The Human Side of AI: Employee Engagement, Adoption, and Leading in the Age of Agents

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Fred Jewell

And either you’re on the train with us getting this adopted, using it the best possible way, learning with us, or you’re probably lost in the end because it really does require people to think differently, to be creative, to be curious.

Brian Betkowski

Welcome back to Jabian’s Strategy That Works Podcast. My name’s Brian Betkowski. I’m here with my friend and colleague, Ed Haines, and we’re excited for another great conversation. Might even call this maybe a little bit of an oxymoron. We’re going to talk about the human side of AI. And most of our conversations, because we have a ton of conversations around AI, it’s kind of been an interesting journey on what people want to talk about. Mostly it’s technical. Mostly it’s what are the tools, what are the techniques? What should I be doing? How’s the best way to create a PowerPoint?That seems to be the hot topic. But as organizations start to adopt this more, we’ve been having a lot more interesting conversations about what does it do to employees that I have? How does it affect customers? How can we … And this has been an interesting thing that we’ve seen.

How do I lead AI agents? That’s an interesting conversation. So there’s kind of both aspects of it. What does it do to the person trying to adopt AI and what does it do to their job as a manager and a leader? And that’s the topic today.

Ed Haines

Excellent. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting when you think about how AI has transitioned for a lot of people. It starts off with a user tool that’s obviously a human in the loop. And then when you get a bit more sophisticated, you’re putting AI into a process and suddenly, maybe not as much in the loop, but they’re still in the loop, but they’re still impacted by that process. And so you can really get the requirements down to make sure you’re really collecting or building the right kind of AI solution to make sure you don’t have this kind of reliance on someone’s or different people’s prompting, for example. But ultimately, there’s the impact to the process itself, but there’s also the impact to the person. And I think that’s what we’re going to talk about today is how do you as a leader, how do you as an employee, how do you interact with this AI in a way that keeps you engaged and keeps you moving forward?

So I have a couple stats. Give it to us.

So first of all, I mean, this is just a general engagement statistic, which is orgs with a higher employee engagement rate. See about 18% higher productivity, which is huge. In big companies, I mean, you can do so much more of 18%. It’s crazy. And then that then translates into about 23% profitability. And so it is a known factor that if you can engage people, then you can get these kind of stats. And then when you look at that against AI, 60 to 65% of orgs cite human factors as a primary challenge in how they’re rolling things out. So that intersection with the human and the AI is obviously there, and that’s a big thing. And that can be from a technical standpoint, but also from how are people coming along with the project and are they on board and so on. And then 62% of orgs with leadership driven, and I think that’s an important word because engagement is leadership at the end of the day.

So orgs with leadership driven AI strategies that come from the top and are very purposeful see significantly higher engagement. So about 62% where they just really drive that through. And then just one other one here. I think this is an interesting one to talk about actually. 56% of workers say their employees have not consulted them. And then actually I’ll throw the other one in as well. 53%, so very similar number, worry about telling their employee what they’re doing with AI because of replacement. And so those two numbers together kind of fascinating where people probably sit in their mindset around AI.

Brian Betkowski

I mean, a lot of human elements going on. We’ve also heard people on their resumes saying how big of a team that they manage and how many AI agents they manage as well. And so this is all coming together in a really, really interesting way, which is exciting, brings us to our conversation today. We have a guest that is perfect for this conversation. Our guest we’ve known for … Well, we’ve worked together, I guess, prior to Jabian and even for the last 26 years. So it’s been 26 years. And he’s not only an expert in human capital and just engagement in general. He created the engagement framework, the Jabian engagement framework. He’s also an author in this book, We Can’t Do It Alone. Welcome, Fred Jewell

Fred Jewell

Thank You. Brian, good to be here.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah, we’re really excited to have you. Before we jump into that topic, just a quick introduce, introduce yourself to our listeners. Who’s Fred Jewell?

Fred Jewell

I’m a passionate people engineer, I would say. I’m an engineer twice over, started out that way, but I always had the people side of engineering in mind. I was a human factors and ergonomics guy, undergrad, and then engineering psychology in grad school, but I ended up doing technology and then process and then eventually having to get people to use that stuff. And so the vast majority of my second half, at least of my career has been focused on. How do you get people to change? How do you get them to adopt something new? How do you get them engaged in their work and their life and the things around them? And that’s really driven the research and the reading and the studying and the experiences with our clients that has led to that book and then also to the engagement framework. So it’s been fun.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. So what we thought today we do is, we’ve got a little picture of the engagement framework here. We thought we’d do is maybe you can use this as a little bit of a guide to take us through your thoughts and research and observations on how the AI world and the human world are in some cases colliding, in some cases collaborating, in some cases causing total chaos and anxiety and everything in between. And maybe take us around, take us on a little tour of that.

Fred Jewell

Yeah. So I’ll take you through the framework first and we can kind of apply it to AI. How’s that? So at the center of the model is engagement. And really what we’re trying to get at is that total fulfillment for somebody. They’re totally into what they’re doing. They’re in flow. They’re enjoying their work beyond just getting it done. It is really engaging for them. And they’re engaged either in a process, they’re engaged with their team, they’re engaged with their company. All of those things matter from an engagement standpoint. So what drives engagement and what drives really adoption because they kind of go together. And there’s really six drivers. And we’ve done all the reading we can, research we can. We’ve bounced it off of academics to really get at, is this valid? And the six drivers that we’ve got in the model are growth. So getting things done, accomplishing things, winning, those kinds of things are motivating for people. The contrast to that is losing, is status reduction in some way.

Each of these engagement drivers kind of goes positive or negative. So growth is the first. Relationships are another. And how are my relationships with other people at work? How is my relationship with my company? How is my relationship with even the community that I live in? All of those things matter. If you have conflict, you have a negative hit to relationships. If you have good relationships with people and then both numbers and in quality and depth, you tend to be engaged. The good thing about growth and relationships are the two upside drivers. They can be unlimited in terms of how much you have. There’s an unlimited upside to both growth and relationships. Then we move into some of the more distractors, I call them, which would be autonomy, start with. And that’s how much freedom do I have to decide what I work on, when I work on it, who I work on it with.

If I’m told how to do my work too much, I lose autonomy, so that’s disengaging. If you ask me to do something tedious, it’s disengaging and that impinges, I’d rather be doing something else so that’s a hit to my autonomy. Autonomy has a sweet spot for everybody, for each individual, and that is different by individuals. Some people want a longer leash and to be able to control what they do and make more decisions. Other people are just, just tell me what to do and I’m more comfortable there. So as a leader, you really have to understand where each of your team lies on the autonomy spectrum.

Ed Haines

And in that case, with some people, you can go too far on the autonomy scale as well, right? I mean, then people can be disengaged because they have too much.

Fred Jewell

They have too much decision-making and they’re not comfortable with that.

So the opposite side of the model, kind of diving down to the bottom left of our circle is security. And security is something that can be massively distracting. If people feel insecure in some way, certainly the email goes out that announces we’re going to be doing a riff of some kind, reduction in force, people are going to start to say, “Oh gosh, is this me? How is this going to affect me? ” They get distracted and they are no longer productive. They’re not engaged. They just need to know what’s going to happen. So it’s that lack of certainty that can really eat into engagement. So it’s all about certainty. It’s all about clarity. It’s all about knowing what’s going to happen next. And if it’s negative, it’s a hit and there’s an interesting characteristic of security, and that’s that it plateaus. You can get more and more security, and then once you get to sort of secure, it’s marketing.

More secure is not that big a deal. After you’ve made your first, I don’t know, $50 billion, you feel pretty good, but this next 10 billion doesn’t really matter that much from a security standpoint as the most extreme sort of example of that. So security is big, especially when we talk about AI from a lot of different levels, but from the emotional security side of things, it’s big. Fairness is something that’s either kind of on or off, either it’s fair or it’s not fair. Am I being treated fairly? Are the people I work with being treated fairly? How do they see … Are they experiencing pain or suffering because of this unfair treatment? Then I’m going to be disengaged as well. If I feel like the company’s treating me fairly, my leader’s treating me fairly, my society’s treating me fairly, I’ll be engaged. And so that is either on or off.

You can’t really get to more fair once things are fair. And then the last one is, in fact, it was a conversation we had with you, I think early on when we were designing this, is we said there’s a place for more than just the things that people resist with. It’s really more, “Am I healthy? Do I feel good? Can I actually get to work and do the work? And is the pace right?” And if I’m overworked, if I’m stressed, if I’m just in some way unhealthy, that becomes a factor. And so wellbeing, we originally called it wellness, but a professor at Georgia Tech actually reviewed it for us and he said, “Well, if I go out and get a … Let me see if I understand this one right. He said, if I go out and get a six pack of beer and a bag of potato chips after a really good presentation that I did on Friday and sit around and eat that all day and watch football on Saturday, is that wellness?” He’s like, “No. Wellbeing? Yeah. Okay. Wellbeing.” So that became wellbeing for us. So those six drivers are the only things that really leaders have to influence and you can’t touch any of them.

So you have all these things on the outside of the model called drivers that you’re not going to get into as much today, but am I aligned on things? Do I have the right implementation things like process technology, policy, infrastructure, training, communications, all that stuff in line with what I’m trying to do? That’s the implementation levers. And then we’ve got governance levers that measurement and do I have a way to control things and pay attention to once things are moving, how do I make sure they’re on track? As a leader, those are the only levers you have to influence these drivers. So from a framework perspective, it’s a great checklist. It is a way for me to step back. It’s my Swiss Army knife for solving people problems. If something’s wrong, I look at the drivers and say, “What’s affected here?” And then I look at the levers and I say, “What can I do about it? And it pretty much helps you brainstorm what is it that you can do to solve a problem.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. So obviously as you were going through that, I’m thinking, wow, AI has a really interesting effect on all of those. Where would you say you’re seeing the biggest impacts and what are people doing about it?

Fred Jewell

So I think the biggest impact is to both growth and autonomy. I mean, growth is getting stuff done and you can get a lot done and accomplish more with AI. It just helps you knock that out. But it also affects your autonomy because in a good way, because tedium is a negative hit to autonomy because if I’m doing something tedious, I’d rather be doing something else. So I may not like all the work I do, but AI can jump in and say, “I can get this. Let’s just put together an initial outline for you. ” That’s kind of tedious to think through some of that. So it can help you get that start so that improves your autonomy. So you can focus on really fine tuning and getting it just right for the situation that you’re working with.

Ed Haines

And that matches up well with what we often tell clients, which is where do you start? You don’t necessarily start with the high value, enjoyable work. If you think about a two by two, you start with the high value tedious work because those are the pieces that allow people to do more of the other high value stuff.

Fred Jewell

100%. Yeah. And if you get the risks there though too, is that you become over dependent on it. So you’re starting to say, “Okay, so is this going to affect me in a negative way?” And I’m not actually learning anymore. I’m not actually growing, which is possible if you’re completely reliant on the tool. So that’s the mentality that a lot of people are going through to say, “Should I be using this or should I not be?”

Brian Betkowski

But what’s so funny is we talk about this a lot of when is it just as acceptable as Excel is or as the tractor is, it wouldn’t be acceptable to say, “I have to go plow the field to the box. It’s not going to happen.” And the same thing as you wouldn’t say, “You should go do the math by hand. Don’t use Excel.Don’t get too reliant on Excel. You should just do it all by hand.” That just doesn’t make any sense. And so there’s a point where AI is going to be just that this is just the way you do it to even be remotely competitive.

Fred Jewell

Yeah. I’m dating myself when I went back to college. When I was in college, there were professors that would still use slide rules because they knew it and they weren’t picking up their HP calculators that were relatively new back then. They were still using it the old way.

Brian Betkowski

So if growth and autonomy are, let’s say, mostly positive things, what would you say is some of the bigger negatives?

Fred Jewell

Security is probably the biggest challenge is what does this mean for my job? What does this mean for my work? How am I going to adapt to this over time and how’s my company going to adapt to it? So there’s just so much unknown about how this is going to affect the world in general, that it’s a really hard thing for people.

Brian Betkowski

So take that one, because I know that’s a super hot topic. I mean, our clients talk about that with us. Using the engagement framework as a tool, like you were mentioning before, if one of our listeners wanted to go, “Yes, I think my folks are worried about security because I’ve got projects going on that are going to probably remove some of their jobs. I know they’re worried about that. ” And even if they’re not, they’re hearing it out in the world. How can they use this as a tool to perhaps address that or come up with a plan?

Ed Haines

And then let me just add to that as well, because I think there’s that element, which is like, I don’t have my job, but on your scale of security, there’s also things like, “Well, I’ve been told to use this agent. I don’t fully understand it, but if it fails,” this is back to the management thing, then I’m responsible. Therefore, I have a little less security now because I had a little bit more control over my job previously. And I mean, that comes into autonomy a little bit more, but put that one into that as well, because I think they’re both related, right?

Fred Jewell

Yeah, no, for sure. And so as part of the, if you’re using the framework and you’re looking at, and we’ve written a bunch of articles about this, there’s 10 articles in our Jabian Journal series that explain the model. One of them is explaining what the implementation levers are used for and how do they impact the drivers. So if you think about security, the easiest thing you can do to make people more secure is communicate. It’s tell them what you know, tell them what you think, tell them and be as open and honest and authentic as you can. That gives people that, all right, I may not know everything, but I know as much as I can know and that this leader is sharing everything that they know with me. So communication is key. So if I’m a leader, I want to make sure that I’m explaining what we know now, how this is working, how this person used it, how I used it, what did I get out of that?

What are we seeing? What do our customers think of it? All of those things are huge from just a pure communication standpoint. So I think that’s one. I think there’s so many angles to security too. And it’s like, is it safe for me to use? So you talked about reliability, can I trust it? What if I’m going to take the fall for this bad answer?

Knowing how well or should I trust it and can I trust it is key for people. And a lot of adoption problems are happening right now because people had a bad experience when they first typed it in or when they use it to query what the score of the football game was last night, not great for that, right? It’ll make stuff up. And if you though focus on the right kinds of questions, the right kinds of prompts, you can get great answers. So when can I be certain that it’s going to be pretty reliable? Because I don’t want to say I have the time to go back and fact check everything. I can go, if it says something that I would’ve said and it came up for me that way and said it really well, that’s fantastic. So it’s really that experience of using it and gaining the trust in it from a security standpoint that gets you to a place where, okay, I can start to see how this is going to be.

Ed Haines

So that feels like that’s down to process in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. So if there are 10 things you needed to get AI to decide and two of them are really, really important, then you might want to think about your process in a different way to really mitigate any risk you have in those. And so is that where the sort of solution is, don’t treat everything the same.

Fred Jewell

Think about it. I’m glad you brought up process because really the adoption problem for AI is largely around how do I change behavior? It’s not a technology problem, it’s a behavior problem. So how and when do I inject AI into my workflow, into what I normally do at work? What are the use cases and how does that work? And from a workflow perspective, how do we plug it in along the way? And so without really stepping back and understanding what are the ways of working, how do we work today and then where can this fit in and then where does it fit in well and where is it dangerous maybe and let’s not do that. That’s critical to really understanding how well this can change what you do every day.

Brian Betkowski

I think there’s two things going on. There’s AI as a productivity tool, which is a lot of what you’re talking about is how can it, if I use it correctly, how can it make me as an employee more productive or have higher quality, whatever? But then there’s the other side of it’s not the productivity tool. There’s like it as a replacement tool as in what can it do that now I’m not needed to do. And I think that’s driving just as much anxiety. And then the games begin, it gets in people’s head. Then the games begin of like, I think you mentioned it earlier of, well, maybe I don’t want to go all in and adopt it because if I do, am I just cutting myself out of the game? I mean, what are you seeing? How are you seeing companies deal with that?

Fred Jewell

So not well yet. It’s a hard thing to think through in a mindset shift to have within a workforce. And we’ve had other technologies that have displaced people, right? I mean, telephone operators back in the day were made obsolete with touchstone phones. And so the ability to displace workers has happened over and over again from a knowledge worker standpoint, which is where most of what we tend to work with, you have to help them see that in the long run, this is going to happen. And either you’re on the train with us getting this adopted, using it the best possible way, learning with us, or you’re probably lost in the end because it really does require people to think differently, to be creative, to be curious. And if you can’t do that innovation of yourself, it’s going to be really hard. So what I coach people on today is just use it, learn it, learn how to trust it, use it for everything. I think, I can’t remember who said this, but it was one of the AI company leaders who said AI first in everything.

And I think that’s a great way to approach it. While if I’m sitting down to do something new, what can I do with AI right now? Just tell it what I’m about to do and see what it says.

Ed Haines

Yeah. And I think that the difference today though is the speed at which that happens because a lot of times those other examples you gave, you had a little bit of time to kind of see that coming and see that process happen. Sure. Things happen so quickly now, it’s even more important to do that, what you’re saying, I suppose.

Fred Jewell

It is. Yeah. And I think that’s the only strategy that I’ve seen work is to really turn this into a curiosity, a experimental, an innovation problem that the people that are best at using AI are the people that are doing that, that are comfortable with something new, trying something new, novelty in some way. Those are the people that are, they’re probably not intact in a lot of cases. They’re just innovators around the company. And so they’re the ones that are making the differences. So anybody who can be creative and is comfortable thinking outside the box and trying something new, they’re the ones that are going to move forward on.

Ed Haines

This fastest. Well, that’s interesting. Yeah, because we talk about this a lot because the personalities are the technology personality, which I think I would fall into and you would too. And me. And of course, and then you go into this, you can go down this kind of path of just technology if you’re not careful, that’s like infinite. And then likewise, you have this prompting, if you want, like the way you ask questions, the more kind of English language-based stuff that you can’t ignore. So I think sometimes the tech people tend to stay away from the other part and the two get separated, but it’s like, how do you merge both without going so deep into the technology?

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. Yeah. And when you were talking before, it kind of reminded me, we were involved with a big outsourcing thing a long time ago. I think there’s a story you always told, maybe you can tell that again about how do you do … It’s talking about the future of this is a resume builder, this could be … Yeah. What would you like the story to be? Do you want to be … You could probably tell that story.

Fred Jewell

Yeah. We were trying to achieve a certification on the capability maturity model that was a big InVogue way to measure IT’s progress in a process improvement effort. And it became the standard in India largely because a lot of what we did on that big engagement, it became the way to measure how well an organization worked. And so people found the new processes tedious and difficult and it changed the way that they had to work and they weren’t super happy about it. Less engaged. Yeah, less engaged because you’re making them do something differently and it’s not what they want to do and it’s affecting their autonomy. I used to do it this way, you can’t do it that way anymore. You really need to do it this way. And we were trying to figure out the messaging around this. And one of the partners that I worked for, when I was talking to them, I said, “We really just have to turn around and tell everybody that this is going to be really good for your career.

This is going to be really good for your resume. You’re going to be much more marketable out in the world if you can say that you worked for a CMM level three organization versus saying that you worked for a CMM level one organization, which one would you want? ” That really resonated with the software engineers and the developers because they’re like, “Huh.” And they started to look into it a little bit more and they realized how big of a deal that was. We can say the same thing about AI. And the leadership eventually came around. They’re like, “Well, you can’t tell them that. They’re going to all leave because the car resumes are going to be better.” I’m like, “Well, maybe, but what would you rather have? ” That situation or a bunch of people who are sitting around saying, “No, I’m not going to change.”

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. I think the version of that now, we talk about it like that you don’t have to be on the bleeding edge of the AI curve right now. You need to be on the correct side of the curve. And so the version of what you’re talking about is, okay, maybe you do get displaced by AI, but do you want the story to be like, “I resisted as long as I could and I finally got overcome by it. ” Or do you want to say like, “Yeah, I mean, I helped our organization get way more productive with AI and we got more and more productive and we worked ourselves out of a job, honestly.” And then some people will find other jobs at the company doing that same thing because you’re like, wow, if you have that mindset of driving productivity, driving quality, driving efficiency, you can do that in any part of the organization. And that makes you very, very marketable to your current organization or a future organization. So I guess it’s all about the mindset …

Fred Jewell

Is a mindset thing.

Brian Betkowski

It really is.

Fred Jewell

100%.

Ed Haines

And I think going back to the engagement model, I’ll steal this from you a bit, but you’re basically using growth to offset security in that case.

Fred Jewell

Yes. And so that’s the thing about the model, which is great. You’re going to have hits to any one of those six drivers and the way you overcome it is with emphasizing another driver. And so in this case, growth, you’re going to grow, you’re going … And what we advise in typical change situations where maybe morale is low because there’s a big change going on. What we emphasize is say, do more with relationships because relationships always picks things up. So do more with, and that’s where the space stuff kind of comes in and having ping pong tables and all that, that’s where all that sort of came from, was when you’re going through these big transformations, getting people together, happy hours or fun activities that you do together, different ways to engage with each other tends to make things better for people. And that’s even harder to do in a virtual world than we are like right now. So relationships is something you can usually use to pick things up. But in the case of what we were just talking about, yeah, if growth is the message.

Ed Haines

How do you think AI impacts relationships than at work now? I mean, how do you think it will?

Fred Jewell

That’s a really interesting point because it can reduce interaction, it can result in more isolation that people feel, but it can also spur faster innovation. So if you are working with a team, you can … I prompted this, I got this. What did you get? I got … Okay, how do we put that? Well, let’s put that in, see what happens. So there is a possibility of teaming around AI. And so the teams that are using it well are not hiding the fact that they’re using it and changing the fonts so everything doesn’t look like it just came AI hyphen. Right. It’s more about making sure that I’m using it to enhance the team, which means I have to again, communicate and be really open about it. It can’t be, “Oh yeah, well, this was my work and so it’s fantastic. No, no, it’s not your work. It’s AI’s work. Talk about that. What did you prompt? How did you do it? ” Share that with everybody else. That can be really, really, really, really helpful. And it’s also just this idea of relationships themselves with AI. And you say, “Well, can you … ” We talked about this. You can’t really have a relationship with AI.

Brian Betkowski

Maybe. What’s a relationship?

Fred Jewell

Right. And so you’ve seen examples where people have had relationships with AI and it becomes a problem over time and they’ve done bad things to themselves. And that certainly felt to that person, obviously, that they did have a relationship with It’s AI. So it is possible for that to happen. And I think there’s a factor of that trust that I can get with AI of saying I trust the results that you’re going to give me, which is a security thing. You help me do it faster and better, which is a growth thing. I do have somewhat of a … I know how to talk to you. I have a good way of you’re listening to me and you’re starting to adapt your responses to my styles of relationship.

Brian Betkowski

So empathetic, so positive, so reassuring.

Fred Jewell

Right. And then my organization treats me fairly with it so that I am able to be upfront about using it. And so that’s a fairness thing. And so if you’re punished for using it or somehow, well, you didn’t send your work. I mean, anybody could have done that. Well, could they? Or did they? It didn’t. So here I am.

Brian Betkowski

It may not have done as fast if you can just speed such a huge component.

Fred Jewell

If you start doing this stuff right now and you’re using it a lot, you’re going to just make yourself that much more valuable in the world.

Brian Betkowski

So I’ve got a specific question, but it’s come up a bunch with clients and maybe some of our listeners are thinking this as well. So one of the big things that are happening now when you talk about efficiency is measuring something. So like, okay, I’m going to get more efficient. And that can be as simple as measuring the number of people or ours, but often it’s other measurements of measurement of quality or effectiveness in some sort. And that concept of measurements, which brings transparency, which brings objectivity as opposed to being qualitative and stuff, all of those things have been around forever. But I feel like our clients are talking about that a lot because when they want to put a business case together for any of this AI, they can talk about, well, which measurement are we changing? And then when you talk about measurements, people are like, “You’re going to measure me. Wait, what’s the baseline?” And it’s an age old thing, KPIs, metrics, yet it’s really bubbling up. So I’d just love to get your take on how people deal with this.

Fred Jewell

Yeah. I don’t think they do very well yet. And I think we’ve always had a hard time with justifying the … And you threw out some numbers at the beginning of the podcast around how much more productive are we? What’s our ROI for investing in engagement? What’s your ROI for investing in good leadership? What’s your ROI for investing in a certain type of training? It’s really hard to quantify behavior change in terms of a dollar amount, straight line dollar amount. You can measure it in aggregate and you can then say … The cynics always say, “Well, there’s a million confounding variables into that better return on investment or that better earnings report.” Sure, there is. But this I trust as a leader, I believe that this has truly made a difference. And you can intrinsically feel it when you’re in an organization that is running under good leadership, that does have that kind of engagement.

So this is exactly the same kind of thing. How do you know? You can’t measure it as … Now you can in some cases. I mean, if you’re talking about an agent in a workflow, sure, they’re going to do it that much faster, for sure. And so for a very specific task, it’s going to be very easy to do that. But in terms of which of my people is more … It should be rewarded or should be promoted or should be kept, it’s a little bit harder to quantify.

Brian Betkowski

What about if you’re going to start measuring something as in you were doing your job, you’re a HR professional in the HR part of the business, and you were never really measured specifically, but now we’re going to start measuring some stuff because I don’t mean measure engagement, I mean measuring actual productivity of the tasks that you’re doing because we want to try to get a baseline so that we can make it more efficient, maybe use some AI agents. And this starts going through your mind like, wait a minute, they’re going to start measuring me now, then they’re going to figure out if I’m slow and then they’re going to use agents and they’re going to replace me or they’re going to expect me to do my job at twice the speed that I do it now. All that anxiety, where does that land on.

Fred Jewell

Oh, it’s a huge security issue because for exactly what you just described, it feels like I’m going to be found out or something’s going to come up because I’m not doing it as well as everybody else. So it’s a big security hit. It’s the same problem as implementing time reporting in an IT organization for the first time. And they always resist it. It’s like CRM is always resisted by the sales force at first because they just feel like somebody’s looking over.

Brian Betkowski

Exactly. Do you want me to code or do you want me to put in my time?

Fred Jewell

Exactly. And so it’s a habit that you have to get into and you have to show them that it benefits them too. So how did they learn from that along the way? It’s a really hard sell. And so it does take some, you have to do this. And our big outsourcing engagement was, we can’t get paid if you don’t do this. If we can’t get paid. If you can’t get paid, then you can’t get paid. And if you can’t get paid, well, you’re not going to last long. So it became a … There is a push. You have to create some insecurity for people to actually get them to do the fear factor to do that work. You don’t want to use that much, if anything. My whole book was around how to do this without having to use the fear factor. So it is something that you do have to help people through and see that this is just a way for us to learn about not just you, but about the whole organization and where we can actually get better. And so if you look at it organizationally and not single out an individual, then I think that is a first start at getting more people to buy in.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. I see. The pattern, and you said this before, but now I’m seeing the pattern more is like, yes, there might be one of the parts of the framework that are a hit and you could try to address that, but then there’s an equal and opposite reaction, something on the other side that you can pull on that lever to kind of equalize.

Fred Jewell

Yes. And that’s why you look at each one of those drivers to say, okay, what is the impact here? How can I do that? And for the CRM example, it’s always, you’re going to sell more and you’re going to make more money. And that’s a growth thing for them. And it’s from making more money applies to all of the drivers too. You can prove your relationships. Say for the future, you can do all those things.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. The answers aren’t all in here, to your point. It doesn’t say make them make more money, but the point is this is a framework to help you to force you to think about those things and help you make decisions and see how this balance is out.

Ed Haines

I’m interested in the autonomy one because on first glance you kind of think, oh, it’s going to take autonomy away because I don’t get to do the things I was doing because AI’s going to do it. But actually the more I sort of think about it as you were talking, it actually gives you more autonomy in a way because you’ve got this flashing cursor essentially. You can ask anything you want and the creativity that you can bring. I mean, how do you think people, organizations can control that autonomy though, if that’s the case, right? Because suddenly you’ve got this really big tool. How do you make sure you … Control is probably the wrong word, but how do you make sure you use it in a really effective way, but also do all the things we just talked about, which is allow people to use it enough and to get comfortable with it. There’s a balance there, isn’t it?

Fred Jewell

Yeah. It really comes back to, I think, emphasizing the growth angle on all of this stuff. The learning angle for you, you got the internet at your fingertips to be able to ask questions. So that’s growth and you can learn and learning is a growth hit for everybody, learning something new.That is the biggest emphasis that I’ve seen be successful is to say, “This is going to help you grow.” And, it’s a mindset, the creativity side of it, the innovation side of it, all of that is a growth driver impact. So that’s where you really want to try to get to and keep emphasizing.

Ed Haines

Sorry, that’s interesting because I was thinking of the internet too, like when internet first came out. But the key difference here, which is, I suppose, a real advantage is that when the internet first came out, there were a few websites and then there were more. And then now we have millions and millions and availability. But here, we just got everything on day one essentially, didn’t we? It feels like, it’s already there. You don’t have to get people to catch into it.

Fred Jewell

Yeah. The biggest piece of advice that I can give people is to just embrace the ambiguity of this whole thing and really get into the growth side of it, really understand how you can use it to make your life better. And that may mean building the first outline or putting the table together that’s going to take you too long to do by yourself. Those are the things that get the tedious work out of the way so you can really focus on the stuff that really matters to your clients, your customers, your family, your community.

Brian Betkowski

So before we wrap up here, we definitely want to spend a little time on this interesting topic of I manage agents. The new world of management and leadership is not just leading people, it’s even weird to say, it’s leading and managing machines that also then interact with people. And so I mean, at some point there is a person at the end of something until just the machines are interacting with the machines that’ll happen at some point. But talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing and how you’re looking.

Fred Jewell

Well, I mean, you do see people talking about the number of agents that they manage and the fact, especially in tech where I’ve got a UI, UX designer that is putting together the front end, I’ve got my database query agent, I’ve got my coding agents and that’s happening. And so it’s really interesting because it kind of relates back to how good is this person at delegating in the first place because delegating to people is not that different than delegating to AI. You’re taking some tasks that you would normally do and you’re asking somebody else to something else to do in the case of AI.

Ed Haines

And be clear about the outcomes. And be clear about the outcomes. It’s pretty literal.

Brian Betkowski

How to do it. Whatever you’re asking, it’s going to happen pretty literally.

Fred Jewell

Right. And so it’s really kind of precise delegation that you need to do with good prompting. And that takes a little bit of extra time, but it is tremendously productive when you do it right.

Ed Haines

Well, what you’re making me think there is like for people, especially coming up in their career, sometimes delegation could be a hard thing for them to start on that. That’s actually a good training wheel to start with the agent because you get used to the idea of being clear and concise and-

Fred Jewell

Absolutely.

Ed Haines

I feel like I’ve become a better communicator since we started using AI. You know, as soon as you’re talking like, “It’s going to do this wrong. I have to be much clearer.” Stop and think about it. You’re really thinking what do I want exactly? What form do I want it in?

Fred Jewell

Yes, a hundred percent. So I think delegation is a good mindset on that whole thing. And to your point, Ed, you’re asking people who have never delegated before to start delegating. So you have to even teach them like, “Well, if you were the boss, you would have to tell your coding team what to deliver, what to do. ” This is now your chance to sort of play with that skill and use AI as your mentee or your intern developing this. And I’ve heard it described as like you’ve got swarms of interns now with AI. They don’t know a lot, but if you ask them to do the right thing the right way, they’re going to give you a pretty good answer.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we hit on a lot of cool topics. Is there anything that we haven’t hit on that’s on your mind that you’d like to talk about or any other things you’re seeing out there?

Fred Jewell

No, I think we did hit on all the things that I wanted to hit on today that I had thought about. And the key, I think you’re going to be more successful, your company’s going to be more successful if you can really focus on that curiosity and innovation side of things. That’s where the safe place to be in AI is and the safe mindset to be in. And if you are fearing it, if you’re resisting it, it’s really, really risky.

Brian Betkowski

Yeah, it’s huge. Well, this is great. So if you’re more interested in the engagement framework, there are 10 or more than that detailed articles in the Jabian Journal that you can access online. We can’t do it alone. You can also look for Fred’s book, which is available on Amazon and other places and soon to be on audio maybe.

Fred Jewell

Yeah, soon to be on audio.

Brian Betkowski

Hopefully. But we can’t do it alone. This is really a great book. It’s a simple but effective book on leadership strategies. I know you also have done some really neat events around this too and workshops around this. So feel free to reach out to Fred if you’d like to learn more about that or the engagement framework. But yeah, thank you. That was really enjoyable. It was a

Fred Jewell

Lot of fun. Thanks for having me. It’s been a blast.

Brian Betkowski

All right, till next time.

Fred Jewell

Thanks y’all.