The pressure comes down from above first.
Why aren’t we further ahead with AI? What’s everyone else doing that we’re not? Your senior stakeholders have been reading things.
It arrives as a question, but it isn’t one. It’s worry, looking for somewhere to land. Part of the job, the part that’s never in the description, is to be where it lands. To take it, hold it, and not pass it down the line in the same shape it came.
Because if it reaches the team raw, it doesn’t make them faster. It makes them nervous. And nervous people start managing how things look instead of doing the work.
So you absorb it. You turn the worry into something a person can actually pick up on Monday. You keep hold of the part that doesn’t have an answer yet, so they don’t have to carry that too.
I did it for years.
Nobody thanks you for it, because when it’s done well there’s nothing to see. The team just gets a leader who seems untroubled. They don’t see the part where you were quietly taking the weight off the floor before they walked in.
