Verne Harnish: AI + A Players = The Future

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Companies with A-Player employees who know how to partner with AI in their roles will dominate their industries. As a recent 2024 Work Trend Index annual report from Microsoft and LinkedIn notes, “The data is in: 2024 is the year AI at work gets real. Use of generative AI at work has nearly doubled in the past six months. LinkedIn is already seeing a significant increase in professionals adding AI skills to their profiles, and most leaders say they won’t hire someone without AI skills.” 

Employ Only A-Players

CEOs will need to employ more A-players able to use AI to help them accomplish key business goals and do so more efficiently. For B-players, AI can help raise their game. And the people whose jobs are in jeopardy will be the C-players already creating messes who end up using AI to make those messes even faster.

The key is a robust recruiting process that attracts A-players and an interviewing process that guarantees you choose the best of the final three candidates. It’s not that you’ll hire bad people without a proper process, it’s that you’ll leave the opportunity to hire a much better person on the table.  

We have a client in the design and construction of concrete Tilt-Up buildings, a method in which walls are cast on-site and placed with a crane. They hired one of three candidates as a project lead but soon needed an additional project lead. They went back to the other two candidates, and the second hire ended up running circles around the first. This confirmed the need to upgrade their interview process. We recommended they read Foolproof Hiring, coauthored by Brad Smart, and adopt his topgrading methodology for attracting, interviewing and hiring A-players.

Articulate the Role of Each Employee 

Next, CEOs need to communicate the need for all team members to bring their A game to work and be clear about what they bring to the table that AI can’t do. As Jim VandeHei, cofounder of Politico and Axios and author of Just the Good Stuff: No-BS Secrets to Success (No Matter What Life Throws at You), told reporters on the topic, “AI is never going to be a subject matter expert that has human sources that can capture the nuance of human conversation and break news and tell people things that they did not know.”  

Will, Values, Results, Skills

My new book, 12 Habits of Valuable Employees: Your Roadmap to an Amazing Career, provides a framework that can help your employees understand how they can up their value to your firm. It details the four attributes of valuable employees: Will, Values, Results and Skills and provides resources, including specific TED talks, books and short training programs, to improve in these four areas. Each attribute is outside the capabilities of AI (at this time): 

1. Will. When the going gets tough, who will rally teammates and themselves to push through the pain and complete a particular project? Tier 1 team captains, as detailed in Sam Walker’s breakthrough book The Captain Class, will be some of your most valuable team members.

2. Values. Serving as the rules for how you operate, values require teammates and team leads to hold one another accountable and model how to live these values each day. Values are the sum total of the behaviors that support a culture able to execute your strategy flawlessly.

3. Results. Rather than just talk a good game, A-players can deliver on the nuanced value proposition that only people can provide, as VandeHei articulated.  

4. Skills. This comes back to having the will to learn, adapt to new technologies like AI and improve one’s people skills as AI replaces the more technical aspects of many jobs.

A-players+AI is the winning formula in 2024 and beyond. Now is the time to prepare yourself and your team to bring increased value to each and every job in your firm.