Don't outsource the part that makes you a leader
AI can save leaders hours. It can also weaken one of the things leadership depends on most, our willingness to make a judgement and stand behind it.
I ran an AI workshop last month for a small founding group, and it left me thinking about this all week. One of the things I enjoyed most was hearing how differently people came into the room. Chris, one of the participants, had never seriously considered using AI before. He saw it as close to cheating, and felt he already had a good handle on his job. He's since using it for far more, both personally and professionally. Nicola described herself afterwards, in a LinkedIn post about the course, as a "sceptical enthusiast," intrigued by what it can do and wary of it in equal measure. I think that's exactly the right place for a leader to sit.
Why leaders can't afford to ignore AI, or trust it blindly
AI is already in our workplaces, our homes and our children's lives, so there's not much use pretending otherwise or waiting for it to pass. What matters is understanding what it does well, where it falls short, and where we still need to think for ourselves.
For me, one of its biggest benefits is collapsing time. I use it for design, for my website, for making sense of large amounts of information, jobs that could swallow hours without moving me any closer to the work I actually wanted to be doing. One workshop participant, Jessica, told me afterwards that it's changed how much client work she can take on, because so much of the fiddly execution now sits with Claude instead of her. Used well, that gives leaders time back for the part of the job that still needs a person in the room, the difficult conversation, the judgement call, the thing only they can decide.
The gifted adolescent genius
The problem starts when that efficiency slides into dependence. I think of AI as a gifted adolescent genius, an enormous mind with almost no wisdom to match it. It works by recognising patterns and predicting what's likely to come next, the same principle as finishing "twinkle twinkle" with "little star" without having to think about it. Because it's built on prediction, it can sound far more certain than it deserves to. It carries the bias already sitting in what it learned from, and like a clever teenager who hates admitting he doesn't know something, it will sometimes make an answer up rather than say so.
The real danger isn't AI taking your job
For leaders, there's a risk that interests me more than any of that. We already live with more information than any leader has had to manage before, another article, another podcast, another expert, and now AI as well. Ask it once, then ask again, and eventually we've collected so many possible answers that we trust our own opinion less than we did before we started asking. For anyone already carrying self doubt or the imposter feeling, that's a dangerous combination. The voice that says maybe I should check, maybe someone else knows better, gets louder, and somewhere in there, without quite noticing, we stop asking ourselves what we think, what our experience tells us, and what judgement we're actually prepared to stand behind.
Those are leadership questions, because leadership has never simply been about knowing what to do.
What leadership actually rests on: strategy, identity and vitality
Strategy is the actual skill of leadership: how we communicate, make decisions, influence, build culture, lead teams and create change.
Identity is how well we understand ourselves and the people around us: our emotional intelligence, our confidence, our values, the protective patterns that show up under pressure, and our ability to trust our own judgement and stand behind it.
Vitality is our physical and emotional health, our energy, our ability to recover, our lives outside work, the resources that let us sustain something as demanding as leadership.
Real leadership mastery sits where those three things meet, and it needs all three to hold. AI can support us across all three, it can help us learn, reflect, organise and save time. It cannot do the work for us though. It cannot know who we are, decide what we stand for, or make the judgement call only we can own, and it cannot build the physical and emotional capacity that lets us sustain any of this. Those parts still belong to us.
Which of the three is thinnest for you right now
If you're wondering which of the three feels thinnest for you at the moment, that's useful information on its own. For some people it's skill. For others it's the confidence and the patterns that surface under pressure, the kind I write about in more depth here. Sometimes it's simpler than either, they're just tired, and no amount of strategy fixes that.
A couple of questions worth sitting with:
Where this week did you ask someone else, or something else, before you'd properly asked yourself what you thought?
If you trusted your own judgement a little more, what would you do differently?
Use it. Don't hand it the parts that are yours
I think leaders have a responsibility to understand AI properly, not to fear it and not to hand it more than it's earned. Use it to expand your thinking, not replace it. Use it to save your time, not your judgement. The rest, the identity and the capacity that actually let you lead well over years rather than just survive the next demanding quarter, still belongs to you.
If any part of this is where you find yourself right now, Lead with Inner Calm is a good starting point for the identity work, and Stay Strong, Lead Well holds strategy, identity and capacity together across ten months. For more direct, personal support, 1:1 executive coaching begins with a simple, no-pressure conversation.
About the author
Johanna Urquhart is a leadership coach, mentor, and the founder of Resta Forte. With 25 years of senior leadership experience including 12 years as a school Principal, she helps women in professional and senior leadership roles lead with confidence, clarity, and sustainability, without burning out or losing themselves in the process.