AI can help a leader find a blind spot. It can also help a leader decorate one.
That is the part we need to take seriously. You can ask an AI tool to help write a strategy, prepare for a meeting, or explain a decision. It can make the result sound calm, coherent, and more certain than you really are. If you are not careful, it will help you sound like the leader you wish you were, while leaving the harder question untouched.
Can the people around you correct you?
A leader who cannot be corrected is not self-aware enough to lead AI-assisted work. Self-awareness is not a certificate, a personality label, or a nice sentence in a leadership bio. It is the practice of noticing the story you tell about yourself, comparing it with what other people experience, and changing your behavior when the two do not match.
The Crucible’s Gift describes self-awareness as honest reflection: looking at strengths, weaknesses, fears, habits, and the gap between the public self and the private self. That gap is normal. We all edit ourselves for the room. The leadership question is whether the edit has become so polished that nobody can reach the person underneath it.
AI makes this more urgent because it can be very agreeable. Ask it to critique your plan, and depending on how you use it, it may still hand back something that feels thoughtful, strategic, and nicely aligned. Lovely. Also dangerous.
The better practice is to build skepticism into the way you use the tool. I would not make this a special ritual where you write something down once and move on. I would put it directly into my AI instructions: help me find my blind spots; do not be sycophantic; challenge the assumptions underneath my thinking.
That can expose a hole in the plan. But it cannot tell you whether your team feels safe enough to say the same thing out loud.
That is where the human work begins.
Most leaders are busy. That is true. It is also the excuse that keeps AI learning private. We experiment alone, polish the answer, and bring the finished version to the team. Then we wonder why people are hesitant, quiet, or overly careful.
Leaders need to demo the practice, not keep it to themselves. In the next decision conversation, show the team the assumption you asked AI to challenge. Say where the tool pushed back. Then ask a real person, “What am I not seeing from where you sit?”
The important part is what happens next.
Do you get curious, or do you start defending? Do you make room for the answer, or do you explain why the concern is already handled? The team will learn more from that reaction than from your AI policy.
Self-awareness in this moment is not being perfectly open, perfectly calm, or perfectly right. It is being intentional enough to model how learning happens while the work is changing.
This week, do not just use AI to improve the plan. Use it in front of your team to improve the conversation.
Dr. James Kelley
Explore The Crucible’s Gift on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999891510
How are you working with AI? Take the AI fluency instrument at Check AI Fluency: https://checkaifluency.com
Sources
- [The Crucible’s Gift, Chapter 2: Self-Awareness](https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-crucibles-gift-5-lessons-from-authentic-leaders/id1415064267)
- [Artificial intelligence adoption in Chinese enterprises](https://www.ilo.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-adoption-chinese-enterprises-productivity-effects)
- [2026 AI Index Report: Public Opinion](https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/public-opinion)