People Do Not Quit Companies. They Quit Leaders Who Stop Being Fit for Purpose
The idea that people do not quit companies but quit managers has been repeated so often it risks sounding trite. Yet in an AI-driven, data-intelligent workplace, the phrase has taken on a sharper and more consequential meaning. Increasingly, people are not leaving because of workload alone or even pay. They are leaving because they sense that their leaders are no longer equipped to lead the future they themselves are actively preparing for.
This is particularly visible when a project begins to struggle in a hybrid team. Delivery slows, decisions feel clumsy and energy drains away. Leadership often responds by asking whether the team is performing to standard. The harder and more honest question is whether leadership itself is still operating at the level required to keep the project and the people, afloat.
Authority Is No Longer Enough in an AI-Driven Workplace
In traditional organisational models, authority flowed from position and tenure. Experience was the currency of leadership. Today, credibility increasingly flows from relevance. Research from Gallup shows that global employee engagement sits at just 23 percent, with disengagement highest where employees feel their leaders lack clarity, competence or trustworthiness. In environments shaped by rapid technological change, credibility erodes fastest when leaders cannot meaningfully engage with the tools, data and systems reshaping work.
The best talent is not waiting for permission to up-skill. They are learning continuously, experimenting with AI tools, improving data literacy and adapting how they work. When leaders are not doing the same, a quiet credibility gap opens. It does not announce itself. It shows up when ideas are no longer shared upward, when initiative becomes cautious and when innovation happens around leadership rather than through it.
People rarely quit at this stage. They disengage first.
When Accountability Turns into Blame
As projects become problematic, many leaders confuse accountability with pressure. Deadlines tighten, oversight increases and scrutiny intensifies. Blame begins to circulate, often subtly, about who is not pulling their weight. Yet decades of organisational research show that blame cultures suppress learning and accelerate failure.
Psychological safety studies demonstrate that teams perform better when they can surface risks early without fear of punishment. When blame enters the system, errors are hidden, not resolved. This dynamic is amplified in hybrid teams, where context is easier to lose and assumptions are harder to correct. Leadership accountability is not about finding fault. It is about taking responsibility for whether the system itself is enabling people to perform at the standard required.
The Silent Redistribution Problem
One of the least discussed dynamics in struggling teams is silent redistribution of labour. When pressure rises, high performers instinctively compensate. They correct errors, fill gaps and absorb complexity because they care about outcomes. Over time, leadership begins to rely on this buffering.
The project appears to survive, but only because a small number of people are operating far beyond their remit.
This is where many leaders ask a seemingly reasonable question “is it fair to ask A players to train and uplift others to elevate the team?” On the surface, this sounds collaborative. In reality, it carries a hidden cost.
Research on high-performing teams shows that sustained reliance on top performers to compensate for weaker capability leads to burnout, resentment and attrition. Skills do not spread evenly, they concentrate pressure. When A players are expected to train others while still delivering at a high level, excellence becomes taxed rather than rewarded. The team may appear balanced, but the system is quietly unstable.
The deeper issue is this. If A players are continuously cleaning up and coaching while leadership retains a persistent C player, the problem is no longer development. It is tolerance. Leadership is making a choice, often unconsciously, to protect under performance at the expense of excellence.
Leadership Relevance Is Now a Retention Issue
In an AI- and data-intelligent world, leaders cannot outsource learning downward and remain credible. When leaders are unable to interrogate data, understand automation trade-offs or engage with how technology reshapes workflows, decision-making slows and trust erodes. High performers notice when approvals are given without understanding or when innovation is delegated but never fully grasped.
This is where people leave, not in protest, but in pursuit of growth.
Being fit for purpose as a leader today does not mean becoming a technical specialist. It means remaining intellectually fluent, curious and visibly committed to learning. Leaders who admit what they do not yet understand and actively close those gaps build trust faster than leaders who rely on hierarchy to mask stagnation.
The Real Question Leaders Must Ask Themselves
So when a project is faltering, the most important question is not whether the team is capable. It is whether leadership is still adding value at the level the role demands.
Are you maintaining the standards, systems and clarity required for sustainable performance or are you relying on your strongest people to quietly hold everything together?
Are you asking A players to lift the team because development is part of a considered strategy or because difficult performance decisions are being deferred?
In fast-moving environments, leaders who stop learning do not simply fall behind. They become the bottleneck.
People do not quit companies lightly. They quit when they realise their future growth requires outgrowing their leader.
The Accountability Moment Leaders Can No Longer Avoid
Leadership accountability today begins with self-examination, not supervision. It asks whether you are evolving at the same pace you expect from your team, whether you are protecting standards rather than personalities and whether your leadership posture actively enables thinking or quietly suppresses it.
These are not philosophical questions. They are operational ones, because every decision you defer, every under performance you tolerate and every skill gap you ignore reshapes the culture beneath you.
This moment in leadership history is different. We are operating in environments where AI, data and rapid up-skilling are no longer optional enhancements but baseline capabilities. The best people in your organisation know this. They are learning continuously, adapting how they work and recalibrating what they need from leadership. When leaders do not do the same, a silent mismatch forms. Performance might hold for a while, but trust does not. And without trust, no system scales.
So the real questions leaders must now ask themselves are these.\
Are you still adding value at the level your role demands or are you relying on authority to compensate for relevance?
Are your strongest people growing because they are stretched appropriately or burning out because they are compensating for what leadership has chosen not to address?
Are you building a culture of shared intelligence and challenge or drifting toward same-think because speed has been prioritised over depth?
These questions matter because the cost of avoiding them is no longer theoretical. It shows up in disengagement, in pessimism disguised as professionalism, in training that loses credibility and in high performers quietly preparing to leave. It shows up when people stop caring not because they lack commitment, but because the system no longer rewards it.
Leadership is not about being in charge when things are stable. It is about remaining relevant when the ground shifts beneath you and courageous enough to change with it. In this era, accountability is not proven by control or certainty, but by curiosity, learning and the willingness to confront uncomfortable truths before they harden into culture.
That is the work now and it starts not with your team but with you.
If this resonated, take a moment to like the post so it reaches others navigating leadership in complex, hybrid environments. Share it with someone grappling with performance, accountability or talent retention. Comment with the one leadership capability you know you need to strengthen to remain fit for purpose. These conversations matter, because in modern organisations, accountability does not begin with the team, it begins with the leader.
