Share with your CHRO
The managerial competency model is being rewritten at companies like Tata Steel, KEC International, and InsuranceDekho, and the pressure point is AI. As AI tools commoditize information access, the manager-as-expert loses currency. These organizations are responding by adding a parallel “People Scorecard” alongside business metrics, measuring succession depth, coaching frequency, and psychological safety, and tracking manager effectiveness through dedicated scorecards and engagement surveys. The shift reframes who qualifies as a high performer.
What this means for your business
The companies quoted here are making a specific structural bet: that a manager who hits numbers by burning through team capacity is not a high performer, but a deferred liability. Where that argument bites depends on whether your own performance management architecture can actually distinguish the two. Most can’t. If your manager scorecards still resolve entirely to output metrics, you’re rewarding the liability while calling it excellence, and your attrition data is probably already telling you so.
The AI angle is more specific than it first appears. The argument isn’t that managers need to learn AI tools. It’s that AI is removing the information-brokering function that gave middle management much of its organizational leverage. When a team member can query a model and get a credible first draft of the answer their manager used to own, the manager’s remaining value concentrates in judgment, context calibration, and coaching, none of which shows up in a quarterly output review. Tata Steel’s move toward “network leaders” who alternate between leading and learning is one structural response to that compression. The CHRO who doesn’t redesign the role’s accountability surface before that compression lands will find managers defaulting to the only metric they know they’re still measured on.
The falsification condition here is worth naming. This framework holds if human judgment and coaching genuinely can’t be replicated at scale by AI itself. If agentic systems begin handling performance feedback, career pathing, and team coordination with reasonable fidelity, the “distinctly human” managerial premium narrows further, and the “people scorecard” risks becoming another bureaucratic layer on a role that’s shrinking. The CHRO’s real decision isn’t whether to adopt the people scorecard. It’s whether the managerial layer is being redesigned for durability or just decorated with new vocabulary before a harder structural reckoning arrives.
Based on reporting from Redefining Management: Essential Skills for Success in the AI Era, ETHRWorld, originally published 2026-09-11 21:53:00.
