What makes a good manager? The answer arguably has changed over the past few years, as flexible working shifted how to lead a team and mental-health and wellness crises intensified pressures. Now the introduction of AI is bringing further change.
Surveys suggest that many managers are struggling. Amid that, middle managers made up almost one-third of layoffs last year, significantly higher than previously. And at the Transform workplace conference this week, we heard several people leaders comment that middle managers were having difficulty adapting to the sort of change needed.
Kelley Steven-Waiss, chief transformation officer at ServiceNow, believes a tension between managing work and managing people underlies this struggle. Here are excerpts from our discussion with her on the sidelines of Transform, edited for space and clarity:
Some of the discussion I’m hearing here at Transform is about how managers, including middle managers, maybe are not doing what people need….
I’ve constantly said, do we even need managers? We have struggled with managing work and managing people in some kind of balance, and what has always happened is the management of people has failed. Managing work is where our incentives were for managers.
As organizations become more agile, the role of the manager is going to shift—with a lot more automation of work and tools—to the focus on [employee] development because there will be tools that give you more insights into individuals. What do they need to learn? Where do they need to grow? We’re going to see the manager role become more a coach to a team than strict management of work.
Also, it’s possible that we get rid of this whole ‘manager’ word altogether and that we push decisions to the front lines and we have more project leaders who are managing work. And then we have these sort of career counselors that are taking the onus off the typical manager to balance both. Where things typically get stuck is in the middle of the organization because of this conflict constantly around management of people and management of work.
What is the exact conflict between management of people and management of work?
Time and the misalignment of incentives. Will you really lose compensation if your people rate you a little bit lower or they don’t meet their career objectives? Probably not. But if your work doesn’t get done, that is going to hit your wallet. And unfortunately, there are managers who are very motivated to develop people, but at the end of the day, the incentives aren’t aligning to that. So we have to start valuing the development of people, and then we need to give the managers the tools for better insights.
Telstra actually has separate work managers and people managers…
That’s really smart. I think that germinated in a situation where we couldn’t balance both of them, so they had to bifurcate the job. In the future, we may continue on that path where we allow for more people to lead based on their expertise. We know people’s expertise and we can put them in a position of leading the work, while we have another set of career counselors that might be the agent for 30 people, and they’re only focused on the career development of those individuals. We have the tools to help both sides of that equation. We may disaggregate the need for traditional management.
How does AI accelerate or change that disaggregation of project and people management?
Management would get mired in administrative tasks and paperwork, and we’re going to see a lot of that get summarized and go to resolution faster. That work gets automated and now there’s more time allocation and more insights are coming in via AI about an issue with an employee, an opportunity with an employee. There’s more opportunity to focus on engagement in a conversation and focus on an individual than ever before. It’s, ‘You took this work off my plate, AI, thank you. You also added insights to me, and now I can focus on a much deeper conversation,’ which then raises levels of engagement and retention of those key individuals. We’re going to see a virtuous loop there.
Steven-Waiss’s new book about female founders, Valley Girls, was published this month.
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