Work is piling up, friends are coming to stay for a few days, and the lawn won’t mow itself. What if I ask a generative AI tool to come up with a theme for this month’s column and write a first draft?

Reality check: I have too much pride and sense of duty to do that. Yet checking out what ChatGPT and its ilk are collecting, distilling, and parroting from the Internet is a shrewd practice. In milliseconds, they can scan the open-source universe of leadership topics, themes, and trends. But we all know that can go too far.

At what point does efficiency turn into complacency — when you ask AI to write the column? When you submit the column with minimal changes? When you do the same thing month after month, even as the column engages more people and spurs more incipient leaders to action? Or when you routinely defer to AI and coast until readership plummets or your editor finds out?

A similar question can be asked about leadership. We all know what complacent leadership is: it stunts innovation, basks in past performance, ignores market shifts, and yawns at new opportunities.

On the other hand, just as ChatGPT may be good for a first draft or reality check, hands-off leadership may fit the moment. The question then becomes, “When does efficient leadership turn into complacency?” When your scheduled check-ins with direct reports become routine, even if they thrive under you? When your performance reviews become performative, or as your words of encouragement get predictable, although staff performance and engagement improve or remain excellent? Or do your followers’ attitude, motivation, or production have to decline before your leadership becomes complacent? In other words, can leadership still be effective when the input becomes stale or uninspired but the output still sparkles?

Complacency isn’t all or nothing; it’s a spectrum. It’s also an easy word to throw around. Sometimes laissez-faire leadership is appropriate, especially with skilled, motivated, or experienced teams. It demonstrates trust in your people and their decision-making abilities.

I unloaded all these thoughts and questions on some accomplished security leaders for their insights. When does low-touch become destructive?

“Technology, remote work, geopolitics, the pace that these are changing right now is unprecedented,” says a security executive who has held senior security positions in several verticals. That professional, who asked for anonymity due to the nature of his employment, drew a line between hands-off and complacent leadership. “If you’re starting to feel, ‘we’re good,’ the fact that you feel that way means you’re not good.” He adds, “By the time the leader suspects they may be complacent or coasting, that’s a symptom of a deeper problem. It means they have fallen so far behind” that they are not keeping up with social, economic, or geopolitical developments.

He offers a couple of antidotes. For one, embrace humility. Second, he says that “Leaders should make their team members authors, not witnesses. Give people decision-power a little out of their comfort zone and your comfort zone,” he advises. For example, it may be faster for you to draft a security policy than the junior security manager. But encouraging them and giving them agency benefits everyone and yields growth. “The key is to always be a little bit uncomfortable,” he says, to the point of willfully seeking discomfort.

Jonathan Perillo, a security executive in the insurance industry and founder of the training startup Safyst, agrees with that conclusion and offers a slightly different perspective. He stipulates that it’s important to know the reason behind the hands-off approach. “Is it because of lack of bandwidth? Is it because you are comfortable with your staff’s performance? Or are you checked out and not striving?”

If it’s a bandwidth issue, proactivity suffers. “You can’t do things like future proofing and strategy,” which appear at the top of ASIS’s CSO Development pyramid, he says. “You are struggling to stay compliant, you’re in a reactive stance, it’s creating risk gaps. But if you are cognitive enough about it, you can get your arms around it” and adjust, he says.

If you are cruising because staff are excelling, that’s a happy problem and “you should take a lap around the golf course,” Perillo jokes. “But if you are getting what you want all the time, you should be tasking your teams at lower levels with those assignments” to increase efficiency, build skills, and forge resilience.

Finally, if you are checked out, “find something valuable about the job again. We all struggle with it periodically. There has to be something engaging, and hopefully it’s your people.”

And maybe that answers the original question about what distinguishes effective laissez-faire leadership with complacent leadership: meaningful connection and engagement with your staff.