If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this in the past three years…
We all have.
There are definitely capacity constraints and burnout happening everywhere and...
It’s time to change the channel.
Who’s with me?
I was talking with a CEO recently who feels caught between a rock and hard place.
On one hand, they want to have compassion and empathy to meet their people where they are right now.
They want to be that leader – kind of like Ted Lasso – who never misses a beat to SEE people for their potential while not pressuring them to do it any other way or on any other timeline other than theirs.
But let’s be real. Ted Lasso is a fictional character on a show I love, but it’s hard to miss that, as amazing as Ted Lasso is for his team, he left his son in the States for a job.
(That doesn’t add up to me and I plan to write about that miss later.)
The pressure to perform in adverse conditions has never been higher.
We can’t keep making marginal moves and expect major progress.
Conditions have changed.
This is what many teams are saying on repeat:
- “We can’t take on another thing right now”
- “No more new ideas, initiatives or technology platforms”
- “That won’t work”
The terrain has never been tougher: rise in inflation, interest rates, and the cost of capital have sent shock waves into the mental ethos of every board and executive room attempting to go full Elon and do a lot more with less.
Bottom line – we all need to solve these problems with fewer resources.
We aren’t talking about doing more with less or getting your team to do hard things. Getting them to do the easy thing – like opening an email, trying a new tool or giving a new idea a chance – can propel that end goal just as much, if we do it with more intention.
If your team has a fixed mindset, it’s not a matter of if but when.
Do you feel like you missed the dot com early waves?
It’s the same story with different headlines – a resistance to change.
They say it's hard to read the label on the jar you are in.
And right now, beyond the pervasive disruption from the pandemic and all the other 2nd and 3rd order effects, there is about to be another wave worth catching that could solve the problem of doing more with less.
Less = AI
Augmenting your current team is the name of the game.
And unless you're living under a rock, you have undoubtedly heard of ChatGPT, or at least heard of some other exciting AI tools, tech, and platforms that some are saying could be bigger than the quantum leap the internet gave us 25+ years ago.
I’ve written about how to unlock AI for your business, but I missed a part: how to get your team to be able to take on that other thing when they feel at max capacity or that they can’t handle it.
Try Priming.
Back in 2008, Yale University psychologists showed people judged others to be more generous and caring if they had just held a warm cup of coffee and less so if they had held an iced coffee. In a second study, they showed people are more likely to give something to others if they had just held something warm and more likely to take something for themselves if they held something cold.
Sounds like magic, right?
To test their hypothesis about the importance of priming, research assistants casually asked undergraduate test subjects to briefly hold either a warm cup of coffee or iced coffee as they wrote down information.
The subjects were then given a packet of information about an individual and then asked to assess his or her personality traits. The participants assessed the person as significantly “warmer” if they had previously held the warm cup of coffee rather than the iced cup of coffee. On personality scales unrelated to the trait of “warmth,” the researchers found no difference in how participants who held an iced versus hot coffee responded.
“It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well,” Bargh said.
“Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well.”
Bring the outside in.
Whether it’s attending training to help build your digital emotional intelligence or bringing in examples of how others are unlocking yesterday’s limits, check out these three amazing stories of how others are augmenting their team’s capacity right now:
- The best use case I've seen for ChatGPT helping those without sight
- A new way to think about generating sales without adding a salesperson
- 100 (Free) AI Courses to Help You Navigate the Future of Work
Beyond this, we are committed to showing even more real-life examples. Dig into these Unlocks with Latch to discover how leaders are effectively reducing lag and drag on a weekly basis.
Anything is possible when we put everything on the table.
