The TRUST Show

ChatGPT took the world by storm. Then, one day, I was asked this question: how could you tell, as a college professor, if your students are cheating by using ChatGPT, and how would you be able to prevent it? I can’t tell you how many different thoughts came to mind simultaneously. I decided to conduct a LinkedIn poll and ask people in the education field what they thought of ChatGPT in the classroom, specifically the college classroom. This two-part podcast episode will give you my position on the issue.

This is the second part of this episode, and will focus more on the educational aspects of the question. It will start with a discussion of cheating, the purpose of education, ChatGPT versus Bloom’s Taxonomy, and finally, give my position on whether we should encourage, allow, discourage, or ban the use of ChatGPT in the classroom. The episode will end with the opportunity I see for education stemming from using ChatGPT.

ChatGPT took the world by storm. Then, one day, I was asked this question: how could you tell, as a college professor, if your students are cheating by using ChatGPT, and how would you be able to prevent it? I can’t tell you how many different thoughts came to mind simultaneously. I decided to conduct a LinkedIn poll and ask people in the education field what they thought of ChatGPT in the classroom, specifically the college classroom. This two-part podcast episode will give you my position on the issue. This is the first part of this episode, in which I discuss ChatGPT in general, the insights I got from the LinkedIn poll I conducted, and our approach (and sometimes fear) to adopting new technologies.

We didn’t ask for the COVID-19 pandemic. We didn’t ask to work from home. But, in March 2020, it was forced upon us. At the time, it didn’t look like there was going to be an end to it, and that this was becoming “the new normal.” We are now out of the pandemic. Many companies have gone back to work at the office, but we also learned the benefits from working from home, both for the company and its employees. Should we go back to the office full-time? Should we work remotely full-time? Should we deploy a hybrid mode? And, in the context of this podcast, should you trust employees who work from home? Or, even better, what can you do so you could trust them?

You have heard the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, more recently, chat GPT. The simplest definition of AI is “the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn.” Chat GPT is “a large, pre-trained language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to process and generate natural language.” In this podcast episode, I will give examples of what chat GPT does, but also discuss AI at a higher level, and, most importantly (and somewhat obviously)—how it affects trust, and what to do to ensure it doesn’t cause people to distrust you.

Last week we witnessed the process of selecting the house speaker in the U.S. Congress. This position is the second in order of succession for the Presidency. I’m not going to offer any political commentary except to say one thing. The process was not a consensus focus, trying to get as many supporters out of the entire house with its 435 members, but rather to get to 218. Just enough to be more than 50%. We know that our political divide is only growing and becoming worse, but this is not the topic of this podcast episode. The topic is decision-making, and the relationships it has with trust. This episode will discuss three decision-making processes (consultative, majority, and consensus) and their relationships with trust. 

If you work in a company with more than 10 employees, you did. If you worked in a company with functional units with more than one person in each, you did. If you work in a company with multiple business units, you did. In this episode, I will explain what are the negative consequences of those silos, what causes them, and how to break silos down. Obviously, it is all about trust.

This episode will answer one simple question: what do I have to do this year to move the needle (upward) on the level of trust in my organization? Over the years, I have developed a process, which this year will be complete. It is made of four phases: launching the process (showing that the company is committed to building trust), helping the HR department (or whoever will champion the process) be more trusted by the organization, training them on how to help others (through a 3-day masterclass), and then launching a company-wide effort, with support. 

This episode will also finally tie my own personal-professional efforts and plan to put all those pieces in place, and the status of them. 

It’s just about that time, and you are starting to think about your new year’s resolutions. You are ready to make the commitment, but you might also be ready to give it up by the end of January. The reason you are not sticking with a resolution is that you are not trying to form a new habit that will allow you to achieve that resolution. “Losing 10 pounds” is not enough. Developing the right habits that will cause you to lose those 10 pounds is.

While the framework of this episode was taken from the Trust Habits™ process of forming trustworthiness habits, it still applies to forming any habit for any purpose. This episode will simply give you a comprehensive set of tools to form habits that will help you achieve your new year’s resolutions.

Trust is important everywhere and in every relationship, personal and professional. Still, I’ll admit that most questions and requests I get about trust are in the organizational setting. Most of the keynotes and workshops I delivered were to organizations, mainly companies, worried about the low levels of trust they experience. Trust is needed in every organization, but it is needed in multiple places and for multiple reasons. Much research was done about the benefits of high trust to the organization, whether to the employees, teams within the company, or company outcomes. But that trust is needed everywhere in the organization, and not just in one relationship. This episode addresses all the areas in the organization where trust is needed and why it is important in each one.

American Corporate Culture is obsessed with leadership. Everyone simply must be a leader. If you are not striving to become a leader, then something must be wrong with you. Even if you are not a leader, not in a leadership position, we will redefine the word leader to claim that you are, in fact, a leader. Just so that you feel good.

This episode will first address the reasons we are obsessed with leadership, and then the four costs of this obsession. Some of those costs are to the level of trust in the organization, and some of them are a result of the level of trust.

Finally, it will show what we can do about it.