AI and The Magic Loop
A proven framework for rapid career growth (now boosted with AI)
Hi, it’s Ethan & Jason from Level Up: Make career breakthroughs with AI-proof leadership skills. Congrats to one of our members (leader at a major fintech) on their promotion, here’s what they shared:
“I’m writing to share some great news: I’ve officially been promoted to the new level we discussed last year! The “looking up and out” mindset shift was a total game-changer during my performance conversations with leadership. It helped me frame my impact much more effectively and definitely accelerated the process. Thank you both for the coaching and the specific, actionable advice. It made a tangible difference in this process.”
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I became an Amazon Vice President by following a process I call “The Magic Loop.”
I also used this process to develop and promote hundreds of engineers and leaders on my team over the years. And thousands more have used it and advanced their careers.
With the rapid disruption of knowledge work that AI is causing, I want to address how The Magic Loop can apply to the new world of work.
This newsletter will explain what elements of The Magic Loop still apply in a post-AI world and which ones need to change to remain relevant to your careers.
Briefly, The Magic Loop is a process for working with your manager to earn trust, build a relationship, and systematically grow your career at any level.
The loop has five steps:
Do your primary job well
Ask your manager how you can help them
Do what you are asked
Ask again, with a specific career goal in mind
Repeat
We will recap each step below, but for more details, read my original writeup in Lenny’s Newsletter here. And if you want to dive deeper with specific tactics on how to drive each step, check out this course.
Step 1: Do Your Job Well
Doing your job well consists of two parts.
First, managing your personal performance.
Second, verifying that you are performing well and in the right areas with your manager.
AI can help with both tasks.
To be personally high-performing in today’s environment requires mastering AI tools and using them to produce more work, faster.
Whether your workplace requires the use of AI tools yet or not, it will either soon be required or be an easy differentiator to stand out from peers.
So, one way AI impacts this first step in The Magic Loop is by being used on any task where it stands to enhance your performance.
Traditionally, a challenge in implementing The Magic Loop can be finding the time to help your manager with tasks outside of your normal scope. AI helps with this, too. A superpower of today’s AI tools is their ability to do a lot of work for you, so this will likely help you free up time to help your manager in step three.
The second place AI can help you in step one is in coaching you through feedback conversations. You can use Ethan Evans AI, my own custom coaching GPT to help you prepare for a conversation with your manager, or you can get pretty good advice from any tool you prefer. Either way, AI can help you ask for feedback in a constructive way, interpret the feedback, plan how to address any gaps, and help you communicate improvements with your manager.
This helps you stay on track with your job so that you can move on to step 2.
In summary, for step one, use AI both to improve your performance and to guide your discussions with your manager.
Step 2: Ask How You Can Help
Ethan Evans AI or any AI chat tool can help you plan and rehearse your discussion with your manager. These tools can go deeper than simply giving you words to consider and ways to ask.
For example, you can feed these tools some of your manager’s emails or other communications, and ask them to analyze how you should approach them in order to best build trust and start a positive discussion around your offer to assist them.
Of course, do not share any confidential or sensitive information.
Once you have a plan for approaching your manager and asking how you can be helpful, act:
Let them know that you will ask them this question in your regular 1:1.
Add it to the agenda or send them a message so that they have some time to think of a response.
Step 3: Do What You Are Asked
This step is where AI can be transformative.
As mentioned, AI allows you to do more raw work than you could in the past. This means that you should have more time to work on your manager’s requests and be able to do what you are asked more quickly.
But the truly transformative part is that AI also allows you to do types of work you could not do before. The best known example is perhaps “vibe coding,” where people with no previous programming experience are now producing prototypes and even working applications. If you are not a programmer, your manager may not think to ask you for help with tasks that need new software. However, you can help your manager realize that you can now do a lot more for them across many different skill sets.
This idea applies to all kinds of skills that used to require deep expertise, not just coding. AI tools can perform basic legal analysis, construct financial models, create user interface mock-ups, and much more. While you cannot yet give your manager world-class work in some of these areas using only AI tools, many tasks can be completed well past the minimum bar of viability.
What this means is that the types of things you can take off of your manager’s plate are now much broader than they were in the past, and you can make faster progress on them once you take them over.
More importantly, doing so will broaden your own set of skills and will allow you to take on more of the total project, increasing your scope and your growth.
The win/win is that AI tools can help you do more for your manager while you learn more skills yourself and impress your manager with your breadth and flexibility.
Step 4: Ask Again (With a Career Goal in Mind)
A career goal could be a promotion, more responsibility on the team, more ownership over a project, etc.
As before, AI can help you rehearse your discussion with your manager. In fact, if you have used an AI tool to work through the first three steps of The Magic Loop, it will have the context to do a great job summarizing what you have accomplished and preparing you to ask for career support.
Ask the tool to help construct talking points along these lines: