Situational Leadership for AI: More Like a Capable Colleague than a Fancy Formula Treating LLMs like vending machines guarantees mediocre results—try situational leadership for better results You wouldn’t hand a new hire a laptop, point vaguely at the codebase, and say “make it better.” You wouldn’t expect a brilliant data scientist to magically produce great marketing copy. You wouldn’t give the same instructions to a seasoned architect and a junior developer and expect identical results. And yet—this is exactly how many (most?) organizations interact with large language models. The executives who’ve spent decades learning to match tasks to talent, provide appropriate context, and adapt their leadership style to individual strengths suddenly forget everything when the “employee” runs on GPUs instead of caffeine. They pump generic prompts into their LLMs like quarters into a vending machine, then complain when the results disappoint.…