Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, opens one of the most important chapters in his recently released book<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://news.linkedin.com/2026/open-to-work--a-new-book-on-thriving-in-the-age-of-ai-"> Open to Work</a> with a line that should stop every coach and leader cold:<blockquote>"The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. No one is going to beat you at being you."</blockquote>&nbsp;He's talking about the age of AI, specifically about what happens when artificial intelligence can replicate everything standardised, everything credential-based, everything that used to be the safe, respectable path. When the generic gets automated, what remains is your specific wiring, the questions that wake you up at 3am, the problems you were somehow built to solve.Here's what I've been sitting with since reading that: most leaders have never been given the chance to find out what that actually is for them.<h2 id="8e54228e-fd61-476b-bd97-7f1e07efba83" data-toc-id="8e54228e-fd61-476b-bd97-7f1e07efba83" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The System Was Built for Comparison, Not Discovery</h2>Roslansky makes a point that hits close to home for anyone working in leadership development. The entire machinery of work, including resumes, performance reviews, job descriptions and KPIs, was designed to make people comparable, categorisable, measurable against one another. It worked well for the industrial age, because standardisation was the point.We're not in that age anymore, yet most leadership development still operates on the same logic: assess against a competency framework, identify the gaps, fill them, and repeat. The problem with this approach is that it treats leaders as incomplete versions of some ideal template, and it never asks the more interesting question:<blockquote>What is irreplaceable about this particular person, and what problems were they born to solve?</blockquote>That is the question that changes everything.<h2 id="330ebe63-50f2-4875-8efb-2bdd26780698" data-toc-id="330ebe63-50f2-4875-8efb-2bdd26780698" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Lost Einsteins in Your Leadership Team</h2>One of the most powerful ideas in Roslansky's book is the concept of "Lost Einsteins," brilliant people whose potential was never unlocked because the systems around them weren't built to see what they were actually carrying. This pattern shows up everywhere in leadership.Consider the manager who has an extraordinary gift for creating psychological safety but has only ever been trained on operational frameworks. The executive who asks questions that cut straight to the heart of strategic problems but has been told they need to be more decisive. The team leader whose unconventional thinking makes people nervous but who, given the right context, becomes the most innovative voice in the room. These aren't people who need fixing; they're people who need discovering.What Roslansky keeps returning to throughout his book is this: when AI handles everything standardised, the organisations that win will be the ones who figure out how to unlock the specific, irreplaceable intelligence in their people, leaders especially. A leader who knows what they're uniquely here to do, and who can help their people discover the same, creates compounding value no algorithm can touch.<h2 id="24bd8634-5a42-493f-951c-3f63a44e7246" data-toc-id="24bd8634-5a42-493f-951c-3f63a44e7246" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Coaching Is the Leadership Skill of This Era</h2>Roslansky argues that jobs are no longer titles, they're portfolios of tasks. Careers aren't ladders, they're climbing walls. Organisations can't survive as rigid hierarchies built around predictability and efficiency, they need to be built around adaptability and human intelligence.For leaders, what this demands is the creation of a new kind of leadership practice, one that innovates at the intersection of management, leadership and coaching and that draws on all three disciplines to unlock human potential in ways that none of them can achieve alone.At the heart of this new kind of leadership practice is a capability that no AI can replicate: the ability to develop the humans around you, to ask the questions that surface latent capability, create the conditions where people do their best thinking, and hold the space for someone to discover what they're actually here to contribute.This is where the coaching discipline becomes central, as the intelligence that animates the whole, not as a skill bolted onto a management role.This is a distinction worth sitting with. There is a difference between coaching skills and coaching intelligence. Coaching skills can be learned from any good program (the frameworks, the listening techniques, the question structures), and those things matter. They are not, though, what makes coaching transformational.What makes it transformational is something harder to teach: a quality of presence, a depth of curiosity, a way of asking questions that lands differently because it comes from somewhere real in the person asking them.That is coaching intelligence, and it doesn't come from a workshop. It emerges when a leader has done a deeper piece of work first, the work of discovering what makes them specifically, irreplaceably themselves.Roslansky doesn't use the term, but at Coach Training Campus we call this their unique intelligence, and that discovery is where everything begins.<h2 id="25dfbf40-422b-4e01-82c9-8d8223099a84" data-toc-id="25dfbf40-422b-4e01-82c9-8d8223099a84" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">A Decade of Research Has Been Building to This Moment</h2>When a book like Open to Work lands, organisations pay attention. The predictable response will be the same one it has always been: enrol leaders in coaching skills training, add a coaching module to the leadership program, and hope that something shifts. It won't, and it hasn't, because that approach misunderstands what Roslansky is actually saying.The Lost Einsteins in your leadership team are not failing because they lack skills. They are failing to reach their potential because nobody has built the conditions for their intelligence to be seen, surfaced, and owned. You cannot train your way to something you haven't yet uncovered. The excavation has to come first, and that is precisely what most leadership development never does.At Coach Training Campus, we have spent nearly a decade building and proving the framework that addresses this with coaches around the world through our Coaches Results Express™ program. The research behind it asked a simple but radical question: what actually separates coaches who create transformational and sustainable results from those who have the same skills and training but never quite find their footing? The answer, consistently, was unique intelligence.<img src="https://ezycourse.b-cdn.net/838/cmnwvwefh1a02poqr1yec3yzw.jpg" alt="image" containerstyle="position: relative; width: 734px; height: auto; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px auto;" wrapperstyle="display: flex;">Unique intelligence is not a competency or a skill set. It is the specific, integrated body of wisdom a person has built through their particular combination of experience, failure, insight, and obsession. It is the questions they have always been drawn to, the patterns only they can see, the way they hold a problem that nobody else quite replicates.It is precisely what Roslansky is describing when he writes about the experiences and unconventional paths that were once seen as liabilities and are now, in the age of AI, a person's greatest edge. Coaches Results Express™ was built to make that intelligence visible, articulable, and lived, to turn it from a vague sense of self into a clear, owned, practised foundation from which everything else flows.This is also what coaching intelligence actually is: not a skill set acquired in a workshop, but the expression of unique intelligence in relationship with other people. Coaching skills give you the tools; unique intelligence gives those tools a soul. One is the root; the other is what grows from it.What this means for leaders is significant. The same excavation that unlocks a great coach unlocks a great leader. When a leader surfaces their unique intelligence and learns to lead from that place, the shift is profound. Their conversations stop being performative and start being generative. Their team stops waiting for direction and starts bringing its best thinking. The culture that every organisation wants but few can manufacture starts to emerge organically, because it is being led by someone who knows exactly who they are and why they are there. That intelligence, once surfaced, doesn't stay contained either. It spreads through how they mentor, how they give feedback, and how they create the conditions for others to discover their own unique contribution.This is why we are now bringing the Coaches Results Express™ foundation directly to leaders and managers through our Leadership Results Express™ program. It is not a new idea built in response to a trend. It is the natural evolution of a proven framework, the same research, the same process of excavation and discovery, now applied to the people Roslansky is writing about most urgently. The leaders who will define the next decade are not the ones who add coaching to their toolkit; they are the ones willing to do what most leadership development never asks of them, to stop asking what skills do I need to acquire and start asking what unique intelligence am I already carrying that I haven't yet fully owned?<img src="https://ezycourse.b-cdn.net/838/cmnwvxa6t16rvb2qsgauiejcn.jpg" alt="image" containerstyle="position: relative; width: 841px; height: auto; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px auto;" wrapperstyle="display: flex;"><h2 id="ed698ebb-11eb-41f4-9032-4c9193836f6f" data-toc-id="ed698ebb-11eb-41f4-9032-4c9193836f6f" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Invitation</h2>Roslansky's book is a call to action. For coaches and leaders, the question it raises is not whether the world of work is changing; it is whether you are willing to do the deeper work that this moment is asking for.For coaches, that means knowing your unique intelligence with genuine clarity, not your niche, not your methodology, not your certification, but the specific body of wisdom you have built that nobody else carries, and the questions you were put here to ask. That clarity is the foundation everything else is built on, and it is what makes the difference between a coaching practice that feels like a constant hustle and one that has real authority and sustainable impact.For leaders and managers, the question is whether you are willing to stop defining yourself by your role and start leading from who you actually are. Whether you are willing to create the conditions for your own unique intelligence to be seen and surfaced, so that you can do the same for the people around you. Roslansky argues that organisations need to be built around adaptability and human intelligence. That starts with the leader in the room knowing what their human intelligence actually is.This is precisely what Leadership Results Express was built for. Grounded in nearly a decade of research through our Coaches Results Express™ framework, it is a proven process for excavating unique intelligence, developing genuine coaching intelligence, and creating a new kind of leadership practice that works at the intersection of management, leadership and coaching. Not a skills program. Not another framework to perform against. A genuine process of discovery that changes how a leader leads from the inside out.If this resonates, we would love to talk. The next decade belongs to leaders who know who they are. Let's make sure you are one of them.

Discover why modern leadership is shifting from skills to unique intelligence. Learn how coaching intelligence, human insight, and AI are reshaping how leaders unlock potential, build stronger teams, and create real impact at work.

Nobody Beats You at Being You: What Every Leader and Coach Needs to Know

The System Was Built for Comparison, Not Discovery

The Lost Einsteins in Your Leadership Team

Coaching Is the Leadership Skill of This Era

A Decade of Research Has Been Building to This Moment

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Nobody Beats You at Being You: What Every Leader and Coach Needs to Know

Nobody Beats You at Being You: What Every Leader and Coach Needs to Know

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