Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of Airbnb, recently made a statement that sent shockwaves through leadership circles: "I don't think people managers will have any value in the future." It's a provocative claim. Like most provocative claims, it’s partially right and partially wrong. The right part is important enough that every leader reading this should take it seriously. However, the part that's wrong is worth addressing, too.
What Chesky Gets Right
The pressure on organizations to flatten, to operate more horizontally, and to eliminate layers that aren't producing meaningful output is real. This isn't a tech industry phenomenon. Lone Rock Leadership is working with organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail, and more, and the message is consistent across all of them. Leaders who aren't close to the work, who aren't bringing proximity to the customer, and who aren't actively contributing to the organization's ability to move faster and innovate more are going to find themselves on the wrong side of an efficiency curve. Meanwhile, that curve is only getting steeper.
AI is accelerating this pressure dramatically. The agentic capabilities now available to organizations, where AI tools work alongside humans to handle tasks that previously required significant time and manual effort, are changing what productivity looks like at every level of the org chart. Leaders who are spending most of their time in low-leverage activities, running recurring meetings, maintaining routines, and producing schedules without meaningfully moving the work forward are right to feel some urgency. The efficiency available to organizations today is making that kind of output increasingly difficult to justify.
Chesky's core point, that leaders need to be in the work, not just above it, is well taken. Managing people through the work rather than around it is a principle that holds up across industries and organizational sizes.
What Chesky Gets Wrong
Where Chesky goes too far is in suggesting that the human side of leadership is a liability. His comment that leaders should check in on an employee's life maybe twice a year isn't a bold efficiency insight. It's a misunderstanding of what actually drives human performance.
The data on this is not ambiguous. Teams with high trust and strong relationships significantly outperform those without. Leaders who create psychological safety generate more innovation, more engagement, and more accountability from the people they lead. Google's landmark research on team effectiveness found that psychological safety was by far the most important factor in what makes teams perform. These are not soft metrics. They are performance drivers.
The version of people management that is dying and should die is the one where a leader's entire value proposition is keeping people comfortable, running one-on-ones without purpose, and acting as an organizational therapist. That version was always weak. AI is simply making its weakness more visible at a quicker pace.
The version of leadership that will thrive is the one Lead in 30 is built around: leaders who create clarity about what matters most, build genuine alignment around priorities, and generate movement by managing the culture and mindset of their team, while staying close to the work and connected to the people doing it. That combination of task and relationship, of proximity to the work and investment in the humans doing it, is not going away. It is becoming more essential.
The Bottom Line
The question Chesky's comments should prompt isn't whether people managers have value. It's whether you are the kind of people manager who has value. Are you close to the work? Are you helping your organization move faster? Are you investing in the relationships that drive discretionary effort and innovation, not as a soft afterthought, but as a deliberate leadership discipline? Leaders who can answer yes to all three don't have anything to worry about. Leaders who can't should start paying attention. The efficiency wave Chesky is describing is real, and it is coming for the low-leverage version of leadership, whether we acknowledge it or not.