The widely accepted management advice that leaders should step back from technical details is becoming dangerous in the AI era. Technical disconnection at the leadership level creates strategic debt: decisions get made on outdated assumptions, AI failure modes go undetected, and cross-domain tradeoffs get mishandled. Staying technical as a senior leader means using AI tools personally in real workflows, being present during key tradeoffs rather than just receiving summaries, and earning the ability to push back substantively on team input. Organizations need to update how they coach, promote, and evaluate leaders to treat technical proximity as a core leadership competency, not something that phases out with seniority.
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