Tag: enablement

I like these 4 ways to use AI for coaching and productivity

Taken from Ethan Mollick’s, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. The book is a practical guide for understanding AI, it’s implications, and how to leverage it for personal and professional life. Recommended.

I like the below applications because it forces the user, presumably your team member, to be curious. I’m not an AI expert, but based on what I’ve read it appears that AI’s utility may be a result of the quality of a user’s curiosity.

I’m pushing the Customer Success Managers (CSMs) on my team to use prompts 1, 3, and 4 daily.

  1. As a coach. 
    • Prompt: I was thinking of sending an email to a client, but I am busy and I’m scared of the outcome and I don’t think I want to send the email until I have…..  Can you reframe my failure to send an email as a loss rather than a default option?  Make the framing vivid.
  2. Ask the AI to impersonate people.  Famous public figures are best:
    • Prompt: “Act as Bill Gates” and then ask for business advice.  
    • Prompt: “Act as a witty comedian and generate some subject lines for my email that get people to laugh”
    • Prompt: “You are an expert and consultant at performance marketing. How would you present these performance insights to your clients in a way they would understand and feel secure in their investments?”
  3. As a teacher.
    • Prompt: “You will be my negotiation teacher.  You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a negotiation.  You will fill the role of one party, I will fill the role of the other party.  You will ask for my response in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it.  After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says.  You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation.  You will give me a harder scenario if I do ell, and an easier one if I fail.”
  4. As a data analyst partner:
    • Prompt: “Adopt the persona of a data scientist.  Here is a spreadsheet I’ve uploaded.  (define the data).  How would you answer these questions…. using the data given?”

Certainty and confidence.

When you are enabling your talent on a new skill, they may express a lack of execution confidence. They may use words like “I’m confused about…” or “I don’t know about…” Your temptation might be to ask, “why didn’t you ask more questions in the training,” but that might be premature.

Principle: slow and methodical practice yields greater long-run returns.

I studied piano in college — music education and music composition. At a collegiate level, music students are taught that slow and methodical practice will lead to faster and more accurate execution. In the music world, near-perfect execution is the bar.

To create a practice similar to how a music student would practice, consider these steps.

Before training:

  1. Identify the outcome/output required of the process being trained.
  2. Identify why that outcome is important.
  3. Break the process down into bite-sized fragments.
  4. Identify a catchy metaphor that simplifies the process. “It’s like baking an apple pie,” or “it’s like sky diving,” or anything that gives the trainee a framework to understand the process.

Training:

  1. Explain the outcome and why it matters — steps 1 and 2 above.
  2. Explain the metaphor.
  3. Teach each step in the process from beginning to end.
  4. Teach the process from the end back to the beginning.
  5. Reiterate the metaphor.
  6. Ask your talent to teach it back to you.
  7. Look for the gaps in what they teach.
  8. Practice the gaps.
  9. Practice the whole process.

Finally, pick real-world low hanging fruit and push your talent out of the nest.