Be transparent to quell your team's high AI anxiety

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ignored some standard leadership rules for successful companies, including responding quickly to a change in industry challenges, resisting price or production changes in the face of demand and admitting mistakes, writes Peter Cohan, founder of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. "Business leaders must take risks. However, if it later becomes clear the bet will not pay off, they should cut their losses and allocate the resources to higher payoff opportunities," Cohan writes.

Put it into practice: Elon Musk is undoubtedly an unconventional leader, but Cohan points out that he may be in over his head as he persists with expensive projects like the Cybertruck and plans to build a rival generative AI platform. "Business leaders must recognize their limitations and find a successor with strengths they lack."

Ease your team's anxiety around how AI will be used by clearly communicating your plans for the technology, developing training programs tailored to each employee's needs and creating ways to measure progress and success, writes Anbu Muppidathi, CEO of Qualitest. "In general, leaders should attempt to maintain healthy communication with their employees to understand better and address the root causes of AI-related anxieties," Muppidathi notes.

Put it into practice: Regularly survey your managers and other team members who are using AI so you can refine your processes and policies, Muppidathi recommends. "Furthermore, buy-in from the workforce is highest when employees feel they have a say and control over the use of AI-powered tools."

Your team is a "group" if they only feel accountable to you but not to each other, writes CEO coach Sabina Nawaz, who recommends leading with curiosity to learn about their experiences without judgment and repeating what you've heard them say to check your understanding. "With a newfound understanding of our collective and individual frustrations, we can empathize with each other, learn to work better together, and shift from being a group to a team invested in a shared outcome rather than individual agendas," Nawaz writes.

Put it into practice: Be keenly aware of your emotions as you interact with your workers because expressing frustration or even humor can stifle communication and undermine your team-building goal, Nawaz writes. "When the problem is managing our emotions instead of managing the room, keeping unfiltered emotions out of the room allows us to remain curious and tackle the real problems."

Michael Bonner, managing director of Aviate and pilot strategy at United Airlines, talks about how he handles racial microaggressions (by not allowing them to "take up any space in my brain") and how his father's advice to work hard and meet, and exceed, the requirements needed for a job helped him succeed as both a leader and a Navy F-14 fighter pilot. "Because if you do that and you go knocking on doors with your resume or your qualifications, they can't say no," Bonner says.

Writing by hand compels the brain to communicate among visual, sensory and motor cortices, while typing activates comparatively small parts of the brain, according to a study in Frontiers in Psychology. In the experiment, participants wore a cap with 256 electrodes that measured their brains' electrical signals, which indicated that handwriting could boost memory and learning, researchers say.

Thanks to the 135 of you who took the time to answer Monday's poll about how your company is currently using (or not using) AI. Nearly 40% of you say you're using AI for some tasks but keeping an eye on what it produces. The majority say it's barely being used at all, or you're not aware of how your company is using it.

Those answers align with UKG research that found 54% of employees don't know what their company is doing with AI, even as three-quarters of executives say they're using it. As Qualitest CEO Anbu Muppidathi notes, this can cause anxiety among employees. Other research from EY found that two-thirds of us are nervous that AI will take over our jobs.

What can you do to quell the anxiety of your workers? First, work on dispelling your anxiety by educating yourself on AI -- how it works and its functionality. Then, take the time to talk with your teams about how it should be used (and how it should not be used).

Employees want to know more about how a company uses the technology. They also want to learn more about it, so comprehensive training and reskilling programs are also needed, as Muppidathi suggests.

AI is here to stay, which means the more we know about it now, the more prepared we'll be to put its good qualities to use while avoiding the ethical and technical challenges that can come with it.

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