hat 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 isthis week, we heard several people leaders comment that middle managers were having difficulty adapting to the sort of change needed., chief transformation officer at ServiceNow, believes a tension between managing work and managing people underlies this struggle.
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 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.Time and the misalignment of incentives.
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.