I have spent more than 30 years in leadership development, executive advisory, and practical organizational change.
And for almost 30 years, I have seen the same uncomfortable truth:
Most leadership development programs do not really change the way managers manage when it matters. I realized that when I was a very young consultant. A win-win situation but with no real organizational impact. Workshops help HR to do something better than nothing. The best we can.Everybody wins.
With respect to the many companies built around this impressive industry, I will not say leadership development is useless. It isnot.
The direct encounter with peers, the reflection, the room, the conversation - that can be valuable. Sometimes even priceless.
But let’s be honest.
Most managers do not remember the model when they need it.
They do not pull out the framework in the middle of a difficult conversation.
They do not recall the five steps, the three principles, the key insight, or the “aha moment” from the workshop when they are stuck between frustrated employee, an unclear decision, and a business target that still needs to be delivered.
And worse - even if the content exists somewhere, no one knows where to find it.
This is a period when we need to ask honestly: “Why”. For everything we did before.
So now, many organizations have moved to the other extreme.
They stopped investing seriously in leadership development and started telling managers to “ask ChatGPT.”
And yes - it is cheaper.
I have already met too many companies that see this as a way to save tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
But here is the question:
What about professional accountability?
What about the generic answers? The main way to impact your company culture and managerial behavior?
What about the confident nonsense AI can produce?
What about the fact that we still do not know what managers are actually struggling with, what they are asking, and what they need at the exact moment they need support?
And the potential damage of leaving this significant area of management open to ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini to decide.
If you are a “numbers person”, then the waste cost of inefficient mid-level managers for a company of 1000 employees >$16M. Yes, this is the impact.
Do you really want to leave it for an unmanaged chat?
As organizations grow, this gap only becomes more painful.
Because leadership development that does not support each manager personally, in their own context, at the right moment, inside the actual flow of managerial work - is simply not valid anymore.
Imagine a different world.
A world where every manager has a “fly on the wall” that follows their managerial environment, understands their systems, their team dynamics, their business processes, and the reality in which they operate.
Not a consultant.
Not a coach waiting for the next session.
Not a chatbot answering isolated questions.
A real business partner for execution.
One that helps in the moment, guides when needed, acts when relevant, and learns the managerial environment over time.
And no - this is not Claude.
Claude is brilliant. Truly. One of the best “employees” we have.
But a real-time managerial tool on top of a general AI chat is a much more complex challenge than most people understand.
Claude does not know how to ask the right managerial questions across many organizational, emotional, operational, and business parameters.
Even if it holds a lot of information about you, the result can easily become a huge soup of context that no manager can actually use inthe moment.
Claude is not designed to protect independent managerial thinking.
And Claude will not give the organization a structured view of what managers are struggling with, what questions they ask, where execution breaks down, and what patterns repeat across teams - because those interactions are private, fragmented, unstructured, and not built for organizational learning.
Then there are organizations that say:
“We built our own agents.”
And honestly? Perfect.
That is exactly the kind of organization I would want to work with.
But then comes the real question:
Who maintains all these agents?
Who connects them into one holistic system? And continue to develop them into daily actions?
Who keeps them aligned with the organization’s processes, changes, leadership language, priorities, and managerial reality?
Who updates them when the business changes?
Who replaces them when the workflow changes?
Who analyzes what they actually improve?
Who makes sure they do not become another layer of fragmented tools?
Because this is not just “build me an agent.”
It is:
Change it.
Update it.
Adapt it.
Replace it.
Understand the context.
Analyze the signals.
Connect it to the business.
And at some point, organizations need to ask themselves:
Are we becoming experts in building AI agents?
Or are we staying experts in building our company?
That is the real question.
Leadership development is not dead.
But the old format is no longer enough.
And “just ask AI” is not a strategy.
The next generation of leadership development will not be another program, another workshop, or another generic chatbot.
It will be personal, contextual, real-time, measurable, and embedded inside the flow of work.
Because managers do not need more content.
They need support at the exact moment execution breaks.
And if you are also feeling this frustration, I would genuinely love to hear:
How are you solving it today?