4 Leadership Practices to Strengthen Critical Thinking and Judgment in the AI Age

AI is turbo charging the speed of work for leaders and their teams. Whether the task is analyzing data, summarizing reports, or generating recommendations, what previously took hours, days, or weeks now takes only minutes or even seconds.

The result is that today’s leaders must wade through a huge glut of AI-generated recommendations. At the same time, they’re expected to process more, respond faster, and make increasingly complex decisions—all while managing demanding workloads and leading teams through constant change.

But there’s a Catch-22: As AI helps organizations rapidly churn out information, leaders are responsible for becoming extremely intentional about the way that they interpret and act on the insights that AI produces. The key leadership conflict isn’t an either-or between AI and human judgment. It’s determining the best strategy for combining the two—and ensuring teams do the same.

I’m currently coaching several leaders who are struggling with this very conundrum. One executive I work with told me that the biggest challenge to overcome is figuring out the most effective use of AI without undermining the independent critical thinking that’s needed for strong leadership decisions.

A New Sticky Floor for Today’s Leaders

In my work as an executive coach and leadership coach, I often explore how “Sticky Floor” behaviors can inadvertently hold leaders back in their careers and limit their effectiveness. I’ve noticed that in an AI environment, a new Sticky Floor is emerging: the erroneous belief that leaders can’t be effective if they don’t prioritize processing more information, responding instantly, and producing more.

Buying into this Sticky Floor can cause leaders and teams to care more about speed than making a discerning decision. Output becomes the primary goal while insight is overlooked. To avoid this problematic mindset, leaders must redefine effectiveness as the quality of their thinking and decisions, not how quickly they offer up answers.

The fact is that while AI serves a purpose in helping to analyze information and identify patterns, AI output isn’t the same thing as critical thinking skills. Offering an answer isn’t identical to understanding an issue, and giving a recommendation isn’t equivalent to determining whether it’s the best one for each unique situation.

Relying on AI-generated recommendations without adding your own leadership insights means that some critical questions won’t be addressed. So before you claim AI’s advice as your own, ask yourself:

• Am I using AI to strengthen my own judgment?
• Am I developing a team that knows how to question and evaluate AI’s advice?
• Have I challenged the recommendation’s assumptions?
• Have I formed my own point of view to tailor the idea?
• Have I fully considered the business context?
• Have I identified potential risks of moving forward?

Here are four best practices to help leaders strengthen their critical thinking and judgment skills to avoid today’s new Sticky Floor:

1. Prep Before You Prompt

To ensure your leadership insights are running the show rather than being led by the nose, form your own initial assessment of a situation before asking AI to weigh in. Ask yourself what you already know, what assumptions you’re making, and what your point of view is. Only after you know those answers from your own insights should you then use AI to challenge your thinking and explore alternatives. In short, use AI to supplement your thinking, not override it.

2. Require Team Insights and Critical Thinking

Leaders need to also hold their teams accountable not just for the AI-generated insights that they deliver, but for the thinking behind those ideas. Team members may be presenting AI-generated recommendations without analyzing and adapting them based on their own knowledge and skills. Leaders should ensure that their teams do their due diligence by thinking through their own assessment, as well as points of agreement or disagreement with AI’s answer. Also support your teams in employing their own critical thinking skills to explain and defend what perspectives, data, or potential risks they haven’t considered, what they may be taking for granted or overlooking, and what evidence would challenge their current thinking or point the team in a different direction. This encourages leaders and teams alike to demonstrate true business understanding and ownership, highlighting blind spots that AI might have missed.

3. Don’t Immediately Act on AI

AI answers always sound authoritative—but don’t confuse a confident answer with a correct one. It’s no secret that AI-generated information can be incomplete or inaccurate. It may also be based on assumptions that don’t fit your situation at all. So don’t simply act on AI output—challenge and test it first. Leaders and their teams should validate all claims while considering risks and exploring alternatives in a human review before accepting AI’s word as truth.

4. Protect Your Thinking Capacity

Ultimately, AI is only as effective as the human thinking capacity that supports it. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize that mental leadership muscle. As AI makes work faster and improves efficiency, the result should be greater impact, not just more busy work. Identify what you can eliminate, simplify, delegate, or automate—and leverage the time saved for strategic thinking that leads to better decision-making.

Remember: the effectiveness of your leadership—and your team’s—won’t be determined by how quickly answers get generated. What matters is what questions you ask, how sound your judgment is, and your ability to help team members mirror your approach to marrying AI recommendations with human judgment.

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Rebecca Shambaugh is President of SHAMBAUGH Leadership, Founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, and author of the best-selling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor, and Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results.