Leading Alongside AI: Knowing What to Hand to the Machine Is What Makes You a Leader

You have a team member who is bringing down the morale of everyone around them, and you have been avoiding the conversation for a month. You have a colleague who is dismissive of you in meetings and then presents your work as their own.

You're stewing, uncertain, and unsure who to trust.

So, you open AI and ask it what to say.

It answers. Calm, structured, reasonable. Maybe it even makes you feel good about yourself while it answers.

Then Monday shows up and those conversations are still yours to lead.

The Temptation to Delegate the Hard Stuff

Managers hand the work they don't love or they don't know how to do to AI first.

• The conversation they are dreading.
• The judgment call they are unsure of.
• The part of the job they never loved or never learned to do.

Hard conversations, judgment, showing up. That is leadership. The tempting handoff that AI can't really do for you.

Nobody Taught You to Hand Work to a Person Either 

It's not only about handing off work to AI.  It's that you probably don't know how to delegate to begin with. Yes, you are being asked to hand your work to a machine, but most of us were never taught how to hand work to a human.

We are not good at delegation. It is rarely trained. Often we inherit our approach, usually from a boss who was not good at it either. It comes with fears of losing control or accidentally inserting mistakes. We aren't sure when to get involved and when to hang loose. How much to explain and how often to check progress. 

Delegating to humans is a familiar problem and now we have the same one but with a machine that runs faster and makes the failures harder to catch.

Leading Alongside AI: Your Competitive Advantage

Our new Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lessons present a series of topics helping you collaborate with AI and humans and lead them.

It opens on delegation, because delegation is what you have to learn to do well with AI. It's what you have to learn to do well with people. And your differentiated leadership comes when you know how to do it well with both.  

This Is Not a Tech Series

We will not teach you to implement AI.

We are building the ability to take advantage of what advanced technology cannot do and will not do well, while polishing the skills that let you lead other humans. Yourself first. Then your team. And even the organization.

Over the coming weeks you'll see lessons on: the difference between collaboration and delegation, cross-functional collaboration, why collaborating with AI is really delegation, how to check the work and own the output, and how to decide what you never hand off. Then presence, reading the room, and the conversations no tool can have for you.

That is what it takes to become UnMachined℠. You move from "how do I work with this tool" to "I am a leader of my team and my organization, and I lead by collaborating with technology and people."

 Where to Start

1. Watch the four-part Discernment and Judgment series first. Judgment and discernment are Human Intelligence skills, and you need both to lead alongside AI. Everything in this series stands on them.
2. Then watch the series intro: Become the Leader AI Cannot Replace. Your Competitive Edge. 
3. Next, watch Episode 1. Why You’re Busier Than Your Team (It’s a Delegation Trap) 

New episodes come out every Friday on the Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lessons channel.  @bossatthehelm on YouTube.

Lead yourself. Then lead others. Be a Boss.

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If you lead a manager population that is improvising its way through AI adoption, we scale these skills across entire organizations through workshops, online courses, and the Helm Leadership Essentials℠ cohort program. We ran it across 100 managers in three cohorts at a post-acquisition technology company. Reach out to learn more: [email protected].