The world of leadership will change more over the next decade than it has in the past 100 years. Being a "people manager" may no longer hold the status and value it once did only a year ago. More and more companies are looking to go the lean route and that means individual contributors will now have an opportunity to grow more quickly and make higher salaries than they ever did in the past.
Keeping your "hard skills" is more valuable than ever. You can no longer expect to just "delegate" to get by. More and more companies are requiring leaders to actually "do" the work. Engineers have known this for years and they often came to a cross road whether to remain an IC and continue to code or let their hard coding skills soften and move into the "people manager" route. This will no longer be just an engineering issue, this now involves every functioning leader thanks to the onslaught of AI.
So what do you think? Is this just another fad or will this change how we perceive the value of leaders in the coming months and years?