Do people grow around you, or just survive you?

Something shifted this month.

Not gradually. Abruptly.

In June 2026, Anthropic's engineers felt it first. Alex Albert : "The model stopped feeling like a tool I direct and started feeling like something I collaborate with." Felix Rieseberg , who leads Claude Cowork, went further: "we are no longer giving AI tasks. We are giving it responsibilities."

That shift took weeks. It changes everything.

We shifted from asking questions to achieving or assigning Tasks to giving Responsibilities to AI.

That progression is worth sitting with. Because it is not just a description of how AI is evolving. It is a mirror held up to how we lead people.

And here is the question I want us to carry through this edition, the one I promised in May: 

Is the way you lead helping people grow or helping them survive you?

The AI shift makes this question more urgent, not less. When machines can take on tasks and soon, responsibilities, the irreplaceable thing a leader offers is not execution. It is growth. Yours, and theirs.

Where we have been

Since January, this season has been building toward something. We started with preparing your mind (January), then rewriting your narrative (February), then the power of communities (March), then reimagining education for an AI-first world (April), then investing in the next generation (May). Each edition has been, in its own way, about the same underlying question: who are we becoming, and who are we helping to become?

This month, we turn to the heart of it. Leadership itself. 

Ethan Mollick , whose book Co-Intelligence became a landmark text on working alongside AI, recently reflected on how quickly his framing had aged. His book described a world of chatbots, where “humans were at the center, chatbots were your helpers.”

That world lasted about two years.

Coding agents now exist that have led to seventeen times more code being written. Anthropic itself reported that AI now writes 80% of its code, with each developer shipping eight times more.

Mollick puts it plainly:

“Software development is changing, and what is happening in coding is going to be happening in many fields.”

His new book is called Co-Existence. The title tells the story. We are no longer learning to work alongside AI. We are learning to live alongside it, to negotiate with it, to figure out which choices remain ours and which we hand over.

That negotiation is exactly what leadership has always been. 

The question of what to delegate and what to hold. The question of when to give someone an answer and when to give them a question instead. The question of what growth looks like when the machine can do more than the person in front of you could do a year ago.

AI is not making leadership less necessary. It is making it more demanding, more human, and more consequential than it has ever been.

The numbers that should stop us cold

Before we talk about what great leadership looks like, let us be honest about the baseline.

Gallup studied 2.7 million employees and reached a conclusion that is hard to look away from: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not the industry. Not the brand. Not the pay. The single biggest factor in whether a team thrives or withers is one person : the direct manager. 

Two thirds of people, by their own account, are not being grown. They are being managed. They are surviving.

Now hold that next to the AI shift. If AI is absorbing more of the execution, the tasks, and soon the responsibilities, then the human leader’s role is concentrating into exactly the thing most leaders are not doing: growing people.

The gap between where most leadership sits and where it needs to go has never been wider, or more urgent to close.

The hardest thing I learned at Microsoft

For a long stretch of my career, my team had a nickname for me. Mr Plus.

Whatever the target, I wanted more. Whatever the bar, I wanted it higher. I told myself that pushing hard was the same as caring deeply. After all, I was only asking people to do what I would have done myself.

It took coaching, and a few honest people around me, to show me the flaw. When the leader is the most intense source of pressure in the room, people do not grow. They brace. They spend their best energy managing me instead of building the thing we were both there to build. I was producing compliance and calling it ambition.

What changed me was not a framework. It was the slow, humbling shift from inspection to coaching. From being the person with all the answers to being the person who grows the people who find them. And I learned, through real loss and real vulnerability, that the strength I had been performing was far less powerful than the strength that comes from being genuinely present with people.

At Live for Good , and across SKEMA Business School ’s campuses, I keep returning to the same truth: people do not rise to the pressure we put on them. They rise to the belief we place in them, and the room we give them to grow.

Three voices that reframe what growing people means

These are three conversations from the Positive Leadership Podcast that cut to the heart of this question.

The Guest: Indra Nooyi — former Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo

When I asked Indra how she got to where she did, she did not talk about strategy or ambition. She talked about the people who chose to grow her.

“I’ve had a lot of people that chose to mentor me,” she told me. “I did not go to anybody and say, can you mentor me? They came to me.”

That detail is the whole lesson. The leaders who shaped her did not wait for her to earn their attention. They extended belief first. In a world where AI can increasingly handle the task in front of someone, this becomes even more important: what a person needs from a human leader is not instruction. It is investment.

🚫 The Trap to Reject: "People should earn my investment by proving themselves first."

✅ The Story to Tell: "The leaders who made me chose to invest before I asked. My job is to extend that belief early."

🎧 Deep Dive: Purpose-driven leadership, breaking glass ceilings — Indra Nooyi

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The Guest: Herminia Ibarra , Professor at London Business School , author of Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader

Herminia studies how people actually change. Her finding is counter-intuitive, especially for anyone who leads by asking people to reflect more.

“Reflection doesn’t help that much,” she told me, “because it’s not in your past experience. What you need is fresh perspective.”

People do not grow by replaying what they already know. They grow by being put in new situations that force new behaviour. This connects directly to the AI shift: the experiences that grow people now are the ones AI cannot replicate. New rooms. New relationships. New responsibilities that require human judgment and human presence.

🚫 The Trap to Reject: "If someone is stuck, give them more advice or ask them to reflect on it."

✅ The Story to Tell: "Growth comes from new action. I develop people by giving them experiences they’ve never had, not just advice they’ve heard before."

🎧 Deep Dive: Organizational Transformation through Structure and External Perspective — Herminia Ibarra

The Guest: Gianpiero Petriglieri , Associate Professor at INSEAD

Gianpiero says something about human development that no algorithm will ever capture.

“A machine can seduce me,” he told me, “but it cannot love me. I think we don’t grow unless we are loved.”

In a leadership context, that word matters more than it first appears. People do not reach their potential under pressure alone. They reach it when they feel genuinely seen, trusted, and cared for. And as AI takes on more of the cognitive load of work, what humans are left holding, the thing only humans can offer each other is precisely this: presence, recognition, care.

The leader who masters this is not the one who uses AI best. It is the one whose humanity becomes more visible because of it.

🚫 The Trap to Reject: "People grow under pressure. Push them hard enough and they’ll rise."

✅ The Story to Tell: "People grow when they feel genuinely seen. Care is not a lowering of the bar. It is what lets people clear it."

🎧 Deep Dive: Leadership and Love, Intention and Freedom — Gianpiero Petriglieri

What AI is really asking of us

Here is the provocation I want to leave with you.

We are entering a period where AI can be given questions, tasks, and soon responsibilities. The machines are moving up the value chain. And as they do, they expose something uncomfortable: most organisations have been built around the same hierarchy. We give people questions when they are junior. Tasks when they are trusted. Responsibilities when they have proved themselves.

That model is breaking. Not because of AI. AI is only accelerating a crack that was already there.

The organisations that will thrive are not those that learn to use AI fastest. They are those that learn to grow people fastest because the only sustainable competitive advantage left is human judgment, human creativity, and human leadership.

Positive Leadership is not a nice-to-have in this world. It is the survival strategy.

The question is not whether AI will change your organisation. It will.

The question is whether you will lead that change by growing the people around you, or whether you will let the disruption manage you.

Three questions worth holding this month

Look at your direct team. Who has grown the most in the last year, and what did you actually do that made it possible? If you cannot name a specific action, the growth may have happened despite you, not because of you.

Think of the last time someone brought you a problem. Did you solve it for them, or did you help them solve it? One feels efficient. Only one builds capacity.

And the honest one. If you went on leave for two months or if an AI took over your reporting function tomorrow would your team stall, or would it finally get the room to grow? The answer tells you whether you have been building people or building dependence.

A challenge for July

Before the next edition, pick the one person on your team with the most untapped potential. Not the safest pair of hands. The one with the most room to grow.

Give them a single assignment that is genuinely above their current level. Something that will make them slightly uncomfortable. Then do the hard part. When they come to you stuck, resist the rescue. Ask one good question instead of giving three answers, and let them carry it.

It will be slower than doing it yourself. That slowness is the investment. It is what growth looks like before it looks like results.

Next month, we turn inward to the question underneath all of this: where does the energy to keep growing other people actually come from, and how do you protect it before it runs out?

The future is not a machine problem. It is a leadership problem.

For two years I have been watching the AI transition from the inside: at SKEMA, where we are rethinking what education means in an AI-first world; at Live for Good, where we are asking how AI can accelerate the impact of young social entrepreneurs; and in every conversation on the Positive Leadership Podcast, where the most urgent theme keeps returning to the same place. 

The future belongs to organisations that grow people. Not manage them. Not survive them. Grow them.

AI is the pressure that makes this choice visible. It is no longer possible to hide leadership mediocrity behind execution capability. When the machine can execute, what is left is you, the climate your team lives in, the belief you extend or withhold, the room you give or take. 

Our job is not to be the hardest force in the room. It is to be the reason the people around us become more than they thought they could.

Make the next one count. 

Warmly,

Jean-Philippe Courtois

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