Hey lovely people,

So am back from seeing the parents in Spain, tanned yes, rested not really… I came back to my living room floor completely collapsed… what a time to be alive!

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Today’s Focus:

TL;DR: “Human-centric leadership” is everywhere on LinkedIn and nowhere in practice. It start with auditing your team and having the honest talk your team needs about them and the future. As leaders, your roles now is to be a Sherpa and protect them from the hollowing as much as possible

When I first stepped into a leadership role, I lived by three basic rules.

Three rules gave me a pretty happy team from the get go, and then it was a case of wrapping a human-centred approach around all of it. I carried those rules for years because they worked. People knew where they stood, you knew where you stood, and the whole thing held together because the basics were solid.

A few years back I wrote a piece called Team Accounting about how to assess the shapes on your team before you invest in capability. I-Shapers, T-Shapers, M-Shapers, X-Shapers, Polymaths. It became one of my most-read pieces, and most of the responses were variations of the same question: which shape should I be developing my leaders toward? That question made sense when I wrote it. Now I'm not so sure.

Because both the old rules and the shapes framework assumed the same thing: that the team has a shared reason to exist, that the people in it find meaning in the work, that leadership is fundamentally about developing humans who are growing, contributing, and building identity through what they do. AI is about to break that assumption for a significant number of your people. And the leadership model has no mechanism for what comes next.

The Great Hollowing

What's coming isn't instant mass redundancy, that's the version everyone is building frameworks for. First will be the harder yet quieter phase…The great hollowing

A majority of CEOs and senior leaders i’ve spoken to all have said in one way or another they are looking at how AI can flatten management layers. Similar to the article shared here

Over half of senior leaders plan to bring autonomous AI agents onto their teams this year. Every one of those decisions runs on the same logic: faster, leaner, cheaper. The addiction to efficiency has been hollowing out people functions for years, stripping texture out of roles in the name of optimisation. All AI has done is feed it the crack it wants.

The roles won't disappear overnight. The people will stay, the titles will stay, but the substance inside the work, the part that gave someone a reason to care about doing it, slowly drains.

The person is still in the room the contribution that defined them has been quietly reassigned, or compressed in ways nobody prepared them for. Every time a human moment gets automated, a ritual gets cut for efficiency, or a development conversation gets replaced by a form, meaning is leaving the room. What AI does is accelerate that drain to a speed most leadership models were never built to handle.

This is where the leadership crisis actually lives, not in managing AI, but in managing the people whose work just lost its weight.

What the data tells us

The hollowing hasn't arrived in full yet, but the signals are already everywhere. Manager engagement has fallen to 27% globally. Trust in direct managers has dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024 according to DDI global leadership forecast yet managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, even though many received limited formal training

These are the people supposed to navigate the most significant shift in what work means in a generation, and most of them have never been taught how to have a conversation about purpose, let alone rebuild it for someone whose role has changed underneath them.

Run a meaning audit…like now

The good news is you don't need to wait for the restructure memo. Take your team list and run a one question audit on each team member simply asking

If AI took the technical output of their role tomorrow, what would they point to as their reason for being here?

If the answer is their expertise, that person is exposed. If the answer is the way they connect ideas, people, or decisions that nobody else connects, they're more protected.

If you can't answer it at all, that's the most honest signal you'll get. This isn't a strategic exercise. It's a five-minute conversation with yourself that changes how you look at every development plan you're currently running.

Map your team shapes

Once you've run the audit, go back to the five shapes and be honest. I-Shapers are most exposed. T-Shapers are partially protected but vulnerable where their bridging role gets automated. M-Shapers are more resilient. X-Shapers are most protected because they operate at the intersection of human and technical contexts. Count how many I-Shapers you have in roles where AI will take the technical core within 18 months. That's your urgency indicator, and it's not for redundancy planning. The people who need you most right now are the ones about to lose the reason they cared, not the ones about to lose the job.

Change the conversation

Now you know who's exposed, you need a different conversation with them. Instead of "what skills do you need to develop?" ask: "what part of your work gives you the strongest sense of identity?" Write down the answer. If AI is about to take that part, you now have a specific, urgent, human problem to work through with that person before it arrives. If AI won't touch it, you've just found the anchor that will hold them through the transition. Most managers have never been trained to have this conversation. It will matter more than any performance review you run for the next five years.

Leadership evolution

Most of the advice circulating right now falls short in the same place. "Leaders need empathy and creativity." "Create Agent Manager roles." "Develop T-shaped leaders." Every one of those recommendations starts from the same assumption: that leadership is fundamentally about managing what people do. When meaning drains from a role, that assumption is already broken.

The leader's job shifts to something more specific: sitting with each person and rebuilding the connection between who they are and what they're still there to do. That means understanding which part of the work still belongs to them, which part has been absorbed, and what new shape their contribution needs to take. That's not a coaching framework. That's a human conversation most managers have never been trained to have, and it matters more right now than anything in the performance management toolkit. The leadership programmes running today are still built around performance conversations and development planning, all of which assume the person across the table has work that matters to them. When that assumption breaks, the entire toolkit breaks with it.

Identify your Xshape leaders now

The leaders best equipped to have these conversations already exist on your bench. They just haven't been identified yet. Who already operates across human and technical contexts? Who reframes problems before the room has finished describing them? Who connects things that shouldn't connect? Those people are your bridge through this transition. Protect them from bureaucracy. Give them the remit to redesign roles around meaning, not just output. If you don't have any, that's the gap to close first, and you won't close it with a workshop.

The honest conversation most leaders wont have

The worst version of this transition is the silent one. Roles quietly emptying out while everyone pretends nothing has changed. Leaders avoiding the conversation because they don't have a tidy answer, and people filling the silence with their own conclusions. Most will conclude that the organisation knows exactly what's happening and simply doesn't care enough to say.

That silence is where culture starts to come apart, not through one dramatic failure but fibre by fibre, as the shared story that held the team together stops making sense. This is how the Culture Thread unravels: not one bad decision, but a thousand small moments where nobody named what was changing, until the gap between the stated experience and the lived one becomes too wide to bridge.

Tell your team whats coming

Name the roles that will change. Acknowledge that you don't have all the answers, but that you're designing the transition together rather than doing it to them. The team that hears "I don't know yet, but here's how we'll figure it out together" will outperform the team that hears nothing until the restructure memo lands. Every single time. If you're the leader reading this, the permission to be honest starts with you.

Let me be clear, this isn't another end-is-nigh piece about AI. I'm pro AI. Always have been.

What this is about is giving weight to the bullshit LinkedIn posts where people are talking about “human-centric leadership" (bullshit term) and yet shying away from being actually human-centric.

Team Accounting was a diagnostic for where your team is now, but this is about where it goes next. You can map every shape on your team perfectly and still lose the people if nobody is holding the meaning together while the work changes underneath them.

Running the audit will allow you to capture the AI exposure early and get ahead of the wayfinding and development conversations, allowing you to have an honest conversation before the silence does the damage for you.

Your people are going to need you to Sherpa them through the storm and help guide them to finding meaning.