Your Team Is Still Human: Leading People When AI Changes Everything

Your team can feel it before you say a word. AI is moving faster than your job description can keep up with, and underneath the excitement about tools and leverage, a quieter fear is spreading through your people about whether the company still needs them. Dr. William Attaway opens Season 5 of the Catalytic Leadership Podcast with the keyphrase for the entire season: your team is still human. He unpacks why 94 percent of companies run a recognition program while turnover and engagement keep sliding, why people leave over feeling unseen three times more often than over pay, and why appreciation is not the same skill as recognition. Using a real story from an agency owner who almost lost his team to silence, William shows what it looks like to name the fear in the room and replace it with real value. He closes with three moves leaders can make before Friday and two questions worth sitting with all week, starting with whether they are leading like their team is still human.

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Transcript

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Dr. William Attaway 1:22

Welcome back. This is season five of the Catalytic Leadership Podcast, and I'm glad you're here. I want to start this season with a question, because it's the question that's going to run underneath this entire season. I want you to sit with it before we go anywhere else. When's the last time you, the founder, the leader, the person carrying the weight of this thing, when's the last time you felt like a person at work instead of a function? Instead of a calendar? Instead of the person who's supposed to have the answer for everybody all the time, every time. Now flip it. When's the last time someone on your team felt that from you? I'm not asking you to make you feel bad. I'm asking because I think most of us already know the answer. And we just don't say it out loud very often. Here's why I'm opening season five with this. I just finished building a webinar for appreciation at work called Your Team Is Still Human. It's aimed at HR leaders, managers, and it's about how AI and generational shift and remote work are all

The Question Behind Season Five

Dr. William Attaway 2:43

colliding all at once and how appreciation is getting lost in the middle of it. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized this is actually a leadership capacity problem. And it's not just happening to your team, it's happening to you first. You are running a business in the most disruptive stretch of time in modern history. AI is rewriting what your role even means in real time, faster than you can update your own job description. You've got people on your team, maybe four or five different generations of them, who all relate to authority, loyalty, and feedback in completely different ways. And if you're remote or hybrid at all, you've got more ways to talk to your people than any leader in history has ever had. And somehow, it still feels harder to actually reach them. That's not a complaint. That's just where we are. And the leaders who are going to thrive through

Why Appreciation Is Slipping At Work

Dr. William Attaway 3:50

this season of work are not the ones with the best AI tools. They're the ones who stay the most human while everything around them gets faster. That's the thread for this whole season. Leading yourself and leading your people in a world that is optimizing everything except the thing that actually makes a team work, being seen. Let me name something almost nobody says out loud, even in rooms full of founders who trust each other. There's a quiet fear that is running through a lot of teams right now. And it sounds something like this. If this company can do what I do with a tool that costs less and never calls in sick, why would they keep me? 75% of workers are carrying some version of that anxiety right now. Not a loud minority, the majority of the people on your team. And here's the blind spot. As the founder, the owner, you might be thinking purely about leverage, about speed, about margin. What AI lets you finally stop doing yourself. That's not wrong. That's part of your job. But your team isn't hearing leverage. They're hearing, am I next? Not long ago, I was working with an agency owner who came to me and said, Man, my team is terrified that I'm going to replace them with AI. And so as we started to talk about this, he shared that he's been very excited about it. And he's been leveraging all manner of AI tools to help make the work better,

The Quiet Fear AI Creates

Dr. William Attaway 5:40

faster. And as we talked about this, I said, Well, have you have you shared with them and told them, hey, this is going to help us be more effective and more efficient, but it's not a replacement for you. I'm not planning to replace you because you bring value. He paused for a minute and he said, Well, no, I mean, they know that, right? They don't know that. What's happening is fear is showing up in their team. Fear is showing up in how they're seeing and hearing everything you're saying. And what you have to do as a leader, you have to go to them and you have to say, look, these tools are going to help us. We're going to leverage them. But these tools are not you. You are valued. You are incredibly valuable to this team. And I don't want to lose you. So I just want to call out the elephant in the room and take away some of its power here. I want you to know I want you here. I said, you say something like that to your team, that's going to help. He went back, he did exactly that. And what a difference. When we talked again later, he said, My goodness, it's like a huge cloud was lifted off the team. Because he went and communicated directly and affirmed the value of each individual human being. Here's the distinction that I want you to write down because I think it's going to define this whole season. Technology can accelerate output. It cannot make a single person feel valued. That's still entirely on you. AI did not create that responsibility, but it sure is exposing how many leaders have been quietly outsourcing it to a once-a-year review, to a Slack emoji, to a great job team, in an all hands that nobody remembers by Friday. This is the core distinction that everything else I teach is built on. So if you remember one thing from this episode, remember this. Recognition says you've hit your numbers. Appreciation says, I see who you are and it matters. 94% of companies in the U.S. have some kind of recognition and rewards program running right now. 94%. And turnover is still high. Team member engagement is still dropping at near record lows. People are three times more likely to walk away from a job over feeling unappreciated than they are over pay or benefits. Three times. It's not pay, it's not title. It's feeling unseen. So the programs exist, the budget got spent, the plaque's on the wall, but it's still not landing. Because most leaders appreciate people in the language they speak, not the language the other person actually receives. You hand out praise because words land for you. Meanwhile, a quarter of your team needs focused, undistracted time with you or with each other.

Recognition Versus Real Appreciation

Dr. William Attaway 9:14

Another chunk needs you to notice that they're drowning and step in without being asked. And they're hearing your words. And they're feeling nothing. That gap is completely closable. It's just invisible until somebody names it. I want to give you three things that you can do before Friday this week. One, stop assuming, start asking. You don't have to guess what makes your people feel valued. Ask them directly, when have you felt most appreciated here? And what did that actually look like? You know, that single question does more than a year of generic recognition ever will. Two, push it sideways, not just down. If appreciation in your culture, your team, only flows from you to your team, you've built a bottleneck. You already have enough of those. Build a culture where your people notice each other's work out loud without waiting on you to hand out the gold star. Three, get the actual data instead of guessing. This is exactly why Appreciation at Work built the motivating by appreciation inventory. 15 minutes, and you and your whole team get a shared language for this instead of everybody operating off assumptions. You can run it yourself at mbainventory.com. This is the thread for season five.

Three Fast Ways To Appreciate Better

Dr. William Attaway 10:55

We're going to spend this season looking at what it actually takes to lead yourself, your team, and your business in a stretch where the tools keep getting smarter. And the temptation is to think that that means the people part gets to matter less. It doesn't. If anything, it matters more. Because it's becoming the only thing AI can't do for you. I want to leave you with two questions instead of a neat takeaway. Sit with them this week. Maybe even bring them to your team. First, if you're honest, are you leading like your team is still human? Or are you leading like they're a function that you're optimizing? Second, who on your team have you been appreciating in your language instead of theirs? And what would it cost you to find out which one actually lands? That's it for episode one of season five. If this hit you somewhere, take the assessment. Go to appreciationatwork.com. It takes about 15 minutes for each person to take the assessment, and it'll tell you more about how to lead your specific people than another year of guessing ever will. And if you know a leader who needs to hear this one, send it their way. I'll see you next episode.