Good morning,

This week in The Insightful Leader newsletter, we hold a mirror up to our readers and ask: Which of these traits of extraordinary leaders, as Kellogg professor Sanjay Khosla defines them, do you consider your strongest?

We also look at new research by Kellogg’s Artem Timoshenko and colleagues about how leaders can be more deliberate about using AI for innovation. 

Wired for leadership

The question of what makes some leaders more effective than others has long intrigued Khosla, a former CEO and current senior fellow and professor of marketing at Kellogg. Across organizations he visited as a consultant, he observed that some leaders had a greater capability to inspire teams and bring the company to the next level.

“These are people at all different levels who share the same leadership tendencies,” he says.  

Effective leaders lead with questions—and get comfortable with potentially awkward silences before sharing their own opinions. This empowers employees across the organization to weigh in on matters and feel that they are being taken seriously.

“Leaders need to create space for answers to emerge,” Khosla says. “I’ve found that great leadership is defined by curiosity and humility, not certainty.” 

Leaders build more-motivated and engaged teams when they emphasize trust and emotional connection over having a transactional mindset. 

“You don’t want to get too personal, but you want to understand where individuals are coming from,” Khosla says. “You need to show you actually care.” 

Great leaders also know the importance of sharing the spotlight and giving credit to their teams when it’s due. 

If one of your employees develops a report, make sure you acknowledge their contribution so they don’t feel marginalized. And if they are presenting, make sure you leave room for them to shine in the Q&A. This offers the opportunity to develop new leaders.  

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Innovation with AI

By now, most of us have read hundreds of articles about how AI can help us and our teams innovate. But the advantages of AI are more complicated than simply turning to it for new ideas. At every step of the innovation process, AI can act as more of a bottleneck than a catalyst. 

Writing about a new working paper in Harvard Business Review, Timoshenko and colleagues examine four stages of the innovation process and find that uncritically relying on AI to resolve these bottlenecks can make things worse in some cases. 

For example, when people or teams are ideating, AI models tend to steer teams toward familiar ideas, which can herd people to fixate on them. AI-generated pitches can be slick enough that their often-flawed first stabs can be mistaken for better, more-polished ideas—while encoding existing biases in their recommendations. 

When conducting consumer research, AI can efficiently simulate customer groups, but it struggles to replicate the idiosyncrasies of real customers. When gathering market information after launch, AI may have a hard time detecting some of the most important signals, such as why customers are not adopting a new product. 

Timoshenko and his colleagues offer some diagnostic advice for leaders when innovating: interrogate the types of bottlenecks that may be exacerbated by applying AI, develop employees who know how to read the data independently of AI, and keep direct contact with customers when possible. 

“As AI absorbs more of ideation, screening, and consumer simulation, the junior employees who used to build judgment by doing that work firsthand no longer get the reps,” they write. “You end up with sophisticated users of AI output who never developed the instinct to know when that output is wrong.”

“Leadership is not telling people what to do; it is influencing them positively. And the best way to influence others is to relate to them.”

See you next week,

Fred Schmalz, Business and Art Editor
Kellogg Insight