Early in my career, I worked with a company that had an unusual internal culture: Employees were expected to move into a new role every 18 to 24 months. Change, and its associated uncertainty, became the new normal. Moving to a new seat in the same company inspired a growth mindset.
People hated it at first. It felt unstable: The ground kept shifting under them. Over time, I watched people who leaned into it build sharper skills, wider networks, and stronger internal brands than people at companies with no such expectation. They learned new tech stacks before they were forced to. They stayed current proactively because it was the only way to stay employed. They negotiated better compensation. The policy was uncomfortable and brilliant.
Watching how business leaders are responding to artificial intelligence (AI), that culture might be a model worth revisiting. AI disruption is not inherently positive, and organizations should be accountable for how it is implemented. And we have the opportunity to individually strengthen our agency, adaptability, and relationships so that we both understand our own value and can self-advocate.
Fear is real. The paralysis doesn’t have to be.
I hear it in almost every coaching conversation these days. Leaders who are competent, accomplished, and genuinely good at their jobs feel frozen by a low hum of dread about what AI means for their relevance. Will this replace me? Am I already behind? Should I have learned this six months ago?
The half-life of expertise is shrinking fast, and there is no manual. Fear of being displaced is real. And, underneath the fear, I keep noticing something we’re not naming enough: AI acceleration is functioning almost exactly like that rotation policy. It is forcing us to do the things we already knew we should be doing and, if we’re honest, had not prioritized.
Update your skills. Build relationships outside your own silo. Get sharp about your own value instead of assuming your title will speak for you. Stay current instead of coasting on what you learned a decade ago. None of this is new. It’s the same advice good mentors have given for years. AI is just the first thing with enough force to make us actually act on it.
Two ways to meet that pressure
I see leaders responding to this moment in one of two ways.
Some collapse under the pressure. They wait to see what happens to them, hoping the disruption lands somewhere else, on someone else’s job, in someone else’s industry. Whether you call that patience or burying your head in the sand, it is not a strategy.
Others engage differently. They put themselves back in the driver’s seat. They start managing their own trajectory the way that a rotation-culture company forced its employees to manage theirs: proactively, with ownership, with discipline. Their own development becomes something they’re actively steering rather than something happening to them.
That second group isn’t less afraid. They’ve just decided fear doesn’t get to be the one making decisions.
Why this requires more than your brain
From a psychological standpoint, most AI-and-leadership conversations are incomplete. Reducing AI disruption to a cognitive problem—solved by learning a new tool or taking a prompt-engineering course—doesn’t just minimize the opportunity. It sets us up for self-sabotage.
Real growth under pressure is rarely about acquiring new information. According to Robert Kegan’s work on adult development, it is about how we make meaning for ourselves. Meaning-making is holistic, embodied, and not purely cognitive.
Whether you’re paying attention to it or not, your nervous system is working overtime under this kind of sustained uncertainty.
Trying to think your way through these moments using only the analytical, logical, “Let’s be objective about this” part of yourself, you’re leaving most of your actual capacity on the table.
Business mastery right now requires integration of self: mind, body, spirit, and emotion, working together rather than cognition laboring alone. “Take a course” is a far easier solution than listening inward. Then, noticing that your body has been in fight-or-flight since your last three all-hands meetings. It means having enough emotional literacy to name what you’re actually afraid of, rather than numbing it with busyness. It means reconnecting, whatever that looks like for you, to a sense of meaning bigger than your job title.
That’s hard, vulnerable, and the whole game.
One thing to try
Rather than a five-step plan, start with an honest inventory. Ask yourself: Where in my life am I still operating by the old rules that no longer apply? Where am I waiting to be rescued, promoted, or picked? What do I want to build myself, instead?
Pick one. Start managing it the way you’d manage a career inside that 18- to 24-month rotation culture: with curiosity, with discipline, and without waiting for permission.
The part I actually believe
This moment is hard. I’m watching real disruption, real job loss, and real grief for people who did everything “right” but still got caught in the shift. That pain is legitimate, and I don’t want to minimize it with a tidy reframe.
And leaders who are deciding to own it instead of endure it are sharper and healthier. They’re more integrated, in the fullest sense of that word, than they were three years ago. AI didn’t ask their permission to disrupt their industry. It is, whether we like it or not, pushing a lot of us toward becoming the people we already knew we should be.
The driver’s seat is still open. We have to participate (and lead) in our rescue.