Videos · 8:22
Your Team Isn't Scared of AI. They're Scared of Your Silence.
Your team went quiet after you mentioned AI? What to say to each person, and a 20-minute doing vs thinking exercise you can run this week with zero software.
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Key points
- The silence after you mention AI is a leadership problem, not a technology problem. When nobody explains what's changing, people fill in the blanks with the worst case.
- The fear is real and growing. Gallup found people who use AI are about twice as likely to fear it will eliminate their job, and Mercer found 40% of workers now worry AI will make their job obsolete, up from 28%.
- General reassurance doesn't work. Get specific, person by person and task by task, about what stays theirs and what AI takes off their plate.
- Owners who use AI day to day see it that way too: in a Goldman Sachs survey of small business owners using AI, 87% said it augments their employees rather than replacing them.
- The exercise: meet one-on-one, list everything the person did last week, and sort it into two columns. Doing (drafting, formatting, first passes, repetitive work) is where AI helps. Thinking (judgment, relationships, catching what the numbers miss) stays theirs.
- Seeing that split on paper turns "AI is coming for my job" into "I'm getting part of my week back for the work I was hired to do."
