Leadership, Loyalty, and the Disappearing Workforce

A well designed, but empty office. Photo by Chris Freitag

The Final Thread

To complete my series around perceived performance in design and at work, I want to talk about leadership. This one’s tricky. I’ve been in the workforce for over 30 years and I’ve worked under some great leaders…and some truly baffling ones. So this isn’t an indictment of leadership as a whole. It’s a reflection on the kind of leadership that quietly corrodes the value of the people they manage.

It’s something I’ve noticed in creative fields like design, though it applies to all fields. These poor leaders, many of whom hold titles they’ve grown into but never earned, seem to carry a quiet resentment toward the very people they’ve hired. They don’t see specialized staff as partners in solving problems. They see them as resources to be replaced the moment a cheaper or more convenient option presents itself. And more often than not, that “convenient option” is whatever new technology is trending at the time.

The Diminishing Role of Design

A tweet from Carl Rivera at Shopify, explaining why designers are just designers.

Take Shopify’s recent decision to consolidate their design roles into one generic title: Designer. No more UX Designer, no more Content Designer, no more UI specialization. Just “Designer.” The justification? With AI tools, anyone can create a competent site structure. It’s the final design, the polish, that separates good from great. The craftsmanship.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But buried in that logic is a troubling message: research, testing, content strategy, accessibility, etc., are all implied to be secondary. Optional. Disposable. What matters now is aesthetics. Make it look good and let the AI take care of the rest.

This isn’t a new problem. It’s just the latest version of the same old misunderstanding. Time and again, we reduce the role of design to surface polish. In the name of efficiency, we cut out the work that makes a product usable, inclusive, and sustainable. But what we’re really doing is rewriting the narrative to justify replacing deep, collaborative work with shallow shortcuts.

Leadership Without Understanding

It’s hard to follow a leader who doesn’t understand what you do. And yet, it’s alarmingly common, especially in larger companies, for leaders to operate with minimal understanding of the departments they oversee or influence. I’m not talking about knowing how to do the job. I’m talking about knowing what the job is, what its purpose is, and what good work actually looks like.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched a CTO dismiss a thoughtful design process because “it’s just a button,” or “can’t we just add a dropdown?” The assumption is that their idea is obvious and correct. Anything taking longer than a few minutes must be unnecessary overhead. It’s not just frustrating, it’s damaging. It reduces design to a checklist item and tells the team their expertise doesn’t matter.

But it goes deeper than design. A good leader should be able to describe what each part of the company does. Maybe not in exhaustive detail, but with enough fluency to advocate for those teams. If a CTO can’t speak to how marketing works, or what sales needs, or what product is trying to achieve, then they’re not leading a business, they’re managing a silo. Worse, they’re sending a message that only their domain is worthy of real understanding.

Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about making sure the smartest people are in the room, listening to them, and empowering them to do their jobs. The moment a leader starts believing they could easily replace the team they’ve hired or worse, that they could do it all themselves if they just had the time, they’ve lost sight of what leadership is actually for.

Promises, Promises

There’s a recurring pattern I’ve seen throughout my career where a new technology comes along, and leadership decides this will finally be the thing that replaces the expensive, complicated, unpredictable human workforce. And design always seems to be one of the first targets.

In the early 2000s, it was Java. “Write once, deploy everywhere!” they declared. Then it was Flash, promising smooth, scalable interfaces without all the messy front-end engineering. Later, it was Electron apps, with the allure of building cross-platform products faster and cheaper. And now, of course, it’s AI. It’s always the same promise that these leaders keep falling for, that surely this tool will replace complexity with automation, and the company will save time and money.

But that promise never really delivers. Because while tools change, the underlying complexity of the work remains. Replacing thoughtful design with prebuilt frameworks or generated outputs doesn’t eliminate any problems, it just moves it downstream. It creates more tech debt and more friction that someone eventually has to clean up.

The real problem isn’t the tools. It’s how leadership views them. They don’t see them as augmentations to human expertise, but as replacements for it. There’s a difference between streamlining a workflow and devaluing the person who was doing the work in the first place. And when a leader’s instinct is to cut people out rather than elevate them with better tools, it speaks volumes about what they think of their team.

Loyalty, Performance, and Burnout

One of the most demoralizing dynamics I’ve seen in modern workplaces is the unspoken demand for loyalty from leadership, while offering none in return. Employees are expected to stay committed, go above and beyond, “act like owners.” All while living under the constant threat of being automated away, reorganized out, or replaced by the next shiny tool or outsourcing contract.

This imbalance is unsustainable. You can’t ask people to give you their best while making it clear they’re only valuable until the next budget cycle. And when leaders operate with this mindset, the work suffers. Because instead of focusing on outcomes, employees start focusing on staying safe. They design to avoid critique. They code to avoid risk. They contribute just enough to not fall behind.

We’ve seen the outcome of this kind of culture before. Microsoft’s now-infamous stack ranking system forced managers to rank employees against each other, regardless of actual performance. Even a great team had to have a “bottom performer” because someone had to lose. The result was predictable, leading to toxic competition, withheld collaboration, and high turnover.

When performance is measured purely by visible output, people stop doing the invisible work that matters. They stop mentoring. They stop experimenting. They stop caring about long-term value. They work just hard enough to avoid consequences…and then burn out anyway.

Great leadership doesn’t push people to their limits to “maximize productivity.” It creates the conditions for people to do their best work sustainably. That means trust, context, and support and not surveillance, scorekeeping, and manufactured scarcity.

Leading Through the AI Shift

There’s no question that AI is changing everything. The tools are faster, more capable, and more accessible than ever. Tasks that used to take hours like creating mockups, or generating copy, can now be done in minutes. That’s real progress. But how we use that progress is what will separate the good leaders from the opportunists.

The best leaders won’t use AI as an excuse to reduce headcount. They’ll use it as a reason to elevate the people they’ve already hired. Instead of asking, “How many people can we replace with this?” they’ll ask, “What can we finally unlock now that we don’t have to waste time on the repetitive stuff?”

No one wants to spend their day redrawing the same wireframe five different ways just to win consensus. No one studied communication theory just to clean up grammar in an executive memo. No one got a computer science degree so they could fix tedious UI bugs all day. AI can take some of that off our plates and that should be a good thing.

But only if leadership sees it that way. Only if they believe in the intelligence and talent of the people they’ve hired. Only if they’re willing to invest in vision, not just velocity.

AI should be a floor, not a ceiling. It should take care of the basics so that people can focus on the creative, strategic, and human parts of their work which are the parts machines can’t replicate. A good leader knows that the goal isn’t to do the same work faster. It’s to do better and more meaningful work.

Leadership Shapes the Value System

Leadership isn’t about knowing everything. It’s about knowing enough to recognize and nurture value in others. It’s about creating the conditions for great work that isn’t defined by output, but by impact. Not by speed, but by purpose.

When leaders fail to understand what their teams actually do, or see their teams as interchangeable resources to be automated away, they don’t just fail those individuals. They fail the entire organization.

The truth is, most people want to do meaningful work. They want to contribute, solve hard problems, and make things better. But that only happens when leadership gives them the time, space, and trust to do it. Not when it replaces thoughtful process with fast results. Not when it trades curiosity for control.

This is the final thread in a larger pattern I’ve seen over the years. Perceived performance wins out over real progress. We’ve covered the myth of constant motion, the trap of performative productivity, and now the role leadership plays in distorting or supporting the value of work.

If there’s one constant across all of it, it’s this: you get what you reward. If you reward speed, you’ll get shortcuts. If you reward surface-level output, you’ll get shallow work. But if you reward depth and collaboration, then you’ll get a team that’s not just productive, but truly valuable.

That’s the kind of leadership we need right now. And the kind that will actually survive what’s coming next.