358| What AI Can't Give You That Your Leadership Requires

You type in the situation, you answer the prompts, you get something back that sounded right, and you sat there and you started thinking, like, it's fine, this is actually fine, but it wasn't you. Hi, I'm Tammy Imlay, and this is a Leader's Purpose podcast. Um, before we get into this, if you've been listening and you're ready to stop guessing and get a real read on what you're carrying, the Aligned Leadership Audit is your next step. 45 minutes, just you and me. Um, I was gonna say no homework, but maybe a little bit of homework. We'll call it an action step, but it's just a diagnosis and what's next for you. Link is in the show notes, and it's worth a call. All right, let's get into this. So last week we talked about that specific feeling, that one where everything is going right but something still feels off. That episode was about what happens when excellent leaders stop trusting their own read on things. This one picks Picks up right there because I want to talk about where that pattern is showing up right now for a lot of, a lot of leaders at your level. So there's a version of you that walks into every room, every decision, every hard conversation, and you already know what you think. You've seen this before. You have the context, you have the history, you have something built into a way that you lead that no tool, no platform, and no system can replicate. Today I want to talk about what that actually is and why it matters more right now than it ever has. So here's what I've seen right now with leaders at your level. They're using AI and they're using it well. And I'm going to tell you right now, like, this is not an anti-AI episode. I actually, I, I believe that we should incorporate it. I believe that we should use it. It is a tool But the thing is, is that they're using it well, you're using it well, and you're still walking away from it feeling like something's missing. So you put in the situation, you get something back that's technically correct, and it's competent, and it's organized, but has none of you in it. No history, no read on the room, no 20-plus years of accumulating knowledge, which the conversation, you know, like which conversation to have before the meeting and which to have after. It's— the answer sounds like leadership, but it doesn't feel like yours because it's not. And here's what really gets me is these are not junior leaders trying to figure out the basics. These are VP, SVP, senior elite, C-suite leaders, senior leaders who have earned the right to have a strong opinion, who have been in the room when things went sideways and were able to keep them from going further. These are individuals who have wealth of experience that most people in an organization are counting on, whether they say it out loud or not. And what they're getting back is generic. And here's the thing, this is not something that I'm observing anecdotally. The Friction Factor, it's a research that I just recently released and it named something that I see in pretty much every organization I work with. Also in over 60,000 leaders that it used to poll, not I did not pull 60,000 leaders. I took research from Harvard Business Review and Gallup and created this. But these leaders are carrying the most, are often the ones that are doing the most translating. They're calibrating. They're reading, the reading of every room before they even walk in. And it's needed. That work does not show up on a performance review. The whole system runs on it. It runs on your read on the room, your experience, your breadth of knowledge and depth depth of knowledge. And AI can't see that work. It can't factor it in. And it gives you the answer without the context that makes the answer right for your specific situation, your specific team, and your specific moment. So what do we do with that? Because I'm not here to tell you to stop using AI because I don't think that's the answer. But here's what I want you to say, and I'm going to say it plainly. AI is not the problem. AI is not the reason that you're getting generic responses. Going to it before you have your own read, that's a thing worth paying attention to. And this is the shortcut many people are taking and it's costing them. And I know that because I've done it. One example, I love a good quiz. I love knowing, you know, give me something that will tell me about myself. I'll take it. Tell me what to do and do it. Tell me what my patterns are. Tell me what my strengths are. You answer a few questions and you get something back. And it's easy, right? It's not wrong. You can find yourself in it, but you put yourself in and you wait for something outside of you to tell you who you are, what to do. It has no soul, no nuance, none of the specific things that makes the way I work mine. So the quiz gives you a result based on what you answered it, right? But AI gives you the same thing. It gives you output based on what you've prompted. Neither one, the quiz or AI, has access to the 20+ years of judgment, nuance, and experience that you walk in with. Both give you something back that sounds right, but none of it has you in it. Because here's what I want you to know at your level, you do not just have knowledge, you have judgment. Those are not the same thing. Information— knowledge is information. You can get it from anywhere. You can get knowledge from— you can get information from AI, from Google, from books. And the judgment is what you do with it based on everything you've learned about how things truly work in organizations and people under pressure. You've been honing that for years and some decades for some of you, and you can't download that into a prompt. The leaders who are using AI are the ones that are using it well, are not the ones who use it instead of or in place of their judgment. They're the ones who are bringing their judgment to it first, and then they are the filter, and then AI is the tool after. When you know your wiring, how you actually make decisions, what drives you, what your values are, why behind the why, where you default under pressure, what you're secretly protecting or that your brain is protecting, and what you are excellent at that does not feel like it's even a skill because it's just so natural for you. AI gets better because now it has something real to work with. It gets more efficient because you stop second-guessing the output that does not match you and start directing it toward what does. And you stop outsourcing the thing that is, that is your strategic edge. And that's when I realized that it's how I changed how I work entirely. So something that I'm working with for my clients right now, and it's because again, I want you to see that AI is not It's not something that you should avoid. I believe that if you do avoid it, you're going to lose the edge. You're going to, you're going to miss out, and there's going to be a lot of things because information and decisions have to happen so fast. But what I'm doing for my clients is after we've done the foundation, which that's where we start, we understand the wiring, the, the what you're protecting, the, your, your leadership styles and whatnot. But then we train, then I train, I do it. I train an AI agent on you specifically with your specific team and your wiring so that way that AI is in the right place when you would talk to it. When you prompt, it gives you something based on your natural tendencies. So it's not that AI is bad, it's that you've got to give it more context. You've got to give it your understanding, but you cannot use AI to replace your judgment. Because imagine, imagine walking into a decision, like a hard one, the kind of answer that there's— the kind of question that there's no clean answer. And knowing that your read on it is not just instinct. It's years of pattern recognition running underneath a clear understanding of how you specifically process, decide, and lead. You're not gonna go to AI to find out what you think. Think. You're gonna go to it already knowing what you think and using it to build a, build out a picture faster. That is a different leader. That is a leader who is not second-guessing her output because she doesn't recognize herself in it. That's the leader who moves faster because she knows the filter she is running through every time and trusts it. And that's the leader who is not generic, who has never been generic, and who who just needed someone to name it. Your experience is not, not context that slows AI down. It is the thing that makes AI worth using. I built my entire diagnostic process around the idea that leaders who are already excellent at what they do, they don't need more information. They need a clear read on what is already running underneath the level that they lead. The wiring that has been there this whole time and they've never been handed a map for it. And the research backs that up. So when you use AI, put in your judgment first. Feed it the context, but give it some more information about you. And the more information you feed it, the better it is. But we got to feed it the right information. But before you go, I mentioned the Friction Factor earlier in this episode, and I realized I didn't really give you much context about it because I've just, I've just released it. It is a research report pulling from over 60,000 leaders across Gallup, Business Harvard Review, McKinsey, these big reports that they've done. And it names something happening at the senior level that no one is talking about. No one's talking about out loud for sure. And if anything I said today sounds familiar, that report is where you start. It will name what you've not been able to name yet. To download it, it's Tammy Marie Coaching, coaching, coaching, like what? Tamimurricoaching.com/frictionreport. And with that, I will see you next week. Bye for now.