Sharpen how you lead, and your agents get sharper too.
AI agents are becoming part of the team. They write first drafts, pull together information, answer routine questions from clients, and take care of tasks that used to fill much of someone’s week. Like any new team member, an agent does its best work when someone explains what the work is for, shows it what good looks like, and gives it useful feedback. Everything an agent knows about your business, your clients, and your standards comes from the people who guide it.
That makes coaching agents a leadership skill, built on the same habits that make someone good at developing people. It also works in both directions. The more clearly you lead, the better your agents perform for you and your team, and the more you work with your agents, the more clearly you learn to lead. A person who gets a vague request will often fill in the gaps by asking a colleague or remembering what you wanted last time. An agent fills them with its best guess, so any gap in your instructions shows up quickly in its work. That gives rising leaders a fast, honest way to see how clear they are.
Explain the Work the Way You Would to a New Hire
When someone joins your team, you tell them who the work is for, what it needs to achieve, what to watch out for, where to find what they need, and when to check with you first. An agent starts in much the same place. It is capable from day one and knows nothing about your organization until someone tells it.
I learned this with an AI agent I work with every week on my own content. I assumed it would use our design software the way I do, so I never explained how I needed to see its work. Its edits were made, but they did not appear when I opened the designs, because I had never asked it to save them for my review or to send me a direct link to each one. Once I added both to my instructions, reviewing its work became quick and easy.
Give your agents the same welcome you give a new hire: what the work is for, who will use it, what matters most, what to avoid, what to rely on, and which questions should come to a person. Once written, that brief helps with every task that follows. For a plain-English explanation of what agents are and how they fit alongside other kinds of AI, see The Five Types of AI Behind Growth Engines.
“The more clearly you lead, the better your agents perform for you and your team.”
Write Down What Good Looks Like
Much of what makes a team’s work good has never been written down. Your strongest people learned it over years: which details a client always checks, which numbers senior leaders look at first, what tone works with a skeptical buyer. People pick up those standards from each other. An agent can only follow them once someone puts them into words.
Picture a sales leader who asks an agent to write the weekly summary of how each region is doing against its target. The summaries are accurate and complete, and the one region that needs a decision this week is buried near the end. Her most experienced people never needed to be told to start with that region. Once she writes the standard down, the summaries improve right away, and every new person who joins the team has the same standard to work from. The effort of describing it also makes her a better judge of all the work her team produces.
Give the Reason Along With the Request
A request without a reason works until the first situation it did not plan for. Ask an agent to keep client emails short and it will, even when a client asks a detailed question that deserves a full answer. Explain that senior clients read on their phones between meetings and want to know right away what you need from them, and the agent can write a short note or a longer answer, because it understands what the request was meant to achieve.
Good mentors explain their thinking for the same reason. People who know why a standard exists use good judgment when something unusual comes up, and agents do too. Sharing the reason means fewer corrections, and better calls from your team when you are not in the room.
Learn How Your Agents Work
Over time, you get to know the people on your team: what each person does well, where they need support, and how to ask for something so it comes back the way you hoped. Getting to know your agents is part of the same kind of working relationship. You learn which requests they handle well, where their work tends to drift, and how much detail a task needs.
My own work with agents has followed this path. Most of what I build with an agent goes through several rounds of sharpening before the result is right. Each round shows me what helped the agent do better, so the next task starts further ahead and we take larger steps together. I now make it a priority to learn from my agents as much as I teach them, because that is how we get things done better as a team.
Fix the Instructions When the Work Falls Short
Every mentor learns that quietly redoing someone’s work teaches them very little. The piece gets better, and the next one comes back with the same problem. Agents follow the same pattern. When an agent’s work misses, fixing the result yourself leaves the cause in place for the next task.
The more useful step is to ask what in your instructions allowed the miss. Usually it is a standard nobody wrote down, two priorities with no guidance on which comes first, or an example that pointed the wrong way. Fix that, and every task that follows improves. When a person needs to step in less often, your guidance is getting sharper, and you have a clear way to show senior leaders that the team’s work is improving.
Agree on One Standard Across Your Team
When several people guide the same agent, its work reflects all of them. If one manager wants every risk listed in a client report and another wants only the risks that need a decision, the agent’s reports will swing between the two, and clients may notice before anyone inside does.
That difference was there before the agent arrived. People simply adjusted to whichever manager they were working with that week. An agent cannot do that, so the difference shows up in the work. Use it as a reason to agree on the standard once, write it down, and apply it to people and agents alike. The whole team’s work becomes more consistent as a result.
Build a Team Where People and Agents Sharpen Each Other
The teams getting the most from AI work as one team. People set the direction, make the judgment calls, and own the relationships with clients. Agents take on more of the preparation and follow-through, work alongside each other, and give people more time for the work that needs them. Clearer guidance from people produces stronger work from agents, and that work shows people where their own thinking needs to be sharper. This is what a modern growth team looks like in organizations of every size.
The responsibility stays with you. An agent can prepare the recommendation, and you remain the person who answers for it with clients, senior leaders, and your team. Deciding what the work is for, which trade-offs are acceptable, and when something accurate is still wrong for the moment are calls that belong to people.
Look at Your Own Guidance First
Coaching agents and developing people rely on the same skill: explaining the work clearly, sharing the reason behind it, and helping it improve through useful feedback. As more of a team’s work involves agents, senior leaders are likely to see a rising leader’s clarity in the quality of that work and how quickly it gets better. The sharper you are as a leader, the sharper your agents will be in supporting you and your team.
The next time an agent’s work falls short, look first at the guidance it was given.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
