What You Do with AI Sets the Tone for Your Team
Your team is watching you more closely than you think. How you use AI, how you talk about it, whether you admit what you don’t know yet—every one of those signals tells them what’s safe.
In the final episode of the Learning Velocity Series on the Performance Matters Podcast, Nic Girvan, Senior Director of Leadership & Inclusion, and Dr. Cheryl Jackson, Director of Organizational Design & Change Management, argue that these everyday leadership moments (not the technology itself) are what set an organization’s learning velocity.
AI’s answers are instant and often polished, and remarkably confident, causing people to respond by turning silent: second-guessing their own judgment, holding back half-formed ideas, and hesitating to bring anything unpolished to the table. Whether that silence spreads or lifts comes down to what leaders are willing to do out loud.
Why AI Adoption Resistance Is Often a Leadership Challenge
Fear of failure isn’t new. It has always been part of work and certainly part of change. And AI is amplifying it. According to GP Strategies’ leadership mindsets research, nearly one-third of leaders cite fear of failure as their top obstacle to adopting new ways of working.
Girvan sees the effect on teams every day. When a tool produces a strong answer in seconds, expectations shift, and we become less tolerant of messiness, half-formed thinking, and other people’s mistakes—exactly the raw material that growth requires. So people go quiet. As she puts it, what looks like resistance is often just caution, and what looks like disengagement is actually self-protection. Some are protecting a professional identity that suddenly feels threatened; others are working around the tools altogether.
What looks like resistance is often just caution, and what looks like disengagement is actually self-protection.”
No one has decades of AI experience to fall back on. Everyone is learning in real time, in public, under pressure. The question is what makes that feel survivable. Both Girvan and Jackson land on the same answer: it depends on what leaders do next.
Visible Decision-Making: Share the Thinking, Not Just the Call
When asked for the one leadership behavior that unlocks momentum, Girvan names visible decision-making. Organizations have long rewarded the hero leader: the one who steps in, makes the call, protects the team, and keeps things moving. In a period of constant change, she argues that instinct now creates blockages, because teams end up carried along by the tide rather than choosing how to swim.
Visible decision-making sounds like: “This is where I’m going to prioritize. This is what I’m parking just now. But importantly, this is why I’m thinking that way.” It means being clear about where teams have freedom to act and where alignment genuinely matters.
Jackson describes the change management twin of this behavior as visible sense-making. When leaders share the journey—what’s changing, what isn’t, and what’s still unknown—people gain the orientation they need to move forward. Without it, she notes, they hesitate, over-check, wait, and ultimately default to whatever feels safest. Sharing your thinking won’t remove uncertainty. It can’t. But it shifts teams from threat to agency.
Sharing your thinking won’t remove uncertainty. It can’t. But it shifts teams from threat to agency.”
Learn Out Loud: Building Psychological Safety in the AI Era
Psychological safety also needs a rethink for the AI era. In Girvan’s framing, it is less about everyone feeling comfortable and more about people feeling able, able to ask a question without worrying how it looks, able to admit “I’m not there yet,” and able to challenge an AI output even when the text sounds certain.
Leaders set that tone, including by accident. When leaders are tentative about their own AI adoption and build fluency where no one can see, their teams learn that uncertainty is something to hide. Girvan’s prescription is to LOL: not laugh out loud, but rather learn out loud. That sounds like, “I ran this through AI and it’s not quite sitting right—can we talk it through together?” Or, “This saved me loads of time, but I think it’s lost the nuance. What am I missing?”
Jackson takes it a step further: bring AI into the conversation the way you would a colleague, rather than letting it run invisibly in the background. These moments signal that questioning isn’t risky; it’s expected. And that the real value still sits with the human. Or, in Girvan’s words: stop rescuing your teams and start resourcing them.
Where Leadership Silence Slows Learning Velocity
Of the four leadership mindsets GP Strategies has identified—growth, inclusive, agile, and enterprise—Girvan says enterprise is the one tripping leaders up most right now. An enterprise mindset means belonging to something bigger than yourself and making decisions with the whole organization in mind. That is exactly what uncertainty makes difficult, because it keeps pulling leaders back to their own familiar patch.
AI sharpens the stakes. It can churn through business data and produce optimized processes, but it doesn’t carry the weight of the organization. It doesn’t live with the consequences of a short-term decision or feel the tension between what’s sufficient now and what’s sustainable over time. That responsibility sits with human leaders, especially in what Girvan calls the messy middle: organizational intent is clear at the top and activity is plentiful on the front line, but the leadership layer connecting them isn’t equipped.
When that layer stays silent, tools get used without anyone knowing why, and AI gets layered onto existing processes without reshaping them. The result isn’t a lack of adoption; it’s a lack of integration. Girvan’s warning is blunt: without leaders translating strategy into the day-to-day, learning velocity gives way to learning that levels off—and once momentum plateaus, it is incredibly hard to get the energy back.
Velocity Is a Choice Leaders Make Out Loud
Both experts end the conversation optimisticaly. Girvan sees organizations finally treating learning as an ongoing capability rather than an event scheduled around the real work. Jackson hears a new question surfacing in her client conversations—how do we develop a continuous learning culture?—and calls the mindset behind it the foundation for real velocity.
The technology will keep getting faster and more confident. What sets your organization’s pace is whether its leaders share their thinking, question out loud, and make it safe for everyone else to do the same.
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