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Leading with an AI-Driven Corporate Landscape
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As AI continues to shape our future, this episode exposes the pivotal skills leaders must hone to navigate this new terrain. From adaptability to emotional intelligence, we dissect the ten commandments of modern leadership, showing you how to wield AI as an ally in productivity, without losing sight of the human touch. Experience a glimpse into the Innovative Leadership Institute's digital avatar initiative and how such tools can amplify, not replace, the human element in leadership development.
Welcome to MICE, the podcast where we empower HR excellence, one conversation at a time. On this month's episode of MICE, our partner is Gibson Insurance and they help companies find and own their edge when it comes to employee benefits. We have Alan Howard here from Gibson who is an employee benefits consultant. Thank you, alan, so much for your partnership and being here with us today. Can you explain what you do and what Gibson does for the community?
Speaker 2Yeah, first off, I just want to say thank you for allowing me to be on here. It's a pleasure Really. Gibson, we are a full-service employee benefits brokerage. I know you said the comment help companies find and own their edge. What that really means is helping companies understand that they are very unique in the marketplace and, when it comes to competing for talent, you shouldn't be offering the same benefits that your neighbors do. So we help companies truly customize their employee benefits offerings so that it matches their culture, what they're trying to achieve, and it takes into account their values, vision, employee talent and that unique combination is what sets you apart.
Speaker 1Do you have any new or rare benefits that you have clients offer that really help them attract and retain talent?
Speaker 2Yeah, we do. It's not really a one-size-fits-all piece. It's mostly just understanding the company's culture. I was on the Naira webinar as a panelist and one of the discussions was how do you customize some benefits for different organizations? The one example I used was we've got some employers that have employees that are standing for long periods of time Inside their benefits plans. We try to really customize their benefits. For example, on that one it's custom molded orthotics helping them to alleviate the back pain from standing all day.
Speaker 2At the same time, we have, you know, a very robust kind of a wellness platform for the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo and when you look at the likes of those employees, they dedicate their lives to taking care of animals. They don't always put their health front and center, realizing that we work with the leadership team at the zoo to help them. You know craft different nutrition and wellness programs that are a little more enhanced than what I would say most people do. But those are just two examples. Again, it all revolves around understanding the culture of the company and understanding what they want to achieve and helping them really find that edge and own it.
Speaker 1You guys work with an array of different kinds of company backgrounds, from manufacturing to hospitality. Do you focus mainly on a few, or is it broad?
Speaker 2It's very broad. At Gibson we are one of the top 100 largest employee benefits brokerages across the country, so we've developed what's called niche teams. So whether that means that you have somebody that works in manufacturing, somebody that works in nonprofits, professional services, we have a big health and human service practice. Whenever we work with an employer, we always try to build a service and capabilities team around exactly what their niche is.
Speaker 1And you guys are ESOP correct.
Speaker 2We are yes, we are 100% employee-owned.
Speaker 1Do you feel that gives you an advantage when you're with clients?
Speaker 2I do, and I think it starts really with we're all struggling right now with retention, so that has helped our retention efforts immensely. We adopted that back in 2011. And ever since then, what's great about it is whenever an employer is talking to one even just the account managers, the client managers, the consultant, whomever it may be they're talking to an employee owner. So we see a lot of our employees take immense pride in what they do and it shows in their work.
Speaker 1Do you have locations all around the country? Is it more so in different regions?
Speaker 2I won't divulge all the details, but we are I call it a national expansion. Right now we're on a fun run with it. So when you look at our offices, historically we've been headquartered in South Bend, but we have offices in Fort Wayne, indianapolis, kalamazoo. Just within the past year, we've opened in Chicago, phoenix, tucson, salt Lake City, with a few more on the horizon. So stay tuned for some of those awesome locations.
Speaker 1Thank you, gibson, for being a partner with NYRA and we look forward to this continued partnership. On this month's episode of Miked, I am interviewing Maureen Metcalf, the CEO and founder of Innovative Leadership Institute and the author of Innovative Leadership and Fellowship. I'm sorry, innovative Leadership and Followership in the Age of AI, that is such a tongue twister. Thank you so much, maureen, for joining me this month. Go ahead and explain a little bit about what you do and what your company does.
The Future of Leadership and AI
Speaker 3So, brittany, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about our work and to hang out with you for a little while. The Innovative Leadership Institute was born out of the idea that, especially now, leaders need to innovate the way they lead. And why I say that? Think about how often you update your cell phone. They become obsolete pretty quickly, quickly, and we know when the hardware stops working For leaders. They are often updating the stuff they do.
Speaker 3If I'm a physician leader, I am certainly staying current on medical trends. If I'm a technology leader, I'm staying current on technology. And yet for many true leaders, they spend 60 to 90 percent of their time leading, not operating in the operating room, not coding software. They're leaders. And what? The investment is potentially disproportionate. If I'm not staying current on leadership approaches, then I am becoming obsolete, just like my old phone.
Speaker 3And we see that in how people are responding to things, like how they reacted to COVID. We saw some leaders absolutely excel and their organizations excel, and we saw others that really were ill-equipped. And these are leaders who have led complex changes in their organizations. But they led complex changes that they planned. They didn't lead unplanned chaotic stuff planned. They didn't lead, unplanned, chaotic stuff, and so the distinction is how do we help leaders continue to update what I'll call their mental algorithms? Right, so we update the algorithm in our phones and our computers to be more complex, but we don't update our thinking and our mindsets at the same pace as the world's changing. Hence the idea of innovating how we lead, and my goal is to stay current on as much of the research as I can and make that practical and translatable for leaders who are trying to do their jobs and make that process of innovating as efficient as possible.
Speaker 1So how do you see AI shifting how leaders need to lead, but also the skills that now they need to obtain?
Speaker 3So I frame the changes AI will create for business like a supercharged change management effort. So ultimately, we as leaders are implementing yet another change in our organization organization. It may not be as chaotic as COVID was, but it's also not going to be as planned and structured as an ERP. Implementation is Because those we've done them hundreds and thousands of times. Each leader has not, but the consultants they hire have. So we know what that pathway looks like. There's always chaos, but we know what it looks like and we can plan for it. So, with AI coming on board, none of us have done this yet, so it's less predictable, but it shouldn't offend us like COVID did.
Speaker 3I say in our latest book there were 10 skills. I'll run through them very quickly Communicate, growth mindset, adaptiveness, emotional intelligence, abundance mindset. I have to have an expertise in the domain, my functional area, my industry AI skills. Still, one of the top things leaders do is analyze and make decisions. That doesn't change, it's just we may be using different tools. I need creativity and I need risk awareness For the AI part, and I can go into each of those in a little more detail.
Speaker 3The example I would give is probably most of your listeners have seen Star Wars, one of the in the Star Wars universe, right? Imagine that your office is relocating because, post-covid, we all work differently and now you go into this new space and when you walk in, everyone has the choice of either an R2-D2 or a C-3PO. We all get our little robots to help us do our work. If we think of AI that way that it is an intern and it has its own abilities and we have our abilities and we come together to use that. Now we also saw in Star Wars that these things, unmanaged, create they become enemies right. Create they become enemies, right. So all of the bad Terminator movies.
Speaker 3There is risk in using AI and there is opportunity. And so how do we use our robot companions, ai companions, to enable us to be more productive? Some of these things that we're reading the trends are four-day work weeks, three-day work weeks I don't know that will ever materialize, but boy, how lovely to cure cancer and work reasonable hours. We just need to navigate the gauntlet of doing it effectively, managing the risks and really seizing some brilliant opportunities to make our lives hopefully our work a little more meaningful and productive. And with all of that, we, as members of the community and leaders of organizations need to acknowledge that when we say 30 to 50 percent of employees, jobs will change. That will also require significant upskilling. It will require workforce development. If we just fire everyone who has no AI skills that's most of us right now that's a bad solution. We really do need to be as aware of the trends and planful as we can be to enable our organizations to thrive and our communities.
Speaker 3Because, if we live in communities with a significant level of unemployment and despair, that also impacts our safety and security of things. Companies being as responsible as their economics allow responsible as their economics allow so I'm not saying we all become communes and just retrain everybody in a way that is not within our financial resources is not practical In the realm of practicality. What is our social responsibility to the humans who've given us days, weeks, years, decades of their work effort? How do we move forward respecting that relationship and commitment and again in the confines of being a profitable enterprise in the confines of being a profitable enterprise.
Speaker 1So AI is still so new and there are a lot of skeptics, a lot of people thinking that AI is taking jobs. What is your thought on that? How would you respond to that?
Speaker 3I tend to fall on the optimistic side. We're doing all kinds of things now that we're. The Institute is small and I'll give a few examples. We have a fake Maureen and if you go on our website, you can see the experiments with the fake Maureen. So, because we offer leadership training, I needed to update some outdated videos. I don't like doing videos. They're expensive, they're time consuming and I don't like it.
Speaker 3We invested in a digital avatar and taught one of our people how to create videos with a digital avatar. That, by the way, looks freakishly like me. So it's not a comic avatar, it's me, videoed and then set to life with the words that also sound like me. Right, it's just a small example of the digital twin not used for bad political stuff that, as we are running companies, we find things that need to be done that we often put on the back shelf. Updating HR policies I did recently with the help of Chad GPT. A colleague wrote a DE&I manual. Now we still run it through our boards and our HR experts and people like that. I'm not just pulling something off the web and considering it good, but boy, it gave me an 80% to 90% start on some things, some of the things that are more generic and things that are much more expertise-driven. It may be a 10% start.
Speaker 3It may not be worth the effort. So I think, yes, jobs will change. I do think people will lose jobs. I also think that we will end up creating more jobs and I would hearken back to when I started my career.
Speaker 3I was a financial analyst. I used a mainframe computer to run my reports. Then we got PCs, then we got laptops. I didn't work fewer hours, I ran more reports. I'm not sure that we're just going to do the same amount of work and let our digital companions help us. I think it increases complexity. I think that we will be working differently and I think for folks who are not computer savvy, there will be a problem. There's also the research is saying right now say, you've got an entry-level HR person, with the use of AI, they could be 40% more productive. It's saying that someone who's senior, who already knows a lot of this stuff, could be 20% more productive. So it will pull in specialized knowledge that that to find it you would have to go off and do a bunch of research. It now gives you the research, but there's still the fact checking.
Speaker 3I still have to make sure that stuff it gives me is accurate. If I am 40% more productive, do you have fewer people? Do you give me more tasks? Do I work fewer hours? I think part of that will be where do I spend that 40% of my time getting smarter about AI? So I think there will be a lot of questions about how companies choose to embrace the tools and how employees also. How do we react?
Speaker 1I like that analogy of going from not working with computers to PC, to laptop, and then, in my mind, ai is just another technology that's evolving and it is taking its course. Yeah, I'm really excited to see how this all will turn out and play out. I love using it, especially GPT, because it does like you said it gets me started on something where I'm like I know what I want to say but I don't know. Said, it gets me started on something where I'm like I know what I want to say but I don't know how to put it out on paper. I'm going to have chat, gpt get me started, and then I'm going to make it more of how I would say it, or more personable so can you give an example?
Speaker 3yeah, what? What have you done specifically that you found really helpful?
Speaker 1I'm actually going to pull up my chat GPT right now. I just used it. So one thing that I do in my current role is like employer branding. I do the monthly employee newsletters and before a different area did our newsletter and then I took it on last year and one thing I did was just ask ChatGPT give me 20 or 10 or whatever topics that would be good in an employee newsletter. Boom, there you go, and then I personalize it to my company.
Speaker 1If I know that I need to maybe do a disciplinary action and maybe it's something severe that we've never really had to reprimand anybody for, I'll use that and just say write me a disciplinary action regarding this, and then I'll spit something out and then I won't use the whole thing. I'm not going to lie. I'll take parts of it out that relate to the incident that's happening then, and because in my disciplinary actions I also like to be very detailed and chat GPT can also give me ideas on how to portray that over into that disciplinary action In HR, that's something that you got to do and I love using it.
Speaker 3Yeah, I grew up or spent early in my career at Accenture and we had a knowledge network. It was people who have done this thing that you're trying to do. You can pull up best deliverables and this seems like that, but bigger, to the extent that you can see what other people have done. I also use BARD and I know it it just renamed, I don't remember the new name of it and for some things that gives me better information and for some things ChatGPT does, and I'm not sure which is which. Yet I even used it for my mother's obituary. Now again, I added to it because it did not know my mother. But boy was it a great start. And that had to to be barred, because chat GPT doesn't do well with obituaries, evidently.
Speaker 1There's a new one that came out. Is it Claude? Or I don't even know how you pronounce it? There's something else that came out similar to chat GPT, and I've used that just to compare what I'm going to get from chat GPT versus the other AI chat box, and it's not always the same. So then I'll pull information from both of them to do whatever task. I'm doing that I need to get completed.
Speaker 3So are you worried about it as an HR professional? Are you worried about it taking jobs away from your people?
Developing Positive Mindsets and Behaviors
Speaker 1I personally am not Again. Like I said, it's involving technology. I see it as a tool, as an aid. I see it as helping my team members grow and learn. When we hire from outside, usually we hire starting out at assistance and then we like to promote from within. When you come in as an HR assistant, you have the opportunity to grow and I see AI or chat, GPT or whatever, helping those team members grow and using it as a tool on their end to take control of their own growth and development.
Speaker 3With that note, I'm going to talk about a couple of the mindsets and behaviors. First is communication. Like any new technology, it's a change management effort. You have to help people understand what's coming, develop a level of comfort with it. That's the standard adoption cycle of any new tool. So being clear and concise in my communication and also facilitating two-way communication. So it's just upping the game on humans, humans working with humans. We know the AI is gonna do a bunch of stuff that we don't have to, but what we do with humans we have to do better.
Speaker 3The second is growth mindset that idea that, as things are changing, I need to have the mental framework that it's safe to grow, creating psychological safety as leaders and for people who are already curious and positively disposed to change, they're going to thrive. For people who are not, how do we help them get there? Then the next is adaptiveness. One is how I think.
Speaker 3Two is what I do and what practices do I have that allow me, when I'm overwhelmed, to step back, recalibrate, just like I have a breathing technique that when I'm feeling overwhelmed, nobody knows I'm doing the breathing technique, I don't turn blue, nothing weird happens and I can just lower my heartbeat. So how do we take on practices that allow us to sit with the discomfort that is going to be natural and for some of us it's going to be really uncomfortable, for first, first, um, next is emotional intelligence and I would say first is the self-awareness and self-management. So again, I'm, I know I'm uncomfortable when I'm doing something that could cause me to look stupid in front of people. So do the breathing technique, do the practice, but I'm never going to be rehearsed enough that I am without risk.
Speaker 3So, how do I manage myself? And then how do I manage others, or help them manage themselves? Next is abundance mindset, or help them manage themselves. Next is abundance mindset, and for me that is the ability to see a positive future. So one stay away from Terminator movies, not helpful. How do I put myself in a place where I am consuming information that helps me see the possibilities? And I'm not saying be delusional, but I am saying be optimistic.
Speaker 1How would you suggest that somebody grow and train themselves to get into that abundance mindset?
Speaker 3I was thinking about that this morning. Actually Some of these sound trite, but the affirmations so reaffirming. When I get up in the morning I think about what positive outcome I would like to create in the day and then what steps I'm going to do to make that happen. Because if I'm on autopilot, we are wired to identify risks and manage and be afraid. My brain wants me to stay alive, so it's continually do risks and manage for it. I've got to reprogram myself literally to equally identify what I'm grateful for. What's the opportunity, what am I excited about?
Managing Risk and Expertise in AI
Speaker 3I grew up with a dad who was in military intelligence and one of my stories is he's been retired for a long time. He's in his 80s. They moved to a new house a bathroom upstairs and there's a window in the bathroom. House bathroom upstairs and there's a window in the bathroom. He wanted to put the bathtub under the window so he could shoot out the window if bad people came and then duck into the bathtub. So this is the upbringing I had. The world is full of risky people. I have to be very mindful of how I'm thinking, or it's easy for me to fall in the unconscious pattern of the world's risky whatever that is. I guess now we call it mindfulness, but it's a constant check-in of what do I want to create in my world. Pay attention, because otherwise many of our minds are scary.
Speaker 1Yeah, and then your next skill is domain expertise. I feel like this one is going to be a good one.
Speaker 3This is not a new skill, but you talked about where you're using chat GPT in disciplinary actions. So your expertise is HR in disciplinary actions. So your expertise is HR. You will need to be an expert in your thing. So if ChatGPT tells you to go down and smack them in the head, you're going to say a little too much. Ncis, not enough good HR management. We don't smack people in the head. The AI will spit out what it's fed. Right now, there's a level of bias that we have to pay attention to. If it surfs the internet, there are all kinds of things that I would say are ethically sketchy. I need to be, I would say, militant about the outcome, output and my domain expertise, along with my AI skills, which is the next one. I need to know how to use the things you talked about using Claude and chat GPT didn't highway.
Speaker 3Prompted because the better the prompt, the better or the outcome.
Speaker 1I will say. I will say that there was a question that I asked ChatGPT once. I think it was about FMLA. It was a question that I knew the answer to, but I could not figure it out. And it gave me an answer and I was like that doesn't sound right. And so I went and fact-checked it and I was correct it wasn't all of the correct information. So, yeah, you do really need to fact-check what it gives you.
Speaker 3And I think your wording there was really important. It is partial information but not complete, so it may not hiccup or lie, but it may just give you a surface response. And so then there are some prompting techniques to ask it to elaborate on things that may help it go deeper, because if you're researching FMLA and it gives you incomplete information, someone may make a life decision based on that. So this pair of domain and AI skills together helps us work with the tools, just like we needed to learn how to use a laptop Conceptually similar, it just is. It's a new tool. The next is analytical skills decision making and systems thinking, and I put all of those together Again. Let's go back to your FMLA example. Somebody comes in with a question about when is it available?
Speaker 3I'm having a hysterectomy or my spouse is having a child and I want to take paternity leave or leave adopted or whatever the range of things is. You need to quickly be able to analyze their situation, analyze the policies, advise them and make good decisions. And then the systems thinking piece to me is I need to understand the context in which they're operating, that if I just zoom in on the very specifics that I know I may miss a bigger picture like tell me what your spouse spouse. Tell me what leave your spouse has and what. What are your goals in raising this new adopted child? How do you want to do they speak English, are they a newborn or a teenager? Help me understand the situation so I can advise you well, and I think in the past we have often given a very narrow answer and consequently, again, just like you said, with the AI giving kind of surface information, we as humans do the same thing if we're not being systemic. So your example was really helpful to illustrate also the systems thinking piece.
Speaker 1I'm going to have to. I'm gonna time out real quick. I need to switch my Zoom account over, so I need to send you a new invite because, I'm on my personal one and I'm supposed I thought I gave you my invitation on my work one, so it's going to time me out in eight minutes.
Speaker 3Do you want to try to finish in eight minutes?
Speaker 1Yeah, go ahead if you can Sure.
Speaker 3The next is creativity, and we as humans have an ability to create things that didn't exist. As of this moment, our algorithms can analyze and synthesize and come up with results based on the analysis. So what it is brilliant at is taking a massive amount of data and coming to a conclusion using an algorithm. It is not yet creating a solution innovatively, and I realize that's a fine line. And, as I say that, I just looked at a tool today that, when prompted, creates a video. So in the creative space, there were things that is doing. There are still things that is not. So I think human creativity is will continue to be important.
Speaker 3And then the last one is risk awareness understanding the risks that this creates. So you'll have to update your HR policies, right? How do we know the risk of missing disinformation? The World Economic Forum in Davos this year said the largest risk in the two-year window is missing disinformation, and a lot of that is created by AI. So how do we create policies and govern organizations in an era where some of this stuff is new? We don't yet anticipate what it's going to be, so we need to be continually aware of the risks and proactive about addressing them. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1I know, on social media at least, a lot of what do they call it the deep fake videos that have been going out and it's just crazy in how real they sound and how real they look.
Speaker 3So in that case and that's really what this World Economic Forum report was looking at is, in the next two years, 60% of the world's population will go to will vote and are people being misinformed worse than already just bad political ads by these deep fakes? So I think there are absolutely risks and it will be harder, and we've all gotten the bad emails that tried to. You just inherited millions of dollars from your long lost uncle, but they couldn't put a sentence together so you knew it wasn't real yeah but now, with some of these tools, it will be harder to spot the fake.
Speaker 3Just think about how much better if you use Grammarly. I don't do anything without Grammarly, because I realize after reading it that I must have looked intoxicated, often by just quickly multitasking, hit, send, and now it at least catches the things that make me look completely scatterbrained. Those same tools used by people phishing, for either click on something or give me your bank information.
Speaker 1Our IC department. They're really good about training us on the phishing emails. So we have something set up with our email accounts where, if we feel like something looks fake, we can click a phish alert and it will send it to whomever to review to see if it's really a phishing email or not. And I get so many random emails a day. I probably phish alert 80% of my emails, to be honest, because you never really know and a lot of them come from outside the company.
Speaker 3So that's another good example of having the tools, because the quote bad guys are using the same tools, so as they get smarter, we need to get smarter. So, as we're wrapping up, what are you most excited about with ai?
Speaker 1good question. Personally, I really like continuous, continuous learning, so I see myself using it in that aspect. When I want to learn something new, I can get impatient and I want to know it and learn it now and just going into chat to VT and asking it a basic question, and maybe I only want bullet points, or I can ask for a summarization of an article or something like that, so I don't have to read through the whole thing, I just want to know the main points. So I personally am excited for the continuous learning part of it beautiful.
Speaker 3I go to a big. It's possible that we cure a lot of diseases that have our friends and family for years. What would it be like if we didn't have cancer or we didn't have Alzheimer's or some of those debilitating illnesses? So I'm hopeful that we cure diseases and, if you want to throw in complete optimism, find world peace. But I'm not sure how AI is going to do that for us.
Speaker 1All right. Thank you so much, maureen, in joining us on this episode of Mic'd. I truly enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to seeing more of your content out on LinkedIn and potentially another book.
Speaker 3It'll be a while, but thank you.
Speaker 1Thank you for listening. Stay tuned for our next episode.