Steering Success in the AI Era: Gen Z Thought Leadership and the Evolution of Work Culture with Professor Dr. Karina Oches

Embark on a voyage of discovery with Professor Dr. Karina Oches, a vanguard of Gen Z thought leadership and the mastermind behind KO SciFi Branding, as she joins us to unravel the enigma of managing in an AI-driven world. Get ready to be captivated by her exceptional journey from academia to creating a branding juggernaut, and learn how her decade of global expertise is reshaping the very fabric of leadership and decision-making. Through her lens, we'll navigate the cultural intricacies and strategies that are paramount in steering businesses to success amidst the AI revolution, providing a treasure trove of wisdom for leaders and entrepreneurs who seek to excel in these transformative times.

Prepare to be enlightened as we dissect the metamorphosis of workplace culture and the diverse expectations of a multi-generational workforce. I'll share the evolution of my grit and adaptability shaped by my own cultural leap from South Africa to the US, spotlighting the agility that is critical in today's dynamic business environment. Together with Karina, we explore how Gen Z's penchant for structure is revolutionizing onboarding processes, the significance of personal time for the younger workforce, and how innovative strategies like intergenerational mentorship and gamification are bridging the gap between age groups. This episode offers a fresh perspective on fostering a resilient work culture that harmonizes innovation with cultural adeptness, a must-hear for anyone poised to lead through the challenges of a multi-crisis era.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning software development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Dege, and I'm happy to be here today with Professor Dr Karina Oches, gen Z, expert, professor of Leadership and Management and CEO at KO SciFi Branding. Welcome.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Hello Dege, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:29

Yes, it's my pleasure. So, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your background and history and how you ended up doing what you do today?

Speaker 2: 0:40

So, as you said and thank you for that lovely introduction I'm a Gen Z expert and I'm also a professor of leadership and management. I offer consultancy programs, speaking services and educational programs for companies, institutional bodies as well as international organizations. I have clients from all over the four continents and I've started doing public speaking and consultancy roughly a decade ago in the United States. Right now, I'm really focusing on next generation leadership and Gen Z in the form of, as I've said, consultancy and speaking services.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Okay, that's amazing, and can you tell me a little bit more about the business? What's your overall strategy?

Speaker 2: 1:28

I guess when you do business, especially in educational programs and in consultancy leadership consultancy you always want to look at what's ahead. So I try to do research and be years ahead to see what's coming. But then again you also need to be ready to implement what's coming, not too early, even though you want to be an early adopter. And then the third thing is, since I work with clients from all over the world, so over the four continents, I need to have cultural awareness of their milieu, because sometimes the leadership strategies that might work in the US or in Europe might not work in Africa, for instance.

Speaker 1: 2:08

Yeah, 100%, 100%. And when did you start the business? When did you make this your baby?

Speaker 2: 2:19

As I said, I started roughly a decade ago and I've started with personal branding. This was before branding was a thing, so I wrote a book on personal branding. It became a best seller. This was written together with Brian Tracy. Then I started speaking all over the world, including TEDx, about this. But right now, the branding landscape, for instance, is really changing with the implementation of AI. So is leadership. So, as I said, I'm always trying to be ahead of the curve.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Okay, amazing. And, as you mentioned, it's changing with AI. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? How has that impacted you and your business?

Speaker 2: 3:00

The AI revolution is really transforming industries and it's reshaping the way we work, and I've been getting more and more clients that are worried about how AI will change their businesses, the way they work, the way they interact with their employees. So really, now we're looking at the ways in which leadership can help, in which AI can work together with leaders, and we're looking at the giants in this sense. We've seen IBM do this, we've seen Salesforce do this, amazon they all started using AI to help the leaders either make better decisions or even create new leaders, so they use it to create funnels in their businesses. It's an interesting time we're living in.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Yeah, it's super interesting and I think the next five to 10 years are going to be somewhat crazy, but I'm excited about it.

Speaker 2: 3:57

Definitely. We're definitely living in what the World Economic Forum would call a polar crisis. So we have several crises that are happening all over the world and they could always augment and become one big crisis. But for us, for entrepreneurs, for people who are A players and trying to be ahead of the game, it's a good moment to challenge ourselves and adapt ourselves to what is new and what is coming 100%, and how are you making use of AI within your business and its operations?

Speaker 2: 4:33

It's very interesting because right now we're testing everything. So, as I've said, we're trying to see how these funnels would go. How could we use AI to be the mentor in the machine, if you will? So how could AI mentor a leader, for instance, at the beginning of their journey, to become better at what they do? How would AI help leaders make decisions based on data pertaining to their HR resources? And we're testing all of these things to see what works and what doesn't work. Of course, as you know, ai has hallucinations, so we have to ensure there's always a person to see corrections and so on. So I'm implementing this in my business, but I'm also working to see how this would go to advise other businesses that I'm working with.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Okay, 100%. And over the last 10 years since you started, what have been the biggest challenges or obstacles that you faced and how did you overcome them?

Speaker 2: 5:37

I would say one interesting challenge was the pandemic, as it was with all of us. First of all, as a speaker, everyone moved in the online sphere, so of course, there's always the question of how do you convey the message to the audience when you can't really interact with the audience, especially since I was trained in the way of speaking face to face with people. That is one thing. Then, pertaining to branding, for instance, if in the beginning, we would have an array of people, you would have designers, you would have all these programmers.

Speaker 2: 6:15

In time, everything is becoming more user-friendly and now, with AI, you don't really need to have a whole team of brand experts. Just one consultant would be fine that could work together with the AI. So there are all these shifts that are kind of changing the way we used to do things. And then, pertaining to my clients, I've had to consult in companies in which they found it difficult to work from home, especially older founders who really liked being in the office and seeing their entire personnel. So it was also the mentality shift that I had to work with my clients on.

Speaker 1: 6:53

Yeah, 100%, is your business also remote?

Speaker 2: 6:58

Part of my business is remote. I wear many different hats and do many different things. So if I would guest lecture, I could do that remote or in person. If I do consultancy, I can do consultancy again remote or in person. It depends on how the contract is structured.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Yeah, 100%. The reason I say that is because it's been such a shift for me specifically. I only work remote now and it's changed my life. It's so much easier. But like the older generation, as you said, they struggle to adapt. Like my grandfather, for example. He's a prostitutor developer and he just obviously going to sites and stuff you can't do that remotely. But having meetings with your partners and stuff he just doesn't understand that you can do it over a video call. He likes to be in person, he likes to shake hands and even during the pandemic he was like 78 years old and he would still insist to meet in person, regardless of the risks, because he believed in a handshake. He believed that that's a man's word and it's hard for them to shift that mindset but it's slowly adapting more and more and it's definitely changing the face of how pretty much all businesses operate. It's quite interesting.

Speaker 2: 8:15

Especially culturally. As you said, there are many cultures around the world for whom having that handshake is very important. Then you have entire groups of founders that know best how to communicate when they can see the micro expressions. In negotiations, it's sometimes better to be in person. So it's interesting to see how we're shifting our body language and how we're starting to use written language, and maybe even these emoticons, in order to convey messages online. But then another difficulty is how do you get a whole array of employees who are used to work in the office to be productive at home, because they have to shift the entire way they have been doing things. They have been used to be supervised in the offices and now they have to do more self-supervised work. So something I'm teaching is self-leadership, which is something that I feel we haven't taught people sufficiently. So self-leadership is how do you teach yourself to become the leader of your own life, and employees really need to learn this when they shift from working in the office to working at home.

Speaker 1: 9:34

Yeah, 100%. Some of our clients have actually come to us with that problem and what we've found is you can somewhat gamify your workforce if they're working remotely, so they can kind of interact with their employees without talking to them, so they can compete on tasks and sales and calls and that type of thing. And a lot of businesses have found that that really helps is having some sort of gamification of the work-life balance, because it gets lonely when you're working from home and if you can see what your colleagues are doing and kind of compete with them, it mostly boosts productivity and takes away that loneliness a little bit. So that's been a huge thing which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 10:23

It's very interesting that you mentioned this. As part of my research on the younger generation, I've seen that gamification helps them tremendously, and especially in the onboarding process, but then, while they become full-time employees, they seem, as you've said, to work better when there's some sort of gamifications, when tasks are broken down, when steps are implemented, which is something that older generations of managers never used to do. So now you have that gap and that clash between generations, trying to merge them together, which is something I consult on.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Yeah, exactly, We've actually just implemented a new onboarding system. So instead of spending like one to two hours running through and like manually onboarding our new hires, we have an automated workflow so they can just go to the next task. We get notified. They have any questions? They can just let us know, and it's saving so much time and it's making the whole process just more efficient. It's great.

Speaker 2: 11:32

And so are you implementing also an evaluation system through this gamification process to see if they're fully onboarded.

Speaker 1: 11:41

Yeah, so we haven't automated that process, but once they've onboarded we'll have like some sort of interview with them and they'll kind of go through what they like, what they didn't like and where we can improve. And it's been super, super helpful.

Speaker 2: 11:55

the feedback Because something else that came across from my research on the younger generations at work is precisely also evaluating them Again, if I devaluation, to see if they were attentively reading, let's say, the materials during the onboarding or looking at the videos. But I think the fact that you're moving towards these systems of automated onboarding will help companies tremendously, especially since, as you very well know, their retention rates have changed in the sense that in the past, we've had employees being with their companies for 40 years and now, with the gig economy, we've seen a reduction of the employees, and my research shows that employees now stay with an employer maybe like around a year. So obviously we need to onboard more as employers and we need systems ideally automated systems to do this, because otherwise all of our middle managers will burn out, which is again another phenomenon that we're seeing. So definitely, both AI and other CRM systems can help in these automatic onboarding, which I think is necessary at the present time.

Speaker 1: 13:17

Yeah, 100%, and I think that's a great point that you mentioned is high employee turnover. Especially with this digital world that we've discussed and remote working, it's very important to have systems in place to make your employees happy and want to stay with the company for long, because people do turn over so quickly, and I've seen it with my previous jobs that I've been in. It's not that I was entirely unhappy Either the pay wasn't right or there was some toxic leadership in there. So I think it's super important to find the right balance to make your employees happy and want to stay, and having the right technology in place can definitely assist in that.

Speaker 2: 13:59

I agree, and also as a manager, sometimes it's not even about making the employees happy at some point, but I agree with what you're saying. But the new reality is that there's this high employee turnover. So, rather than trying to force the life cycle of employees, it's good to be prepared and see okay, if someone leaves, how do they leave things, so the next person can jump right in. But another thing that managers could focus now is for them to rethink, to completely rethink the way tasks look like, because in the past, employees used to do a little bit of everything and everything of what is needed, and now I think employees are coming in with different expectations. They want everything to be a clear cut, and this is something that older managers were not used to. So now they have to go to the entire job descriptions, make realistic job descriptions and then rework through their entire processes to see how they can explain this to an individual, which is again a shift in which I think various autonomous systems could help. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1: 15:20

I've actually experienced that myself. So I think it's a bit of a culture thing, because I'm from South Africa and when you get, when you start a job in South Africa, you're kind of like told what to do and how to do it and you trained to do it. And when I signed this new role for Lean Discovery Group, I was kind of brought in and that's what I expected. And I was a little bit like worried in the beginning because I didn't have much guidance. But then I did a bit of research and that's just how people work in America. Firstly, they want you to think on your feet. They want to see how you would do jobs, see if you can do it differently and better rather than staying the same, if that makes sense. And that's been super beneficial to me and it was a huge learning curve and I'm really glad that it happened.

Speaker 2: 16:11

It is a system that I prefer, having people think on their feet and see if there's a new way of doing things. What I found is this doesn't work with the younger generations at all. Of course, that would not be your case, since this was not your first job. But with the younger generations for instance Gen Z, who are now maybe having their first or second job they expect to have these onboarding programs in which they know, step by step, what they need to do. I suppose somewhere this is understandable, since they're very young. This is their first job and they're trying to understand how the world works Rather than. This way of thinking on one's feet seems to be something that they really run away from, and they think that this is the reason why they're burnt out.

Speaker 1: 16:58

Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's a super interesting world how things are changing at the moment.

Speaker 2: 17:06

And even the work-life balance concept at the moment. In the past, gen X and Boomers they gave everything to their jobs. Now, with the rise of millennials, we've seen this concept of work-life balance and trying to build a life rather than a hustle. We're seeing hustle culture be confided to, let's say, the entrepreneurs or the Silicon Valley. Groups of entrepreneurs, rather than the younger generation, seem to be more focused on building hobbies and using work to support their lives, which I think is an interesting shift that makes companies rethink their benefits. So if in the past, you would implement company holidays, for instance, or gym memberships paid by the company, these are really perks that Gen Z, for instance, don't seem to enjoy that much. So they don't want to be forced to come to a company event. They want to do what they want to do in their own time. So these are slight shifts that HR managers need to do when they consider their bonuses or their packages that they're building for employees.

Speaker 1: 18:22

Yeah, 100%, and from experience I couldn't agree more. I'm a zillennial, I think they call me. I was born in 97. So I'm like on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, and that's exactly it. We don't just want to work and build a career, we want to actually enjoy life while we're doing it. And having the choice to do our own things is huge and it's very important.

Speaker 2: 18:46

So do you feel like all of these remarks that I've made about Gen Z? Do they speak to you as a person? Do you feel like as a zillennial, they may refer to you as well.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Yeah, 100%, 100%.

Speaker 2: 19:05

At the beginning. It was very interesting for me to bring the perspective of new employees and companies, especially in consultancy, because I do offer consultancy to companies that are trying to bring in younger workers that have difficulties with the young workforce, and almost all companies A want to bring in younger workers and B they have difficulties with the younger workforce and there's this intergenerational conflict that happens across organizations. Something I've kept hearing is we can't work with these younger employees. It's not that you can't work with them. You need to find the right way to mentor them and to work with them, and one way is definitely gamification that we talked about at the beginning of the interview.

Speaker 1: 19:56

Yeah, 100%. And I've been somewhat lucky in my career experience because all my employers have been relatively young. We've had a maximum of like an eight-year age difference and now within Lean Discovery Group we're all within five years of each other, so we kind of understand each other and how we work, you know.

Speaker 2: 20:20

This is indeed important when one builds multi-generational teams. My research shows that it's good to have the team leader be maybe like a Gen X or an older millennial, because if you have a boomer as a team leader, there's very little chance that they will work well with, say, gen Z. But then if you have a team leader, that Gen X, that person can communicate with both the older generations and the younger generations, and when you want to build that sort of team, you want to bring everyone's capabilities together. So of course boomers will have more experience and that experience needs to be used in a good way. But then Gen Z would come in with all these fresh ideas, with all the technology, with the flexibility and adaptability. So it's the new way of doing things, and merging these things together is really where the secret sauce of business is.

Speaker 1: 21:22

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I've just actually looked at the time and we are running a bit behind, but I do have a couple more questions before we go. I've really enjoyed this conversation, by the way. So, in terms of your business, if we were to sit down again in 12 months time and everything has gone right, completely right, what would your business look like then, and what has changed?

Speaker 2: 21:53

I think it's difficult to say at this time, and I'll tell you why. In the past, if you would have asked me pre-pandemic, I would have given you five year plans, 10 year plans, kpis, everything that we've learned in business school and everything that I teach as a professor of leadership at management and management. But the world has changed and, no matter how much we like to use these five year plans and so on, I don't think it's something we can do right now. The world is changing so fast, technology is changing so fast. We need to be on our feet and every time, just see what's the next thing that we need to do.

Speaker 2: 22:38

It's difficult right now, in the present time, especially with the global economic crisis that is looming. Arms conflict everywhere I'm in Romania now, there's an arms conflict next. So you need to be cognizant of all of these things and find your stepping as you go, which is super interesting, because it's a time for leaders, and I'll explain this in a few seconds that we have left. There are times in business for leaders and there are times for managers. Leaders orchestrate the growth well as managers manage the business. Yeah, you can ask a manager the five year plans and they need to keep things afloat, but when there is so much change that is coming, you need leaders to navigate the storms, and I feel like that's what we're doing now all of us that are business leaders.

Speaker 1: 23:33

Yeah, 100%, and I appreciate that answer. Thank you, and before we go, what if you could give one piece of advice to other business owners looking to? Well, let's narrow it down. If you could give advice to Gen Z business owners looking to succeed in this crazy world we're living in at the moment, what would that advice be?

Speaker 2: 23:55

It's easy for business owners to especially older ones eliminate this idea of technological development, ai development, and say it's going to be something like social media. But it's not. It's going to fundamentally change the way we operate and things. So jump on this AI bandwagon, figure out how to ethically implement it, figure out how it can help your business make autonomous systems and so on. This AI revolution needs to be taken into consideration because it's here to stay 100%.

Speaker 1: 24:33

I appreciate that so much and thank you for being on the show. I've really, really enjoyed this conversation. What is the best way for our listeners to get in touch with Dr Karina Oches? Professor, dr Karina Oches, if you have any offers for them or if they're looking to take advantage of any of your services.

Speaker 2: 24:54

Of course I do, as I said, consultancy and speaking services, guest lectures on various topics. My website is drkarinaocchishcom with the DR. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on all social media, so look for me on drkarinaocchishcom and you'll find many resources on next generation leadership, multi-generational leadership or how to lead GNC. Thank you, Amazing, amazing.

Speaker 1: 25:24

Thank you so much for your time today, thank you.