I’ve interviewed 700 leaders. The ones outsourcing their thinking to AI lose their best people first

Ryan Hawk has interviewed over 700 leaders and high performers on The Learning Leader Show, a top-ranked management podcast. He is the author of The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance.

I’ve spent the last 12 years interviewing more than 700 leaders for The Learning Leader Show. I’ve started noticing the same failure pattern across founders, executives, and managers alike: some of them are outsourcing their thinking to AI, and their best people are the first to notice. 

You can outsource almost all your thinking to AI. With Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, answers are instantaneous. But you can’t outsource your own understanding. Credible leaders build trust among employees, investors, and the general public through translating data into meaning. By conveying that meaning, they build motivation, inspiring others toward a shared vision. This is a human skill that AI lacks.

At the beginning of every new coaching gig with leaders, I ask the same question: “What is your writing practice?” I start here because I know that writing, by forcing messy thoughts out of your head and onto the page, creates clarity. As a leader facing overwhelming complexity, you don’t know what you think until you can explain it in simple terms. 

Answers have always been available. Books, essays, and podcasts have made the management and leadership knowledge of the greatest minds in history a click or two away. But your team doesn’t want leaders who just give out answers. They want to work for people who truly understand the product, the market, the job. People who have faced the same day-to-day struggles and can speak to all of them........

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