If you lead a team, you're probably feeling lots of pressure right now.
Your competitors are all working hard and working fast against you. They’re taking advantage of all the latest AI tools and new technology. Doing more with less. And somewhere in that realisation you probably developed an implicit expectation: your team should be faster.
We should also be using the tools. We should also be producing more.
But I would encourage us all to slow down for a moment and consider what we’re losing when we optimise our businesses (or our lives for that matter) for speed.
If there’s one thing I’m sure of about people, it’s that we want to be of value. We want to contribute, and we want that contribution to be recognised. People won't give their best to organisations that treat their contributions as interchangeable with a prompt.
Encouraging your team to find the quickest solution to a problem, even if that involves an AI generated solution, or just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, sends a message that what you value isn’t the best ideas but the most efficient ones.
There's a satisfaction that comes from building something yourself. When you take it away by defaulting to the fastest option, you don't just get worse work. You get people who stop trying. Why would they? Their opinions and creativity aren’t valued.
This matters for your brand more than you might realise.
Culture is branding. The way your team feels about their work shows up in the work itself. In the emails they send, the products they build, the service they deliver, and the small decisions they make that you probably don’t even notice.
If your internal culture is "get it done fast," that's what your customers will feel.
If your culture is "take the time to do this properly," that shows up too.
Your work will feel more human and your customers like you really care.
If you’re currently leading a team, and want to build a stronger internal brand, here’s what I would suggest.
Encourage creativity and new ideas.
Give people time to work through problems and projects.
Bring back old school workshops and meetings where we get everyone together, in a space they can feel creative in—no laptops or ChatGPT allowed. Let them try new things. Allow them to give more of themselves and reward them the business succeeds as a result.
Bring back creativity, and make it part of your brand and your values.
Then when your teams are more engaged and positive, watch as that trickles over to your clients.
Your competitors may seem to be ahead temporarily.
But your brand will only benefit in the long run.
