How to help managers lead more effectively with AI

When Lisa opened the resignation email from one of her top performers, she froze.

As a regional sales VP at a fast-growing tech company, she prided herself on building a loyal, high-performing team. She’d recently adopted AI to streamline workflows and free up time for more strategic work. But in the exit interview, the employee shared something she hadn’t expected: he felt unseen, disconnected, and undervalued.

Some of her managers went even further—using AI-generated scripts for everything from difficult feedback to performance check-ins, and even praise.  The messages felt impersonal, disconnected, and inauthentic. Employees took note. Even if productivity increased, effectiveness took a dive. One top performer began to disengage and soon gave notice.

For busy leaders, automating conversations with team members can bring a sense of relief. Plug in a prompt. Let the machine guide the 1:1. However, when we offload the emotional labor of leadership, we risk eroding trust and connection, the very foundations that make teams thrive.

AI can be a game changer for managers, but only when it’s used to amplify the human side of leadership. Too often, tools designed to save time end up weakening connection and culture. The opportunity isn’t just to use AI. It’s to use it well.

Leading Effectively with AI 

With the proper guardrails, AI can expand a manager’s capacity, freeing them up to lead with more empathy, presence, and purpose. Think of AI as your backstage partner, not your stand-in. 

This risk is especially real for Gen Z professionals, many of whom launched their careers remotely and hadn’t, for a time, seen relational leadership modeled in person. Today’s managers play a critical role in helping them build the emotional fluency and resilience they’ll need to lead. If we let AI handle the hard parts for them, like navigating conflict, building trust, or making tough calls, we miss the chance to develop the very capabilities they’ll need when AI inevitably falls short or fails in a crisis.

Through our work advising dozens of companies facing these dynamics, Kathryn, as an executive coach and keynote speaker, and Jenny, as an executive adviser and learning & development expert, have identified four strategies to help managers embrace AI in ways to make them more strategic, effective, and human-centered.

1. Know What to Automate—and What Needs You

As generative AI becomes more embedded in day-to-day workflows, leaders must guide their managers in determining which tasks should be automated and which demand human judgment and emotional intelligence.

AI is well-suited for structured, repeatable tasks: generating first drafts of reports, summarizing meeting notes, preparing talking points, or reviewing written communication for tone and clarity. These applications reduce cognitive load and free up time for more meaningful work.

But AI falls short in moments that require discernment, empathy, or trust-building. It cannot read between the lines of disengagement, coach a direct report who’s questioning their fit on the team, or navigate a high-stakes conversation that touches on identity, like feeling excluded, overlooked, or underestimated. Delegating these responsibilities to a tool, even one that appears well-crafted, risks eroding a team’s psychological safety and your leadership credibility.

Use AI to clear space, not to take your place. We helped Lisa’s team draft a simple guide to distinguish what to automate and what to lead directly.

What to Automate vs. Where to Show Up

 Pro tip: Ask yourself: Am I using AI to enhance my leadership, or to avoid the parts that feel uncomfortable?

2. Show Your Team What Good AI Use Looks Like

If you want AI to be used well, your team has to see what “well” looks like. That starts at the top.

Managers take their cues from what leaders say and what they do. When Lisa began introducing AI into her team’s workflows, she focused on implementation, but hadn’t yet modeled how to use it thoughtfully. Her managers saw the tools being used for speed and scale, but not as an enabler for coaching, collaboration, or deeper thinking. 

In a recent coaching session, Lisa reflected that she had unintentionally created a culture of quiet experimentation—without guidance, feedback, or clarity about what effective AI use looked like. We encouraged her to share her learning process with her direct reports: where she was experimenting, where she’d made mistakes, and where she saw potential. 

She began demoing use cases with her team, inviting feedback, and normalizing discomfort. That shift, from quiet adoption to visible shared learning, sparked more thoughtful, responsible AI use across her team.

Here are three ways you can do the same with your team:

• Share your learning journey. Be open about where you’re experimenting and what you’re still figuring out.
• Frame AI as an enabler. Position it as a way to work smarter and lead with greater focus and presence.
• Create psychological safety. Encourage your team to try, fail, and learn without fear of judgment.

Even with great modeling, boundaries matter. Without clear guardrails, AI can quietly start doing the parts of leadership that should never be outsourced.

3. Draw the Line Between Support and Substitution

When expectations are vague, AI can slowly shift from a helpful assistant to a leadership shortcut. We’ve seen managers start by using it to draft talking points, only to lean on it later for delivering feedback or handling conflict. The tone may be polished, but the message often lacks the personalization and presence. People notice, and over time, trust erodes.

Leaders must help their teams set clear boundaries. AI can help structure a message, but it shouldn’t deliver it for you, especially when the moment calls for empathy, vulnerability, or moral courage.

Research from MIT Sloan reinforces this distinction: while AI excels at structured, transactional tasks, it’s significantly less effective in emotionally nuanced situations, such as coaching, conflict resolution, or performance feedback.

This is especially important for middle managers, who play a critical role in developing Gen Z professionals. Many early-career employees are still building confidence through live, relational interactions and will take their cues from what is modeled. When managers default to AI prompts, they not only weaken their own impact, but also risk sending the message that presence is optional.

A useful rule of thumb: If a conversation could shape how someone feels about their value, performance, or belonging; it needs to be human-led.

As AI tools become more capable, drawing the line between support and substitution will become one of the defining responsibilities of modern leadership.

4. Help Managers Use Saved Time Strategically

One of AI’s biggest benefits is time. But without a clear plan, that reclaimed time is often consumed by low-value meetings, inbox clutter, or busywork. The risk isn’t just wasted hours. It’s wasted opportunity.

Help managers use their freed-up capacity with intention. Encourage them to reinvest it in what matters most: mentoring team members, building culture, thinking strategically, or developing their own leadership skills. These are the high-leverage activities that often fall by the wayside, but make the biggest difference over time. 

Ask yourself:

• Where is your time most valuable, and how are you protecting it? 
• What high-impact conversations are you putting off, and why?
• In what ways could you invest this time to grow your team, or yourself?

Pro tip: Use time by design, not by default.  When time is freed, leaders have a choice: fill it by default, or use it by design.

A Better Way to Lead with AI

Lisa began modeling her own learning, setting clearer boundaries, and making space for reflection. She stopped simply asking what her managers were automating, and started asking why. That shift helped her to rebuild trust, reconnect with her team, and lead with focus. Ultimately, the most significant impact of AI wasn’t speed. It was presence.

AI will continue to shape how we lead, communicate, and make decisions. But leadership has never been just about efficiency. It’s about discernment, trust, and showing up fully for the moments that matter. The best leaders won’t only ask, “How can I use AI?” They’ll ask, “How is my use of AI impacting the people I lead?”  The future of leadership isn’t a choice between human or machine. It’s human—you bringing yourself to the job, with AI as your copilot.