I see a big opportunity for managers to become more effective via the use of AI tools, whilst maintaining the parts of management that only a human can ever do. I believe that AI can take away many of the tasks that don’t require much thought or headspace, but do require time, and allow us to spend more time and energy on the parts that really matter.
Let’s talk about how to start integrating AI into your management workflow and I’ll share a few practical examples of where you can start.
Practical ways to integrate AI into your workflow
Start with administrative tasks
Think about the basic, repeatable tasks that you do each day with your team such as taking meeting notes, summarising actions and data analysis. These areas are fairly “safe” to start with because they focus on administrative areas and not the actual management of your team.
For example, simply use AI tools to record meeting transcripts and to summarise them. Google Meet and Zoom have these features included, whilst standalone tools such as Fathom can be very useful here too.
This can help you have more meaningful conversations with your team because you can be more present and engaged.
Use AI insights as conversation starters
It’s unlikely that AI is going to be able to give the right answers to complex problems that you encounter with your team. But it could give you some help on how to dig into these problems and the kinds of questions that you should be asking.
You can use tools such as ChatGPT or Claude to help you with this. Simply give it the context of the problem that you’re trying to solve and ask for some questions that can be conversation starters. You can then pick and choose which ones are most appropriate for the situation you’re dealing with or refine the questions by giving a bit more context and feedback.
Use AI to spot patterns in your meeting notes and development plans
If you’re automating the recording of meeting notes, transcripts and actions, you can use AI to look back over all of this information and spot patterns that you may have missed.
There are a few tools that can help you do this, such as NotebookLM, but the simplest way that I’ve seen is to put all meeting notes into a single Google Doc and then use Gemini to query this document.
For example, you can use prompts such as “what patterns of challenges can you spot from the last three months of meeting notes” or “what opportunities for progression would you suggest focusing on based on the progression plan and meeting notes.”
Ask AI to help you phrase feedback
Sometimes, you know that you need to deliver some feedback about a certain topic but you just need a bit of help with how to word things or how to start the conversation.
AI can be really helpful for this because you can describe what you’re trying to say and the problem you’re trying to solve, then ask it specifically to give you appropriate wording.
This works even better if you can give it some feedback models or frameworks to work within.
For example, you could give it the SBIA feedback framework and ask it to give you an answer that fits within it. Or you could ask it to use the communication pyramid to help you structure the conversation that you’re about to have.
The important point to remember is that you still need to read over the suggestions and almost certainly tweak them to suit the situation and your style. AI simply won’t get this 100% right every time, so still use a healthy degree of scepticism with what it says and don’t assume that it’s totally correct every time.
The parts of leadership that AI can’t (or shouldn’t) replace
Many of the tasks above will save you time, enabling you to be more effective at the parts of management that have the biggest impact on your team. Embracing these is unlikely to have a detrimental effect on your team – but you do need to be careful not to let AI take over parts of your role that could have a detrimental effect on your team.
Emotional intelligence
When it comes to the day-to-day emotional support for your team, I don’t believe that you can beat human experience, empathy and understanding. Only you carry your experience and are able to use that experience to guide and support your team when they need help.
Whilst AI can (and is) providing a layer of emotional support for many people, I believe that great managers are able to go far above and beyond what even the smartest AI can do.
Yes, providing this level of support and being emotionally intelligent can be very draining. But it can make a huge difference to your team (and your success as a manager) if you’re able to go beyond systems and processes.
Building and maintaining psychological safety and trust
As a leader, you literally take the lead on enabling a culture of trust and psychological safety. If you don’t do this, then your team will only ever get so far in achieving their goals and ambitions. Trust allows people to perform at their best because they know that they are able to have autonomy to do their jobs, free of micromanagement.
Psychological safety allows people to give and receive feedback, along with asking for help without fear of being judged.
Only a human leader can do this – talking to an AI tool simply won’t cut it!
Knowing how to lead when things go wrong
Anyone can lead when things are going well. Most teams can feel unified and happy when things are going well.
It’s when things start going wrong that teams and individuals are truly tested.
It’s when things start going wrong that you transition from a manager to a leader.
When things go wrong, you may need to make quick decisions and judgement calls based on incomplete information, along with factoring in human ego and emotions.
Guess that doesn’t function well with a lack of context and incomplete information? AI.
