SUMMARY

In a nutshell: Hell yes.

Why? Managing teams of people — and agents — is the one job AI can’t replace.

Managing is a skill that makes you valuable to an organization. When you are valuable to an organization, you can control your career destiny. When you manage a high-performance team that consistently meets or exceeds its goals, you get to make decisions; you get to call the “shots”.

Managing is also ascending in importance to organizations, as AI commoditizes functional knowledge and teams become part biological and part digital.

The biggest transition in organizational structure in the last 100 years is happening right now — and managers are directly in its path.

So yes, I believe managing is worth it. In fact, I think managing the human-agent team is a new and exciting career choice in the same way we used to think of finance or engineering before AI.

Reason #1: It’s the most important job in the company

Let me be direct: managers have the most important role in the organization — only after the CEO.

That’s not hyperbole.

Managers are accountable for execution. Managers manage the teams getting the work done — the front-line operations that makes any organization successful, or not.

The direct relationship between execution and managers always puts the out-performers in the spotlight. When your team exceeds expectations, you will be recognized — because the most important eyes in any organization are hyper-focused on what execution delivers: the results and where they are coming from.

Reason #2: Managers are the new corporate structure.

For the last century, functional excellence defined the most important roles in an organization. The most innovative engineer. The “chairman’s club” seller. The “finance person” who could make sense of the numbers. It’s why everybody majored in engineering, business administration and finance.

I think it’s clear AI will erode or de-value functional excellence over the next few years. To be clear: de-valued doesn’t mean “go away.” It means budgets for these teams will be smaller, as will the number of senior leadership positions available — as AI takes on traditional human roles. In this world, some significant part of traditional functional knowledge and value will be in the RAM of the bots, not people.

Unless we’re all replaced by robots, the organization of the future will be some combination of humans and agents/bots. Real and digital people working together will be commonplace — we’ll be talking to the agents like they’re colleagues during meetings.

It’s managers who will be making this new organizational model happen. It’s an amazing opportunity to express what makes someone uniquely human: Critical thinking, intuition, curiosity, emotional intelligence.

Reason #3: The best people want to run the agents and bots.

The best people — the people you want on your team — want to be the ones responsible for building and working with the agents and bots. They know that’s the future. Millennials and gen-z understand the corporate ladder is dead — the next generation knows all they control is their story and see a role on your team as an opportunity to write a bestselling chapter of their story.

Therein lies your opportunity.

You have a team and resources. You manage an organization and a budget. You have opportunities to grow and advance people with job roles and skills that will be recognized and rewarded.

As a manager, you want your people excited to execute what's on your dashboard, what you are accountable for — because having people writing a chapter of their career story on your team is like having a team of best-selling authors working for you.

Reason #4: Very few people are good at it.

The facts are clear: few people are good at managing.

As a consequence, great managers inevitably shine.

Why? Because so many poor managers stand out — for all the wrong reasons.

The stats on bad managers are appalling:

• Bad managers have an outsized impact on talent attraction and retention. Seven out of 10 people leave a job because of their manager.
• Alarmingly, a low number of competent managers exist in most organizations —typically less than 10 percent of the total manager population.

I hate pointing out that “competent” is a low bar. But it also means there is opportunity to separate yourself (i.e., be recognized) because of the quality of your skills as a manager.

Reason #5: What it takes to be a great manager is learnable.

I’ve managed about 5,000 people in my career — I’m not a consultant or an academic. I’ve walked in your shoes. I was consistently ranked in the top quartile of all managers when I was at Cisco, one of the world’s best places to work.

I left Cisco to answer one question with research and evidence: what does the manager of the future look like?

I learned consistency is the number one reason millennials and gen-z recommend their manager to friends or colleagues. It makes sense when you think about it. In a world changing so fast because of AI, consistency is the exact opposite.

My research identified Six Drivers of Consistency that separate great managers from the rest:

1. Accountability - Following through on commitments
2. Alignment - Connecting job roles to your priorities and goals
3. Facts - Using data to make decisions
4. Listening - Hearing what your people need
5. Mindset - Being open about how you think and make decisions
6. Process - Establishing a clear operating model for running the team

Here’s what I want you to remember when you get back to your team tomorrow: consistency isn’t a personality trait. It’s a set of behaviors — and every single one of them is learnable.

START HERE: TAKE THE SELF-ASSESSMENT

Learning starts with introspection. How consistent are you? Take the self-assessment. See where you stand as a manager.