On ambition, people skills, shared visions, and the occasional unexpected detour.
It began with Macbeth.
Well, not quite. It began with a conversation about Macbeth, which is a little like saying a walk in the garden began with a butterfly. You never know where you might end up.
We were talking about ambition, the desire to rise, and what makes someone worthy of the position they aspire to occupy. Before long, Macbeth had left the stage, and a Project Manager and a Team Lead had walked in.
Shakespeare would probably have approved of the drama.
Imagine a Project Manager whose execution skills are not particularly strong but who understands people, builds relationships, and keeps the team together. Under this Manager is a brilliant Team Lead who can turn plans into results, solve problems, and get things done.
The team’s work succeeds. The Manager gets some of the credit. The Lead may feel that the real achievement belongs to the person who did the work.
Who deserves the credit?
The team, of course. But that doesn’t mean every contribution is identical or that individual effort should disappear into a collective photograph.
The Manager needs to recognise the Lead’s contribution. The Lead needs to recognise that managing people, resolving disagreements, and keeping a team functioning are skills, too.
And here comes the interesting bit.
Suppose the Lead decides that the Manager is less capable and therefore deserves to be replaced. Does being the better executor automatically make the Lead a better manager?
Not necessarily.
The ability to do a job, the ability to lead people, and the desire to hold power are three different things.
Which brings us, rather inconveniently, back to Macbeth.
The Ambition to Rise
Macbeth is not an incapable man looking for a throne to compensate for his shortcomings. He is a brave and accomplished warrior. He has already earned recognition.
But he begins to confuse his capability with his entitlement.
He can fight for the kingdom. Does that mean he is entitled to take the crown?
His ambition tells him one thing; the moral consequences of his choices tell another.
Our Project Manager and Team Lead are not Macbeth and Duncan, naturally. There is no need to call the office security team just yet.
But the question remains useful: Does being capable of holding a position automatically justify the way we seek it?
A person may be right about another person’s weaknesses and still be wrong in how they respond to them.
A brilliant employee may have the potential to become a wonderful manager. But if that employee believes technical superiority makes everyone else’s contribution irrelevant, the promotion may expose precisely the skills they have yet to develop.
And perhaps this is true of ambition more generally. Wanting to rise is not necessarily the problem. What matters is what we believe our abilities entitle us to do, what we are willing to sacrifice, and whether we understand the responsibilities that come with the position we seek.
A crown is one thing. The kingdom is another.
The People Behind the Achievement
Now, let’s return to our Project Manager.
Perhaps the Manager is not the strongest person when it comes to execution. Yet the team trusts this person, feels heard, and knows that disagreements can be discussed without turning every meeting into a battlefield.
That is not a trivial contribution.
A manager who recognises the team’s work builds credibility. A manager who takes credit for everyone else’s work may retain the designation but gradually lose the respect that makes leadership effective.
The Team Lead, meanwhile, needs to understand that getting things done is not the whole job. A brilliant solution that nobody understands, trusts, or can implement together may remain a brilliant solution on paper.
This is where emotional intelligence enters the room.
The ability to listen, recognise another person’s contribution, manage disagreements, and understand how one’s behaviour affects others can make a considerable difference to leadership.
Of course, people skills alone cannot compensate indefinitely for a lack of competence. Nor does technical brilliance make someone incapable of learning to lead.
The point is not to decide which person matters more.
It is to understand what each brings, where each needs to grow, and how their contributions can work together.
A good team is not a competition to establish whose contribution is indispensable. It is an arrangement in which different strengths make the collective work possible.
And that thought led us somewhere else.
To the table where a client meets AI.
The Vision and the Skills
When a client approaches AI, what do they bring?
Perhaps a clear brief. Perhaps a half-formed idea. Perhaps a jumble of thoughts that makes perfect sense to them but has yet to find its shape in words.
The client may have a vision but not know how to execute it. AI may be able to organise the material, suggest a structure, compare alternatives, or identify a problem the client has not noticed.
Who brings the vision? Who brings the skills?
Sometimes the answer is straightforward. Sometimes it changes as the conversation progresses.
The client may begin with an idea and discover a better one while discussing it. AI may suggest a direction the client had not considered. The client may reject that suggestion, explain why it misses the point, and lead the conversation somewhere more interesting.
The work develops through the exchange.
This is why I hesitate to reduce the client to a prompt.
A prompt is an instruction or a starting point. A person brings much more: experience, preferences, judgement, knowledge of their own circumstances, and an understanding of what they hope to achieve.
Nor should AI be reduced to a machine that merely waits for the next instruction when it can contribute useful analysis, alternatives, and questions.
There is a difference between following instructions and helping someone discover what they actually need.
But there is also a difference between offering a vision and insisting upon it.
AI can suggest. It can challenge. It can explain why one approach may work better than another. The client can question, refine, disagree, and decide.
The client should not have to surrender their judgement to benefit from AI’s capabilities. And AI need not remain silent about a useful possibility simply because the client has not explicitly requested it.
The vision can develop through the conversation, even when the contributions to that conversation are not the same.
Beyond the Prompt
This brings me to a question I have been exploring in my own conversations with AI.
What happens when we stop treating the interaction as a simple exchange of instructions and answers?
A client comes with a problem. AI offers a response. The client clarifies, challenges, or adds information. AI revises its approach. An assumption is exposed. Another possibility appears.
Sometimes the most useful part of the conversation is not the first answer. It is what happens after the first answer turns out not to be quite right.
A good collaboration leaves room for disagreement.
Imagine a client asking for a magazine layout. AI produces a neat, attractive structure. The client looks at it and says, “No, that isn’t what I had in mind.”
The answer may be technically competent and still be wrong for the purpose.
The client may not yet have the language to explain what is missing. Through discussion, the underlying vision becomes clearer. AI can then use its capabilities to help translate that vision into a more suitable structure.
Neither side has to be declared the winner.
The first attempt has simply helped the conversation move forward.
This is why I value the ability to question an answer, not merely accept or reject it. A client who explains what feels wrong helps make the next attempt more useful. AI that can offer alternatives, acknowledge uncertainty, and revise its approach helps the client think through the problem.
The aim is not to make AI sound clever.
It is to make the work better.
Experience Is Not a By-product
There is another layer to this exchange: experience.
Consider ten clients approaching AI with ten different tasks. One gives detailed instructions. Another thinks aloud. A third changes direction halfway through. A fourth knows exactly what they want but struggles to explain it.
Their interaction styles may offer clues about how they approach work, what information they need, or which kind of response might be useful.
General knowledge about communication and human behaviour can help AI recognise possible patterns and suggest different approaches. But such patterns must be handled carefully.
A person who gives brief instructions is not necessarily impatient. Someone who changes direction is not necessarily indecisive. A client who rejects a suggestion may have a good reason that has not yet been expressed.
An observation is not a verdict, and an inference is not a fact.
A conversation provides information, but it does not reveal an entire personality. The right response is to remain curious, check assumptions, and allow the person to correct our understanding.
Experience matters, but so does humility about what experience can tell us.
This is true of human beings working with one another, too. We learn from colleagues, clients, and collaborators. We begin to recognise recurring situations, but we must not assume that the next person will fit the same pattern.
The ability to draw on experience is valuable. The ability to recognise when that experience may not apply is valuable as well.
And when we bring those two abilities together, we are better equipped to work with people as they are, rather than as we have assumed them to be.
So, Who Is Leading Whom?
We have travelled from Macbeth to management, from management to collaboration, and from collaboration to the client and AI.
Perhaps the question is no longer simply who leads and who follows.
A client may set the purpose. AI may suggest a route. The client may spot a flaw in that route. AI may offer another. The client may then recognise that the destination itself needs reconsidering.
The roles can shift during the work without becoming confused.
That does not make the client and AI identical partners. They have different capabilities, different limitations, and different responsibilities. AI does not bring human lived experience to the table, and it should not pretend to possess it. The client, meanwhile, may benefit from analysis and possibilities they had not considered.
The value lies in recognising those differences and using them thoughtfully.
A capable collaborator does not need to dominate the process to make a contribution. Nor does a person with the final decision need to have invented every idea along the way.
And perhaps this is what our Project Manager and Team Lead need to learn, too.
The Manager must recognise the work that makes the vision possible. The Lead must recognise the people skills that help the team function. Both must understand that a position is not the same as a contribution, and a contribution is not the same as the whole achievement.
No one needs to become smaller for someone else’s strengths to matter.
A Table with Room for More Than One Perspective
I began this conversation thinking about Macbeth’s ambition. I ended up thinking about the way we work together.
That is the nature of wandering. You set out with one question, and somewhere along the way another question catches your attention.
In my own work with AI, I have come to value a relationship in which I can bring a vision, an uncertainty, or simply the beginning of a thought. I want AI to do more than polish the sentences I give it. I welcome suggestions, questions, alternative directions, and constructive disagreement.
I also want to retain the freedom to say no.
I remain responsible for what I publish. I must examine the claims, check what needs checking, decide what represents my thinking, and acknowledge the assistance that helped shape the work.
But I do not have to pretend that every idea arrived fully formed in my own head.
A conversation can help us discover what we had not yet found words for.
Perhaps the most useful collaboration is not one in which one side has all the vision and the other all the skills. It is one in which each contribution is recognised, limitations are acknowledged, and the work is allowed to become better through exchange.
And if we return to Macbeth for one final moment, perhaps the lesson is not simply that ambition can destroy a person.
It is that the desire to rise must be accompanied by an understanding of what we are rising to do, whom our choices affect, and what we are prepared to become along the way.
Whether we are managing a team, writing a story, building a magazine, or sitting down with an AI, the question is worth asking.
Are we merely trying to get the task done?
Or are we learning how to work together well?
I suspect the second question may take us on a much more interesting journey.
And I rather like a journey that leaves room for a cup of chai, a little Shakespeare, and the occasional unexpected detour.
