes to trust-building, it is also essential to communicate personalised, relevant and timely information to teams. Intelligent AI platforms can customise messages for individuals and teams, ensuring they have the information they need, when they need it and via the most appropriate channel.

 

However, the best way to communicate is via behaviour – leading by example. Employees tend to learn not from corporate handbooks or slide decks but from what they see every day.

 

So supermanagers need to walk the walk – using AI tools to make experimentation legitimate, creating reassurance for the wider team and becoming the human interface of digital transformation. One global engineering company used this approach when rolling out a new AI-powered talent marketplace. By embracing the marketplace as a way to unlock growth, managers empowered employees to use the technology to help shape their own career paths. As a result, more employees began to engage with the platform and it became a bridge to improved visibility, mentorship, and mobility.

 

What next?

Supermanagers have a huge opportunity to embrace in the near future: acting as the connective tissue between digital transformation and workforce empowerment while ensuring that AI will act as a force multiplier for worker capabilities. Here’s how:

• Integrating AI into daily workflows to improve productivity, innovation and decision-making.
• Fostering trust and transparency by clarifying how AI is used, where the data comes from and how it supports the wider corporate mission.
• Modelling accountable AI adoption by using the tools and sharing successes and failures
• Enabling continuous learning by helping their teams explore and implement new use cases.
• Combining a human-centred approach with the power of AI to become stronger leaders and elevate their teams’ performance.

For HR, encouraging the rise of supermanagers means that leadership development must now include AI fluency and digital ethics as essential skills. Managers need to be equipped not only to guide their teams through ongoing changes, but also to lead by example as transformation unfolds.

 

Now is the moment for organisations to reimagine their management approaches for the superworker era, redefining what effective leadership looks like and empowering leaders at every level to drive and accelerate innovation.

 

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Julia Bersin is Associate Director, Research at The Josh Bersin Company, which provides research, advisory, and education on the trends, technologies, and best practices for the new world of work

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Organic Media