AI Enhanced Leadership: Unveiling Opportunities and Overcoming Challenges | Episode 270

Scott McCarthy [00:00:00]:

You. It’s here. And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know it’s here. It’s the dawn of new age, the age of AI essentially everywhere. If you haven’t heard of this new technical revolution that’s been going on now for some time, I don’t know where you’ve been hanging out because everywhere you turn right now, AI this, AI that, AI, AI, AI, and everyone’s talking about, oh, the cool, amazing things AI can do. AI can write a book at one. AI can do this for us. AI can do that for us.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:46]:

But who’s talking about the leadership context of AI? And that’s what we’re going to be diving into today, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to be navigating the AI frontier in leadership. And this is what I’m tackling for you today solo. So if you’re ready for this, all right, let’s do it. Welcome one, welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a senior Canadian Army officer with world class guests to bring you the most complete podcast on leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website@movingforwardleadership.com.

Scott McCarthy [00:01:55]:

And with that, let’s get to the show. Hey, welcome back to the show, ladies and gentlemen. It is your Chief Leadership Officer, Scott McCarthy. Thanks for tuning in today’s episode where I’m changing things up a little bit for you in multiple realms. One, I’m going solo today out of the blue because I really felt like talking about this subject. And two, we are talking about something that is really different but yet super crucial in the leadership space, and that is AI in leadership. And what it means and what I’m going to be diving into today is that I’m going to be talking about the implications of AI in the three domains. And those are, of course, leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:02]:

Okay? So that is what we’re going to be talking about today. And what I want to really kind of hit at is that recently in our Leader Growth Mastermind calls, which we have weekly, we were talking about opportunities, but as well as challenges, you see, with every opportunity there will be a challenge. With every challenge, there will be opportunities. You just have to look for them. So with opportunities and then in turn come challenges, what you want to do is mitigate the challenges. But when you have a challenge, what you want to do is seize and take advantage of the opportunities. I know that makes sense to you because you’re all smart people. So today we’re going to look at both sides of that spectrum when it comes to AI.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:10]:

Now, if you’re wondering, what the heck is this Leader Growth Mastermind that you mentioned, Scott? Well, it is our group, our community focused on growth, as you can tell, seeing how it’s in its name, literally. And the whole goal of the leader Growth mastermind is provide a safe community for leaders to be able to come and essentially discuss their problems with other leaders and get advice and guidance from a community on their issues. Now, it’s not only that, but we help leaders level up by providing curated content, guest speakers, weekly calls, community support, and so on. So if that’s of interest to you, then be sure to check it out@leadboss.com mastermind. All right, so that’s out of the way. Let’s talk about AI and leading yourself in the age of AI. And one of the cool opportunities that AI presents is self assessments, right? We’ve seen all these self assessments out there. Take your Chronotype is one, take your personality test, take the Myra Briggs one, et cetera, et cetera.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:42]:

AI can actually help explain that these tests mean, but as well as give you actually more in depth analysis and actually closer reality to what your strengths are, what your styles are, where your areas of growth are, and so on, these are actually more consistent and closer to reality than what a lot of these other tests out there are. And the beauty with AI is that you can run multiple of these tests at the same time. They can ask you a load of questions, but use your answers in those questions across a spectrum of tests. Not just Myers Briggs, but rather, it could be talking about your leadership style, your strengths, and your areas of growth or improvement at the same time. And what does that mean? It means it saves you time, right? It saves you time and gives you better information back. Now, who wouldn’t want that? The second thing when it comes to AI, and this is another advantage opportunity per se, is time management. AI can now help you with your time management of scheduling, of planning, of coordinating your tasks, when you should do things, when it would be the best time to do things, especially if they get coupled together with those. Self assessment that I talked about when it comes to taking one, where it looks at your Chronotype and then plans out your tasks and your days based off of the optimal time for you to do different things throughout your day.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:44]:

AI can do that for you, right? D can reduce your administrative burdens, which allows basically which I mean by that is you just sitting there and trying to figure out what the heck you’re going to do for the day, how you’re going to plan your day, and when you’re going to do things. All right? So it can help you alleviate that burning. And reality is, what is it doing? It is allowing you to focus on those high important and high impact tasks. That is the most crucial thing. That’s where we want to be spending our time at AI can help us with that. Now, the challenge when it comes to AI is the ethical considerations for it, right? There are some potential pitfalls in that you can suddenly start relying on AI for too much, and then suddenly you’re no longer looking at it through the lens of using your judgment and critical thinking skills, but rather just simply getting the artificial intelligence to give you whatever answers you’re looking for. And that in turn, can lead to a number of fallacies. You can go down to different blind spots, such as confirmation bias, where essentially you’re going to get the AI to tell you what you’re hoping to hear in the first place.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:22]:

So that is the challenge with AI, that it can become a crutch. It’s easy. Hey, chat GBT. What? Fill in all the answers you’re wanting to hear and say, is this a good idea? Well, yes, it is absolutely a great idea, et cetera. But the reality is you didn’t give it the full context, and then in turn, it doesn’t know all the different factors to provide you with. No, actually, you shouldn’t do that. You should do this instead, or you should take these factors into consideration. So those are three different well, two opportunities and one challenge when it comes to leading yourself in AI.

Scott McCarthy [00:10:12]:

All right, but now let’s look at leading your team, because we want to look at how AI is going to pack your team members. And the first one is AI enhanced collaboration. We can use it. AI essentially like giving all of our team members their own virtual assistant or our team virtual assistant that can go ahead, schedule meetings, transcribe discussions, facilitate the communication amongst our team members regardless of where they’re at or even if they’re there anyway. The AI technology alleviates the burden off of our team members to take notes, to try to figure out when the best time is to have a meeting with people across four different time zones, 18 different calendars, and so on. AI can actually pick the best time for it and then go ahead and schedule the meeting for us. And during that meeting, it can transcribe it. So then the notes are there waiting for you right after.

Scott McCarthy [00:11:26]:

And as I said, if someone’s not available, if you’re not available for the meeting and you’re supposed to be there, you can go ahead and immediately check out the notes. You’re not waiting on someone else, you’re not trying to figure out what the heck is that word scribbled down and what are they talking about? AI will go ahead and enable this. AI can also be used in performance tracking. There are tools out there that can analyze team dynamics, identify areas for improvement, and provide data driven insights, which you can use for data informed decision making, right? So you can go ahead and use AI to track performance and then more importantly, identify those areas of weakness where people need to develop themselves, turn around and develop a game plan on how you’re going to develop that within your team. And finally double down on the areas where you’re performing the best. And AI tools out there can do that for you at a fraction of the time, which means at a fraction of the cost than doing it normally. All right? So those are two opportunities that AI is presenting us when it comes to leading our teams. But what’s a challenge.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:00]:

The challenge is like the good old challenge, whenever change comes around, and that is resistance to that change. So many people out there fear that AI and privacy issues, they fear that AI is going to take over their jobs, which in some cases is actually true, sadly say. But this is the world, okay? Just like any change, you need to get your team in and on board with it, bringing them in, saying, hey folks, what are your concerns here? What are the opportunities that present themselves to us? And we understand that people will definitely be concerned and resistance to anything that will potentially take their job away. And I can completely understand that. But if you lead ahead, lead forward, think about opportunities to change their roles, to keep them around, to enable them to still be part of the team, right? AI is not going to take over everything. It’s impossible. Just can’t be done right now. And in fact, sometimes we reverse our decisions.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:30]:

Look at the self checkouts here locally. Now, Walmart’s in the local area are starting to bring back good old people cashiers because it has noticed that its amount of theft has risen significantly since the installation of self checkouts and the laying off of people cashiers. So sometimes change is good, sometimes change is not so good. So let people know that there’s still a world for them, but at the same time, there’s an opportunity for them to grow, get some new skills, develop themselves further. The printing press is a great example, right? Look at that technology, what it did, it brought the ability to print documents at a significantly quicker pace. But what did it do? It put a lot of writers, like actual hydraulic writers, out of business. Because no longer were individuals just individually writing things, but now they were actually pressing things. But what came along with that? The need for different trades and opportunities.

Scott McCarthy [00:15:56]:

Maintenance, ink, development, distribution, because there was so much more being made. Now the requirement for more paper because the demand going up. See, these are all opportunities out of the change challenge. So with your people, see how you might seize the opportunities that come out of your company’s change when it comes to AI. So that’s leading your team. So, again, two opportunities. One challenge, two opportunities being the AI. Enhanced collaboration workspace as well as AI in performance tracking.

Scott McCarthy [00:16:40]:

Then followed up with the challenge, of course, with the resistance of AI. Now, when we look at leading your organization, AI can have strategic impacts. It can be used at looking at market trends, your customer preferences. It can be used for strategic decision making as well as competitive analysis. Why? Because it can run through an enormous amount of data at a ridiculously short amount of time. It can enable you as a leader to point your business in the changing marketplace instantly. Well, at least point you in that direction. It’s going to be up to you to get moving in that direction.

Scott McCarthy [00:17:37]:

But the AI can do that for you by waiting on those manual analysis, waiting for someone else to make the first move, and then you playing catch up with your organization. Additionally, AI can allow for operational optimization, right? Think about what Toyota did in just in time delivery as well as lean management and such. It was revolutionary. What savings could you potentially have in your organization through its operations? From your supply chain management to your resource allocation, time, personnel, equipment, what have you. AI can help you optimize that. Meaning you get more out of it and then end up wasting less. Which means in turn, there are more resources available for your whole organization to be used. So that optimization is crucial.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:54]:

It’s something we should be doing all the time. AI can shorten that time frame and enable you to enact on it instantly. However, much like in leading yourself, there’s ethical and social responsibilities for organizations when it comes to AI, it means that we need to be transparent and fair about the use of AI in our organizations. How is it being used when it comes to our people? How is it being used when it comes to our customers? Are we grabbing data from them which they don’t want us to give to take? You have to look at these from that ethical and societal responsibility lens so that you’re not misusing AI. In turn, your organization then finds itself in hot water, in the news for bad things, and ultimately developing a lack of trust amongst your customers, your people, and basically society at large. No leader wants that, no matter what. So that is AI in leading your organization folks, again, two opportunities. One challenge.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:24]:

The opportunity of strategic implications, operational optimization, followed by the challenge of ethical and societal responsibilities that you hold. Let me tell you, this episode is barely scraping the surface. And that’s basically what it was meant for. It was just meant to get you thinking. Because the reality is no one’s been talking about AI yet in a leadership context. And I want you to start thinking about it. And if you think, oh, it’s not really here, I don’t really see it, well, I got a new slash for you. You’re completely wrong.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:13]:

Let me tell you, I use AI in this podcast all the time. The outline for this episode was literally developed 24 minutes ago and I’m into 21 and a half minutes worth of recording. Just to give you an idea, it literally took me no time at all. And oh, by the way, I wasn’t even set up to record before I actually got Chat GTP to do me an outline. My show notes are actually developed by an AI platform specifically for podcasters. Shout out to cast magic. By the way, you guys are rock stars. If you’re a podcaster as well, go give them a look and hit me up because I got a link for you if you feel like joining them.

Scott McCarthy [00:22:06]:

So the moral of the story is this AI is here. Whether you like it or not. It’s here more than what you think it is. The question is, are you going to seize the opportunity, mitigate the risk, mitigate the challenge, and be successful? That’s it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Remember, as always. Lead. Don’t. Boss.

Scott McCarthy [00:22:39]:

Take care now. And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the peak Performance Leadership podcast. But you know what you could do to truly support the podcast? And no, that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend. And that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them. If you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams, or their organization, so do that.

Scott McCarthy [00:23:15]:

Help me help a friend. Win win all around. And hey, you look like a great friend at the same time. So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more there’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.com subscribe. Until next time. Lead.

Scott McCarthy [00:23:56]:

Don’t boss. And thanks for coming out. Take care now. Bye.