Is Leadership Human Enough Today

The organization becoming more efficient while the people inside it become more depleted is not transformation.

It is extraction with better technology.

Something has changed in the language of leadership.

You hear it in meetings.

How much can AI take out?
How many layers do we really need?
How much capacity can we release?
Can the team move faster?
Can one manager handle more people?
Can the same work be done with fewer people?

Every one of these may be a legitimate business question.

And that is precisely what makes this moment difficult.

Because somewhere between productivity, restructuring, automation and relentless optimization, a quieter question is becoming easier to miss:

What is happening to the humans doing the work?

Not whether they are engaged. We have surveys for that.
Not whether they are productive. We have dashboards for that.

Something harder to measure.
Are they thinking more deeply?
Exercising more judgment?
Growing in capability?
Feeling more ownership?
Having better conversations?
Becoming more courageous?

Or are we slowly designing organizations in which humans are increasingly efficient, increasingly monitored, increasingly assisted and increasingly exhausted?

Nobody intends the second organization.

That does not mean we cannot build it.

Consider four signals appearing almost simultaneously in the world of work.

Uber is flattening. The company announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,300 roles, around 10 percent of its workforce, while reducing management layers and broadening spans of control. The stated logic is familiar across corporate life today: fewer layers, faster decisions, greater efficiency.

Twilio is making a different bet. CEO Khozema Shipchandler has been publicly arguing for the importance of middle managers and human judgment. In an age of scale, he also does something spectacularly unscalable: writes personal handwritten notes to more than 80 members of his leadership team each year.

Wipro says AI has freed capacity equivalent to approximately 20,000 employees. What is interesting is what reportedly happened next. The company says those employees were redeployed rather than simply removed, alongside significant investment in AI training.

And then there is Safeguard Global, which tried something that sounds unquestionably human: a four-day working week. Except some employees began compressing five days of work into four exhausting ones, while others quietly worked on Fridays anyway. The company listened and changed the model.

Four companies.
Four very different decisions.
And none can be classified neatly as human or inhuman.

That is the point.

We have spent enormous energy asking what artificial intelligence will eventually become capable of doing.

I wonder whether we are paying enough attention to what humans are becoming while that happens.

The technology itself does not answer that question.

AI can remove repetitive work and give someone more time to think.
It can also remove repetitive work and give them twenty percent more work.

A flatter organization can restore autonomy and remove bureaucracy.
It can also leave one manager responsible for so many people that management becomes administration rather than leadership.

A four-day week can restore people's lives.
It can also compress the same exhaustion into fewer days.

A handwritten note cannot transform an organization.
But neither should we dismiss what it represents.

It is inefficient.
It takes time.
It cannot be automated without destroying the very thing that gives it meaning.

And perhaps that is worth noticing.

We have become accustomed to treating efficiency as an unquestioned good.

But not everything valuable about leadership is efficient.

Listening is inefficient.
Mentoring is inefficient.
Sitting with someone who is struggling when you have another meeting in eleven minutes is inefficient.
Thinking before deciding is inefficient.
Allowing disagreement to remain unresolved long enough to understand it is inefficient.
Knowing your people is spectacularly inefficient.

Human beings are inefficient.

That may not be a design flaw.

The danger is not that organizations suddenly decide to become less human.

Nobody puts that into a strategy document.

It happens through thousands of individually rational decisions.

One more layer removed.
One more role automated.
One more dashboard introduced.
One more meeting shortened.
One more manager carrying twice the span.
One more person asked to absorb the productivity gain.
One more difficult conversation replaced by a process.

Each decision makes sense.

The cumulative experience may not.

This is Leadership Drift at organizational scale.

Just as an individual leader can drift gradually under sustained pressure without noticing the change in themselves, organizations can drift under sustained pressure toward efficiency, speed and control while continuing to describe themselves as people-first.

And by the time the contradiction becomes visible in engagement, attrition, trust or performance, the behaviour has often already become culture.

For most of my working life, leadership development has asked some version of the same question:

How do we make leaders better?

More strategic. More emotionally intelligent. More resilient. More agile. More inclusive. More productive.

I have spent much of my own career working on those questions.

But lately I find myself increasingly interested in another one.

Better at what?

If technology allows a leader to process twice the information, manage twice the span and make decisions twice as quickly, have we created a better leader?

Possibly.

But what if that leader now has half as many conversations?
What if they know less about the people doing the work?
What if there is no longer any empty space in which judgment can form?
What if efficiency has increased while presence has disappeared?

This is why I have become wary of using words such as human leadership to mean kinder leadership.

That is not what I mean.

A human leader may make an extremely difficult decision.

They may restructure a business, close an operation, reject an idea, challenge someone sharply or demand significantly better performance.

Human leadership is not the absence of hardness.

It is the refusal to stop seeing the human being while doing hard things.

And in the age we are entering, I suspect that distinction will matter enormously.

For most of my working life, leadership development has asked some version of the same question:

How do we make leaders better?

More strategic. More emotionally intelligent. More resilient. More agile. More inclusive. More productive.

I have spent much of my own career working on those questions.

But lately I find myself increasingly interested in another one.

Better at what?

If technology allows a leader to process twice the information, manage twice the span and make decisions twice as quickly, have we created a better leader?

Possibly.

But what if that leader now has half as many conversations?
What if they know less about the people doing the work?
What if there is no longer any empty space in which judgment can form?
What if efficiency has increased while presence has disappeared?

This is why I have become wary of using words such as human leadership to mean kinder leadership.

That is not what I mean.

A human leader may make an extremely difficult decision.

They may restructure a business, close an operation, reject an idea, challenge someone sharply or demand significantly better performance.

Human leadership is not the absence of hardness.

It is the refusal to stop seeing the human being while doing hard things.

And in the age we are entering, I suspect that distinction will matter enormously.

Identify one meaningful efficiency your team has gained from AI, automation or a new process.

Then ask: Where did the saved capacity actually go?

Did it create thinking time, learning, customer attention or better work? Or did it simply become more work?

Do not judge the answer. Just find it.

Look for one part of your leadership this week that is deliberately inefficient.

A conversation without an agenda. A handwritten message. Ten minutes longer with someone who needs it. A question you could answer immediately but choose to think about.

Notice whether its inefficiency is precisely what gives it value.

If technology gave you back 20 percent of your time tomorrow, would your people experience more of you or would the organization simply receive 20 percent more output?