Hi Reader,
There is no shortage of conversation about artificial intelligence right now. Executive teams are investing heavily in new tools, platforms, and infrastructure. Boards are asking about AI strategy. Leaders are under pressure to “do something” so they do not fall behind.
But there is a critical investment area that very few leadership teams are talking about.
To make the most of AI, you don't just need better technology. You need stronger teams.
A recent Deloitte insight shared by their CTO highlights a startling imbalance. Organizations are investing roughly 93 percent of their AI resources into technology and only 7 percent into people. That ratio should give every executive team pause.
- AI does not decide how work gets done. People do.
- AI does not determine priorities, trade-offs, or ethical boundaries. Teams do.
- AI does not create value on its own. It amplifies the way humans already work together.
If your teams struggle to collaborate, make decisions, or adapt, AI will not fix that. It will magnify it. Below are three team-centered investments that can equip your team to get the most out of your AI investments.
1. Teamship and a Clear Team Charter
Before AI can accelerate anything, leadership teams need a strong foundation for how they work together. Many teams operate with good intentions but very few have documented agreements about how they will collaborate. As a result, roles blur, decision norms are inconsistent and expectations go unstated. Over time, teams drift into accidental norms, intentionally building a culture they don’t want to work within.
A clear Team Charter creates a shared agreement around why the team exists, how it shows up for one another, how decisions are made, and how the team operates. It moves a leadership team from improvisation to intentional teamship.
Without this foundation, AI investments land on shaky ground. Tools get layered onto fragmented ways of working. Friction increases instead of decreasing. But when a leadership team has strong teamship and shared operating agreements, new capabilities like AI integrate far more smoothly into the way the team already leads together. When teams have clarity on how they want to collaborate, they can use those agreements to make critical decisions about how to best leverage AI.
2. Shared Clarity and Strategic Focus
Focused leadership teams are clear about what truly matters. They align on the few priorities that deserve the team’s collective energy. They name trade-offs and they protect that focus when new opportunities and distractions show up.
When that clarity is missing, teams can still be very productive. In fact, they often get a lot done. The problem is not effort. The problem is direction. Work expands into whatever feels urgent, visible, or locally important. Progress becomes fragmented. Momentum spreads thin.
AI accelerates this dynamic. Teams can move faster, generate more output, and automate more work. But if the team has not clarified what actually matters most, the technology simply helps them do more of the wrong work, more efficiently. Activity increases, but impact does not. In some cases, it can even create more noise, rework, and misalignment across the organization.
High-performing leadership teams reverse the order. They first build the discipline of shared focus. They clarify what outcomes truly matter, where leadership attention should be concentrated, and what success looks like together. Only then do they ask how technology can meaningfully support that focus.
When priorities are clear, AI becomes a powerful multiplier of the right work. It strengthens execution, accelerates learning, and sharpens decision-making. But without focus, speed simply magnifies confusion. Clarity must come first.
3. Learning and Change Capability
AI introduces uncertainty by design. New tools, new workflows, and new possibilities surface faster than teams can fully predict. If teams do not have the capacity to experiment, reflect, and adjust together, that uncertainty quickly turns into hesitation, frustration, or shallow adoption.
Teams that struggle here often default to playing it safe. People hesitate to try new approaches. Mistakes feel costly instead of informative. Learning becomes individual rather than collective. Over time, innovation slows not because the tools lack potential, but because the system does not support healthy experimentation.
High-performing leadership teams create a different environment. They normalize curiosity. They treat early missteps as data rather than failure. They build regular rhythms for reflection into how the team operates so learning becomes part of the work, not an extra activity. Leaders model openness, asking better questions instead of needing to have the right answers. This matters most at the top. If the leadership team is not learning together, the organization will struggle to learn well at scale.
The Leadership Imperative
AI is a powerful amplifier. It will magnify clarity or confusion, alignment or silos, strong teamship or weak collaboration. The organizations that see real return on their AI investments will not simply be the ones that bought the best tools. They will be the ones that invested just as intentionally in the leadership teams responsible for using them.
Before asking what AI your organization should adopt next, it may be worth asking a more foundational question: Are our leadership teams equipped to lead together well enough to make this investment count? That may be the most important AI investment of all.
-Shaun & Joe
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