Preparing Leaders for AI: The Skills That Actually Matter

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The management skills AI can't replace. And why your leaders need to develop them now.

David Buirs is a Leadership and Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. In this article he examines what AI-driven automation means for new and developing managers: which skills are becoming obsolete, which are becoming critical, and why the bar for every leader is rising fast. Relevant for managers, HR professionals, and organisations considering leadership training for new managers.

Most leadership training programs teach the same things. Goal-setting. Progress tracking. Planning. Running structured meetings. Giving annual reviews.

These are solid skills. And AI is going to automate most of them.

Not completely. Not tomorrow. But the direction is clear, and it is moving faster than most organisations are ready for.

Over the past few years I have had dozens of conversations with senior leaders across industries. Directors, VPs, executives navigating this transition in real time. And a pattern keeps emerging. The technical side of management, the administrative backbone of the role, is becoming less and less what separates a good leader from a poor one.

What remains, and what increasingly cannot be delegated to a machine, is harder to teach. And far more valuable.

What Gallup has been saying for years

Before we get to AI, it is worth starting with a number that should already be unsettling.

Gallup studied 2.5 million teams and found that only one in ten managers naturally possesses the talent to lead well. The other 90 percent need deliberate development to succeed in the role. Gallup also estimates that closing this management gap could unlock close to ten trillion dollars in global productivity.

Ten trillion. And yet most organisations still promote their best individual contributor, hand them a new title, and leave them to figure it out.

The result is predictable. Teams disengage. Performance drops. Your best people leave. And HR is left managing the fallout of a problem that was preventable.

This has always been true. But AI is about to make it much more visible, much faster.

The skills that are becoming automated

In my conversations with senior leaders, there is growing consensus on which parts of management are most exposed to automation. Goal-setting frameworks. Progress dashboards. Meeting summaries. Scheduling and prioritisation. Performance data analysis. Compliance tracking. Even structured feedback templates.

These are things AI tools already do reasonably well, and will do better every year. They are also, coincidentally, the things most leadership training programs spend the majority of their time on.

That is a problem. Because if you are developing managers primarily around tasks that are being automated, you are training for yesterday.

The skills that are becoming more important

The leaders I speak with are consistently clear about what will matter more. Not instead of the basics. In addition to them. But with far greater weight.

Motivating people. Understanding what drives each individual on your team. Creating conditions where people want to do good work, not just perform for an audience.

Building real connection. Not team-building exercises. Genuine interest in the humans you work with. This is what creates psychological safety. And psychological safety is what makes people speak up, take risks, and grow.

Creating and communicating a vision. Where are we going, and why does it matter? Machines can generate roadmaps. Only a human can make people believe in one.

Judgment in complex situations. When the data is ambiguous, when the right answer is genuinely unclear, when values are in conflict. AI can offer options. It cannot own the decision.

Asking better questions. Coaching your team rather than solving their problems for them. Helping people think more clearly instead of just giving them answers. This is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and one of the hardest to develop.

Coaching as a leadership style. Not as a one-off conversation, but as a way of operating. Building people's capacity over time. Making yourself less necessary, not more central.

Navigating conflict and difficult conversations. Not avoiding them. Not softening them into meaninglessness. Having them directly, with care, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than damaging it.

Communication across ambiguity. Being clear when things are not clear. Keeping people grounded during uncertainty. This is increasingly what senior leaders say separates managers who retain their teams from those who lose them.

None of these are new. What is new is how much more weight they will carry in the years ahead.

The agent economy: fewer people, higher expectations

There is a second change coming that most organisations are not yet talking about openly.

Companies will likely have fewer employees. Not because the work disappears, but because individual employees will increasingly supervise autonomous programs doing parts of that work. AI agents handling research, reporting, drafting, analysis, customer interaction. The human in the loop becomes the decision-maker, the quality controller, the strategic director of that work.

Fewer people doing more. Each person carrying more responsibility. Each leader managing a team of humans plus a layer of automated processes.

This means fewer leadership positions overall. And significantly higher expectations for the ones that remain.

Up or out is coming for everyone

The Big 4 consulting firms have operated on an "up or out" model for decades. You develop, you grow, you take on more, or you leave. There is no comfortable plateau.

That model is starting to spread. The economics of AI-driven efficiency are pushing organisations toward leaner, more demanding structures. The comfortable middle is getting harder to hold.

What this means practically: the managers who are not actively developing their human skills, who are relying on technical expertise and hoping that is enough, will find their position increasingly difficult to sustain. Not in some abstract future. In the next few years.

This is not a threat. It is a description of a landscape that is already changing. And knowing the landscape is the first step to navigating it well.

What this means for leadership training now

The organisations that will come through this transition well are already treating leadership development as something more than a one-day training or an annual offboarding of information.

They are asking different questions. Not just "did the training go well?" But: did anything actually change? Are our managers coaching their teams differently? Are difficult conversations happening earlier? Is the culture around feedback improving?

This is why management training built on learning science, with real attention to transfer and behaviour change over time, produces different results than a standard programme. Not because the content is secret. Because the architecture is different.

And for individual managers navigating this landscape: leadership coaching gives you a dedicated space to develop precisely the skills that cannot be automated. Coaching skills, communication, judgment, self-awareness. The skills that will define your career over the next decade.

If your role sits at a more senior level and you are thinking about leadership impact at the directorial or executive level, executive coaching is a natural fit.

Start now, not when the pressure forces you to

The managers and leaders who will thrive are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who took their development seriously before the external pressure made it unavoidable.

Communication. Coaching. Judgment. Connection. These are not soft skills. They are the skills that will be hardest to replace, and hardest to develop quickly if you have not started.

The time to work on them is not when you are under pressure. It is now, while you have the space to build them deliberately.

If you are curious about what that could look like for you or your organisation, feel free to plan a free introduction. No obligation. Just a conversation.

Why Don’t Our Managers Show Leadership?

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

Why Don’t Our Managers Show Leadership?

David Buirs is a leadership coach and trainer based in Amsterdam, specializing in managers with 0 to 4 years of experience. This article is written for HR managers and senior leaders who notice their managers are not leading effectively. It explains why this happens and what structural change actually looks like.

You see it every day. Managers who are present, but not really leading. Teams that bring every decision to you. Conflicts that never get resolved on the floor, but land on HR’s desk instead. Meetings without direction. People quietly disengaging, while nobody says a word.

It is tempting to think it is a motivation problem. That they simply do not want to lead. But that is almost never true.

Most managers genuinely want to lead. They just do not know how.

You promoted your best people

Most managers ended up in their role because they were exceptional at their job. The best developer became team lead. The top sales rep became sales manager. The sharpest analyst became department head.

That is a logical choice. And a costly one.

Being good at your craft has very little to do with being good at leading people. They are two fundamentally different skill sets. The first is about technical knowledge and personal output. The second is about people. About having conversations that feel uncomfortable. About setting direction without having all the answers. About building trust instead of doing everything yourself.

Most new managers never get properly taught that second skill set. They are thrown in at the deep end and expected to figure it out.

The forgetting curve beats the training

At some point, the organization sends them to a training. Two days at a conference hotel. A deck of slides. A handful of models with acronyms. And a satisfaction score that comfortably lands above an eight.

A week later, they work exactly the same as before.

This is not a lack of good intentions. It is neuroscience. The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed in the nineteenth century that the brain forgets newly learned information rapidly without repetition. Within a week, most of it is gone. Within a month, almost nothing remains.

One-off trainings are not an investment in behavior change. They are an investment in the feeling that something is being done.

Knowledge is not the problem

Ask your managers what they should do when someone is underperforming. They can probably tell you. They know the steps. They know what a good conversation looks like.

But they do not have the conversation.

Because giving feedback is uncomfortable. Addressing a former colleague feels personal. The risk of damaging a working relationship outweighs the abstract knowledge that things would be better if they just said something.

Behavior change does not require more information. It requires practice. Repetition in a safe environment. Reflection on what worked and what did not. And guidance that lasts long enough for new habits to actually stick.

That is what most trainings are missing. Not the content. The architecture.

What actually works

Leadership develops over time, not in two days. That sounds obvious. But the implication is rarely taken seriously when designing a training program.

What works is a program that runs over several months. That connects to the manager’s day-to-day reality. That links theory to concrete situations on the floor. And that builds in space for reflection between sessions.

Not a program you roll out. A program you build around the specific challenges in your organization.

That is the core of my approach to in-company management training. Every program starts with one question: what needs to concretely change here? The design follows that question, not a standard catalogue.

The real question

Your managers are not showing leadership. Not because they do not want to. But because the organization promoted them without supporting the transition. And because the trainings that followed were too short to change anything that lasted.

That is fixable. But it requires looking further than a one-off intervention.

The question is not: how do we make sure our managers know what leadership is? The question is: how do we make sure they actually do it?

Curious whether a program like this fits what is happening in your organization? Let’s have an honest conversation about it. No sales pitch, just a good look at what is needed. Plan your free introduction here.