Adoption and change management is imperative to the success of many technologies. None is more true than the wave of Generative AI technology hitting the market to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more!
This is a totally new way of working. Prompting is a new art. And it is everyone within the organisation, especially leadership roles and management, to create and foster an environment where everyone can benefit from the technology.
I wanted to share my top 5 tips as a manager on how to make this technology work for your team:
- Create energy around the technology and use it as an opportunity to Team build – my team and I recently ran a TaskMaster session on what prompts would speed up common tasks and process’. It was a great way to perfect prompts and share the ones that were most useful to our roles in getting tasks done. The additional benefit was it helped bond us as a team as we shared common experiences.
- Keep your fingers on the pulse with a constant feedback loop – setting a regular survey (I use Viva Pulse) with your team to capture anonymous feedback around how the tool is having an impact on their role allows you as a leader/manger to make adjustments and ‘listen’ to what is working and what isn’t
Make Copilot a team habit – Be proactive and intentional with encouraging your team to use Copilot daily. Psychological research shows it takes on average 66 days for something to become a habit. I set 10min recurring meeting before 9am as a reminder to the team to start off the day with a prompt and share within that meeting your findings.
- Lead by example – this sounds obvious but if you are not leveraging the technology and being deliberate in making sure on calls ‘Copilot is turned on’ then you aren’t demonstrating the right behaviours. I love to copy and paste Copilot meeting recaps as it automatically details that it has been ‘Generated by Copilot’ reinforcing your use of the technology
- Champion best practice – As a leader when you see incredible impact from an individual we spotlight and reward the behaviour. With Gen AI creating a whole different way of working, to support that shift, we should also seek out those ‘influencers’ and champion them and the gains/efficiencies they get from using the tech. I personally use the praise feature in Viva Insights to achieve this.
Having managers and leaders who support the shift from our current modes of working to one which mutually entwines Gen AI into working methodologies will accelerate the much needed productivity gains whilst maintaining work/life balance within your organisation.
These are by no means the only ways a leader/manager can support the adoption and change management of Gen AI products within their organisation and so I would love to hear more from everyone on what works (and what doesn’t) for them.
