AI and Leadership Performance: Is Faster Really Better?

AI is making a lot of work faster. Nobody at our first LPX: Leadership Performance Exchange disputed that, and I don't think anyone these days would.

The harder question, the one Angus Scott and I spent an hour circling in front of a live audience, is whether faster is doing anything for leadership performance itself. Neither of us landed on a clean answer. Neither did most of the people who joined our conversation.

We opened with a simple poll: has AI made your decisions better, or just faster? 60% said faster, 40% said better. Most of us can point to work that's clearly quicker now. Fewer of us are confident it's actually better.

Where does the judgment go

Angus's case: every wave of technology, going back to the steam engine, has pushed the work of producing something down to a machine and pushed judgment up to a human. AI, in his view, is just the newest version of that pattern. His line for it: “Humans are no longer producing. They are judging.”

That's a question I don't think we fully answered during the session. If judgment is the job now, who's actually building that skill on purpose? Reviewing an AI's output and deciding whether to trust it is a different capability than producing the work yourself, and it's not obvious anyone, including us, has a real plan for developing it deliberately rather than assuming it shows up on its own.

What speed costs

My own case circled that same question from another angle. A lot of leadership development, in my experience, has happened inside the friction of getting something done: the back and forth between a leader and the person doing the work. If AI increasingly produces the first draft, that particular kind of friction goes away. It's an open question what replaces it, or whether anything does.

My shorthand for it: results get better, relationships get worse. That's a trade some organizations may already be making without quite deciding to. Whether it's the right one probably depends on what you're actually trying to build over time, and that's not a question AI can answer on your behalf.

Three questions we're carrying forward

Angus and I used three lenses from the Leadership Equation, Pace, Power, and Norms, to try to get underneath the debate rather than settle it. They're worth sitting with past this one session:

• Pace: what changes in how you lead once the gap between a question and an answer keeps shrinking?
• Power: what are you actually comfortable handing to a machine, and what still needs a person?
• Norms: what have you already started accepting as normal, without quite deciding to?

None of those have tidy answers yet. I'm not sure they're supposed to.

What's next

I closed the session with the question that comes up most in my conversations with learning and development leaders: what does leadership development actually need to look like now? Nobody on the call, including me, claimed to have it figured out.

That's where our next LPX picks up: September 24, 2026 @ 12pm ET | When Pressure Arrives, Who Shows Up?