Our work is shifted from mere execution to wholistic orchestration. When you look out at your own workplace—the ecosystem—what is your vision?
While artificial intelligence (AI) did not start that shift, it increasingly is making the shift impossible to ignore.
For most of my own career, the acknowledged “job of a leader” was to be the best.
The best at the work.
The best at leading people.
The best at the skills required.
The strongest performer got promoted. The technical expert became the manager. Mastery of the work was the credential; execution was the deliverable.
That model is under real pressure. Not because mastery has stopped mattering…but because the systems we now lead have grown beyond what any one person can be “the best” at!
Distributed teams
Specialized ability
Deep expertise
Layered tools
In the organizational structures and cultures I support, an individual trying to be the best performer in the room is playing the wrong instrument.
A Conductor on Leadership
I attended the Training 2025 Conference & Expo where conductor Sarah Hicks gave the keynote.
Here is a quote I have carried with me since:
“Conductors lead via collaboration and influence. A good conductor—as a good leader—helps each player understand their role in the whole ensemble. They rely on the talent and expertise of the players. The conductor needs the orchestra, and the orchestra needs the conductor. When we are on the stage, we agree to agree.”
Sit with that last line.
“We agree to agree.”
That is not how most leaders think about authority. Most leaders are trained (and rewarded) to think about authority as something they have and others receive.
Hicks described something else: a working agreement among individuals, held together by someone whose job is to orchestrate a vision of success.
That is the leadership role that is now non-negotiable.
The Work Has Changed
This is where the shift gets specific for training, learning, and development professionals. Many of those who ask me to facilitate leader and leadership development programming are still focused on training for execution.
We could continue to teach people how to plan better, decide faster, communicate clearer, manage tighter. These are real skills. They are just not as competitive as they used to be.
And by themselves, they are not enough.
Better, faster, clearer, tighter…those are now expected.
They will not, by themselves, make anyone stand out.
The leader who is going to do work that matters needs an unusual set of capabilities; they need to be a conductor of awesomeness.
They need to know what each part of their system is genuinely capable of, including the parts that are not human. They need to design how those parts fit together. And they need to know, with honesty, what only the humans can bring.
That is not an execution skill set. It is an orchestration skill set. And it is slowly making its way into leadership curricula.
Oh, and we need to go faster.
What Orchestration Asks of a Leader
I reflect on this in three ways.
The first is honest reflection on capability. Leaders who do not acknowledge the diverse strengths of both human and technological contributions will misallocate attention.
They will ask people to do work the AI is better at. They will ask the AI to do work that requires a human in the loop. They will spend their own time on tasks any capable system could carry.
The second is integration. How work flows. Who is in which conversation. Which tools support which decisions.
I recently worked with a senior leader who realized in the middle of our third coaching session that one of the documents her team had been drafting for her every Friday morning for the past six months could be drafted in mere minutes by an agent they could build (and share) on their desktop.
The third is the question that becomes more important every quarter. (Or is it every week?):
What does only the human bring?
Connective coherence
Sense-making
Ethical judgment
Relational trust
Presence in the moments that matter
As AI takes on more of the analytical and administrative load, this question stops being philosophical. It is now operational.
What this Means for People Who Build Leaders
If you are advocating for or building leaders and leadership capability in your organization, the time is now. You have to think differently.
The programs that trained high performers to become high-executing managers are not the programs that will build the next generation of effective leaders.
The capabilities have shifted. The curriculum must follow.
But this does not mean we abandon the fundamentals. Decision-making, communication, accountability, feedback…these still matter. But they sit below a foundation that some existing programs have yet to address.
The capacity to lead a system you do not personally execute.
The capacity to design conditions rather than dictate outcomes.
The capacity to integrate human judgment with non-human capability without losing what is human in the process.
That is the new training problem. It is also the new leadership problem.
Questions for Your Next Meeting
Open your calendar and schedule a block of time where you can meet with three to five people on your team and unlock answers to questions that sound like these:
- What is each person in this room uniquely capable of contributing today, that nothing and no one else in the system can?
- What is the AI, our platforms, and the systems we already have capable of handling that we are still doing manually out of habit?
The answers will not arrive at once. That is your reflective practice. As Hicks said, “An orchestra is a group of people—who do different things, play different instruments at different times—who come together to bring a vision to life.”
Leaders in the training ecosystem, what is your vision?
