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In this episode of Medley Moments, Edith Cooper is joined by co-founder Jordan Taylor, and Medley coaches Archana Bharathan and James Renwick for a candid conversation on leadership in the age of AI.
At Medley, connection is at the core of growth, and this conversation explores how leaders can navigate complexity, build resilient teams, and sharpen the most human skill of all: judgment. Together, they discuss the opportunities and risks of AI, the responsibility leaders hold in shaping culture, and the practices that help leaders embrace discomfort while guiding their organizations through profound change.
This Q&A is a curated summary of their full conversation.
Jordan: What are the biggest challenges leaders and organizations are facing right now as it relates to AI?
Archana: I think about AI’s impact at three levels: the individual, the team, and the system.
- At the individual level, leaders are wrestling with confusion. AI drafts emails, schedules appointments, even codes. Leaders ask: If AI handles the coordination, where do I add value?
- At the team level, AI redistributes power. The people curating or training the AI suddenly have outsized, often invisible influence. That creates ambiguity around decision rights.
- At the system level, organizations face governance and workflow challenges. Without redesign, they risk duplication or silos.
So yes, there are challenges — but with every challenge comes opportunity.
Jordan: Community plays a powerful role in shaping how people lead and work together. How can leaders and organizations maintain a strong team culture as AI becomes so integral to work?
James Renwick: I think it can feel quite lonely in leadership right now, with many of us feeling less connected than ever before, less connected to each other as humans, perhaps less connected to our values, to meaningful work, maybe to the great outdoors and to nature as well. It also feels like we have so much to do and so little time available. The tendency is to bypass the connecting as humans and to jump too quickly into getting stuff done. So a sense of human connection and belonging, a sense of feeling like we’re part of something bigger, is a universal motivator, and has never been more important.
Thinking about AI, in my experience of working with leaders, there’s often an assumption that everyone else is ahead of the curve. It’s kind of the opposite of that statistic that 80% of drivers think they’re better than average. Here, it’s that people think everyone else is ahead of them.
Having an opportunity to connect with others in a space where they can let their guard down, share their lived experience, their concerns, their fears, or their excitement around this topic, and feel validated that they’re not as far behind as they thought, that feels like a huge opportunity.
It’s about creating a conversation where people feel part of something bigger.And what we see within the Medley conversations that we hold is that there are so many opportunities for us to support one another, even from competing systems, when we’re able to put our egos—and sometimes our job titles—to one side, just accept people for how they show up, listen deeply, and be really present and ask great questions.
So I think there’s both a huge opportunity and a real requirement right now for us to do more to support one another through this.
Jordan: If leaders are themselves feeling threatened or fearful about what’s to come, how can they lean in to support others?
James: I’m of the belief that we can’t be great leaders unless we’re great humans first and foremost. So a lot of this work in leadership starts with ourselves as humans. Thinking about all of the things that are important to us as humans, that have been called into question or compromised by the rapid advancement of AI, well, they also present opportunities. So I’ll call some out, just a handful:
- Status: That’s universally important to us as humans—our perceived position in the pecking order of life. It plays out at work in hierarchies. In a Medley group, I heard someone refer to FOBO—the fear of becoming obsolete. What a threat to our status, the existence of our jobs as we know them.
- Certainty: That’s another one. Life has never felt less certain.
- Autonomy: It can feel like AI is being imposed upon us, or that our autonomy is being taken away in the choice of content we consume.
-Relatedness: We’ve already talked about the importance of human connection.
So I think, working in groups and as individual leaders working through systems, we can start to condition the environment so that these things—status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, security—actually play to our advantage. We can improve them for people, instead of seeing them as threatened or taken away.
Archana: I agree. A lot of that sense of threat comes from wanting to protect something, status, purpose. But what makes us human, community, connection, belonging, AI hasn’t replaced. Research shows that connection helps us buffer uncertainty. It accelerates resilience. That’s one of the reasons we have conversations like this at Medley, because they accelerate growth.
In Medley groups, I’ve seen leaders approach AI challenges differently, but the way they support each other is similar: by focusing on trust and belonging. That’s the role of community. AI may not be able to do that yet, to keep community, purpose, and belonging intact.
The best leaders design for both efficiency of the system and belonging of its humans. So go right ahead—let AI do the heavy lifting. But, invest more deliberately in rituals, conversations, and shared meaning-making that only we as humans can provide.
Jordan: How do leaders deal with the uncomfortable zone, the fear and uncertainty, as the pillars of what has been success in the past begin to shift?
James: I was co-facilitating a walking and coaching event just last week in Richmond Park, UK, which is a deer park, on the topic of AI and its impact for leaders. There is an abundance of deer, and yet they’re really hard to get close to because they’re constantly scanning for threat. You can see their ears prick up in the distance.
And it’s kind of the same for us as humans. We are constantly on alert for danger. Whether it’s perceived or real, our body responds in exactly the same way. It manifests as a negativity bias. That fight, flight, freeze, or fawn state that we enter when we feel activated prevents us from doing our best thinking and actually from seeing opportunities.
So how do we deal with that reaction to perceived threat? I think it can be approached both physically and consciously.
- Physical shift moves: Just slowing things down as leaders. We’re always in such a rush to get things done. Slowing down helps shift us from the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic nervous system. Breathing—taking deep breaths—reminds the anxious part of our brain that it’s okay, we’re safe, we’re not in real danger. Posture matters too. Amy Cuddy’s TED Talks on body posture are worth watching—she has an abundance of evidence about how posture affects brain chemistry, about the balance of cortisol and testosterone. When we literally sit up, we prepare ourselves to enter challenges more openly.
-Conscious shift moves: I take inspiration from Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman, authors of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. They say we spend most of our time ‘below the line,’ in an activated, threatened state. In that place, life feels like it’s happening to us, and there’s always drama. The key is noticing when we’re there: Where am I right now, in the context of what’s happening around me? Once we notice it, we can accept ourselves for where we are, acknowledge the feelings that are emerging, and then ask: Am I prepared to shift to a more resourceful state?
James: And curiosity is the antidote to being below the line. Just asking: How fascinating. What can I learn from this? What’s this here to teach me? That allows us to shift into a place of resourcefulness where we take responsibility for our experience. From that place of presence, curiosity, wonder, and open-heartedness, we can do our best thinking. Because the blood isn’t in our extremities preparing us to run away—it’s in the right part of our brain, where we need it for deep thinking.”
Edith: How do leaders help themselves and their teams manage fear and uncertainty when the pillars of past success feel shaky?
Archana: So much of what we do as humans, the neuroscience behind it, the simple things you talked about, the physical shifts, the curiosity—imagine if we could scale that.
At the individual level, if we’re able to find that groundedness and resourcefulness within ourselves, we can then support our teams and team members who are anxious about AI.
Going back to really ancient wisdom: first, name it. Name the emotion. Is it anxiety? Is it stress? Is it fear? Is it feeling threatened? Once people have space to name their feelings, without leaders rushing in to reassure them with facts, it creates space to feel, to sit with uncertainty, even to ask questions around status or security.
Then maybe we can start to put things into a framework. At the team level, I use the “three E’s”:
- Educate: The number one thing that comes to mind for me is: how can teams and team leaders educate themselves? Demystify AI. Show teams. Demonstrate. Do it with them. Don’t just delegate. Get hands-on together with what AI, and specifically with what agentic AI, can and cannot do. Clarity and connection really help mitigate fear. And that mitigation of fear spreads at the team level.
-Experiment: As you’re doing things together, create safe-to-fail pilots the team can try together. Whether it’s coding labs or safe spaces to test outputs without pressure. And I go back to something a mutual friend says often: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Slowing down allows the organization, at the system level, to actually move faster, to see around corners, build resilience, build agility, grow innovation.
-Empower: Keep humans in the loop. Make clear where human judgment is irreplaceable. Because at the end of the day, AI can scale workflows, but it’s us as humans who can scale trust
Edith: When leaders want quick answers from tools, how do we encourage them to also value the human interactions that test their thinking?
Edith: Some leaders say their most meaningful ‘conversations’ are with AI tools. They can ask questions without worrying about pushback and get answers that reflect their thinking. But that’s also the limitation. Growth happens in dynamic interaction—when someone says, “I disagree, let’s debate this.” Strong organizations thrive on debate and diverse perspectives. AI isn’t designed for that. So the opportunity for leaders is to embrace discomfort and dialogue, not just efficiency.
Archana: It’s about mindset. Thriving leaders practice curiosity, resilience, and openness. It’s not about mastering the tool, it’s about mastering your own state of mind. That comes from practice, connection, and creating safety in the system.
James: I think the likely experience of all of us not knowing, you know, we're all navigating our way through the unknown. Presents a really rich opportunity for us to role model vulnerability. And empathy. You know, to admit that I don't have the answer to this. I don't know. Yet. I think, is a really powerful invitation. For us all as leaders, too. And an openness to experiment and to fail. And to learn feels really important in this space, which links back to there being a prerequisite for psychological safety.
Archana: As we're thinking about how we are interacting with AI, in many ways, it's like how we would learn to interact when a new team member comes into an organization.
And as we know, when onboarding a new team member, it's very well planned out. It’s important for the onboarding to happen in a way that actually is additive to the culture and team.
I wonder if we can leverage agentic AI so that when interactions are being automated through the agent, they've been automated based on how an HR onboarding team would do the same for new team members.
Edith: This pace of change and the depth of change is greater than we've seen. So knowing that, what do we say to people who say people are going to lose their jobs?
The existential threat of job loss for certain types of jobs is very real. What organizations can do is invest in resources to take some of the uncertainty out of the equation by giving people access to understanding the tools, retraining and reskilling. Also, individuals should consider how and where they want to invest and take advantage of some of the resources to learn and position themselves for the future.
We're already starting to see some companies restructuring and reorganizing, and I love the recognition that people need to own their agency. Individuals can own what they can control, and recognize that in any situation, they can control how they respond to things and how they spend their time and prioritize their time.
Jordan: This big transformation is going to bring people along and not leave people out. At the end of the day, people will lose their jobs. Or the jobs that they have. Because technology will continue to impact work as it always has. There is a bigger question around what is the role of society, the role of companies, and the role of even smaller systems and communities.
Edith: Research shows us that layoffs are the worst possible thing that can happen to an organization. And still, the pace or the rate of layoffs in the last 11, 12, 13 months has been significant, especially in the tech industry.
I see both sides of it. I see the layoffs happening. And on the other end, there isn't enough talent to be hired, because this is where we're at as a society: the educational system is not yet equipped to meet the moment.
We see AI certifications everywhere, but then when you go talk to a startup founder, or you go talk to a head of engineering at one of the M7s, what are you hearing? You're hearing about the lack of talent and not having enough people they could hire to do this.
And so there are two stories over here. And I think both stories share something about society at large.
For more resources on leading through this time of AI transformation, check out the following Medley articles:
- How Leaders Are Navigating the Tensions Between Human Genius and AI
- Human Centered Leadership in the Age of AI
Medley is a leadership development company that brings people together in small, facilitated groups to grow through shared reflection, learning, and accountability. We believe that leadership is not a title but a practice, and that people learn best in community with others who offer diverse perspectives and experiences. Through our programs, members build greater self-awareness, develop key leadership skills, and cultivate meaningful connections that support both professional and personal growth.
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