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Leadership Lounge: How GenAI Can Elevate—And Expose—Today’s Leaders
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Generative AI is reshaping how leaders think, decide, and communicate. Used thoughtfully, it can sharpen strategic thinking and accelerate decision-making. But when GenAI output replaces genuine insight, it can expose leaders who can't defend their...
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Leadership Lounge, a place to kick back and listen as our experts dissect some of the biggest questions leaders face today. I'm Emma Coombe, a leadership advisor in our London office, and today's episode is all about generative AI. If you're like the thousands of leaders who've already started using gen AI tools such as ChatGPT, you can you'll know how quickly it's becoming a part of our everyday work. It's shaping how leaders write, decide and communicate. Used well, it helps leaders move faster and get more done. But when work is this easy to generate, how do leaders know the thinking behind it is any good? Whether you're stepping towards the C Suite, already, a sitting C Suite executive, or a CEO accountable to the board, this episode is about exercising judgment while using Genai. We aim to arm you with actionable advice on how Gen AI can enhance your leadership, not undermine it. But before we dive in, please share any burning questions you'd like our experts to answer by emailing redefinersusslerynolds.com and if you value conversations like this, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Let's dive in. So first up, we're delighted to welcome Amy Sissons, Chief Marketing and communications officer in RRA's New York office, into the conversation. Amy also leads our firm's AI transformation, overseeing activation and implementation efforts. So I'm looking forward to getting her perspective on this topic. Amy, welcome back to the Leadership Lounge.
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Thanks Emma. It's great to be here.
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So Amy, research from BCG found that 85% of leaders in 2025 are regular AI user, meaning they use AI several times a week or daily. How should C Suite leaders be thinking about using Genai in their work?
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Most leaders think about Genai tools as primarily for lower stakes work. We actually know that senior leaders have a lot of opportunities to think differently about how to use Genai. One of the ways that I like to advise senior leaders is thinking about using the tool as a bit of a sparring partner, especially before going into board meetings or some of the difficult conversations is to think through how those talking points might actually be perceived. Also, senior leaders that are quite advanced will create Personas of a board of directors or potentially focus groups that can help them look at various angles of a particular viewpoint. It gives leaders more time to focus on strategic thinking and and high value, very meaningful work with their teams.
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I think your point there Amy, about creating board Personas is particularly interesting. It gives CEOs or C suite leaders the opportunity to pressure test their thinking before they enter the boardroom. It shows the power of these tools as coaches if they're really carefully set up. I'd now like to introduce a second voice into the conversation to talk on this point. Sean Deneen is a leadership Advisor based in RRA's Boston office and is experienced in advising senior leaders through transformation. Sean, welcome back to the leadership Lounge.
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D
It's great to be back. Thanks, Emma.
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Sean, I'm curious, what are you seeing senior leaders using AI tools for?
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One of the CEOs I'm coaching right now uses his AI as his devil's advocate for big strategic choices. And he's often having that AI play different roles. I want you to be the voice of the customer, I want you to be the voice of a challenging board member, et cetera.
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B
That's such a smart use of AI, Shaun. And it's interesting how both you and Amy shared examples of senior leaders using AI as a sparring partner. That's also what I'm seeing. And I think what many leaders are also realizing is just how vast the use cases for AI are. For example, I was looking for some coaching around what my focus area should be over the next three to five years, and the sophisticated way in which ChatGPT made me think through the decision making process was incredibly powerful. I was actually kind of gobsmacked by the questions that it was throwing at me. So we've talked about the fact that AI isn't just for low stakes work and that senior leaders should absolutely be engaging with it. But Amy, for C suite leaders who are still cautious and understandably so, how should they start experimenting with Gen AI today in a way that builds confidence in what it can and can't do before trusting it with truly critical decisions?
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My advice is start in the sandbox, start using the tool right away, whether that's perplexity. ChatGPT Claude and start thinking about what are some of those low risk tasks that you can use to start to play around with the system. The reality is we know that those that use AI and learn it faster will ultimately win. And so it's really about becoming more comfortable with the tool. The leaders that are most effective are making sure that whatever they're producing, they're reviewing very carefully. They're thinking through the parameters of what they've prompted and remembering that ultimately they cannot hide behind the tool.
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I think that's absolutely right, Amy. Creating an environment for experimentation. But of course, also, AI shouldn't have decisions entirely delegated to it if there are workflows where AI is being increasingly used to run automated processes. There are also critical intervention points for human oversight and analysis to make sure that decisions are being made correctly, and I feel safe experimenting at Russell Reynolds we have a moat around our data. It's a proprietary platform, but I know for highly regulated industries that have, for example, data that's sensitive to sovereign governments, there's still a lot of regulatory frameworks to be put in place because the export of data isn't entirely limited yet, and there's a real concern that it could be accessed by foreign governments for their own benefit, compromising defence. So it's really interesting to see actually how much more work needs to be done to create a safer environment for all different industries to adapt to using AI more this reminds me of a conversation my colleague Simon Kingston had with Covio Chairman and CEO Louis Tetu in our Redefiners podcast last year. Here's a clip from that conversation to bring the importance of this moment into focus.
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If you have 10,000 employees, what happens when every employee can handle 30% more complexity, 50% more of the time, 90% faster? That's what we're talking about. And so the world's going to be divided between the AI adopters and non AI adopters. And I always say AI or die. It's going to be the greatest competitive divide in business that we will have ever seen.
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I love that quote from Louis. And we've heard similar sentiment in our CEO AI Lab roundtables we held last year. One CEO confessed, whoever learns AI fastest wins. And talking of winning, it was fascinating to read earlier this year that Accenture told its senior staff they must regularly use AI to be considered for promotions for leadership roles. That they were going to analyze how frequently employees had been logging into their platforms, and if it wasn't enough, then they weren't going to be eligible for promotion. So we've talked a lot about how Genai can elevate senior leaders. But as these tools become more powerful and accessible, there's a growing concern that it's creating workslop Genai output that lacks real insight. Sean, I'd like to turn back to you. Are you seeing this show up in organizations?
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Yeah. AI is so good and it can be easy to get lazy. On the surface, what comes out genuinely looks great. However, once you dig into it, you realize that some things can be off, the language isn't yours, and it can almost feel too polished and come across as inauthentic. There's also the risk of hallucination and while this is getting better, it's real. On the whole, this can lead to workslop.
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You're right, Sean. The initial output can be incredibly deceiving. I've seen pages of AI generated output based on various bits of data, and whilst it looks incredibly well structured when you actually interrogate it, it's really lacking depth. So your word hallucination seems very apt for some of the output. And we've all heard stories from companies in the press where the use of AI has gone wrong. So leaders need to tread carefully. It's interesting because while workslop has been reported to occur most often between peer to peer or upwards from an employee to a manager, Harvard Business Review research found that 16% of workslop is flowing down the ladder from managers to the team or from even higher up the chain. So leaders need to be cognizant of this. Some leaders I work with are starting to use one AI platform to check the work produced by another to try to reduce the risk of work slop. Ultimately, no one leader will know how to walk this road perfectly. Sean, what's the personal risk for leaders who rely on seemingly polished AI output without developing their own point of view?
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Generative AI tools make it incredibly easy to sound prepared and confident, but it can often mask shallow thinking. And this is going to catch up with leaders. When leaders lean too heavily on gen AI, they their thinking can look generic. And people will quickly notice that a leader's voice lacks originality or isn't distinctive enough. In a crowded and competitive market, it becomes even more important to find ways to stand out. And credibility is going to suffer when leaders can't explain why they believe something or defend it under pressure and they're going to get exposed. So at the end of the day, you can't outsource your own thinking and judgment. AI can be a part of partner for you to help you shape your thinking and even enhance it. But it can't be a replacement for your personal judgment.
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It's a fascinating point, Sean, around AI shaping your thinking. And actually I've read some recent research that really highlighted for me how sycophantic AI is. It's programmed to be positive, to reinforce you. And actually one journalist has likened it to junk food. It gives you a similar hit to eating hamburgers. And it doesn't require any kind of thought on your part in terms of the human reaction. You're creating any kind of introspection. So it's really false flattery. And it's so important if you are using AI to shape your thinking, to ask it to be critical of you as much as it might also give you some positive steers as well and positive reactions. We'd now like to introduce our third voice into the conversation, Fawad Bajwa, Leadership Advisor and leader of AI analytics and data in RRA's Toronto office. Fouad, welcome back to the leadership Lounge.
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Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be back here
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again Fouad, I know you also wanted to touch on this point about how you can make sure AI doesn't undermine your credibility as a leader.
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As a leader, credibility is your currency that you built over a sustained period of time is built by way of insights and perspectives that you have as an expert. And that in the long run leads to trust. Trust that you built. When you start to lose credibility, you lose trust. If you think about somebody who's defending their PhD thesis, they've spent years doing the grunt work, data analysis, interviews, going in with hypotheses and proving and disproving them. When that person is defending that thesis, they can go down to third, fourth level of detail beyond the executive summary that's on top of that document. Now creating the executive summary can be done using a Gen AI tool. But if you think about leaders who are relying on gen AI outputs for their day to day perspectives, they're at that executive summary level of depth. And if you can defend your perspectives to the second, third degree when put under pressure, that's when you start to lose credibility.
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That's a very interesting perspective and example Fawad. The most effective leaders are those who have the ability to interpret, challenge, challenge and refine output from gen AI tools rather than accept it at face value. So Sean, what types of questions should leaders be asking of AI before they trust what it produces?
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Context is a critical factor and what we find is the more contextual information and insight you can provide, the better the output. And there's often wisdom that underpins context. So leaders carry a lot of wisdom. They need to be feeding that wisdom into AI, providing that context, educating it in many ways in terms of what they know, what they're seeing, what's surrounding where they're operating and how they're thinking and that's going to produce some of the best output. So context is king. And the more that you can bring that in as leaders, the better you're going to get in terms of the insights.
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I really like that that leaders need to feed their wisdom into the AI tool they're using and, and not to assume anything Fouad, I wanted to speak a little now about leadership skills. What would you say is the leadership skill most critical to reducing work slop today?
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One of the key leadership skills is critical thinking. I worry about it the most in terms of, you know, the critical thinking is something that's built through struggle. It's built through testing ideas, getting them wrong and learning from that. If you are already an expert, you can look at a code or a gen AI created output and decipher whether it's right or what nuances need to be fixed. If you've grown up in this world of gen AI and you haven't had the opportunity to build that critical thinking skill, then you're not going to know what's right and what's wrong, especially when it comes to nuanced outputs. And so I think about critical thinking more from the perspective of developing leaders versus leaders that are already in senior positions and have established themselves. An example I like to use is think about a surgeon. A good surgeon knows how to conduct surgery. A better surgeon knows when to conduct it. But the best surgeons are the ones that know when not to conduct it. And that requires critical thinking.
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That surgeon analogy is really interesting, Fouad, and it also talks to the criticality of having apprenticeship cultures in this AI led environment that generations with more critical thinking experience can pass it down to the new generations coming through even faster because the rate of this output is exponential and it has to be interrogated. And our research found that 60% of leaders are worried that individuals aren't generating critical thinking, which is really concerning. What skill do you think is most critical, Sean?
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I think the best leaders kind of hold this tension of being curious and open and explorative and asking questions to refine the thinking, but equally bringing some healthy skepticism to pressure tests to understand where the insights are coming from, is there sound evidence to back it? And is this really something that you can stand behind?
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You're right, Sean. And finding that balance is critical. This reminded me of a conversation my colleague Clark Murphy had with Redefiner's guest, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. He spoke about being realistic on what Genai can and can't do. Let's hear from Brad.
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None of this should ever be used, in my opinion, as a tool to encourage people to stop thinking. It is a tool to help people think better. And I appreciate it when people expect a machine to yield an answer that's 100% accurate. But if you walk out of your office building and you ask the first person you meet for Directions to go somewhere. Then you're gonna ask yourself, okay, that sounds good, but is it right? I know something about this neighborhood. In the same way, always ask yourself, does this make sense? How do I use it? How do I make it better?
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What a great insight from Brad Smith. That is definitely an analogy I'm going to hold onto. I'd like to turn back to you now, Amy. What other leadership skills or behaviors will be important? Amy, in this Gen AI world, I
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spend a fair amount of time talking about transparency, especially when using Genais. One is the concept of accountability, making sure that whatever you use in terms of byproduct that comes out of the system, it's being carefully reviewed and really owned by the individual that's using the system. My philosophy when using Genai is to be very transparent about how I use the tool. Oftentimes I will indicate I used Genai for 30% of this piece of work. It also creates a culture of transparency amongst others that around me, so that we're very clear on how much of it is augmented through Gen and how much of it is human created.
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I think it's really important, Amy, to have that transparency with colleagues. Internally it promotes the use cases for AI and it can drive faster adoption. But externally with clients, it's not appropriate in today's world to share how much you've used AI. And actually it really links to this piece around accountability. No matter how an output has been generated, if AI has supported it, ultimately you are accountable. It's on your head. I think we've all had examples where AI has masked errors because the output looks so polished. So actually that need to check and double check is even more paramount potentially than it was in a pre AI world. So our time in the lounge today has come to an end. What our guests have highlighted through this episode is this AI output reflects how you approach it. If you're clear, disciplined and thoughtful, AI will amplify that. If your approach is rushed or you prioritize volume over value, it will amplify that too in 30 seconds. This is what we've learned. Genai can elevate leaders when used thoughtfully, helping you sharpen your thinking, pressure, test decisions and prepare more effectively for high stake moments. But it can also expose leaders. When polished output masks shallow judgment or replaces genuine points of view, the differentiator remains human. Critical thinking, contextual wisdom and the ability to stand behind your decisions under pressure. And as AI becomes embedded in how we work, authenticity, accountability and transparency will matter more, not less. If you have any topics or burning questions you'd like us to cover in future episodes of Leadership Lounge, do get in touch. Email your question to redefiners@russellreynolds.com until next time. Goodbye.