The Leadership Skills AI Will Have a Much Harder Time Replacing
Leadership and executive coach David Buirs, based in Amsterdam, examines which human leadership skills remain hardest for AI to replicate as org structures flatten and management tasks become automated. This article draws on Self-Determination Theory and Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 research to make the case for connection, curiosity, focused presence, and coaching as the capabilities that will define effective leadership in the years ahead.
The org chart is getting flatter. Here’s why.
A marketing director used to need a team. Someone to run the campaigns. Someone to write the copy. Someone to pull the reports. Someone to manage the tools. Now that same director can work with five AI agents running in parallel. One monitors ad performance and adjusts bids automatically. One drafts content variations for testing. One pulls weekly analytics and flags what needs attention. One manages the posting schedule.
One person. Five autonomous processes. The output of a team.
That’s happening across functions, across industries. Companies need fewer people to get the same work done. The pyramid shrinks.
That changes what leadership actually means.
When AI can measure progress, flag underperformance, schedule 1-on-1s, and generate a status report in seconds, what’s left for a manager to do? Quite a lot, as it turns out. But the nature of the work changes completely.
What remains is almost entirely human.
Connection drives motivation more than most leaders realise.
There’s a well-researched framework in psychology called Self-Determination Theory. It identifies three core drivers of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. That last one matters more than most leaders realise.
Relatedness means feeling genuinely connected to the people around you. To your team. To whoever leads you.
Research consistently shows that people who feel a real connection with their manager are more motivated, more committed, and more willing to go beyond what’s strictly required. People work hard for someone they respect and feel seen by.
An AI can schedule your check-in. Making you feel like someone actually cares about your development is a different thing entirely. That will keep mattering, even as the tools get smarter.
Curiosity means something different when it comes from a person.
A good leader notices things. They pick up on a team member’s tone in a meeting. They sense something is off before anyone says it out loud. That kind of attention comes from genuine interest in people, and it produces questions that land differently.
AI generates questions from patterns in data. That’s useful. But a team member can tell the difference between being genuinely wondered about and being processed. One opens things up. The other closes them down.
Leaders who bring real curiosity to their teams create something no dashboard can: a culture where people feel worth understanding. That’s a harder thing to replace than any technical skill.
We’ve become terrible at focus.
Here’s something that rarely shows up in leadership development programs: the ability to simply be present with someone.
Notifications have made sustained attention rare. Most managers are half-listening in most conversations. They’re physically there, mentally elsewhere. People feel that. It erodes connection faster than almost anything else.
One practice I suggest to the leaders I work with: sit for ten minutes a day doing absolutely nothing. No phone, no podcast, no task. Just sit. It sounds trivial. It trains something the attention economy has been systematically dismantling.
A leader who can genuinely focus on a person, for a full conversation, without drifting, is increasingly unusual. And increasingly valuable.
Coaching is becoming the core job of a leader.
Tracking whether goals are on target, flagging missed deadlines, organising feedback cycles. AI is already doing a lot of this, and will do more. The administrative layer of management is shrinking.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, which surveyed nearly a quarter of a million workers across 160 countries, points to three actions organisations can take to reverse the engagement crisis. Coaching is the second. Managers trained in coaching practices saw performance improvements of 20 to 28%, and their teams reported up to 18% higher engagement. You can read the full report on the Gallup website.
What AI cannot yet do is sit across from someone who’s struggling and help them figure out what’s actually going on. Ask the right question at the right moment. Hold space for the answer without filling the silence too quickly.
That’s coaching. And it’s becoming the job, not a nice extra.
As a certified executive coach, I work with senior leaders who want to develop exactly this: a coaching style of leadership that builds trust, draws out ownership, and makes the people around them better. It’s a learnable skill. It takes practice and the right conditions to develop it. Leaders who invest in it now are ahead of a curve that’s moving fast.
This is about the long game.
Some of what feels uniquely human today will look different in five years. Language models are getting better at simulating empathy, curiosity, connection.
But genuine human connection, real curiosity, focused presence, and the ability to coach someone through a hard moment. These will be the last things to go, if they go at all. Building them now makes you a better leader regardless of what the technology does next.
The pyramid is smaller. The people still in it need to be genuinely good at the things machines aren’t, at least not yet.
If you’re an individual leader looking to develop these skills, management coaching or coaching for executives is a logical place to start. For organisations that want to build a coaching culture across their management layer, leadership training is worth a conversation. Plan a free introduction here. Zero obligation.
