The Three New Skills Managers Need

Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:

“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”

In the coming years, both business leaders and their employees will face a number of challenges as they deal with changing digital technologies. In particular, they will need to learn three important new skills: (1) how to partner with new digital “colleagues”; (2) how to create a mindful relationship with increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies; and (3) how to develop empathy for the varying technology preferences of their human coworkers. Organizations, for their part, will need to design programs and processes to support these efforts.

1. Partnering With Digital “Colleagues” Employees across a wide spectrum of industries will be working with what are, in effect, “digital coworkers” — algorithms that help them tackle a range of tasks such as answering call-center help desk questions, making financial investment decisions, diagnosing medical conditions, scheduling and running manufacturing assembly lines, and providing dashboard advice regarding important performance indicators. These digital colleagues will embody intelligence that evolves cognitively and learns continuously about the specific task it is applied to, by incorporating new solutions learned from experience and applying them to future problems.

Given the complexity and often real-time application of this sort of intelligence, it may be unnecessary and indeed impossible for human professionals to verify the veracity of an algorithm’s solutions. However, as the data become denser and algorithms get faster and more complex, there is a danger of “runaway algorithms” that become disconnected from the reality of the phenomenon they represent, eventually leading to wrong solutions. To prevent this, managers will need to retain their expertise and control over their tasks and processes. They should provide context for the decisions and recommendations of their digital partners by monitoring those decisions from time to time and recalibrating them against their own experience, insight, and intuition — even going against their digital coworkers if necessary.

While digital colleagues will, for the most part, independently handle routine aspects of their tasks, exceptions — that is, those cases where their digital intelligence does not have a satisfactory solution — will require human decision making. At the same time, cloud-based intelligent algorithms for relatively narrow and contained tasks — for example, understanding niche buyer behavior — will make it possible for managers to solve everyday problems more effectively.

Leveraging such opportunities will require managers to be alert to opportunities and problems, to have deep process knowledge and to explore, innovate, and engage with their digital coworkers. In short, managers will be confronted and challenged by digital colleagues — just as they are by their human coworkers. They will need to learn how and when to question, agree, compromise, and stretch.

2. Becoming Digitally Mindful Because digital technologies enable remote work, the nine-to-five workday is becoming less and less meaningful in many settings. Ironically, current management mindsets still focus on the separation of work and nonwork time. Consequently, because managers find it difficult to establish boundaries between work and nonwork, organizations face the fallouts of “techno-stress,” technology addiction, and information overload. However, technologies will only increase in flexibility, richness, and seamlessness, and that will lead to their greater use at home for work and vice versa.

The emphasis on work-home conflict ignores the possibilities of such flexibility. It points employees toward managing a conflict rather than leveraging work-home seamlessness. Technology use that enables a continuous flow of meaningful tasks — irrespective of whether they are work-related or not — may be more beneficial for managers’ well-being and productivity. Managers should start thinking about cultivating a mindful relationship with the technology — one that embodies their individual preferences about what constitutes such flow. Rather than being troubled about work-home boundaries, which perhaps cannot be maintained in the future, organizations will need to support employees in managing the possibilities of flexibility. The paradigm should shift from conflict to flexibility, from technology detox to flow-driven use, and from the digital dark side to digital mindfulness.

3. Developing Empathy for Others’ Technology Preferences Even as leaders and managers learn how to work with digital colleagues, they will need to understand and develop empathy for the technology choices and preferences of their human coworkers. A colleague recently objected to me writing work emails to her late at night. On seeing the time stamp the next morning, she felt pressured to answer my messages immediately, to the exclusion of other, more important emails. My first reaction — that she was supposed to prioritize her own email and not be perturbed by what I did with mine — is typical of current organizational mindsets about technology use. Individual managers are so busy managing their own use of technology that they have given little, if any, thought to the preferences and habits of coworkers. However, this goes against an important tenet of management, which is that individuals work best together in teams and departments when there is some level of fit along important aspects.

Everyone has different preferences and habits for using technology. Some may prefer to be contacted by text, others by email, still others by phone or face-to-face. Some may prefer the flexibility afforded by constant email connectivity, while others may favor allotted email time. A clash between preferences can break down communication between teammates and increase misunderstanding, conflict, and stress. Going forward, managers need to not only be proactive about communicating their own technology preferences but also empathetic about their coworkers’ choices, particularly when they are working on the same teams and projects.

In terms of future work design, employees with similar preferences should ideally be put on the same projects and teams. For instance, individuals who like multitasking might appreciate frequent synchronous interactions on instant messaging systems when working on a team together. Those who enjoy constant connectivity might work well with supervisors who share such preferences. More generally, the key to handling this and other similar workplace challenges brought about by digital technologies is for managers to be both flexible and thoughtful in the way they respond.

The Three New Skills Managers Need