# #179 | My Team Uses AI to Do the Work. How Do I Know If They're Actually Good at Their Job? Page: 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 Text version: 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 Podcast: [Leman Tech Leadership Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/leman-tech-leadership-podcast-7045357) Published: 2026-07-21T03:30:02+00:00 Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/179-my-team-uses-ai-to-do-the-work-how-do-i-know-if-they-re-actually-good-at-their-job--73042737 Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73042737/179_my_team_uses_ai_to_do_the_work_how_do_i_know_if_they_re_actually_good_at_their_job.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: 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 Duration seconds: 1136 ## Resource ▶︎ #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… ## Actions - request_transcript: `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. - read_markdown: `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. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.