When your AI writes your development plan, it’s not your growth. It’s a shortcut that skips the most important part of leadership development: the struggle to name your own growth areas. That struggle is the actual growth. Without it, you’re just presenting polished words that don’t belong to you.
Why Writing Your Own Development Areas Matters
The purpose of writing your own development areas isn’t to produce a perfect document. It’s to force a reckoning with uncomfortable feedback. You take a dozen stakeholders’ worth of criticism and wrestle it into first-person sentences you actually own: “I tend to…” or “My pattern is…” The document is just the receipt. If you outsource the writing, you skip the reckoning. And without that reckoning, there’s no real growth.
The Real Cost of Using AI as a Ghostwriter
Consider Nikhil. He used AI to write his entire development plan. The document was clean, confident, and perfect. But when I asked him to explain his first development area, he stumbled. He read from his own paper like it was someone else’s work. He had no ownership. Days later, he was supposed to present that plan to his manager. He barely recognized it as his own.
The problem isn’t the technology. I use AI myself—to summarize interviews, draft notes, and think through problems. But I position AI drafts as food for thought, not as the final answer. The difference is simple: AI should be a helper, not a ghostwriter.
Why a “Crappy” First Draft Is Actually Good
When a client writes their own development areas, the first draft is usually kind of messy. Not in grammar—in ownership. You see deflection, justification, and a little blaming of circumstances. That’s healthy. It’s like the early stages of grief, because that’s exactly what it is. A defensive first draft is diagnostic gold. It shows where you’re explaining away feedback. Working through that together, iteration by iteration, is the real growth.
An AI-polished first draft hides all that evidence. The deflection never makes it onto the page, so you can’t work on it. You lose the chance to grow.
What the Research Says About AI and Cognitive Engagement
Preliminary MIT Media Lab research found that people writing with AI assistance showed the weakest cognitive engagement. Many couldn’t recall what they had just “written.” The researchers called this cognitive debt. A 2025 study of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that the more confidence people had in generative AI, the less critical thinking they applied to its output. These are early studies, but the risk is clear: using AI to write something as important as your development plan can actually make you less aware and less engaged.
One Important Exception
Some brilliant technical leaders work in their second or third language. For them, AI is access, not laziness. I understand the appeal. But even then, the first draft is the worst place to take the help. The first draft is where the growth lives.
How to Use AI Without Losing Your Growth
Here’s a simple sequence that works for my clients:
- Draft ugly first. Write your own words, deflections and all, before AI touches anything.
- Invite AI in as a sharp colleague. Let it tighten a near-final version, play devil’s advocate, and ask what you’re not seeing.
- Finish with the test that caught Nikhil. Put the document away and explain each development area from memory, out loud, as if your manager just asked about it in the hallway.
That last step is the whole game. Polish was never the sin. The version Nikhil eventually brought me was still polished, and he may have used AI along the way. The difference was that he knew exactly what each line meant. At the checkpoint meeting, he walked his manager through each area and took their candid feedback without flinching. A senior colleague told him he was impressed by how little ego he brought to the conversation. The work isn’t finished—and never is—but now it’s truly his.
Your Go-Do This Week
Take one piece of hard feedback you’ve received this year. Write three sentences about it. First person, no AI, no polish. Then read them out loud. That wobble you feel is the homework. Don’t outsource it.
The executives who grow fastest over the next decade won’t be the ones with the best-written development plans. They’ll be the ones who keep doing the work that can’t be delegated: wrestling hard with valuable feedback until it becomes the truth in their own words. The homework was never the document.
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