Stop Expecting Employees To Think Like You

If you’ve ever felt that weird push-pull about AI, you’re not alone. The real risk isn’t that ChatGPT makes people lazy, it’s that we use it like a vending machine for quick answers and then check out mentally. I want the opposite: AI as a thinking partner that clears the repetitive noise so we can do the work that actually requires leadership, creativity, and judgment.

We dig into a practical leadership problem that shows up everywhere: getting what’s in your head into your team’s heads with real clarity. When people need to hear something “seven times,” it’s usually not because they’re slow, it’s because the message is still foggy or loaded with assumptions. I explain how AI can help you map your ideas, tighten your communication, and build a clear narrative your team can act on, especially in an attention economy where distraction is constant.

Then we get hands-on with AI for business process mapping and workflow optimization. I share prompt patterns you can use right away: tell the model what role to assume, outline your current process, ask where you’re redundant, and request a streamlined version plus a communication plan for your team. From there, we step into the next level with AI agents and agentic workflows, including a real example of how an AI review can surface issues like brand voice drift and suggest a weekly voice calibration loop. The goal is simple: draft faster, lead clearer, and redesign work in a way people can follow.

If you found this useful, subscribe, share the show with someone who leads a team, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Transcript

Free Your Brain For Creativity

Redesign Work And Lead The Shift

Prompts For Process Mapping Clarity

The Employee Expectation Trap

Agentic Workflows And AI Feedback

Turn AI Output Into Team Plans

Subscribe And Book A Session

SPEAKER_00 0:04

AI made simple live. We've been talking about a lot of people have uh a little tension when this uh using AI in their business or the discussion about teachers being worried about uh their kids, their students using AI and that um reducing their critical thinking skills. But here's the deal if that's all that you're you're expecting from um AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, any of the others, if that's all you're expecting that is to quickly get you um an answer and you're disengaged and you just want to get this out of the way, yeah, I can do that. And it can reduce the you know, we use a lot of energy when we think, and our brains are just designed to have shortcuts. And if there's um there are instances where you don't need to waste a lot of time thinking about um little things that aren't important, but in the context of learning, in the context of leading, um AI releases you to be creative, it releases you to be a leader, it releases you to become what you really are. This um this being that has this creative energy, you potentially have an answer, a creative answer, a unique way of seeing something that could be solved that many people would be uh appreciative of. And yet, if you never get the chance to pull your energy away from um repetitive minutiae that pulls you down, and you you're not able to redirect your energy into where you're really valuable, impactful, brilliant, um, encouraging. Well, that's that's something that you can control, that's something that you can release yourself from. And that's um, you know, my main message uh of implementing as a leader in your business, in your organization, in your classroom, uh as a as someone in your family, why not? Why not step into something and ask what if questions, what's going on? So that's what today's discussion is about. Is like, come on, let's um, let's take advantage of this, let's move forward, and let's not just use AI, let's think about it. You know, AI is, you know, people are using it, starting to use it to write an email, and it's impactful, or summarize that meeting, or or make me a list, right? And and that's excellent, but that's like your first tiptoe into using it. But when you really sit down and start to back up and look at what all you could be doing, the real opportunity isn't just for doing your work, it's like let's design how work happens, and then let's use it to lead people through that redesign. I'm gonna show you a couple of examples today, but this is a big leadership shift. The biggest challenge any leader has is clearly communicating what's in their head, what they're thinking, and getting their team, the folks that they're they're leading, to get the idea and to take it and they pull it into their area and they add their unique value on top of it. But if you can't clearly communicate what you're thinking and where you want to go and what your vision is, then that that um that sets you up to struggle as a leader, you know, and so your biggest challenge isn't your people. Often that's where a lot of the complaint goes. Oh, my employees are just not getting it, or they don't, and I've told them several times, but we've all heard that saying people don't really hear you until you tell them seven times. And think about why is it that people need to hear it from you seven times before the light bulb goes off? That's that is that's not your the folks that are following you, that's not their problem, that's your problem. You need to resolve that, but that's the truth. Our brains are looking for a shortcut. We're designed to have a bias, we're designed to be um to our brain is designed to reserve energy on things that don't matter. You've you've heard us, you've heard people say this is the attention economy, and then when you get on social media, everything's very um clickbaity. Why is that? It's because it's trying to grab your brain out of wherever it's daydreaming and pull it into focus, and so clear clarity in your communication just does that, and so using AI to do that moves from like, well, this is just how we do it, to hey, let's sit here and map. I want to use AI to map this out so that it can be more clear about where I want to go and what I want to do. And so don't don't just think of AI just to help me get this task done. If you back up and as a leader, go, all right, this task is a part of a process. I wonder, I wonder how we can improve this process. So here's some examples of how we can we can do this. It's like, you know, wait a minute, here's my process and tell it your process, and then go, all right. So I'm curious of what a better version of our existing process would look like, and then give me a plan, a suggested um way to communicate it clearly to my team. We're gonna move in this direction and why. So here's uh here's some prompts that you can use. You know, when you when you're using Chat GPT, you're wanting to tell it, I'm looking for you to assume this role. And here's what I'm wanting to do. I want you to be in this role, I want you to be an expert process mapping consultant, for example, and then I'm wanting to onboard a new client, set up a um a follow-up process to get reviews or whatever that may be, but help me help me map out the full process from start to finish, and then how do I streamline it? You can pop this in there. I mean, this is just a conversation that you would have with an employee that you trusted, right? This would this is a conversation you would have with an employee that's actually kind of engaged and cares about the business and cares about your customers or cares about your your church or whatever it is, whatever organization it is that you're leading. And so you would have you could spend the time and get prepared, and it gives you helps you leapfrog in your leadership process. Here's another one. Okay, so here's we actually have a process. Now you're an optimization expert, and here's what our workflow looks like. And then where are we redundant? Where where do we have uh steps that are unnecessary? And where can we can like plug in more automation or AI to improve this version of our work? This is huge. This is this is you know, one of my frustrations with uh you know with my employees is I had uh expectation that they think like me and and and and they don't. They're they don't have the backstory of my business and why I started it and all the struggles that I went through with it, and what was what was the energy that was pushing me through the hard times, they don't have that. They bought in, they want to be a part of it, but when they go home, they have a family, they have another vision, they have another life that they're leading. And so to expect them to be all excited to sit down and and understand it like you, that's an improper expectation and only sets you up for frustration. And to your employees' um defense, they want to make you happy, but they're not, they're not set up with um the thinking process, they haven't been in your shoes, and so you're expecting them to step up to something they're not qualified to do, and they don't want to fail you, and so they're gonna react in whatever way they react. It may be defensive, they may be um intimidated, they may be offended yeah, they just may shut down, and you're you're just setting up a situation where you're brainstorming with the wrong people, they're not set up to help you. That's why you masterminds exist. That's why these organizations where business, like-minded business people go to and they get energy and ideas from people that have been in their shoes. Well, this is a same experience that you can um have. You can have a tool that actually understands you, actually, is an expert in many areas, and can help you define ways to improve what you're doing, and then map out how you're going to present it to the folks you lead. Another way here, let's we're let's say you're a systems architect. You can ex you can expect that you need you've got a system or a process that needs to be built out, you need a workflow, then you can expect this thing to lay it out and bring it to you and be like, wow, this is saving me a lot of time and energy. Let me show an example. So here's a uh a process. We have an agentic, you know, and right now most of the conversations that we've had in this live stream with is how to use a chat bot, an AI chat bot to do these uh one-off projects for you. But the next level you're gonna start hearing more about are AI agents, where you have multiple AI assistants that perform various roles. Okay, for for example, um maybe you have a marketing analyst agent that's a specialist, and in a certain step, that marketing analyst agent is going to go out and do research and bring back the analytics, and then you're gonna have an agent that's gonna take those analytics and is gonna be really good at discerning what the analytics show, and then it can take and go, you can hand this off. So, this is an agentic workflow that um we've built out, right? And so I put it in here and I asked the chatbot, let's study this process and tell me where we have an opportunity to improve, and let's just see what it does. It's gonna study this, and I didn't even tell it the role to assume, but it's bringing back ideas, an evaluation. It took the time to go and study it, and then it brought back really good things that maybe I didn't consider. So, like for example, um, the brand voice analysis agent is well placed, but its feedback loop only touches QA when consistency fails. Voice drift. So create a voice calibration data set that the brand voice agent refreshes weekly from top performing content. This is a great idea. It's complicated, would have never thought about it, but now this is something that that would be like an improvement on what I'm doing. So see how it went through and put put in suggestions. We don't have a human oversight. It's implied, but it's unclear where. Well, that's a great, that's a great observation. So let's say you're you're implementing um the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS. Well, this is a great way to look at your system and get some feedback. And so let's say that there's one area in here that I liked. All right, the brand voice uh drift risk. All right, so I'm gonna take, I'm just gonna take this and go, all right, uh, give me um three three ways to uh consider implementing this. All right. So here we go. Let's see. So now we got three options to consider. We don't have to ask for one, but we it can bring us three, and then I can take I can take one of these that I kind of like, and then sit down with my leadership team and talk about this. All right, so let's say let's say I want to do all right, number one. All right, so all right, set up a um let's do let's do this. Okay, I'm gonna bring my leadership team into this, and what I want to do is help me set up a simple presentation to to get them conceptually up to speed on why uh I'm doing this and what my expectations would be. Make a little presentation that makes them easy to catch up to where I am, and let's uh make it about number one, the voice calibration loop. So get me a little bit of a plan that I can share with the team in our next meeting. And so now we're getting now we're getting a rough draft that I can take and tweak and go into the meeting prepared to lead this change. It's gonna give us a backstory, why it matters, what what what is a voice. You know, there's a lot of assumptions that my team that I'm bringing into this understand everything, and that's an improper thing, and that's that's um foggy leadership, right? And so now I can bring an agenda that gives confidence, gives clarity, and then creates energy to implement a plan. Where what we're gonna end up with is gonna be different. This is our first draft, but after I bring a team in, they get clear, they see what the proper expectations are, then they apply their perspective and their higher value, then this plan's gonna be even better. But here I've walked into the situation, I've given them clarity, I'm giving them confidence, and then they're able to chip in with a clear understanding. And this this power, this power of leadership, you know, some people have it naturally, but um often most of us as leaders, we stepped in because somebody had to. And that's that's where this becomes leverage. This becomes something more than just just uh um more than just using AI, it's thinking with it and leading, being a good leader. And so if you're getting value from these, you know, I'd love that you you like, make sure you subscribe, share it with some folks that might really appreciate that, that you uh work with or spend time with. But if you know, if you want to know how to start implementing AI in your business, um this is a place to start. We'll set up a strategy session, we'll go into a clarity session. I'm gonna interview you, we're gonna get clarity, we're gonna we're gonna do a lot of cool things, but you're gonna get a custom GPT, it's gonna be tailored, it's gonna help you capture this, it's gonna be the foundation for your AI SEO, but it's also gonna set you up to lead with clarity. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter as well. And come set up a strategy session. Let's go. Let's get a clarity session going. That's what we do. I'm Steve R O I Brown. This is AI Made Simple Live. We'll see you next week on another episode of AI Made Simple.