Canada’s leadership confidence gap has become its costliest AI oversight, according to author and strategic leadership adviser
More than eight in 10 Canadian executives believe they need to transform their leadership culture – but fewer than half are confident they can. That gap, documented in research by Vince Molinaro, founder and chief executive officer of Leadership Contract in Toronto, sits at the centre of a problem that is growing more acute as AI adoption accelerates across the country.
Molinaro, a New York Times bestselling author and strategic leadership adviser who holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, was at HRFest Canada 2026, an event that brought Canada's senior HR leaders together to examine the challenges reshaping the profession, to speak in a session titled “How to Ensure Strategic Change Launches Your Career, Not Shrinks It.” Before his session, he spoke with HRD Canada about his research, which he says is drawn from conversations with more than 150 chief human resources officers (CHROs) across Canada and found that 85 per cent of organizations are navigating a strategic shift right now.
When strategy pivots, the expectations on leaders multiply. Those leaders – often already overloaded – are rarely given the support they need to meet an expanded mandate, according to Molinaro.
The accountability gap in AI adoption
The most immediate failure in AI implementation is structural – organizations are deploying the technology without establishing who is responsible for what it produces, says Molinaro.
He describes an exchange at a U.S. conference for transformation leaders and project managers. He asked the room how many people felt more efficient because of AI. Every hand went up. “I said, ‘So what’s the problem with AI?’ and they said everybody else’s work,” says Molinaro. “So people just throw work over the fence, but they’re not providing oversight. They’re not really doing the due diligence afterwards.”
This is the foundational error, according to Molinaro: employees using AI without taking ownership of its outputs. And the problem compounds at the organizational level, where senior leaders and managers are frequently unclear on who owns AI governance. The pattern is consistent with what HR practitioners have found as AI reshapes leadership but people must still come first. “It’s being implemented with a lot of positive intent and positive energy, but there isn’t a lot of governance and oversight of how it’s being implemented,” says Molinaro.
He also challenges the idea that AI decisions can be safely delegated to the technology. Whether CHROs should be comfortable handing decisions over to AI, Molinaro says it should be none “because it absolves your accountability.”
Fragmented culture is the deeper risk
The accountability deficit runs deeper than AI. Molanaro says that research from Leadership Contract found that up to 75 per cent of organizations surveyed have a fragmented leadership culture – one in which there is very little consistency in how leaders lead, what behaviours they model, or what results-focused mindset they hold.
“They’re not adopting the same behaviours, they’re not adopting the same mindset of leadership needed to drive execution and results,” he says. “And so that creates significant risk in an organization.”
Molinaro says that a key driver of this fragmentation is the dual mandate placed on leaders during transformation. Organizations are asking leaders to manage the current business – and hit existing targets – while simultaneously navigating change. “What we often don’t realize is leaders are having to lead two organizations at once,” he says. “The one that is current and you've got to keep delivering your numbers, and ‘By the way, we need you to transform and change the company at the same time.’”
That pressure, compounded by years of disruption and change fatigue, helps explain why the confidence gap persists. It is independently corroborated by the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) CHRO Priorities and Perspectives 2025 report, which found just 18 per cent of CHROs report an HR strategy fully aligned with broader organizational goals, leaving the majority without the strategic coherence that transformation demands. Many CHROs lack data on where their leadership culture actually stands – which means they cannot diagnose what to fix, according to Molinaro.
Freeing HR for the work that matters most
Where AI takes on transactional work, Molinaro sees a genuine opening. When administrative tasks shift to technology, HR practitioners gain capacity to focus on what machines cannot do: building relationships with executives and managers, helping leaders manage the human side of change, and attending to the ambiguity that employees experience during transition.
“In a strategic shift, which most companies are facing right now, the amount of ambiguity and complexity increases and we often don’t appreciate how unsettling that is for employees,” says Molinaro. Managers need to focus there – and AI, applied well, is what creates the space for them to do it, he says.
What CHROs should commit to in the next 12 months
Molinaro’s advice to CHROs balancing AI transformation and leadership rebuilding follows four steps. The first is data: organizations cannot fix a problem they haven’t measured. His firm uses a diagnostic tool to assess leadership culture, and he said the results are often revealing. “When we do it, it’s a bit sobering for them because they don’t realize how bad the situation really is,” he says.
Second, clarify what strategic shifts now demand of leaders – and communicate those expectations explicitly. Third, build alignment, giving leaders the opportunity to internalize new expectations and translate them into day-to-day behaviour. Fourth, invest in community. Molinaro says his research points to the value of bringing leaders together – in person or virtually – on a regular basis, reinforcing commitment before fatigue erodes it.
The result, he argues, is a CHRO who operates not just as an HR function head, but as a genuine strategic partner at the centre of transformation. As transformation reshapes people strategy for HR leaders across Canadian organizations, the CHRO sits at the intersection of company strategy, the transformation being delivered, and people and culture – and “increasingly, CEOs are going to be looking to their CHROs to help their organization navigate those three priorities,” says Molinaro.
The standard is rising and the CHRO role is changing, according to Molinaro. “If business as usual isn’t going to cut it, then leadership as usual isn’t going to cut it,” he says.
