Your team's resistance to AI is an identity problem

You think your team's resistance to AI is about job security.

It's not. It's about identity.

When I was 6, my teacher asked us to draw what we wanted to be.

That simple exercise reveals the core leadership problem with AI today.

I remember the other kids drawing firefighters, doctors, and pilots. We were taught early on to fuse our identity with a professional function.

This fusion of work and identity has deep roots. In 1522, Martin Luther's German Bible translation reframed everyday labor as a divine "calling." For the first time, your job wasn't just what you did - it was part of who you were meant to be.

You can see how deep this runs today. Visit a German graveyard, and you'll find "Dr." or "Prof." carved into the headstones, defining people even in death by an honorable profession.

So when your people resist AI, it's not just because they fear losing their jobs.

They fear losing themselves.

The key question that most people have but don't say out loud is this. "If a machine does what I do, but better... who am I?"

Moving from being an expert to mainly becoming an overseer of a machine feels like a demotion. It's an erosion of meaning.

And honestly, I don't have a simple answer for this.

It is a human evolution we are just beginning to navigate. The first step is to respect the depth of the challenge.