Be wary of abandoning a model that has served us well
You get it. The robots will do the donkey work. AI will free us from the mundane. The routine duties that once swallowed up a manager’s workday will be handled by digital agents. You dislike scheduling, triaging problems, and chasing status updates on projects? Join the club. And welcome the future – because soon you won’t need to do those anymore. The dreary gruntwork will no longer be part of the managerial canon. What will remain is the cerebral activity leaders were hired for in the first place. As modern management theory has it, the new triad of leadership is founded on human intellect: coaching, judgment and care.
This truth is almost universally acknowledged, as it should be. Yet hiding beneath it lies a more sinister reality. The disruption to leadership comes not from the fact that the role has changed. The disruption occurs because the way we have historically learned to lead has collapsed.
From time immemorial, leaders were made in guilds – the workplaces where every one of us learned our craft. The guild logic demanded a duality: a master and an apprentice. Every apprentice performed their work under their master’s eye. They developed judgment through gradual exposure to the consequences of their – or their master’s – decisions. Sometimes the apprentice would make a wrong decision, and the master would rectify it. On rarer – but formative – occasions, the master might concede to the apprentice’s choice, recognizing that no-one has a monopoly on good ideas, or smart planning. Yet, in all cases, everyone would learn to lead.
The way decisions played out – the daily recognition that choices predict outcomes – provided leadership lessons for both master and apprentice. Workaday tasks like the programming of workflows or arrangement of meetings provided a real-world guild for leadership. In 2023, I warned in this column that leadership behaviors must be assessed on “intact, working teams – not in a classroom” (Dialogue, Q4 2023). That was as true then as it is now. The workflow was the classroom. But AI is emptying the school.
The master-guild model is dying. As there is no junior work, there are no natural apprentices. Instead, the management theorists champion a new model – that of coach-player. Leaders, once at the helm, stand instead on the sidelines, coaching the stars of tomorrow to success. Instinctively, the coach-player paradigm might make sense – creating tasks for humans that can be done better and more efficiently by machines is little more than Luddism. Better to reshape the workforce around technological reality.
Yet here is the flaw. Who coaches the coaches? A coach earns the right to coach by having been a player. In the AI configuration, machines do the playing. Nobody is accruing the experiences that produce judgment and care. Organizations are optimizing for coaches while removing the very fields where they learned to play.
We must be wary of abandoning a model that has served us well. As the machines become workflow masters of context engineering, the solution is not remodeling the master-guild paradigm to that of coach-player; it is rebuilding the guild itself. Paradoxically, the technology that destroyed it – AI – is the only force with the power to revive it.
Vishal Patel is president of global markets at Duke Corporate Education
