Use your AI early adopters to fuel company trainings

New leaders may be reticent to give feedback -- or even to receive it -- but as assistant professor Leda Stawnychko and Ph.D. candidate Mehnaz Rafi write, they must master both. Leaders should practice in low-stakes scenarios, treat the feedback they receive as a gift and be sure they're in the right frame of mind and have chosen the right time and place before giving feedback to others, they advise.

Put it into practice: When giving feedback, be sure to focus on your team members' tasks instead of their value or performance, recommend Stawnychko and Rafi. When receiving feedback, they advise you to be humble and appreciate the courage it took for your direct reports to talk with you.

Develop programs to upskill your entire workforce on AI by identifying those already using the technology within your organization and leveraging their skills to create new training programs, writes Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. "Regularly update training materials to reflect the latest advancements in generative AI and provide opportunities for employees to attend conferences, webinars and other learning events," Tsipursky advises.

Put it into practice: Use the expertise of your generative AI pioneers to produce videos, workshops and in-depth training across your entire organization, writes Tsipursky. "Engage leadership in promoting a learning culture, foster a collaborative and supportive learning environment and celebrate successes and milestones in learning journeys."

Resentment between team members can be defused by creating tasks that require them to cooperate to achieve success, writes Nadav Klein, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. "This will create preliminary evidence for each individual that the other is not so bad, while laying the groundwork of increasing trust and goodwill for eventual conflict resolution," Klein writes.

Put it into practice: You can rein in your team's "devil's advocate" by assigning them collaborative projects outside of the areas they tend to criticize, Klein writes. "This would give your devil's advocate and the rest of the team the chance to demonstrate cooperative behavior towards one another and help change the team dynamics."

Benefits can tip the scales. Most of you believe you have a solid benefits package (85% said average or better). When salaries stagnate and raises are hard to come by, you might find "poachers" coming after your best talent to entice them to leave your company to join theirs with the promise of higher salaries.

While you can't prevent this from happening and you likely can't change your benefits plan, you can communicate all your organization's benefits to your team members to help them see the bigger picture. If you've got a great benefits package, show them what they'd be walking away from (unvested incentives, length of service modifiers, accrued vacation and higher levels of vacation due to tenure, etc.). Painting a complete picture can help them realize the grass might not really be greener on the other side.

For those of you with deficient benefits plans, communicate the impact of that situation to your leadership and benefits departments. Help them understand the impacts on recruiting, hiring and retention efforts. If you help them see the "real" business cost of being stingy with benefits, they might consider improving your benefits plan.

-- Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, which includes TITAN -- the firm's e-learning platform. Previously, he worked at McKinsey & Co., Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro. He is a West Point graduate and author of three leadership books: "One Piece of Paper," "Lead Inside the Box" and "The Elegant Pitch."

A commitment to collaborative leadership, being an active listener, embracing diversity and relying on her strengths as a woman in the male-dominated world of oil and gas has helped Kendra Lee, chairman and CEO of Merichem, succeed. "[A]s I've gotten older, I've come to acknowledge my strengths and talents and can say, 'it doesn't matter that I'm a woman, I have just as much to contribute to the conversation as a man does,'" Lee says.

Residents of Carmel-By-The-Sea, Calif., can't tell you the address for their homes because they don't have any house numbers in the one-square-mile town, but that's about to change after the city council voted to create street numbers. Long-time residents say they're used to not having a house number, but others say they've not received medicine, flowers or other deliveries because their homes lack numbers.

I spend much of my time away from work, either writing or performing music. Now that I'm retired from leading a spiritual community, I have more time for songwriting, so I joined a songwriting group online. They hold feedback sessions a couple of times a month where the professionals who lead the group will give you tips on how to improve your songs. It's a fantastic experience because no matter how well-polished (or not) the song is, they always find something truly constructive to say. Their feedback is always kind, thoughtful and helpful.

In the online community, we have an opportunity to do the same thing for each other, but I often get stuck. Sometimes, I cannot make it all the way through someone else's song for various reasons, including the production quality, their voice or lyrics. I genuinely want to be helpful and find a way to give that kind, thoughtful and helpful feedback that the pros give us, but often I stick to my mom's rule of, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."

That violates the spirit of the group for me, though, so I find something kind, thoughtful and helpful to say, even if it's just to compliment them on one or two lines of the lyrics and a chord progression. The folks who run the group, though, recently posted a video on how to give feedback, and it's very much like what assistant professor Leda Stawnychko and Ph.D. candidate Mehnaz Rafi suggest. Look for ways to help others improve their performance by focusing on strategies and techniques instead of their abilities or value, and watch how others are giving feedback and mimicking them.

When I post songs for feedback, I'm always grateful when others reply. I've even incorporated some of their suggestions, which have improved my songs.

Feedback can be scary to both give and receive, but if we focus on helping one another improve our technique and skills, it can be the best gift we can give each other.

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