You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace – whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
Brain Drain
A new MIT study drops a cognitive bombshell: ChatGPT isn’t just doing your thinking, it’s training your brain to stop thinking altogether. Researchers used EEG scans to peek inside the heads of essay writers and found something unsettling. Students who repeatedly leaned on LLMs showed measurably weaker neural connectivity, couldn’t remember what they’d just “written,” and felt like strangers to their own work. When they tried to write without AI later, their brains stayed stuck in low gear. Meanwhile, old-school search engine users kept their cognitive muscles flexed and could actually quote their own sentences. The study reveals we’re trading short-term convenience for long-term brain fog. For leaders managing teams increasingly tempted by AI shortcuts, this isn’t just about encouraging real writing – it’s about preserving the critical thinking that drives innovation, strategy, and authentic problem-solving. When we delegate what should be humanly considered, we undermine our capacity to do it ourselves.
— Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, 4m, #cognition, #leadership, #ai
Management Repair
Here’s a truth bomb that’ll hit every team leader right in the gut: you’re going to screw up. Badly. You’ll crush someone’s confidence with poorly-delivered feedback, commit to impossible deadlines without consulting your team, or lose your temper when you should’ve stayed composed. The real separator between managers who build trust and those who destroy it isn’t perfection – it’s what happens after the mess. Drawing from Dr. Becky Kennedy’s parenting wisdom, this piece reveals that management’s most crucial skill isn’t avoiding mistakes, it’s repair. When you inevitably put your team through hell with a hasty commitment or misguided decision, the difference between losing your best people and building deeper trust comes down to four words: “I messed up completely.” Repair isn’t just saying sorry and moving on. It’s being brutally specific about what you did wrong, focusing on the impact rather than your excuses, actually changing the behavior, and giving trust time to rebuild. Because when you know you can fix things when they go sideways, you stop being paralyzed by perfectionism and start taking the reasonable risks that great management requires.
— Terrible Software, 4m, #leadership, #management, #trust
Stretched Thin
Your boss doesn’t have time for you anymore – and that’s by design. Corporate America has tripled the employee-to-manager ratio since 2017, going from one boss per five workers to one per fifteen, with some companies pushing even further. Google axed 35% of its small-team managers, Amazon wants bigger ratios, and Axon cut its management ranks from 1,250 to 700. The result is a workplace where career coaching happens on Friday “office hours,” one-on-ones get pushed to monthly, and managers wake up at 4:30 AM drowning in inadequacy. Some bosses now oversee 36 people while admitting they don’t even know if their reports are married. Companies call it “delayering” and praise the speed and autonomy it creates, but managers are burning out trying to Tetris their calendars around basic check-ins. The new reality: only self-starters thrive, personal relationships are optional, and if you want mentoring, find a senior peer. It’s the ultimate test of whether flat organizations create efficiency or just spread the chaos thinner.
— The Wall Street Journal 🎁, 10m, #management, #leadership, #workplace
AI Job Audition
The hiring game has shifted. Tech GTM job posts requiring AI skills exploded from 65 in July 2023 to nearly 1,000 in July 2025, and now even Meta lets candidates use AI during coding tests. But being “AI fluent” isn’t about memorizing prompts – it’s about proving you can actually build stuff that works. Kyle Poyar surveyed leaders from Clay, Zapier, Wiz, and Vercel to crack the code on what hiring managers actually want. The secret sauce? A six-step “FLUENT” framework that separates the AI tourists from the AI natives. Smart companies now categorize candidates from “unacceptable” (AI-resistant) to “transformative” (using AI to rethink entire strategies). The best interview question isn’t about tools – it’s “Tell me about a time you helped someone else use AI” because it reveals the collaboration mindset that actually moves teams forward. Translation: your next promotion depends less on knowing which AI to use and more on knowing how to make others better with it.
— Growth Unhinged, 8m, #hiring, #ai, #leadership
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
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Learn more at runsteady.com.
