Organizations are redesigning work for AI while still promoting managers for a pre-AI world. The criteria that built their leadership pipelines may now be working against them.

The traits that helped managers succeed in a pre-AI workplace — confidence, visibility and decisiveness — were optimized for environments where leaders were expected to project certainty, move fast, command attention and personally drive execution.

But those same traits may now be blocking the kind of human agency AI transformation depends on. Confidence without humility can become a failure to question AI outputs or distinguish fluency from accuracy. Decisiveness without reflection can scale flawed decisions across systems before anyone catches the error. Visibility and executive presence matter less when leadership increasingly happens inside workflows, systems and decision design. Click here to read the full-text article