Two Ways Leaders Are Failing Right Now (And a Third Way)

There are two failure modes showing up everywhere right now, and neither one looks dramatic from the outside.

Failure One: The Leader Who's Standing Still

The first is the leader who's basically ignoring the shift. Still running things exactly like they did five years ago, treating AI tools as a curiosity rather than part of the team. Nothing looks broken. But quietly, competitors who took this seriously are pulling ahead, and the gap compounds every quarter it goes unaddressed.

This failure is comfortable, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. There's no crisis moment that forces a reckoning. Revenue doesn't collapse overnight. Instead, the business just gets slightly less competitive every quarter, in ways that are easy to attribute to other causes — market conditions, timing, bad luck — right up until the gap has grown large enough that it's undeniable and, by then, hard to close quickly.

Failure Two: The Leader Who Let Go of Too Much

The second is the opposite mistake: over-delegating. Handing so much of the thinking to a tool that the judgment underneath starts to atrophy. Ask this leader why a call was made, and the honest answer is "the tool said so" — which is a fine answer sometimes, and a dangerous one when it becomes the default.

This failure is seductive because it feels like progress. Things get done faster. The inbox empties quicker. The reports get written in a fraction of the time. What's harder to notice is the slow erosion of the underlying skill — the ability to actually reason through a problem from scratch, without a tool's draft as a starting point. That skill, like any skill, degrades without use. And it tends to degrade exactly when you need it most: in the moment the tool gets something confidently, plausibly wrong, and there's no sharp human judgment left to catch it.

Neither Is Really About Technology

Neither of these is really a technology problem. Both are leadership problems — a failure to actively decide what belongs to a person and what belongs to a tool, instead of drifting into an answer by default. The leader who ignores AI has defaulted to "everything stays human." The leader who over-delegates has defaulted to "everything that can go to a tool, does." Both defaults are failures of the same kind: neither one was actually decided. Both just happened.

The Third Way

The third way isn't splitting the difference. It's staying deliberate, situation by situation, about which of the two — human judgment or tool leverage — the moment actually calls for, and being honest enough to keep re-checking that call as things change.

Practically, this means building a habit of pausing, even briefly, before defaulting either direction. Before handing something to a tool: is this a place where being wrong would actually cost something meaningful? Before insisting on doing it yourself: is my involvement here actually adding value, or am I just protecting my own sense of control?

That's what V7 calls Versatility — playing the orchestra, on purpose, rather than by accident.

This essay is part of The Hybrid Leader's Field Guide.