June FAQ - How do I lead when everyone is talking about AI tools?
Navigating uncertainty around AI in retail.
One Friday each month, I dedicate the post to looking at some questions I have heard recently from developing leaders. Sharing those questions and my thoughts for them is a way for me to spread the information to as many leaders and future leaders as possible. If you have a question about leadership, or just a situation you would like some additional insight on, please email me at Effective Retail Leader. Let’s take a look at this week’s question.
I hear everyone talking about AI and I feel like I need to incorporate AI into my leadership somehow. How do I lead my team with everyone talking about AI?
It’s a fair question, and it’s coming up more often. If you're a store manager or a district manager, the answer is probably less complicated than you think. Unless your company is already deep into using AI at the store or field level, most of the noise around it stays just that. Noisy. So the first thing I'd tell you is that a lot of this comes down to you. What's your interest, and what do you want to do with it?
Let me walk through a few ways to think about it.
Start by understanding why the question is being asked
If your team comes to you with questions like "How is the company using AI?" or "How do you use AI as a store manager?", start by understanding why they're asking. That tells you a lot.
From there, do some research. Understanding how your company is using AI is a great conversation to start with your district manager. They may be able to point you to the right person.
Most companies are still early in figuring out how they use AI. But here's something worth knowing. Most companies currently have tools that, whether you call them AI or not, are already doing this kind of work behind the scenes. Unless you're writing your schedules in Excel, AI is probably already part of your scheduling or your replenishment. If you've got any kind of workforce management system or an optimized scheduling system, it's likely in there in some form.
So understanding why the question is being asked really does come first.
Leading at the district level
At the district level, it's the same starting point. Understand why a store manager or a team member is asking.
If they're asking because they're genuinely interested in AI and want to know how the business is using it, go find that information and have a great conversation with someone who wants to be engaged with the business. I'd also take the chance to understand their career aspirations. Whether they're store managers, assistant managers, or hourly team members, if they're asking these kinds of questions, they're interested in learning more. That's encouraging. Take full advantage of it, get them an answer, and see what they want to do with it.
A practical example: performance appraisals
This question comes up a lot around performance appraisals, specifically whether it should be “allowed” to write them. Personally, I think there's real value in letting AI help you polish performance appraisals. I don't think it should write the whole thing. It can't do that well, because it doesn't know the person the way you do. But if you use it to clean up the language, make it sound more professional, fix the grammar, and help fill in some of the blanks once you've explained how someone works in your building, that's a perfectly fine use of AI.
I also think you can leverage AI to help guide you through what you can and should be evaluating someone on. Let it ask you the questions, and the answers you provide allow for the creation of your appraisal of your team.
Should you be using AI to help you lead?
If you're trying to figure out whether you should be using AI to help you lead, I'd start by getting familiar with the different large language models. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok. There's a lot of conversation in the marketplace right now, and having some sense of what these tools can and can't do is useful. You can also look at some of the other articles I've written on AI to get a feel for what you can be learning in this space.
Recommended Reading:
How to talk about it with your team
When it comes to talking with your team, keep it personal and honest. Here's how I'm using AI. Here's what I think. If you're still early in your journey, say so. If you've run into limitations, share those too. And be open to pushback. If someone says, "I've been doing this and it does all of these things for me," and you weren't aware of that, say, "Wow, that's interesting. Show me how you got there."
AI shouldn't change the way you lead. At its best, it's an enhancement, if you allow it to be. A lot of that depends on the journey you're already on and how you want to share it with your team.
Don't be afraid to learn together
When a leader asks me if they should be looking at AI and using it in different ways, I say yes without hesitation. Explore it. Learn it. Pick one or two tools and really dig in to see what they can do for you.
The same goes for your team. If an hourly employee or a store manager comes to you and says, "I used AI to put together a personal development plan, and I'd like you to see it," engage with that. Sit down with them. Ask how they got there. Maybe you haven't done some of that yourself yet. Now you're both learning, and you're both engaged together.
Here is an important consideration: don't let the fact that someone on your team might be ahead of you on AI stop you from engaging. That's okay. You bring other leadership skills to the table, and that's why you're in the role you're in. Be confident about that. If a team member is ahead of you on the learning curve, they'll probably feel pretty good about it, and you'll learn something too. You can even turn to AI itself and ask, "I'm a district manager, my store manager is asking me about this. How should I go about it?" Start your journey right there.
Don't turn people off because you're unfamiliar with something. Learn together. They'll be okay with that.
A simple place to start
If your team isn't asking you about AI yet, here's a good exercise. Sit down and ask yourself, "What might my store managers start asking me?" Then start using AI in those ways yourself. Even if these questions aren’t getting in the way of how you lead today, think about what you'd do if they came up. Build your plan and your strategy around learning AI from that perspective. That's the kind of preparation that makes you a stronger leader when the questions start coming.
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