Your People Can't Follow a Leader Who Can't See Them

Korn Ferry just published numbers that should give every executive team pause in the middle of an AI rollout. In The Confidence Gap Undermining AI Transformation, Guangrong Dai and Sarah Jensen Clayton of the Korn Ferry Institute report that the share of non-executive employees who are confident in their senior leaders fell from 68% in 2024 to 53% in 2026. Their argument is fair and well made: AI may reshape how work gets done, but trust will decide whether people help build that future.

I agree. I also think their data points to something underneath trust, something leaders can start working on this week.

Two Companies Under One Roof

Look at how differently the top and the rest of the same organization see things. Among executives, 64% say AI training is adequate. Among employees, 40% agree. Sixty-two percent of executives believe leaders understand AI, compared with 43% of employees. And while 62% of executives say employee voice is welcomed, only 46% of frontline employees feel that way. Over two years, the share of non-executives who feel their ideas are welcome dropped from 70% to 54%.

I don't read that as a communication gap. I read it as a seeing gap. Executives are describing the transformation as it was designed. Employees are describing it as it is lived. Both are telling the truth from where they stand, and too few leaders spend enough time on the other side to notice the difference.

When people stop feeling seen, they rarely protest. They edit. They keep their real questions to themselves, nod through the town hall and save the honest version for the hallway or the exit interview. I wrote about that pattern in Why People Wait Until They Leave to Tell the Truth. Korn Ferry shows what it costs at scale, during the largest change most organizations will ever attempt.

Borrowed Confidence Won't Carry People Into AI

Most change plans ask employees to borrow confidence from their leaders. Trust the roadmap. Trust the training. Trust that there will be a place for you on the other side. Borrowed confidence holds up when the path is familiar. AI is not a familiar path, and nobody, executives included, knows exactly what the work will look like in three years.

What carries people through that kind of uncertainty is conviction: the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain. No one can hand it to a workforce in a memo. People earn it in small reps. They try a new tool and are free to say it didn't help. They raise a concern and watch it change a decision. They see their own strengths named in the role being redesigned around them.

Korn Ferry found that employees with high confidence in their leaders are nearly three times more likely to view AI favorably and more than five times more likely to believe their organization can adapt. I take that as evidence that people follow leaders who know them. When employees believe their leaders understand who they are and what they bring, they lend their effort to the unknown. When they don't, even a well-built AI strategy produces little more than the illusion of progress.

Gallup sees the same pattern from another angle. In its survey of more than 22,000 U.S. workers, only 20% trust their leaders a great deal to use employee data responsibly, and roughly four in five say no one at work has talked with them about the data collected on their work. Companies know more about their people than ever, yet rarely talk with them about it.

Close the Seeing Gap This Week

Consistency in the rollout is an asset. Common tools, shared training and clear guardrails are how a company scales AI without chaos. But a rollout designed only from the executive view treats every employee as the same user. Leadership pairs that consistency with knowing the individual: what each person naturally solves for, and where they could contribute more once the repetitive parts of the job are gone. That is a different problem from the one I described in Don't Leave the Engine Room Behind, but it has the same root. People grow when someone takes the time to see them.

Sit on the other side of the dashboard. Before your next AI update, spend an hour with a team using the tools. Ask what is working, what isn't and what they have stopped saying in meetings. Compare their answers with the report you were going to present.

Ask the identity question, not only the skills question. For every role being redesigned, ask the person in it what they do better than anyone else on the team. Build the new role around that answer instead of around the old job description.

Show people what their voice changed. The Korn Ferry authors put it plainly: "Trust grows when people are heard, not simply informed." Hearing becomes believable when people can point to a decision their input shaped, so name it out loud every time it happens.

AI will change what work looks like. Whether your people walk into that future with you depends on whether they believe you can see them in it.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.