First, Some Important Context
In 2006 Gaelle Watson was given the task of running virtual classroom sessions. The internet was different, the infrastructure was different, and so was the mindset: she had to fight her corner to show that the same learning happens behind a screen, and that people can be just as active there. What that work came down to was trust and engagement.
Twenty years on she sees a similar situation with AI. People are not always engaging with it because they do not trust it. Not just the output. They are unsure how they will be seen using it, and what it means for their work if they are seen as replaceable.
The Questions We Get Into
How do you build trust with a team you rarely sit next to, and does AI make that harder or easier?
If transparency means being told the truth about your future, can you take it? Could your organisation say it?
Can you be your true self at work when so much of how you come across now passes through an AI filter first?
And if AI can do the manager’s job, do we still need managers? Or do humans essentially need other humans?
Growth or Surveillance?
The tools most of us use every day can already track how long you spend in an application and the words you use with colleagues and clients.
For a learning specialist that is gold: you can revisit a conversation, get personalised feedback and do it better next time.
For an employee it looks like a permanent performance review.
Growth and surveillance, Gaelle says, are the same coin. An employee is very unlikely to trust that data which can be accessed will not be. So ring-fence it. A separate, anonymised space for practice that cannot be accessed for performance purposes. If your practice was shocking, fine. You will learn from it, and it will not cost you your career.
Unmuting Emotions
Gaelle is Director of SyncSkills Performance, a facilitator working on communication, collaboration and leadership in hybrid and remote teams, and host of the Learning Horizons podcast. She invited me onto her AI in the Workplace series last year, and I recommend it, (and not only because I was on it). She has a law degree and a business degree, no technical background, and describes herself as a Mediterranean woman who waves her hands when she cares. She has been working remotely for over twelve years.
When I asked her where she sits on the AI spectrum she gave herself a six, with a caveat that being French, a twenty out of twenty is unheard of. She is comfortable with the strategy and the tools, curious about what is under the bonnet, and clear-eyed about the risks, ethical and environmental. Powerful, she says, but we have to be intentional about how we use it.
The Sandwiched Manager
I put to her a figure from Bertie Tonks’ LinkedIn post on the quiet collapse of the middle manager: around 6% fewer managers than four years ago. When people go, the work does not, and managers are already sandwiched between leadership and their teams, expected to be coach, systems specialist, ethics lead and health and safety officer at once. Equipping them with AI is essential. But learning a tool takes headspace, permission to make mistakes and time to start with the easy stuff, and that space is very seldom available to managers.
Who Carries the Can?
We also get into accountability, and whether you can hold a person answerable for AI’s mistakes when they are not in control of the output. Two lawyers on a call, so it went somewhere I did not expect: we are accountable because we care, and AI is not driven by that.
And we talk about the double dash. If the first thing your reader sees is one, they are not thinking “keen attention to detail”. They are thinking you did not care enough to write it yourself. The irony being that they have probably used it too.
Her line of the episode: ‘If your practice was shocking, it’s fine. You will learn from it, and it will not be at the detriment of your career.’
Where in your organisation could someone practise badly, safely? And if that place does not exist, who decides what the data gets used for?
Lots to think about in this one.
Listen in and stay sovereign.
