How to Assess Your AI Leadership Readiness in 5 Minutes

Every week, leaders ask Joel Salinas some version of the same question: "Am I ready for AI?" They have read the headlines, sat through the vendor pitches, and watched their competitors announce new AI initiatives. What they have not done is pause and honestly assess where they stand as a leader before making a single investment.

That skip is costly. Not because self-assessment is some philosophical exercise, but because the leaders who jump straight to tool selection routinely pick the wrong tools for the wrong problems. They invest in AI that their teams cannot use, automate work that did not need automating, and then wonder why the results do not match the promise.

The good news: a meaningful self-assessment does not take a consultant or a lengthy survey. It takes three honest questions — one for each dimension of the AI Leadership Triad.

Why Leaders Skip Self-Assessment (And Why That Is a Problem)

The pressure to act on AI is real. Boards want AI strategies. Employees are already using tools without formal guidance. Competitors are making announcements. In that environment, pausing to assess your own readiness can feel like a luxury you do not have time for.

But here is what Joel Salinas has observed consistently across leadership coaching engagements: the leaders who struggle most with AI adoption are not the ones who lack intelligence or resources. They are the ones who underestimated how much their own leadership posture would determine success or failure. They treated AI readiness as a technology question when it is fundamentally a leadership question.

Research from Rand Corporation found that roughly 80% of AI projects fail to deliver meaningful ROI — and the most common cause is not bad technology but bad strategy. The gap between "we have AI tools" and "we are an AI-capable organization" is almost always a leadership gap, not a technology gap.

The AI Leadership Triad — built around Adaptability, Innovation, and Creativity — gives you a framework for assessing exactly that leadership posture. Here is how to use it as a rapid diagnostic.

Question One: Adaptability

When you last heard about a major AI advancement — a new model release, a capability breakthrough, a competitor adoption story — did you feel energized or threatened?

Be honest. Not the answer you would give in a board meeting. The actual feeling.

Leaders who feel primarily energized by AI news share a common trait: they have mentally decoupled their identity from the specific methods they currently use. They know their value comes from their judgment, their relationships, and their understanding of the mission — not from the particular processes they have mastered. When a new tool or capability arrives, their first instinct is curiosity: "What does this open up?"

Leaders who feel primarily threatened have usually tied their confidence to mastery of the current way of working. AI news triggers a status threat. Their first instinct is skepticism or deflection: "That won't work in our industry" or "We'll wait until it matures."

Neither response is shameful. But they point toward very different development needs. If you feel threatened, the work is not learning more AI tools. It is building the psychological flexibility to tolerate ambiguity and rapid change. That is a leadership development challenge, and it is the right one to tackle first.

Strong score: You feel genuinely curious and energized. You are asking "how might this change what we do?" rather than "how do I avoid being disrupted?"

Weak score: AI news primarily triggers anxiety, skepticism, or a desire to wait. This is your development area.

Question Two: Innovation

Name three things your organization does today that could be done better with AI. Can you explain the specific business outcome of each improvement in one sentence?

This question separates leaders who understand AI in the abstract from leaders who are ready to apply it strategically. Anyone can say "AI could help us be more efficient." Very few leaders can say "AI could reduce the time our grant writers spend on first drafts from four hours to forty minutes, which would let us apply to twice as many opportunities each quarter."

The discipline of connecting an AI application to a specific, measurable outcome is the foundation of effective AI innovation. Without it, AI initiatives tend to drift into expensive experimentation with no clear definition of success. With it, your team knows what they are building toward and can evaluate whether it is working.

If you struggled to name three use cases, or if your use cases stayed vague ("AI could improve our communications"), that is actionable information. You need to spend time closer to your organization's actual workflows before you can lead AI innovation effectively. The solution is not more AI research — it is more conversations with the people doing the day-to-day work.

Strong score: You named three specific use cases with clear outcome statements and you had more ideas after the first three.

Weak score: You struggled to get to three, or your outcomes stayed abstract. Spend time inside the work before investing in tools.

Question Three: Creativity

When did you last solve a problem in your organization by applying an idea from a completely different domain?

This question might seem disconnected from AI, but it is one of the strongest predictors of effective AI leadership that Joel Salinas has found across coaching engagements. Here is why: AI tools are rapidly becoming table stakes. The leaders who create disproportionate value with AI are not the ones who use it faster — they are the ones who use it more unexpectedly. They bring frameworks from adjacent fields. They notice analogies others miss. They connect dots across domains.

A church operations leader who applied Toyota's lean manufacturing principles to their volunteer coordination process is more likely to be a creative AI adopter than a leader who only looks inside their own sector for inspiration. A nonprofit executive who borrowed customer journey mapping from retail to redesign their donor stewardship process has demonstrated the kind of cross-domain thinking that makes AI genuinely generative rather than merely efficient.

If you cannot remember the last time you did this, it does not mean you are not creative. It often means you have been too busy executing to expose yourself to ideas from outside your immediate world. That is a fixable problem — and it is one where a coaching relationship can create significant leverage, fast.

Strong score: You can name a specific example in the past twelve months. Bonus points if it happened more than once.

Weak score: You are drawing a blank or your examples are from years ago. Deliberately expanding your inputs is your development area.

Reading Your Score

If you scored strong on all three questions, you have the leadership foundation to drive effective AI adoption. The right next step is building a concrete AI roadmap tied to your organization's highest-priority work — and moving quickly, because this window will not stay open indefinitely.

If one dimension is weak, that is your starting point. Not a reason to delay, but a reason to invest your first energy in the right place. Leaders who push forward on AI adoption while ignoring their own development gaps tend to create initiatives that collapse when they hit the first serious obstacle.

If two or three dimensions are weak, that is not a failure — it is an honest diagnosis. It means the most valuable investment you can make right now is not an AI tool subscription. It is leadership development specifically designed around AI readiness. That is a concrete, solvable problem.

For a more structured version of this assessment, Joel Salinas built the AI Leadership Compass specifically for this purpose. It takes about five minutes, gives you a score across all three Triad dimensions, and tells you exactly what to do next based on your results. You can access it at compass.jsalinas.org.

If you want to discuss your results with someone who can help you build a specific development plan, the next step is a free 30-minute discovery call to talk through where you are and what would move the needle most.