Coaching Conversations in 2025
Coaching Conversations with Tim Hagen, where we teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees. This is the ideal podcast for leaders, managers, and aspiring leaders to improve their coaching and leadership skills to create a more positive coaching culture within their teams.
In 2025, we're doing weekly podcasts on various coaching topics and strategies that will rotate throughout the month, as opposed to 2024 where the weekly episodes featured a monthly theme. Coaching Conversations will continue to have four episodes per month and we're going to sprinkle in masterclasses, which will be lengthier, workshop-style formats.
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Coaching Conversations in 2025
Why Rapid AI Adoption Will Reshape Jobs And Leadership
Welcome to Coaching Conversations
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When I think about artificial intelligence, I think about something running downhill. It's running downhill and it's getting faster and faster. It's picking up steam. Think about it as a snowball in Wisconsin where I live and really uh picking up more and more snow, getting bigger and faster. It's not going to be stopped. It's going to have some hiccups, it's going to have some errors, and so regulation will come into play. But as that ball rolls downhill, think about the impact that that has just for a second, just on leaders. The leaders really understand artificial intelligence. They understand its output, they understand what it can do, but they're put into a very precarious position of representing artificial intelligence. Let me give you an example. One of our client sites has a great learning and development, learning and development director, and she told me, she said, I don't have my arms around this. And I said, I don't think your arms are long enough. And we both started laughing. I go, I love this stuff. But my arms aren't long enough. There's so much that we're not going to get our arms around it. It's not like mastering an LMS platform or an instructional design model. What it's forcing us to do is to learn things at such a rapid speed while we're doing our jobs. And if we don't learn it while we're doing our jobs, we may not have our jobs. As cynical and sarcastic and as crude as that sounds, it's actually true. She later told me they found a tool that does development work. It can produce videos, it can take a prompt, build out workbooks. And I remember her calling me saying, What do I do with our instructional designer? It's a very small credit union. And I said, you know, it's tough. I said, can you reallocate? Because I think what's going to happen, and I want everyone to really hear this. First of all, I love artificial intelligence for what it's done for our business. I build faster, I build better, I build more accurately with the tools. I now have a tool called coachapplybuilder.ai that can build out coaching plans in a matter of seconds that absolutely 1,000% coincides with the model that we teach in our courses. That's a huge plus for the value for our clients. So with that being said, what it's prompting people to do is to learn really, really fast. And if we don't learn, we're going to fastly get behind. But then human nature is let's slow down. Even Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, has recently quoted in October of 2025, we need to slow down. He's making a fortune right now because of the pace. He's actually saying to slow down. And so I think we have to understand its impact, but it puts leaders in a tough spot. So when an employee comes up and says, Is my job on the line? Am I going to get replaced? That's a tough question. Because then in the moment, it's easy to say, no, no, no, no, don't worry about it. And six months later, the mandate comes down that we're going to put AI into these file and job functions. We need to reallocate people, which is going to force people to do what? Not resist, not take their time to think about it, but to quickly adapt and change. It is going to force employees adaptability, flexibility, and their ability to embrace change at rapid speeds like they've never experienced before. They will not have a choice. I used in one of my other podcast episodes a very fundamental example of a receptionist. And she's been answering the phone to this manufacturing company for about 27 years. She's got about six years left. You know where this is going. I just want to do my job. I just want to get to retirement. She doesn't want change. She doesn't want to learn the AI. And remember, they asked me to sit down and talk to her because I know her fairly well going into the company all these years. And I finally said, I'm going to leave you with a thought. And the next time I see you, I want you to just share with me what's going through your mind. She goes, Okay. I said, you do not have a choice. The choice that your company has is to pay you, let's say, 50 grand a year, whatever you're paid. Don't want to know what you're paid. For$5 a month. And her jaw dropped. I go, I'm not kidding you. I build this stuff. It is going to have an impact on humans. So if you take time to fight, you may not have that time to even fight or be listened to. That's how fast this is going. Now, while that creates fear and trepidation and anxiety, ask yourself, what do you do really well? Where else could that be allocated in the company? What are you willing to do to get to that retirement comfortably? Next time I see her, she comes up and she says, I have not stopped thinking about her conversation. And I said, Where are you at? And she said, I've been reading. I went out and and my my grandson, who's a teenager, was showing me some things that I was blown away. I said, It is, it's daunting. When you first experience it, like, what is this thing? And this thing is inside companies, all over the place. I'll give you another example. I saw a tool in the medical field that actually can have somebody without leaving leaving their house put their face up in front of a webcam, lay still, take a picture. The picture immediately looks at the skin for a dermatologist application, diagnoses your skin ailment, and can send a prescription to your local pharmacy in a matter of five to ten seconds. Now, what's going to happen with that? What if it's diagnosed wrong? Would you go back to AI? Probably not. You'd go see your doctor, right? So what's happening is AI is going to force all these interactions. They are going to have what I call emotional impacts. They are going to have an impact on people. I'll give you another example. I was in a meeting in the Midwest at one of our credit unions, and they were talking and showing all these spreadsheets they wanted people to use. And I had just gone off a young lady's channel who showed how to use AI and automation with uh Microsoft Excel. I'm not an Excel person, so I know a little bit about HLOOKUPS, VLOOKUS, pivot tables. She was literally showing the automation and how to use AI. It was blowing me away. So ironically, I get into this meeting, there's about, you know, 30 people in the meeting. And all of a sudden, somebody asks the question at the end of the meeting well, how long will this take us to fill out all these spreadsheets, do you think? And the woman running the meeting goes, well, probably about three hours a week each. I'm looking around the room and I'm like, man, that's 90 hours. That's holy cow, that's 400, that's 360 to 400 hours a month. That I quickly ascertained, I think, would take about five minutes per person. Now they're dealing with people's money, right? So do you want to throw AI at it and be wrong? Probably can't. But it wasn't really dealing with their customer, their members' money. And I was watching this, and the woman I report to said, What was going on with you? And I said, What do you mean? She said, You had this weird expression. So I confided in her and I told her. She was, are you serious? I said, Oh yeah, that's all manual. That's done in a matter of seconds. I'm not saying you should do that because what he's talking about, or the people in the group were talking about, is very, very serious. AI's here. It is going to force adaptability. It is going to force employees to do things quicker and faster without emotional pushback. But it's also going to put leaders in very awkward, precarious conversational situations. What are your thoughts?