Practical Insights on Improving Communication, Leadership, and AI Adoption in Complex Organizations

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have the author of the book Effective How to Do Great Work in a Fast Changing World. Melissa Swift, welcome.

Melissa Swift: It’s great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about this book. How did it come about?

Melissa Swift: Yeah. So, you know, it’s interesting. I would like to pretend I had some master plan, but actually this book came from the question that everyone asked me after my first book came out. My first book, work here now describes a lot of problems and kind of modern modern workplaces and how work is actually harder to do. And after people read that, they said, you know, this is this is great spot on. Characterize the problem really well. Okay. What do I do personally? What can I do if I don’t necessarily have control over my organization’s ways of working? What are some things I can do as an individual? I thought it was a great question. And effective is the book that came out of that question.

Lee Kantor: So when you were, uh, you wrote the first book you wrote, the second book. Is this based on kind of your business history? Can you talk a little bit about your back story? So we understand the context in which this all came about?

Melissa Swift: Sure. So I’m a I’m a long time people consultant and people consulting leader. And the reason why I say both is that it kind of gives me a dual lens, that there’s all the work that I’ve done for clients and a ton of learning out of that, but also I’ve been a leader myself in large, complex organizations. So I’ve been, you know, forced to eat my own dog food on more than one occasion. And so that kind of forms the, you know, the basis of the foundation of this book. And then I also went out and did some original research myself on work intensification. I tapped into all the kind of academic research about a whole bunch of these topics. I did a ton of interviews. I interviewed kind of a couple dozen folks from academia and the business world, and really tried to pull all of that knowledge together into some pithy tidbits that, you know, people can take and then use immediately.

Lee Kantor: So are these kind of actionable, some of the things that you’re, that you within the book are actionable? Are they focused primarily on large enterprise organizations, or do they apply as well to like the solopreneur or the business coach out there?

Melissa Swift: Well, see, this is the interesting thing is, as I was doing the research for this book, a lot of what, you know, academics would say about some of our problems in the modern workplace is they’re problems of scale and complexity. But the interesting thing is that you don’t have to work for a large, complex organization to be affected by scale and complexity. So, you know, the fact that a company like Amazon exists changes the lives of so many other companies, no matter what their size. So the interesting thing is that basically every single size of organization, we’ve got some of the same problems.

Lee Kantor: So now a lot of there’s a lot of talk, obviously, and I’m sure your book addresses this in great detail is AI. And the impact AI is, um, is having on the work force and the, and the, and the organizations that are utilizing it. What’s kind of the net net of AI in your mind is, is AI this big thing that we should be afraid of or an individual contributor should be afraid of? Or is AI this great tool that’s going to make everybody more effective and productive?

Melissa Swift: I believe it’s the latter. I believe it’s going to be a fabulous tool that, you know, it creates. It will ultimately create jobs. It’s creating jobs already. I think, however, we need to stop seeing it as the former that many, many organizations have kind of framed it as a replacement for human work. And when you actually get in there in the nitty gritty way and study the, the real workflows, how work actually gets done, it’s nowhere close to replacing humans. And in some of the places where we’ve had it do. So the results are fairly disastrous. I mean, I’ll give the example of, you know, AI chatbots have been sort of brute forced into a number of customer service encounters, and I have yet to talk to an actual customer where that improved their interactions with the company in general. The experiences are pretty negative because we didn’t really think through what the actual workflow was, and there were probably ways that AI could be integrated into customer service. And I have spoken to actually some companies that are starting to look at smarter ways to do this. So I’m encouraged by those conversations. But you know, when we kind of just slam AI in without an understanding of the work that human workers do, then, you know, we get some pretty gnarly results. And we’re now living through the first generation of those gnarly results.

Lee Kantor: But this is the first generation. I mean, AI has been around for a minute, but this is where you’re seeing a lot of, at least in the media, you’re seeing a lot of, oh, all these layoffs left and right, and they’re all saying it’s AI related when in actuality, maybe that’s not accurate.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the layoffs have to do with kind of normal layoff things like economic twists and turns or investments in, you know, sort of the wrong market segment. You know, the normal things that lead companies to unfortunately lay people off and it’s trendy and, you know, fun to say, well, it’s AI, we’re just doubling down on AI. And indeed, companies are spending a lot of money on AI, but the two are not fundamentally related. And then it’s creating, you know, I this will someday be studied as a case study in how not to do change management, because then companies are going, well, why are our employees so resistant to AI? Well, if you position it as the thing that’s going to take their job. See? Yes. They will not happily adopt it. You know, the water is wet. The sky is blue. Grass is green. I mean, it’s it’s a pretty straightforward, uh, you know, set of events. So it certainly interesting times on that front.

Lee Kantor: So you think it’s more of a clumsy implementation where on one hand, all these leaders are saying how great AI is and how, you know, this is going to be such a huge disruption for the workforce. And then simultaneously they’re like, hey, we’re deploying AI. And then the, the frontline workers connecting the dots and going, why am I training AI to replace myself? And that’s what’s kind of creating some of this friction.

Melissa Swift: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s just, you know, if you were going to go back in time and say what strategy would get people to really enthusiastically adopt AI, it would do basically the opposite of much of what has been done. I mean, it’s just it’s just, you know, kind of poor, poor communication and, and not I think some of it is some of these companies, the companies actually producing the AI technologies, not thinking about what we would call sort of overheard messages that, you know, they’re communicating a message that they think will be very attractive to the C-suite. And they’re not thinking about the fact that the company’s other, you know, 7000 workers also hears that message. It’s, again, kind of communications 101 stuff.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you think that that frontline worker, the one who is impacted maybe down the road with AI, is better served in leaning in and just kind of embracing AI and using AI as a tool to make them the best worker they can be. Because I think the bottom line about AI is that AI may or may not replace your job, but the person who’s going to have that job in the future is going to be really good at AI.

Melissa Swift: Well, we have to think about automation versus augmentation. You know, automation is AI takes over the task entirely. And the reality is that often is, is not the greatest result at the current moment with the current state of technology. Um, you know, augmentation is what happens far more frequently that it simply, you know, helps us to do the thing rather than doing the thing for us. And I think that’s a useful frame for both companies and, you know, for, for workers. I mean, look, I use AI myself absolutely every day, but it is always about how can I grow my capabilities and do more. And I’m very careful and assiduous in my own use about I don’t let it think for me. And that’s, I think, a clear, bright line that is a good one to again, to think about both as an individual and as a leader within an organization is. There are many, many instances when it can help you in your thinking, and it can be a great sparring partner. But when we get into letting it think for us or letting it communicate for us, that’s where a lot of the downside seems to occur.

Lee Kantor: So now in your company Anthem Insight, uh, you’re kind of a boutique consultancy, right? Like you’re not an enterprise organization anymore. Now you’re kind of the person that has to get hired in order to deploy some of your thought leadership and strategies within organizations. Is that right?

Melissa Swift: We’re boutique very focused on what I would call the ways of working space. And that’s a lot of the kind of the nitty gritty about how organizations get work done, you know, kind of the, the stuff about, you know, how do we assign work? How do we perform work? How do we structure our days? How do teams work together? Um, you know, all of these, these kind of things that kind of make the world go around, make the working world go around. Uh, it’s based on, in some ways, my experience in corporate consulting is sometimes we would come in and want to do these great epic moves at the top of organizations, and we would hear over and over again, well, you know, that’s, that’s not going to work because our people sit in meetings all day or that’s not going to work because people get too many emails or that’s not going to work because fundamentally teams just don’t work with each other across functions. So really looking at some of the more day to day pieces of work that actually, you know, make a make a huge difference.

Lee Kantor: So now what’s the pain an organization is having right before they contact you or somebody on your team about an engagement? Is there something that’s happening or is there a signal or a symptom that they’re like, okay, this is not good. We better bring Melissa and her team in here.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely. A lot of times it’s something like, you know, we’ve got a whole group of leaders that seem to be struggling. So, you know, when you have one leader struggling, you say, okay, I’m going to I’m going to get that person a coach. Um, you know, and, and we oftentimes, you know, we’ll work in tandem with folks doing wonderful behavioral coaching because what we do is not a substitute for that. But okay, we’ve got a whole group of leaders struggling. What’s, what’s up with that? And at that point, often the issue really does exist in the ways of working space is, you know, these leaders have, you know, again, overloaded, confusing days. They’re working in chaos. They’re struggling with, you know, hyper transparent environments. Uh, you know, a lot of leaders today have real trouble with the fact that everyone talks about everything all the time, be it in the company group chat or on social media. So at that point of, okay, we’ve got this kind of systemic issue across, you know, a group of leaders or we’ve got this systemic issue across a whole talent population. You know, we feel this whole group is kind of underperforming. That’s when you call us. That’s when I think, you know, we can come in and really think through in a structured way. What is the support that people need again, to their day to day ways of working that’s going to change the game.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned, um, you know, having one leader, somebody in your charge struggling is one thing, but having several is another thing. What are some of the signals to the leader of leaders that a person is struggling? Is it them raising their hand and say, hey boss, I’m struggling. I mean, I can’t believe people are that self-aware that that would happen. But are there symptoms or things that are actually happening that a leader of leaders could point to and go, okay, we have an issue here. My team is struggling.

Melissa Swift: Yeah. So I would say, and you’re absolutely right, by the way, that people do not generally self-identify it fear that you don’t want to be the leader. Like, oh, I’m having a hard time. And then, you know, you get you’re the leader who gets laid off or whatever. That’s a, you know, a kind of a neurosis within organizations and unfortunately, kind of a fair one in many cases. So. Instead, how the problem shows up is things like leaders being in conflict a lot. You know, even kind of what feels like bickering in staff meetings, that’s a tell that something is systemically wrong. Another thing is that critical initiatives just get stuck, and you can’t quite figure out why they’re not moving forward, or there’s not a logical reason why they’re not moving forward. You know, a lot of times that’s, again, there’s, there’s like a ways of working thing just at root of, okay, you know, why is this, you know, systems implementation stuck? Why is this strategic transformation stuck? And it turns out not to be some big picture strategy issue or deep technological issue. It turns out to be ways of working. People just can’t get there because of the ways they’re working together. And they just need some help in thinking through how to do it differently. Um, so it’s, you know, those are, those are some of the canaries in the coal mine.

Lee Kantor: So when you, when you identify some of those issues? What is the, um, kind of the action that can be taken to mitigate that or make it go away? Is it just put them in a room together and have them talk it out like like what? What are you happening? What are you doing? That’s, you know, fixing this.

Melissa Swift: Sometimes it’s, it’s looking into true kind of systemic root causes. So, you know, when people are in conflict, it’s very easy to say, well, it’s just so and so’s personality. Or like those personalities just have friction when in fact, the issue might be that, uh, your staff meeting is too large. You actually have too many people in the meeting. And when that happens, there’s a greater propensity for conflict because there are literally more people interacting with more people on kind of a limited stage. So trying to trace some of it back to structural and systemic issues rather than just kind of personality conflicts, uh, it can be really, really helpful, you know, similarly, okay, this initiative is stuck. If you go in on a data driven basis and look at what’s on the plates of all the leaders who are trying to drive it, and you might see that there are kind of leadership agendas are horrifically crowded, but nobody really looked at that because they were just looking at each kind of little silo of the organization and didn’t look at the kind of the issue in aggregate. Again, that’s a nice structural solve of, okay, well, we actually need to pause on this initiative over here and this initiative over here, because this one over here is the one that we truly value. But if you don’t kind of pull the lens back and look at the data, you’ll never see that.

Lee Kantor: So now do you have a niche that you serve? Do you have a sweet spot where you do most of your work?

Melissa Swift: I would say, you know, generally what we look at is across a large organization, like a horizontal slice. So that slice might be a topic. It might be, you know, like well-being. It might be a group of leaders like the top 150 leaders in the organization. It might be a function like the IT function with smaller organizations. You know, we really do kind of engage at generally at, at enterprise level because you don’t need to kind of do those slices to sort of make the complexity manageable. But with larger organizations, again, we would look at, you know, a functional leadership group or a topic slice.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for that aspiring enterprise leader that, um, you know, wants to do better in the area you just described? Is there some low hanging fruit or are there some actions they could be taking today to improve those, uh, communication and relationships?

Melissa Swift: I would say a lot of the issue sometimes really comes down to listening and making time to listen. And that sounds very banal, but sometimes what’s happening is leaders get almost because their days are so busy and so overcrowded, they get very inured to hearing certain things and they write things off as, oh, that person is whiny, or people just like to complain and you gotta shut down the complainers. I’ve heard that more times than I could even count. Um, and what’s actually happening is that people are giving them data and it’s valuable data. And if they sat there and said, okay, this person isn’t whining. Actually, they’re, they’re pointing out a real issue. And I listened to this other person and they pointed out this piece of the issue. Leaders can do much better pattern recognition and say, hey, okay, actually, we’ve got, we don’t have a collection of whiny individuals. We have this real business problem. And I can assemble the data differently because I was willing to listen to people for sort of two extra minutes in an emotionally uninflected way. I think if you can do that, it’s it’s getting the data in. You know, a lot of leaders, once they have that right data set, they can think through what to do, but they’ve turned themselves off to hearing the data.

Lee Kantor: But how do you help that leader who may not be a natural, active listener?

Melissa Swift: I think some of it is just coaching on what to listen for that. A lot of times, again, they’ll get hung up on the early part of the sentence. So I’ll give an example. So somebody is saying, you know, I’m just really upset and exhausted because, you know, the this meeting seems to always go poorly and they get hung up on the part of the sentence. I’m upset and exhausted. And they either, you know, kind of dig in and say, oh, I’m so sorry. You’re upset and exhausted, you know, but don’t address the underlying issue or they get upset with the person and say, you know, you have no right to be upset and exhausted and you need to just push through. And again, this is, you know, this is whining and that’s not the important part of the sentence. So you do have to acknowledge that you do want to lead with empathy and say, okay, I really, I understand, I hear how you’re feeling, but then you have to do the motion where you’re digging into. Okay. When you say that meeting always goes wrong, what what are you seeing? What are you observing? And just coaching leaders on acknowledging the emotion and then getting into the factual questions and really collecting the facts better. I think that’s something anyone can learn how to do.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure anyone could learn how to do it. I don’t know how many people would do it though. I mean, I think that that area that you just described, I think is a, is a perfect example of the kind of the power of where AI might be able to help, where if they if AI was able to take that transcript of that conversation and then help the leader kind of decipher what you just described, I think that might make a behavioral change.

Melissa Swift: I think it would be.

Melissa Swift: Incredible if we could use AI tools to, to do better pattern recognition of. Yeah, what facts are showing up over and over. What themes are showing up over and over? Right.

Lee Kantor: Because I.

Melissa Swift: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: Right. I think, I mean, I think that’s where there’s a real opportunity to improve communication and clarity because I think a lot of times people have knee jerk responses to certain words or phrases or triggers that get them fired up, and then they stop listening to the rest and they’re missing out on, you know, kind of the the gold that’s hidden in there.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely. It’s perfectly characterized because that’s, that’s exactly it. They hear a word they don’t like and they shut down. And again, they’re, they’re shutting down hearing the parts they need to hear. But just they’re having this, you know, emotional response. So if there’s a way to use AI to get past that initial motion where they stop listening, I think it would be incredibly valuable.

Lee Kantor: Now, as I understand that in your research and your work, are you studied some of these organizations and teams that have where the stakes are the highest, where failure is not an option? Can you share some of the findings? When it came, when the stakes were so high, what was working and what maybe can be applied for other folks where their day to day work doesn’t have that kind of high stakes?

Melissa Swift: Yeah.

Melissa Swift: This was this was a lot of this was probably the most some of the most fun I had writing the book was I interviewed a firefighter and air traffic controller in an emergency room physician. And I really got nitty gritty with them. But like, how do you get your work done? Right? You guys are not in a position to screw up. How do, how do you do things? And so there’s a few interesting things that emerge. Number one, they kind of embrace certain aspects of boring repetition that always doing things the same way over and over is a virtue for them. And this is interesting when you think about kind of knowledge work, right? The kind of work that you or I do, you know, like, oh, I want to do new things all the time and tackle new challenges. But for these folks, if really failure is not an option, then part of what you need to do is be in that group of being boring at 80% of it. So the 20% that always changes. You have the mind space to do it. You know, if you think about it, if you were constantly trying to re because we’re always like, what is we got to reinvent it. We got to transform. And you know, if you’re a firefighter, you can’t transform how you fight fires every single day.

Melissa Swift: That it that’s exhausting. And buildings would burn down and people would die. Right? So there’s this embrace of, of repetition again, to free up cognitive space, which I think is something we could all really take a lesson from. There’s also an incredible simplicity in how people communicate in high stakes work. So a great example would be the emergency room physician I interviewed, Doctor Rebecca Parker was saying how important it is when someone’s, you know, loved one has has died. You need to say the words died and dead. You have to make it completely unambiguous because otherwise sometimes people don’t realize what you’re talking about. And it’s emotionally a lot harder on them when they do realize that their loved one is is, in fact, dead. And this is another one where, you know, if we kind of thought about it and said, what’s one word I could replace in my day to day communications where I just might make things clearer for people? If I used a word that maybe sounds a little more harsh to me, but would give people the gift of clarity, I, you know, again, I think it’s kind of a neat it’s a neat lesson. It was very energizing to me to hear about some of these techniques.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And it goes to your earlier point about language communication, clarity. These are kind of you better get good at this stuff. Like this is where a lot of stress, conflict or friction appears because people are hedging and they’re hemming and hawing and they’re not just, you know, speaking clearly and where there’s understanding on both sides.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely.

Melissa Swift: And in the, you know, again, in the AI age where people are using AI to write these like three screen emails, if you’re the person that can write a few clear, short sentences and get your point across, I think it’s wonderfully differentiating.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share about maybe your work with organizations implementing some of these great ideas that you have? Can you share, don’t name the name of the organization, but maybe share what they came to you with, what challenge they had when they started working with you, and how you were able to help them get to a new level?

Melissa Swift: So I’ll share.

Melissa Swift: A very micro example, which is an organization that wanted to kind of get its leaders energized for the AI journey. You know, at leadership level. And it was interesting because they’d, you know, they’d had some dialog with kind of technical folks on the subject and it hadn’t left them particularly energized. It was a lot of the like, oh, shoot, it’s going to take my job. Right? And I went in and did a workshop with them where we started by talking about things like, what was the first piece of technology you learned to use when you were a kid, and how did you feel learning to use it? And we got into some of these feelings of joy and exploration, and then we started talking through, okay, now as an adult, how do you learn about technology? How do you get better? We talked about people, you know, we split the, the room into groups and okay, you know, you guys are, you know, people self-identify. I’m more technologically oriented, I’m less technologically oriented. And each group talked about their strategies again for sort of learning and growing. And then we talked about debunking some myths about AI. So we talked about automation versus augmentation and how a lot of work is going to actually get augmented. And at the end of the workshop, people, the polarity in the room had changed. People were much more excited. People were ready to go learn. Some more. People felt like they’d gotten some good strategies actually from each other, right? Not not not all the stuff has to come from the person at the front of the room. They learned a lot from each other. And I think it’s a great micro example about how, you know, it was a couple hour workshop. It wasn’t something massive, but you can really change how people think about things when, you know, you kind of pull back and, and provide some clarity, but just take them on a different emotional journey than the one they’ve been on.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. The impact is real. I mean, the, and it’s great that you were able to kind of help them learn amongst each other rather than the smart person in the front of the room. I mean, I would think that’s so much more powerful.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely.

Melissa Swift: People, what people learn from their peers sticks.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more about your practice or get Ahold of your books, is there a website? What’s the best way to connect.

Melissa Swift: So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can check out the website and insight.com. Um, the book is available wherever books are sold. Uh, so I really encourage folks to, to check it out. And I promise it is the least boring business book you’ll read this year.

Lee Kantor: Right? There’s lots of things that are actionable that this isn’t just kind of hypothetical and theory theories. There’s a lot of things that you can bring into your day to day life pretty quickly.

Melissa Swift: Absolutely.

Lee Kantor: Well, Melissa, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Melissa Swift: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.