AI can handle routine tasks and free up your time, but leaning on it too much erodes your own judgment. The solution isn't to avoid it. Use AI to boost productivity, then push back on what it suggests with your own expertise and your team's input.
No one was talking about AI just a few years ago. As both a gift and a threat to your effectiveness as a leader, it's impacting everything that you should be doing each and every day. So on the gift side, AI can genuinely reclaim hours of your administrative, repetitive, drafting type of work and really get it off your plate once and for all. But on the threat side, Leadership researcher Barry O'Reilly, who works with Fortune 1000 CEOs, has identified something that he calls atrophied reasoning, meaning that as AI gets embedded in daily workflows, some leaders are becoming less confident in their own judgment, not more. They move faster, sure. Yet even MIT research has now confirmed that overreliance on automated decision tools can reduce long-term understanding, even when short-term performance improves. Leaders are executing AI suggestions without fully understanding why. And that is dangerous. And that is a leadership crisis that is actually hiding inside a productivity trend. And it needs to change. Now, the answer is not to avoid AI. The answer is to use AI intentionally to enhance and leverage your critical thinking and then challenge the suggestions and the outputs that you're getting with your own experience, expertise, and team insights while you're protecting and exercising your own judgment each and every single day. We don't want you losing your judgment. We don't want you losing your core foundation of the experience, expertise, and insights you have within yourself, let alone from a computer.
From Stuck to Leading, Episode 2 — Meet the 5 Inner Fears Destroying Your Leadership
