Business leaders have learned to give AI very clear instructions. Prompt engineering is now a skill set. You build structure, add context, define goals, and voilà, the model gives you exactly what you asked for. Or flags your mistakes instantly.
Now compare that to how we lead people.
Executive leaders often manage through abstraction, which puts vision over clarity, and assumptions over feedback. Their direct reports, usually senior directors, aren’t always people friendly. Many were promoted for their connections or strategic brilliance. It’s rarely for emotional literacy, which means the actual humans doing the work are often expected to run on vague goals, intermittent praise, and minimal social safety. And most of those workers will try to do their best, because trying is easier than starting over.
AI shows its frustration much, much faster. Feed it bad instructions and it will regurgitate bad output. AI is loud and immediate. Humans? They internalize. They adapt. They lose steam. Sometimes they start interviewing elsewhere. And by the time leaders notice, it’s already cost them more than they figured on.
The gap here isn’t motivation. It’s precision. If leaders gave their teams the same level of instructional care they give an algorithm, performance would improve. Clarity isn’t condescension. It’s respect.
AI prompting has four basic rules:
Tell the system what good looks like.
Break the goal into parts.
Offer examples.
Iterate.
Why don’t we do that for employees?
Great managers already do. They guide. They train. They recalibrate. But tech leadership at scale still tends to lean into strategy and numbers. It’s all too easy to ignore the messy, nonlinear art of human development.
AI is not just a tool. It’s a mirror. If we want people to thrive, not just function, we need to start leading like prompt engineers. One thoughtful, iterative instruction at a time.
