Revolutionize Your End of Year Conversations with AI: Discover the Power of ChatGPT for Leaders

7 min readJan 16, 2023

It’s that time of year again…

It’s time for ‘End-of-Year Conversations’, or ‘Performance Appraisals’ as they are sometimes known - yayyyy!!!

End-of-year conversations with employees are crucial for setting expectations and goals for the upcoming year. And as a leader, you know that it is important that you make sure these conversations are productive and effective.

But, let’s face it, leading these conversations can sometimes be challenging, especially in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business environment.

The good news is that technology, specifically AI, can help you navigate these conversations with ease and efficiency.

(I honestly didn’t think I’d be writing those words anytime soon but here we are, Moore’s law and all that!)

In this article, we’ll explore how AI, in the form of ChatGPT, can support you in having successful end-of-year conversations with your team.

We’ll cover what ChatGPT is and how to leverage the power of it to prepare for these conversations. I’ll even share some example conversations that I had with ChatGPT, just to show you first hand how you can apply it

By the end of this article, not only will you be far better prepared for your EOY conversations, you’ll also be well on the way to understanding how you can leverage this amazing technology to 10x your leadership skills.

As the saying goes:

‘AI won’t replace jobs, but people using AI will’

End of year conversations

Before we talk about the exciting technology, lets first examine the age old corporate favorite, the ol’ ‘end of year conversation’…

End of year conversations have been around since long before I started in the corporate industry. In fact, according to an Employment Hero article (found here), performance appraisals have their roots in Chinese cultures around 1800 years ago. Although what we now consider the current performance appraisal really started to take shape around the mid-1900’s.

As a leader, end-of-year conversations are a crucial opportunity to:

Reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and challenges
Set clear goals for the upcoming year
Provide positive and constructive feedback to your employees
Discuss progress and identify areas for improvement

By having effective end-of-year conversations, leaders can improve employee engagement, motivation, performance and generally set individuals up for success in the year ahead.

However, as I’m sure you have experienced at some point, end-of-year conversations are not always straight forward and they can be challenging at times. Some common challenges that leaders face include:

Difficult employees who may be resistant to change or feedback
Bottom-performers who may, or may not be confrontational
Employees who are out of touch with reality and overestimate their performance
Remote working and virtual teams making it harder for you to create a sense of connection and engagement.

Fortunately, with the help of AI we have never been better prepared to tackle some of these challenges head on.

Introducing ChatGPT

If you have not heard of ChatGPT yet, then where have you been over the last 6 weeks!?!

Joking aside, I honestly cannot remember there ever being such hype about a new technology as what we’ve seen with ChatGPT since it launched on 30th Nov 2022.

To put the adoption rate into context, it took Facebook over 10 months to get to 1 million active users. It took ChatGPT…

Just 5 days!!!

The hype and excitement is palpable, although to be fair it is also being met with some well reasoned skepticism and other people fearing that the robots are taking over…

I could bore you to tears with my thoughts on what the future potentially holds for AI and ChatGPT but that’s for another day.

What is clear however, is that right now, we as leaders have a powerful tool available to us. And the saavy leaders among us will be jumping all over this amazing opportunity!

So what is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an advanced AI model developed by OpenAI that is trained to generate human-like text responses. It has the ability to understand and respond to natural language inputs and quite honestly, it’s just an awesome experience. We’ve all interacted with chatbots at some point but this is in a completely different league to anything I’ve experienced before.

The hype around ChatGPT is not only due to its ability to generate human-like text but it has been trained on huge amounts of data making it a powerful tool for a wide range of applications, including language translation, chatbot development, writing code and I’ve even seen people playing text-based games that they created on the fly with it. The possibilities are endless and you have to explore it for yourself to really get a sense of its capabilities.

There are lots of use cases that I can think of where ChatGPT can be used by the modern leader to take them to another level of performance (I’m anticipating that being another article in the not too distant future) but for right now, I want to focus on end of year conversations specifically, just to give you a flavor of its capabilities!

At the moment ChatGPT is in a free-beta mode and you can access it by simply going to the OpenAI website and navigating to the ChatGPT section. From here you simply need to sign-up and away you go.

How ChatGPT can help your End-of-Year conversations

Ok so rather than me trying to explain to you just how amazing this tool will be at helping you navigate your End-of-Year conversations. I thought it would be easier just to show you…

I have prepared three common scenarios that you might encounter as a leader and have asked ChatGPT to help me navigate them. The scenarios we are using are:

A mid-level performer who believes that they are performing better, and providing more value to the team than they actually are. Goal: find the best way to structure the conversation to bring them back to reality without demotivating them
A bottom performer who has been on a corrective action plan throughout the year, they are quite confrontational and you are expecting some push back. Goal: understand how to approach this conversation as it will likely include some conflict
A teammate who’s performance has dropped off and it is clear they are demotivated right now. Goal: understand how to structure the conversation to try and figure out what is going on and to get them back on track

Lets see what advice ChatGPT has for us…

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

As you can see from each of these examples the advice and guidance that we got from the AI was genuinely very good. You’d struggle to get much better advice from your boss or local HR team.

The beauty of this tool, and you only saw a glimpse of it in Scenario 2, is that you get to go back and forth with the AI on any point it raised to really dive into any parts of the conversation that you want to explore more. You essentially have your own personal coach/mentor at your finger-tips 24/7

In fact, you could very easily role-play the entire conversation and have ChatGPT respond in whatever way you think your employee will respond. With ChatGPT at your side you will never have been more prepared for your difficult end-of-year conversations than you will be this year!

Note: when inputting information into third-party tools like this, please practice sound judgement about what personal or company data you can include. As you saw from my example, you can be very specific about the situation without revealing the name, address and inside leg measurement of your employee. If in doubt about the information you can include in the tool, contact your local HR rep!

Summary

We all know that end-of-year conversations are crucial for setting expectations and goals for the upcoming year, but they are not without their challenges…

By embracing technology you will be more prepared for these conversations than you ever have been!

And in this article we are only just scratching the surface of how technology and AI can help you become a better leader.

Are you ready to take advantage of this amazing technology and 10x your leadership skills?

Let me know how you get on in the comments.

Ian

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