The recent events at OpenAI, culminating in the firing and subsequent reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, have sent shockwaves through the AI community and beyond. While the specific reasons for Altman’s initial dismissal remain unclear, the episode has served as a stark reminder of the challenges and complexities of leadership, particularly in the dynamic and rapidly evolving world of AI.

The Power of Transparency and Communication

At the heart of the OpenAI saga lies a critical lesson in transparency and communication. The board’s abrupt decision to fire Altman without consulting with employees or the broader AI community created a climate of fear, uncertainty, and distrust. This lack of transparency eroded confidence in the company’s leadership and decision-making processes.

Effective leadership hinges on the ability to communicate openly, honestly, and proactively. When decisions are made without proper consultation or explanation, it breeds suspicion and undermines the ability to foster a cohesive and motivated workforce.

The lack of agreement on key behaviors valued in a great leader is a prescription for disaster for employers who need leaders to drive business outcomes. However, most organizations report that they lack widespread agreement on the critical attributes and competencies of great leaders and how to develop them, according to the Brandon Hall Group study, Great Leaders: How Do We Develop More?

The Importance of Cultural Alignment

The OpenAI saga also highlights the significance of cultural alignment between leaders and their organizations. A strong company culture is built on shared values, mutual respect, and a sense of shared purpose. When leaders’ actions and decisions deviate from these core principles, it creates dissonance and disrupts the delicate balance of a company’s culture.

In the case of OpenAI, the board’s actions appeared to contradict the company’s stated values of transparency, collaboration, and responsible AI development. This disconnect between leadership and culture contributed to the turmoil that ensued.

Culture is often hard to define, but it is one thing that makes a company an employer of choice. It also has a huge impact on how things get done. No one-size-fits-all culture works because each industry, company and location have unique values. Using broad definitions, organizations are spread across four basic culture types — Collaborative, Creating, Controlling or Competing.

Percentages for each culture type are based on averages of all Brandon Hall Group studies conducted over the past five years, according to our paper, Employee Engagement: A Framework for Success. About 8% of organizations indicated their cultures did not fit any of the definitions. Culture is a key ingredient in your approach to employee engagement and should be reflected in each key process.

The Path Forward: Embracing Transparency, Fostering Trust

Moving forward, OpenAI must prioritize transparency and trust-building measures to restore confidence and unity within the organization. This includes:

• Open and transparent communication: Leaders should proactively communicate decisions, providing clear explanations and rationale for their actions.
• Employee engagement and feedback: Actively seek employee input and feedback to ensure that decisions align with the company’s values and the aspirations of its workforce.
• Reinforcement of shared values: Regularly emphasize and reinforce the company’s core values, ensuring that they are reflected in decision-making and everyday actions.

OpenAI must be intentional about building and maintaining a collaborative and supportive culture. This single element consistently ranks highest among attributes that contribute to a positive employee experience, according to the Brandon Hall Group study, Culture Eats Strategy: Is Your Employee Experience What You Intended?

Ensuring a culture remains collaborative and supportive requires intention on the part of all involved. It begins with clearly defining organizational expectations around a collaborative work environment — what it looks like in the specific context of your company and how it plays out in daily work. Once you set those expectations, holding leaders accountable to behave in alignment to those expectations becomes critical.

The future of OpenAI hinges on its ability to learn from these recent events and emerge stronger, wiser, and more united. By embracing transparency, fostering trust, and aligning leadership with its core values, OpenAI can navigate the challenges ahead and continue to make meaningful contributions to the field of AI.

The Sam Altman saga serves as a valuable case study in leadership, communication, and culture. OpenAI has an opportunity to transform this crisis into a catalyst for positive change, demonstrating how effective leadership can navigate turbulent times and emerge stronger, more resilient, and better equipped to fulfill its mission.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly advancing, as seen by the explosion of chatbots developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and others. While AI delivers enormous productivity gains, it lacks human emotional intelligence — the ability to understand, empathize and connect on an emotional level.

As automation proliferates, emotional intelligence becomes even more critical across the workforce. A new Brandon Hall Group research brief, commissioned by EI Powered by MPS, explores the growing importance of emotional intelligence in the age of AI.

The report reveals that emotional intelligence enables collaboration, effective leadership, adaptability, better customer service and ethical decision-making. It provides solutions to potential issues arising from AI, such as job displacement and dehumanization.

With AI in the process of taking over more routine and analytical tasks, the ‘softer’ skills of emotional intelligence — empathy, communication, motivation — are crucial for managers and employees alike. Leadership training is already reflecting this shift, with 58% of organizations targeting emotional intelligence and 55% focusing on empathy, according to Brandon Hall Group research.

The research brief provides examples of how AI can improve learning, through personalized recommendations and adaptive learning platforms. However, it cautions the reader that AI lacks human creativity, emotional support and cultural awareness. This is where learning professionals must step in to address these gaps. Instructional designers and L&D leaders need heightened expertise to contextualize and humanize AI-generated learning content. Curriculum must be designed around emotional intelligence in order to fully engage today’s diverse learners.

EI Powered by MPS, a Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Preferred Provider, recognizes these challenges. With over 30 years of learning design experience, EI integrates emotional intelligence and AI through frameworks like their Learning and Performance Ecosystem and the LITMUS Framework. These holistic approaches ensure that learning initiatives achieve desired outcomes for individuals and businesses.

Human-centered emotional intelligence combined with the scale of AI creates a powerful learning formula. But most organizations lack the in-house resources or capabilities to execute this combination effectively. That’s where trusted partners like EI Powered by MPS come in.

Want the full picture on emotional intelligence in the age of AI? Access the exclusive research brief from Brandon Hall Group and EI Powered by MPS. Discover why emotional intelligence is moving from ‘nice-to-have’ to business necessity as AI transforms our workplaces. Get actionable insights to foster emotionally intelligent learning in your organization.

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Retention of top talent is a top-of-mind topic for all high-performing organizations. According to research by Brandon Hall Group, 92% of organizations surveyed agreed that the top talent in their organization is at risk of leaving in the next year. Losing an exceptional employee is not just a disruption, it is also a costly setback. Expenses may include lost productivity, replacement costs and decreased morale.

Complexities

Despite the clear benefits of retaining top talent, many organizations struggle to do so. The competitive landscape, increasing demands from employees for more fulfilling work experiences and ongoing shifts in workplace dynamics have further complicated the matter. The result of these ongoing challenges is that organizations are divided in knowing where to invest time and energy to best impact retention. Knowing which aspects of the employee experience or company culture to focus on seems to vary somewhat based on the size of the organization.

Consequences

Our research shows that many organizations will make two cultural attributes their top priority over the next year:

Critical Questions

1. How can you identify the hidden superpowers of your team members?
2. What are some ways to create connection between employees and a meaningful sense of belonging in a digitized world?
3. Are you clearly communicating information up and down the organization on a continuous basis?

BRANDON HALL GROUP POV

Consider these three high-level strategies to address increasing retention of your workforce.

1. Get to Know Those Hidden Superpowers — Organizations that prioritize respect, integrity and open communication tend to have lower turnover rates. One way of demonstrating this is by fostering a strong connection between leaders and their team members. As a leader, carve out a few short pockets of time to check in with your team members. Notice what surrounds them in their workspace. I once learned that a team member practiced calligraphy as a hobby by noticing all the beautiful notes on her desk. Now we put that to great use, helping us make the office look bright and beautiful. It’s not about the handwriting. It’s about the connection and recognition for contributing something seemingly non-work-related to help her team that made her feel seen, heard and appreciated in a new way.
2. Build a Sense of Belonging to the Organization — Providing the space and time for team members, and their leaders, to get to know each other and learn about each others’ skills and strengths. When team members have a chance to get to know each other, they thrive. They are delighted and a bit more connected after learning something new about each other. On the surface, it may not be something directly work related, but those capabilities can be filed away and brought up when the need arises. Ask curiosity questions that might seem to be irrelevant, but actually serve as a catalyst for valuable interaction.
3. Ongoing Communication: Up, Down and Every Which Way — It’s been said that the role of chief executive officer should actually be called chief repetition officer. And for that matter, leaders at all levels. Crafting a meaningful and relevant message for the workforce and then repeating it, consistently over and over, to multiple groups is a powerful tactic that all leaders should use. Messaging should also be used as a chance to convey the company’s mission, vision and values. It may feel uncomfortable, being so repetitive. Remember, the employees are hearing the message for the first time, or maybe even the second. Cognitively, people cannot absorb the entire message on the first or even second go around. Be prepared to convey the message with continued enthusiasm repeatedly.

— Marie Barnes, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

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Of highest priority for nearly all organizations today is keeping their most vital talent in-house. The departure of high-performing employees in an organization can be disruptive, at best, and crippling at worst. In such times of rapidly changing economics, technology, and even the nature of work itself, organizations must prioritize retention strategies to stay viable and competitive. According to the Brandon Hall Group Study, Retaining Talent 2023, a vast majority of organizations believe they are successful at retaining their talent (87%), which is substantially higher than previously (31% in 2022).

Complexities

When HR and the business units are out of sync, the entire organization suffers. Creating and adhering to a cohesive retention strategy demonstrates unity of leadership and fosters collaboration. Even at a time when talented team members have numerous options, creating a unique sense of belonging in a workplace seems to be rare.

Underlying the disconnect between these two entities is typically a scarcity of resources — time, money, people, etc., or competing perspectives seen through two lenses, one as boots on the ground in the field and the other from inside a corporate headquarters site. Whereas teams work feverishly toward accomplishing objectives, competing priorities can impede progress. Without consensus of executive leadership and unification of efforts, meeting business needs and objectives will be hindered.

Consequences

A retention strategy must be aligned with the organization’s business goals and longer-term strategic goals. A lack of alignment will result in competing priorities that divide efforts and resources unnecessarily. Uncertainty already pervades our reality and misaligned priorities only create more confusion and disruption. Organizations need to be positioned and ready to address flight risks and ongoing growth needs.

Without unifying leadership and command of the business, effort from team members will decrease and they will likely feel caught in the crosshairs of battles between the “higher-ups.” Unless top leadership establishes a cultural norm of “when one of us fails, we all fail” teams will spend their time and energy surviving the churn of turf wars and political battles.

Critical Questions

• What’s the nature of the relationship between HR and the business units? How can you better align the talent management efforts between these two teams?
• How seamless is the connection for a new hire throughout the processes of interviewing, onboarding and working on the job?
• Do all stakeholders know what the goals and expectations are for retention?
• Have you promoted hybrid or remote work to the greatest extent possible?

Brandon Hall Group POV

Your Retention Strategy: Be Proactive and Plan

Developing an effective retention strategy includes comprehensive planning, diligent implementation and precise tracking.

The only way to know where you’re going is to have a plan. A strategic plan includes the steps needed and the stakeholders who are responsible for taking action. Laying out what needs to be accomplished, by whom, and in what timeframe, is essential for an organization to move toward realizing its vision.

Identify what retention strategies may be needed by asking these questions

• Do employees have access to career opportunities and see themselves growing within the company over time?
• Are leaders retaining your talent? Employees need to feel heard and appreciated. Cultivating a leadership style that promotes open communication, regular feedback and recognition can greatly enhance retention.
• Is the compensation structure competitive within your industry? Are non-monetary benefits such as flexible hours, health benefits and vacation policies available and realistic for your employees?
• Have new hires developed a sense of inclusion and belonging during their onboarding experience? Conducting stay interviews during a new hire’s first 90 days can provide a rare opportunity to identify gaps that would otherwise go unnoticed. I remember being asked by my new Director if the new job was what I was expecting or not and why. Just the fact that she asked mattered to me. I was candid with her and we worked together to close some gaps. This definitely made me stick around rather than go back into job-search mode.

Put It into Practice

Highlight success stories, for example, talk to new hires who have had a positive onboarding experience and have them share the meaningfulness of that on their feeling of belonging and engagement. A seemingly small gesture can go a long way for onboarding. In one organization, the business unit’s hiring manager would meet the newly hired leader for lunch on Day One. Years later, that new hire was still recounting the story of her first day of work.

Create positive and ongoing efforts that emphasize the importance of retaining talent. New leaders especially tend to underestimate their influence on retention. Starting a regular practice of one-on-one meetings with direct reports can be highly effective. Recognition from a boss for hard work and excellent outcomes during a particularly challenging project provides a sense of purpose and meaning. Leaders who take feedback, through surveys or anecdotally, to heart and follow through earn credibility and loyalty, which translates to retention.

Consistency is Key

Track progress otherwise you won’t see the needle move. Identify relevant and meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can pinpoint sources of success and provide the feedback and recognition to those who are driving the change. For example, look at both voluntary and involuntary turnover separately to better understand your results.

To foster synergy and collaboration, encourage interdependency instead of accepting the cultural “norm” of staying in your lane. Both HR and business units must understand and appreciate each other’s roles, goals and challenges. Regular, transparent dialogue can foster this understanding, creating a common language and shared objectives.

When interviewing for a potential opportunity, I typically ask, “How does the HR strategy help drive the success of the organization and feed into the overall strategy of the business?” I can’t tell you how many times I got blank stares from HR leaders in response to that question. Let’s change that! Beginning with the CHRO and the CEO, who can join forces and align strategic priorities, essentially working in tandem to forge a clearer understanding between HR and the overall organization.

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