How Bad Leaders Turn Brilliant People Into Useful Idiots

The most dangerous leaders are not those who fail to attract talented people or successfully establish and scale businesses.

They are those who attract exceptional people, extract everything valuable from them, and then convince them that their depletion is simply failure or inadequacy. These kind of leaders seek to extract, rather than empower their teams.

Most industry's are rife with these kinds of 'leaders'; as you read this, you may be recalling one or a few that you've met throughout your career. And this technological supercycle is amplifying the very worst of them.

In my recent reflections on leadership, I started pondering on the idea that AI is seemingly accelerating far more than productivity. In the wrong hands, it is also accelerating the extraction of human talent, judgement and agency.

Two days ago, I wrote about the leaders we will need over the coming decade. Not just in the workforce, but even beyond.

That same day, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and issued a warning that reached more than 150 million people globally: those building advanced AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

His warning concerns existential risk, but it also forces a deeper moral question: what kind of leadership continues developing a technology its own creators believe could destroy us; and then encourages society to surrender more of its judgement to that exact technology?

This is no longer only a technical challenge or puzzle to be solved. It is a test of conscience and humanity.

And many leaders are failing the test.

The systems shaping humanity’s future should not be governed by capability, competition or profit alone.

I believe fervently that we require heart-centred leaders with the courage to ask not only what can be built, but what should be built, who it serves and what must never be sacrificed in its pursuit.

The New Useful Idiot

“Useful idiot” is a term that emerged in Cold War discourse to describe someone who unknowingly advanced another person's or entity's agenda.

If (like me) you were hooked on the T.V show Homeland, you will recall the episode where Carrie realises she was manipulated and labelled a useful idiot by the CIA for advancing a covert Russian propaganda campaign to undermine the U.S President and sow civilian discourse. Her intentions were pure, we know Carrie to be a ruthlessly patriotic character, to a fault, but she was nonetheless manipulated and inadvertently served someone else's agenda.

The modern day workplace now risks producing a modern equivalent.

I see AI squarely at the helm, because it not only serves as a force multiplier for skilled workers or teams, it can equally multiply poor judgement, unethical leadership and the systematic erosion of human agency.

AI can summarise your reports, write your strategies, interpret your data and recommend the decisions for you. Used intelligently, this expands human capability.

Used passively, it makes intellectual engagement frictionless. It removes the human element of work processes and operations.

People stop interrogating the output when they use AI daily, leaders stop explaining their reasoning, and entire teams become efficient executors of decisions that nobody has truly examined or truly owns.

Poor leaders can capitalise on this. This kind of technology allows leaders to centralise judgement while distributing execution, automate scrutiny entirely out of operational processes and reward compliance as adaptability.

The result? Well, an army of capable, brilliant people made highly useful, but gradually stripped of context, confidence and agency.

We're at a serious inflection point, we must course-correct.

Super Intelligence Still Needs Humanity

In her executive letter for Future Today Strategy Group’s 2025 Tech Trends Report, futurist Amy Webb describes the convergence of AI, advanced sensors and biotechnology as “living intelligence”: meaning systems that sense, learn, adapt and evolve.

She stated we're in a technological supercycle.

She warns that organisations unable to process this rapid technological acceleration will face profound disorientation in the years to come, with the gap between leaders and laggards widening over mere months... rather than decades.

This assessment aligns perfectly with what Jacob Coxon warned about in his resignation post from Anthropic.

The temptation right now for leaders is to respond to this technological supercycle by shortening every surface and horizon in their business: automate now, reduce headcount now, survive the quarter.

Webb argues the opposite. Organisations must continue long-term planning because perpetual short thinking guarantees that they will continue to be left behind.

This is the moment to cultivate high agency in our teams and workplaces. Reading Amy's insights, I believe we can learn what high agency teams look like in the future, here are some ideas:

• Automate workloads without discarding human capability. Use AI/technology to remove friction and amplify expertise or output, not as a reflexive substitute for talent but as a force multiplier. Assign ownership to skilled team members, task them with creative agency over their workload; stay engaged as a leader with your teams.

• Operationalise your ethics. “Technology for good” means little without an ethics framework translated into ownership, safeguards, review processes and contingency planning. Operationalise your values. Review your governance processes. Create the guardrails now.

• Protect the long view. Leaders must still champion three- and five-year planning cycles, even when technological change makes next month feel unpredictable and unknowable. Resist the FOMO, and lead with the future in mind. Reduce vaporware, reduce AI slop, commit to quality over quantity in everything.

The More Powerful Technology Becomes, the More Human Our Leadership Must Be

So how do bad leaders turn brilliant people into useful idiots?

Certainly not by making them any less intelligent or brilliant or worthy of respect and dignity.

They do it by withholding context, punishing dissent, manufacturing constant urgency and rewarding execution without examination or ownership.

Over time, highly capable people learn that questioning the system they operate within is more dangerous than serving it. They retain their talent but surrender their judgement; and their usefulness to their leader begins to replace their agency.

The antidote here, I believe, is not rejecting technology or resisting change.

It is building workplaces where technology strengthens human judgement, ethics viciously govern execution, and people are trusted and empowered to think.

The defining question of this era is not simply what AI will become, but what leaders will encourage people to become alongside it: independent minds capable of shaping the future, or brilliant people trained only to advance somebody else’s agenda?

The choice is yours; and ours.