What Leaders & Managers need to change to survive

Gartner predicts 20% of organizations will eliminate more than half their middle management positions by 2026. Korn Ferry found 41% of companies already reduced management layers last year.

AI, and other factors, but finally enabled by AI, is allowing companies to reimagine what middle management looks like, and take steps to drastically reduce the middle management layer.

If you’re a manager, or are considering becoming one, these are the 5 changes I see happening in the near to mid future, and the skills I thinks managers need to have in order to succeed in the next few years.

Everything needs to be happening faster.

Clients demand everything fast, cheap and good and, for once, they have the leverage to actually get it.

Decisions need to be faster. Monthly decision cycles, an eternity. Two weeks, way too long.

Teams need to be formed faster. Nobody has time anymore to wait 3 months for a junior to get acclimated, 6 months to “norm” a team and 12 months to perform.

Leaders and managers need to be able to make quick decisions, and form quick connections, and reach some kind of operating model and “fast trust” in days, not months.

Needles to say, Scrum is dead, and not one second too soon. Some corporations will still use things like SAFe for a while, because corporations change slowly, but that’s dead too.

Team will be smaller and they will be mixed in every possible way:

• Members from your organization together with members from other organizations (client, other suppliers, independent contractors etc)

• Fully or partially allocated to your team

• Different locations

• Different cultures

Managers need to be able to work with such teams quickly, from human relationships, align, motivate and figure out an operational model that works for that team, for that project.

This is exponentially harder than back in the day, when you had a team coming to work to the same office, every day, all reporting to you, all fully allocated to you, and all with the mindset that they were going to be 10+ years in the same company.

With AI, there is no need for most specialization. There is no concept of being a “Python developer” when you do not write one line of code. You’re going to be a “builder”. A “Product Engineer”, an “AI Engineer”, or whatever name the industry is going to settle on.

Also, every member of the team will be more autonomous than they are now. They will have to be, as they will have to organize their own work, interact in a more decentralized way with other people, and also manage agents and AI processes.

If the word “generalist” gives you the impression of superficial, read this.

Every team member will be a little manager.

All team members will also need to have better skills in planning, decision making and Fast Trust kind of soft skills than they need now.

The kind of manager who is not involved in building or shaping the product, nor in managing the client, or in market research, or anything else, who are simply “facilitating” processes and brokering information, is going to become practically extinct.

For one, there will be less need to do this kind of basic facilitation and basic management (basic planning, basic issue tracking etc), as 1) AI will do a lot of it and 2) the team members themselves will be at a higher level of autonomy and will not need or want such hand holding.

Similarly, with faster more dynamic projects and fewer management layers, every manager will have to be client facing, and good at providing value by being a true Consultant in the real sense of the word. There’s going to be no more “hiding places” in between teams and clients, somewhere in the middle of the pyramid, because the middle of the pyramid will shrink.

I am of course referring to the metaphor from Eric S Raymond’s article.

Cathedrals are organizations who prioritize consistency (same processes, same rules, same ways of working, same standards in every corner of the organization), centralized command, and strict control through long term, detailed plans and strategies.

Bazaars are organizations who are much more decentralized internally and care less about consistency and centralized control. Yes, there is an overall vision, a high level strategy and some ground rule everyone follows, but every team in the organization is like one shopkeeper in the bazaar, which their own stand, selling and doing whatever works for them. Ideas are not distributed top down, but are tested in the free market darwinian environment of the bazaar, and the successful ones will be naturally copied by others and will spread.

This cathedral to bazaar change encapsulates the previous changes I’ve listed, as it impacts management, methodology and much more in the ways I’ve listed (and more, but out of the scope of this article).

In times of stability, cathedrals tend to win as operational optimization is the key competitive advantage. In times of change, bazaars tend to win as adaptation is the key competitive advantage.

1. Superb Critical Thinking and Decisions Making Skills in conditions of ambiguity, volatility and speed

2. Superb Planning skills in similar conditions. Adaptive, Self Healing Planning. At higher seniority, Strategy too

3. Excellent Fast Trust Soft Skills. Soft Skills remain essential, but fast, direct, assertive, with people you work with for short periods, from different cultures, organizations, and who don’t report to you other than in the context of the project. You are not “the boss”, you are just a contextual leader. This includes: Communication, conflict resolution, team habits formation, cultural difference awareness, relationship management, commercial awareness.

4. Business, market and client facing skills. Almost every manager will have to understand the market they operate in, the need of their clients and customers, what the competition is doing, so they can actually come up with valuable ideas and proposals and shape the direction of what’s being delivered. This was the promise of Agile, it didn’t happen, but now it will have to happen.

5. In technical terms, managers will have to be excellent AI users (whatever AI tools will be relevant in 3, 6, 9 months), and understand that with AI they can become builders, prototypers, and be much more directly personally involved and contribute to all areas of the project, and not just facilitate and coordinate.

Anyone can adapt, but it will be easier for some than for others.

The types of leadership personalities that are Process Oriented will find it harder to change, because these are the people who mostly appreciate doing things “the right way”. If you’ve spent 10 years learning what “good code” looks like, it will be difficult to suddenly accept that code is going to be written by agents, for agents, no human will review it (most of the times), and it doesn’t matter one bit how good it looks.

On the other hand, if you’re more of the Outcome oriented personalty type, where you’re more interest din the result itself rather than how we get that result, you will find this transition easier.

Also, Builder types who have invested a lot of effort, heart and meaning into building teams, organizations, processes in some way, carefully along time, brick by brick, will find it harder to now suddenly accept that some of those ways of working are not relevant anymore. Builder are all about consistency, meaning and stability and all three are under attack now. Explorers will find it easier to adapt.

In my opinion, the 2010-2022-ish period was a period of stability in the IT industry. Yes, we had the pandemic but, fundamentally, what we were doing, and how we were doing it, stayed the same, and it only changed incrementally, and in the same, consistent direction. A period of stability like this encouraged the development of 1) Cathedral Organizations with 2) Builder and Process Oriented managers. Therefore, many organizations and managers today are not ideally suited to the period of radical change we’re undergoing, but they will have to adapt nonetheless.

I am currently running a Beta Version of a New Leadership Development program that is defined to address this exact vision. You can register here (scroll the bottom of the page) to be notified of when the final version is out (I estimate 2 months).