Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
With the ChatGPT revolution upon us, many business leaders have been wondering if artificial intelligence can have a productive application within their business.
Sure, AI can help students plagiarize an essay into a good grade, but can it help companies increase their teams’ productivity?
One option that my team at Ambition In Motion has been testing is integrating AI into our goal-setting system via our AIM Insights program.
Here’s how it works. Every month, we ask the direct reports of a leader to input their goals. We ask direct reports to determine their own goals (as opposed to the manager) because research shows that people who set their own goals are much more likely to achieve them.
This has been a great system so far, but one challenge is that not every employee is adept at consistently setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals. The issue is that, while most people can understand the idea of a SMART goal, it takes practice to get comfortable setting and achieving SMART goals each month.
Employees who can independently set their own SMART goals have a massive ripple effect on the entire company. Their leader trusts them and doesn’t need to be constantly looking over his or her shoulder to make sure they are on track.
Both leaders and employees can achieve greater balance with their work. As opposed to checking, rechecking, and rechecking again a direct report’s work, leaders (and employees) can use their time effectively, and everyone can stop work at a reasonable hour.
How do we get to a point where employees are autonomously setting their own SMART goals?
AI!
The best leaders share an objective their team needs to achieve and the key results they believe it takes to achieve that outcome. They then empower their direct reports to achieve those key results in whatever fashion they deem fit. Remember, you are paying these people for their skills and expertise—learn to trust their instincts.
This leadership style works when direct reports know how to effectively set SMART goals. It falls flat when employees don’t know how to set SMART goals.
The reason AI can be so powerful in this process is the immediacy of the feedback. Behavior change and positive habit formation occur when one’s pattern is disrupted, and the feedback received is immediate.
Leaders could make themselves available immediately after a direct report has set goals, in order to share feedback on whether the goal is SMART. But that is incredibly time-intensive and not conducive to the leaders achieving their own tasks that they need to focus on.
AI changes all of that with immediate feedback. In our AIM Insights program, when employees set goals every month, our AI integration tells those employees immediately whether their goal is SMART. If it is, AIM Insights gives employees immediate positive reinforcement. If it is not, AIM Insights gives employees suggestions on how they can rewrite that goal as a SMART goal.
This AI integration into AIM Insights has increased the number of SMART goals set by employees, their ability to set SMART goals on their own and, subsequently, those employees’ and leaders’ productivity.
The ripple effect ramifications from this type of innovation can be huge for the productivity of teams. Sure, employees will be more productive in less time worked, but they will also be more resilient.
Employees (and, really, everyone) tend to be resistant to change, so when a company pivots its business model or the way it works, the proposed change is always met with some amount of resistance.
When the process in which employees set goals doesn’t change—only the objective—they are more likely to embrace the change in direction because the way in which they work and achieve results doesn’t materially change, only the objective and key results. This makes for a more resilient team.
This can positively affect the way companies integrate people and strategies during mergers and acquisitions, enter new business opportunities and markets, succession-plan and promote people, and do any other action that might disrupt the way in which employees currently work.
Companies and leaders that can quickly adopt AI into productive applications will give themselves a major boost into the future.•
__________
Mintz is founder of Ambition in Motion, a firm that helps companies increase employee engagement and collaboration by implementing corporate mentor programs.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.