We the People: Leading Through the AI Leap
Three mindset shifts to navigate AI-induced fear
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I recently had a conversation that stopped me in my tracks and left me concerned.
I was talking to a senior leader, someone who’d spent 20 years building expertise in their field. He is smart, accomplished, and respected. And then he asked me a question that I’ve heard variations of at least a dozen times in the past few months:
“Joel, you are deep in AI, do you think I am about to become obsolete?”
Not irrelevant. Obsolete.
That word hit me hard. Because it made me realize that we’re not just dealing with another wave of technological change. We’re dealing with something that’s moving faster than our ability to process it, threatening the very identities we’ve spent decades building.
And honestly? That fear is completely human. It’s also completely understandable.
But here’s what I also know: the leaders who will thrive in this moment aren’t the ones frantically trying to become AI experts. They’re the ones learning how to help their people move through change with clarity, purpose, and humanity intact.
That’s why I asked
to share her perspective with you. Melissa is the founder of Ready Leader and creator of Honest Office (a publication that’s become one of my go-to resources for practical leadership wisdom). She specializes in helping leaders align vision with people-centered strategies, and more importantly, she understands something critical: AI doesn’t implement itself. We the people do.
What follows is one of the most grounded, human-centered takes on leading through AI-driven change I’ve encountered.
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In this article, you’ll discover:
How to normalize uncertainty instead of bypassing the fear your team is feeling
Why co-creating the path forward builds momentum instead of resistance
How to use AI as a diagnostic tool to fix what’s broken, not just automate dysfunction
Why your relevance as a leader has nothing to do with becoming an AI expert
Here is Melissa.
Am I irrelevant?
We’ve long said change is hard. It disrupts our routines, challenges our identities, and often demands more of us than we’re ready to give. It’s one of the many reasons people lean into the support of therapists during big life transitions, or why businesses seek out consultants to support them in navigating complex changes.
But change takes time, or at least it did before.
In historical contexts, it was something that unfolded slowly and incrementally, both by necessity and by design. This, in turn, gave both people and the systems they were operating in a bit of breathing room to process and adapt to it.
Let’s take the Industrial Revolution, for example. Though it profoundly reshaped the labor market, economies, and society at large, this occurred over decades. The refinement of the agricultural industry, the rise of the factory, the rapid spread of electricity—these were transformative forces, but when we compare them to what we’re seeing now, they pretty much unfolded gradually. There was time to react. And that’s not to say it was perfect, but industries could adapt, allowing new generations to grow up alongside the shifts rather than be consumed by them.
Conversely, change in the age of artificial intelligence is anything but slow. It’s rapid. Exponential. What once took years can now happen in months. What once took months can now happen in weeks, or even days. AI doesn’t wait. It’s not patient. It just keeps moving. And even if it wanted to pause and take a breath, many of us just wouldn’t allow it.
And as a result, entire fields—from media to medicine to education to software engineering—are being changed more quickly than ever.
This kind of rapid change will give just about anyone whiplash, and it certainly generates considerable uncertainty from top to bottom. In the context of leadership more specifically, our old playbooks for leading and managing start to feel outdated. Box checking. Command-and-control. Monitoring. Filtering. Whether we like it or not, these functions are losing their value at a rapid pace.
But I also have some good news.
They’re being replaced with something new—something that any leader has the capacity to learn and contribute to:
The ability to create the conditions for change to be both embraced and sustained, and to be more human.
AI is fast and confusing, and I definitely get that there’s an innate tension between moving rapidly to try to keep up and slowing down long enough to bring people with you. But as leaders, our relevance no longer rests upon our ability to keep up with every technical maneuver behind the latest trend, but in our ability to help our teams make sense of and move through the change it brings. It comes from our ability to translate complexity into clarity, anxiety into possibility, and urgency into momentum that can be sustained for years to come.
New technologies will continue to emerge and change, but people will always need leaders who can help them navigate uncertainty with purpose. Our real currency here isn’t technical expertise or trend-chasing; it’s our capacity to build trust, foster collaboration across differences, and create the conditions where change isn’t something people fear, but something they own and work through collaboratively.
Because in all honesty, AI doesn’t (yet) implement itself. Technology doesn’t adopt itself. We the people do. We decide how it’s used, what it replaces, what it enhances, and most importantly, whether it brings us closer together or pushes us further apart. The future isn’t something that happens to us, but rather, something we shape together.
Recently, I sat down with
(the thoughtful mind behind Leadership in Change) to explore the intersection of AI and leadership more deeply—and the conversation left me thinking even more about what it really means to lead through the change despite all the fear.We agreed that what we often hear most from leaders, especially those who’ve worked hard to build credibility, loyalty, and institutional knowledge in a specific domain, is a fear of becoming irrelevant.
“Will I still matter if I don’t fully understand this tool?”
“Will my team still need me if this software can write our department’s strategy or analyze my team’s performance better than I can?”
If your role is built entirely around information hoarding, control, or mere box-checking that can’t actually be tied to value creation because it’s shrouded in ambiguity, then yes, you’ll quickly become irrelevant.
But if your leadership is rooted in understanding people and building systems that bring the best out in them, then no, it’s likely you’re not destined for the same fate.
You might be thinking:
“I don’t have those skills.”
“I’m a specialist.”
“I don’t really understand how to manage people.”
Sure, these fears might be rooted in your current realities, but just as you learned a technical discipline and mastered your craft, you can learn a lot of the new skills—the ones an AI-driven workforce is not only requesting, but demanding, too. The new and unfamiliar can be scary, but as Joel and I discussed in our recent Live, a bit of fear can be good. It’s unequivocally human, and it offers one opportunity for connection (which is, by the way, an absolute non-negotiable if you have hope of navigating uncharted territory with even the slightest bit of success).
To help you and your team gain more confidence to traverse the waters ahead—and to address AI-related fears from a human lens—here are 3 mindset shifts you can start working on today.
1. Normalize uncertainty.
In psychology, there’s a practice called exposure therapy. It essentially means facing the thing that’s making you fearful. While I’m not a psychologist, I think there’s considerable power in this strategy because it forces us to face “the thing”—whatever it is—head-on, thereby taking some of its power away.
Exposure therapy actually works. If I have a worry about something, sometimes I’ll spend some time writing about it, and sure enough, the fear begins to dissipate. Not go away completely, but feel less debilitating.
Name the fear openly: “We’re worried this might make our roles redundant.”
Instead of bypassing fear or dismissing unspoken discomfort, effective leaders acknowledge its existence because this is ultimately the first step we need to take if we want to begin to move through it. We have to acknowledge that uncertainty, and the paralyzing fear that so often spawns out of it, is normal. When we do, we give ourselves and our teams the space to feel heard, in turn setting the stage for receptivity, which subsequently positions us to begin moving through any negative emotions with more grace and ease.
There’s significant power in our ability to acknowledge the hard and uncomfortable stuff, and this is especially true in the context of leadership. Fear that goes unspoken by leaders becomes resistance, whereas fear named by them becomes momentum.
2. (Co-)create the path forward.
My daughter received a bike for her fourth birthday this year. She had been really enjoying it and doing quite well, but after succumbing to a bad fall while in the care of her funcle (fun uncle, for anyone unfamiliar with the term), she suddenly became paralyzed with fear. Now, even months later, we’re still trying to work through it.
I’ve honestly tried everything I can think of to get her back on that silly bike. Logic (“But you were doing so well before!”), bribery (”We can get ice cream after!”), minimization (”It was just one little fall, come on.”), even bargaining (”Just for a second?”). Frustrated, I let it be, and so the bike sat in the garage collecting dust while she and my youngest proceeded to fight over the baby scooter.
For some reason, I acted as if my daughter were some subspecies of human, exempt from the nervous system’s natural response to unfortunate incidents. But when I finally came to my senses, I realized that no amount of reasonable parenting could talk my daughter (and her nervous system) out of what she was fearing. Instead, I had to help her carve her own path.
So this past week, we started over. I changed my approach, trying to reduce the pressure I had been needlessly manifesting around the bike. In fact, I didn’t even mention it for a few days. And what do you know, she finally walked up to the bike and asked if she could give it another try.
“Sure, mamita. How can I help?”
“Well, can we put my helmet on?”
“Good idea! Let’s start there.”
“Can you also make sure to stand close to me?”
“Of course, I’ll be right here. What else do you need?”
“Ummm… maybe we can just go really slow.”
“Definitely. I remember how good you were at this before, so I’m proud of you for trying again.”
“Yeah, but I’ll make sure to get off when there are bumps so I don’t feel scared.”
“Good idea.”
And off we went with her bike.
As we rode around the block (not without a bit of fear, but certainly with a lot more confidence), I got to thinking:
Isn’t this kind of similar to what’s happening in our organizations? Our nervous systems are in overdrive, destabilized by profound fear around AI?
It’s not that it isn’t justified, nor is fear something that can just be turned off. But I do believe we can begin to carve new pathways to help us move through it and engage with it more productively.
This means reframing our journey with AI not as one of “this versus that”—rooted in extreme mental paradigms like “keep up or fall behind,” or “adapt or become irrelevant”—but as something that, when implemented responsibly, offers us the opportunity for greater innovation, connection, and purpose.
“What do we now have the opportunity to build or do with greater efficiency?”
“Where do I now have space to add value where I couldn’t before?”
If we can strive to position AI not as automation but as augmentation, making it clear to both ourselves and our teams that it need not be about replacement, but about enhancement, suddenly this big and ominous thing feels a bit more palatable. Like we might be able to confront it again and even take it out for a spin despite being scared to fall. And when we do it together—carving the path forward side by side—we lean into change from a place of connection instead of friction. Because ultimately, we’re empowered as the creators of the change.
3. Don’t automate dysfunction.
The arrival of AI in the modern workplace means that leaders now have a unique opportunity to unearth the flaws (or missed opportunities) that are holding them and their teams back. Things like decision-making bottlenecks, vague KPIs, meetings absent of purpose, siloed communication, etc.
The leaders who are best equipped to help their teams move through change use AI as a diagnostic tool. Seeing the possibility of positive, human-centered transformation, they understand that AI can help address many of the most painful issues weighing them down and their teams, providing an opportunity to infuse new trust, energy, and life into previously broken workplaces.
“What’s no longer serving us?”
“Where is our own structure getting in the way of progress?”
“How can we streamline systems while protecting clarity, trust, and autonomy?”
Now, to avoid being too optimistic and, quite frankly, idealistic, there’s a price we can also end up paying in the name of our unwavering obsession to fix. In an AI context, we risk automating dysfunction, making broken processes faster but not better, creating AI-powered versions of the same problems we had before, except in expedited form, at machine speed, with a team whose trust in the system has plummeted even further.
So, in this moment of great change, where we have more than ample space to thoughtfully redesign our most broken systems, we can’t afford to put the cart before the horse. We need to ask the right questions, and to do so in the company of the people who are most impacted by them, before we jump off the deep end without a life jacket.
We don’t all need to be AI experts.
AI is here. It’s not going anywhere. And while it might feel a bit idealistic, I truly believe it’s offering us a unique opportunity to revitalize our workplaces with the humanity we’re all craving.
It can help us minimize resistance and catalyze growth—not by forcing compliance or mandating adoption, but by creating space for people to carve their own paths forward at a pace their nervous systems can actually handle.
It can bring people along for the ride as drivers rather than passengers, as co-creators of the change rather than subjects who’ve had it thrust upon them.
It can help us redesign what isn’t working—things we’ve been tolerating for years but haven’t really had the time, space, energy, or enlightenment to tackle.
What I’ve learned, both as a parent trying to get my scared kid back on her bike and as someone deeply invested in the world of leadership development, is that change doesn’t fail because the plan was bad, the system was flawed, or the technology wasn’t ready.
It fails because we the people weren’t ready—because we moved too fast, didn’t acknowledge the fear, automated something that just wasn’t working, or forgot to bring everyone along.
Change doesn’t fail because a plan or system was bad.
It fails because “we the people” weren’t ready.
If nothing else in all of this, please remember that you don’t need to become an AI expert.
You don’t need to understand how all the models work or keep up with every new release, or pretend you have all the answers. I know I don’t.
What you need to do is help your people move through the change it brings. Thoughtfully. Strategically. Humanely.
Because that’s the work that actually matters—the work that will always need a human to do it.
Start with what’s human. Start with we the people.
Amazing. Thank you,
!If you only remember this:
Your relevance isn’t tied to technical expertise.
Fear that goes unspoken becomes resistance. Fear that’s named becomes momentum.
Co-create the path forward.
Don’t automate dysfunction.
Start with what’s human. Start with we the people.
What’s one process or system in your organization that AI could help you redesign (not just automate) to better serve your people?
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Thank you for your work here, @Melissa!
Thank you for writing this. It's the reminder I needed that starting with what's human isn't soft leadership.