Episode
#179 | My Team Uses AI to Do the Work. How Do I Know If They're Actually Good at Their Job?
- Published
- Jul 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1136
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/episodes/179-my-team-uses-ai-to-do-the-work-how-do-i-know-if-they-re-actually-good-at-their-job/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357/179-my-team-uses-ai-to-do-the-work-how-do-i-know-if-they-re-actually-good-at-their-job.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
▶︎ #179 | My Team Uses AI to Do the Work. How Do I Know If They're Actually Good at Their Job? In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska unpacks a question that's been sitting with her since a mentoring conversation a few weeks ago: if a piece of work looks correct, clean, and well structured, how do you actually know whether the person who produced it understands it? The spark was a real story: a leader approved a pull request from one of her strongest engineers. It broke in production. When she walked through it with him afterward, he couldn't explain, ninety seconds in, why the code did what it did (not because he was hiding anything, but because he genuinely didn't know). Alex is direct that this episode isn't "AI is bad" or a case for banning tools. It's something narrower and more urgent: leaders have lost their old visual signal for competence, and most haven't built a new one yet. She reframes the anxiety many leaders feel as a Contracting gap (almost no team has explicitly agreed on what ownership means when a tool did part of the work) and brings in the PCM layer: asking people to "explain their reasoning" lands very differently depending on personality base, and can read as an accusation if it isn't introduced as a team-wide standard set in advance. If you've caught yourself wondering whether your team's output still tells you what it used to, this episode gives you four concrete moves to start rebuilding that signal this week. Mentioned in the episode: "From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For": https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/ ✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎ LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska X: @lemanskills Startup…