I’ve spent most of my working life inside organisations, and for most of that time we’ve developed leaders in pretty much the same way.
First, we decide what good leadership looks like. We build the framework, define the competencies and behaviours, and then assess people against them.
I’ve watched this happen from the inside more times than I can count. Often it starts by looking at the people who’ve already succeeded. What do they have in common? What do they do well? Add some research, interviews, maybe an external consultant, and eventually you have your leadership model.
Then, because organisations are organisations, we operationalise it. The competencies become rating scales. The rating scales become calibration conversations. And before long, something that started as a description of good leadership is influencing who gets the stretch role, who makes the succession list and who gets promoted.
Now, there’s plenty about this that makes sense. Of course organisations need standards. Of course there are things we should expect from people who have responsibility for other people’s careers, livelihoods and working lives.
But I think somewhere along the way we confused having standards with believing there was one best way to meet them.
I’ve also seen what happens when someone doesn’t naturally resemble the model. She gets told she needs more polish. More visibility. More strategic presence. More of whatever the organisation has decided leadership should look like.
Sometimes that feedback is absolutely right. We all have things we need to work on. But sometimes a very capable person ends up spending an enormous amount of energy trying to look more like somebody else’s idea of a leader.
Consistency has a way of slipping into conformity before anyone notices.
And now we’re doing it again
Every conversation about leadership and AI seems to produce a list sooner or later. Adaptability. Curiosity. Empathy. Digital fluency. Critical thinking. Systems thinking. Comfort with ambiguity. “Human skills” - as if we’ve just discovered that empathy exists.
To be clear, I don’t particularly disagree with any of it. Curiosity matters when the tools beneath us keep changing. Judgement matters when AI can generate options faster than we can evaluate them. Nobody really has this figured out, so being able to operate without certainty matters too.
It’s not really the list that bothers me. It’s what we’re going to do with it, because I can already see the frameworks coming: the assessments, the development programs, the new definition of the “future-ready leader” that everyone can start measuring themselves against.
The language shifts. The system stays the same
I think that misses something much more interesting about what’s happening.
AI isn’t simply another technology leaders need to learn. It’s starting to change the work itself. Things that once took a considerable amount of time, expertise and effort can increasingly be done in minutes. Information can be summarised, data interrogated, options generated, plans challenged and communications drafted.
None of that was ever the whole job of leadership, obviously. But it took up a lot of our time, and being good at it gave people a certain amount of credibility.
When AI can produce ten reasonable options in the time it once took us to develop two, generating the options becomes less valuable. Knowing which one makes sense for this organisation, this team and this moment becomes more valuable. If the first draft becomes easy, knowing what the draft is missing matters more. As information becomes abundant, discernment matters more.
That doesn’t make expertise irrelevant. But I do think it starts to change where some of the value sits.
That leaves me with a much more interesting question than whether leaders can learn to use AI:
When more of what leaders can produce becomes easier to produce, what becomes more important about the person doing the leading?
Leading through what AI changes
There’s another part of this conversation that I think we need to talk about too. Leaders aren’t only being asked to adopt AI. They’re going to have to leave people through what it changes.
Some of it will be exciting, and some of it will be anything but. Roles will change and some will disappear. Expertise that took years to develop may suddenly feel less scarce. There will be people wondering what they are still valued for when technology can do in seconds something they spent years learning to do.
There will be leaders sitting opposite those people - leaders making decisions about jobs, leaders implementing restructures, leaders who know their teams are frightened and who cannot truthfully sit there and promise that everything is going to be okay.
That isn’t simply a change management problem with a communications plan attached.
If you’re worried about whether your job will exist in twelve months, you probably don’t need another slide about the opportunities ahead. You might need someone to be honest with you. To listen without immediately trying to make you feel better. To tell you what they know, what they don’t know and what happens next.
AI doesn’t make that part of leadership less important. If anything, I think it makes it easier to see how important it always was.
Some things really do still matter
One of the things I find slightly frustrating about the conversation around AI is this idea that everything has changed, so everything we knew before must somehow be out of date.
I just don’t buy that.
I’ve been around leaders for a long time now, and some things matter whether AI is in the room or not. Judgement still matters, and so do integrity and trust. Being able to sit with someone in a difficult conversation without rushing to make the discomfort go away matters. Leaders still have to take responsibility for their decisions.
AI can help with almost everything around a decision. It can lay out the options, model possible consequences and surface something you might have missed. It can’t own the decision. It doesn’t sit in the room afterwards and answer for what happens next.
You’re the one who does.
That’s what I mean when I talk about leadership foundations. Not another list of traits every leader needs to possess, but the things underneath how we lead that remain important even as the context around us changes.
The expression of them might change. What good judgement asks of you might change. What trust looks like in a workplace full of AI-generated information might change. The conversations requiring courage will certainly change.
But the foundation underneath them doesn’t suddenly disappear because a new technology arrived.
What have we already built?
This is the part I find particularly interesting when I think about experienced women.
Sit down with a woman who has fifteen or twenty years of working life behind her and ask what she brings to a role, and chances are she’ll start telling you the things that belong on her CV: roles, projects, qualifications, results.
But there’s so much underneath that which never appears on a CV.
Over time, she’s learned how an organisation actually works, rather than how the organisational chart says it works. She can walk into a meeting and sense who’s really deciding, who isn’t convinced and where the resistance is likely to appear in a corridor conversation afterwards.
She’s learned when a no needs to be said plainly and when something needs time. She knows the difference between a fight worth having and one that’s going to cost more than it achieves - often because she’s got that judgement wrong before.
She’s watched strategies meet reality. She’s sat with failure. Not the neat version we all package up for an interview when somebody asks about our biggest learning experience, but the real kind, where something she built or believed in didn’t work.
And over all those years she’s learned things about timing, relationships, politics, judgement, and people. Maybe she’s become brilliant at taking something complicated and making it understandable. Maybe she can hold a difficult relationship together when somebody else would walk away. Maybe she spots a pattern because she’s seen a version of it three times before.
A CV tells you what she did. It rarely tells you what she learned about people while she was doing it. I think of all of that as leadership capital.
I wonder if we’ve been undervaluing quite a lot of it, because much of that capital doesn’t become less useful as AI takes on more analysis, drafting and coordination. Some it may become more useful.
AI can analyse what the numbers say. It doesn’t carry twenty years of experience of what happens when a particular kind of decision meets an actual organisation. It doesn’t know this team the way you know this team. It doesn't have your relationships, your credibility or the history sitting behind the conversation you’re about to. have.
You’re the one who does.
I keep coming back to why so many development conversations begin with what someone lacks. I think part of the answer is simply that our systems are very good at finding gaps. If you compare somebody with a model, the distance between the two becomes the obvious thing to talk about.
Spend enough years inside systems like that and eventually you start doing it to yourself: What do I still need to work on?
There’s nothing wrong with that question. I’ve asked it plenty of times myself. What if it wasn’t the only question? What if we also asked: What have I already built that may become more valuable now?
I don’t think moving forward means throwing away everything that came before. Discipline still matters. Mastery matters. Commitment matters. So do focus, clear communication, relationships, courage, boundaries and knowing how to contribute without exhausting yourself.
There is real wisdom in what we’ve already learned, and it’s worth carrying forward. We might need to get better at recognising it.
We still need to change - that part hasn’t gone away
I don’t want this to turn into one of those comforting arguments that says just be more human and AI can’t touch you. I don’t think that’s true either.
There are things leaders genuinely need to learn. We need enough understanding of AI to know where it’s useful and where it isn’t. We need to know when to hand something over and when to hold it tightly. We need to get better at recognising the difference between something that sounds convincing and something that deserves to influence a decision.
Beyond that, I think there’s another question: what does this changing context ask of this particular leader?
Think about the leader who has always been the expert in the room. She’s spent years building that expertise and it’s probably a big part of why people trust her. Now she has access to technology that can produce the analysis faster than she can.
That doesn’t make her expertise worthless. Far from it. It might change what people need from her. Perhaps her development is about using that expertise differently - bringing more judgement, asking better questions, knowing what to challenge and becoming more comfortable when she isn’t the person providing every answer.
Think about the later whose natural strength is empathy. She’s the person people go to because she listens, understands and makes space for what’s difficult. What happens when she has to lead an AI-driven restructure and make a decision that she knows will hurt people?
More empathy probably isn’t her development edge. She may need to become more comfortable making a difficult decision while still remaining humane.
Then there’s the leader who is brilliant at moving quickly. She reads a situation, makes the call and gets everyone going. There will be moments when that is exactly what her team needs. There will be others when a frightened team doesn’t need another fast decision; they need to feel involved in what happens next.
None of these women needs to become the other one. They may just need to understand where their existing way of leading serves them brilliantly - and where this changing context is asking them to stretch.
That’s what I mean by emerging possibilities.
Not a new list of things every leader needs to become good at, but possibilities. For one person that might be greater personal agency - taking ownership of what is hers to influence, decide and change. For someone else it might be relational openness, or trusting her judgement rather than continuing to gather information long after she already knows enough.
It could be communicating more in the moment instead of rehearsing the perfect response, using her capability more purposefully rather than pushing simply because she can, or having the courage to initiate something when it matters.
The point isn’t that everybody needs all of them. The development edge isn’t the same for everyone because the starting point isn’t the same for everyone.
I think we lose something important when we pretend otherwise.
What if we started with the person?
If I were building leadership development for this moment from scratch, I don’t think I’d start with another model.
I’d start with the person.
I want to understand what is already there, what is already working and what she has built over years of experience that perhaps neither she nor the organisation has properly valued.
Then I’d separate three conversations that we have a habit of bundling together.
What remains fundamental? These are her leadership foundations - the things underneath how she leads that continue to matter, even if the way she expresses them changes.
What has she already built that is worth carrying forward? This is her leadership capital - the wisdom, experience and ways of contributing she has accumulated over time, including some things she may barely notice anymore because they come so naturally to her.
What might be worth becoming curious about next? These are her emerging possibilities - not gaps on a scorecard, not a prescription for who she needs to become - just the places where the changing context might be asking something new of her.
Those feel like very different conversations to me.
If we treat everything as development, we end up trying to fix things that were never broken. If we ignore what someone has already built, we miss things that may be becoming more valuable. If wee turn the last part into another generic list of future-ready skills, we’re right back where we started.
I’m not suggesting we throw standards out of the window. We shouldn’t. Leaders need to be trustworthy. They need to make sound decisions, take responsibility for outcomes and be capable of leading other people well.
But standards don’t require standardisation.
Two people can meet the same standard through completely different strengths and very different ways of leading. Maybe that difference is about to matter more than we think.
If analysis and information become abundant, then a genuinely different way of seeing a problem becomes valuable.
Think about a leadership team. One person sees the strategic pattern. Another notices the person who hasn’t spoken. Someone understands the history behind the resistance. Someone else sees the possibility nobody has considered. One knows when to move. Another knows the organisation isn’t ready yet.
You don’t want to develop all of that difference out of them. You want to understand how to use it.
Which makes me wonder if we’ve got this slightly backwards. Maybe the organisation that’s genuinely ready for what’s coming doesn’t need its leaders to become more alike at all. Maybe it needs to become much better at recognising, developing and combining leaders who are different.
That brings me back to the belief underneath almost everything I’m building in With Carrie:
There is more than one way to lead well
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn. It doesn’t mean every way of leading is equally effective. And it certainly doesn’t mean AI changes nothing.
It just means I don’t think development always has to start by showing someone the distance between who she is and who we think she ought to be. I’d rather start by understanding what’s already there, what remains fundamental, what she has built that is worth carrying forward and then, yes, where she might need to grow as the world around her changes.
I’m less interested in asking women whether they have the skills to become a future-ready leader. My question is much simpler:
What might become more important about the leader you already are?
A small, personal invitation
I’ve been turning that question into something practical.
Your Leadership in the Age of AI is a private, personalized reflection for women navigating a changing world of work. It looks at what may remain fundamental about the way you lead, what you’ve already built that may be worth carrying forward, and what might be worth becoming curious about next.
No score, type or ranking. No generic list of AI-era leadership skills.
Just a different way of seeing the leader who is already there.