By Professor Mayowa Babalola, Stan Perron Chair in Business Ethics at UWA Business School

A few months ago, in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, I spent time with UWA alumni whose careers now stretch across industries, cultures and borders. Some were leading teams, some building companies, some steering organisations through the upheavals of artificial intelligence and a workforce asking more searching questions of work itself. The conversations were generous and full of optimism, but underneath them was a question I have not been able to put down since.

What kind of world of work are we leaving behind us?

We talk about the automated age as a place we have arrived in, somewhere we are learning to live – that misreads the moment. In fact, we are not its residents: we are its ancestors. The norms we set now, often without noticing, about how fast people should move, when a machine’s recommendation goes unquestioned, whether someone can safely say ‘this isn’t right’, will not feel like choices to those who come after us but will simply feel like how work is. So, we are writing the rules of a house that future generations will be born into.

Much of my research has circled a single, ordinary human act: whether the people inside an organisation notice when something is going wrong and feel free to say so. The failures we most regret are seldom failures of ability; they are failures of attention. Someone looked away or was too afraid to speak. What makes the automated age different is that when decisions move faster than reflection, looking away stops being an occasional lapse and quietly becomes the culture. As such, efficiency without humanity can become a very polished form of neglect. Work gets faster while life gets thinner, and none of it announces itself. It simply becomes normal, and then it gets handed down.

This is why I have stopped thinking of leadership as a matter of authority and started thinking of it as a matter of ancestry. To lead is to take responsibility not only for this quarter’s results, but for the defaults you leave behind in the people and culture around you. By that measure, you do not need a title to lead. You need only to be the one who notices, who protects another person’s dignity when the pressure is to optimise it away, and who refuses to let silence become the way things are done.

Here is what I want us to sit with. The most consequential thing many of us will do in our careers is not a strategy or a launch. It is the small, repeated decision about whether the people around us are treated as fully human while the machinery speeds up – that is the inheritance we are creating.

None of this is a soft skill. It may be the hardest thing a leader is ever asked to do, because every incentive around them pulls the other way.

And here is the part we cannot afford to forget: we cannot look after the people around us while we are running ourselves into the ground to keep pace with machines that never tire. Looking after ourselves is not an indulgence to be squeezed in once the real work is done – it is part of the real work. For example, a depleted person cannot notice anyone. In that regard, rest, boundaries and the honesty to say ‘this pace is not sustainable’ are not signs of weakness in a leader. They are the conditions that make caring for others possible.

Here is why this should move us: the people who will inherit the workplaces we are building are not abstractions. They are our children, our students, the graduates not yet born who will join organisations whose unwritten rules we are drafting now. We are deciding, in a thousand ordinary moments, whether they walk into a world of work that makes people more fully human, or a little less. That is not the weather we are bracing for. It is a legacy we are authoring.

It is also why a program like the MBA matters more in this age, not less. As the UWA MBA marks 50 years, we are celebrating far more than a qualification: a community formed to think across disciplines, cultures, and borders, and to carry responsibility rather than hand it to a system. That is, in the truest sense, the work of raising good ancestors. Machines can analyse, draft and predict but cannot teach a person to sit with complexity, or to feel the weight of what their decisions leave behind – management education, at its best, still can.

So, this is the invitation I would leave with you: wherever you are in this global community, whatever you build or lead, you are an ancestor of the automated age. The inheritance is being written now, in the next conversation you have, the next moment you decide a human being matters more than a faster process. The question will be what it has always been: will the world of work we leave behind help people become more fully human? Each of us has a hand on the answer. That is the highest calling of leadership and it has never mattered more than now.