AI is filling a leadership gap that only listening can close

Recently, a senior leader got in touch to ask about coaching. He wanted help with his leadership, and in particular with his listening. When I asked how he had found me, he told me he had simply typed his request into ChatGPT. It had named me as the strongest fit for developing how he leads, and suggested I could help him listen more and ask better questions.

I smiled at the irony of that for quite some time afterwards. Here was a thoughtful, capable leader asking a machine to find him a person who could teach him to listen to people. It also told me something about where many of us now go first when we need help, and perhaps about what we are not finding closer to home.

The research echoes what I hear from the leaders I work with. One survey of younger workers found that 62% would like to talk to their manager more often about their career but feel their manager is too busy, while 47% said they received better career advice from AI tools such as ChatGPT than from their manager. Those numbers seem to me, to describe a gap that is not really about technology at all. It is about attention, and it is widening quietly in organisations of every size.

The gap we have created

The pattern is just as visible here in the UK. Research from Robert Walters found that a third of Gen Z professionals now turn to AI with work questions before asking their manager or colleagues, and that 39% of UK professionals across all age groups are asking their line manager fewer questions as a result.

Last week I asked the members of my Human Centred Leadership Community what was new or emerging for them. Almost every thread of the conversation led back to AI. Their concern for young people came through again and again, both how quickly a dependence on AI can form and how many of the early roles in business, the ones where so much of our own learning happened, are beginning to disappear. Adzuna’s research suggests entry level jobs in the UK have fallen by nearly a third since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Think back to where you first learned to lead. Many of us learned it in conversations nobody would ever have called development, perhaps a manager who asked what we thought and then genuinely waited for the answer, or a colleague who stayed late to talk a problem through with us. When those conversations are replaced by a quick answer on a screen, the work may still get done, yet something in the person doing it goes undeveloped. It leaves me asking what kind of leaders we are growing now, if so many of them never learn to think aloud in the company of someone who is truly interested in what they will say next.

What leaders are wrestling with

The leaders I coach are not against AI. Most use it every day, and the small business owners among them often feel the pressure to keep pace more keenly than anyone. What they tell me is that it has arrived with new questions attached.

The first is about quality. So much of what AI produces looks convincing on the surface, polished and confident, yet it still needs to be checked and sense checked, and a figure that is quietly wrong can travel a long way through a business before anyone notices. Researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that the more confidence people placed in AI, the less critical thinking they applied, while those who felt confident in their own expertise thought more critically about what it gave them.

The second concern runs deeper, and it is the one I hear most often: that we are gradually giving away our capacity to think, and deskilling ourselves without quite noticing. A study from MIT described this as cognitive debt, and found that most people who wrote with ChatGPT could not accurately quote their own essay just minutes after finishing it, while nearly all of those who wrote unaided could.

Then there are the hidden costs. Many of the tools organisations are now building their processes around feel inexpensive today, and there is a growing suggestion that the models, frameworks and coding we come to depend on may be priced very differently in the future.

Leaders find themselves pulled two ways, encouraged to adopt AI quickly and widely while sensing that the very thing that makes their people valuable, their capacity to think for themselves, is the thing most at risk. Somewhere in that tension sits a responsibility that I believe belongs to us as leaders, which is to uphold the human skills that no tool can hold for us.

Who filled the gap?

I think the risk is not the technology itself. The risk is that we allow a machine to fill a gap that we, as humans, created, by being too busy to listen or too quick with our own answer to give someone the attention their thinking deserved.

When did someone last do their finest thinking in your presence? How often does a member of your team leave a conversation with you knowing more about what they think than when they arrived?

There is another side to this, and I want to honour it. AI can be a genuine enabler of human thinking and creativity. It can carry the heavy lifting of research, work through complex coding and format long documents in a fraction of the time, and while all of it needs checking, it can hand back hours that people could spend together, meeting in person, listening to one another and developing ideas into something finer than any of them would reach alone.

I use AI myself, and I have learned to be deliberate about how. I have set it up to ask me questions, so that the ideas I develop and the pieces I write come from my own experience, drawn out of me rather than handed to me. I also use it to help me find relevant research, which I then read and weigh for myself. Interestingly, the MIT study pointed the same way, since those who wrote on their own first and only then turned to AI used it to strengthen their work rather than replace it. Think first, then let the tool assist.

If you would like to explore this further, my friend Rebecca Rutschmann’s podcast, The Edge of Human and AI, is well worth your time. It explores what happens to coaching when AI enters the room, and does so with real depth and care.