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Speaking the Same Language
Consider the following hypothetical cases and options for response. You know what you are doing, enjoy doing it and have …
Written by Sam Shriver with Training Industry’s Lori MacIssac
For decades, leadership was about turning potential into performance. It still is, but today, artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the equation. Employees can draft board presentations in minutes, analyze markets in seconds, and generate ideas at a pace that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Yet many organizations are discovering an uncomfortable truth: As AI undeniably helps employees work faster, it doesn’t necessarily make people better.
In fact, the opposite can happen.
When employees rely on AI to think for them instead of with them, they may produce polished work while ignoring development of the very capabilities that make them valuable—critical thinking, discernment, creativity and judgment. At the same time, managers are drowning in a flood of AI-generated output they cannot possibly review, coach or approve at scale.
The challenge for leaders is no longer simply increasing productivity. It is ensuring that the pursuit of productivity remains a viable means of translating potential or capability into verifiable skill.
The answer lies in combining AI with one of leadership’s most enduring frameworks: Situational Leadership®.
Historically, organizations were constrained by the amount of work people could produce. AI has dramatically reduced that constraint.
Today’s bottleneck is management capacity and human judgment.
Employees generate more analyses, proposals, emails and recommendations than ever before. Managers respond by creating more review cycles, approvals and checkpoints, inadvertently becoming the obstacle to the very productivity gains AI was supposed to unlock.
Even worse, many organizations mistake polished output for refined expertise.
An employee may produce an exceptional strategy document with AI assistance yet be unable to explain its assumptions, identify its weaknesses or recognize when the model is confidently wrong.
In the AI era, execution has become abundant. High-quality judgment remains scarce.
The Situational Leadership® Model is grounded in adaptability. Leaders need to adjust their influence approach based on an employee’s competence and commitment for a specific task:
Those principles remain sound—but AI changes how leaders need to assess the Performance Readiness® of employees to perform. The traditional determinant of skill level was output quality. Today, output quality can be manufactured with a prompt.
Consider that in the world of AI, “skill” is a function of questions like these:
If the answer to questions two through four is “no,” a trust and freedom approach (Empowerment) is premature regardless of how impressive the deliverable appears.
Many AI initiatives celebrate time savings: reports completed faster, emails drafted automatically, presentations built in minutes. Those gains are real, but they are insufficient.
The more important metric is whether employees are becoming better decision-makers.
Leaders should encourage team members to:
These practices transform AI from an automation tool into a thinking partner that strengthens human capability instead of replacing it.
For inexperienced employees, don’t start with prompt engineering.
Start with the task!
Define the objective, articulate the assumptions and outline an approach before employees open an AI tool. Then contrast their understanding and thinking about the task with the output and perspective provided by AI.
The goal is not merely to produce an answer. It is to build reasoning skills.
Managers often spend hours rewriting or redirecting AI-generated work.
A better approach is a leader-driven discussion, in the context of the task or problem or opportunity. Consider directive questions like these:
Coaching should focus on strengthening judgment as it relates to solving the problem or completing the task, rather than the increased identification of opportunities and options.
As employees develop and demonstrate the Performance Readiness® to perform, leaders should shift from providing structure to facilitating reflection.
Encourage team members to use AI to test scenarios, generate counterarguments or critique their own proposals. The objective at this juncture is task related intellectual resilience, as opposed to an unchallenged dependency on an artificial source.
True delegation in the AI age is not about trusting someone to use AI.
It is trusting them to know when not to!
The employees who deserve autonomy are those who consistently validate facts, recognize hallucinations, question recommendations and apply sound business judgment as it applies to task, problem or opportunity.
Managers are no longer editors-in-chief of every deliverable.
They are architects of capability!
Their role is to create an environment where AI amplifies learning instead of replaces it, where employees gain confidence without becoming complacent and where productivity gains compound because judgment improves alongside efficiency.
The organizations that win with AI will not simply produce more work.
They will produce better and more thoughtful leaders.
The traditional image of leadership is vertical: The manager diagnoses the employee and selects a style. That remains an important part of the influence equation, but it is incomplete.
AI is changing work too quickly for expertise to reside at the top. Senior leaders may possess judgment but have limited familiarity with new tools; junior employees may understand AI but lack context.
Influence must therefore flow downward, laterally, upward and across functions. Leadership shifts according to the task and expertise required.
The principle is not that everyone is the boss. It is that everyone has a responsibility to help the organization think, actively increase proficiency and lead!
Artificial intelligence changes the economics of work, but it does not change the fundamentals of leadership.
In fact, AI makes adaptive leadership more important than ever.
The leaders who create lasting advantage will not be those who squeeze the most productivity from AI. They will be those who use AI to accelerate the growth of human judgment, gradually moving employees from dependence to independence through deliberate coaching, thoughtful delegation and continuous learning.
In an age where everyone can produce impressive work with AI, the defining competitive advantage will belong to organizations that have people who can think!
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