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The Dismantling of Traditional Leadership

Huibert Evekink |

Why AI Demands Post-Heroic Capability 

Dec 18, 2025
 

For decades, leadership evolved away from command-and-control toward empowerment, trust, and collaboration. This shift became known as post-heroic leadership, which made sense in a world where work was complex, knowledge-driven, and distributed across people with different expertise. Leaders focused on direction and meaning. Workers handled the execution. Distance protected everyone.

AI structurally collapses that distance.

When agentic workflow executes work at scale, leadership will lose the buffers that once made partial competence survivable. Time and ambiguity will disappear. Delegation without understanding becomes dangerous. Powergames will be easier to spot.

The moment agents go live, leadership stops being abstract

Imagine a leadership team that has approved the introduction of AI agents into customer support. The goal is modest: automate first-line responses, scale faster, and reduce pressure on the team. No full-blown transformation, but the kind of efficiency decision leaders have always made.

What changes is not the decision itself, but the “hero-leadership” inefficiencies it exposes.

First, tech understanding can no longer be delegated

In the past, non-tech leaders could say, with a straight face, that they trusted their experts. Technology lived at a safe distance. If things went wrong, the causes were opaque, technical, or slow to surface. Today, when agents handle thousands of customer interactions autonomously, that distance vanishes.

If the system misclassifies complaints, mishandles emotionally charged customers, or quietly prioritizes speed over resolution, the impact is immediate and visible.

Implementation can still be delegated. Understanding cannot. Either leaders grasp enough to lead responsibly, or they approve outcomes they cannot explain, defend, or repair.

Second, workflows ignore the org chart

That same customer message no longer belongs to one department. In seconds, it triggers sales logic, finance checks, product analytics, and legal constraints embedded in contracts. On paper, these remain separate functions with separate leaders, but the agentic workflow behaves as a single organism.

The management team, which thought it was automating support quickly, discovers it is building an end-to-end system spanning multiple power centers. Optimizing one silo now breaks another. Turf protection and political trade-offs do not survive contact with workflows that move faster than human negotiation.

Third, every decision leaves a permanent audit trail

Before AI, leadership enjoyed time and plausible deniability. Bad calls surfaced slowly. By the time consequences appeared, conditions had changed enough to explain them away. Markets shifted. Priorities evolved. Someone else clearly dropped the ball.

With AI-driven execution, that buffer disappears. A leader’s instruction on Monday becomes system behavior on Tuesday. By Wednesday, the dashboards show the result.

Fourth, leadership becomes dependent on trust from every direction at once

 When the system fails, the leader needs their team’s trust and courageous communication to surface issues quickly. They need peer leaders to collaborate transparently across functions. They need vendors and partners to respond fast because integration points are now mission-critical.

Traditional leadership could survive by managing up and controlling down. Sideways trust was optional. In AI-powered organizations, it is built in. Sofskills become a hard reality.

What remains is capability

 Put together, these shifts reveal something uncomfortable and hopeful at the same time. AI is making leadership harder by removing excuses and easier by doing your job really, really well.

Distance disappears. Boundaries dissolve. Consequences accelerate. What remains is capability:

  • technical literacy to understand systems deeply enough to lead them
  • focus under pressure
  • responsibility that cannot hide behind delegation
  • real expertise rather than posturing or winging
  • emotional intelligence strong enough to maintain trust in all directions simultaneously, including inward
  • a curious and resilient mindset

Most leaders will not fail because they lack intelligence. They will fail because they are unwilling to endure the discomfort required to stay credible once protection is gone.

For those willing, the path is more straightforward than ever. Build capability and let results speak for themselves.

The dismantling has already begun. So has the opportunity.  

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