The Next Great Leaders Will Be Architects of Leverage

For most of modern business, leadership has been closely tied to scale.

More revenue meant more people.

More customers meant more salespeople.

More products meant more engineers.

More complexity meant more managers.

A leader's ability to build and manage a larger organization was often a proxy for their impact.

AI is beginning to challenge that model.

The next generation of great leaders may not be the ones who can manage the largest teams.

They may be the ones who can create the most leverage from a relatively small team.

The job is changing

Historically, when a company wanted to increase output, the answer was often straightforward:

Add people.

Need more sales?

Hire more AEs.

Need more product capacity?

Hire more engineers.

Need more customer support?

Add more people to the support organization.

AI introduces another lever.

Instead of asking:

"How many people do we need?"

leaders can increasingly ask:

"How much more can this organization accomplish with the people we already have?"

That is a fundamentally different management problem.

And it requires a different kind of leader.

The architect of leverage

I think the next great leaders will increasingly operate less like traditional managers and more like architects of leverage.

They will constantly look for ways to multiply the output of their teams.

That might mean:

• Automating repetitive work

• Giving employees AI agents to handle lower-value tasks

• Redesigning workflows around what machines can now do

• Removing layers of unnecessary process

• Giving smaller teams greater ownership

• Using data to make decisions faster

• Reallocating people toward higher-value work

The technology matters.

But the technology isn't the hard part.

The hard part is knowing where to apply it.

This changes what we should look for in leaders

For years, executive hiring has rewarded relatively easy-to-measure indicators:

How large was your team?

How much revenue did you own?

What was your budget?

How many people reported to you?

What size organization did you inherit?

Those metrics aren't going away.

But I think they're becoming less interesting.

Imagine two executives.

Executive A managed a 200-person organization that generated $100 million.

Executive B managed a 75-person organization that generated $100 million because they fundamentally redesigned how the organization operated.

Which leader created more leverage?

Historically, we may have simply said Executive A had more scale.

In an AI-enabled organization, I think we need to ask a different question:

Which leader built the better system?

This doesn't mean smaller organizations are automatically better

This isn't an argument for cutting headcount.

It's an argument for thinking differently about headcount.

AI will create situations where the right answer is to grow.

It will create others where the right answer is to automate.

And in some cases, it will allow a company to pursue opportunities that previously weren't economically viable.

The leader's job isn't to minimize people.

It's to maximize organizational output.

That requires judgment.

The new executive scorecard

I suspect we're going to start evaluating leaders on a different set of questions.

Not just:

How many people did you manage?

But:

How much leverage did you create?

Not just:

What was your budget?

But:

How effectively did you deploy resources?

Not just:

How large did the organization become?

But:

How much did the organization accomplish?

And perhaps most importantly:

What did you redesign because AI made the old way of working obsolete?

Those questions reveal something that a traditional resume often can't.

This is where executive hiring gets difficult

Most companies are still hiring leaders using scorecards designed for a different operating environment.

They look for the executive who has:

• Managed the biggest team

• Run the largest P&L

• Worked at the biggest company

• Held the title the longest

• Done the job the same way before

But the leaders who will create the most value in an AI-enabled organization may not have the most traditional backgrounds.

They may have spent the last two years experimenting with AI.

They may have eliminated entire workflows.

They may have built small teams that dramatically outperform larger organizations.

They may have changed how their teams operate before anyone asked them to.

Some of those experiences won't show up neatly on a resume.

The leadership advantage

AI is creating a strange paradox.

As technology becomes more powerful, leadership may matter more, not less.

Because when everyone has access to increasingly powerful tools, the advantage shifts toward the people who know how to deploy those tools effectively.

The technology becomes more available.

The judgment becomes more valuable.

The organizations that win won't necessarily be the ones with the most AI.

They'll be the ones with leaders who know where AI creates leverage, and how to redesign the organization around it.

That's why I believe the next great leaders won't simply be managers of people.

They'll be architects of leverage.

And I think we're going to have to fundamentally change how we identify them.