Discover how to transform your team’s fears around AI into a catalyst for innovation, collaboration, and growth. Drawing from organisational psychology, this video explores the three pillars of job satisfaction—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and how common AI-related anxieties can disrupt them. Learn actionable strategies to empower your team, including inclusive decision-making, organisation-wide AI training, and positioning AI as a tool to amplify human strengths.
Using engaging analogies and real-world examples, we reframe AI not as a replacement for human talent but as an augmentation of your team’s unique abilities. By the end, you’ll have the insights needed to foster a confident, AI-enabled workforce ready to lead in a transformative era.
Brief Video Summary
- Explores common fears about AI and their impact on team motivation and job satisfaction.
- Highlights three pillars of motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
- Provides real-world examples of how AI can challenge these pillars in the workplace.
- Offers strategies to address AI fears through inclusive decision-making, training, and clear positioning of AI as a tool.
- Uses the “Power Loader” analogy to illustrate AI’s role in augmenting, not replacing, human capabilities.
TL;DR – Addressing AI fears and taking your team with you
- Train everyone on AI fundamentals – nobody in your organisation has a monopoly on good ideas.
- Involve the team in AI development, processes and outcomes
- AI is not a team mate, it’s technology to augment humans (Think Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the iconic film Aliens using a ‘Power Loader’)
Video Transcript – How to Turn AI Fears into Confidence and Capability: The Psychology of AI Integration
Introduction: Addressing Team Fears Around AI
In this video, we’re going to be looking at some of the fears that might exist within your team around AI, and how to pivot those and turn them into confidence, innovation, and teamwork. And we’re going to lean upon the insights from organisational psychology to help us get there.
The Key to Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
I’ve been working for a long time with IT leaders around how you change the habits of an organisation, around how it handles technology, and I’ve seen firsthand how a slight change of perspective and awareness of the teams around the technology can really reap dividends.
So if we look at somebody with a high degree of job satisfaction, and they’re motivated at work, and they enjoy their work. They’re likely to have these three components, according to psychology, so they’re going to have a degree of autonomy, so they feel like they’ve got a bit control over what they’re doing, and they can, they can influence things. They’re going to have a degree of mastery, which is, I’ve got the opportunity to improve myself, to really own the role and progress.
And finally, they’re going to have a degree of purpose, which is I feel connected with the rest of my team. I’ve got a good relationship with my team, and I feel that I’m contributing towards the mission of what we’re all doing. And I’ve got that team spirit of actually delivering against something bigger than myself. And if we’ve got these three components, you’ve got highly motivated and self satisfied employees.
The Impact of AI Fears on Employee Motivation
Now if we look at the most common fears around AI technology, we can see how these fears can actually chip away at these three pillars and lead to unsatisfied and demotivated team members.
Real-World Examples of AI-Induced Challenges
For autonomy, it’s possible that an individual doesn’t feel like they’re part of the decision making process. Now, an extreme example of this is we heard the story of the delivery company. Let’s call them that whereby the people that were picking and packing in the warehouse were reporting in reportedly reporting into a piece of technology rather than a manager. So you’ve lost that autonomy. If you feel like AI is making the decisions on your behalf, or you can’t influence them, and it’s the opposite of autonomy. You feel like you’re enslaved to the technology.
For mastery, some people might feel, actually, I don’t feel a master over my subject. I worry that I’m being left behind by this technology. I don’t know how it’s going to apply to my role. I’m fearful of what’s going to happen to the company, there’s the opportunity that I will actually feel irrelevant because I’ve got no mastery, and this, this technology, is running away from me.
And finally, we have the purpose, and this is where you might have flat out panic around AI. So you know, the robots are coming. I’m going to be replaced by machine. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to my role, or how my role is going to influence what we’re doing as a company, and I feel detached from the company. So you can see how the common fears around AI can actually really ruin a person’s feeling about the job satisfaction and motivation at work.
Strategies to Address AI Fears and Build Confidence
So how do we begin to address these fears? What? What approach should we take if we want to address these with our team? Because we want to, you know, the ethic of this is we want to take the team with us. It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about augmenting them and supporting them with technology. So how do we take them with us and address these fears? So three things to think about.
Everyone can contribute to AI transformation
I believe that everyone, in terms of autonomy, everyone has an opportunity to contribute. So this is the temptation with technology, is to do a special Skunk Works, you know, like an SAS team that does some essay, that does some AI work, and everyone will find out the results of that later. I think it’s better, even though it will take longer to take the entire team with you. Everyone gets an opportunity to contribute. Everyone can help shape the policy and processes around AI. Everyone’s involved in that process and feels they’re contributing. That gives them a sense of autonomy of the process and not You’re not serving the technology. You’re you’re working with it.
Everyone should be trained on AI awareness and opportunity spotting
The next opportunity is around mastery, and I believe that everyone should be trained on this technology at a basic level, so that we go on a collective transformation of the organisation. Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas just because you’re working the AI team, or you’re that specialist, or you’re a technology specialist, doesn’t mean you’ve got the monopoly on good ideas. This technology needs to be trained across the entire organisation, because everyone is going to have ideas around transformation. So that means learning new skills so that people feel relevant and they can.
Apply it to their the role around AI, give them hands on experience with this technology, Show it. Show people how it works. It’s not some sort of black box. Actually deconstruct how this stuff works, and that will spark the ideas and the innovation across the entire team.
AI as an Augmentation Tool: The Power Loader Analogy
And the final point is sort of how you position this technology, in terms of people feeling a sense of purpose. I believe that AI is a tool for humans. There is speak in the industry about AI being a teammate, and I don’t really agree with that terminology. If AI is a teammate, then there’s certainly a subordinate. The AI is here to serve us as a tool, as a technology.
So I believe that AI should be positioned as a way of augmenting people’s superpowers. Every one of your team members has got unique abilities, and use the AI to augment that and and increase their powers around that. The way I sort of envision this is, you know, Sigourney Weaver in Alien, she’s, I think it was called a power loader, and she’s got this technology where she’s able to pick up, she’s wearing this suit, she’s able to pick up huge, heavy cargo and shift it around the space station Bay using this suit.
And she was making, yes, she’s been augmented. It’s not her muscle. Ripley has been augmented by this, like hybrid forklift thing, but she’s deciding what to pick up. She’s deciding where to put it. She’s been augmented by the technology, not replaced by it. And this is how I think we should think about this, with AI.
A Roadmap to AI-Driven Organisational Transformation
So if you consider these components, take this of Outlook, then I think you have a whole lot less fear around the technology, more embracing it, and people thinking about how I can innovate for my specific role. Doesn’t mean they’re going to be an AI expert. Doesn’t mean they’re going to be a technologist. Just means that they can spark the ideas about how they can innovate across their department, their sphere of influence, and the whole organization goes on this transformation journey.