Welcome to the golden age of leadership
The most important skill in your job finally has a development path.
Everyone I know in tech management is at least mildly anxious about AI. The usual version goes: my team is becoming more autonomous, decisions are moving faster, and I’m not sure what I’m for anymore.
I think they’re looking at the wrong thing.
The managers who should be anxious are the ones whose authority came from knowing more than their individual contributors. The solution architect who became a manager and held the technical high ground. The senior engineer promoted because they were the most capable person in the room.
That version of management is getting harder to sustain… contrary to the common narrative that “AI makes you irrelevant”, what I’m seeing is AI is lifting your team’s floor faster than you're figuring out where you stand.
The technical competence gap between managers and team members is narrowing.
But there’s another kind of manager, whose edge was never competence but was judgment and the capability to make the right calls that would materialize not for the deliverable - but for the team, the bosses, the customers.
Let me tell how how I learned that the hard way.
I mention the changing business model that I went through, and that’s a microcosm of what is happening across the industry right now - jobs being changed, leaders and individual contributors being asked to do more with AI and the top leadership not giving clear prescription on how to add value with AI, but just to “go all in”.
Here’s why I think this is a golden era for managers with the right skills.
When the technical floor rises - when your individual contributors can do in two hours what used to take two days, when status reporting writes itself, when code review is partially automated - something gets freed up.
There’s a conversation to be had about “ok, what should I be doing” and “how do I create more impact instead of just doing more work”?
I want it to start with leadership.
Here is what AI makes possible that nothing else has.
After any significant meeting, I run the transcript through an AI review. Not for merely a summary - to ask the question I’m too close to answer while I’m still in the room.
Where was I vague?
Where did I leave a loop open?
Where was I reacting to the surface of what someone said instead of what they actually meant?
The first few times, it feels like light editing. You catch a sentence here, a dropped thread there. Useful, but far from transformative.
After a week, something shifts. You start seeing the same pattern appear again and again - the same tendency to give information of instead of providing the answer, that moment where you feel the slight urge to avoid the error but you yield nevertheless. At the very least the pattern starts resembling a shape - you can recognize it before it happens.
By week four, you’re making different calls in real time, because the habit is changing.
That is not something a quarterly coaching session produces and neither does reading a management book. It is the result of a feedback loop that runs after every significant conversation - on a consistent basis, without ego, without the social dynamic of admitting something embarrassing to another person.
The machine doesn’t care… it just shows you what happened.
This is what I mean by unprecedented - the ability to hone a skill that previously had no reliable feedback mechanism. And compound interest on a skill with a tight feedback loop is extraordinary.
More on my experience with the communication coach agent in the article below.
You see the same pattern in your own communication appear three weeks in a row and suddenly it’s not abstract anymore… it’s a habit you can name and act upon accordingly.
The managers who will lead in this environment aren’t the ones who figured out how to use AI to move faster. They’re the ones using it to get better at the parts of the job that don’t automate: the creativity, the conversations, the relationships. The calls that look small but determine everything downstream.
Technical competence is becoming a commodity. Judgment - the ability to know what a situation actually requires, and to have the precision to deliver it - is becoming scarce in relative terms.
Now it’s something you can train deliberately, consistently, starting this week.
That is why this is the golden age of leadership - for the first time, the most important skill in the job has a development path.
Which kind of a leader are you going to be on the other side of it?