Today’s leaders are under more pressure than ever before, especially regarding AI adoption:
- A recent Gartner survey found that 91% of customer service and support leaders are under pressure from executives to implement AI.
- BairesDev reports that four out of five senior tech leaders feel pressured to overstate the progress or impact of their AI initiatives to satisfy stakeholders.
- Data from Huble suggests that while almost 60% of organizations report strong executive confidence in their AI strategies, only 8.6% are fully “AI-ready.”
There’s a lot of talk about the tech: the data infrastructure, the governance, and the ability to scale. But what isn’t really being discussed is whether leaders are ready.
That goes beyond whether they know what prompt to type into Claude.
For all the astounding things AI can do, it can’t create effective leaders. It just makes your existing leadership habits and behaviors more visible and consequential.
Every investment your organization makes in AI tools merely magnifies what already exists in your culture. If your culture is focused on clarity and trust, your AI investment will likely yield better focus and capacity. But if your cultural norms are reactive or ambiguous, all you’ll scale is confusion and fear.
Our research surfaces a core challenge behind today’s leadership gaps: Only 7% of leaders are rated highly for setting ambitious performance expectations and caring deeply for their teams. This “Expect a Lot, Care a Lot” combination is rare and powerful. And it’s exactly what’s needed at a time when tech gets a lot of the glory (and the flak).
7%
of leaders have the rare “Expect a Lot, Care a Lot” combination: They’re rated highly for both setting ambitious performance expectations and caring deeply for their teams.
FranklinCovey · Great Leader Insight Report
Think of AI as Your Leadership Megaphone
AI can analyze data patterns, speed up work, and assist in brainstorming. But it’s never going to create or replace great leadership. It’s simply going to act as a leader’s megaphone, ensuring that their beliefs, words, and actions carry greater distances and make a bigger impact—for better or for worse.
“AI can’t create effective leaders. It just makes your existing leadership habits and behaviors more visible and consequential.”
So, what will AI make louder in your organization? We’ve surfaced three patterns that predict the answer:
what gets amplified
87%
of leaders view disruption as something to merely survive, retreating to the status quo.
2 in 3
employees have low confidence in today’s leaders; only 42% trust their own.
80%
of employees describe their manager’s approach to AI leadership as “hands-off”.
These numbers reveal an important truth: The AI tools aren’t the problem. Leadership is. Your AI megaphone will amplify both the behaviors of your leaders and the norms of your organization. If expectations are fuzzy and trust is low, AI models will generate more work and more friction without improving outcomes. But when expectations are clear and accountability is shared, AI tools can free up time for higher-value thinking and other key priorities.
We’ve found that only 35% of employees who currently use AI reinvest the time they’ve saved back into innovation, strategic thinking, or deeper client engagement. It’s not because they don’t technically have the bandwidth; they lack leaders who emphasize purpose, connection, and collaboration to fuel engagement and meaning.
This moment tests leadership maturity. We discovered that seven in 10 employees say technology is advancing faster than their company’s culture can adapt. Nearly half worry about whether their roles will even matter in the future because of AI. And the more frequently people use AI in their work and exhibit AI readiness, the more likely they are to trust its answers over the judgment of managers and colleagues. These dynamics require leaders to provide more clarity, more trust, and more meaningful conversations about where human judgment must lead the way.
What Do You Want to Scale?
Innovation vs. stagnation
Most leaders still default to survival rather than progress, and that tendency trickles down to their teams. AI exposes and scales both caution and recklessness in equal measure; the pattern you reinforce is the pattern that grows.
But leaders who consistently embrace the opportunity of disruption and help their teams do the same with clarity and confidence will avoid the stagnation trap and accelerate innovation.
These aren’t new leadership trends specific to AI readiness. They’re timeless behaviors, tweaked to transform this type of disruption into a source of advantage.
Innovation
Teams feel confident to innovate and empowered to use their human strengths alongside these tools. AI amplifies disciplined experimentation and strategic bets. Leaders establish guardrails, model responsible use, give permission to try new things, and visibly celebrate wins.
Stagnation
Teams are fearful or unsure, and leaders don’t empower their people. AI amplifies delay, risk avoidance, and analysis without action. Leaders who wait for perfection, launch pilots without clear goals, and shield their decision-making process see hesitation and ambiguity mirrored back tenfold.
Quick AI Innovation moves for leaders
- Select a small number of use cases that support your strategy. For each, define the outcome you care about, the guardrails that protect quality and privacy, and who owns the decision to scale or stop.
- Put learning on the calendar. Host a brief weekly review where teams share what worked, what didn’t, and what will change next.
- Ask yourself: Am I (and are my leaders) equipped to lead this disruption as an opportunity for innovation? Or will we use it to maintain the status quo?
Trust
vs. Compliance
AI may be seen as the new way of working, but it can reinforce any antiquated leadership holdovers in your organization. And although our data shows many managers take a “hands-off” approach to AI leadership, the introduction of new and unfamiliar tools can also have unintended consequences: work slows, quality dwindles, and people hold back ideas that could create value.
But when high trust is at the center of it all, AI amplifies both speed and ownership. The bottom line? Trust isn’t a soft benefit. It’s a performance lever. It’s no coincidence that organizations with the highest levels of trust exhibit revenue growth 3.6 times that of low-trust organizations. The financial impact is merely an indicator of how trust builds better relationships, speeds up decisions, and produces higher-quality work.
trust
Trustworthy leaders set clear intentions, expectations, and guardrails. They extend trust by giving people real responsibility and access to information, make metrics transparent, and invite candid dialogue about human involvement to ensure context, ethics, and empathy.
Compliance
AI can reinforce outdated “Command & Control” leadership if that’s already present. New tools can cause some leaders to tighten their grip: work becomes opaque and isolated, people hesitate to take initiative, and leaders rely on surveillance rather than shared standards.
Quick Trust-building moves for ai leaders
- Model credibility by stating your intent, explaining the “why,” and being specific about outcomes and constraints. Keep your commitments and be open about mistakes.
- Extend trust intentionally. Give ownership for a use case, agree on quality checks, and let the team decide how to meet the standard.
- Replace monitoring for its own sake with simple, visible metrics that everyone can see and improve.
Performance vs. activity
Productivity doesn’t equal engagement (or even results). We’ve found that 80% of employees can clearly articulate how AI increases efficiency or output, but these aren’t the only markers of success. Sometimes, they aren’t indicative of actual success at all.
When AI is introduced, leaders may feel more productive as their team output increases, but customers see little change. Our research also suggests that AI use can reduce peer-to-peer interaction and drain energy, resulting in reduced collaboration and connection. In other words, deeply human needs may go unfulfilled.
The best technological tools can’t fix these human problems. Only leaders can.
And when leaders set the stage for real, lasting performance? Teams use their AI readiness to improve quality, reduce rework and cycle time, and create capacity for higher-value tasks. Leaders get hands-on, not by monitoring their teams’ every move but instilling clarity, confidence, and alignment.
performance
Leaders set clear goals and expectations, maintain focus on what matters, and provide a visible framework that unites teams around shared initiatives. They celebrate impact, not activity, and create confident candor about what AI does well and where humans need to lead.
activity
AI can free up time, but many employees don’t reinvest it, creating busywork where leaders prioritize quantity over quality. Teams look efficient on paper, but the energy drain and isolation of AI-driven work can lower engagement. Eventually, the pace becomes unsustainable and quality tanks.
Quick performance-drivers for ai maturity
- Shift from a vague “use AI more” to “let’s achieve this result.” Define a small set of outcome metrics for each use case, like accuracy, turnaround time, or customer satisfaction.
- Create a simple standard for quality and risk. Document the review steps, data privacy rules, and escalation path. Keep it short and usable.
- Publicly recognize teams for measured improvements and for sharing reusable playbooks with others.
Turn Up the Volume on Your Leadership
It’s no longer a decision of AI investment. Whether they realize it or not, your leaders are making a choice about what their AI investment will expose and scale.
Leadership behaviors already exist within your organization. AI will make them louder. If you default to survival or fear, you’ll scale caution and delay. But if you create clarity, build trust, and cultivate a taste for performance instead of activity, AI maturity can help you scale speed and value.
“Your AI megaphone will amplify both the behaviors of your leaders and the norms of your organization.”
At a time when most leaders still treat disruption as something to endure and employees remain unconvinced that their leaders are worthy of trust, the leadership call to action has never been clearer. The question is: Will you hear it over all the noise?
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Read Where Are All the Great Leaders?, FranklinCovey’s full research report on the leadership gaps AI is exposing.
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