Agile, situational leadership: How leaders make people decisions during crises | Part II

As businesses navigate changing growth priorities, cost pressures and AI-led transformation, Anshuman Das, CEO and Co-founder, Careernet Group, highlighted how workforce agility increasingly requires leaders to revisit people decisions when the assumptions behind them change. “Agility sometimes means accepting that a people decision made six or twelve months ago was correct for the assumptions at that time, but those assumptions no longer hold,” Das said.

Das also pointed to how AI can simultaneously create excess capacity in some areas and shortages in others. In one large technology organisation, AI-led productivity had freed capacity equivalent to around 20,000 employees, while more than 100,000 employees had been trained in advanced AI capabilities. “Instead of asking, ‘Does this person’s current job continue to exist?’, the better question is– ‘What capability does this individual have, and where will that capability create the greatest value now?’”

For Das, this requires leaders to distinguish between capacity and capability. While automation can reduce the capacity required for certain work, deep domain expertise, AI architecture, cybersecurity, product knowledge and institutional knowledge can take years to rebuild. “The people who need to be protected are not necessarily the most senior or expensive. They are often the people whose capabilities would be hardest to recreate,” Das said.

Das sees this as a broader shift, with workforce agility moving from an HR process to a leadership and capital-allocation capability, requiring leaders to balance immediate business viability with the capabilities organisations will need beyond the current uncertainty.