AI is Not Your Threat. Your Outdated Leadership is

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: while the leadership industry claps itself on the back, AI is tearing up the rulebook and making your leadership style look prehistoric.

For change has taken a rather ‘soft landing’ in the highly lucrative Leadership Training industry in recent years. From the framing of “the Charismatic Great Man who rides in to save the day”, to a recent sprinkling of new garnish in the shape of buzzwords like ‘empathy’ or ‘human’ (whatever that means) or some other meaningless intangible.

The Servant Leader who still clings to decision-making ownership!

In so many SMEs, leadership behaviours remain stuck in a pre-digital, industrial age playbook, just with softer language and the occasional Diversity platitude thrown in for good measure.

Strawmen aside, the way too many leaders still think about their role, even when cosplayed in the latest buzzwords, is fundamentally flawed for the world we’re operating in.

Now, well before AI, and anytime in the future.

Because, in this age of complexity, AI and the accelerating digital transformation, leadership isn’t about better top-down empathy.

It’s about producing organisations capable of withstanding any of our unpredictable futures. That doesn’t just mean ‘getting’ the value of AI. It means designing organisations and capabilities that no longer rely on top-down control at all. Redesigning starts with a rethink at the top. Not easy, but those who find that counterintuitive will limit their business’s ability to thrive and survive in the future.

The Legacy Mindset That Won’t Die (...or the jobby that won’t flush!)

The Leadership gurus will still centre on the notion that leaders sit, or are destined to sit, at the top of the pyramid. Why wouldn’t they? Their ideal customer profile needs a problem to pay for and being the smartest guy in the room, with an MBA proof of concept in hand, is the answer they need.

Sure, the Business Schools will teach them to:

• Strategise and plan - in a world of unpredictability!

• Make decisions – whilst being the furthest guy from the client, at the periphery!

• Cascade the message – when the urgency demands speed and when all their people want is autonomy!

In this modern mental model, leaders may be kinder, even more emotionally intelligent, or heavens above, even tech-savvy, but they’re still positioned as the ones who steer the ship, while others execute.

But the last time the world needed that model, our leaders wore bell bottoms and platform shoes! Today, success means knowledge, insight, and responsiveness are no longer concentrated at the top. They’re distributed across value-creating networks inside organisations, across markets, and now even between humans and machines.

In fact, that legacy leadership thinking isn’t just a quaint throwback. It creates bottlenecks, and leaders who get stuck trying to “own” digital transformation, while their teams remain passively waiting for instructions.

The Modern Playbook – Distributed Leadership principle

“In a complex world, leadership must be distributed because value creation is distributed.”

For SMEs, this is more than a philosophical statement. It’s an operating principle and the first place I tend to go to when I engage with a leadership team struggling with change and transformation. It means that success isn’t just about deploying new, shiny AI tools, automating processes, or hiring that new Fractional Head of Digital. It’s about rewiring the organisation so that leadership is a property of the system, not a trait embodied by a few.

In other words: stop trying to build better, kinder, more strategic bosses. Start building organisations where leadership capability, decision-making power, and strategic thinking are broadly distributed, especially close to where value is created: with your teams, your clients, your frontline people.

Technical Mastery vs. Organising Mastery

Yes, mastering the technical is crucial. Yes, being seen to lean in on personal digital learning pathway is a great way for codifying new habits and creating momentum.

But (and it’s a big but!) this technical mastery alone isn’t the source of competitive advantage.

The real competitive advantage comes from designing your organisation to be adaptable, responsive, and creative in the face of relentless change. That requires a different leadership posture: less about commanding and controlling, more about cultivating environments where distributed leadership can emerge and flourish.

The Foundation for Sustainable Success

This is foundational. Drop Tech into the old systemic playbook of command and control, and you join the large failure rate club. You’ll be the SMEs that continues to treat digital transformation like a project to be “managed” rather than an ongoing, adaptive state.

You can spend thousands on AI tools, shiny new platforms, and digital roadmaps, but if your leaders still operate with command-and-control thinking (even in softer, more human-centred language), you’ll see digital efforts stall. You’ll struggle with resistance, miss opportunities, and have a workforce that feels like transformation is being “done to them.”

But when leadership is distributed, and you create the conditions where teams have the autonomy, data access, and psychological safety to make decisions and drive innovation. That’s when digital capabilities supporting them become transformative rather than just transactional.

Three ways to get started (and yes, they start with you!)

So, if you’re an SME leader reading this, what next? How do you begin moving from the comfort of legacy leadership to this thing called distributed leadership?

Here are three starting points. But a warning: they start with introspection:

• Audit Your Own Leadership Reflexes Reflect on your own habits. Do you default to solving problems personally? Do decisions gravitate to you? Do your teams feel like they need your approval before acting?

Takeaway: If the answers are yes, that’s a sign your leadership is centralised, even if you’re “human-centred” in your approach.

• Redesign for Decentralisation This isn’t just about mindset. It’s about organisational architecture. How are decisions made? Who owns what?

Takeaway: Start building team structures, rituals, and systems that decentralise authority. Cross-functional teams, decision-making frameworks, and clarity of purpose all help here.

• Learn to Lead Without Knowing Everything The age of AI is the age of not-knowing. Leaders need to become comfortable with uncertainty, experimentation, and being wrong.

  
  

Takeaway: Part of your job is to facilitate learning and action across the organisation, not to have all the answers or solutions.

Final Thoughts

Legacy leadership thinking, of the more ‘humane kind’ favoured by the gurus, is holding SMEs back from fully realising the potential of digital transformation and AI.

And that becomes an existential issue that you can’t afford to do.

The real reveal isn’t just the tools or tech. It’s about creating the organisations that think, decide, and lead at every level. This is the SME success criteria of the future:

“Adaptive, decentralised, and built for complexity”

So, with that in mind, the question isn’t: “How can I be a better leader?”

It’s: “How can I create a better organisation where leadership isn’t a role, it’s a system?”

Class dismissed ! There's your homework.

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