There’s a myth going around that leaders have to master AI before they’re allowed to talk about it with their teams. Get certified, run a few pilots, come back once you know what you’re doing.
It’s backwards, and it’s costing companies time they don’t have.
What teams actually need from a leader isn’t technical mastery. It’s proof that it’s safe to not know something yet. A leader who asks a genuinely curious question in a meeting, or admits a prompt didn’t work the way they expected, does more for adoption than any rollout plan.
That’s not a soft skill. It’s the mechanism that determines whether your team touches the tool at all.
Hesitation Reads as a Warning Sign
Teams watch leadership behavior closely, whether leadership intends it or not. When a leader avoids using a new tool in front of others, or waits until they’ve quietly figured it out before mentioning it, employees read that as a signal: this is risky, tread carefully.
Nobody has to say it out loud. The hesitation itself is the message.
The opposite is also true. A leader who opens a laptop in a team meeting and says, “I tried this yesterday and it got the summary completely wrong. Here’s what I changed,” gives everyone in the room permission to do the same thing without fear of looking incompetent. That single moment of visible trial and error does more to unlock experimentation than a training deck ever will.
What Changes When Leaders Model Learning Instead of Authority
When a leader goes first, a few things shift at the same time.
Curiosity stops being something people hide. Asking, “How does this actually work?” in front of colleagues stops feeling like admitting a gap. First attempts stop being treated as a risk to reputation. And the whole team starts measuring progress by whether they’re learning something, not by whether the output looked polished on the first try.
This matters more with AI than it did with past tools, because the fear of being wrong is baked into how people interact with it. A bad prompt, a hallucinated fact, an awkward output shared in front of the team – all of it feels exposing in a way that fumbling a new spreadsheet formula never did. If leadership doesn’t actively counter that fear, people quietly stop experimenting and go back to doing things the old way, just with an AI tool open in another tab that they never actually use.
Sharing the Misstep Is the Point, Not a Bonus
There’s a version of “leading by example” that stops at showing up. Leaders sit in on training, nod along, maybe try the tool once for a demo. That’s attendance, not modeling.
Modeling means showing the team what it actually looked like when it went wrong. The leader who says, “I asked it to draft the client email and it made up a detail, so now I always check names and numbers before I send anything AI touched,” is teaching a real lesson: AI can make work faster, but it can also make mistakes faster, and judgment stays with the person hitting send.
That’s a more useful thing for a team to absorb than any polished success story. Success stories tell people what’s possible. Missteps tell people what to watch for, and that they’ll survive the process of finding out.
This Is Servant Leadership, Not Performance
Going first isn’t about proving competence. It’s about absorbing the risk of looking uncertain so the rest of the team doesn’t have to carry it alone.
That’s the servant leadership piece. Leaders aren’t handing down answers from above. They’re doing the uncomfortable part first – the fumbling, the wrong prompt, the “let me try that again” – so the rest of the organization can watch how uncertainty actually gets worked through instead of imagining it has to be avoided entirely.
Reflection worth sitting with: what would shift on your team if they watched you learn something in real time, instead of only seeing you after you’d already figured it out?
Sometimes the strongest move a leader can make isn’t having the answer. It’s taking the first visible step without one.
At LS|EG, we work with leaders on exactly this through leadership development workshops and learning-focused sessions built to help them guide change by example, not authority.
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Always motivated, lugo
© Copyright LugoSantiago Enterprise Group 2026
Dr. Jose Lugo Santiago is the chief leadership and foresight strategist for LS|EG, a consulting firm dedicated to facilitating change through leadership, strategy, and foresight. He holds over 28 years of experience leading organizations in the military and civilian sectors, and crafting strategy to meet successful business process re-engineering and innovation. He is also the author of several titles to include peer-reviewed academic works. His doctoral areas of research are Leadership and Foresight, Culture, Strategic Change, and Organizational Development.