When Machines Have the Answers, Leaders Need Better Questions
AI is taking over more of the work that used to define expertise. That does not make leadership less important. It changes what we should be looking for.
For decades, many leaders rose because they knew more than the people around them: the best engineer became head of engineering, the best salesperson became sales director. Expertise was the ticket to leadership. That model is under pressure.
Complicated versus complex
Harvard’s Arthur C. Brooks makes a useful distinction in an HBR Executive masterclass. AI is increasingly good at complicated problems, the ones with a solution that can be calculated. Leadership is about complex problems: people, meaning, uncertainty. That is exactly where machines fall short.¹ HBR describes the mental shift this requires: from certainty to clarity, from expertise to exploration, and from emotional control to emotional insight.²
Trust is the scarce resource
According to Gartner research published in HBR, most employees do not trust their leaders. Leaders who explain the reasons behind their decisions and take visible ownership build trust faster.³ It is not a soft issue. Employees who do not trust their leaders will not trust the AI tools those leaders introduce either, and adoption stalls.⁴
The squeezed manager
HBR’s annual trend reports have been sounding the same alarm since 2023: managers are caught between the expectations of senior leadership and those of their teams.⁵ Conflict resolution, coaching and people leadership have become core skills, no longer extras.⁶ HBR also warns against treating resilience as a personal trait some people have and others lack. It is a shared responsibility of the organisation.⁷
Measuring the wrong things
There is a subtle trap here. Employees who use AI heavily can look highly productive, while those who take time to check, challenge and correct AI output look slower, precisely when they add the most value.⁸ Leaders who keep steering on the old metrics will reward the wrong behaviour.
What this means for selecting leaders
This has direct consequences for executive search. A CV shows where someone has been. It says little about how that person handles what nobody has seen before. Gartner even expects forward-thinking employers to bring the human element back into hiring, as a counterweight to automated selection.⁹ We agree. In our assessments we look beyond track record, to judgement, the capacity to build trust, learning agility and the ability to give direction when the map is incomplete.
Russell Reynolds CEO Constantine Alexandrakis put it this way in HBR: leading transformation means creating urgency, building a leadership team designed for change and preparing people for complexity.¹⁰ None of that can be delegated to an algorithm.
Our view
Leadership is the L in G.O.A.L. for a reason. It comes last because it has to serve everything before it: the growth ambition, the organisation, the alignment. The right leader is not the one with the best answers. It is the one who asks the right questions, and is trusted to find the answers together with the team.
Questions we ask our clients
- What kind of leader does your GOAL require right now: a builder, a connector or a transformer?
- How do you test judgement, trustworthiness and learning agility when you select leaders, beyond the CV?
- Which behaviour do your current metrics reward, and is it the behaviour you need?
Our work starts with your GOAL — not with a vacancy. Read more about our G.O.A.L. model or get in touch.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, “What AI Can’t Do: The New Job of Leadership”, April 2026. hbr.org/2026/04/what-ai-cant-do-the-new-job-of-leadership
- Harvard Business Review, “The Mindsets Leaders Need as AI Accelerates the Pace of Business”, October 2026. hbr.org/2026/10/the-mindsets-leaders-need-as-ai-accelerates-the-pace-of-business
- Harvard Business Review, “Most Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders. Here’s What to Do About It.”, December 2025. hbr.org/2025/12/most-employees-dont-trust-their-leaders-heres-what-to-do-about-it
- Harvard Business Review, “To Adopt AI at Scale, Employees Need to Trust Agents”, September 2026. hbr.org/2026/09/to-adopt-ai-at-scale-employees-need-to-trust-agents
- Harvard Business Review, “9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2023 and Beyond”, January 2023. hbr.org/2023/01/9-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2023-and-beyond
- Harvard Business Review, “9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2024 and Beyond”, January 2024. hbr.org/2024/01/9-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2024-and-beyond
- Harvard Business Review, “What Leaders Get Wrong About Resilience”, June 2022. hbr.org/2022/06/what-leaders-get-wrong-about-resilience
- Harvard Business Review, “Performance Management Needs New Metrics in the AI Era”, July 2026. hbr.org/2026/07/performance-management-needs-new-metrics-in-the-ai-era
- Harvard Business Review, “9 Trends Shaping Work in 2026 and Beyond”, February 2026. hbr.org/2026/02/9-trends-shaping-work-in-2026-and-beyond
- Harvard Business Review, “How the Best CEOs Lead Transformation”, July 2026. hbr.org/2026/07/how-the-best-ceos-lead-transformation