How Management Has Changed in the AI Era, with Mads Singers

James Dooley: How has management changed in the AI era? Today I'm joined with Mads Singers. So, let's jump straight into it. How has management changed with artificial intelligence?

Mads Singers: Oh, that's a big interesting question, James. So, a lot of people now own robotic farms full of AI agents. Um, in the online space we are in, at least that's the case. However, in most businesses, that ain't reality, right? In most businesses, there's still lots of people around. And the key secret with management is very little has changed. Now, what has changed for many business owners is attention has gone away from their staff and to AI. So, a lot of the technical people we both know and both work with have been so obsessed and focused on AI, they've forgot about their staff. And that's a shame because when you don't manage staff, you don't get a great output from them. Right? So the biggest change that I've seen over the last, I would say, 6 to 12 months is definitely business owners getting so lost in AI and so FOMO about, "Oh man, we need to do all these things," that they really stop communicating to their teams. And I've seen multiple companies almost collapse from it because they're trying to do all this automation. They're trying to do all these things. They're not necessarily doing the right things and the staff get left behind.

James Dooley: With regards to that, I've seen it as well, um, quite a lot with regards to culture. Just like they've literally bypassed culture and they've gone, everything's behind humanoids and they're all robots now and stuff like that. And what's... What is... What would you recommend for the management team to make certain that they don't oversee that?

Mads Singers: Keeping that culture is key. Yeah. So the key thing, and again, the management training I've been doing the last 15, 20 years, still the same, right? It's still have good one-on-one conversations with your team members. Build great relationships. Make sure your team is bought in. Make sure they're clear on your vision. Make sure they're clear on where the company's going, right? Um, make sure they're being given ownership and responsibility, right? That's one of the things that I've dropped off a lot with lack of communication, is business owners are so busy, they're so focused on the AI stuff that they, they forget about growing their team. They forget about getting the team into AI, which is an absolute huge mistake, right? Because if your team doesn't get comfortable with AI, you're, you're going to struggle, right?

James Dooley: Do you know, I'm not saying this because you're here to big you up, but something I've seen a massive divide on. There's so many businesses that you've mentored and coached that are absolutely flying, and there's so many that you've not in the community and they're really struggling. And you know what I've put it to, right? One of the biggest things in the coaching programme of what you do is where you give staff responsibility. You don't give them a task, you give them the responsibility. So they own the SOP. You don't give them an SOP and go, "Follow these instructions." You give them the what, the how and the why. And on the why part, if they can improve upon the SOP, because they're doing it day in, day out, they will improve upon it. And that builds a mindset into them that they're needing to be improving and setting the systems up and the processes up. Where some of us have got very efficient, or had very efficient businesses, that now are really struggling.

Mads Singers: Yeah. And it's because half the staff don't think. They just follow instructions.

James Dooley: Yeah. And when you're not thinking and understanding what can and can't be done, how are these people going to manage to... Apart from just saying, "Come and get my mentorship and come and get my coaching," what are they going to need to do with regards to their management to make certain that employees now are going to have to level up and understand, knowing that prompting AI and not just coming with problems, but actually coming with the solutions to the problems? Like, what, what would you say to those people? What are they needing to be doing?

Mads Singers: The solution is actually very simple. Come get my coaching. [Laughter] No. Um, fundamental responsibility, right? So you, you described it perfectly, exactly as I do. Like, every single one of the people listening here have all been in a situation where they have grown. They've all had someone who gave them some ownership, gave them some responsibility, and that has got them to where they are today. No one would ever be a business owner if no one... If a customer or something didn't give them ownership and responsibility. They would... All humans grow through ownership and responsibility. So the way to go about it is very simple. It's sit down with your staff and instead of saying, "Hey, here's a process. Here's a task," figure out for each of my staff members, what are they going to be responsible for? What is the thing James owns? What is the thing Bob owns? And give them a clear expected outcome of what they need to deliver. That is the single most powerful way to get the most out of your team. Now, I mentioned one-on-ones, and for me the, the key aspect where when you have good ownership and responsibility, that your team know what they're doing, you still need to make sure you communicate with them, right? Like, you still need to build good relationships. And good relationship doesn't mean you have to be best friends, but it means they need to feel they matter. All humans are very similar. Simple. If we don't feel important, if we don't feel we matter, we're not going to do the best work, right? If you feel that no matter how crap a job you do, your boss doesn't care, that's not how you get the best work out of people, right? So, so, so having those check-ins, spending that time as a, as a boss with the people who report directly to you, but also make sure that the managers you have or, or the other team leads you have in your business, that they're doing the same, right? Because you need to make sure that your team is bought in and that people feel valued and respected within the business.

James Dooley: So, I've got a different kind of question now. It falls in line with management in the AI era and we've spoke about the culture and building the culture with the team and stuff like that. But what about managers? Because I've seen this as well, right, in certain businesses. What about managers that aren't willing to embrace AI? And I think they're not willing to embrace AI because they feel the security of their job might be at risk. What are you doing if you're going into a business owner and the middle management, you're finding out of the eight middle managers there's two or three there that are like... These are not embracing AI. What, what are you doing there from a management setup in the AI era?

Mads Singers: Simple. It's having the right conversations. And the conversations I have with my team are very simple. If we don't get on this, we'll need to find someone, right? Like, reality is that AI is such a huge opportunity for the businesses. And reality is, if I have managers in my company who are not learning, who are not growing with AI, then it will hold back the company and eventually they will need to be replaced.

James Dooley: Yeah. Right. So it's, it's, it's a funny situation because, as you say, a lot of them are afraid, but AI in principle doesn't necessarily remove jobs. AI makes everything way more efficient, way more powerful, way more scalable, and you still need humans running the machine, right?

Mads Singers: So, so the way we look at it, um, majority of the people we work with are still in our business, right? Like, we haven't let go of people because of AI. But what we're doing is we're delivering significantly more. So it enabled us to grow and deliver way more for our customers at the same cost, right? So our company is able to, to grow and develop significantly more, and that is, for business, that is just opportunity, right?

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I'll give you an example. In one of the businesses that I have, um, we had to get rid of the CFO and he'd been around for a long time. Um, underneath him, he had several bookkeepers and a couple of accountants, and no one in the finance sector in this business and the others had, had implemented and scaled massively with regards to what can be being done. Like, what reports we can get. Because, like, we wanted certain reports. Like, we wanted faster monthly reports. We wanted to know all of our KPIs. We want to know our lifetime value, our average order value. And this time, some of that in this business, it was three, four months before we're getting the numbers. You can't do that with ads. It's way too slow. And there were certain systems and processes that could have been put in place with different LLM models, and they wasn't willing to do it. So the minute we got rid of the CFO, I think one or two of the other members of staff was like, "Oh." And we ended up... One of the accountants got promoted internally who had embraced AI. And it was funny because the way he was explaining it to the other team members, I was sat in the meeting with him, was like, "Listen, we can all be old school and work out long form how to work out a sum, or we can use a calculator. Like, what's easier?" And they go, "Using the calculator." Well, this is what AI is like now. AI is like the calculator of the old, and it's here to make our life a lot easier. And then we can do things faster. We can be better, cheaper and faster. And you're like, it's like brilliant. This is our... What we need to do. So for us, the management need to be on board of it even more than the employees initially because they're the ones that are going to be pushing it forward and building the culture around, you embrace this and you can... I think in one of the other episodes, like you said, if you embrace AI fully and become an expert within AI and knowing how to prompt it and knowing how to supercharge you, you could 10x your salary because you're going to 20, 30x the business.

Mads Singers: Yeah. Like, you're going to be rewarded heavily for doing it. You want to be part of the journey. Why would you not want to be embracing AI?

James Dooley: Is there anything with management that you're seeing that they are doing wrong at present that you've come across or a business owner's come to you and said, "We've got this issue"?

Mads Singers: Yeah. I, I honestly, I don't think it has changed much, but I still see the biggest challenge in most businesses is they'll invest in training for the developers. They will invest in training for the salespeople. They'll invest in training for the customer service people. But they don't invest in training for the leaders. And, and here's the thing. The most valuable people in your business is the people who have been there for a long time. It's the people who know stuff. It's your managers. And if you don't invest in getting them training and how to manage, if you expect, "Oh James, I'll promote you tomorrow, so from Monday you'll, you'll be the boss," if you get no training, you're not going to deliver the best possible results.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. So that's still, for me, that's still the number one bottleneck in most companies. And, and by the way, this is not just small business. I'm talking big multinational companies that have the same challenges.

Mads Singers: Yeah. Anyone who's watching this episode on the management of the team within AI, then I strongly recommend checking out a few of the links in the description about how to level up existing staff to be able to use all the different LLM models, but also how to build a team that's successful in the AI era. Things are moving fast. Mads is an absolute legend when it comes down to business consultancy and doing a lot with different AI agents. So yeah, strongly recommend check out the links in the description. And Mads, thank you very much as always.

James Dooley: Thank you.