Welcome to the new Manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome. I am glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. I'm continuing to learn and think about AI. It's a huge topic. I've been really appreciative of the messages and the comments that I've been getting from from you and from some of your other Co listeners. Learning how you are actually thinking about AI as a tool set and using it is so interesting. So that offer still stands.
The invitation is still open. If you want to tell me about how you are using AI and why, or if you're not using it at all and why, tell me. I'm really curious to know. Comment on the episode. If you listen through Spotify, you know how to do that right in the app. And otherwise you can leave me a message through LinkedIn or through my website. So for today, I wanted to start with something very specific and even simple.
And one of the reasons I'm excited about this is because I find that when we're feeling overwhelmed and when there's a lot of complexity, it's easy to go into a freeze mode. And the thought might be I don't know where to start. And so I won't start at all. Or it might just turn into kind of like a shutdown and a withdrawal based on there's already too much for me to do. And when we're feeling that overwhelmed, it's like our curiosity can't come online.
So thinking about what something small that might be helpful for understanding you know what this is and how to use that like value those small little ideas or those small steps because that is often I found the best way to make real progress when you are learning about something new.
So the one idea that I want to share with you today that I think will really make a difference in how you think about AI and how you use it. This comes from an author, Ethan Moloch, and he wrote a book called Co Intelligence Living and Working with AI. This is on my book list. I haven't read it yet, but I can tell you that there is one passage in this book where he's laying out some guidelines or rules for working with AI and one of them really stood out to me. This is what the rule is.
He says treat AI like a person, but tell it what kind of person it is to get the most useful output. Give the AIA clear context for the outputs you need. The more detail and insight you can provide in a prompt, the better the AI can make the appropriate language token predictions to generate useful outputs for your task. So to kind of distill that to get back to this simple principle, it's these two parts. Treat this tool like a person, but tell it what kind of person it is.
Do you want it to be an expert? Do you want it to have a like an encouraging demeanor or approach? Like you might imagine it as your really smart, eager assistant. What kind of person do you want it to be? And I think that's so interesting because when we're in the course and flow of everyday life, we're simply meeting people as they are appearing to us. We very rarely think, you know, what kind of person do I want you to be? We're more like, what kind of person are you and how are we
going to work together. The only time we might kind of back up a step and ask that question is when we're thinking, who do I need to talk to in order to address this kind of issue? Do I need to talk to this kind of expert? Do I need to talk to that kind of person? Who is the person I talked to in order to, you know, get some help with this kind of problem?
So when you're working with an AI tool, right, like Claude or with ChatGPT are, you know, two of the very popular ones, you can think about it as, OK, I'm going to talk to it like it's a person, but I need to tell it what kind of person it is. And this actually dovetails really nicely with a resource that one of my students shared in an earlier cohort this year in my communication strategies class.
And the student had shared with me this thing, this framework, it's called a race prompt framework. And R stands for role, A stands for action, C stands for context, and E stands for execute. And the idea is that this framework is a structured approach for AI prompting. Like the thing you say that then AI will respond to the prompt it responds to.
And it will guide you through these four steps of defining what is the role that your AI should be, what is the action like, the specific task that you want the AI to do? What is the context? So what's the relevant background and execute? What are the expectations for the delivery, what you want the result to look like.
And so it's this, you know, systemic method to help organize your thinking so you can give clear instructions to your AI tool about what kind of person they are, what you want them to do, what the bigger context is, and what exactly is the output that you want. Now, what I think is really interesting about this is I can see this as a way to help develop your thinking skills when it comes to delegating to
regular humans. Like if you had to delegate work to a human, it would also be really helpful for you to think about what is their role here and maybe you need to clarify for them. Here's the role I want you to take with respect to this assignment or this project. You want to be clear about the action. What's the action you want this person to take at?
What's the bigger context? What is the additional background that they will need to understand in order to be effective at following through with your ask and then execute. Be specific in in telling them what is the format or the style or the expectations of what the final thing should look like. You might even have an example. You might even say make it look
similar to this. So I think this is really interesting when we think about, you know, kind of what does it mean to be a manager in a world where AI is is also now here. And there are lots of different ways to use it. And one place to start is to ask yourself this question, OK, if I'm going to treat this tool like a person, what kind of
person do I want it to be? And understanding that because it requires you to slow down and be very intentional in thinking about, oh, like this is what I'm looking for. You can then bring that same skill set to working with people, right? Like you can bring that same process of thinking through how can I be specific in conveying what I want, how I want this person to approach this thing. I think it's interesting too, because of course, with AI we get results generated very, very quickly.
And if you get a result you don't like, you can then respond and say, oh, OK, I need to be more specific in giving this instruction or giving this correction. Try it again, but now do it this way or take this and change it in this way. And so there is a little bit of an engagement where it goes back and forth.
It is an iterative approach and it can actually happen very quickly because the time it takes for your AI tool to generate something that you can then see and evaluate will happen a lot faster than with a human. With a human, you might go through this process. They say, I got it makes perfect sense. They come back three days later and you're thinking, oh, OK, I, I wasn't clear because the result you've given me is not what I actually had in my mind, what I was expecting.
Let me see if I can explain this a different way. So I think there's some interesting ways that using these tools in this way can help prepare you to delegate and to work with humans even more effectively. Because ultimately it's just asking you to think more deeply and more precisely about what are you asking for and how can you provide the context or the examples? How can you give that to whoever you want to take it and do something with it in a way that will be effective.
So that's the idea I wanted to plant a seed for and offer a resource for. For some of you, this might be really basic. For some of you, this might be really helpful. And you know, hopefully it kind of falls somewhere in between. I think it's, it's neat, especially when we think about communication. Are there ways that you can practice where it feels low stakes? And often with humans, everything feels high stakes because there's a real human
that you're communicating with. And there can be the fear of if I do this incorrectly, then I will, you know, make everything harder for us, or I will create friction. Or there can just be this fear of like, oh, I need to get it right the first time. One of the things that I teach in my course is process, not perfection.
So rather than, you know, trying to get the words exactly right before you say them or before you write them, let's get a really clear process in place and focus on that so that you learn by doing rather than holding yourself to an impossible perfection standard and then using that to kind of create more anxiety and hesitation. And with AI and this idea like talk to like a person, tell it who you want it to be. That means you have to think who
do I want this role to be? What is the role that I want this to be? My thinking is that this using AI tools in this way will create more low stakes, fast response scenarios for you to practice thinking and communicating in this way. You know, on LinkedIn, sometimes I see conversations happening in the feed and people will say, oh, there's always like fear, right? The incoming class of leaders, oh, they're not going to know how to do anything because they're going to use AI for
everything or whatever. And I keep thinking, you know, I think the people who get really good at using these AI tools, they might be more ready for managing people because they've become more practiced in thinking through these different levels, right? Like, who do I want this to be? What is the, you know, what is the role? What is the task I need them to complete? What is the context you need in order to complete that task? What do I want the outcome to look like?
I mean, all of that is really useful when communicating with humans too. And the sooner you start developing that, you know, reflex and ability and skill, the easier it becomes to use it in lots of different situations. So that is what I wanted to offer today. Continue to be curious. And if you want to learn with me, then make sure that you sign up to get notified of the next
cohort. We're currently in a class, so you can't join this current group, but get on the list so you're notified of when the next cohort opens. And of course, if you want one-on-one coaching and to work with me more specifically focused on your goals and what you'd like to experience and create in, you know, your life and your work, then you can connect with me through my website. There's information on how to do that. All right, thank you so much for
listening. I hope you have a great week and we'll talk to you next time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life. And when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.