A friend got promoted to manage a team of six people she used to work alongside as a peer, and she told me nobody trains you for the actual hard parts — how to give feedback to someone who used to be your equal, how to handle a scheduling conflict fairly, how to write a performance review that's honest without being brutal.
She's been using an AI chatbot to think through those exact situations before she's actually in them — practicing how to phrase difficult feedback so it lands as constructive instead of personal, drafting a first pass at a performance review she then edits heavily to sound like her, and working through how to say no to a request from someone on her team without shutting the conversation down entirely.
It's helped her rehearse harder conversations before having them for real, which she said has made her feel less like she's winging management and more like she's actually thought through what she wants to say before the stakes are live.
She's clear that the actual decisions — who gets promoted, how to handle an HR situation — go through her own judgment and her company's actual HR process, not a chatbot's suggestion. This is a rehearsal space, not a replacement for the actual leadership work.
Nobody hands new managers a manual for the interpersonal parts of the job, which are usually harder than the technical parts. Having somewhere to practice those conversations before they matter has made the transition into leading people a lot less nerve-wracking for her.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.