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Businesses still spend billions each year on management training programs, but here we are in 2025with a growing leadership gap and executives scrambling for answers. And if I can get honest for a moment: Were still approaching the problem backward. Senior leaders keep promoting high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles and expecting them to figure it out on the fly. Many dont have the time, support, or temperament to lead people well. Then were surprised when the results are uneven or the team burns out. Before companies invest in another round of training, they need to start with a more fundamental question: Are we choosing the right people to lead? And more important, are we modeling the leadership behaviors we want them to learn? Start with what actually works: Model servant leadership Leadership boils down to people, trust, and relationships. And the simple truth is still the same today: Great leaders lead by serving. They focus on what their people need to succeedclarity, coaching, safety, and supportnot on protecting their own ego or authority. For readers familiar with my coaching work and the book I authored earlier this year, you know Ive been beating this drum for years: Servant leadership has moved from a niche, values-driven concept to the core operating philosophy of many of the worlds most admired and profitable companies. After over two decades of developing leaders, Ive seen a consistent pattern: The best leaders genuinely want their people to thrive. Theyre willing to put the teams needs first, share credit freely, and take responsibility when things go sideways. They grow people rather than simply manage tasks. And that kind of growthpersonal, professional, relationalis what builds resilient teams. Whether you lead 3 people or 3,000, these behaviors will elevate your impact and build trust faster than any leadership playbook. 1. Build trust through real, intentional caring Strong leaders show interest in peoples work, their goals, and their long-term direction. Theyre curious about what motivates each person and intentional about creating opportunities that stretch their skills. This isnt soft. Its emotional engagementand its one of the biggest drivers of performance and retention. Think about it: When leaders support their people through promotions and pay raises (first and foremost), internal moves, stretch assignments, or removing obstacles from their path, it sends a powerful messageyou matter. As the (often-attributed) John C. Maxwell quote goes, People dont care how much you know until they know how much you care. When employees feel their leaders genuinely care, confidence rises, performance follows, and career paths become healthier and more aligned with their strengths. 2. Use empathy to connect with others and drive results In 2018, Global training powerhouse Development Dimensions International (DDI) assessed 15,000-plus leaders across 20 industries and found empathy to be the strongest predictor of overall performanceespecially the ability to listen and respond with empathy. That hasnt changed. If anything, the modern workplacewith hybrid teams, rising burnout, AI, and constant changehas made empathy even more essential. But empathy isnt a strategy you perform and it doesnt come from a to-do list. It shows up in how you listen, how you check in, and how you respond to someones realityeven when their experience is different from your own. Empathic leaders dont just hear what people say; they understand the context, emotions, and challenges behind it. That perspective creates psychological safety, and safety unlocks creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. 3. Be radically transparent A transparent culture builds trust and fosters collaboration. When people feel safe voicing their thoughts, it deepens engagement and creates a more resilient, trustworthy team dynamic. Tip: Encourage employees to ask any questionyes, even the hard ones. People also dont stress around transparent leaders and teamwork isnt undermined, because information is shared openly to let everyone know whats going on at all times. Going a step further, studies prove that organizations that share privileged information with their employeestypically reserved for the ivory tower in command-and-control power structuresreduce uncertainty and alleviate stress about where they are headed and why. One example of openness, perhaps a bit extreme for most companies, is social media optimization company Buffer. It goes so far as to post its formula for salaries online for everyone to see, including the compensation of CEO Joel Gascoigne. Bringing it home No leadership framewor works without spending real time with your people. Learn who they are, what energizes them, and what blocks them. Understand their strengths, their motivations, their values, and their blind spots. So heres a question worth asking yourself today:How well do you really know the people you lead? If you want to advance your leadership impact, start by serving. Learn what matters to your team. Shape roles that offer meaning and purpose. Use their strengths wisely. And champion their growtheven if that growth eventually takes them to a new team or a new company. When you invest in people this way, you dont just build stronger teams. You build a healthier culture, a deeper bench of future leaders, and long-term success for everyone involved. Like this article? Subscribe here for more related content and exclusive insights from executive coach and speaker Marcel Schwantes. Marcel Schwantes This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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There’s a lot of chatter right now about an AI bubble, fueled in part by a perception that productivity gains from AI are largely illusory. I can’t speak to the market, and whether AI is broadly overvalued or undervalued, but I can tell you that in the past year alone, AI has completely transformed how I work. Looking at the tools today that didn’t exist a year agodeep research, browser agents, the big leaps in performance for all the latest modelsthere’s a host of ways AI can speed up or enhance many tasks of knowledge workers, especially journalists. As an independent journalist, I’m perhaps a little less constrained than most (my AI policy is whatever I want it to be), and AI has made me rethink how every part of the job gets done. So bubble or not, that shift is already here. To better articulate this and highlight tools and techniques that are broadly useful, I’ve broken down several ways I use AI in my writing, researching, and reporting. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} The most intuitive way to organize this is by walking through the story processfrom developing ideas to hitting publish to sharing on social media. Here are 10 ways I use AI as a journalist and content creator: Beat monitoring: The set of stories that any individual reporter needs to keep up with is different, and AI’s ability to personalize and summarize is extremely helpful here. I find ChatGPT Pulsewhich doesn’t just compile stories, but explains why they’re relevant to your work and includes other personal info (like your schedule)to be extremely helpful, but it’s also constrained to the Pro plan ($200/month). A stripped-down, but still useful tool is scheduled tasks in ChatGPT or Perplexity, where you craft a prompt that searches for the latest stories you’re interested in and sends it to your inbox. Accelerated skimming: Once I land on an article that I’m interested in, I often read the summary before deciding if I want to spend the time reading. There’s a dedicated button for this in Perplexity’s Comet browser, and there are a host of browser extensions that do this for Chrome. On X, I find the ability to simply reply to any post with “@grok what is this post about?” for a short, instant explanation to be a huge time-saver, especially for memes and trends I’m seeing for the first time. Going deeper: When Google’s NotebookLM made its big splash last fall with its ability to create instant conversational podcasts, many dismissed it as a gimmick. But I find the feature to be an incredibly useful tool for getting primed on a topic or news story. You can either drop a single URL in the folder or use the new Fast Research feature to find a story, generate your audio overview, and boomyou have a short podcast all about the thing you’re researching. Listen at 1.5x speed to blaze through it even faster. Story ideas: Finding the connections and missing angles in between stories will always be a mostly human-driven process, but NotebookLM is a good partner here as well. Prompting it to suggest story ideas based on the questions implied or not answered in the set of articles in the notebook is often a great starting point for a story idea. Getting in the weeds: Once I know the idea I’m running with, it’s time to research. AI is obviously great at this, specifically the deep research tools that have emerged in the past year. I use them all, but differently: Perplexity is excellent for a first passit’s fast, but typically not as thorough as the others. I generally find Gemini to be the best at finding sources on the web, but less great at prioritizing them. My go-to for serious research is ChatGPT, which I find to be the most thorough. It’s also excellent for turning its deep research abilities inwarddirecting them at a large set of files in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder (via Connectors). Targeting highly specific information: When the key to your story is a singular document or piece of data, it’s helpful to outsource the task of finding it to a browser agent. For example, court documents are typically kept in hard-to-navigate services like PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Just finding the right case often involves performing several searches, especially if you’re unsure of the exact names involved or the specific court. When given clear tasks like this, a browser agent like Comet or ChatGPT Atlas is the perfect research intern, usually finding exactly what you’re looking for in just a few minutes. Writing coach: Now that I’ve gathered and processed all the background material, it’s time to write. For my columns and original reporting, I don’t let AI write for me, but I do often use it as a coach. I’ve crafted a Custom GPT to act as an inquisitive interviewer: probing me with several questionsverballyrecording my long responses, and then assembling them all into an outline once I’m done. From there, I’m off to the races, sometimes returning to the coach when I go in an unexpected direction. The process helps me write in about half the time as before. Writing intern: I write a news igest for my Thursday newsletter, with each item coauthored by AI. For these short blurbs, I’ve built a Claude Project that’s trained on my style, the digest format, and the target audience. Once given a story or news trend, it writes a one-paragraph summary in my style, which I then edit and add to. It turns a 15-minute process into something that takes about five minutes. (And, yes, I’m fully transparent to my audience when AI acts as a coauthor.) Copy desk: Everything I write goes through my AI copy desk: First, a Custom GPT looks at it critically but constructively, suggesting edits (and sometimes further research) to make the piece stronger. Then another GPT does a proofreading pass, aimed at making it either more newsy or conversational, depending on the context. Importantly, neither GPT does automatic rewritesthey’re all suggestions that I can take or leave. Social media manager: Finally, once the piece is live, I have specific prompting that writes social copy for LinkedInboth for my personal profile and The Media Copilot company page. In this case, I don’t manually paste anything into an assistant on the web, but instead use Zapier, an automation tool that automatically generates the social post and queues it up for my review. That saves a lot of back-and-forth between browser windows and ensures I never miss a post. I hope you see a pattern in what I’ve laid out: Each process involves AI bringing things to my attention, but it prioritizes my attention. In my view, AI is an extraordinary accelerant for specific tasks in story creation, but the process needs human review and judgment throughout. And while AI can be a helpful writing “intern” for very specific formats, I keep the text in anything substantive (such as this column) human written. That human centricity will remain, no matter how intelligent and automated parts of the process get. While I don’t doubt that AI will continue to improve, the point of using it is to sharpen, accelerate, and amplify how I communicate with audienceshuman audiences. Machines can be great partners, but the moment they become the focus is when we stop communicating and are just creating “content.” The media just experienced an era dominated by SEO, algorithms, and lowest-common denominator thinking. Let’s not do that again. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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Below, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic shares five key insights from his new book, Dont Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). Chamorro-Premuzic is the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, cofounder of Deeper Signals, and an associate at Harvards Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. Whats the big idea? Authenticity is overrated and can backfire, especially at work. Success comes from strategic self-presentation, empathy, and balancing personal freedom with responsibility to others. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Chamorro-Premuzic himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Authenticity isnt the life hack its cracked up to be Authenticity has become one of the most celebrated traits in every single area of life, especially in the workplace. But this trenddespite its well-intentioned beginningshas not gone according to plan. What was initially supposed to free people from the pressures of conformity in the workplace is backfiring in surprising ways. Excessive praise of being ‘true to yourself’ can fuel narcissism, extreme individualism, and a disregard for obligations to others. While research in positive psychology shows that feeling aligned with ones true self can boost mood and well-being, societys obsession with authenticity has a darker side. Excessive praise of being true to yourself can fuel narcissism, extreme individualism, and a disregard for obligations to others. This cultural phenomenon often harms more than it helps, especially in professional settings. 2. The four traps of authenticity For leaders who want to be competent, effective, and create an inclusive and diverse working culture, it is important to avoid the four authenticity traps. The following mantras seem to propel beneficial behaviors, but can actually hurt objective career success: Always be honest with yourself and others. Most people think of themselves very positively, but decades of research show this self-perception is largely biased and often misaligned with how others see them. Even when we are self-aware, honesty isnt always what others want. They often prefer encouragement, positive feedback, or polite social interaction over unfiltered truth. Always stay true to your values. Following your values blindly can be dangerous if those values are harmful, destructive, or antisocial. History is full of leaders who acted consistently with their values but caused great harm. Even for ordinary people, rigid adherence to ones values can prevent self-reflection, fuel polarization, and make always follow your heart misleading advice. Dont worry about what others think. The idea that we shouldnt worry about how others see us is unrealistic because humans naturally perceive the world through others perspectives and rely on social feedback to grow. Ignoring others input may preserve a self-image of heroism, but it prevents real development as leaders, colleagues, and human beings. Bring your whole self to work. Our whole selfincluding the grumpy, impulsive, or self-centered partsis rarely fully welcomed at work, so telling people it is safe to express themselves is a bit of a trap. Organizations should focus on creating inclusive environments that balance self-expression with being a responsible, collaborative team member, recognizing where personal freedom ends and obligations to others begin. 3. Authenticity can hurt career and leadership outcomes Career and leadership success require strategic self-presentation. Rather than imposing an unedited self on others, people benefit from deliberately managing how they are perceived. This involves understanding the social context, adapting to the needs of others, and making intentional choices about what to share and how to share it. Effective impression management isnt manipulative; its a practical way to achieve real-world goals without compromising integrity. 4. Effective leadership is about managing perception Leadership is less about indulging in self-expression and more about creating value for others. Leaders must distinguish when trustworthiness becomes oversharing, understanding how to manage emotions and communicate effectively rather than engage in inappropriate self-disclosure. Authenticity without strategic awareness can lead to missteps. It is crucial that employees receive information in a way that helps them grow. Authenticity without strategic awareness can lead to missteps, whereas thoughtful communication fosters influence, loyalty, and effective collaboration. 5. Authenticity is a rare privilege Complete self-expression is often a luxury of the powerfula privilege for the elite. Only those with status can impose their unfiltered selves with fewer consequences. But for most people, this approach risks professional and social setbacks. Success comes from balancing authenticity with empathy, collaboration, and awareness of social and organizational norms. Dont just be yourself. Be strategically, responsibly, and thoughtfully yourself. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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