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Coaching Corner
Human accountability in the age of AI everything
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
The challenge
Mohinder is a Chief Operating Officer at a global technology company. Known for his analytical acumen and solid performance at the helm of his function, he nonetheless struggles with some of the more relational dimensions of leadership. At times, he finds it hard to communicate as openly and transparently as he knows his team and peers need. He tends to avoid the more challenging conversations with team members, to withdraw when he feels threatened and to send mixed messages to his colleagues who typically read his silence as disapproval. Mohinder is aware of these traits, in no small part because for the last 18 months he has quietly been using an AI coaching tool – late at night, between meetings, and ahead of difficult encounters. And while he has a strong grasp of what more effective leadership might look like – he has read frameworks, completed assessments, and engaged thoughtfully with his AI coach – Mohinder is at something of an impasse. He knows what is missing, but he cannot translate his understanding into behavioural change. A conversation with his CHRO yields a phrase that resonates with him: the gap is not between knowledge and ignorance, but between the leader you present to the world and the underlying patterns that undermine you when pressure mounts.
Encouraged by his CHRO, Mohinder agrees to seek the support of an executive coach, though he is sceptical that a human being can offer what his AI tool has not.
Instead of gaining more knowledge or understanding, Mohinder’s coach encourages him to reframe his goal as acting with greater accountability.
The coaching journey
Instead of frameworks, Mohinder’s coach kicks off by asking questions and listening. As he recounts some of the more challenging experiences of his leadership – a stalled product launch, a competent but joyless restructuring, a difficult and destabilizing board transition – the coach shares an observation. When asked what outcomes he wants for his team, Mohinder’s answers not only change by context; they actively contradict each other.
Pushed by his coach to pinpoint why this might be, Mohinder begins to perceive a pattern. When things change and the business moves faster than he can actively control, he defaults to information-gathering at the expense of decision-making. Meetings become lengthy consultations causing delays. Under pressure, uncertainty builds and leads to paralysis. Armed with this insight, his coach makes two structural interventions.
First, Mohinder is challenged to commit to a difficult conversation with his CFO that he has been avoiding – a simple accountability mechanism to gauge decision-making and follow through. Instead of an AI coach, Mohinder agrees to report back to his human coach the following week. This is qualitatively different from the tool’s follow-up prompt, which he had learned, unconsciously, to dismiss.
The second intervention is around the purpose of coaching itself. Instead of gaining more knowledge or understanding, Mohinder’s coach encourages him to reframe his goal as acting with greater accountability – being accountable for behaviours and decisions, and to other human beings who have earned the right to hold him accountable.
The impact
Week by week, Mohinder begins to understand that understanding without accountability is a form of avoidance. Working with his human coach, he is held accountable for building self-awareness, identifying and naming patterns, and exploring how his accumulated history can shape the leader he is deciding to become. His team is noticing more speed and confidence in his decision making. He is more engaged in the immediacy of the moment. The difficult conversation that he committed to having with his CFO has yielded strategic alignment to unblock two initiatives that had been stalled for a quarter.
Mohinder recognizes that the patterns are not gone; they resurface under acute pressure. What has changed is the speed at which he catches them – and relational accountability that keeps him on track.
Mohinder’s AI tool remains part of his daily practice – a reflective habit, a decision supported at midnight, a problem externalized before it calcifies. At a deeper layer, however, he understands the critical value of human coaching and connection to surface patterns, explore the accumulated layers of identity under pressures, and exercise accountability. Mohinder no longer uses his AI coach to avoid the harder, slower, more uncomfortable work – and impact – that a human coach affords.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Are you using reflective tools to understand your patterns, or to avoid acting on them?
- Is there a conversation you have been postponing that, if you are honest, has already cost your organization something?
- Who in your professional life carries an accumulated model of how you behave when the pressure rises — and are you permitting them to use it?
In the Coaching Corner series, we share real-world cases that come from our work with leaders. Read other examples to discover the specific challenges that face each of the leaders we have coached – and the insights that have helped them navigate their multifaceted challenges to find their own solutions. How might these insights and questions apply to you?
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