How mentoring is changing in an AI world - and real ways it’s shaped top leaders

Lara Abrash, Deloitte: Lara Abrash, Deloitte: As a leader in business, you're not necessarily there because you're the best person at whatever your company does. You're the person who can tap into what every person can bring, the best version of themselves. And that's what a team is.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they’re tackling the word’s biggest challenges. In today’s episode we talk about mentorship - how AI is changing it and it’s shaped the best minds of our time.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And don’t forget to rate and review us. I’m Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum - and this is Meet the Leader.

Samantha Cristoforetti, Astronaut, European Space Agency: To me, there's a difference between being a manager and being a leader. A manager can focus on the metrics and the outcome and the results and that might even work out well for him or her, at least for the short term. A leader, however, thinks first and foremost of the people.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Mentorship is in crisis. A Harris Poll found that young workers, those facing the brunt of our disruptive technologies and shaky economic climate, understandably feel the most unsure about the future. As a result 74% of those surveyed say they lack access to the mentorship and advice that could give them the confidence they need to move forward.

Of course, I bet if you think about your own work journey, I’ll bet that formal career development and mentorship was pretty rare. I bet it was even a little ad hoc. We had the advantage of many things not changing that often. Today’s episode is a recognition that as skills change our approach to mentorship will need to change, too. As we all navigate more unexpected change we’ll need find unexpected champions.

This episode is also a tribute to the quiet impact we have on one another. Some of the cleverest people I know have built their own informal boards of advisors, people they talk to with different skillsets and backgrounds in different moments of their lives, people who might never know that they’re seen as someone’s guiding light. Those boards of directors will increasingly include AI tools going forward, but our very human ability to bring out the best in one another is gonna be the skill to hone.

I’m going to structure this episode in two parts – first setting up how mentoring is changing and what it needs to be really effective. But also I’ll share the actions and behaviors that taught key lessons to some of the greatest minds of our day right when they needed them most -- lessons that have stayed with them.

We’ll start with with Kian Katanforoosh. He’s the CEO Workera, that’s a skills intelligence platform. And he’s thought a lot about mentorship since his company has developed an AI mentor that can help companies and workers develop key skills. You can listen to our longer conversation on why skills are so difficult for leaders to objectively assess - I’ll put a link in the show notes – But he’ll kick us off with telling us more about how human mentoring will change in an AI era – especially as more and more of us are going to AI for advice.

Kian Katanforoosh, Workera: Human mentors will need to work on their emotional intelligence. And I've seen it in different ways. The first example is teachers. To date, we've trained so many teachers around the world. Even as we speak, there is teachers being trained to be teachers.

The job of a teacher is extremely complicated. It requires to be a facilitator and motivator and mentor. It also requires you to have a subject matter area in math and physics and chemistry and so on. It's a lot to juggle. Not only you have to teach but you have to look at which student is disengaged or which student is ahead and adapt yourself to them.

I think that role will change. Subject matter expertise on a variety of topics can be delegated with AI. And the real role of a teacher or a mentor is to be the facilitator. To be the motivator, to be the person who's gonna cheer you up when you need it and hold the bar really high when you need it. And that's a very human skill and I think we need a lot more of that in society.

Less so of the person who just knows the curriculum by heart and is teaching on a whiteboard the curriculum. And I think for a mentor in the enterprise, managers, you can imagine that they're gonna be able to manage more people. Today, what's the ratio of a manager to employees: one to five, maybe one to seven and then it gets complicated.

I think in the future you might have a manager that relies on AI agents that are specialized for measuring people's skills, allocating the team to the right task in a good way, helping them with a variety of management tasks and as a consequence of that, one manager might be able to manage a hundred people, for example.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Workera’s new tool is an AI agent, one he told me in September that can show up in any enterprise workflow, helping with assess someone for their career development, or their eligibility for a project, or simply give them feedback. Here’s what’s important about this tool - and the gap it’s bridging that everyone should better understand.

Kian Katanforoosh, Workera: Immediately, it saves a lot of time and money for people in an organization...A lot of untapped potential within [the] organization. We hear every day from employees who are saying, I should have had that project. I just didn't know the VP personally and this person got that project. I have no way to show my skills and to raise my hand and say I want to take care of it and I'm gonna do it well.

That's significant untapped potential within organization. And then I talked already about the billions of hours of humans interviewing other humans or humans judging other human skills. Time wasted, unfair, biased, a lot of problems to solve there. And finally, retention and attrition.

Most people leave because of their manager. And oftentimes, you realize the manager has never been trained in evaluating people's skills. Very few managers actually know how to evaluate people's skills well.

And so, without understanding the skills of their people, managers are assigning the wrong tasks, they're coaching them the wrong way and then as a consequence, a portion of the population that you did not want to leave ends up leaving. And one of the problems we saw in the longer term is a more meritocratic society.

I truly believe in a skills based society where work and rewards are based on who deserves it and who's capable of it and we're able to support people to get access to those opportunities. That future of a more meritocratic society is only possible if we have a universal measurement engine that everybody trusts, that is scientific research-backed and we just know it's better than human judgment.

Once we have that system, I expect a lot of things are gonna change in the way we assess people, we evaluate them, we promote them, we reward them and it's gonna be for the better overall because people are gonna get placed in the right thing that they're good at or going to be coached to achieve the things that they're not able to do yet.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Human or non-human he also shared the traits all mentorship will need to have to be effective.

Kian Katanforoosh, Workera: Effective mentors are able to do three things really well. The first one is assessment.

If the mentor can't assess your skill, understand your skills in your psychological profile, they're not gonna be able to help you very well or customize their guidance.

The second thing is they understand what you're capable of, your potential and they're able to ask to help you dream bigger.

You might be dreaming of something and you could be dreaming of that thing times two. And a good mentor helps you identify that. And then once the mentor understands the starting point and the ambitious yet achievable goal, the mentor is able to close the gap.

And good mentors have a lot of experience, having mentored other people, on how to connect the dots between those two points.

Now, my point of view is that we're never gonna be able to scale human mentorship and that's why I think AI helps a ton.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Ebru Ozdemir is the chairperson of Limak Group, a public private partnership investor and one of the biggest construction groups in the world, a firm that has built airports in Kuwait and Senegal, one that’s constructed the world's largest span bridge and the fifth highest hydropower plant. Her firm has also developed a special initiative -- Global Engineer Girls -- to bridge gaps for female engineers. Now in its 11th year, here's Ebru on what the initiative has made possible so far.

Ebru Ozdemir, Limak Group: In order to increase the women workforce, what we have done is we started a global engineer girls program ten years ago and we are supporting women engineers not only in Turkey but also other countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, North Macedonia, Spain, Kosovo. And now we are starting in the UK. We also started the program in two African countries, which are Ivory Coast and Mozambique. So we are changing the perception.

Second, the graduates that we are choosing become one of our employees. So they started to work in our projects and when they prove themselves, actually, they are also influencing their other sisters from the project. I call this a sisterhod, and they also applied to these projects or to these companies as well. Currently, in very important defense companies in Turkey, we have 10 to 12 graduates working there. Because when one of them prove themselves and they gain the self-confidence, they also affect the others, and we suddenly see that the numbers in that company increases. We had one graduate started to work in our port project, and she was the first industrial engineer, woman engineer, in the port. She became so successful that the management started to hire other women engineers. So basically, we are just opening the way to the other girls that are coming from this pipeline.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Ebru had a special take on what great mentors and mentorship needs. Here's what she said:

Ebru Ozdemir, Limak Group: The mentors should be able to listen. Whenever I speak to the mentors they say this is a win-win relationship. I mean, no relationship continues if it's not a win-win. So they see, they tell me that they are also learning from the mentee. So learning [from] both sides is very important. So she'll be able listen well and she'll able to share her experience and her journey with the mentee in the most open or transparent way. And of course she has to be able to give her time because in our program they have to meet every month at least once. And she has to guide her during her worst times because when you're a student you're like a fish in a bowl. So she's already been to these days. And you know in the university you feel like even if your one exam is not good you feel like you're going to die. So she has carry her in the most difficult times. Shared her experience in the most transparent way, but also learn from her and listen to her.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: At Davos this year, Cellist Yo Yo Ma curated a really inspirational conversation on how leaders can live in balance with the planet. It’s a pretty incredible session and it's one that stopped me cold when it played in our staff office in January during the Annual Meeting. You should watch it on your own - I’ll have a link in the show notes.

But there was a moment in the session where Yo Yo Ma asked Aulani Wilhelm, the ceo of non-profit Nia Tero, that's an organization that supports Indigenous Peoples and their guardianship of lands and waters globally. He asked her about the idea of ancestors and being a steward of our environments and the impact we have on others. It’s an enlightening moment for our mentorship discussion especially as leaders are stewards for their organizations and the teams you develop can have impact in the long term.

Aulani Wilhelm, Nia Tero: We think in multi-generation. We might have to make decisions right now, but you have to think about them in generational time, which often comes in conflict with a quarterly revenue statement or what you need to put on your annual balance sheet or election cycle time. But it's that just really grounding yourself in the genealogy that you have, in the knowledge that you come from people and that who were long there before. And if we become good ancestors ourselves, then there's a fighting chance that there'll be people before. It also is humbling to realize you're in a long line.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Of course, so many leaders we spoke to shared fascinating lessons from mentors that shaped them. We’ll start with Adam Grant.

You might know Adam Grant as the best selling author and Wharton Organizational psychologist. You might not know that he was a competitive diver when in school. He spoke to my colleague Robin Pomeroy about taking chances. Here's what he learned.

Adam Grant: Well, I was really lucky to have an extraordinary coach, Eric Best, who changed the way that I thought about motivating myself and also other people.

I remember one practice where I was supposed to do probably the hardest dive I had ever done to date. It was a full twisting two and a half, so two flips, 360 turn, and then a dive.

And normally, as a diver who faced a lot of fear, I would stand at the end of the board shaking for a few minutes before I went, when it was time to try a new dive. This is a whole 'nother level of fear for me. I stood there shaking for 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes. Finally, at 45 minutes, I'm just frozen. Eric has run out of patience. And he says, Adam, are you going to do this dive? And I thought, yes, one day I would love to do this dive. And I told Eric that. He said, great. What are you waiting for?

And all of a sudden, Robin, I realized I had the relationship between confidence and action backward. I was waiting until I felt confident to take the leap. But I needed to take a leap in order to gain confidence. And that's literally true in diving. But I think it's a great metaphor for risk taking in life.

I remember when I got tenure at Wharton, I had a group of students tell me I should write a book. And I said, I'm not ready yet. And then I heard Eric's voice in my head. Would you like to write a books one day? Yes. Great. What are you waiting for?

When I got asked to give my first TED Talk, I thought there's no way I'm ready to get in that red circle. And I heard Eric's voice echoing. Would you like to do this one day? Yes. Why not today?

And it's a question I've found myself asking over and over of myself, but also with other people. I used it frequently as a diving coach. I would ask divers, just like Eric asked me, do you want to do this? What are you waiting for? But I've also found myself motivating friends, family, colleagues the same way, even my own kids sometimes.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We mentioned Kian Katanforoosh earlier. His mentor was an AI pioneer. Here’s how that man's example changed how he built Workera.

Kian Katanforoosh, Workera: Yeah, I was lucky in my life to have a few great mentors that shaped how I think and the things I aim to achieve. One of them was Andrew Ng, who's my advisor at Stanford University. Professor Eng is the founder of Coursera, as well as one of the leading founders of Google Brain. And there are a few things I learned from Andrew.

One of them is Andrew has a really high bar when it comes to content development. With him, I had the chance through lecturing at Stanford or teaching online to teach millions of people around the world AI skills. And the reason it resonated with the community is because the bar was so high.

In fact, we spent 80% of our time deciding what to teach and only 20% teaching it because we knew it was so important to not distract people with matters that they did not need but just focus on the essentials.

On top of that, I remember in the first article or paper that I wrote and gave Andrew, he just looked at the first 30 characters out of 17 pages and he gave it back to me and he said, you need to work again on it. And then every day I would come back and put that stack of paper in front of him and he might read a little more and you know, mark what he liked and what he didn't like until we got calibrated and I felt I had a better sense of what his bar is for content development.

And over time, it became also my bar to a certain extent, where I was able to understand what a high-quality article or research paper looked like. And I think that served me all my life. On top of that, like starting an AI company requires specific knowledge or specific skills in terms of how to structure your team, what you know is going to work and not going to work and I learned a lot of these skills with Andrew as well.

One of our values at Workera are learning, growth mindsets, lifelong learning. And that comes from Andrew's lifelong learning mindsets.

And I'm really glad we kept that as one of our values and that every time we interview someone, we truly look for: do they have this growth mindset or this insatiable curiosity that you want to have when you're starting a startup in an uncertain environment and are ready to pivot before you can find what your true purpose is and scale it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Lara Abrash is the US Chair at Deloitte. She's also a major advocate for women's sports and the role they can play not just in communities and economies but for individuals as they strengthen teamwork and leadership skills. Here's Lara talking about the lessons she learned from her high school softball coach, Frank Catalano.

Lara Abrash, Deloitte: Probably one of the lessons, best lessons I ever got from a coach was there's never enough practice. You cannot know what life is going to put in front of you. And so this idea of catching, I used to have a coach who would take me out, Coach Catalano, he would take my out after school and whenever all the girls left the field we would continue. I played center field at that time and we would just continue to flag fly balls. And then in a game, I found myself doing something that we had covered that we may not have gotten to. It was like this idea that practice does in fact make perfection. And so you are constantly pushing yourself and when you don't think you -- this coach told me -- when you actually get to a point that if you think you're trying to be perfect, you haven't actually pushed yourself enough. So this idea of practice does make perfection is something this coach taught me and he made me live it. And to this day, I try to practice things inside and outside of work just for that moment when it may come up.

Sports has been huge for me. I could talk all day about the things I learned. The knowledge that it's okay to not be the best person on the team. Ultimately it's about bringing the team together. As a leader in business, you're not necessarily there because you're the best person at whatever your company does. You're the person who can tap into what every person can bring, the best version of themselves. And that's what a team is. That's ultimately what leaders end up doing. They are not the best person in the organization. They're the person who can unlock everybody around them.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: European Space Agency Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti has spent more than a year in space across all her missions. Cooperation is a huge training priority for space crews and she shared with me the lessons one mentor drive home for her about the experience of the work day. As leaders model behaviors others follow, I think it’s a powerful lesson for any of us on how our actions can make a wider different.

Samantha Cristoforetti, Astronaut, European Space Agency: So, certainly one thing that was very important to me and I had actually learned that from ISS Commander, Butch Wilmore, that I served with on my first space flight, is to always remember that being in space is a special moment for every one of us. It's something that we have made sacrifices for, that our families have made sacrifices for, that we have looked forward to so much. And it might be our first and last flight, or our second-to-last flight, you might not come back to space again and this is on the mind of everyone. And so what Butch told us during the course of that first space flight I did and I really tried to keep that in mind in my second space flight, where I had a leadership role, is like, it's of utmost importance that each one of us has a good experience up here.

When you make that a priority and you communicate that clearly to your team, people feel empowered to share with you if they're not having a good experience, right? Maybe they're performing very well in all of their tasks, but maybe there is something about a dynamic onboard or something that is going on and it's just preventing them from having a good experience. And so it's very important to empower them to to come to you and share so that you can find a solution together.

I think sometimes in a normal company office setting, that element of how are you experiencing your daily life at work gets a little bit lost in the metrics of how are you performing your tasks. To me, there's a difference between being a manager and being a leader. A manager can focus on the metrics and the outcome and the results and that might even work out well for him or her, at least for the short term. A leader, however, thinks first and foremost of the people.

The approach that I have learned throughout my career, and I think I try to apply when I'm in a leadership position, is like, you take care of the people and the people take care of the work. And so that's really important, because you've got to make sure people are having a good experience, are happy coming to work, are enjoying it and you've got to check in with them. I mean, you know ask those open-ended questions, which are not you know, how is this report coming along, but: "hey what's on your mind? What's going on? How are you doing?"

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Jonathan Reckford is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity. Two women in his life set key standards for him for what he could contribute and how he can be present with people in the moment to listen and get real things done. Here’s what he said about his grandmother Millicent Fenwick and his godmother Jill Ker Conway.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: In your life I read that you took a lot of inspiration from your grandmother, Millicent Fenwick. Do you want to tell us a little bit about her?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International: You know, she was a bigger than life character for in my life, had in some ways a sad but remarkable life story. And I won't go through all of it. But her parents were on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by the Germans. She lost her mom when she was young, went through some very hard times and, you know, couldn't get a job because though very well-educated, she not finished high school because their family moved to Europe. And then she started copywriting with Conde Nast and becoming the war editor of Vogue magazine and wrote the Vogue Book of Etiquette, which sold a million copies in 1947.

So I found her fascinating and terrifying. If you went to her house, you had to be able to sit up straight and hold your fork properly and discuss food problems in sub-Saharan Africa. And so I think she didn't always really believe in children, just small grown ups. But I found her fascinating.

And whenever I was with her, she would almost always quote her favorite verse from the Bible, Micah 6:8: "He has showed you a man what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" And then she would ask me what we were going to do to be useful. And she co-chaired the Civil Rights campaign for the state of New Jersey for 14 years, and then at the age of 64, ran for Congress and was a ferocious fighter for civil and human rights. And I found her incredibly inspirational from a career perspective. And she was a big figure in my life.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You mentioned that she was an inspiration to you. How so? What was something that changed you that had you not have these experiences with her that you might have been different?

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International: You know, I think and not just her. I had an amazing mentor in my godmother who was another pioneering woman leader and the first woman president of Smith College and a corporate board titan over time. And I think for both of them in different ways, I learned some really important lessons. From my grandmother. I think it was that real deep passion for justice. And I remember I wrote in my book that my wife, one of the only debates I ever saw her, her lose was we were talking about is, is love more important or is justice more important? And my wife was arguing for love. And I think ultimately my grandmother said, yes, but we need justice because love isn't always sufficient. And there's a sadness to that, but of reality to that, too. So I think that deep passion for creating justice -- she fought for migrant farm workers. She fought for civil and human rights. And I think that was embedded in me.

And I think for my godmother, it was the sort of remarkable leadership level and wisdom around leadership combined with an extraordinary ability to be totally present. And I've always wanted to emulate that while fighting hard living in the present and deeply engaging with the people in front of you as you're trying to to get bigger things done.

And one thing she told me that was very meaningful, though it took a while to really understand. When I was in college, I ran for student body president and I lost and probably should have lost. And it was only way later that I look back and realize I was really probably I would have tried to do good things, but I was running because it was something to achieve rather than because I had some mission I was really committed to. And one of her lessons to me was, you know, if you seek power for its own sake, it's inherently corrupting. But if you have a mission that's worth pursuing, you'll accrue the power you need to achieve your mission. And that has stuck with me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Thanks so much to all the leaders who spoke to me for this episode. And thanks so much to you, for listening.

For more great advice, check our our recent 200th episode. It's a whopper of an episode with aha moments from the late Jane Goodall, Al Gore and more. I'll make sure to have a link in the show notes.

For a transcript of this episode or my colleague’s podcast Radio Davos, check out wef.ch/podcasts

This episode was produced and prsented by me with Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's all for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum - have a great day.