AI Career Prompts - Leadership

Learn the best starter prompts to drive your career growth

How do we do to expand our knowledge in the ‘I didn’t even know it existed’ realm?

We can wait around for some words and phrases to be dropped in conversation, or we can take the time to read and research ourselves.

I aim to make that process easier with sets of Career Prompts.

Career prompts aim to inspire creativity and innovative thinking in a professional context. They can be used by anyone at any stage in their career.

Prompts are common in art (before AI made that term super famous). Art challenges aim to be open-ended words designed to spark creative thinking and show the brilliance of a straightforward thing being interpreted differently in so many ways. There are often prompt challenges weekly or monthly.

This tool would be excellent with a career development spin because it is simple; anyone can do it, and you can learn quite a lot. 

Each prompt is a word or short phrase

You can use AI tools to explore and expand upon the prompt, for example, ‘What is {prompt’’ or What does {prompt} mean?’}

These Career Prompts are about external creation and creativity that aim to push you to think outside of your usual box and apply creativity to career growth - following the rabbit down the rabbit hole in your research.

That research doesn’t have to take long.

Comparatively, the Motivation Monday series is about starting the week with a positive mindset with actionable insights related to career growth with practicality in mind to apply to your professional lives from inward reflection.

Through creative exploration with AI tools, you can innovate and focus outward on your career to expand what you don’t know. This is what Career Prompts aims to do.

I’ll drop these in a regular weekly monthly drop, which will only be posted to the Substack web (and not sent to inboxes as I don’t want to send loads of emails). Update: Since switching this series to monthly, I’ll push these to subscribers via email every month when they drop! Let me know if you would rather this be a separate series you can opt in or out of.

Example of how to use a Career Prompt

Let’s start with the first Career Prompts set, which is all around the theme of ‘Leadership’, and run through an example as if I were doing this. I’m going to use AI. However, you can easily use your favourite search engine instead; it can make your research and responses less conversational and harder to understand as you have to parse through massive amounts of content yourself.

Let’s begin.

Looking at the prompts for this week, I want to look at the 5th prompt - ‘Adaptive Leadership’. I can pick these in whatever way I want, one a day, two a day, one a week, whatever. This word looked interesting, so I’m going to pick it.

I use ChatGPT, so I am going to ask ChatGPT what Adaptive Leadership is:

What is Adaptive Leadership

Great. So I’m getting somewhere, I can ask ChatGPT to simplify or maybe I want to think about it for a while. I can go look up the framework on my favourite search engine for some fact-checking, find there was a book published by these professors at Harvard and perhaps find the Harvard information on it now I know it’s associated to them, like this or this. I can even find some more information which break down what Technical and Adaptive Challenges are.

Now, this sounds like a fancy word but what do these things mean to me? I’ve used Adaptive leadership in my career, without knowing it was called this.

So with this new information, I can now ask this:

Provide me with examples of somebody applying Adaptive Leadership in their job?

So that is great too but the examples provided were not really roles I have been in or in right now. I got some interesting generic information though about applying some of the principals:

We are getting somewhere. So now I make things more specific to my current role, and ask:

Where can I apply adaptive leadership principals in my role as a program manager?

You can easily switch out my role ‘program manager’ for your role.

I can absolutely see I have done some of these things. Perhaps I could get a bit more information which would help me articulate these when I am describing my skills:

What skills are often associated to this Adaptive leadership?

Great, now I have the skills, understanding of application and knowledge of what Adaptive Leadership is. I have clearly relatable information to trace this back to my skills and now I can reflect on how developed those skills are. For example I know I already have emotional intelligence, I did a course on systems thinking and have a great deal of resilience.

My final follow up is:

Why is Adaptive leadership valued within an organization and where is it most useful?

Now, I understand if this is worth prioritizing based on my understanding of my career goals. Since Adaptive Leadership is sought after, I can now clearly articulate what it is, understand how I have applied it to my career examples and choose to develop those skills.

I went from not knowing what 'Adaptive leadership' is to being able to grow specific skills intentionally and be more valuable to an organization I am part of. For example, I could even use this new knowledge when discussing my skills in an interview setting.

This is a fantastic application of AI in your career because you're using the information provided, thinking about it yourself and, reflecting on it, then making that insight you have relatable to your specific job experience and skills. You can dig deeper into some of the specifics, such as in this example, and dig deeper into the original framework of Adaptive Leadership if you want to learn more about it.

This is the intention of Career Prompts. Let me know what you think in the comments and any questions!