Adam Grant, talking with Adi Ignatius and Alison Beard on the HBR IdeaCast in Why Great Teams Don't Need to Like Each Other, made the case that a shared purpose predicts how a team performs better than whether the team likes one another. In his words, "A great team and a great organization is made up of allies, but being pals or companions is optional." (spoiler alert...a good ol' fashioned corporate pizza party doesn't fix everything) He is not saying skip the connection, he is saying alignment comes first. As he puts it, "I think the goal is to be both clear and kind." Clear and kind. Not clear or kind, which is where most of us default when things get hard.

Brené Brown, in an episode of The Curiosity Shop, answers questions from her LinkedIn community, and two things she covers also double down on this point. One is how "work slop" drains leaders' mental energy, and how to tell polished output from real understanding. The other is Aiko Bethea's idea, which Brené shares, that "transformation requires grief." That is the one I would expand on, because I think it is the missing piece in how we announce and approach change. Let's walk through two ways a leader could open the same conversation around change. The first: "We are moving to a new system next quarter and everyone will be expected to use it. Questions can go in the project channel." Clear, sure. The second: "We are changing how we do this work, and here is why. Here is what is staying the same, here is what is going away, and I know for some of you that is a real loss. Here is what I don't know yet, and here is when I expect to." Same facts. The second one is clear and kind, and it is the one where people can actually hear the rest of what you say. I would argue most of the resistance we label as "change fatigue" is unspoken grief that nobody gave a name to.

Note: Clear does not mean having all the answers, and kind does not mean softening the message. It means telling people where we are headed, what is changing, what is staying, and what we don't know yet. Then leaving room for how they feel about it.

In The AI Era Needs Better, Not Fewer Managers, as Leadership Demands Grow, Study Finds, the Fair Play Talks editorial team reports on a Betterworks survey of 521 senior HR and business leaders in the US and UK. More than 80% said managers' responsibilities have grown over the past three years, and only 10% think AI will make managers less important. As the article puts it, "If AI is not giving managers capacity back somewhere, it is adding to their workload." We are asking managers to be the clear and kind voice through all of this change. I would argue you cannot process change and the grief associated, or even begin to have a thoughtful conversation about it in the ten minutes between back-to-back meetings. If we want leaders to say the harder, kinder version, we have to give them the room and tools to do it.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to think about a few things.

1. Think of the last change you announced, or the last one announced to you. Did it say what is staying, what is going away, and what nobody knows yet, or just the tool and the date? Try rewriting the first two sentences.
2. What is one thing in a change that you're currently navigating that is a real loss for someone, like a routine, a role, or a way of working? Have you said it out loud yet? Pick one person you can say it to next week.
3. If you lead managers, what is one meeting, approval, or report you could take off their plate so they have room for the harder conversations? If you are a manager, which one would you ask to cut?

"I think the goal is to be both clear and kind."

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

Full transparency, I'm not the source of these ideas. They belong to the folks linked above, so please go read and listen to them. My role is connecting the dots on what I'm seeing.

In my experience, when we're walking through uncertainty and change, people read our posture long before they process our words. Posture is the stance we walk in with, the energy we bring into a room, how steady we look, how much we claim to know, and how we treat the people closest to the work. The pieces I'm sharing landed in the same place for me, so I'm going to follow it from the inside out, starting with how we hold ourselves and ending with how we work alongside each other.

Let's start with the inside job...because honestly, most of the work is an inside job. In Sydney Lake's Fortune piece, Brene Brown says the key to surviving AI is rejecting Jack Welch's advice and embracing humanity. She says we are wired for certainty, not sustained stress, which is a rough fit for a moment like this one, and that leaders need self-awareness, the ability to regulate their own nervous systems, and the discipline to slow decisions down. She also takes on Welch's forced-ranking "vitality curve," which she says breeds fear and weakens collaboration. "Fear has a short shelf life" (YES!) A leader running on fear sets the tone for everyone else, and it does not last.

From there, Jacqueline Carter, Robert Hoppe, and Paula Kelley give that inner work some shape in The Mindsets Leaders Need as AI Accelerates the Pace of Business, published in Harvard Business Review on October 2. They name three shifts, from certainty to clarity, from expertise to exploration, and from emotional control to emotional insight, plus a four-step practice of pause, perceive, pivot, and practice. The first shift is the one that resonated with me most, and it is the same thread Brené was pulling. Leaders feel pressure to walk in with every answer, and nobody has every answer right now (hot take from me: nobody knows what they're doing). Clarity sounds like "here is where we are headed, here is what I know, and here is what I don't know yet." Certainty sounds like "here is the plan, any questions?" Here's a fun experiment, run your next change conversation both ways in your head and notice which one you would rather be on the receiving end of. The first invites people to help you build it. The second invites them to quietly polish their resumes. I know which one I would trust and be inspired by.

The second shift, from expertise to exploration, is a tough one for those of us who got promoted for knowing things. Expertise is often what gets us into leadership, and exploration asks us to hold it a little more loosely. Expertise says "here is how this works." Exploration says "here is what I think, and here is what I would like to test." You still bring everything you know, you just stop treating it as the final answer. (More on that in a minute, because Allie has thoughts.)

The third shift, from emotional control to emotional insight, is the one I think gets misunderstood. The authors describe it as treating our feelings as information to understand, not only something to manage. That does not mean you stop managing yourself in front of your team. It means your reaction becomes a personal data point. Control says "I'm fine, let's move on." Insight says "I notice I'm anxious about this timeline, so what is that telling me?" It is the same inside job Brené was talking about, self-awareness and regulating your own nervous system.

The authors also offer a four-step practice to help leaders notice their automatic reactions and change them, pause, perceive, pivot, and practice. They name the steps, and here is how I would translate them for a Monday morning meeting. Pause means letting the first reaction go by before you answer, which is Brené's "slow decisions down" in real life. Perceive means asking what you are actually reacting to, the facts in front of you or the fear underneath them. Pivot means choosing the response you want to give instead of the one that showed up on its own, and sometimes that response is "I don't know yet, here is how we will find out." Practice means doing it again tomorrow, in low-stakes moments first, building that muscle, so it is there when the stakes are high. None of us do this perfectly, but I would argue the trying is where the trust gets built. (Those are my translations, so go read the authors for their version.)

Allie K. Miller (if you're not following Allie in the AI space, run, don't walk) takes the exploration piece outward. She sat down with host Molly Wood on Microsoft's WorkLab podcast for Find your "weirdos" and let them lead. The episode highlights that breakthroughs happen when leaders give unconventional thinkers room to experiment, rapid iteration can matter more than polish, and that a leader's job is to move ideas from the fringes into real business results. It can start with a simple question. Who on your team is already poking around with the tools? They likely know more about where AI helps than anyone, and I would argue we should sit down with them before we turn to a dashboard.

Here is where I landed this week. Steady on the inside, clear on the outside, curious about who knows more than you, honest about what you don't know, and careful with the fear that is already in the room. That is a posture, not a technique, and the impact of that is greater than any words you say.

Note: Next time something lands on you at work, try pause, perceive, pivot before you answer. None of us do it perfectly, me included, so start with something small and let it be a little awkward.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things.

1. Write down one honest sentence that starts with "here is what I don't know yet." Say it out loud once this weekend, and notice how it feels to hear yourself say it.
2. Who on your team is already experimenting with new tools, even quietly? Pick one person and plan to ask what they have figured out before your next meeting.
3. Think of one moment this week when your first reaction showed up before you did. Run it back through pause and perceive. What were you actually reacting to, the facts in front of you or the fear underneath them?

"AI is changing not only what leaders need to know, but how they need to think."

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

Full transparency, I'm not the source of these ideas, so please go read and listen to the sources linked above. My role is connecting the dots on what I'm seeing.

Sahil Bloom describes what he calls routine anxiety in his article “My 90-10 Rule For Routines”. Routine anxiety is the stress that shows up when life gets in the way of a perfectly optimized morning. After a career in HR, I honestly don’t know what a perfectly optimized morning is and often feel like I need to leave 90% open for the unexpected. Anywho, I digress. His fix is a 90-10 split, 90% locked-in structure and 10% left open for the unexpected and the “good enough” days. He points to research from Sharif and Shu showing that people who build in planned flexibility hit their goals up to 40% more often than people with rigid plans, and that they recover faster after a miss. I love the point he makes of “the best routine is the one you can break.” I understand this concept, but I was also the child in middle school who color coded her assignment notebook, so there’s that.

Debra Gittler makes the point in “Chapter 4: Leadership in these times of AI” that the bottleneck in organization’s used to be the capacity to produce, but now it’s the capacity to absorb. AI can draft, analyze and problem-solve for us, which means a lot of us can now do alone what used to take a conversation. Her point is that culture, relationships and deliberation can’t be outsourced, because the people next to us bring their own experience and their own stake in what happens next. She asks leaders to sit with the question “where do we want to maintain the inefficiencies?” I absolutely LOVE this question. It really made me think about the value of intentional inefficiency. I would argue that without intentional inefficiency, we end up with fast organizations that don’t absorb anything. When I look back at the transformation initiatives throughout my career that were the most impactful and successful, it was rarely the ones that moved the fastest, it was the ones that moved most intentionally.

Note: I'm the last person to tell you to slow down. Patience is not my strength, and I love a fast, well-run day. So this isn't a case against structure or speed, I want both. The point is to be deliberate about where you slow down before the calendar, or the tools, or somebody else's urgency, makes the call for you.

On “The Framework for Leading With Both Care and Accountability” from the Curiosity Shop podcast with Brené Brown and Adam Grant, leadership coach Aiko Bethea coaches Brené live on a real leadership conflict using her Anchored, Aligned, and Accountable framework. Two things really stood out to me from that conversation. The first is incredibly challenging but so important, it is slowing down enough to make a call based on your values instead of the urgency of the moment. Second, the difference between assuming good intent and believing someone is doing their best, which changes how accountability actually works. It's easy to treat those two things as the same thing. Assuming good intent is about motive, that the person didn't set out to cause a problem. Believing someone is doing their best is a different bar, and a harder one, because it asks me to look at what they're working with (their capacity, their context, everything on their plate that I can't see) instead of just the gap between what I expected and what I got. I can assume good intent and still have a real conversation about a missed commitment, because good intent doesn't erase the impact. When I believe someone is doing their best, the question shifts from "why didn't you" to "what's getting in the way, and what do you need from me?" A common worry that leaders have is that if they lead with care, they're not holding their team accountable. Not true. Some people hear “believe they’re doing their best” and think it means you excuse the missed deadline, skip the hard conversation, and lower the bar. That’s the fear you’re speaking to. The commitment was still missed, and you still talk about it. What changes is how you open the conversation. “Why didn’t you do this?” assumes the person was careless or didn’t try. “What’s getting in the way, and what do you need from me?” starts from the belief that they were working at their limit, so you look for the obstacle instead of looking for blame. The standard is the same, but you get to the real problem faster, and the person is less likely to get defensive and shut down.

Many leaders treat the two as a dial, where more care means less accountability and the reverse. Good leaders can hold both fully at once. Care without accountability turns into letting things slide. Accountability without care turns into blame. Strong leadership has both.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things.

1. If your calendar is 90% locked in, what’s one thing you could leave open this weekend, and what might you notice with that room?
2. Think of a change or initiative on your plate right now. Are you giving the people involved enough time to actually absorb it, or just enough time to complete it?

3. Where on your team are you protecting a little inefficiency on purpose, and where has speed quietly squeezed out something that mattered?

I’ll leave you with this

Andrea

Full transparency, I’m not the source of these ideas. Every week I pull together what I’m reading, listening to, and learning from some of the smartest voices in leadership and AI, and I tag every one so you can go to the source (please do). What I like to do is connect the dots on what I’m seeing out in the world.

That gap between 43 and 21 is where I have a ton of curiosity. A work change, transformation, reorg, and the space between “this is coming” and “we are ready” is always where the people get left behind and often lost.

So, as it relates to management, the structured half gets automated and we are left with the creative and social half. All fine and good, and then I read AI Is Undermining Leaders’ Judgment. Here’s What to Do About It by Leonid Sudakov and Nathan Furr in HBR and it got uncomfortable. (side note: I talk a lot about the importance of being uncomfortable for a person who deeply loves comfort.) Drawing on a Harvard study of 228 evaluators, they argue that leaders “are being trained out of the very capacity that creates competitive advantage, original judgment.” Not replaced. Trained out. That’s a different thing all together.

The two things they say protect it are noticing weak signals and forming your own view instead of deferring to the output, and the practices they recommend are structured curiosity and intentional dissent. I really like the two practices and think they are both incredibly relevant and important, so I’ll say them again...structured curiosity and intentional dissent.

Here is where all of this landed for me. The part of the job AI is handing back to us is the part we are least practiced at, and the part we have always been quietly willing to outsource. Not to a machine, to the room. We have to build new muscles.

Next, a little evidence that the human half is the half that moves the needle. Lara Ewen wrote up new Gallup research in HR Dive, AI use may improve engagement, but only under the right conditions. Employees whose managers actively supported their AI use came in at 48% engagement, against 30% for those without that support. Put frequent AI use, a clear organizational plan, and an actively supportive manager together and engagement hits 53%, against a national average of 31%. “Managers are the primary way employees experience their organization.” No tool did that and no tool can replicate a true human connection.

One more and then I’ll stop. Brooke Wright had Amanda Jefferson on her podcast Not Another AI Girl on July 23, She trained under Marie Kondo. Now she builds AI tools., and the episode circles one sentence that people say to themselves all the time, “I’m not techy enough to build anything.” Amanda trained under Marie Kondo. She builds AI tools now. The barrier was never her capability, it was the story she had about her capability. This is not so different from a leader deciding the hard call belongs to somebody further up the org chart.

So here’s my stake in the ground this week, the judgment, the noticing, the willingness to say “I don’t agree” out loud, the intentional dissent, that is not the soft part of leadership that we get to after the real work is done, it is the only part that was ever ours, and it is the part that atrophies fastest when we stop using it. AI is not going to take it from us, we are going to hand it over, politely, one small deferral at a time, because handing it over feels like collaboration and holding onto it feels like friction.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a few minutes with these:

1. Where did you agree with something this week that you did not actually agree with? A recommendation, a summary, a room full of nodding. What would it have cost you to say so out loud?
2. Gallup found that people whose managers actively support their AI use are far more engaged than the ones left to figure it out alone. Who on your team is figuring it out alone? Pick someone on your team and have a conversation on Monday.
3. Sudakov and Furr talk about noticing weak signals, which are the small things that have not made it into the data yet. Have you noticed any weak signals this week? Write it down this weekend, even if you are not ready to raise it.

I’ll leave you with this:

What resonated with you this week?

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

The promise of AI at work, the one in every deck and every vendor demo, is time. Real hours back, and I think the hours are real. The part I keep coming back to is that hardly anyone can tell you what actually happened to them. They exist on paper, but they do not show up on anybody’s calendar.

This week I read Sahil Bloom’s Jevons Paradox: The Perils of Efficiency, and he gave me the words for what I’ve been thinking about. Jevons Paradox is an economics idea from the 1860s, originally about coal, and the short version is that when you make something more efficient, people consume more of it, not less. His example is the one that resonated. “Smartphones made email processing more efficient, so we all send 10x as many emails as we did before.” Then he takes it one step further, “get more efficient at processing email, and you’re effectively reducing the cost to others of emailing you, so it’s more likely they will.”

When I replace e-mail with AI in that sentence, it all comes together. Every hour you get back lowers the price other people pay to ask you for something, so they ask for more, usually without even thinking about it, because you made it cheap.

That is the individual version. The organizational version turned up in Fortune in Dan Schawbel’s How AI turned your best work into the bare minimum. It is blunter than I expected from a business magazine, and I’m here for it. “Efficiency gains from AI are not being returned to employees as breathing room. They are being immediately converted into higher output expectations.” The numbers he pulls together are wild. Employees are saving two or more hours a day with AI. 60% feel more pressure to be productive, not less. Focused deep work is down 9% and 77% say AI generated work takes more review time than human work, which tells me some slice of that two hours was never really saved at all, it just changed clothes and moved to a different part of the day.

The line that really stuck it to me was “the productivity gain and the human performance cost are arriving simultaneously. Most organizations are only tracking one of them.” That, my friends, is not an AI problem, that is a measurement problem, and we have been making that exact mistake through every transformation, reorg and system migration I have been part of in my years in corporate...this one just moves WAY faster.

Shifting gears a little.

Brené Brown did a solo episode of The Curiosity Shop on August 20 called Brené Brown on Protecting Our Attention, Time, and Humanity in a World That Won’t Slow Down, and she takes on the quality side of all this (for anyone new here, I am a HUGE Brené fan). She talks about where AI can support our work without replacing human discernment, and she names “work slop,” the polished output that costs a leader real cognitive bandwidth to untangle. The question she puts to leaders is a pain point I think we can all relate to. Can you tell the difference between polished output and actual understanding? She also tells a story about getting fired from a house cleaning job and what it taught her about why shiny can never replace mastery.

I think that might be the whole thing, honestly. AI is very good at shiny. Mastery is still ours, and checking for it takes time we just finished telling everybody they saved.

Next, the reason I do not think a policy fixes any of this. I referenced this article last week too, but I keep coming back to it around a variety of topics. Adam Grant wrote The Truth About People Pleasing in Granted, and he is not writing about AI at all, but he describes the mechanism exactly. “The root of chronic people pleasing is not concern for others. It’s concern for their acceptance and approval.” Hand a team two hours back and say nothing about what those hours are for, and the hours go to whoever asks first. It’s not because your team is weak, it’s because saying no costs something, and nobody wants to be the person who looks slow in the year everybody got fast. His answer is worth borrowing and saying out loud to your people. “Sharing your preferences is not a display of disrespect. It’s an expression of self-respect.”

Land the plane, Andrea...ok, so efficiency is not a strategy, it is a result, and somebody has to say out loud what the result is for, or the default answer is always more. If you have not said the words “the time we get back from this is for (fill in the blank)”, you have not given your team time back, you have given them capacity, and capacity gets filled.

I spend my working life helping organizations adopt this stuff, and I still catch myself admiring the hour I saved instead of asking what the hour was for. It is a very easy thing to miss when the tool works.

Note: I read four pieces this week about the time AI is giving back, and not one of them had an example of an organization that decided ahead of time what the time was for. Four out of four. If you are doing this well, I would really like to hear how.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a few minutes with these.

1. Where did your saved hours actually go this week? Not where you meant them to go, where they actually went.
2. What is one sentence you could say to your team on Monday that finishes “the time we get back from this is for...”?
3. What did you approve this week because it looked polished, and are you sure you understood it?

I’ll leave you with this -

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

The first is from Adam Grant, who calls himself a recovering people pleaser. For years he didn’t tell the Uber driver the car was freezing. Relatable. His point is that people pleasing feels like we’re doing the kind thing, but it isn’t really about the other person, it’s about our own fear of being disliked. We avoid making others uncomfortable because it makes US uncomfortable. It’s really about us the whole time. He shares that we end up putting “our image above our values.” ughhhh.

The second is from Simon Sinek, on playing the victim. A social worker told him that playing the victim is powerful and it feels good. My initial response was “gross”…but she’s right. It’s so much easier when it’s someone else’s fault. But Sinek points out that if we’d never let a friend take ALL the blame for something, the logic has to run both ways. It “can never always be everyone else’s fault.” A good thought to pause on is this: if the common denominator in these situations is me, I have some self reflection to do. I realize the sweeping generalizations and oversimplification of that, I also know that situations are wildly nuanced and complex, AND, so much is outside of our control, truly, so what are those things that we can actually influence and impact?

Here’s what I see in both. The people pleaser takes on too little honesty and the victim takes on too little ownership. Both are protecting themselves from an uncomfortable feeling. In organizations, both show up constantly.

The manager who gives a “meets expectations” review to avoid a hard conversation. The team that explains every missed goal with “leadership didn’t give us what we needed.” The leader who says yes to every request and then quietly resents it.

So what do we do with that. An interesting concept to explore is the power of our own agency. Ethan Mollick has been writing about AI and agency, and he makes the case that human agency, meaning the willingness to act, experiment, and push without waiting for instructions, is becoming one of the most important things we bring to work. I agree, and I don’t think it’s just about AI.

Agency means saying the true thing kindly. Agency means owning your part. Agency is taking the wheel instead of narrating why the car is in the ditch.

It’s not comfortable, it’s actually deeply uncomfortable, but it’s better.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things:

1. Where are you choosing comfort over candor right now, and who’s paying for it?
2. What’s a story you’ve been telling about a setback that lets you off the hook a little too easily?
3. What’s one thing your team is waiting for permission to do that they could just...do?

I’ll leave you with some wise words from Brené:

Have a great weekend!

Andrea

The goal of Friday Food for Thought is really just a stream of consciousness from me on what I learned in the realm of leadership during the past week. It often led to bigger conversations and hopefully a pause to reflect on why we do what we do.

I listened to something this week that I have been thinking about a lot. It’s an episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant’s podcast (for those of you that don’t know, I’m a HUGE Brené fan girl), and their guest is Aaron Sandel, a primatologist who spent more than a decade studying the Ngogo chimpanzees. He was there when one of the largest chimpanzee communities we know of split into two factions. He watched individuals he knew, by name, turn on each other. (To be clear, I did not go looking for a leadership lesson in chimpanzees. It found me.) The conversation is about friendship, conflict, hierarchy, and belonging. How a community fractures, and what that does to the individuals inside it rather than to the group on paper. Brené and Adam keep pulling it back toward us, toward polarization and how quickly “us” turns into “us and them.” It’s really interesting how individuals respond when in a place of fear and uncertainty, especially when we live in a time of extreme change, fear and uncertainty.

I have been through a work change, transformation, reorg or two..or three…or more in my years in corporate…and I have never once thought about it as a community splitting. I’m not sure if that’s the right frame either, but it’s a more honest one than “new structure, effective Monday”. I do not subscribe to the statement that work is a family, but it is certainly a community, and an incredibly important and impactful one at that. It can be really easy (and frankly, more comfortable) to compartmentalize change as an org chart exercise rather than a community impact.

Shifting gears, and about as far from chimpanzees as you can get…

Sahil Bloom published a piece this week called It Was Just a Game of Catch. It’s about a father and a son playing catch, the same simple game, across decades. That’s it. That’s the piece. And underneath it he makes an argument I keep turning over, ordinary moments get their meaning from the fact that they’re temporary, and being present is the closest thing any of us has to control over time. Thinking about all of the ways I try to maintain control of life, and how having control is truly an illusion. Sahil’s comment that being present is the closest thing any of us has to control over time really stood out to me. What a powerful simple thought. Be where your feet are.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a minute to reflect on a few things:

1. Where have you watched a group split, and what did you actually do for the individuals inside it, not the org chart?
2. What ordinary thing are you rushing through this week that you’re going to miss later?
3. What’s one thing you can do this weekend to be present?

I’ll leave you with this one line from Sahil’s piece that resonated:

Have a great weekend!

Andrea