What to say when your team is scared about AI (and what not to say)

Lia (00:00): There is a lot of fear in the workplace right now. Every single day that goes by, there’s a new headline about layoffs and replacing people with AI. And I think there’s no person out there that isn’t at least thinking about what does the next five years look like? What is my job gonna look like? Or my friends or my spouses or my kids future? These are these questions that all of us are facing.

And as a leader, you might be freaking out wondering the same things. But I say this because as a leader, it is our responsibility to create some kind of semblance of stability on our teams. Maybe we didn’t ask for that, but that is what we signed up for. And that is what we are being called to do right now. It doesn’t mean we have to have all the answers and it doesn’t mean we gaslight folks and it doesn’t mean we say, nothing’s gonna change and we really have no idea.

It means we stay in the conversation and we figure out a strategy for right now how we support our team members in kind of making sense of what’s out there for them. And that’s what I wanna talk about today is how to talk about AI with your team, how to make space for folks to learn and experiment and utilize tools without feeling like they are creating the thing that will be replacing them because of course they’re gonna be doing that pretty begrudgingly.

How do you just deal with what we’re facing today? I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what the future holds either, but I do know that when we stay in the conversation and we show our teams, hey, we’re here, we’re all trying to figure this out together, things will go a lot better than if we don’t do that. All right, let’s dive in.

I mentioned on the show last week, I have been diving head first into cloud code. I’ve got terminal open, I’m building web apps. I’m working with clients to figure out how to really supplement their workflows to give their team members superpowers. And as I’ve been doing this, I’ve been feeling really optimistic. Now, if you’re a long time listener of the show, you might’ve heard my tune was a little bit different before. I feel like I still do.

we are having the wrong conversations around AI. So much of it is around replacing people. Should we do layoffs to cut costs and then figure out later? I think we’re not having the right conversation. What I want to do on this show is equip you with the tools to have the right conversation because there is so much out there that we can do to actually save our team members time and give them space back to focus on the things that they really should be doing. We can also…

be utilizing things like Claude code and building out skills and like Claude skills to build our own skills and give ourselves the ability to remove a lot of wasted time, duplication of efforts, all the stuff that I already support you with when we talk about these things on the show. It’s actually, know, automating some of the systems. So there’s a lot there. But when we talk about AI with our team, before we even talk about what’s possible, we’ve got to remember

what the people on the other end are thinking. Where are they going the moment we say AI? And I’m gonna tell you, it’s not a hypothetical question, it’s not rhetorical. They’re thinking, my gosh, you are getting ready to replace my job. Or they’re thinking, gosh, how much longer is it gonna be until I don’t have a job anymore? I’m not guessing. I know that is what people are thinking. That is what people talk about every single day when I meet with business owners.

or VPs or high up leaders, they’re feeling like, I don’t know if people are thinking about that. Your teams, when I talk to your team members, the employees, the folks on the ground, that is what every single one is saying. So just like newsflash, if you feel like, I don’t know if that’s really the case, that’s what we’re all thinking about. With that said, what does it look like if you go to your team and you say,

Hey, everyone, like learn Claude, it’s the wave of the future. You you need to be up to speed on this and you don’t say anything besides that. What do you think goes through their minds? ⁓ here we go, I knew it was happening. This is it, it’s only a matter of time and it starts spinning. And even if your team members are super tech savvy or super into it and adopt these tools right away, there is a good chance they still have this looming feeling in the back of their minds, like, gosh.

this is it for me, there’s gonna be a day when you’re gonna say, okay, well, like the tool is working really well, like what do need you for? This is what’s going on and that is because we haven’t set any context at all. Now, when that starts to happen, you see productivity dip because people think, well, I’m just gonna stick around and get that paycheck till I don’t have a choice anymore. I see a lot of folks in corporate teams feeling like, well, especially if you’re working in tech and you’re building software that’s…

designed to be replacing roles. Meta has a planned set of layoffs coming May 20th. They have publicly said to lay off at least 10,000 people. think that’s 10 % of their workforce, if not more, because of AI. They have said that. So like, this isn’t stuff I’m guessing at and making up. These are things that in big tech is being talked about publicly as like, So of course your teamers are thinking about this. Now, in my opinion,

If we were the thousands of people that I worked with and supported and being better leaders, I’d have to think, well, that’s not gonna be good. That’s not gonna create the right culture that we wanna create inside of our team. That’s not gonna create the right motivation. That’s gonna create a Lord of the Flies situation. But there is a belief in some companies that we should scare people into, know, getting, working faster as if we’re gonna outrun AI. I’m not trying to give you a tools to outrun AI. I don’t think that’s possible.

I think what we can do is to understand where we work with AI, where we utilize AI as a superpower, where we utilize it to supercharge our own skills, where we supplement things that we weren’t very good at or that took forever or that we are reinventing the wheel every single time with our clients. And we use it in that way so that we become even better at the human stuff that we should be doing. That’s what I see as possible.

And that’s the conversation I encourage you to have with your teams is to figure out like, what is your strategy? What is your belief about this? And then how are you helping your team members figure out this yes and. And this is what a lot of folks have been bringing me in to do is to look at, okay, let’s look at where we have these inefficiencies. Where’s their duplication of efforts, especially agencies that have to do some kind of like a lot of upfront research on kicking projects off.

or on research and strategy and be kind of putting out the same reports over and over. They’re bringing me in to evaluate, okay, where can we utilize and set up our own custom cloud skills, which I then build for them so that they’re totally dialed in so that they can save their team members 10, 15, 20 hours per project, per team member on things that they were getting really stuck on. So this is one of the ways that we’re using these tools to give our team members superpowers.

supercharge the skills instead of just saying yeah like it’s a matter of time until you’re out of here. And we I think there’s a way to reframe a lot of this fear by talking about our own vision as leaders. Our own vision as of incorporating it into giving ourselves more space to do the human stuff. Now for example

When I’ve recently built out a tool for the snippets tool that I talk about on the show, this is coming soon. Right now I’m beta testing it with a few of my clients to make sure I work all of the bugs. It was a Google Doc. I built it into a web app in cloud code so that we can identify proactively trends across what’s getting done, what priorities are coming back, where people are getting stuck, where bandwidth is at. So this snippets tool that gives you a bird’s eye view into what people are working on instead of having it as a Google Doc.

I’m using, I used AI to build this into a web app that gives you these real time trends. This is pretty freaking awesome. Now I didn’t replace myself in having that as a tool. I use this so that I can have something at a glance, show me what’s happening on this team. And then I can go back through it with my clients and say, hey, when this kind of thing is showing up week after week, here is the…

here’s actually what’s going on behind the scenes. I can then say, because I know that context with that client, I can say, ⁓ you know, we’ve struggled with Joe in the past, feeling, you know, wanting that more recognition. Now I’m seeing this show up again. Let’s try this. And we have that human conversation. So we’re utilizing a tool to consolidate the data, help us extract the themes so that we can then apply a human solution to it. I’m not asking AI to just spit something out for us.

No, it’s pulling together the data that would take a lot of manual work to find so that we have an answer there. And this is why I’m so excited, right? Is because when we are finding what are things that we actually couldn’t do before or would have taken a lot of different connection points behind the scenes, how can we use that to bring it together? This is where the superpowers are. Same thing as I mentioned with my agency clients. By creating custom cloud skills that

that run a lot of these searches and different connection points that they were doing to be able to prep for client kickoffs, this is not replacing that account rep on the job. This is giving that person the ability to actually have a better and more informed conversation that can then support their client in achieving their goals faster. We’re not replacing the human, we’re replacing some of the stuff that actually was hurting that business from being able to deliver a better result.

Those are the ways that we talk about the power of AI without it feeling like it’s you or the computer and one of you isn’t gonna win this battle. So there’s a lot out here. And I think, again, if you’re a long time listener, can see my tune has shifted against, hey, I’m nervous. There’s a lot that we don’t know to, hey, as these tools and capabilities have gotten so much stronger and so much more fine tune.

I think now we’re at this moment, we’re using it very, very strategically and in a very customized way with our teams. We finally have a better way to talk about the strategy of utilizing AI. A year ago when it was like, we’re typing into chat GBT and we’re just copying and pasting and half of it was garbage, that’s where we weren’t.

quite in a maturity, I think, to be able to have a really clear strategy around it for how to engage with it in our teams. You know, it’s always been a really powerful tool for saving time, reducing steps, you know, the note taking is obviously like stuff like that. But I think right now with the ability to design something that is taking the things that are really the biggest sticking points on your team, it’s bringing together all the things that I always talk about to life.

It’s not you’re placing you in feedback conversations. It’s not letting you skip the hard part of delegating, which is kind of figuring out the context and what success looks like. It’s giving these other, I would say, kind of periphery activities that take away from the core of what you’re doing. That’s what, that’s where we can really save time. Give you another example. ⁓ Clinicians or therapists or some coaches, you know, they capture notes.

of their sessions and everything’s like that so that they can ⁓ just kind of have a longitudinal plan. Utilizing AI for analyzing trends and patterns and figuring out, like what’s happening across the board? That can be really useful. Now we don’t take that at face value. Now we layer in the fact that we were in that session, we were in that conversation. We say, here’s a perspective based on a transcript.

Now I was actually in that conversation or your team member or whoever, what is the actual truth in the middle? What is the actual reality? And I’ll give you an example. ⁓ Take any meeting where you have your meeting notes transcribed, right? So you’re using Fathom or maybe Zoom is doing it or Otter or whatever these tools are. And it’ll give you the top points, you know, action steps. If you read through those,

I’m gonna say at least half the time, maybe 75 % of time, in my opinion, when I read through that, the main, main point wasn’t fully accurate of what the AI captured. The AI thought, you know, this thing was mentioned a few times. So then like by virtue of like understanding language learning models or whatever they’ve captured because it was mentioned a few times, it must be more important, right?

What it doesn’t have is your own context. It doesn’t know that, okay, this thing was emphasized more, or this person has this title. It doesn’t sound like the most important title, but they’re the most influential person in the room. Or you have the context that you had the one-on-one with someone before, and you know that, hey, this is a popular thing to say, but it’s actually not the priority. This is why the human still has to be in the conversation. And this is what I want you to reassure your team members with, is…

Don’t just spit the notes out and send them to the client. Go through them, read it, figure out what is the piece in the middle. Add that layer of personalization. Your team members, when they decide to opt out of being a human, I was gonna say, of doing that human piece, and they just wanna hand off that AI output without looking at it, that’s their choice too. So what we need to do as leaders is show them how to…

apply this to take it to massage it, to use it as a data point, but not the all or nothing, right? That’s part of the conversation. And again, that’s what I’m helping businesses with. It’s so exciting. There is so much out there. ⁓ It’s a scary time. People are worried. Am I obsolete? Nobody knows what’s happening, you know, past the next six months. Seriously, it’s weird, but we’re here. We’ve got to show up. We’ve got to equip people with the tools. And if you need support, I’m so excited to help guide you on this journey.

Reach out at hello at liagarvin.com and we will build what this looks like to just figure this out and have these conversations with your teams. There is a lot of questions that we don’t have the answers to and we don’t have to make up the answers. We just gotta stay in the conversation. All right, see you next time.