As an AI enthusiast and a professional executive coach, I see tremendous value in the incorporation of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, into our practices. The growth in AI capabilities in recent years (strike that, months) presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to revolutionize the way we engage with, learn from, and coach our clients. Artificial Intelligence not only complements the human touch but also optimizes our services to an unprecedented degree.
Here is a recent example where I've asked my client to create a 5 yr vision statement to share with his team during our next quarterly offsite. In this example, my client had a loose vision but was stuck trying to articulate it well. Here is my prompt:
Please coach me through the creation of a 5 yr business vision that I can share with my entire company. I'm the owner and I want to get my entire team aligned with where I'd like to take the company. Thing is, I'm unsure of exactly where, and I need help structuring and generating the content. Can you please continually prompt me with questions to guide me through that? Please stop between each question and wait for a response. Do this until the end of your questioning.
The result was wonderful. Note the "please stop", this ensures that GPT will pause between questions as to not overwhelm my client with a rush of questions.
Once the questions were finished the next prompt was:
Please summarize everything you've learned here and in less than 1500 words, please articulate a compelling company vision, in the first person. Make it engaging and persuasive.
AI can handle this aspect with ease and precision, swiftly analyzing responses and generating comprehensive, customized reports. With this, I can focus more on designing strategic interventions instead of collating data. In addition, AI can also assist in administering psychometric tests and in interpreting the results, ensuring accurate, objective insights.
GPT helps me in maintaining the continuity of the coaching process. For instance, ChatGPT can serve as an "always-on" assistant, facilitating between-session communication and engagement. This consistent availability means that clients can seek support, motivation, or advice at any time, ensuring continuity and reinforcement of learning. This seamless, 24/7 availability is something that we, as human coaches, can't provide due to our inherent limitations.
In the context of business coaching systems such as Scaling Up, AI can provide immense value by helping to drive the adoption and implementation of the system. It can assist in providing a clear and structured path to scale up a business by breaking down complex strategies into manageable actions and tracking progress towards each goal, similar to my example above. By acting as an enabler and a catalyst, AI tools like ChatGPT can make the daunting task of scaling up a business much more manageable and efficient. Adopting such cutting-edge AI tools is not merely an option, it's an absolute necessity to stay ahead in the dynamic world of executive coaching.