CEOs who’ve been at it for a while all know it’s less about what you SAY and more about what people HEAR.
People listen extra closely to the CEO’s words. They know that your decisions affect their livelihood.
Your casual remark can become an omen they stew about at family dinner.
Recent conversations about AI-driven productivity growth got me thinking about this. I know CEOs who talk a great deal about expectations that their team will be 2x as productive in the next two or three years thanks to AI. Maybe even more productive than that.
That’s great. I agree with them.
But as leaders we must consider what the team hears when we say “In two to three years, you will be twice as productive.”
Some personality types (Steadiness DISC types, for example) are probably going to mentally translate that as: “In the next two to three years, you will need to work twice as hard… or else.”
Of course that’s not what you mean. You mean they will be able to create twice the value they did before - while working the same amount, if not less!
Some employees will get your meaning right. Others will picture themselves as John Henry competing with the drilling machine. They’ll think their job is hanging by a thread unless they work themselves to the bone.
That’s a classic threat response, and as we know from the work of David Rock, stress responses cause employees to disengage from work. This is killer for a company. And you could be contributing to it unknowingly by what you think are rosy prognostications to your team about AI.
The main point is this: different people are going to hear you talking about AI and hear different things.
The right thing to convey to your team about AI is that:
1. We do, as a team, need to understand how to capture maximum value from AI.
This is an exciting, positive development that does not mean I want you to work more hours. It means I am here to help you understand how these tools can help you do more of the great work you do with the same (or even less!) effort.
2. We need to work smarter, not harder, and sheer output does not equal value created.
Just because AI spat out a marketing campaign for you does not mean it is a good marketing campaign. And if an LLM is giving you output that’s taking you longer to fix than it would have taken to create yourself, something is wrong. This is a companywide experiment and we should be sharing our successes and the lessons we learn.
3. We as a leadership team are right here with you.
We’re working to make ourselves more productive with AI too. We’re not asking you to do anything we’re not working on ourselves.
The main point is this: different people are going to hear different things when you talk about AI.
To a Dominance DISC type, you’re best off framing this as a fast-moving competitive race for that person to get the most out of AI. Say the same thing to a Steadiness type and you’re likely to send them to Indeed.com. To them, you need to talk about how AI can save them time and effort and help the team work together for better outcomes.
So you’ll need to speak sensitively, tailor your words to your audience, and say what you mean more than once, in different ways, when speaking to the whole employee base.
I read just this morning an interview with Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S that I think got this right. Among a pretty nuanced discussion of how AI and humans interact, he said:
AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.
As a Cognizant employee, this tells you that your CEO sees AI as a way to enhance your abilities, not something that’s going to force you to work twice as hard.
PS: Are YOU using AI?
By the way, CEOs should themselves be using AI to make their employees’ lives easier.
For example: Instead of lobbing nebulous, half-formed ideas over the fence to my team and expecting them to know what I mean, I can now spend a short amount of time giving that idea to Grok/Claude/ChatGPT, having it build on it, and then correcting and honing its output. That lets me hand off something more substantive that captures the full scope of what I’m after.
It’s much, much faster than writing it all out myself, but the marginal time I spend refining with an LLM is disproportionately helpful to my employee on the receiving end. Not only am I saving them time but I’m also setting the right example about how we can use AI to amplify our effort.
The basic lesson here is timeless: pay attention to how you communicate, including through your actions.
Too many leaders still think “I just say what I mean and people get it.”
That’s a dangerous assumption, especially on topics as novel and emotionally charged as AI.