70% of Leaders Are Making Their Companies Worse. | Dr. Kelly Monahan | Ep. 222

AI is moving fast. Leaders are not. That was the subject line in the email that landed in my inbox from today’s guest — and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
In Episode 222 of the Localization Fireside Chat, I sat down with Dr. Kelly Monahan, co-author of the national bestseller Essential (Wiley, 2025), founder of Beyond the Desk, and one of the most serious researchers working on the intersection of leadership, behavioral economics, and the future of work. She has done this work at Deloitte, Accenture, Meta, and Upwork — and what she’s seeing right now should concern every leader in every industry, including ours.
The number that stopped me cold: 70% of leaders today say they are leaving their organizations worse than when they took over. Kelly has the data to back that up. And rather than blaming the people, she points directly at the systems — and at the leaders who built them.
The Kodak Story That Started Everything
Kelly grew up in Rochester, New York. Those who know Rochester know the name Kodak. During her middle school years, she watched her class sizes shrink as Kodak quietly laid off 45,000 workers over a decade. What struck her later, as a researcher, was this: Kodak invented the digital camera. The technical capability was there. What wasn’t there was the culture and the leadership to act on it. That insight has shaped everything she has studied since.
Her first job out of college placed her in an HR role where her very first assignment was a reduction in workforce. Robotic process automation — what she calls “baby AI” — had made 200 employees at a financial services company redundant. She was 22 years old. The question that followed her out of that room has never left: how do we make sure people stay relevant when technology shifts the ground beneath them?
The Leadership Gap Is Not About Technology
One of the most important things Kelly said in our conversation is that the problem with AI adoption is not technological. It is leadership. Organizations are spending tens of millions of dollars on AI deployments with no clear ROI. Behind closed doors, board members are asking each other what they are actually doing differently. The answer, in too many cases, is not much.
Kelly’s framing is precise: AI is the elevator of our time. When Otis invented the elevator in the 1880s, engineers did not celebrate being able to move faster from floor one to floor five. They used the elevator to reimagine cities and build skyscrapers. That is the skyscraper moment organizations are standing in right now. Most leaders, under pressure from investors and boards, are using AI to move floor one to floor five with fewer people. That is not what this moment is about.
The Seatbelt Study Every Manager Should Know
Kelly’s background in behavioral economics surfaces in some of the most practically useful parts of this conversation. She walked us through a real study where researchers tried to get people to wear seatbelts. One group was paid every time they buckled up. Another group was appealed to on the basis of safety — this is good for your family, this is the right thing to do. The result? The people who believed it was the right thing to do kept wearing seatbelts long after the study ended. The people who were paid stopped the moment the payment stopped.
Most HR incentive systems, she argues, are elaborate seatbelt programs. They generate short-term compliance and call it culture. The 90% of employees who actually want to do the right thing, and want to be trusted to do it, are being managed like the 10% who don’t. That mistrust is expensive. Great Place to Work research she cited shows that high-trust organizations generate 8.2 times more revenue per employee.
What the Localization Industry Needs to Hear
This is where our conversation got particularly relevant for this audience. When Kelly was at Upwork leading the Research Institute, translation and localization was one of the most disrupted freelance categories in their data. Investors told her the category was finished. AI would eat it entirely.
Then something unexpected happened. After an initial downward slope in demand for human translators, Upwork’s longitudinal data showed a rebound about two years later. The work that came back was more complex, more nuanced, and better paid. The transactional, lower-complexity translation work had migrated to AI. The work requiring cultural judgment, domain expertise, and the ability to catch what machines get wrong came back to humans — and paid more.
Her point for freelancers and LSP leaders alike: the race is not to resist AI. The race is to move up the value chain before someone else does. Those using AI to handle the lower-value work and applying their domain expertise to the higher-value work are winning. Those waiting for the market to stabilize on its own are not.
The One Thing She Wants Leaders to Do Tomorrow
I closed by asking Kelly what she would tell a leader running a 50-person LSP — managing remote translators and project managers across multiple time zones — if they could only change one thing starting tomorrow. Her answer was immediate: cultivate curiosity. Get curious about what AI can and cannot do. Get curious about how to move your people up the value chain. Get curious about what motivates the different parts of your workforce.
Curiosity, she said, is the number one leadership skill for this moment. Not because it sounds good on a framework slide, but because it releases dopamine. It turns a defensive posture into an engaged one. And in a world where 70% of leaders are already feeling like they are losing ground, shifting from defensive to curious might be the most important move available.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lOE-3CGzzJc | Listen on Simplecast: https://localization-fireside-chat.simplecast.com/episodes/70-of-leaders-are-making-their-companies-worse-dr-kelly-monahan-ep-222 | Connect with Dr. Kelly Monahan: https://drkellymonahan.com | LinkedIn (LFC): https://www.linkedin.com/company/localization-fireside-chat | Blog: https://robinayoub.blog | N49 Networks: https://n49networks.com | Book a conversation: https://calendly.com/robin-ayoub/localization-fireside-chat-podcast-recording