This past week has been very interesting. I have met with a variety of middle managers from a variety of organizations. These are generally good people, doing good work and been doing it consistently. They have built up deep expertise and the good judgement that goes along with it. Their instincts in their chose fields are often on target. They can read and respond to a room full of executives.
One thing that was common amongst all of them, they have been using one or the other LLM model for work and have gotten good at it. And almost all of them are feeling something they are struggling to name. It is neither anxiety nor confidence. It is something quieter, an uncomfortable uncertainty, about what insight is theirs and what is not (AI generated). The uneasy sense of a loss of authenticity.
Convenience vs Authenticity
Going to AI is easier, faster and more convenient, so usually that is what they end up doing. Reflecting on their experience, sifting through their emotions and thinking about a situation critically is slow, time consuming and inconvenient. So, they are doing that less and less often.
Add to it, the fact that the AI tool can give a polished output, almost ready to be used with a slight tweaking, makes it that much more convenient and gives a sense of improved productivity making it that much harder to stop.
But convenience has a cost. And some of them have started to notice it.
A psychologist named Alice Boyes recently named five signs that AI is having a negative effect on you. Not on your output. On you.
- You feel less confident in your own abilities than you used to.
- You spend more time wrestling with a prompt than it would have taken to just do the task yourself.
- You feel anxious when an AI platform changes, because your work now depends on it.
- You find yourself anthropomorphising the AI — and then projecting its patterns onto the people around you.
- The tone you use with AI — directive, efficient, a little impatient — starts leaking into how you talk to your team.
That last one is worth sitting with.
Most managers I speak to recognize the first four once they hear them. The fifth one lands differently. Because it is not about what you are losing. It is about who you are becoming.
The question worth asking
Here is the question I keep coming back to: who are you as a leader when the AI is off?
Not what can you produce. Not what decisions can you make. Who are you? Really. Authentically.
Are you shaping the AI you use or is it slowly shaping how you think?
Does using AI tools enhance your true self or are they moving you away from your true north?
The Center for Creative Leadership put it plainly — AI expands what you can do, but it can quietly erode who you are. For a middle manager, that distinction matters more than for almost anyone else in an organization.
You are not setting strategy at the top. You are not executing tasks at the front line. You sit exactly at the point where human judgment is the job.
Reading the room. Knowing when someone on your team is two weeks from quitting before they say a word. Sensing which conflict needs to be addressed now and which just needs time. What does the new change in strategy or the latest re-org mean for everyone on your team? What is troubling your top performer?
You cannot prompt your way to that. And you can lose it, gradually, without realizing it.
What the best leaders already know
Corning CEO Wendell Weeks was recently recognized by Yale CEO Caucus, for his ability to inspire excellence, loyalty, and respect among people, over decades. Not for his strategy. Not for his technical knowledge. For the kind of leader he is. Stated simply, for who HE IS and how he shows up for the people he leads.
One line from that coverage has stayed with me: “AI doesn’t diminish the value of a great manager any more than it reduces the value of a great teacher.”
The leaders who have been doing this for a long time are not confused about this. They know that the qualities that make someone worth following, like presence, judgment, the ability to hold someone’s growth in your mind across years cannot be outsourced to AI. They can only be practiced as lived values.
And when you stop practicing them, they get weaker.
This is not about using less AI
I want to be clear about what I am not saying here.
I am not saying don’t use AI. I use it. Daily. Multiple times a day. I will keep using it. There are things it frees me from so I can focus on what matters to me.
What I am saying is that there is a difference between using AI as a tool and letting it become a substitute for your own thinking. Between asking it to help you prepare for a difficult conversation and asking it to have that conversation on your behalf or blindly follow its recommendation.
The leaders who will matter most in the next five years are not the ones who adopted AI the fastest. They are the ones who used it without losing themselves in it — who shaped the tool in their own image, rather than letting the tool shape them.
So, here is a simple test.
Think about the last three important management moments you had. A tough conversation. A performance call. A moment where someone on your team needed you to show up.
How many of those did you fully own before you opened the tool? Did you use the tool in a way to shape it in your image or did you allow the tool to shape you in its own image.
What would it mean to walk into the next one with your judgment leading? What would it mean to use AI as a tool that sharpens our thinking rather than replace it?
