Rina had always been proud of her emails. They were clean, polite, and efficient. Her subject lines were sharp. Her bullet points were tidy. Her grammar had the kind of smoothness that made busy managers feel safe. So when she was asked to write to her team after a difficult quarter, she did what she had begun doing more often lately: she opened an AI tool and typed a prompt.
“Write a warm, motivating message to a struggling team after a missed target.”
Within seconds, the screen filled with a polished paragraph. It sounded excellent.
*Your commitment, resilience, and collaborative spirit continue to inspire. Challenges are part of growth, and I am confident we will emerge stronger together.*
Rina read it twice, nodded, and sent it.
For a moment, she felt relieved. The message was done. No awkward drafting, no emotional wrestling, no staring at a blank screen. Then the replies began.
One team member wrote, “Thanks.” Another sent a thumbs-up. No one said much else. In the next meeting, the room was quiet in a way that made her skin prickle. They listened, but not closely. They answered, but not openly. The energy was flat.
After the meeting, her deputy, Arjun, stayed back. “Can I say something honestly?” he asked.
Rina smiled. “Of course.”
He hesitated. “The note was… fine. But it didn’t sound like *you*. It sounded like what someone would write if they wanted to sound supportive without really knowing what happened.”
The sentence landed harder than she expected.
That evening, she opened the email again. It was indeed smooth. But it was also empty in a way she had not noticed before. It praised “resilience” without naming the late-night client call, the broken presentation, the analyst who stayed back to fix the numbers, or the confusion caused by the revised scope. It offered encouragement without evidence. It looked like leadership, but it did not carry any of her actual attention.
So she deleted it and started over. This time, she wrote slowly.
“Last Tuesday, when the client changed the scope after the review meeting, I know several of you had to rework your analysis at short notice. I saw the extra effort, and I appreciate the way the team responded without panic. We did not hit the target this quarter, and I take responsibility for the parts I could have handled better. Next week, I want us to review where the breakdown happened and what support you need from me before we move into the next cycle.”
It was shorter and less elegant. But it was definitely more honest.
She added one line at the end: “Thank you for staying in the work when it became difficult.”
The next morning, the team’s responses were different. Neither dramatic nor emotional. But real. One person wrote back with a specific issue. Another asked for a meeting. In the next team discussion, people spoke more freely. The tone had changed.
Rina realised something important: the problem had never been that the first message was badly written. It was that the writing had removed the human part of leadership.
AI had made the process easy, given her better sentences. But trust was hard to come by. It required her observation, judgment and responsibility.
From then on, she used AI only for specific routine purposes. For the parts of communication that were safe to delegate (structure, clarity, trimming repetition), she used AI. Where she needed to be herself, required trust-building and relationship maintenance, she wrote messages herself.
And her team noticed.
