One of us (Erin) has started writing personalized notes to colleagues, intentionally including specific details to show she wrote them, not ChatGPT.
For example, in a recent LinkedIn post, Erin praised Charter’s event producer Maggee Dorsey Thomasch, writing:
“She has been with us since our very first in-person conference, though you rarely see her in photos because one of the many things she does is create the photographer shot list and is so focused on them capturing everyone else’s moments.”
The Monday before our most recent conference, Charter employees started the day with a company-wide Slack message from Erin, praising each person for their specific contributions to the event.
These small acts reflect a broader effort to maintain authenticity as a leader at a time when it’s easier than ever to fake it—her small rebellion against the increasing number of emails and LinkedIn posts that were clearly written by genAI without substantive input from or oversight of a human.
Authentic leadership involves transparency and leaders sharing their own thoughts and perspectives. Tools like ChatGPT make it easier than ever to put words on a page, regardless of whether you would have said them yourself. The risk is that when leaders use AI for personal communication, they’re putting distance between themselves and their employees.
As AI takes on a growing number of operational and efficiency-focused tasks, the human parts of leadership, like empathy, communication, and the ability to motivate others and build trust become your competitive advantage. Don’t let AI diminish them.
What authentic leadership looks like
Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi used to occasionally write personal letters to her workers about topics on her mind, like the separation anxiety she felt when her kids left for college. “I want them to know me as a person, rather than just [as] an executive,” she once said. She also wrote letters to the parents of hundreds of her senior executives, thanking them for their child’s contribution to the company. (Charter’s co-founders recently took a page out of Nooyi’s book, writing letters to every employee’s parents on Employee Appreciation Day.)
In 2005, Steve Jobs gave his famous Stanford commencement speech. It was deeply personal, touching on everything from his firing from Apple to his cancer diagnosis. Jobs struggled like crazy to write it, sending a draft to a friend with the message, “I’ll send you something, but please don’t puke,” as Steven Levy recently reported in WIRED. It’s considered one of the best commencement speeches of all time. He wouldn’t have gotten there by offloading the struggle.
These are powerful examples of leaders sharing their thoughts and working to create human connection.
The risk for leaders
A recent study found that an AI system trained on the communication of Zapier CEO Wade Foster could imitate his writing style so well that his own employees could only tell when a message came from the AI or him 59% of the time. However, the employees rated responses as less helpful when they believed they came from the bot, regardless of who actually wrote them. Other studies have found a similar aversion to AI-generated content, with people perceiving AI-written communications as less authentic.
So what should you do? For starters, use AI for the less personal stuff. “The target [AI] use case today should really be communicating with strangers or automating the drab parts of writing,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, co-author of the Zapier study, told Harvard Business Review. “You could use AI to answer questions about your pricing strategy or what you expect to happen to interest rates for the next year. But I wouldn’t use it to write an email to a board member about your last vacation.”
And when you do use it for personal communication, make sure you’re still at the center.
Draft your next talk and ask your favorite chatbot to give you feedback from multiple personas. If you have to deliver some difficult news but you’re not sure how to phrase it, dictate your thoughts and transcribe them, ask the chatbot to synthesize the thoughts, and use that as a starting point for your draft.
If you’re writing a new LinkedIn post and you’re stuck on an idea, ask the chatbot to interview you. Use AI for research and structure, but keep the personal touches that build trust. There are so many ways to get writing help from these chatbots that still allow you to add meaningful details and insights the AI would never know. And if you heavily lean on AI to write something, be open about it.
We’re still in the early innings of genAI, and we expect norms to shift over time. People’s attitudes toward AI-generated communication will likely evolve as the technology improves and we get used to seeing more of it. But until that happens—and likely even after that happens—we’ll keep communicating for ourselves.