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Becca Banyard: A conversation around AI and the new hotshot in town, ChatGPT, I’ve revolved around the sentiments of replacing people. But is there a world where AI tools can be used for relationship building?
Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, Becca Banyard!
Today, I’m joined by CT Leong. He’s the Co-founder at EngageRocket, an engagement software platform that helps midsize businesses build empowered leaders, engaged teams, and elite organizations. CT is going to be sharing with us how ChatGPT can help human resources, managers, and leaders build better human connections at work. So stay tuned!
Hello, CT, and welcome to the show!
CT Leong: Thanks for having me, Becca.
Becca Banyard: It’s really great to have you here today. Before we get started on the conversation around ChatGPT and how it can help managers become better leaders, I’d love to know just a little bit more about your background leading up to the co-founding of EngageRocket, as well as what you do now and what you’re passionate about.
CT Leong: Absolutely. I’m actually an economist by training. So, I’m a numbers nerd. I like playing around with data. I did my bachelor’s in the UK at the University of Cambridge. I actually went into political science at Columbia University in New York right after that and served about 6 years as a combat officer in the Navy before jumping out to take on a regional director role at Gallup.
So I spent about 5 years at Gallup actually working together with my co-founder of EngageRocket, working with fortune 500 companies with regard to their employee engagement problems running through organizational analytics with them. And I think at that point, my co-founder and I could see both sides of the fence.
We could see how companies were not really able to solve their engagement problems with once a year surveys. And providers were not well set up to be able to help them solve those problems that happened in between those big surveys. And so we jumped out to start EngageRocket in 2016. And ever since then, we’ve been evolving to grow the company globally.
In terms of what I’m passionate about, I’m really excited by the space that we’re moving in towards where we’re using, now infusing technology a lot more into our work. And I feel like work takes up so much of our waking life. And for a long time, just kind of left it to its own devices. And I think it’s only in the last few years that we’ve taken the much more scientific approach to improving people’s work lives.
And by extension, their lives as well. That excites me a lot and the ability to use technology in that space gives me a lot of satisfaction.
Becca Banyard: Yeah, that’s amazing and here at People Managing People, we’re all about the future of work and how we can make the workplace a better place for everybody. So I’d love to now dive into ChatGPT and tech and talking about how, like you said, we can infuse technology with our work to make our work lives better and subsequently our lives better.
So what role do you see evolving technologies like ChatGPT playing in the role of empowering managers?
CT Leong: I love that question, Becca, because when I think about this and how we would want to create empowered managers, it’s so much a part of our mission statement at EngageRocket. We really had to take a step back and look at why managers may not be empowered in organizations.
When we took that step back, we went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how is it that managers even become managers in the first place? Very few managers actually become managers because they were great managers to begin with. Nobody’s a manager until you become a manager. So how do you become a manager?
You’re a good salesperson. You’re a good customer service rep. You’re a good engineer, whatever it may be. And then you get promoted into management. And then all of a sudden, magically you have superpowers or you’re supposed to have superpowers. You’re given more responsibility. You need to manage more stakeholders.
You need to coordinate resources from multiple different departments. And most managers, they have to learn that on the job while at the same time dealing with a lot of hidden responsibilities. Things like one-on-one conversations, how do I have that conversation with my team? Hiring and onboarding new team members, running performance reviews, giving constructive feedback, dealing with employee satisfaction scores, coaching and career planning. It’s overwhelming.
And there are very few organizations short of maybe the very large fortune 500 that invest heavily in leadership and management development enough that can help with all of these different areas. In fact, a poll recently on LinkedIn, it was more than 13,000 people that were responding and still going, asking about whether managers receive sufficient training and support to communicate with and lead their teams effectively.
91% of people said “no, they don’t.” And so this is where I’m going to pull this back to where is it that technology plays a part in actually empowering these managers who are, they’re almost set up for failure to begin with. They’re entering this job of managing a team without the necessary equipment or learning and tooling to be able to set them up for success.
So to break this down, there are two main components of being a great people manager, right? There’s the human side of things and this is the part that technology can never touch. Building an environment of trust, psychological safety, breaking bread with your team, connecting outside work, setting clear expectations, resolving conflict between team members, of making someone feel welcome when they join your team.
These are things that you have to do as a human. You get that from training, you get that from role modeling. But where does technology come in? Technology comes with the process of management. And there’s a lot of hidden process of management that just doesn’t get talked about. So we have things like hiring, onboarding, offboarding, provisioning access, welcome messages, farewell messages, keeping track of interview feedback, candidate references.
There’s performance coaching, being able to schedule your one-on-ones, keeping track of agendas, your goals and progress, logging feedback that people give and the responses to that feedback, whether it’s actually making a difference to this person’s development when it comes to team engagement. Analyzing key issues, designing even a simple workshops discuss, like, what do we do with given that we’re not satisfied with what can we do about it?
And then small things like reminders, right? So not just someone’s anniversary, like, “Becca, it’s your one year anniversary. Congratulations. Thank you for being a part of our team.” These days, they’re all part of the process of management. And that’s where technology can actually lend a helping hand or almost be that co-pilot to managers who are not, first of all, not set up for success.
And secondly, even the best managers, they have a ton of other things on their plate besides just people management. So how do we enable and support those managers to do their job as people managers as well?
Becca Banyard: So I’m curious then for an organization who wants to empower their managers and give them the opportunity to improve their processes, what would you recommend the next steps be for them in implementing or building tech or ChatGPT or other types of AI into their processes?
CT Leong: That’s a good question. I think the lowest hanging fruit with AI tends to be automation. So there are already a lot of processes in place that are manual. So just inspecting those processes and trying to see where are we using a lot of Excel sheets?
Where are we sending a ton of email for coordination? Where are we spending a lot of time going back and forth over something that, you know, could have been done automatically? That’s kind of the low hanging fruit. When it comes to generative AI, like ChatGPT, I would almost start with, okay, where are we, number one, try to process a lot of information and summarize something of value.
So, for example, what we saw at EngageRocket was a lot of managers spent a lot of time before performance reviews actively seeking feedback from people that their team was working with. So they would spend easily 8 to 10 hours per employee sending emails out to their colleagues, coworkers, trying to get feedback on them. Summarizing that feedback into a format that would fit the performance review form, and then entering that data into that form.
And 8 to 10 hours per employee, that’s every performance review cycle. And so that was an area where, where does technology like ChatGPT excel? It excels in things like processing vast amounts of data, excels in things like automation. And so being able to summarize that feedback was one great addition that we could find.
And then even to be able to generate that feedback in the first place. The people that we’ve spoken to, when they receive a request for feedback from, say from a manager, they often had to spend time on their end as well. So this was a good 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or even an hour, just trying to recall what happened, writing it down, putting it on paper, and then sending it back to the manager.
So all of that could also be taken up by ChatGPT, where for example, you just list out these three key things that the person has helped me with. And then GPT’s engine that creates a pretty robust feedback that just for you, which you can then edit and send it back to your manager. So we’ve automated some of that within EngageRocket product.
That’s just one really narrow use case. There’s so many across the board. Like I think for HR business partners, just go to your managers and I’ll say, well, if I’m an HR business partner and you’re a manager Becca, I’m just going to go to you and say, Hey, you know, what is it that you hate me bugging you for?
Because HR business partners, they bug management for so many things, right? And I’m sure like most people are very polite and they get stuff done, but you know, it’s frustrating. It’s outside the flow of work. So that’s a really good place to start.
Becca Banyard: We’ve had AI technology for a while now, but with the release of ChatGPT, there was quite a disruption in the workplace. And I think people’s eyes were kind of open to seeing how much the world of work could shift dramatically in the next few years. So, I’m curious from your perspective, how do you think that innovation in tech and in AI will impact management practices in the coming years?
CT Leong: I think the biggest impact that this is going to have is it’s going to lift all boats when it comes to quality of people management.
You’re always gonna have that, you know, Gallup research shows that about 1 in 10 people are just great managers. They’re just born to be great managers. And I don’t think technology is going to impact that group that much, because they’re great anyway. I think it’s the rest of us. We have the potential to be good, but we get tripped up by various things.
And this is the big role where technology can actually help us to be more human, ironically, by taking out a lot of the process bits of management and allow us to focus more on the human aspect of management. In aggregate, in what this would do, the impact that it would have, like the personalization of people management to be able to individualize and management approach to different people on the team based on how they learn, based on how they grow, based on their personal and professional goals that they have.
Management is now going to be in a better position to be able to address those and to connect them with the business goals and the demands of the organization and all of this tooling would make management processes a lot less like alchemy and a bit more like science.
Becca Banyard: So with the shift that’s going to come, as hard skills perhaps become less relevant to managers as they implement more technology to maybe look after some of the processes that they’ve typically been required to do, what are some of the soft skills that you think are going to be vital for managers to stand out from the crowd and to succeed in their practices?
CT Leong: Well, there are so many. This is a really interesting dynamic because as you move from an individual contributor to a manager, the biggest shift that you have to deal with is your productivity is no longer what you can individually do. Your productivity is now what your whole team is contributing to the company. And the ability to rally your team, to engage them and align them with the goals that you have in the business are going to be so critical.
So things like strategic thinking would never go away. Like being able to understand the company direction, translating that to your function, whether it’s an internal audit, whether it’s in finance, whether it’s in HR. We need to be able to translate what is it that the company is trying to do to what is it that what value can my function add to that?
That’s never going to go away. The other thing that’s never going to go away is the ability to have crucial conversations like difficult conversations with people in order to resolve certain things that may be difficult to resolve, being able to negotiate well, being able to actually have people understand what you’re saying.
Sometimes can be a challenge for some people, myself included sometimes. And then there’s that ability to be a coach, which involves a lot of sub skills as well, like the ability to observe and behavior to infer skills from certain behaviors, to be able to correct behavior when it needs correcting, and provide encouragement when someone needs encouragement.
These are all lumped together, I’m going to lump them together under coaching skills. And all of these soft skills are now actually going to become a lot more critical. I would say they’re going to be even more important than hard skills. Like what you mentioned earlier, Becca, I think the half life of skills is really going down like the World Economic Forum, IBM, they found that the half life of skills is now between two and a half to five years.
And what that means is that any hard skill you pick up today, any technical skill within two and a half to five years, it would be only half as relevant as it is today. And so that keeps going down. And so as a manager, what are the evergreen things that you need to invest in from a skills perspective? These are going to be ironically now the soft skills.
Becca Banyard: That’s such an interesting statistic. I haven’t heard that before. So what are the implications then for organizations? What can they do to help support their managers in getting skilled in the right areas so that they can stay relevant and continue to add value to their team?
CT Leong: That’s a great question. I think that’s pretty much the holy grail of leadership development. And the approach that I’ve seen works the best and I would say that this is at a strategic level rather than tactics, is that human development really can be split into three components. And it’s called the 70/20/10 rule, which I find very useful.
Basically 70% of human learning comes about from on the job experience. 20% comes from coaching and mentoring. And only 10% comes from formal classroom learning. That little rule gives us a hint about how we would adopt this strategy for empowering managers within the organization. It’s like having a baby.
You can go for all the prenatal classes you want, but you know, you’re never going to learn how it’s like to change a diaper or to bathe a baby until you actually have one. And it’s the same with management, right? You can go for all the management courses you want, but until you’re actually managing a team, actually going through a full cycle of the year and seeing through here’s how we hire someone, here’s how we onboard them, here’s how we off board someone, here’s how we give a performance review. Here’s how I conduct a series of one-on-ones, here’s how I understand the development goals of my team and connect them or not with what the organization wants.
And this is how I deal with disappointment from people in my team. This is how I deal with conflict between my team and others and even within my team. So I think ensuring that there’s a healthy pipeline of new managers coming through actually builds that muscle within the organization to handle manager equipping.
So that’s the first piece. So that deals with the 70% on the job training. It’s almost a default that is going to happen. The second one is coaching and mentoring. So how do we encourage more seasoned leaders in an organization to coach and mentor managers who may be struggling or on the flip side, managers, new managers who are actually very promising.
And they want to take their skills up to the next level. So building a culture that encourages that kind of knowledge sharing just comes with all kinds of other benefits anyway. Both from just experience sharing, more connectivity within the organization, and so on. So I’m not personally a big fan of formal mentorship programs.
I actually don’t believe they really work. But it’s a start. And if we have to start with something programmatic, that’s helpful. Typically what I’ll do, what I normally would recommend is find two to three leaders who are naturally inclined to want to be more of a mentor or a coach to younger managers and find five to 10 new managers or, you know, even middle managers who want to improve their management skills and just connect these guys in forward.
And see where that goes. And then over time, you will start to see more and more of this positive behavior replicating itself because people who have been coached actually do a good job of coaching others well. And then the last 10%, that’s where the multi billion dollar budgets go today already. I honestly think sometimes companies overspend on training in the hopes that this changes behavior.
It’s only 10%. So I would say that if anything, you can actually cut your training budget by half and still be okay. If you invest in here.
Becca Banyard: If you were to cut your training budget in half, what would you recommend that organization do with that training budget in order to get the most kind of bang for their buck? Like what type of training or do you have an ideal model for learning and development that you would recommend?
CT Leong: Was it Abraham Lincoln who said, “If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend the first seven hours sharpening my saw” or something like that? Yeah. So basically I think that if we did free up that learning development budget, I would actually personally invest it more in people analytics or HR analytics.
So really understanding my organization better, because I think that movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years. But today there’s still a vast number, a huge percentage of organizations that are making a lot of really expensive HR decisions without good data. I mean, if you’re making a decision on lunch or where to have lunch based on gut feel, I think that’s fine.
But if you’re making a decision on whether to give out free lunches at a cost of $5 to $10 million a year based on gut feel, that’s a problem. So where people analytics would come in with like being able to make sense of employee listening data, being able to make sense of workforce data that comes through, being able to connect performance data with business data, with attrition data, and understanding the levers from which your organization operates.
This includes learning needs analysis, because for all we know, we’re spending 60% of our training budget on programs and courses that only address the needs of 10% of the organization. So sharpening our saw by investing a little bit more in our capabilities and understanding the organization and then being able to deploy resources more intelligently is what I would do.
I don’t even think it’s going to take up half of the learning budget, like the learning budgets are so huge, it’s just a fraction.
Becca Banyard: I love that analogy. So let’s look to the future a little bit more. Which areas of work do you foresee being most disrupted by innovation?
CT Leong: I think there are three areas. The first one is around learning and development.
So we’ve been talking a lot about this. I think that fundamentally we’re all now, like it or not, on a treadmill of continuous skills development. In our lifetime and in our careers, we can’t run away from that. And I think because of that necessity and that half life of skills, we’re going to see a lot of new technologies coming in to support this continuous learning and development that all of us need to go through in our careers.
I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who is heading up a machine learning team at one of the fan companies. And that team spent a lifetime acquiring their skills that he’s now telling me are going to become obsolete in the next two years because of ChatGPT and generated AI. And that blew my mind.
I couldn’t believe it because just three years ago, those were the hottest skills in the market. And right now they’re almost obsolete. I mean, closer to home, like podcasting as a part of the marketing stack. I mean, this was something that only blew up in the last few years. Like in 2012, like nobody would have thought this was a skill that we needed at all.
So I think skills development, learning development, that’s going to be one big area that we’re going to see technology disrupting massively. The second big area I think is actually, and again, maybe I’m biased about this, is workforce analytics and workplace analytics. So being able to truly understand how to optimize our workforce.
And in so many organizations today, you know, a good 70%, 80%, 90% of operating expenses are just salary, people cost. And this is typically the hallmark of knowledge-based companies. So anyone in technology, anyone that deals with professional services or whatever it may be, where humans are literally the key asset of the organization.
It is appalling how poorly we understand the humans in these organizations. So I think that is another trend that as companies continue to compete for productivity, continue to compete for obtaining the best talent, we’re going to see an influx of new ways of making these workforce insights a lot more accessible to leaders and HR teams.
And then the final big piece that I think technology is already disrupting is the ways of working. And right now, I think thanks to COVID, we’re now seeing more and more organizations adopting policies where employees can work from anywhere. And that totally disrupts both the time and the place of work.
Asynchronous work is also unlocking talent globally. So no longer do we look at our talent pools as just within a hundred miles from our office locations. We’re now looking across all waters and we’re already seeing a lot of technology companies coming in to support that model of talent acquisition and talent management. And kind of related to that is scalable on demand talent where you can now work with a network of contract workers, for example, that can scale up or down depending on the needs of the organization at different times.
And you get a lot more flexibility from an operating expenses standpoint from a company to be able to deploy across talent when needed. And this gives companies a lot more agility in dealing with changes in the business environment and so on. So I’d say those three areas like learning and development and skills is the first one. The second one really workforce analytics, understanding of people better.
And the third, ready in the ways of working at how we communicate asynchronously, cross borders, and how we work with contractors and scale up and down.
Becca Banyard: Just as we prepare to wrap up here, what is your number one piece of advice for managers who are looking to grow in their leadership skills and looking to build more connection in the workplace?
CT Leong: I do think that throughout my career, this has never really failed me. One of the pieces of advice I got when I was an early manager, I was managing a small department on a ship in the Navy. At that time, my principal warfare officer, he gave me a bit of advice. He said that when you manage a team, first thing that you need to do is to give.
Give to your team, right? Hear them out, understand what they need, make immediate changes to get them on your side and show genuine care. Be a human to them. And you know, don’t do that with any expectation of getting anything back. Like just be human and give first before hoping to get. His point was that magically, if you do that, the team starts giving back to you the productivity, the engagement, everything else that you want multiple fold.
That was something that struck me as so simple and yet sometimes so difficult to do even now, like much later in my career, you start thinking about, okay, I’m asking my team to do all of this stuff, but when was the last time I’ve actually given to that, like, whether it’s my time, whether it’s just hearing them out whatever it may be. And I constantly have to remind myself that go back to that fundamentals, right?
Give first, be that manager who’s people first and your people would then rally around you and you’ll be able to do wondrous things together.
Becca Banyard: Awesome piece of advice. I love that ‘people first’ mentality. CT, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show. If people would like to reach out and connect, where can they find you?
CT Leong: You can find me on LinkedIn very easily. So if you just search for my name, CheeTung Leong, I should pop up. There are not many with my name around. And of course you could connect with us at www.engagerocket.co as well. I do man the live chat every once in a while, so yeah, love to see you guys there.
Becca Banyard: To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. If you would like to stay in touch with all things HR and leadership, head over to peoplemanagingpeople.com to subscribe to our newsletter and join our membership community.
Until next time, have a great day!
