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The Future of Leadership Development: AI-Driven Manager Enablement
London — The operating system of work isn’t AI or Slack or ServiceNow or whatever else is trying to lay claim to the title. It’s trust, said Edelman’s Francesca Woodhouse.
Woodhouse set the tone for the two-day Engage Employee Summit in Battersea, London. She urged leaders to build trust with their employees at a time of increasing anxiety around job loss, trade and tariff conflicts and polarization.
But this call to action isn’t merely to provide employees with a cushion from the outside world. It’s a business imperative. High-trust teams outperform low-trust teams, said Woodhouse. Employees who trust their employer are more open to AI adoption, even when they believe it can do their job, she continued.
At a time when it feels as if AI is the start, middle and finish of strategy, spending two days hearing about the business benefits of running a human-centered organization was a welcome respite.
Table of Contents
- Trust Is Built Through Actions, Not Words Alone
- Most Communications Fail the Relevance Test
- Managers Are Still the Strongest Communications Channel
- The AI Stress Test
Trust Is Built Through Actions, Not Words Alone
Work is one of the only places where trust can be built deliberately, said Woodhouse. One of the most striking examples of this came from Kevin Green, Chief People Officer of First Bus.
First Bus is one of the UK’s largest bus operators, with over 18,000 employees and over 65 hubs across UK sites and Ireland, each with its own mini-culture. When Green entered the organization in September 2021, he received a brief. Page one mentioned bullying and nastiness were rife and by page four, the phrase “toxic culture” appeared. Forty-two percent of the bus drivers left during the Great Resignation for other opportunities.
Green started by making a business case for why the company needed to turn engagement around, because, “it’s not just about doing nice things for people, it’s about transforming the business.” Part of this was changing the mindset of the business from an asset organization (the buses) to a service organization (the people driving the buses and the people they are transporting).
Green urged people leaders to lead with a narrative to make their initial case. For First Bus, he used “moments of truth,” those points when bus drivers face a choice that can improve or ruin a customer’s experience. Think person running for the bus: does the driver pause and let them on or do they drive off?
Employee engagement gets you in the heads of your employees so that when that moment of truth happens, they know they matter and they’ll do the right thing, Green said.
Following an extensive listening campaign, Green started with the basics: 25 toilets fixed in the first year. Free tea and coffee for everyone at every depot, not just for back-office workers. They cut the time managers spent reporting and replaced it with 20 minute conversations with employees. The program took off, with over 80% of employees requesting calls.
Within two years, employee engagement went from 41% to 66%. Attrition more than halved. Absentee rates dropped from 7% to below 4%. They added emotional temperature questions to their surveys and saw a 28% increase in positive emotions.
At this point, Green said he easily gets funding and support for employee initiatives. He told anyone wanting to take on a similar transformation to “be brave, be courageous and get a hypothesis.”
Most Communications Fail the Relevance Test
Internal communications is the medium through which so much of change is relayed. Yet internal comms teams are optimizing for efficiency over effectiveness.
“When people don’t read, we look for a new platform or a new channel to communicate — but that’s not the problem,” said Joel Turner, head of internal communication at gaming company Betfred. If the message doesn’t matter, the channel won’t save it, he continued.
He offered a three question stress test to put any messaging through before hitting send:
- Who is the message actually for?
- What do they need to do differently?
- Why should they care and care enough to take action?
Turner’s final words of advice: “Say less, make it matter.”
One of the dangers of optimizing for efficiency is it leads to more time spent on content creation and less time recognizing how employees are taking in that content.
Construction and infrastructure firm BAM UK and Ireland was drowning in content. Director of Communications, Ken Leitch was tasked with connecting the primarily frontline workforce with the company’s vision and purpose. But the company had fragmented internal channels, zero mobile reach and a frontline workforce who were impossible to reach.
His mantra was to make comms less sophisticated and to make it work.
Leitch’s first move was dramatic: he shut off the news that was buried in SharePoint and switched to mobile-first access to a single source of truth. The result was an 80% adoption rate in the first year, with 81% of deskless workers active on the site.
He also recognized that people trusted the people they worked next to day to day, so he added knowledge hubs as a core part of the solution as well as spaces for colleagues to interact. At this point, almost half of the content on the site (48%) is created by employees.
The solution in both cases wasn’t more sophisticated communications technology. It was reducing friction and making information feel relevant again.
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Managers Are Still the Strongest Communications Channel
A common thread carried across multiple sessions: the most powerful communications channel available isn’t email or a newsletter or a digital platform, it’s people managers.
Turner said as much during his session, but noted companies aren’t equipping managers to explain, they’re treating them as a forward button — an intermediary between a set message and the recipients.
It’s a point Deniz Aydin Wober echoed. As strategic HR Business Partner Europe at SONY Electronics, she said HR is being asked to use AI and to be more analytical, and strengthen human connections at the same time. Switching your brain back and forth between these two priorities is a challenge.
She shared the example of an HR lead who used AI to write an email response to an employee’s emotional message. The email was professional, correct — and had no connection whatsoever to the employee, their emotions or their problem.
Aydin Wober urged HR leads to make sure managers speak to their people to maintain the human connection, so it isn’t just the message, it’s the connection that helps deliver a message. Part of this involves alerting business leads before important communications go out so they are aware and prepared to speak individually with their direct reports after the digital comms lands.
Similarly, when Clarity Environmental went through a big change — regulatory, technologically and restructuring — CEO Natalie Rea made sure managers were aligned with the language they were using so employees could understand why things were changing and where the opportunities lie.
The company increased communications frequency throughout the transition, even if the message at times was “We don’t know.” She credited the messaging as helping people relax into the unknown.
The AI Stress Test
The summit’s most consistent message was that organizations are misdiagnosing many workplace problems as technological ones. Whether the issue is AI adoption, employee engagement or internal communications, the underlying variable is often trust. And trust is built through managerial behavior, clarity and visible responsiveness rather than platforms alone.
AI is a stress test of how strong trust is in your organization, said Edelman’s Woodhouse. How companies introduce AI — through adoption mandates and poor communications or through upskilling and transparency — will shape their long-term culture.