Young managers are over-relying on AI

As the management demographic across Australia continues to diversify, the experience a manager holds can vary – with a cohort of young managers struggling to balance the needed skills.

HR Leader recently spoke to Karlie Cremin, co-founder and managing director of DLPA, about the differences in management styles across the Australian workplace.

In a previous conversation with HR Leader, Cremin coined the current demographic of leaders and managers as a “mixed bag”.

“What we’ve seen is managers becoming much more task-focused rather than people-focused. That makes it a little bit harder to build the trust and rapport, particularly when new people are coming into the work environment,” Cremin said.

“The other area is that there’s inconsistent capability or competency amongst managers in the workforce generally. With the challenges that we’ve had over the talent landscape over the last few years, we have quite a mixed bag of managerial skill.”

According to Cremin, new managers especially have shown an over-reliance on new technology, much to the detriment of their teams. This reliance on tools such as ChatGPT and other new technologies has dissuaded the use of skills such as critical thinking – which has historically been an imperative method for a manager to use.

“New managers have an over-reliance on technology, specifically ChatGPT and others. One of the key elements that we’re doing a lot of development with organisations on is around critical thought; that as a skill seems to be really missing,” Cremin said.

“It’s a really important one for managers in the context of trust as well, of guiding your team through critically appraising change and coming up with collaborative responses and things. I think that that deferment to AI and other tools is really changing the landscape and is something that we’re all going to need to respond to.”

The current landscape when it pertains to leaders and managers derives from what Cremin previously touched on as some of the “challenges” in the talent market. These challenges have thrust “accidental managers” in a spot that they may not be ready for – and it’s influencing the output and cohesion of organisational teams.

“It’s become more prevalent and compressed in recent times around these kinds of accidental managers. People who are technically strong in what they do and may come up into these managerial roles without actually having the managerial skill set, which is quite different to a lot of the technical skill sets,” Cremin said.

“So, having that, not just as an onboarding into a managerial role, but then that ongoing support is so important. Because with managerial skill, you can have the frameworks and the tools, but the real world doesn’t behave like the textbook.”

“Having that ongoing development and support as well as saying, what do you do when it doesn’t do what it says on the box? What do you do when people don’t follow the script and say what you expect? And how you roll with that change that is ever present is really important.”

“When we’re seeing organisations not do that, that’s when we’re seeing the major fallout in terms of increased problems, increased complaints, increased errors and need for rework and so forth.”

Kace O'Neill

Kace O'Neill is a Graduate Journalist for HR Leader. Kace studied Media Communications and Maori studies at the University of Otago, he has a passion for sports and storytelling.