You are panicking about the wrong thing: trust is not a prompt
By Eylem Samland, FIERA Leadership. Published 2026-08-10.
When I got my first management role, I was the youngest person on the team by a decade. Some of the people I was suddenly leading had been at the company longer than I had been out of university. Nobody said any of this out loud. They did not need to. You could feel it in the first meeting: the way people looked at each other before they looked at me, the half-second delay before someone answered a question I had asked.
I had the title. The title meant nothing. I read every management book I could find, made frameworks, built agendas. None of it moved the needle.
What actually moved it
Over about six months, something so simple it embarrasses me to name it. I stopped trying to prove I deserved to be there. I started asking people about their work, the messy version, the "help me understand what you are really dealing with" version. When I did not know something, I said so, went and figured it out, and came back.
Somewhere in there the temperature shifted. My team started bringing me problems instead of watching me struggle from a distance. They had not decided I deserved the role. They had decided I could be trusted with them.
Where AI genuinely wins
- Synthesis across large amounts of material.
- First drafts of documents nobody enjoys writing.
- Remembering what was said across the last twelve meetings.
If your work is compiling, summarising or generating content, AI is coming for a real part of it. Honestly, most of those are tasks you should be losing: the reports nobody reads, the updates nobody remembers, the synthesis you could have delegated years ago.
Where it stops
Trust is not information. It is a track record, built from repeated exposure to how you behave when there is nothing in it for you.
AI cannot walk into a room where people have decided they do not trust you and change their minds. It cannot sit in silence with someone who is grieving and know when to speak. It cannot be the specific person someone chooses to bring their real problem to.
What to defend
- The ability to walk into a room and change its temperature.
- The ability to give difficult feedback that makes someone better instead of smaller.
- The ability to hold your ground in a hard board meeting without becoming the person your team cannot approach afterwards.
- The ability to build trust with the specific human in front of you, over months, with nothing in it for you except the relationship.
That is what you were hired for. It just did not look like it, because for twenty years the visible work was the cognitive tasks. AI is quietly telling you which of your skills were the important ones all along.
The skills AI cannot copy are the ones worth deliberate practice. That is the work I do with leaders 1:1. See executive coaching