🚀 The One Thing Nobody Tells You About Leading in 2025 + My Biggest AI Fail

Your weekly dose of caffeinated wisdom

Hey Leadership Lounge Family! ☕️

Remember when I promised to keep it real? Well, buckle up – because this first edition starts with a story about how I completely messed up with AI last week (and what it taught me about leadership in 2025).

🎯 The Story You Need to Hear

Picture this: There I was, feeling like a tech genius, letting an AI run my team's weekly planning meeting. "It'll save time," I thought. "What could go wrong?"

Spoiler alert: Everything.

The AI created the perfect agenda, summarized everyone's inputs, and even suggested action items. Sounds great, right? Wrong. What it couldn't do was read the room when my team was clearly burnt out, notice Sarah's hesitation about the new project timeline, or pick up on Tom's brilliant but half-formed idea that needed some gentle encouragement.

And that's when it hit me – the one thing nobody tells you about leadership in 2025:

The more AI we use, the more human we need to be.

💡 The Real Talk Section

Here's what I've learned (the hard way) about leading in the AI era:

1. AI is your amplifier, not your replacement

   • Use AI to handle the routine stuff (I'll share my favorite tools in a minute)

   • Save your energy for what matters: the human moments

   • Let AI be the calculator while you be the mathematician

2. The 80/20 Rule of AI Leadership

   • Spend 20% of your time learning AI tools

   • Invest 80% in sharpening your emotional intelligence

   • Because guess what? Your team needs your humanity more than your efficiency

3. The New Leadership Stack My current favorite tools (that actually work):

   • Claude for strategy docs and analysis (it's like having a smart friend who never gets tired)

   • Otter.ai for meeting notes (because you should be listening, not typing)

   • Beautiful.ai for presentations (because nobody deserves death by PowerPoint)

🔥 What's Working Now

Last week, I tried something new with my team that blew my mind. I call it the "Human-AI Sandwich":

1. Start with human connection (15 mins of real talk)

2. Let AI handle the middle (data, analysis, routine updates)

3. Close with human insight and decisions

Result? Meetings cut from 60 to 35 minutes, engagement is up 200%, and people actually look forward to our catch-ups!

👉 Try This Today

Here's a prompt I used that changed how I run meetings:

"Hey Claude, analyze this meeting agenda and suggest:
1. Which parts could be handled asynchronously
2. Where human discussion is crucial
3. How to structure the meeting for maximum human connection

Context: [paste your next meeting agenda here]

Note: Focus on creating spaces for human insight and emotional connection"

🎮 The Experimental Corner

I'm testing something new: "AI Office Hours." One hour where my team experiments with AI tools together, sharing wins and fails. No judgment, just learning.

First result? Joe found a way to automate our weekly reports that saved everyone 3 hours. (Thanks, Joe! The coffee's on me.)

💭 Parting Shot

Remember when we thought email would make face-to-face meetings obsolete? Yeah, how'd that work out? AI's the same – it's not about replacement, it's about enhancement. Your humanity is your superpower.

🤔 Question of the Week

What's one task you automated that made your team feel more connected, not less? Hit reply – I read every response (yes, really!).

Keep being brilliantly human,

Adil Mahmoud ☕️

P.S. Next week, I'm sharing my embarrassing story about accidentally letting AI respond to client emails for a day. Stay tuned – it's both hilarious and enlightening!

Forward this to a leader who needs a good laugh (and some real insights). They can join our caffeinated crew at The Leadership Lounge

Written with ❤️ and possibly too much espresso by Adil Mahmoud