It’s the hottest role in any company: the chief executive officer. This person sets the vision, leads the team, and holds the final say. A great CEO can transform a business, a bad one can render it obsolete. How a CEO thinks, speaks and acts has a ripple effect throughout every level of their organization that governs how it ultimately performs. What happens in the boardroom matters.
CEOs look to constantly improve so they can play at higher levels and achieve more for the collective good. Here’s how ChatGPT can help them do that.
How to use ChatGPT to be a more effective company leader
Create an inspiring vision
If your company’s vision is uninspiring, your team will be uninspired. If it doesn’t spark the imagination and motivate them to do their best work, they won’t show up with everything they’ve got and they won’t excel in their roles. Your company’s vision has to be grand. It has to be audacious. Otherwise there’s no point. As soon as you suspect you could be dreaming bigger, ask ChatGPT for a leg up with this simple prompt.
“The company I run is [describe the nature of your company] and it achieves [outcome you achieve] for [target audience you serve]. So far we have helped [describe the scale of impact you have made]. I want to go bigger with our vision. I want to create a huge mission that will inspire people to get behind us and support us, both our team and external parties. Can you suggest wording for a new, inspiring vision that takes what we do to a whole new level?”
Improve communication
People don’t remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. While this might be true for regular managers, it’s not true for the CEO. Not only will people remember what you say, they will repeat it. It will echo around their conversations with friends and be woven into interactions with clients. Your phrases and metaphors will be used by others long after they have left your desk. For crystal clear communication, clarity is key and conciseness wins. The more direct you are, the less room there is for interpretation and the more consistent a message carries through your company.
Use this prompt for emails, meeting outlines, written updates and meeting transcripts: “This is an example of a message I send to [audience of the message] with the purpose of [goal of the communication]. Please rewrite the text in a way that makes it more [compelling/persuasive/assertive] and tell me what you have changed and why: [Include message here].”
Keep perspective
Every professional has weaknesses and CEOs are no different. The flipside of a dominant, driven and ambitious leader is a curt, impatient and frantic micromanager with the propensity to be a living nightmare. This is exacerbated if you’re tired or overwhelmed, and small issues can blow right out of proportion and make you angry. Stop the impending feelings of irritability and irrationality by regaining perspective just as quickly as you lost it. Find the sense of calm that the best version of you acts from.
“When I feel overwhelmed I lose perspective and I find it easy to become [angry, irritable, negative, highly-strung]. One example of this was [give an example of where you lost perspective]. Imagine you are a high-level advisor to visionary CEOs. Can you give me some practical guidance on how I can keep perspective and continue to lead my company well?”
Get more from your team
A key responsibility of any CEO is to assemble a dream team. Attracting talent and putting the right people in the right places cannot be underplayed for a company’s likelihood of success. But bad habits and suboptimal attitudes can make tiny cracks in the ship that, if left unnoticed, can cause it to sink. Use this ChatGPT prompt to find those cracks before it’s too late. Explain your team structure, describe the people aboard, and see if it suggests anything you haven’t considered.
“Here’s a list of the people in my team and their roles and responsibilities [include a list]. At the moment, our main challenges are [describe your main challenges in your team], the most important of which is [mention the most important]. Imagine you are a coach in the field of team performance. How would you suggest I make changes or improvements in my organization to improve my team in terms of [metric you want to improve]?”
Improve self-awareness
You should never be surprised by someone else’s feedback. As a CEO, aim to possess incredible self-awareness, so you know when you’ve messed up, you spot where you could have done better, and you have made your plan for improvement so it doesn’t happen again. Knowing yourself is the fastest way to be more effective in your role, and ChatGPT can help you find out how. You’d much rather spot your own weaknesses than have them pointed out. Playing offense trumps defense every time, so use this prompt to find out what you’re missing.
“I want to improve my self-awareness so I can become a better CEO. My main skills are [describe your main skills] and I believe my main weaknesses are [include your main weaknesses] but I potentially have others. I would describe my personality as [explain your personality and character traits as a CEO]. If I fail at something, it’s often because [describe the main reason things go wrong]. Can you act as a high-level leadership coach and tell me what I may be missing, based on elements of my personality and actions that I explained?”
ChatGPT prompts for CEOs
Become a more effective CEO by creating an inspiring vision, improving how you communicate, keeping perspective throughout tough times, getting more from your team and improving your self-awareness. Ask ChatGPT for ideas and guidance to keep upping your game for the benefit of your company. Figure out the gap between where you are and where you want to be with the help of these five simple prompts.
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