The Apprenticeship That Made Leaders Isn't Happening Anymore

Individual contributors are becoming managers, managers are becoming individual contributors, and almost nobody is getting the leadership development they'd need to succeed at either one.

Look at what actually changed in the day-to-day. ICs used to write code, design features, and execute tasks. Now they spend much of their time writing requirements, breaking work into delegatable chunks, and reviewing what AI produced to confirm it drives the outcome anyone wanted. Managers, meanwhile, are expected to stay more technical than ever. Contribute directly, debug the issue, understand what's happening under the hood, keep up with tooling that changes every few months. And all of this is happening while companies flatten their orgs, pull out layers of middle management, and shrink team sizes… so managers carry wider spans with less time for coaching, exactly when the ICs under them are being asked to influence without any authority to back it up.

Leadership capability has always transferred through apprenticeship. The informal conversation on the way out of a meeting, watching someone experienced handle a hard room, doing the thing with a more senior person close enough to correct you. Those conditions are disappearing. Remote work removes the proximity, faster cycles remove the slack where coaching used to fit, and the gap between what senior people learned by doing and what junior people need right now widens every quarter. Since AI keeps absorbing more of the execution, human leadership and influencing skills become the actual differentiators. Which makes leadership development a deliberate, measured investment rather than something you assume will happen on its own. Build structured opportunities for the coaching conversations that used to happen organically. Design programs around influencing without authority instead of assuming people arrive knowing how. Measure leadership capability the way you'd measure any other critical business function. That gets built on purpose, or a lot of talented people spend the next few years struggling in roles nobody prepared them for.

0:00 The leadership development crisis

0:14 How IC and manager roles are changing

0:45 Why traditional mentorship is breaking down

1:10 What we need to do differently

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