Leave the performance.
Take the story.

Off the record: The first time someone on my team admitted they were scared of AI, they didn’t say it in a meeting. They said it in a hallway, after the meeting, when no one was watching.

That’s where the real stories live. Not in the all-hands, in the hallway or the text message at 9:47 PM that starts with “hey, real talk…

Here’s what they actually said: “I just don’t know if what I’m good at still matters.“

I’ve heard some version of that sentence from a senior creative director, a VP of operations, a CFO, and a frontline manager all in the last ninety days. The wording shifts, but the fear underneath it is identical: the thing I built my career on is about to be rewritten, and no one is telling me a story I can hold onto.

I keep thinking about Charlie Malouf, the CEO of Broad River Retail, who stood in front of his leadership team last summer and called 2015 “the year we broke all our bones.” An ERP conversion gone wrong. Orders backed up and customers canceled. The company on the brink. He didn’t open with the recovery. He opened with the fracture. “We sucked and failed miserably,” he told them. “I’ll put myself in that mix, by the way.“

What he gave his team that day was a precedent, a story that said: we have been here before, and here is what surviving it looked like.

That’s what’s missing in most of the AI conversations happening inside companies right now. Leaders are sharing the what—the tools, rollouts, pilots and policies. Almost no one is sharing the why. And almost no one is telling the story of a time they were the one in the hallway, wondering if what they were good at still mattered.

Our brains are wired to resist disruption. When the landscape shifts under us, the fear center fires before the logic center has a chance to weigh in. You can’t org-chart or Slack-channel your way out of it. The only thing that calms a fight-or-flight brain is another human being who has been through something like it and lived to tell the story. Especially a leader.

Your team doesn’t need you to have the AI answers.
They need you to have the human ones.

THE TAKEAWAY

The Moral of the Story

01  Fear of change is not a strategy problem. It’s a story problem. When people are afraid, more information rarely helps. A real story almost always does.

02  Be the leader who has been scared before. If you’ve ever had your professional ground shift from a layoff, a pivot, a technology that ate your job description, that story is now an asset. Tell it because your team is desperate to hear it.

03  Don’t sell the future. Share the precedent. Every company you admire has lived through a moment that felt like the end. Find that story in your own company’s history and tell it now, while it matters.

04  The hallway is the focus group. What people say to you off the record is the truth. What they say in the meeting is the performance. Lead to the truth.

DO THIS WEEK

The Cheat Code

This week, before your next team meeting, ask just one person this single question:

What part of your job right
now do you wish someone
would just be honest with you about?

Don’t fix it. Just listen. You will learn more about what your team needs from you in the next twelve months than any survey will ever tell you.

Remind someone who they are this week.
– Danielle Krischik