The 6 Levers of an AI-Augmented Leader

Get clear on what you actually want.

Most people open a chat and start typing. The leaders who get real leverage start somewhere else. They get clear on what they're trying to do first. AI is a mirror for your thinking: vague in, vague out. This is the whole idea behind a Telos file. Write down what you're actually responsible for, in plain words. The goals, the projects under them, what "good" looks like. Not a vision statement for the wall. A working document you'd actually open.

Put your world in one place.

The reason a chatbot gives you generic answers is simple: it knows nothing about your world, so it guesses. The fix isn't a cleverer prompt. It's context. The leaders who are good at this have put their world somewhere an AI can see it: the people they know, the companies, the projects, the open threads. We call ours Mission Control. When the model can answer from your actual situation instead of the average of the internet, the answers stop being generic.

Decide what AI takes, and what stays yours.

Not everything should be handed to AI, and pretending otherwise is how you end up trusting none of it. The skill is deciding. Map what you actually do in a week, then sort it. What can AI take now, what would you redesign first, and what's better left to you. The judgment calls, the relationships, the things only you can be accountable for: keep those. Hand over the drafting, the research, the formatting, the tedious first pass.

Build a check so you can trust the output.

Here's the thing nobody tells you. The reason most AI output is slop isn't the model. It's that no one checked it. Good AI work has a checking step built in: a way to know the output is right before it goes out with your name on it. Sometimes that's a second model reviewing the first. Sometimes it's a short checklist. Sometimes it's you, but faster, because you know exactly what to look for. Skip this step and you'll quietly stop trusting the whole thing.

Turn one-off prompts into workflows.

A good prompt used once saved you ten minutes. The same prompt turned into a workflow you run every week saves you ten minutes every week, for as long as you do the work. That's the difference between people who play with AI and people who are genuinely augmented by it. Stop solving the same problem from scratch. When something works, save it, name it, reuse it. Your weekly report, your meeting prep, your research process: each should get faster the second, third, and tenth time.

Bring your team with you.

The point was never to be the one person in the building who gets it. A leader who hoards the skill becomes the bottleneck. A leader who models it, shows the work, and shares the workflows raises the whole team. This is the quiet multiplier. When people see you actually doing it, not just forwarding articles about it, they follow. So augment yourself first, until you have something real to show. Then bring them with you.