I've been a people manager for most of my career. I've managed teams of 10 and teams of 200. I've managed through company transformations, market disruptions, and now — the most fundamental shift in the nature of knowledge work since the internet.
Here's what I believe about people leadership in this moment.
The Fundamentals Haven't Changed
The things that make a great manager great are remarkably stable across time and context.
Clarity about what matters and why. Honest, timely feedback. Genuine investment in each person's growth. The ability to create psychological safety — so people feel they can take risks, admit mistakes, and ask for help without fear.
These are not AI-era leadership skills. They are enduring human leadership skills. If you're not doing these well, no amount of AI fluency will make you a great leader.
But Some Things Are Genuinely New
The context has changed enough that some of what leadership requires is new.
You must model comfort with uncertainty. AI is changing the nature of many roles faster than anyone has clear answers for. Your team is watching how you hold that uncertainty. If you perform false confidence — acting like you know exactly where this is going — you will lose their trust when reality doesn't match the narrative. Model honest uncertainty. Model the curiosity and experimentation that uncertainty calls for.
You must develop your own AI intuition. You cannot lead a team through an AI-enabled transformation if you don't understand what AI can and cannot do. Not at a technical level. At a practical level: what kinds of problems does AI actually help with? Where does it fail? What does good AI-assisted work look like versus AI-generated-and-unreviewed work?
If you're not using AI tools yourself — regularly, for your own work — you cannot evaluate the quality of your team's AI-assisted output. And you cannot have credible conversations with your team about what good looks like.
You must think explicitly about skill development in a shifting landscape. The skills that will be most valuable in three years look different from the skills that were most valuable three years ago. As a leader, you are partly responsible for helping your team navigate that shift — identifying what to invest in, what to let atrophy, and how to build the learning habits that will matter more than any specific skill set.
You must protect against automation of human judgment. AI will automate a lot of what knowledge workers currently do. The work that remains will require more judgment, not less. Your job as a leader includes protecting space for genuine human reasoning — and not accepting AI-generated output as a substitute for thinking.
The Leadership Constant
I'll end where I started. The fundamentals haven't changed.
The most important thing you can do as a people leader in the AI era is the same as in every era before it: care genuinely about the people on your team. Invest in their growth. Be honest with them. Create the conditions for them to do great work.
Everything else is context.
Views are personal.