The hidden cost of using AI as a leadership shortcut

Right now is a really freaking hard time to be a leader. We have so much pressure to be productive, to do more with fewer resources, amidst this cloud of AI affecting the workplace, creating more and more confusion every single day. Your team members are asking you, well, what does it mean for my job? Am I going to be replaced? Are there going to be layoffs? All of these questions that, let’s face it, you don’t have the answer to.

And you’re wondering, well, shoot, their job, I don’t know about that. What about my job? Because most of these articles, and a lot of them are clickbait, I’ll say that, most conversations about AI have to do with leaders being replaced, managers being obsolete, being irrelevant, not being necessary. And so you’re like, well, is my time up? And what I’m seeing every single day is leaders, instead of figuring all this out, they jump right in, start utilizing, going haywire, utilizing a lot of AI tools to replace themselves willingly.

And it breaks my heart because it’s actually creating more confusion, more chaos, more disagreements, more discontent, more demotivation, more disengagement, more all the bad things that are really chipping away at productivity. When right now, what we need to be doing more than ever is making sure that our team members are productive. Because that’s what the folks at the top want to see. A lot of it is about the bottom line, reducing turnover, keeping motivation high, but making sure the results are happening.

I mean, hey, if promotions are flat, or raises are flat, or you don’t have a lot of levers, we’ve got to keep our team performing. But we don’t just do that by scaring them, no. But we certainly are never going to motivate them if we’re stepping out of the equation. I’ve talked on the show about the… I don’t believe middle managers are obsolete, but I also want to caution you from opting in to being obsolete. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today on the show is where we’re going wrong with using AI and what to do right so that we can really utilize AI in the workforce and as leaders the right way.

I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the New Manager Playbook Podcast, where I am on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. Because dealing with people, it is hard enough. And on the show, I talk about strategies and tools and tips that I developed working in some of the most influential companies in the world where the stakes are really high. Managing program management teams at Google, and working on the design team at Apple, working on the first AR headset at Microsoft.

These were environments where the pressure was so freaking high. And I say that because the pressure is really, really high right now. But we’ve experienced these kinds of things before. And had I as a manager completely opted out to having hard conversations with my team, had I had a tool that I could type in a question and it would give me an email to send my team, would that have been the right thing to do? Not really.

And I heard something this week that blew my freaking mind. I was talking to a colleague that does coaching on storytelling and developing of keynotes and different ideas. And he said he was at a marketing conference and a leader got on stage and had this really awesome, beautiful presentation. It looked really cool. He was super charismatic on the stage. Everyone was really excited about it. But his talk was literally about how he had an AI clone and he made really motivating speeches to rally his team around ideas.

And he sent those to the team. And so he actually was able to remove himself from communicating to his team. And he was up on stage talking about how awesome that was, that he saved time, that he could get out of the equation, that now he could send all these cool videos all the time. And I thought to myself, are you freaking serious? Like what? No. I’m literally speechless. I can barely respond to this right now.

That to me is the worst possible thing that we can be doing. I mean, there’s all sorts of conversation on using AI clones and video and everything like that, for creative, whatever. But to actually opt out of leading, to having a human conversation with your team, to be replacing yourself in these key moments. So this guy, he was using this to share videos to deliver hard messages. Now, what if he just wrote a script using AI but still recorded the video?

I feel like that would have been a little bit more palatable. But the kicker was the team had no idea. And they don’t realize he’s opting out of being a leader. And something just doesn’t sit right for me. Again, and I’m not saying like, don’t use it or do this. I’m saying, let’s really be discerning as leaders. Let’s really be discerning with what we’re using it for and why and when. So like with motivating your team, getting them excited about a new strategy, a new plan, that’s one of your biggest and most critical moments.

That’s where you’re really like kind of on the stage, like called up to be a leader, to craft a vision for your team and to communicate it, to get people on board so they see the bigger picture. A lot of what we’re supposed to do as leaders is, right, not only define the what and the why and the how, but rally people around that. If we don’t have any part of that process, what the hell are we doing?

Then we have opted out. Then we should be obsolete in a sense, right? So I think when it comes to motivating your team and rallying your team around, it’s like, that’s not the place to totally opt out. And so that kind of brings me to another use case. I think we’re really making a mistake is creating team communication and just sending it right along to our team. So we’re saying like, hey, how do I create a, you know, putting the prompt into chat GPT or quad or Gemini or whatever and saying, hey, how do I craft a really motivating message for my team?

You know, people are really feeling frustrated and stuck and demotivated. So what should I say? And we read it. We’re like, this is good stuff. Okay. Copy paste. And I’m done. No, no, no, you’re not done. You know, there’s some, there’s a level of uncanny valley, which means you kind of know it’s like, sort of there, but not sort of, not, not fully there. It feels almost human, but it’s not quite there yet. That shows up in a lot of AI communication.

And even if we can’t tell, again, we, it’s really our responsibility as leaders to do that. Like at least one round of review and edits, at least remove all the em dashes and the visible tells you’re using AI. I think when your team member sees an email that you visibly copied and pasted from, you know, from an AI tool, it sends the message to them like, I’m actually like shortcutting my responsibility of thinking about this stuff, of actually caring about motivating you.

I’ve outsourced my own job. They start to lose respect for you. That’s the truth. And I’m hearing this all the time. When I’m sitting in with teams in companies from whether it’s from Google or small businesses or whatever it is, when team members are seeing leaders utilizing AI in place of themselves, they’re starting to feel less motivated. They’re saying, God, my manager, you know, they used to, you know, think of ways to talk to us. They used to really be engaged.

Now I’m just getting these stuff copying pasted. I don’t even know if they’re doing their job. And it’s kind of like, you know, with, you know, parents and kids, like if we see our parents not really caring about certain things or breaking habits around things, like we don’t really fall in line, right? It’s the same with our managers. We start to… We’re trying to uphold this integrity in our work and we’re throwing the towel, like why are they going to care?

And so I recently did an episode on when folks use AI a little bit too much, you know, and you can see, well, we can’t do that as managers. We have to model that. So it’s not about not utilizing it, but a straight up copying and pasting like, please don’t do that. There’s like so many other things we could do. Instead of just outsourcing, you know, a motivating message to AI, we could get some ideas and still use our own critical thinking around it.

So that’s the third real mistake I think we can make as managers is using AI to wrestle with feedback or a hard conversation. And the mistake there is when we put into a prompt one side of a story to get a script, we have no sense of what’s going on on the other end. And I’ll share a story here. So years ago, I talk about it in the new manager playbook. Years ago, I was managing a former friend.

So she and I were really close friends when we were peers. I’m sorry, it started as peers. Okay, this is why you went sideways. So I was peers with someone on a team and I became the manager and was managing someone that I was close friends with. And this went sideways really, really quickly because I didn’t follow any of the best practices of resetting the relationship, whatever. I pretended everything was normal. Everything was fine. I’m just in charge now.

Well, that doesn’t work out because the relationship does completely change. And sure enough, so whenever there was the first bump, the first hurdle where I had to give some hard feedback or had to hold her accountable, it went completely sideways. Now, what happened in that situation was we had to have a ton of repair conversations, reset our relationship, figure out how to navigate conflict, all these things. If I had chat GPT and I just had said, how do I get this person to listen to me?

How do I get this person to respect me? How do I get this person to follow instructions? Which is what a lot of us are typing into chat GPT like, hey, tell me what to say here in this hard conversation. Tell me what to do. I’m feeling stuck. If I had just done that, I would have ignored all of the context that we used to go to lunch together every day, that she planned a baby shower for me and really cared about me as a friend, that we were super close and we had all of this history and context.

That just getting an answer from chat GPT that had none of that in mind, it would have had me approach the situation all wrong. There would have been so much missing. And so I think this is such a big miss that we’re doing as leaders is it sucks to have a hard conversation. It sucks to have to give feedback to a team member that isn’t cutting it and you know is going to get defensive and is going to be pissed and is going to be throwing it back in your face and saying, well, you didn’t say this, you didn’t say that.

That’s the absolute worst. It’s one of the worst things about being a leader. But when we take ourselves out of the equation and assume, act like there’s no context and there was no relationship before and just like pass it off, this is going to make the situation so much worse. Because the human on the other side of that feedback conversation, well, they have that context. They’re wondering, why is this the way you’re communicating this? And they’re very likely to come back to you with a response that is not what you expected or not what you had planned in this AI conversation, right?

So there’s great ways to utilize all these tools. I think planning some talking points saying, okay, well, what are some different things of if I get triggered or I… We can do it on our end. But assuming that something knows the other end or can really anticipate how someone’s going to respond, whether it’s around motivating your team, whether it is around giving hard feedback or getting people rallied around a vision, that’s where we don’t want to opt out.

And Sergey Brin shared recently that in an episode of the All In podcast, that he felt like managers were the easiest thing to automate, they’re the easiest thing to offload. And I see that a lot. I see that dialogue all the time. And when people are saying that, they mean that when you are just assigning and approving a task queue, when you’re just approving expense reports, when you’re just doing these sort of automatable tasks, that yeah, it is the easiest thing to get rid of.

Well, sure. But when we’re actually leading, when we’re using critical thinking, we’re having hard conversations, when we’re recognizing a team member who’s stuck but has a ton of potential, if we just shift a few things around, that is where we become completely indispensable. So why would we opt out? Why would we say, meh, it’s hard, I don’t like it. And we’re like, we don’t have a choice. If we want to replace ourselves, then we shouldn’t be leaders.

We shouldn’t be in this business. We should become an IC or do some whole different thing. And I’ll say this, for managers of managers, you’re in a really tough situation right now because your managers are squeezed. Managers have higher burnout rates than ICs do because all of this pressure is happening from all different ends. If you’re managing managers, think about the situation that they are in. They’ve got all the demands from you, from your leadership, from stakeholders, from clients, from whoever, and then all their team members wondering what the hell is going on.

And so it is really on you to help them feel equipped in how to utilize AI, but how to not overdo it because they’re struggling right now and they need support. All right. And on the other end of this, on the other end of getting support and learning how to give feedback and being able to navigate conflict and change effectively by getting that training, by getting that coaching, you will have people that are truly AI proof.

That is my strong belief. Their jobs may change, their responsibilities may look different, but they will become indispensable in whatever they’re doing. And that is on us to fix. All right. So this is really, how do we utilize AI the right way? It is really important as leaders. We don’t just voluntarily opt out. It’s hard enough out there and our team members are relying on us. Okay. This is what’s going to keep everybody relevant. All right.

See you next time.