If the leadership skills your top executives are known for have zero overlap with what your teams actually say they value — as global research suggests — whose leadership development plan is really working?

It’s tempting to frame this topic as “which leadership skills will AI kill off” — but the more accurate, and more useful, framing is which leadership behaviours have already become table stakes because AI does them faster than any human ever could.

Traditional performance metrics for leadership potential are becoming obsolete as AI advances, according to a 2026 study by personality assessment firm Hogan involving nearly 10,000 employees across 25 countries. That study also uncovered something confronting: there was no overlap at all between the top five leadership competencies executives display and the top five their teams actually value. In other words, plenty of what’s long been rewarded as “leadership” — data mastery, information gatekeeping, always having the answer — was already on shaky ground before AI arrived, and AI has simply made the cracks impossible to ignore.

So what’s genuinely on the way out? Leadership defined primarily by “having the answer” is a strong candidate. Effective leaders must now prioritise good judgement and responsibility over merely providing answers, because AI can generate answers faster and more comprehensively than any executive briefing ever could. Similarly, leadership built around controlling the flow of information is losing relevance fast — when data and analysis are a prompt away, the leader who hoards information as a source of power has nothing left to hoard.

Command-and-control decision-making is also fading. AI can suggest feedback frameworks and surface patterns, but leadership increasingly means deciding what matters when data is incomplete, conflicting, political, or moving fast — a distinctly human judgement call that no model can make on a leader’s behalf.

Importantly, this isn’t a story about AI replacing leaders — it’s a story about AI exposing which leadership skills were never that valuable to begin with. Jobs and Skills Australia has been explicit that communication, teamwork, critical inquiry, creative thinking, and leadership remain essential as work changes, arguing these should never be dismissed as “soft skills” because they’re central to productivity and workforce adaptability.

For L&D teams, the task now is to prune leadership curricula of anything that trains people to be human search engines or human dashboards, and instead double down on coaching, judgement under uncertainty, psychological safety, and hard conversations — the capabilities that get more valuable, not less, the more capable AI becomes.

So tell us: If the leadership skills your top executives are known for have zero overlap with what your teams actually say they value — as global research suggests — whose leadership development plan is really working?

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