Featured in today's briefing:

  • How managers can help their teams develop “learning agility.”
  • The most in-demand skills for middle managers. 
  • Super Bowl sick days. 

AI and Work Radar

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced this week that ChatGPT “should now be much less lazy” following an update, after months of user complaints that the chatbot was refusing to act on the prompts it was given.
  • Some 21% of leaders say their organizations struggle to stay up to date on technological change as a result of employee skills not being where they need to be, according to a new report from Springboard, a professional development platform. Similarly, 79% of early-career workers said they personally have trouble keeping up with the rapid pace of change around AI.
  • Engineering researchers are using AI to streamline chip design, currently an onerous process involving hundreds of people, by creating tools to generate hardware code and foster collaboration between large groups of workers, such as by synthesizing notes from multiple teams. 
  • To decide whether generative AI is the right approach for a given task, ask, “What is the cost of being wrong?” As a team of researchers recently explained in Harvard Business Review: “Generative AI is good at first drafts and ‘close enough’ answers,” making it a useful tool for tasks that leave room for error. “But close enough is not good enough for prescribing medicines, controlling air traffic, or driving a car in traffic. Can your problem live with less-than-excellent accuracy?”

Focus on What Makes Someone a Good Learner at Work


The ability of a worker to learn is getting new focus from employers, as they anticipate accelerating changes to jobs with the introduction of generative AI and other technologies. Accenture, for example, asks every job candidate to name something they learned in the past six months as a test for this learning agility. “If people don't demonstrate that they have learning agility, you can't come work here because—especially now, this technology came fast and it's moving faster,” Ellyn Shook, Accenture’s chief leadership and human resources officer, told us recently. “The learning is going to have to be continuous.”

To better understand what makes someone a good learner and how organizations can increase workers’ learning agility, we reached out to Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, chief innovation officer at BetterUp, which provides coaching and related services. Kellerman is a medical doctor by training and co-author with Martin Seligman of Tomorrowmind, which highlights the psychological skills we need to adapt as work changes. Here are excerpts from our discussion, edited for space and clarity:

What makes someone a good learner, in this context of learning agility in the workplace?

At the individual, personality level, one of the biggest factors is something called openness to experience. It describes a type of person that's really excited about new ideas, new people, and new adventures and walks around with a bit more open-eyed curiosity. That is harder to change than other parts of us. From an organizational lens, it comes down to selection: How can you select for people who naturally have that disposition, which will make them excited about learning new things and more naturally drawn to new ideas and opportunities?

Then there are these developmental states that we can really influence through coaching that influence learning agility. One would be cognitive agility, which is very akin to learning agility. It's our ability to move from one idea to the next, to not get stuck at any one altitude of problem solving. It correlates very highly with learning agility or desire, and ability to learn and pick up new things. 

That's something that we target frequently with coaching. We help people learn how to get their minds unstuck from being in one place vis-a-vis a decision, vis-a-vis an opinion, to challenge that and to become more flexible. More broadly, our mental flexibility is a sign of wellbeing and maturity. 

Another aspect of learning agility at the individual level is novelty seeking. That also relates to the first thing we talked about—openness to experience—but it can be carved out and you can help people gain more behaviors around novelty seeking. How do you introduce more novelty into your life?

We talk about new ways of commuting, about ordering something different off the menu, watching something completely different on TV, really trying something different out of your comfort zone and seeing what good things come of it. That's similar to a way we want to show up at work. There's a new system our peer is using. What can we learn about it? How's it helping them? Versus pulling back from those new systems and those ideas because of a threat they introduced to us.

What can organizations and team leaders do to increase the learning agility of their members?

The first piece is the team leader themselves. It's very important that they be someone who models agility in their own way of doing it and who celebrates it. You need a leader who embodies this mindset, who makes other team members feel safe that this is a good thing to do, that they won't be punished for doing that, but also that this is adaptive and it's what's going to make them and the team successful. 

Simple ways to do that in team meetings are to highlight people trying new systems. Have them come in and demo for the team the ways it could work, have the team leader talk about what they like about it, and talk about examples where bringing that kind of thing in has worked. 

It may be that the team tries a tool and it's a failure. It caused a lot of stress and it didn't produce the outcome. That doesn't necessarily mean that's how the team leader should tell that story. It may be that actually there were good things about that, and it may be that there weren't, but they still need to tell the story in a way that doesn't shut down other people's willingness to try those things. So be very, very mindful of the fact that as a leader, your sense of any negative sentiment you put out about an experiment is going to be amplified because of that power distance.

Charter Pro members can read a full transcript of our conversation with Kellerman, including her belief that prospection is an essential skill and advice for how to address workplace anxiety related to the introduction of AI.

Learn more here about becoming a Pro member.

What Else You Need to Know

Collaborative skills are replacing supervisory capabilities as the in-demand trait for middle managers, according to research from Harvard Business School researcher Letian Zhang. From the period between 2007 and 2021, the number of job postings that mentioned collaborative skills tripled, while the share that included more traditional managerial skills declined by 23%. 

  • Zhang’s study—which analyzed tens of millions of online and newspaper job postings—also found a link between firms’ emphasis on collaboration in job postings and their level of innovation, as measured by research and development spending. 

More employers add to the stream of layoffs in the tech industry. In January, the tech sector laid off 16,000 workers, the highest number since May 2023 and second to only the finance industry, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Many of the companies now cutting jobs had quickly added in the years leading up to 2022, including DocuSign, Snap, Okta, Zoom, Google, and Amazon. 

  • Although the reasons for layoffs vary among organizations, many leaders have pointed to a focus on profitability and increased automation with the adoption of generative AI. US companies have announced more than 4,600 job cuts in connection with AI since last May, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.  
  • Looking at the US economy broadly, hiring remains strong and layoff levels are relatively modest.
  • At Google, current employees reportedly allege that the organization’s culture has taken a hit as a result of the layoffs, affecting engagement and productivity among remaining workers. 
  • Charter Pro members can read our advice on rebuilding morale after a layoff, as well as our guide to creating a long-term staffing strategy to prevent over-hiring in the first place. 

Utah joins Tennessee, Florida, and Texas in limiting DEI programs in public universities and government agencies. The new law requires campus diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to include everyone versus focusing on any marginalized group, and restricts the use of DEI practices in state government. 

  • Eighteen other states are set to consider similar bills in upcoming months. 
  • While the legislation does not cover employers in the private sector, one likely impetus for the law “is to scare other companies to comply into not doing these types of initiatives,” labor and employment lawyer Andrew Turnbull told HR Brew. 

Leaders are grappling with a transparency gap. While 88% of leaders surveyed for Deloitte’s latest Human Capital Trends report said increasing trust and transparency is an organizational priority, just over half said their organizations are actually doing something about it, and just 13% said their organizations are far along in meeting their transparency goals. 

  • One clear area for improvement: Less than a third of c-level executives said they solicit worker input on strategy.
  • The report highlighted Asana, which circulates board meeting minutes to get all employees on the same page around company strategy, as an example of “proactive transparency,” or “leaders or workers intentionally choos[ing] to share information to improve trust, accountability, decision-making, or to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.” (The authors contrasted this type of communication with “reactive transparency,” required by law or regulation, and “forced transparency,” which can look like organizations nonconsensually collecting worker data or employees publicly sharing sensitive information.) 
  • Charter Pro members can read our research briefing on steps employers can take to increase employee trust.

Here are some of the best tips and insights from the past week for managing yourself and your team:

  • Block off time for responding to messages. Fielding a constant stream of requests over Slack, email, and other channels can make focused work difficult. Instead, set aside no more than 20% of your day for responding to messages, and only check your notifications during these blocks. 
  • Use discovery groups to solicit feedback. These small groups meet regularly with a facilitator who encourages participants to share their experiences on a specific topic, whether that’s inclusion or vendor processes. For the most honest and vulnerable feedback, ensure that attendees’ responses and attendance will be anonymized. 
  • “Taskify” your roles to prepare for automation. Break down job responsibilities into discrete tasks to identify areas that generative AI can assist. This also helps workers and managers understand the skills required of their roles and where they may want or need upskilling. 
  • Designate a point person to handle election-related conflict. The upcoming US presidential race brings potential for heated workplace disagreements about politics. To support managers in navigating and defusing the tension on their teams, assign a member of the HR team to field any questions about dealing with potentially contentious exchanges. 

Coda

Monday blues incoming. Some 14% of US workers plan to miss some or all of the workday tomorrow following the Super Bowl, according to a survey from UKG Workforce Institute and The Harris Poll. 

  • More than a third of survey respondents also said they’re in favor of making the day after the Super Bowl a national holiday.