The Role of a Manager

The role of the manager has changed drastically just in the past year. I read AI Is Automating Routine Management. Company Leaders Must Redesign Their Jobs by Julien Jourdan, Emmanuel Coblence and Catherine Tanneau in Forbes and their framing was interesting to me. “Management tasks are often structured, rule-based, and data-rich. Leadership relies more heavily on creative and social intelligence.” AI is pulling those two apart after decades of us bundling them into one job description. They also share that 43% of leaders expect AI agents to significantly disrupt their workforces in the next 12 to 18 months, and only 21% say their business processes are ready for the shift.

That gap between 43 and 21 is where I have a ton of curiosity. A work change, transformation, reorg, and the space between “this is coming” and “we are ready” is always where the people get left behind and often lost.

So, as it relates to management, the structured half gets automated and we are left with the creative and social half. All fine and good, and then I read AI Is Undermining Leaders’ Judgment. Here’s What to Do About It by Leonid Sudakov and Nathan Furr in HBR and it got uncomfortable. (side note: I talk a lot about the importance of being uncomfortable for a person who deeply loves comfort.) Drawing on a Harvard study of 228 evaluators, they argue that leaders “are being trained out of the very capacity that creates competitive advantage, original judgment.” Not replaced. Trained out. That’s a different thing all together.

The two things they say protect it are noticing weak signals and forming your own view instead of deferring to the output, and the practices they recommend are structured curiosity and intentional dissent. I really like the two practices and think they are both incredibly relevant and important, so I’ll say them again...structured curiosity and intentional dissent.

Here is where all of this landed for me. The part of the job AI is handing back to us is the part we are least practiced at, and the part we have always been quietly willing to outsource. Not to a machine, to the room. We have to build new muscles.

Next, a little evidence that the human half is the half that moves the needle. Lara Ewen wrote up new Gallup research in HR Dive, AI use may improve engagement, but only under the right conditions. Employees whose managers actively supported their AI use came in at 48% engagement, against 30% for those without that support. Put frequent AI use, a clear organizational plan, and an actively supportive manager together and engagement hits 53%, against a national average of 31%. “Managers are the primary way employees experience their organization.” No tool did that and no tool can replicate a true human connection.

One more and then I’ll stop. Brooke Wright had Amanda Jefferson on her podcast Not Another AI Girl on July 23, She trained under Marie Kondo. Now she builds AI tools., and the episode circles one sentence that people say to themselves all the time, “I’m not techy enough to build anything.” Amanda trained under Marie Kondo. She builds AI tools now. The barrier was never her capability, it was the story she had about her capability. This is not so different from a leader deciding the hard call belongs to somebody further up the org chart.

So here’s my stake in the ground this week, the judgment, the noticing, the willingness to say “I don’t agree” out loud, the intentional dissent, that is not the soft part of leadership that we get to after the real work is done, it is the only part that was ever ours, and it is the part that atrophies fastest when we stop using it. AI is not going to take it from us, we are going to hand it over, politely, one small deferral at a time, because handing it over feels like collaboration and holding onto it feels like friction.

Leaders “are being trained out of the very capacity that creates competitive advantage, original judgment.” Not replaced. Trained out.

Pause and reflect

As we head into the weekend, take a few minutes with these:

1. 01Where did you agree with something this week that you did not actually agree with? A recommendation, a summary, a room full of nodding. What would it have cost you to say so out loud?
2. 02Gallup found that people whose managers actively support their AI use are far more engaged than the ones left to figure it out alone. Who on your team is figuring it out alone? Pick someone on your team and have a conversation on Monday.
3. 03Sudakov and Furr talk about noticing weak signals, which are the small things that have not made it into the data yet. Have you noticed any weak signals this week? Write it down this weekend, even if you are not ready to raise it.

I’ll leave you with this:

“Use AI to sharpen your judgment, not replace it.”

What resonated with you this week?

Have a great weekend!

Andrea