You'll Never Know Enough About AI | The Right Call S2E1

Loaves and Leadership

We are never going to be good enough at AI. Fortunately, that's not our job.

Our job is leading people. And AI is changing what that takes.

The law of the land

Years ago, when the Affordable Care Act passed, I asked my brother what he was going to do about it. He sells health and life insurance to small and mid-size businesses, in a business our dad built. Neither of us liked the law. His answer stuck with me: "It's the law of the land. I'll figure out how I can leverage this."

Over the next few months he reshaped his business. His clients were better served, and the business did as well or better than before.

For a long time I read Dale Carnegie's principle cooperate with the inevitable as "suck it up and deal with it." Don't fight it out loud. Just roll with the punches. My brother showed me what Carnegie meant. Co-operate: operate in conjunction with. This is the situation. How do we make it work for us?

The wrong question about AI

Most of what I hear about AI is about minimizing the damage. How do we keep it from hurting our business?

That's the wrong question. A better one: How can AI make our business better? How can we serve our customers at a higher level, take better care of our people, and make our own work easier?

And for leaders, one more: How can AI help us create the conditions that make our best people want to stay?

That question matters more now, because AI hands our best people the knowledge and the tools to go out on their own, faster than ever.

Leadership is an environment

Eisenhower said leadership is getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. That's not untrue, but it puts the whole weight on the leader. I'd have to be near perfect. I'm a Dale Carnegie trainer, and I still fall short a lot.

Dale Carnegie defines it differently: leadership is creating the environment that influences people to achieve group goals. That isn't all about me. It's the culture, how we interact, how we train people to work with each other, and who we bring in.

The military does this on purpose. Navy boot camp teaches you to operate in the Navy. Army boot camp teaches you the Army. The service academies do the same for officers. Every branch has its own identity, and people learn to succeed inside it.

Sewell Automotive does it too. Since 1911 they've built customers for life, and they treat their employees the way they want their employees to treat customers. They are so selective about hiring that someone once posted a comparison in one of their boardrooms: it is easier to get hired by the FBI than by Sewell. People come into an environment that's almost custom-made for them to flourish, and then they're trained to flourish in it.

The question shapes the answer

Our minds go where our questions point. Ask "Why can't I do this?" and we'll get a list of reasons. Ask "How can I make this happen?" and we draw on the same reservoir and get a completely different answer. AI works the same way.

Barnes & Noble seems to have asked, "How can the internet help us sell books?" A good question. Jeff Bezos seems to have asked, "How can we serve our customers at a higher level?" Neither was a bad question. They produced two very different businesses.

Be ready to act on the answer

The answer to a better question usually demands change. The Dale Carnegie course ran 16 weeks in 1912. It was 14 weeks when I took it in 1976, 12 weeks when I was certified to teach it in 1996, and 8 today. Society changed, and the course changed with it. That's cooperating with the inevitable.

Then graduates kept asking, "What's next?"  The best I could offer was another training program in a few months. I didn't have anything to help them continue on their new trajectory without a break in momentum.  For a long time my question was, "How do I sell them into the next program faster?" The better question is: "How do we extend the benefit of the program they took?"

That question became the Servant Leader Operating System: four in-person segments over about 16 months, with coaching and masterminds in between.

What AI asks of us

AI is a huge opportunity to make our businesses better. The same opportunity is open to our people, including the opportunity to leave. So we have to become the leaders they don't want to leave.

As Christians, there's one person we serve: Jesus Christ. He places us in roles the way a wrap goes on a bus. The wrap changes. Our identity as servants doesn't. The more fully we understand that, the more effective we are as servant leaders, with a lot less drain on us.

If that's a conversation you want to be part of, join us at The Table in the Servant Leader Network. It's free: jeffcockrell.com/slc

Next week on The Right Call: navigating through the AI storm.