Last week Brian Elliott, Christina Janzer and the team at Charter published the Charter AI Pulse, based on more than 5,000 people using AI at work, and one finding made me laugh out loud, because I’d been hearing the exact same thing from clients. They call it the demonstration gap. Managers were twice as likely to say they were doing the things that help their teams with AI as their teams were to notice them doing it. For example, 54.7% of managers said they use AI visibly in their own work, but only 30.4% of workers said they’d actually seen it.
When I’ve asked leaders I work with whether they feel supported with AI at work, most of them have said “kinda.” They’d had the training, and then they were left to figure out what it meant for their own role and for their team. So if the managers don’t feel supported themselves, it’s not much of a surprise their teams don’t either.
Charter’s demonstration gap is about what managers are showing their teams, but from my conversations I think the same gap runs right through how managers support their teams with AI more broadly, and a lot of it comes down to how each side defines “support” in the first place.
For a lot of managers, support means telling the team to give AI a go, sharing the list of approved tools, and making sure everyone has turned up to the mandatory training. From where they’re sitting, that’s the job done, and it’s exactly what they were asked to do. Great.
For the team though, it can feel completely different. They’re still trying to figure out how to find an hour in the week to experiment, nobody has told them when they’re expected to use AI and when they’re not, and they’ve no idea what their role will look like in a year’s time, or whether it’ll even exist.
So the manager is helping, it just isn’t the help the team needs.
I want to be really clear that I don’t think this is always the manager’s fault. When I was in staffing, I watched leaders get held responsible for gaps they were never given the tools to close, over and over, and I think the same thing is happening here. There’s a finding in the research that fits with this. Managers are 1.6 times more likely than workers to hide their own AI use, and nearly half of them say it’s because they’re worried about looking incompetent. It’s hard to show your team what good looks like when you’re not sure yourself.
A manager can easily tell their team to experiment, but can they take work off people’s plates to make room for it? They can talk about AI automating the reports that eat half of someone’s week, but have they been told enough about how roles are changing, or even been in the room for that conversation, to answer the questions that come back? Most of the leaders I work with haven’t. They’ve been handed something as big as “lead AI adoption” and asked to reassure people about a future they don’t have the answers to either.
We talk a lot about getting employees comfortable with AI, and a lot about how executives should think about AI strategy. There’s a whole layer of leadership in the middle expected to make it actually happen, translating strategy into daily work, handling worries about job security, keeping performance up and working out how their teams need to operate differently. Charter found that 11 of the top 14 factors tied to people benefiting from AI come down to what managers do, so I don’t think we’re doing nearly enough to prepare them for any of that.
If you’re on the receiving end, what would make a difference to you right now? Time, clarity, or someone being straight with you about what’s changing? Have you told your manager, or have you assumed they already know?
If you’re the manager, how do you know your support is landing? Have you asked, or are you going off training completion rates?
I completely agree with Brian and Christina that managers are where organizations need to invest. My worry is that the obvious response to research like this is to roll out another round of manager training, and I don’t think that’s where organizations should start. Before anyone books a workshop or signs up for a new AI training platform, I’d want to know what managers are actually doing, what their teams need from them, and what’s stopping that support from being felt. Sometimes it’s a skills gap. More often it’s workload, a lack of clarity from the top, or managers being held accountable for adoption with no say over the conditions that make it possible.
AI training and AI adoption are two different things. People can know exactly how to use the tool and still have no idea how to fit it into their actual working week. Charter found the biggest factor in whether people benefit from AI is having a say in how it fits into their job, and only 37% of workers have that. If we skip diagnosing what’s actually missing, we’ll spend money on leadership development that fixes the wrong problem, and the teams still won’t feel helped.
So, do you agree?
Managers think they’re helping, and their teams don’t agree. I’d rather we worked out why, and what we even mean by support, before deciding who needs “fixing.”
If you’re a People or Transformation leader planning leadership development around AI adoption this year, book a 30-minute call with me before you commit the budget. We’ll work out whether your gap is capability, capacity, clarity or something else entirely.