Can AI Help You Develop Your Leadership Capability?

When you type the search term: "Leadership Development Program" into your favorite search engine you will get links to more different programs than anyone can even review in a lifetime.

And for good reason.

When you "lead" something (whatever your definition of the word), there are certain skills and behaviors that make your and your team's efforts more effective.

Now there are many traditional methods to help you learn or improve your skills, but does a Chatbot offer a viable alternative?

Let's see...

(And as always, the link to the full conversation is at the end of the article)

The Prompt

For this exercise I wanted something more than just a rehash of every article and LinkedIn post on the subject that I had to read through.

Because, quite frankly, that is quite meaningless.

So instead, I approached this from the perspective of a 30-day program. Over a period of 30 days, address 1 element of good leadership per day.

And this was the initiating prompt:

Morning ChatGPT - need some advice and possibly assistance, I manage a small team of people and we are getting along fairly well, things are going decently, but with everything I am reading on leadership I want to work on my leadership abilities - so that I can provide the team with even better leadership. 

Can you help me with a 30-day program that we can follow to sharpen my all round leadership ability? 

I'm thinking that we focus on 1 element per day, through some specific focus or exercise and then review the progress or action for that item at the end of the specific day.        

The Response

It provided me with an outline that works as follows:

• The 30 day period is divided into 4 sections, 1 per week. These sections cover Self-awareness, Team leadership & Communication, Vision & Strategy and Team development & culture,
• Each week has 6 days of focus on specific elements, followed by a day of reflection on that specific week before moving on to the next week. The last week had some more sections to make up the balance of the 30 days.

The response was good and I did not feel the need to review and re-do.

Taking It Forward

I then went ahead with the following prompt:

I think this works. Ok, today is Day 1 - what do you want me to do?        

and it provided me with an impressive 30-minute exercise to cover the topic for Day 1, which is the initial leadership self-reflection component.

A good idea is to feed your self-analysis back into the chat which can then be used as additional context data for the further days in this process. In fact, do this at the end of every day.

Finally

Does this replace the value a good mentor can add?

No, not at all. The value you can gain by working with a good mentor is more than just the information. It is the guidance from a position of experience, and from a place of human context, which the AI cannot yet replicate.

Does this replace a leadership coach?

Well - that depends. If you are working with someone that is worth the investment you make, then a coach can do what an AI cannot do yet - keep you accountable. But if you remain disciplined - and you understand how to effectively engage with the AI - then you will get far with this technique.

Does this replace a leadership course?

Maybe, maybe not. But now you have an option to consider before spending hundreds of dollars on a course that you take and walk away from, perhaps none the wiser.

The Chat

As always, below is the link to the chat with all the detail. I'd suggest it is well worth reviewing because this is a technique that you could use with many more topics than this leadership training.

30-Day Leadership Development Program

And as always, if you want some tutoring to understand how to best use Chatbots to enhance your own capabilities, reach out on DM.

Best wishes

Johan