What to Never Hand Off to AI: The Two Tests Every Manager Needs

You are standing in front of your best client, halfway through the deck, and you hear yourself cite a statistic that belongs to their biggest competitor.

How did that get in there?

It started when you asked AI to write an email. Then draft the team update. Then create the proposal. Then it handed you a deck you never really read. Next thing you know, egg on your face in front of your best client.

AI will never tell you that you gave it too much

The tool never told you that you handed over too much. It never will. You have to apply your judgment.

AI can help with all of that work. What you cannot do is hand over your judgment along with the task. 

Give it your performance data and it will log the reviews and prep your one-on-one notes, and it will score people lower for reasons you would have caught in a second, like not having been on the team long enough to have a competence record yet. It looks right. It sounds right. It can be wrong because it often doesn’t have all your context and never has your judgment.

Bias, errors, and blind spots slip in when humans create the work, too. The difference with AI is speed and scale. It will take everything you give it and never once tell you that you handed over too much.

What a missing judgment call cost Zillow

 Zillow built Zillow Offers on an algorithm that estimated what homes were worth, then bought at those prices with the goal of reselling. The model bought thousands of homes and missed a market turn that an expert watching closely would have caught. Zillow bought high and could not sell. In the fall of 2021 they closed the unit, took a write down of more than 300 million dollars, and cut about 2,000 people, roughly a quarter of the company.

There were smart humans at Zillow. Nobody pressed pause to say the numbers stopped behaving the way they did a month ago, let's get curious and find out why. Curiosity is a Human Intelligence skill, one you hone to become an UnMachined℠ leader, and it was the one missing. The machine had been handed a judgment call in a live, moving market, and machines are not good at that.

Two quick checks you can make:

• Reversibility. Jeff Bezos calls this one way and two-way doors. If it goes wrong, can you walk back through it? Two-way doors go to the machine.
• Your Just Me list. Ethan Mollick's test for knowing what to keep and to hand-off. The decisions that require judgment and values or impact your reputation should never be delegated. Keep them on your desk.

Most of the one-way doors are people. Leading people is one judgment call after another. Noticing who went quiet in a meeting. Deciding how to say the hard thing so it is kind, candid, and useful. Knowing when someone needs a push and when they need grace. Stepping in to guide two people who cannot solve it themselves. That is Peopleship℠- the practice of leading humans.

 Let AI prepare you. Let it organize your notes, surface a pattern, take a first pass at your words. The moment it does the human part, the deciding and the conversation, you have handed off the thing that makes you the leader. And you'll end up losing trust and, if you're lucky, having to rebuild it, slowly, if you can.

Before you hand anything to AI this week, ask one question. If this goes wrong, can I undo it? If yes, hand it over and stay vigilant. If no, keep it. 

Learn more. Watch @bossatthehelm on YouTube

Subscribe to Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lessons for a new episode every Friday.

Watch this week's Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lesson on YouTube:

How to Decide Which Work to Hand to AI and Which to Keep  

Start with yourself. Own the decisions that are yours to own. Lead yourself. Then lead others. Be a Boss.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Judgment is a skill and it can be taught to all your managers. That is what Boss at the Helm builds through live workshops, online courses, and the Helm Leadership Essentials℠ cohort program. Start a conversation at bossatthehelm.com/contact.