Chris Kolenda: 3 Steps to Take Instead of Complaining about Gen Z’s Fragile Mental Health.

3 Steps to Take Instead of Complaining about Gen Z’s Fragile Mental Health.

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Do you have Gen Z employees (most of your twenty-somethings) whose mental health is fragile? 

They want feedback but only the positive kind; they’re frequently taking mental health sick days and have difficulty recovering from setbacks. The result is lower productivity, increased workplace drama, and more stress for everyone else.

I hear leaders complaining about Gen Z’s poor resilience and work ethic. You might be correct, but that’s irrelevant.

Here’s the deal: if you cannot inspire your Gen Z employees to contribute their best to your company’s success, the fault is in the mirror.

You can have the best processes and plans in the world, but if you cannot gain the buy-in of the people in front of you, then all you have are interesting theories and ideas that don’t work.

When I worked with the Cleveland Browns a few years ago, the tight ends coach told me he coached at Army in the 1980s under legendary coach Jim Young. I was a cadet then and remembered we were 2-9 my freshman year. It was ugly.

The coach said after the season that Young got them together and said, “This was our fault.” They brought their winning system from the University of Arizona to West Point and expected it to work fine there, too.

Army could not field quarterbacks with cannons for their arms, grow 300+lb linemen who could hold blocks, or receivers who could outrun opposing cornerbacks. 

It was a great system at Arizona but an epic fail at West Point.

Instead of complaining about the talent they didn’t have, Young and his staff examined the talent in front of them. They were smaller than their opponents but quick, agile, disciplined, and made good decisions. 

The best offense for Army’s talent was the so-called wishbone. It amplified their strengths and masked their limitations. Army went 8-3-1 the following year, tying Tennessee in Knoxville and winning a bowl game. 

Your Gen Z employees grew up with the toxic effects of social media, online bullying, and snowplow parenting (where parents violently blast away any obstacles in their children’s lives so they never encounter any difficulties). Mental health challenges among teens skyrocketed after 2012.

You handle social media and online bullying okay because you’ve built life experience and resilience beforehand. Many in Gen Z never had that opportunity.

It’s not their fault.

If you cannot adapt your practices to the talent in front of you, it’s your fault, not theirs.

Here are some things you can do:

  1. Feeding Forward. Most employees get defensive when you rake them over the coals for mistakes. Many Gen Zs shut down. Instead of harping on past mistakes, focus on improving future performance. Ask these questions:
    1. What went well that you want to sustain? (This discussion focuses on the behaviors you want them to repeat in the future).
    2. In what ways did you improve over the last time? (This discussion helps them visualize their improvement, so they keep doing it.)
    3. What would you like to improve for next time? (This discussion gets them to focus on how to improve instead of what they did wrong).
    4. What does ideal support from me look like? (This question elicits a specific response and lets them know you want to support them).
  2. Weekly 1-1 check-ins. Spend 15 minutes one-on-one with each direct report, setting them up for success. Hit reply if you’d like a copy of the format I recommend.
  3. 90-day Updates. Spend an hour once per quarter with each direct report, discussing how they’ve improved and want to improve over the next 90 days. It’s also an opportunity to update their Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Yes, I have a format for this one, too, that I’m happy to share.

These three simple practices will help your Gen Z (and other employees) contribute their best while reducing sick days and workplace anxiety. 

For a copy of my resources or for more discussion on leading your Gen Z employees, send me an email or schedule a call. 

Chris Kolenda: You cannot afford to waste a single brain when it comes to your company’s success.

You cannot afford to waste a single brain when it comes to your company’s success.

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What would happen if all your employees were engaged and committed to your company’s success?

What would change if two-thirds or more of your employees were committed to your company’s success?

Many leaders rely on a few all-stars, hoping the rest can pull some of the load. According to Gallup, barely one out of every three employees reports being engaged at work. With one-third or fewer pulling the load, you are burning the candle at both ends.

I met someone this morning at a global affairs conference in Washington, DC, who shared her story of burnout and walkout. Her employer was content to waste the talents of the unengaged and ride the workhorses until they broke.

No leader intends to waste the brains and talents of their employees, but most don’t know how to move them from unengaged to engaged without micromanagement. Who has the time for that?

What if you could get more people pulling the load? Your all-stars would still be in their zones of genius, stay with you longer, and contribute better, because the unengaged are pulling on the oars in the right direction and cadence.

Everyone has unique gifts– natural strengths or superpowers – that too often get overlooked in the hunt to hire people with the right skills.

You need to put people in roles where they use their natural talents and exploit them with their skills.

When you put people in roles that don’t engage their natural talents or skills, they will fail and drop out.

A more common occurrence is putting people in roles that match their skills but not their natural talents. It’s like putting a big-ideas person into a role that requires them to pore over Excel spreadsheet details. High-functioning big-ideas people will perform the job well but burn more energy than a details person will. This problem is what happened to the person I met in DC.

The upper left quadrant occurs when someone is in a role matching their talents, but they do not yet have the skills to exploit them. Steve Jobs, for example, was in this quadrant during his first stint at Apple. His people skills were so terrible that he got fired from the company he founded.

Jobs grew from the experience and developed enough people skills to avoid being radioactive. He moved into this zone of genius.

How can you help people find their zone of genius? I’ve created the PROM Archetypes® quiz to give you a broad frame. PROM stands for the four types of people you find in the workplace: Pioneers, Reconcilers, Operators, and Mavericks. They each make distinct contributions when in their zones of genius. 

Once you have their PROM Archetype® and identify their zone of genius, you can more precisely define the skills they need to exploit them. You can also use this tool to check your company’s cognitive diversity.

When you know people’s natural talents and skills, you can put them in zone-of-genius roles where they will thrive.

There’s no reason to waste people’s talents.

Would you like to discuss ways to use the PROM Archetypes® to strengthen your company and help everyone get good at getting better? Schedule a call. There’s no cost, obligation, or BS.

Chris Kolenda: Boosting Psychological Confidence

Boosting Psychological Confidence

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Psychological confidence arises when people are willing to speak up without fear of retribution; they do so respectfully and are confident they’ll be heard.

I prefer this term over psychological safety because safety-ism has created an expectation that employees should be free from accountability. Psychological confidence is about the courage to speak up and listen with an open mind, not about trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions.

People with psychological confidence report problems immediately, offer you fresh ideas that improve your business, and responsibly try new things that make your people, processes, and products work better. 

You don’t get innovation without psychological confidence.

According to an Accenture study that cites Gartner, HBR, and Gallup, companies with high psychological safety (confidence) experience:

27% lower turnover

76% higher engagement

50% more productivity

Your employees experience:

74% less stress

67% willingness to try new things

29% more life satisfaction

All three elements are vital for psychological confidence. Employees who fear retribution for disagreeing with their boss will keep problems and ideas to themselves, just like the co-pilot on the ill-fated Air France flight 447. 

The inability to disagree agreeably promotes gaslighting – employees will stay silent to avoid being blasted by a colleague. Such self-censoring is rampant on college campuses. 

Finally, no one will waste the effort to speak up if they don’t believe you’ll take them seriously; exhibit A is FTX’s collapse.

Magic happens when all three elements are working together. The willingness to speak up and disagree agreeably creates open-mindedness. Speaking up and believing you’ll be taken seriously creates confidence, and agreeing disagreeably while knowing you’ll be taken seriously builds trust.

Open-mindedness, confidence, and trust are the heartbeat of psychological confidence, creating the abundance mentality to share wisdom and co-create, leading to innovation.

To help you assess the degree of psychological confidence in your organization, Dr. Mark Goulston and I developed a survey that produces your Net Psychological Confidence Score.  

You can take it here as an individual to gauge your personal level of confidence. We can also create a version customized for your organization.

You’ll gain:

  • Your organization’s Net Psychological Confidence score, which you can use as a baseline for gauging progress.
  • Knowledge on what factors are playing the most significant role in your score.
  • Follow-up videos and action steps you can use immediately to strengthen your organization’s psychological confidence.
  • Greater trust, more innovation, lower turnover, and less stress as you implement these steps. 

Check out the survey here, and email me or schedule a call if you’d like to see if your Net Psychological Confidence Score is a good fit for your organization.

Chris Kolenda: Do you want Awesome repeats? Three-peats? Make this one simple change.

Do you want Awesome repeats? Three-peats? Make this one simple change.

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If you have good employees who perform inconsistently, I’ve got a way for you to boost individual and team performance with one simple change.

Most business owners I know are relentlessly positive people. Natural optimists who believe they can succeed and are willing to try new things to grow their business and bring out their employees’ best.

It’s not unusual for them to walk around the business complimenting people for their good work.

Stay awesome, Joe!

Keep on rocking it, Sara!

I appreciate you, Jane!

The effect of general compliments on employer and employee alike is easy to see: smiles, enjoyment, a boost in everyone’s mood.

Then, everyone moves on. Joe, Sara, and Jane keep doing good but inconsistent work. 

They know you appreciate them but don’t know what behaviors to repeat or adopt because your praise is too general.

What, exactly, is Joe doing that’s awesome, and what can Sara and Jane learn from it and vice versa?

If you want them to repeat high performance, you need to make your compliments specific. That way, Joe knows precisely what you believe is awesome about his performance.

Because he’s performed it and you acknowledged what he did, Joe knows what to do again. So do Sara and Jane, and they know what they can adopt from each other because you told them with a specific compliment.

Joe, I loved how you handled that customer’s complaint. You maintained eye contact, made sure she knew she was heard by repeating the complaint back to her, and used your discretionary funds to fix the problem and make her feel like a winner. Stay awesome, Joe!

Sara, the way you coached Brian to solve a problem he was facing was perfect. You asked him what he would do and what support he needed from you to make it happen. Brian’s solution wasn’t perfect – you knew that – and you knew that a good solution he owned was better than you giving him a perfect solution. Keep on rocking it, Sara!

This practice works everywhere you go. When I complimented a flight attendant on how well he treated people by looking at them directly and acknowledging them, I noticed he started doing it even more than he had before. The same happens with nearly everyone providing a service.

Specific compliments are your way to celebrate what right looks like, and the effect is infectious because your employee and their co-workers know precisely what to repeat.

General comments give a temporary mood uplift. Specific compliments give you a sustainable performance boost.

Let me know how this action works for you by sending me an email or leaving a comment.

Chris Kolenda: Leading in an AI World: 4 Ways to Repair the Trust Crisis

Leading in an AI World: 4 Ways to Repair the Trust Crisis

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Have you considered how AI will affect relationships in your workplace?

If not, it’s time to get ahead of the curve. Information technology provides massive benefits to society and your business, but its misuse has damaged relationships and created a trust crisis. 

Is that person really working all of those hours?

Is that “Hey Chris” email for me or personalized spam? 

Why do my employees make more than I do? 

Will a bot take my job?

Why does the CEO, who gets mega-millions, say she cares about us but can’t afford to give us raises or training?

It’s not that our company’s leaders won’t keep their promises; it’s just that they haven’t.

AI can widen the breach; it can also repair it. 

We live in an era where AI isn’t just a tool—it’s becoming a co-worker. 

AI exposes contradictions, say-do gaps, and potential unfairness while creating deep anxiety and uncertainty. This trust crisis corrodes relationships, impedes performance, and sours your company’s culture.

Why should you care? High-trust companies reportedly outperform their rivals by nearly 300%. 

And yet, how do you sustain trust as AI takes on more roles while raising troubling questions about credibility, agency, and employee value?

Here are four behaviors that will inspire employees to contribute their best even as AI’s role expands (my chatbot helped me craft these ideas after I gave it suitable prompts).

  1. Be Transparent with AI Integration: Remove the enigma surrounding AI. Educate your team on extracting the best from AI while recognizing its limitations. Your employees’ ability to provide actionable prompts will make AI an ally in your mission, not a mystery.
  2. Boosting Human-AI Innovation: AI can crunch numbers but can’t think outside the box. AI’s efficiency plus human creativity reduces risk and improves innovation. Leaders who promote critical thinking will get the best from AI while limiting garbage-in-garbage-out problems, drift, and look-a-like challenges.
  1. Creating Ever-Better Personal Interaction: Relationships become more important with remote work and distributed teams. You have a reduced margin for error, making every human touchpoint critical for building trust and unity. Face-to-face interactions in high-quality and innovative off-sites accelerate belief in you and each other.  
  1. Gaining Buy-In & Proactive Accountability: Move away from AI as a surveillance tool. Build a culture where leaders use AI to help employees improve future performance and spark their discretionary effort. 

You can anticipate AI’s effects on workplace relationships and develop behaviors that maximize its capabilities while limiting the downsides.

Anticipatory action on your part becomes compounding interest as trust increases performance, which enhances confidence in your company’s future. Wait, and you’ll regret the bill for corrective action.

Are you ready to get ahead of the curve? Schedule a call or email me for information about my keynotes and workshops on building trust in an AI world.

Chris Kolenda: McCarthy’s ouster shows that Americans can find common ground

McCarthy’s ouster shows that Americans can find common ground

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Getting people to find common ground seems more challenging these days, given 24-hour cable news, social media outrage, and polarization. 

These challenges can also enter the workplace, creating obstacles to buy-in, innovation, and change.

If you are experiencing similar frustrations getting people on board with new ideas, the recent U.S. House of Representatives drama can provide you with a productive way forward. 

Eight angry Republicans united with the Progressive Caucus and the rest of the Congressional Democrats to oust Representative Kevin McCarthy from his role as Speaker of the House.

Although the parties involved rarely agree on anything and base their fundraising strategies on demonizing the other, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder to remove the Speaker.

Chaos brought them together. 

The eight Republicans were appalled that McCarthy created a bi-partisan agreement to fund the government until mid-November. The Democrats view chaos across the aisle as a way to improve their 2024 electoral prospects in hopes they can regain the majority.

McCarthy, for his part, failed to create a goal more compelling to the Democrats, who were his only hope of retaining the Speakership.

He did not need to create a power-sharing agreement. Continued funding for Ukraine might have been enough to sway eight Democrats or more to keep McCarthy in the saddle.

Here’s what this episode means to you.

The key to gaining buy-in for change is to begin working from where people agree and working together on ways people believe they will be better off. 

Your employees will not believe a lecture on why a certain change makes them better off; they have to come to that conclusion themselves. 

Employees have strategies to thwart change. They can slow-roll implementation in hopes that the change comes off the rails. Telling you what you want to hear and doing what they want to do instead is another common approach. Sabotage works, too.

You need people’s active support if you want change to stick.

Here’s an approach you can use.

  1. Develop a goal that enjoys common ground
  2. Collaborate on options to achieve the goal
  3. Have your direct reports identify how they will be better and worse off in each option, and develop strategies to mitigate or offset the disadvantages
  4. Choose the option that best makes the people involved better off

The option might not be perfect in your eyes, or even optimal, but you will gain people’s active support and reduce or eliminate passive resistance.

If you are ready to gain greater buy-in and accountability, consider joining one of my programs or schedule a call with me to get started. 

Chris Kolenda: The Fetterman Rule: How Companies Win the Struggle for Accountability

The Fetterman Rule: How Companies Win the Struggle for Accountability

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Does your company struggle with accountability? 

If so, the U.S. Senate’s recent dress code drama will help you understand the struggle and take corrective action.

If you are like most people, you prefer to avoid confrontation, but you’ll do it if necessary. This preference accounts for why many leaders wait to confront deviations from standards until they become too big to ignore.

The problem with waiting, though, is that deviations become hard to break habits. You will spend significant time and energy and pay a high emotional tax trying to break a bad habit. 

You are better off nipping the problem in the bud right away when there’s no emotional attachment to the deviation, and it hasn’t become a habit.

The best case is when your employees enforce standards among each other so you don’t have to get involved. 

This is where the Fetterman Rule comes into play: your standards are what you tolerate. 

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman loves to dress in a hoodie and shorts; it’s reportedly part of his persona to connect with blue-collar constituents. I’ve got no opinion on his politics or how he dresses in his own home or when he’s out and about.

The U.S. Senate, however, has had an unwritten business attire dress code, and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer tolerated Fetterman’s flaunting of it. He even planned to abolish the dress code to accommodate him. 

Worrying about the new policy’s effect, Senators voted overwhelmingly to establish business attire as the official dress code for the Senate floor.

Your best indicator of buy-in is when your employees enforce standards among each other.

Creating buy-in for standards means that people need clarity about them; they must believe that they are better off when everyone follows the standards, and there must be consequences to guard against deviation.

Do your employees enforce your company’s standards, or do you feel you’re doing it alone? 

If you’d like to get your employees more involved in accountability, schedule a call, and we can discuss what’s getting in the way and specific action steps you can take to move forward.

Chris Kolenda: 13 Behaviours Draining Your Energy: The Michelangelo Principle Can Help Your Leadership Improve

13 Behaviors Draining Your Energy: The Michelangelo Principle Can Help Your Leadership Improve

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Are you a leader tired of people telling you to pile more stuff – goals, reading, workshops, conferences, journaling, activities, etc. – onto your overloaded life? 

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The individual ideas sound great, but who has the time for it all? It feels like the good intentions on the road to hell. 

If you are like most leaders experiencing good idea overload, you pass on capacity-building activities as nice-to-dos. 

I’ll get to it when I’m not so busy.

You leave opportunities on the table for becoming ever-better, and the delays rob you of development’s compounding interest effect.

If you’re experiencing this tension, I’ve got something that will help you create more space in your rucksack, and it’s not another failed productivity hack. 

Take away your time and energy vampires by following the Michelangelo Principle.

When someone asked Michelangelo how he created David, the sculptor replied that he simply took away everything that was not David. 

The Michelangelo Mindset is a term I first heard from Dr. Mark Goulston about the importance of removing the obstacles in your way. 

For this article, the Michelangelo Principle states that you must take away what’s holding you back to become an ever-better version of yourself. 

Imagine someone piling more “good stuff” onto the marble containing David, making Michelangelo’s job harder. We might never have this work of genius.

The principle is the same for you. In this case, you want to prune away behaviors that create needless friction. 

Behaviors – how you apply your standards to the people around you – separate elite leaders from everyone else. At a certain point, your skills and experiences no longer differential you. Your behaviors set you apart.

Below are fourteen behaviors that drain your time and energy. Most leaders have two or three of these behaviors. Prune these away, and you’ll save hours each week in no longer correcting miscommunication and misaligned work or having to pick up the slack that didn’t need to happen.

  1. Adding unnecessary value. When you improve someone’s idea by 5%, you reduce their commitment by 50%. Your employees perform far better with an 80% solution that they own than with a 100% solution you provide. You waste time and energy because you must make up for lost employee commitment.
  1. Offering unsolicited advice. Your good intentions create resentment by saying, “I’m better than you.” You waste time and energy by creating needless friction. Your employee is worse off, and you must pick up the slack. Ask, instead, what support you can provide to help them succeed faster. 
  1. Winning every argument. When you insist on winning every argument, you drag out meetings, create unnecessary conflict, and undermine goodwill. Gaining people’s buy-in is more important. Once you’ve got that, shut up and move out. 
  1. Butting in. Nothing matters before the But. The same goes for However and No. You create resentment with these words that say, “You make a good point, but my point is better than yours.” You waste time with needless input and micromanaging compliance with your mouse-turd caveats.
  1. Providing Constructive Criticism. Criticism builds defensiveness, which impedes progress. You waste time and energy relitigating the past, and your employee is less likely to innovate and try new things. Stop dwelling on history and start framing a better future by feeding forward: “How will you do it better next time?” 
  1. Justifying your actions after requesting feedback. You asked for feedback on what you can do better. Your employee tells you something you do that bothers them. When you justify your actions, you imply someone other than you is at fault. They feel they stuck their neck out, wasted their time, and gained your resentment. When you ask for advice and get it, say, “Thank you.” 
  1. Not Listening. Instead of focusing on your employee, you try to multitask. Your employee thinks they are unimportant to you, and you get only a fraction of what they said. Other times, you listen to respond (see winning every argument), so you miss their more essential points. You waste time and energy on misunderstandings and rework. Focus 100 percent of your attention on listening without passing judgment. Seek first to understand. 
  1. Speaking (or typing) when Angry. You are guaranteed to worsen the situation by creating resentment, putting your foot in your mouth, and piling on problems. Step away from the keyboard, go for a walk, and ask, “What can I do to improve the situation?” 
  1. Negativity fixation. You want to show how smart you are by explaining why every new idea will fail, so you stifle initiative, undermine ownership, and stay mired in a failing status quo. Ask instead, “How will you address this challenge?”
  1. Feeding someone’s negativity fixation. You’ll waste hours arguing back and forth with a know-it-all who’s stuck in their ways. Ask instead, “If it were possible, how would you do it?
  1. Letting Perfectionism impede progress. Moving from an 80 to 90 percent solution can be prohibitive in time, money, and opportunity cost, so stop waiting for perfection. Go with the 80 percent solution and adapt as needed. You’ll save time, energy, and resources while seizing opportunities that grow your business.
  1. Obsessive fault-finding. Some leaders treat finding an error like discovering a buried treasure. You spend so much time looking for what’s wrong that you miss seeing and recognizing what’s right. You spend time correcting faults, large and small, but fail to reinforce productive behavior, so unnecessary problems keep piling up.
  1. Finger-pointing. Leaders who obsess over faults tend to fixate on blame. This tendency creates predictable backlash as people try to defend themselves, cover their backsides, and re-litigate the past. While you waste all this time and energy, the problem’s cause remains. Focus on the cause, not blame, address it, and move on.
  1. Being the Hero. When you parachute to solve everyone’s problems and answer their questions, you become a crutch for your employees. Instead of building self-reliance, you create dependency. You rob yourself of the time to do your job, and rob your employer of the value you are supposed to provide. Instead of solving the problem for them, ask, “How would you do it?” 

Are you ready to slay your time and energy vampires to become an ever-better you? I can help you zero in on the behaviors to chip away and give you the action steps you need to reveal your own David. Schedule a call here and let’s get started.

Chris Kolenda: In an AI-informed company, the one who knows Why will replace the ones who know How. Here are 5 Things you need to know.

In an AI-informed company, the one who knows Why will replace the ones who know How. Here are 5 things you need to know.

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Have you experimented with AI chatbots like ChatGPT? If you are like me, you probably were awed by their ability to crank out information, produce analyses, and generate content. After further use, you likely perceived some implicit biases, basic errors, and odd phrases. 

AI isn’t perfect, but it’s here to stay. The question for leaders is how to make the most of AI’s extraordinary capacity and limit the downside while inspiring people to contribute their best.

Here are five ways the best leaders will adapt to AI:

  1. Why Leaders trump How Leaders. To date, subject-matter-expert leaders, what I call How Leaders, dominate most companies. How Leaders have the plans and the expert knowledge to solve problems and direct people what to do. The downside is the dependency they create as employees wait to be told what to do and how to do it.

AI makes How Leaders less relevant, because anyone can tap into generative models for expert answers on any technical skill. Need code for a new program? No problem for AI. Need a manufacturing design? Presto! You get in seconds what might take weeks for an expert to produce. 

Why Leaders, on the other hand, provide the questions and guidance that bring out the best in their employees – including their artificial intelligence teammates. Why Leaders become more critical to your organization because of their ability to tap into expertise and direct it toward your company’s common good. 

  1. Strengthening personal interactions. Remote work, powered by AI, makes face-to-face contact more rare and important. AI’s ability to produce deep fakes (AI can replicate your voice in three seconds) can undermine trust between you and your employees. Was I talking to a real person or AI? AI can handle data, my Chatbot writes, but it cannot establish trust. 

The most effective leaders make every face-to-face interaction count to build trust and strengthen relationships. Gone are the days when you had so many interactions that a few bad ones got less attention. Now, the stakes for each interaction are higher. 

Bring people together for quality personal interactions in extraordinary venues and you will reap the benefits of high trust and increase the capacity of their subordinate leaders to inspire the best contributions of their human and AI employees.

  1. Fighting Bigotry and Unfairness. AI can expose as well as perpetuate biases and unfairness. My Chatbot writes: According to a 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute, some companies with significant pay disparities between the CEO and average workers included: 

Employees will increasingly see when people are promoted or punished based on their chromosomes, and when CEOs lavish pay on themselves and do little or nothing to support their employees’ livelihoods and professional futures. 

The best leaders will exemplify their company’s standards and hire only those likely to buy-in; the hypocrites are at higher risk of exposure and damaging your company. 

  1. Reducing surveillance anxiety. Weak leaders and autocrats will use AI as a surveillance tool to monitor employee compliance. As my Chatbot notes, When employees feel watched, they watch their backs—not their work. The AI-as-Big-Brother kills morale and innovation.

The most effective leaders will use AI to improve future performance. For example, AI can identify skill gaps and address them, offer advice, create systems for setting up your employees for success, and suggest the most productive career pathways. 

  1. Enhancing decision-making. AI can process data, my chatbot tells me, but can’t understand its impact on people. As I’ve found in my time with ChatGPT, the bot is only as good as the guidance I give it. Even the most thoughtful prompts get, at best, a 70 percent solution.

I appreciate the time I save moving from a 50 or 70 percent solution to 80 percent, and not having to start from scratch. At the same time, it’s the critical thinking skills that allow me to provide the quality guidance the chatbot needs to crank out meaningful answers. 

The best leaders will develop their subordinates’ critical thinking skills so they can bring out the best in their human and AI teammates. You’ll get better outputs from them and you’ll make better decisions as a result.

What ways do you expect AI to affect your leadership? I would love to hear about it! Email me and let me know. 

Chris Kolenda: 21 Days until Expert Consulting Mastery Begins

21 Days until Expert Consulting Mastery Begins: Price Goes Up Next Week

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Would you like a 10x return? One mid-size client pays for your investment ten times over.

When you participate in this program, you will scale your business in ways you never imagined because you become someone new – an expert consultant who is significantly better at being an expert consultant.

I don’t mean a little better. 

You become significantly better because you approach business development with confidence. 

You let go of the low-fee, high-maintenance clients that consume your time and energy. 

You attract high-fee, highly engaged clients, who respect and value your time and energy. It’s like deep sea fishing where the marlins are biting.  These clients are a joy to work with and happily pay your fee because they recognize the value you provide them.

Let’s contrast the significant differences between wrong-fit and right-fit clients, and how making this one change can help make your business more meaningful, joyful, and profitable.

For example, if you charge hourly rates for wrong-fit clients, you are most likely:

  • In a lower-fee race to the bottom with people who provide a fraction of your value;
  • Working long hours with high-maintenance clients to gain the income you want, which robs you of time for other priorities;
  • Leaving your client wondering if you are bilking them.

When you find the right fit clients, you will:

  • Charge higher fees based on the value you provide – your clients appreciate a partner who gives them a massive return on investment.
  • Solve problems more quickly, which delights your clients and reduces your workload.
  • Strengthen your relationships because your clients know you want what is best for them, instead of what increases your billable hours. 

If you’re interested in doing this work together, I want to remind you that the extra early bird pricing is only available until September 30th.  You’ll save $1000 when you act now.  Email me, fill out a brief application, and let’s discuss how this program will benefit you and your business.

If this program helps you gain one additional mid-sized client, you will gain a ten-fold return on your investment.

If some part of the process is not working for you, here’s my promise and guarantee: I’ll work with you until it does – at no additional charge.

P.S. Want to read all the details about Expert Consulting Mastery?