These boots won't get you anywhere ...

... Because AI has changed the terrain, and old strengths can become hidden liabilities

Most leadership breakdowns don’t arrive with a bang. They arrive dressed as competence.

You still hit the deadlines. You still stay calm in the meeting. Your calendar is full, your reputation intact, and in theory your team is technically fine, and yet something is making you feel as though you’re pushing through an undefinable resistance, compensating in ways that look like discipline but feel like drag.

That’s the moment most people miss, because nothing looks wrong from the outside.

I had that exact realisation last weekend when I took my old ski boots to the tip. They still looked fantastic, the buckles still clicked perfectly into place, and if you had seen them neatly by the door you would have assumed they had years left.

But the problem with ski boots is that they don’t fail on the surface. They fail in the parts you don’t see, from the repeated flexing, the cold, and the slow fatigue of material that has done its job faithfully for a long time and is now giving way. Even the moulded footbeds designed to hold you safely in place begin to crumble, and the danger isn’t obvious until the day you need support and it isn’t there.

You don’t get a dramatic warning. You just get instability.

Leadership habits break down the same way, and the AI era is accelerating the wear and tear.

The behaviours that built your success, you being the one who always has the answers, always fixes, always steps in, can keep you looking impressive long after they’ve stopped being sustainable. They still work in the same way that my ski boots still fastened, but the terrain has changed and the work environment is moving faster.

And the cost of using yesterday’s internal structure in today’s landscape shows up as  strain, in the form of decisions that seem to be more difficult to reach, a team that waits for you rather than growing beyond you, and a culture that becomes careful because the leader is running things too tightly to tolerate healthy challenge.

Executive Coach, Marshall Goldsmith, explored this years ago in his bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. At senior levels, what got you here is often exactly what people praise you for: high standards, speed, competence, decisiveness, reliability. These qualities build careers, and they can also become constraints when the context shifts and the internal operating system doesn’t, because a strength can harden into a reflex.

And when certainty shrinks, as is currently happening in today’s AI-accelerated environment, reflex takes over. The nervous system moves first. Some leaders grip harder. Some hide behind their expertise. Some tighten control and call it “standards”, when what’s actually happening is the body trying to feel safe in a landscape that no longer feels stable.

AI turns leadership into a live pressure test.

It reveals whether you can stay grounded whilst not having all the answers in public, whether you can tolerate not knowing without becoming defensive, and whether you can create a space where people contribute rather than comply.

This is where best-selling author and researcher Joe Dispenza’s suggestion that a new reality requires a new personality becomes hard to ignore, because if you continue to think, feel and react from the same automatic identity, you will recreate the same patterns, just at greater speed. You cannot step onto new terrain with an old internal blueprint and expect stability.

In cross-cultural teams, the consequences surface quickly. When competence hardens into certainty and certainty becomes the unspoken standard, people adapt. They manage the leader instead of the work, and that careful, compliant culture costs more than any AI tool will ever save because it erodes truth, ownership and innovation.

The leaders who will thrive in this terrain are not the ones who cling tighter to what once worked. They will be the ones willing to examine who they are under pressure and to consciously build the emotional range, cognitive flexibility and relational courage that this moment demands.

Those ski boots still looked great, but I knew that they were no longer fit for purpose, which is why they had to go.  Good leadership is the same - you update the internal support before the strain becomes failure.

If this resonates and you’re navigating this shift, message me. I’ll point you towards the most useful next step, whether that’s a resource or a conversation.