Using AI to replace your leadership presence, whether through AI video clones, copy-pasted team messages, or scripted feedback, erodes team trust and accelerates disengagement. Lia’s framework is simple: use AI to brainstorm and prep, but never let it substitute for the human moments that make you indispensable. This episode is essential for any leader wondering how to stay relevant and keep their team motivated in the age of AI.
This episode is part of the AI for Leaders & Teams series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“Missed expectations equals reset expectations. Whether it’s utilizing AI, whether it’s missing deadlines coming in at 9.15 for the 9am meeting, whatever it is.”
“…that little discomfort you’re feeling, that is a signal of misaligned expectations. It’s not necessarily a signal that your person doesn’t care or the person’s the wrong fit or they’re taking advantage.”
“It’s not a replace. It is a rethinking. And we’ve had to rethink work over and over and over. That part’s not new.”
Episode highlights
The frustration is real, and it is a signal
You told yourself you were the kind of leader who was totally fine with AI. Then a freelancer hands you a deliverable full of em dashes, generic formatting, and unverified citations, and you think: I could have done this myself. Lia names that frustration directly and reframes it. The discomfort is not proof your hire was wrong or that they are slacking. It is a signal of misaligned expectations, full stop.
Missed expectations equal reset expectations
Lia’s rule applies here the same as everywhere else: before you conclude someone does not care or is cutting corners, ask whether you ever set the expectation in the first place. Most of the time the answer is no. The reaction to AI overuse is the same as the reaction to showing up 15 minutes late to a 9am meeting. You set the expectation. You do not jump straight to “bad hire.”
What the expectation actually looks like
Setting an AI expectation is not “no AI.” It is specific. For written content: use it for a first draft, then read it, humanize it, bring in the brand voice, remove the giveaways (the em dashes, the emoji, the generic headings), and verify every source by clicking through to the actual article. For research: AI is a starting point, not a synthesis. Your team member still provides the context, the judgment, and the accuracy check. Once that anchor is set, if the behavior repeats, now you have grounds to give feedback and figure out what is really going on.
The harder question: what happens to the five hours AI gives back?
If AI saves a team member five hours a week, that is 20 percent of their job. Does it mean they sign off earlier? Lia’s take is clear: when automation reduces the tedious, the goal is not a shorter workweek, it is a larger scope. Taking on more is not a punishment. It is how your team stays irreplaceable. That does not mean burning people out. It means asking: what was a reasonable workload before, and what is reasonable now?
Freeing people up for more strategic work
The real payoff of AI is not cranking out more email copy through a chat tool. It is that removing the tedious parts of a job frees someone to do something more thoughtful, more strategic, more future-facing. As a leader, your job is to figure out what that looks like for each person. That requires actually talking to your team members and knowing them well enough to reinvest their reclaimed time in the right direction.
This is not new. It still requires a point of view.
Work has been rethought before, including when COVID forced a global renegotiation of time, place, and purpose. AI is another rethinking, not a replacement. What is new is that it is moving fast, and team members will get excited and overshoot. Your job as a leader is to have a point of view ahead of time, set expectations, and revisit them as things shift. That is what thoughtful, resilient leadership looks like right now.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 232: What to say when your team is scared about AI (and what not to say). When your team hears “AI,” they immediately think their job is on the line, and if you haven’t addressed that fear directly, it runs silently in the background of every conversation. Lead with your vision for how AI enhances your team’s work rather than replacing it, and save 10 to 15 hours per project by targeting the tasks that were never the core of anyone’s job. This episode is most useful for owners and leaders who need to open the AI conversation without triggering a productivity crash or a quiet exit.
- Ep 208: What AI should replace on your team (and what it should not). AI can handle tactical tasks like notetaking and scheduling, but replacing an entire role means losing the invisible human value that holds teams together. Lia walks through a practical way to audit what to automate versus preserve, using the example of an executive assistant whose real job was culture, candor, and translation. This episode is most useful for founders, operators, and leaders who are under cost pressure and tempted to automate their way out of staffing decisions.
- Ep 197: How to navigate the Gen Z and Gen AI collision on your team. The tension between Gen Z workers and AI tools creates three specific problems for leaders: entry-level jobs disappearing, critical thinking skills going undeveloped, and team members outsourcing work entirely to AI. The fix is not banning the tools but training people to think first and use AI second. This episode is most useful for owners and leaders who are watching their newer team members default to copy-paste AI output instead of doing the real work.
- Ep 189: The hidden cost of using AI as a leadership shortcut. Using AI to replace your leadership presence, whether through AI video clones, copy-pasted team messages, or scripted feedback, erodes team trust and accelerates disengagement. Lia’s framework is simple: use AI to brainstorm and prep, but never let it substitute for the human moments that make you indispensable. This episode is essential for any leader wondering how to stay relevant and keep their team motivated in the age of AI.
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Full transcript (click to expand)
You’re trying to embrace technology, you’re trying to bring AI into your team, into your workflow, and then you notice the little things your team members are doing it without double-checking it. You got the em dashes, you got the emojis, the bolding of the headings, and you’re thinking to yourself, hey, I thought I was the manager that was totally fine with using AI, and now my team members are taking advantage. And it starts to make you really frustrated, right?
Are we all facing this right now? I know me, when I bring on a freelancer, and I can see that they’ve moved everything into AI, like without double-checking it, copying and pasting it directly, without doing any of the common sense things, I’m thinking, well, it would have just been easier to do it myself, right? And that’s what we’re facing every day as a manager. So if this is what you’re dealing with, you are not alone, and that is what we’re going to talk about today.
I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new manager playbook, where we dive into how to navigate all the ins and outs of the workplace. And right now, one of the biggest challenges and things we’re facing is how to deal with AI, how to understand it, how to use it thoughtfully, how to embrace it, how to not replace people with it, all the things. And this is one of the things that comes up is, are my team members using it a little bit too much?
Are they getting a little bit too comfortable? You say, hey, can you put together this slide presentation based on the thing that we want to present to the stakeholders? And they’re like, oh, yeah. And they have it done in 20 minutes. I’m like, I’m ready. Now I’m going to take off. Or now I can take something else on. So there’s a lot of stuff that starts to surface. And I want to talk about two questions that I’ve been answering a lot with the clients that I work with.
And I’ve been doing a lot of hands-on work with teams on how to think about AI thoughtfully. So if this is something that you’re wrestling with, send me an email. Hello at LeahGarman.com. Because my new workshops and keynote around how to really embrace AI thoughtfully is going to really help set the foundation. And so I want to talk about two areas that’s coming up. One is how to actually put some constraints on it. Because I know for myself, when I am given something by a team member or a freelancer or whoever, and it’s obviously complete AI, I feel like, what am I paying this person for?
And I think that’s what a lot of us are wrestling with. And the immediate reaction is to feel frustrated, maybe a little bit taken advantage of. And I want to just name that because it’s not a bad thing if you’re feeling frustrated. I think we’re all getting used to it. I think team members, they’re thinking, well, gosh, there’s tools that are going to make my job a little bit easier so that I can maybe manage my tasks better.
Maybe I don’t have to be so stressed about this thing that I was really dreading doing research. I didn’t really know how to go about it and get started. So we don’t want to automatically assume someone’s like, screw this. I’m just going to use AI and go to sleep. No, right? But I’m sharing that because it is a natural reaction to feel like, whoa, wait a second. Am I okay with this? And when we have that reaction, we don’t want to just say, okay, no more AI.
Get rid of it. We’re not doing this. That’s an opportunity to, drum roll please, set expectations. Whenever something feels out of align with our teams, we’ve got to set expectations. That’s what we do. Missed expectations equals reset expectations. Whether it’s utilizing AI, whether it’s missing deadlines coming in at 9.15 for the 9am meeting, whatever it is. And that little discomfort you’re feeling, that is a signal of misaligned expectations. It’s not necessarily a signal that your person doesn’t care or the person’s the wrong fit or they’re taking advantage.
No. First is expectations. We don’t actually know the answer to those snowball questions. And a lot of times when leaders come to me and they say, gosh, I think I’ve made a bad hire. I don’t know what to do. This person’s not cutting it. I say it and I know you’ve heard on the show. I asked, well, what were the expectations? And the person sits there like, well, I thought it should be obvious. I’m paying them.
They should do this. And I’m like, okay, okay. Slow down. Let’s set the expectations. And then if they say, okay, well, I had really clear expectations. Then let’s say we had answered that that way. I asked, okay, well, what feedback has been shared? And then I get the same silence. And well, I’ve said this. No. If we haven’t set expectations and we haven’t given feedback, then it’s not really okay for us to jump to these conclusions because we don’t really know.
And so some of the assumptions I think we’re making around team members really utilizing AI for every single thing that they can think of is that I’m going to call it. Maybe you think they’re lazy. Maybe you think they don’t care that they’re slacking, that they’re cutting corners, that they’re trying to free up extra time and not have to work. Whatever you’re snowballing, I’m just naming it so that you see it’s out there. We don’t want to jump to that conclusion until we first set expectations.
So whatever that looks like for you. You might set expectations around, hey, if you write content in AI, that’s great to use for first draft. Then the expectation is you read through it, you humanize it, you bring in your tone or brand voice, you remove the em dashes, the emojis, the formatting, that’s the giveaways that it’s AI, whatever it is, that if you are utilizing for maybe to collect information from multiple teams, that you’re still putting together some synthesis.
Then you’re bringing your context to it, right? Because that’s not always things that some of the stuff that’s missing. But you’re double checking the accuracy, right? They call it, I think, AI hallucinations. A lot of things that comes out of AI is the answer has incorrect sources and citations, has information that’s not in the article that it’s citing. This is the reality of utilizing AI at the stage right now. It is not a copy and paste.
And I think especially folks that are just getting used to it, maybe folks that haven’t been in the workforce a long time where they realize or written papers or whatever in school where you have to double check sources. That we do not want to just copy and paste because it doesn’t necessarily come from that source. You want to click in to the article, read it, find the thing that you’re pulling, okay, yes, it is, or that was in the document.
So whatever parameters, those are the expectations that you set. I have folks a lot of times ask me for a marketing perspective, writing emails or copy. Yeah, you want to still read it. It’s not a copy and paste. And when you set that expectation, now you’ve planted that anchor. Now, if the person does it again, that’s where you give the feedback. They do it a few times, you’re saying, hey, wait, is this negligent? You overlooked it or you’re not getting it or the task is too challenging for you or whatever it is.
Now you figure out how to go from there. So that’s what I think can really help us anchor to like, how do I put the lid back on this thing that I’m okay with them using, but it’s getting a little bit too much. The second thing, I know you’re thinking it, calling it out on today’s episode. If you’re thinking, well, what happens if they’ve been able to automate a good part of their job? Let’s say your team members are able to automate about five hours a week.
Let’s say they’re saving about five hours a week, right? So that’s 20% of their job. Does that mean they get to go home five hours earlier if they’re in person, sign off five hours more? What happens with that time? This is really, really can be subjective. It can be contentious. I think there’s a world in which a team member thinks, okay, well, if I can just do my job faster, why would I be penalized if I take on more?
As a boss, as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner, whatever you are, you’re thinking, well, if they got five hours back, we should be able to do more stuff with that time. This is a balance. My opinion, because of how fast things need to go, because automation is here, and we have to stay on the cutting edge, that when we are able to do our job faster, it’s not a punishment to take on more.
It’s that we are optimizing ourselves so that we can actually have a larger scope so that we remain irreplaceable by robots. I’m not saying we burn people out. I’m not saying we stretch them to all ends where they’re having to work. No. It’s saying, what was a reasonable workload without some of these optimizations? What’s a reasonable workload now? There’s a lot of industries in businesses and companies where, yeah, you may have to check emails at night before a big project launch.
Or I work with events companies, marketing companies, PR companies all the time. Those are things where, hey, when there’s something going on, yeah, folks are signing off at odd hours. The idea is that time is compensated. The idea is that the time balances out. Maybe you get a Friday off because you worked a late night or whatever it looks like. But I want to be really clear that I think it’s okay, as a leader, to say, hey, let’s look at what we’ve been able to optimize utilizing AI and utilizing some of these tools and automations.
Okay, we’re saving about five hours a week. Well, wow, with that time, what can we be doing with this? How can a team member be building a skill, getting more strategic, taking on a project so that you don’t have to hire that freelancer or additional workforce if that’s something that you wouldn’t have had to do? You know what I’m saying? And so this is not about replacing people with automation. It’s about saying, hey, when we have streamlined ourselves and we’ve given our team members opportunities, that it’s not like the whole workweek gets shorter.
We have to think about what does that mean? And so then it asks us to rethink how we’re paying people. And this is a question that comes up a lot with the business owners that I work with. How do I know how to pay someone? There’s a lot of pay transparency, right? That’s a great place to start. We can see what the market rate for these jobs are. How do I know how long something should take?
Well, that’s an expectation setting. It’s asking someone potentially, hey, map this out the first few times. Let’s see, does that feel reasonable? Is that how long someone in a similar role in the past has taken to do this? Is it twice as fast? Well, is there steps missing or they really have a better process? Okay. Well, if it’s twice as fast, then maybe that job, the complexity has been reduced and we can’t add something else. So you see, it’s not a one size fits all, but it is a question that’s going to come up.
I just want you to be ready. I want you to have a point of view that as things are getting done faster, if that’s the case, I think that’s really the idea of why we’re utilizing tools, right? Optimizing our workflow, making things easier, moving tedious steps. That’s the goal. And we’ve done that. What are you doing to optimize? How are you helping that human person continue to thrive, continue to grow? Because someone just cranking out more email copy scripts through a chat tool, that’s not really an answer, right?
So if someone has removed a tedious part of their work, the idea is that frees them up to do something more thoughtful, more strategic, a little bit more future thinking, whatever it looks like. And that’s going to look different for every single one of you, right? That’s why the workshop I’m doing is really getting hands on with, okay, what are we automating? What are we keeping? How do we utilize our folks the right way? How do we still grow?
How do we really strengthen our leadership skills? These are the questions that are coming up. It’s not a replace. It is a rethinking. And we’ve had to rethink work over and over and over. That part’s not new. When COVID hit, we had to rethink, not every industry, right? But we had to, in general, rethink, well, what makes sense to be done in person versus hybrid versus remote? We saw way more distributed teams than ever. Our whole relationship with time shifted.
Even if folks went into the office the whole time through COVID, there was minimal disruption in their day to day, well, the whole world was facing this. We all formed a very different relationship with time. Folks formed a different relationship with work, right? There was just this whole new thing because we kind of had a new relationship with mortality. All these things cause us to think about work very differently. So that’s not new. But as a leader, it’s on you to have a point of view, to think about, well, how are you best serving your team?
How are you best thinking about a few steps ahead? And how are you utilizing your team in the right way? So this is something that’s going to be coming up. Team members getting real excited about using AI, maybe sort of overdoing it. And those are the questions to think through. How do I set expectations around it? And how do I figure out what to do with this maybe freed up time or bandwidth so that we’re really continuing to reinvest in our people?
And not feeling like, well, someone is not using AI because they don’t want to… They’re wanting to do it tedious because they don’t want to take on extra work if they do it. Like, no, no, no. You’ve got to have a point of view. This requires talking to your team members and really getting to know them, right? And that’s where if you need support and you’re kind of like, I don’t even know how to start, that’s where you call me because we can figure that out together.
It’s going to look different for every company, but the ideas are the same. We have to be thinking about it big picture, forming that point of view, setting expectations, and then revisiting them because things are moving fast. Things are changing really quickly. And it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment to get that stride. And that’s okay. That’s how we show resilience and we show thoughtfulness as a leader. All right? Need help? You know who to call?
Hello at liagarbon.com. I guess that’s the right… Shoot me an email. Hello at liagarbon.com. And I am here. We’ve got this. It is a lot, but we’ve got this. You are not alone at figuring this out. See you next time. Bye.
Questions this episode answers
How do I tell my team to stop copy-pasting AI output without reviewing it?
Set a clear expectation before assuming the worst. Tell your team that using AI for a first draft is fine, but the expectation is they read it through, humanize the tone, remove the giveaways like em dashes and heavy formatting, and double-check any facts or citations for accuracy. AI hallucinations are real, meaning sources and information can be fabricated. Once that expectation is set, you have an anchor. If it keeps happening after that, then you give feedback and figure out what is going wrong.
My team member finished a task in 20 minutes with AI. Do I give them more work?
Yes, but frame it as an opportunity, not a punishment. If someone saves five hours a week through AI and automation, that is about 20 percent of their job freed up. The goal is to reinvest that time into something more strategic, whether that is building a skill, taking on a project, or thinking more creatively. It is not about burning people out or stretching them thin. It is about asking what a reasonable workload looks like now that some of the tedious steps have been removed, and making sure that freed-up time benefits both the person and the team.
Is it okay to be frustrated that my team member is overdoing it with AI?
Yes, that frustration is normal and worth paying attention to, but do not let it jump straight to conclusions like they are lazy or cutting corners. That feeling is a signal of misaligned expectations, not proof that the person is the wrong fit or does not care. The first move is always to set clear expectations around how AI should be used on your team. If you have not done that yet, the frustration is a sign the system is missing, not that the person is failing.
How do I figure out how long a task should take now that AI speeds things up?
Have your team member map out the process the first few times and track how long it actually takes. Compare that to how long a similar task took before AI tools were involved. If the time has been cut in half, ask whether steps are being skipped or whether the process is genuinely better. That conversation tells you whether the complexity of the job has decreased, which might mean the role needs to expand, or whether there is real efficiency happening that you can build on. It is not one size fits all, but it does require you to look at it directly.
What should I do if a team member seems to be using AI to avoid taking on more responsibility?
Start by having a real conversation instead of assuming. Some team members are worried that if they finish faster, they will just get piled on with more work indefinitely. That is a reasonable concern. As a leader, your job is to have a point of view on what the freed-up time actually means, and to communicate that clearly. The goal is not to punish efficiency. It is to help people grow into more strategic, higher-value work so they stay relevant and irreplaceable. If you skip that conversation, the hesitation to use AI tools well will continue.