It’s easy to say “be authentic.”

My research showed millennials and gen-z want to work for managers who are consistently “true to themselves.”

But what does it really look like?

WHY IS MY AUTHENTIC STYLE SO IMPORTANT?

In the age of AI, people are betting on their manager to help them write a chapter of a career story. They know the corporate ladder is dead. They know all they control is their story. They know change is coming, including opportunities for growth.

So it makes sense that people would want to know how their manager approaches things — how you are inclined to behave when setting goals, making strategy decisions or trade-off choices, and rewarding performance.

Because all of that helps them understand if there truly is an opportunity to grow on your team. The people on your team don’t want to reverse-engineer your brain as their manager. They want you to share the unique way you think, process information, and make decisions.

I’ve found that the best way to be your authentic self is through the lens of your communication style. How you communicate is a reflection of how your brain is wired.

When your people know the way you approach decision-making, they stop guessing and start aligning. They know how to come to you with a problem, how to present an idea, how to tell you when something isn’t working. It’s a virtuous cycle.

In this issue of the Manager Mentor, I’m going to share a model that will help you describe your communication style as a reflection of your thought processes — and make it easy for you to be true to yourself.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM MICHAEL DELL, ERIC SCHMIDT, RICHARD BRANSON AND JOHN CHAMBERS ABOUT COMMUNICATION STYLES.

I was lucky to help some incredible CEOs tell their stories in my career. I was able to work with and watch Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt and John Chambers evolve into world-class communicators — and I was lucky to interview Richard Branson from a stage at a Cisco event in front of thousands of people.

I learned from these experiences that people have two primary questions to answer when assessing their communication style:

1. How do I process information — am I analytical or am I conceptual?

2. Am I an introvert or an extrovert?

Here’s how I came to think about these four communication styles. Do any of them sound like you?

1. Analytical Introvert — The Architect Comfort zone: plans, process, details. Delivery: reserved, factual, specific. Content: methodical, organized, well-prepared.

2. Conceptual Introvert — The Visionary Comfort zone: theories, strategies, concepts. Delivery: calm, detached demeanor that may mask true conviction. Content: full of ideas, shares with discretion, future-focused.

3. Analytical Extrovert — The Driver Comfort zone: results, getting things done. Delivery: confident, quick and forceful. Content: direct, accurate, factual, bias for action.

4. Conceptual Extrovert — The Catalyst Comfort zone: ideas, vision, strategy. Delivery: outgoing, enthusiastic, often spontaneous. Content: big picture, rarely bogged down with detail, uses stories and humor.

I’d need a whole series of newsletters to describe my working experience with these great leaders over the past few decades, but I place them in the following quadrants.

I know many of you may be surprised to see Richard Branson in the introvert quadrant — given his flashy marketing style. But that wasn’t my experience. He was shy, reserved and thoughtful. Think about it: he hot-air-ballooned around the world by himself; he loves his one-person submarine; and he lives on an island.

HOW: Three Steps to Communicate With Authenticity

Step 1: Name Your Style

You can’t share what you haven’t named.

Start with two questions: How do I process information — am I analytical or conceptual? Am I an introvert or an extrovert? Your honest answers are the foundation.

Ask your trusted advisors and mentors these same questions.

In the end, the opposite of authenticity is being someone you’re not. I’ve said this many times to many CEOs over the years: fall in love with yourself — and tell people about it.

Step 2: It Isn’t Personal

Most people don’t wake up in the morning looking to disagree with you. What looks like disagreement is often just a reflection of the way someone else thinks and processes information. An Analytical Introvert and a Conceptual Extrovert can look at the same problem and see completely different things — not because one is wrong, but because their minds work differently.

The best thing you can do is tell the other person how you think and make decisions. When you do that, you give them permission to do the same. And then you’ll each learn something about each other — and know that none of it is personal.

The divide in most teams isn’t about personality conflicts. It’s about communication styles that were never made visible. Once they are, most of the friction disappears.

Step 3: Read Other People’s Cues

Once you know yourself, you can start to recognize others. The easiest way to assess someone’s style is to observe three types of cues:

• Communication comfort zone — Do they talk about vision or results? Details or strategies? When do they feel most comfortable in a conversation?

• Delivery cues — Are they confident and forceful, or reserved and calm? These are physical cues that show interest.

• Content cues — Do they get excited about details or big ideas? Gathering groups or working alone? What tops their agenda and what do they leave out?

Once you’re fluent in identifying styles, you can present information in a way that makes a stronger connection — without abandoning who you are.

SEE WHERE YOU STAND

How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.

ManagerMentor • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026

I’ve always loved this quote by William Gibson of Neuromancer fame: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”

The arrival of agents as full-fledged members of a team — working side-by-side with humans — will happen in some way for most in 2026.

I write here about the differences between managing as a boomer versus managing as a millennial and gen-z. I focus on the implications to a team when biological and digital people sit at the same table.

All of this change is happening in real-time, it seems to me. But I know from experience that any technology revolution starts with a small set of early adopters — teams that are way ahead of the curve.

So I went looking for an early adopter of agents — and found one with Blake Wood, a childhood friend of my son. Blake’s now a sales leader at Salesforce. I was lucky to interview him last week.

This was clear: Blake is living in the future — what managing will look like for everyone else a year or two from now.

Here’s another thing: his unabashed enthusiasm for the agents felt like generational thinking to me. Like, “this is the way things are supposed to be.”

This blew my mind: I literally laughed out loud when he said the greatest benefit of agents came down to the quality of his sleep.

Seriously.

“I used to have a notebook on my nightstand where I’d wake up at 3 a.m. and jot down notes — I slept horribly,” Blake says. “But with the agents we’re using, I’m sleeping the best I ever have.”

Which is surprising, because his job is nuts when you hear about it. But then again, maybe this is what the power of AI is all about.

WHY: Managing a team today is at least an order of magnitude more complex than it was for boomers.

It’s hard for boomers to understand the pace and complexity of managing a team today. Here are three differences:

1. Millennial and gen-z managers have twice the number of direct reports as boomer managers.

2. As flatter structures replace the hierarchical structures of the boomer era, today’s managers spend more than 50 percent of their time collaborating across an organization versus within it.

3. It’s not unusual for a manager today to spend 80 percent of their day with communication tools like email, Zoom and Slack coordinating with people outside their organization to move projects forward.

The collaboration “tax” is very real.

Blake says that each account executive on his team coordinates sales activities with about 75-100 other sellers inside Salesforce. That’s right: Blake’s organization has to align its work to more than 1,000 other people in the organization — every minute and hour of every day. And as all of us know, sales people live in the moment, not in the future. So that’s a lot of voices to listen and talk to every day.

“There is just no way to track everything that’s going on,” Blake says. “We have to leverage our AI products here internally — to prioritize the work, to prospect, to find new insights, to do deal inspections.”

Think that stat about spending 80 percent of your day communicating in some way is a little off?

It might actually be low.

“People on my team typically have only 6-8 hours a week of non-meeting time,” he tells me.

ARE YOU A CONSISTENT MANAGER? Find out in less than 2 minutes:

Free Self-Assessment

WHAT: To agent or not to agent? The people are speaking.

Here’s what hasn’t changed between boomers and the current generation: you need the best people on your team.

The best people know agents are the future — and want to be the ones building and operating them.

Blake is clear some people are resisting agents, especially people with more “tenure.”

“The younger people coming into the business are all over it,” he says. “They are the ones actually creating new ideas of how to use agents.”

Millennials and gen-z know the corporate ladder is dead, and all they control is their story. No doubt agents as productivity or innovation tools will be central to writing a bestselling chapter of a career story.

As a reminder, agents are not chat bots; they are autonomous pieces of software that occupy job roles on a team. “Agents don’t just summarize a situation; they prompt ideas and new ways to think about information, “ Blake points out.

Here are five use cases of the agents working on Blake’s team:

• Morning account briefing — Every morning, each AE gets an autonomous overnight summary of everything that happened in the last 24 hours on their key account: support cases, internal Slack messages, meeting notes, CRM data, Google docs — all aggregated and summarized with prompting ideas on how to act on it.

• Prioritization and prospecting — Agents help the team figure out where to spend their time across a portfolio of 75-100 co-sellers, surfacing which accounts to prioritize and why.

• Deal inspection — Agents pull together deal data to help AEs assess the health and status of opportunities.

• Case trend analysis — Agents surface support case history: volume, average resolution time, topic commonalities — to help identify adoption challenges or technical health issues in an account.

• Meeting time tracking — An agent that tells Blake how much non-meeting time his people actually have in a given week.

HOW: Avoid the “Wild West”

Agent adoption right now is, in Blake’s words, “a little bit of the wild wild west.” There are no limits on how many agents your team can build — and at Salesforce, anyone can build one often in less than five minutes.

That’s exactly why you need a weekly meeting.

Once a week, Blake sits his team down and asks one question: who found something new? “Almost every week someone’s got something that is helpful,” he says — and that single meeting is what turned his most resistant people into believers.

Here are three questions to put on the agenda every week:

• What did you build or try this week — and what did it save you?

• Where are you still doing work at night that an agent could do for you?

• What agents aren’t working and what can we learn?

The wild west needs a sheriff. For managers, the weekly meeting is it.

SEE WHERE YOU STAND

How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.

ManagerMentor • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026

Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:

How do I make accountability open and transparent?

When I was at Cisco, senior leaders would frequently say: “Did he do what he said he would do?”

So much of accountability in the boomer generation centered on personal behavior. It was personal, relational, and reputation-based. The corporate structure of the boomer era created enough ambiguity that it actually encouraged passive-aggressive behaviors — where agreeing in public, but not so in private, was common.

Personal follow-through became the visible face of accountability. “Your word was your currency,” as former Cisco CEO John Chambers told me many times.

On the other hand, millennials and gen-z have a different “face” of accountability: agents.

And I think it’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to accountability.

What’s New:

Here’s what I mean: boomers were awful and, at best, inconsistent when it came to accountability. It mostly didn’t matter to career progression: the corporate ladder was always there to save people with a predictable path forward.

And here’s what every boomer reading this knows is true: people got ahead who shouldn’t have gotten ahead.

Millennials and gen-z don’t have that luxury. They know all they control is their story. The best people today want managers who can help them write it — and accountability is an essential part of any bestselling story.

My own research and others have determined this fact: millennials and gen-z want to work for a manager who is more authentic and less political than the boomer generation. More than 80% of millennials and gen-z put openness and transparency at the top of their list when evaluating potential employers. My own experience has taught me that this generation really cares about fairness.

And here is the crazy optimistic thing: agents are going to make accountability even more open, more objective and less subjective. The agents doing, for example, business value metrics or driving pipeline through internal data have to be openly designed and tested against a known set of outcomes.

Here’s why this matters to managers: the best people want to be the ones managing the agents. They know “open accountability” is their best friend. They know if they outperform, their work will be objectively superior.

In the not too distant future, I don’t think it will ever have been easier to be accountable for something. It still means you need to perform, but at least you know it won’t be political.

ARE YOU A CONSISTENT MANAGER? Less than 2 minutes:

Free Self-Assessment

Why this matters:

Alignment and accountability are the bookends of a high-performing team.

Alignment assures everyone is playing their position relative to the team’s priorities, goals and metrics. Accountability puts a name to a set of responsibilities on your dashboard.

Agents bind alignment and accountability into an “open” system.

Your job as a manager is to teach your people how to manage agents — because the lens of accountability is on them now — for better or worse.

My final team at Cisco was largely made up of hardware and software engineers. Before I worked with them, I wasn't that familiar with ideas like validation, verification and testing.

But now I am — and your best people need to be too. Those aren't software concepts anymore. They're management skills.

How: Publish Your “Open Accountability” Framework

Read more

Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:

How do I keep agents and people aligned to the same priorities, goals, and metrics?

There’s been a lot of back and forth recently about the role of the manager in the age of AI. Some arguing for its demise. Others the reverse.

So let me be clear about where I’m coming from: managing a team is the one job AI can’t replace.

That’s because managers are responsible for execution. It’s black-and-white. Nothing is more important to successful execution than aligning every job role on the team to the priorities, goals and metrics on a manager’s dashboard.

What’s New

We’re half-way through 2026.

I know teams are piloting or trialing agents right now. I know a lot of people in sales so I hear about teams looking at agents to handle pipeline management for example. By the end of the year, about half of all teams will have some role on the team handled by an agent or agents.

It’s time to get ready: Agents shouldn’t be any different than people. Agents will need to play their position on the team, just like the people on the team.

On the highest performing teams, people can literally “hold” their box of responsibilities in their hands and know how to measure its success.

It’s the manager’s job to ask agents to show you their “box” of responsibilities and how it aligns to your dashboard.

Boomers could get away with a little alignment “drift.” Millennial and gen-z managers can’t.

Why this matters:

It’s an assumption of mine that all great managers understand that they have to have the best people on their team.

As the late great sales leader at Cisco Rick Justice reminded us at the company, “It’s a small matter of people.”

The best people on your team want to be the ones building and operating the agents — they know agents and bots are the future. Your people know the corporate ladder is dead, and all they control is their story.

And as a manager, you want as many people as possible on your team motivated to write a chapter of a best-selling story. It’s the key to discretionary effort and innovation.

In my research with millennials and gen-z, I found that today’s generation looks for managers who are consistent in the way they run the team. I identified Six Drivers of Consistency. Alignment is one of them.

I think alignment is the necessary first step in building a high-performance team — and what that means is both people and agents have to be able to “hold” their box of responsibilities in their real and virtual hands.

ARE YOU A CONSISTENT MANAGER?

Less than 2 minutes to score: Take the Self-assessment.

Read more

It is literally the opposite of the corporate ladder that boomers experienced — where everything was so predictable. It was easy to plan in the boomer era; a time of incremental growth and incremental change.

Managers today are faced with planning for the present and future at the same time: on the one hand, evolve the team as agent technology gets better; on the other hand, operate and run a team to get results.

In my last job at Cisco in sales operations, my team never missed a quarter — spending nearly a $100 million of Cisco’s money every fiscal year delivering more than 2 million product demonstrations for it.

I was lucky at the time to have a right-hand person named Mimi deGrandpre as my business partner. I was used to a financial analyst as a partner, but Mimi taught me about planning — because I couldn’t miss a quarter or all hell would break loose.

I recently reached out to Mimi — because she’s still teaching teams to plan.

I wanted to get her thoughts on managing today, and how managers can navigate — by planning better — the age of AI.

WHY: The Numbers Tell You Everything You Need to Know

I spent the last year interviewing a lot of people for this newsletter. In each interview, I don’t really have a position about what I’m trying to write about. It sort of reveals itself by the wisdom of the person I’m listening to.

That’s what happened when I sat down with Mimi.

I wanted to talk to her about all the change happening inside of organizations today — and specifically what first-time and early-career managers are supposed to do about it. How do you plan when everything is moving? How do you lead a team when the rules keep changing?

Mimi opened with three numbers that I think every manager needs to tape to their laptop about the “quality” of planning today:

• 20. The percentage of all projects so badly misaligned to strategy they should never be done at all.

• 40. How much better proactive prioritization outperforms “fair” allocation of capital, according to McKinsey’s research over 15 years.

• 60. The percentage of strategic goals that are actually successfully delivered.

Those are awful numbers. On some level, it must reflect the lack of training and development managers get — which is why I called Mimi.

Free Assessment: Are You Consistent?

WHAT: The 4M Method

Mimi said something in our conversation that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“Without a strong vision and purpose of some kind, you’re always going to struggle. Your team is going to struggle to understand what they’re marching toward and what their reason for getting up in the morning is.”

This deeply resonates with my experience as a manager. When so much in the present is changing, a compelling vision of the future keeps the team believing in the work it’s doing. I learned this from John Chambers when he was CEO of Cisco. As I recently told my friend Ash Seddeek, John would tell me, “Belief is worth 1-3 points of growth.”

Mimi uses a framework she calls the “4M Method.” As readers of this newsletter know, I’m frustrated by the lack of training first-time managers get for the job. That’s why I love frameworks that solve specific problems. So managers, here’s your “planning in a box” - the 4M’s:

1. Mission. Use your organization’s mission, purpose, and vision as the filter. If an initiative doesn’t tie directly to your purpose or your long-term vision, it shouldn’t make the cut. Ask yourself: does this move us closer to our core purpose? If the answer is no, it might be interesting — but it’s not strategic.

2. Money. Strategy without financial context is just wishful thinking. Every project or idea must connect to one of three things: generating revenue, saving costs, or laying the groundwork for future financial gain — investment in people, process, or tools. Think of this as the business case lens for every strategic decision.

3. RoadMAP. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Stack-rank every initiative, without emotion. Your roadmap should reflect the mix of foundational work that keeps the lights on, growth work that builds the future, and transformational projects that disrupt the status quo. Lay them out across an 18-month timeline. Move from reacting to planning. Prioritization isn’t about saying no forever — it’s about saying “not yet.”

4. Measure. This is where most plans fall apart. Metrics are often too vague or disconnected from what the team actually controls. SMART metrics force you to be clear. What exactly will success look like? How will you know you’re making progress?

“Metrics aren't just for reporting — they're for motivation, clarity, and alignment,” Mimi emphasizes. “When your whole team understands what success looks like, they're more likely to achieve it.”

HOW: Start Here This Week

Before you build a plan, Mimi says you need to know if your approach to prioritization is or isn’t working.

Here are her “five signs” you have a prioritization problem:

1. There’s no list of projects and no criteria to assess them

2. There are resource allocation issues — overload or burnout

3. There are frequent changes in direction

4. Everything is considered a priority

5. There are “side” or “pet” projects

If you recognize yourself in any of those, here’s Mimi’s five-step process to fix it:

Step 1. List ALL projects, no matter the size or budget.

Step 2. Choose five criteria to assess all projects against — strategic alignment, customer impact, ROI, resource availability, risk.

Step 3. Stack-rank the projects using the criteria.

Step 4. Assign resources — financial and human — to ensure success.

Step 5. Say “no” or “not yet” to anything that falls below the budget line.

Process is one of the Six Drivers of Consistency

What Mimi is describing with the 4M Method is exactly what I mean by consistent process — one of the Six Drivers of Consistency I identified in my research with millennials and gen-z.

The best people know every manager has their own operating model. The team can only follow your lead if you share your process. Take a hard look at Mimi’s 4M Method and learn from it.

SEE WHERE YOU STAND

How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.

ManagerMentor • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026

Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:

How do I keep agents and people moving in the same direction?

My favorite part of managing people always centered around getting the team on the same page to try something new.

There’s lots of metaphors about “rowing in unison”; “skating to where the puck’s going”; “running a tight ship” — these all exist because it wasn’t always easy to get people on a team to stop doing things and start doing new things.

Now that it is a given that most teams will have agents in 2026, managers have an added level of complexity to coordinating execution beyond just people.

What’s New:

Here’s why: everyone knows how to use AI assistants like Claude or Gemini.

But AI assistants respond to prompts. Agents make decisions.

An AI assistant is reactive. You prompt, it responds. Claude doesn’t independently do things between our conversations — it is waiting for me.

On the other hand, an agent is proactive and autonomous. It’s running in the background, executing tasks, making decisions, taking actions in systems — without waiting to be asked.

When a team asks an agent to take on pipeline management, for example, it’s a serious decision.

It requires the same degree of coordination as creating a new job role on a team, building a job description, and hiring the right person.

Except an agent isn’t a person.

Why this matters:

With an AI assistant, humans are always in the loop.

With an agent, the human has to design the loop. Humans set up the goals, guardrails and feedback mechanisms up-front. Agents are executing the loop 24 hours a day. It’s someone’s job to make sure the output of the agent is delivering what was promised.

That’s why I firmly believe that agents need to be managed by people — and why I believe people who are great at managing teams of people and agents will never have their jobs replaced by AI.

And here is what else is important: the best people on your team want to be the ones managing the agents for you.

Every manager has to exit 2026 knowing how to accomplish two things:

1. How their team designs an agent’s work.

2. How the best people on the team manage the agent’s work

SEE WHERE YOU STAND

How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.

How: Master the Quarterly “Synch Meeting”

My research showed that millennials and gen-z want to work for managers who are consistent. One of the Six Drivers of Consistency in the learning and development system of the Manager Mentor is “process” — how a manager consistently operates and runs a team.

Read more

Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:

What is my front line actually experiencing as agents arrive on the team?

The biggest change in corporate structure is coming in 2026 as 50% of all teams will include humans and AI agents in 2026.

Managing the transition to biological-digital teams comes with risk that always accompanies change: the people on your team have deep anxiety about AI taking away their jobs, while at the same time there is no guarantee that an agent on the team is working as planned.

For managers of teams, the key is listening to your front-line people — the people who are likely the ones working with agents day-to-day.

What’s New:

The people working with agents day-to-day are accumulating real-time intelligence your spreadsheet will never capture — what’s making an impact, what could be better, where to go next.

2026 has to be the “year of listening” for managers.

My research into the future of managing found that millennials and gen-z want to work for managers who know what’s keeping the team “up at night” — whether it’s the performance of agents or the fear of agents.

The best people are already talking among themselves about what’s working and what’s not — and they want their manager to tap into it and be as current as they are.

“No news is good news” was a boomer refrain. This generation feels exactly the opposite.

Why this Matters:

Your front-line people know 2026 is a consequential year — just as you do.

The next 6-12 months may be the only time in your managing career where you get a chance to learn how to manage the transition to combined human-agent teams on your terms.

HOW: Make Skip-Level Meetings a Standing Commitment

Skip-level meetings are your mechanism for codifying your approach to the three things that matter most right now:

1. How agents and humans best complement each other.

2. How to talk to your team about the future of work.

3. How to make sure your best people are the ones working with agents — these people know it is their future opportunity.

The skip-level meeting is critical to listening as a manager. Knowing people layers below you gives your team confidence you have a full picture of the team’s performance in your mind — not just some spreadsheet in your hands.

So set your cadence. Publish your schedule. Let your people know you’re coming to listen. Make skip-level meetings with up-and-coming high potentials a regular part of your calendar. There’s no better way to listen than to meet your people where they are, in person.

When you commit to listening to your team, you’ll learn things that will make you a better manager. You’ll find out ways to improve performance and likely be exposed to better ways of doing things.

Grade Yourself as a Manager

TAKE ACTION: 5 STEPS

Read more

Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question: What work on my team is going to move to agents and away from people?

One of the pillars of being a great manager is the way you consistently operate the team.

Every team has an operating model: how you set goals and metrics, how you set budgets, how you manage performance. Every team’s operating model will evolve in 2026 as teams transition to be part-agent, part-human.

What’s new:

Because agents can do more work every quarter, your team needs to understand your decision-making processes about how the team of people and agents will evolve.

My research showed that millennials and gen-z are looking for managers who are authentic and share their decision-making style.

The best people want to know how you think and how you’re wired — because the arrival of agents on the team is going to affect the people on the team.

And let’s not forget: the best people want to be the ones building and operating the agents — they know agents and bots are the future.

Why this matters:

Everyone on the team already knows the future is in flux with agents and people each owning work. Make it easy on everyone (and perhaps yourself) by spelling out the way you intend to approach this transition.

What happened in 2025 was like an appetizer: it was a tease of AI’s true impact on the workplace. This next year will reveal specific frameworks that drive an organization’s operating model for the next 3–5 years. In short, where companies place their bets with leadership, budget and headcount — and where they don’t.

All of this will land in the laps of managers.

How: Publish the rules for how work will evolve on your team

Your people want to know the rules. Tell them explicitly how you will decide when work goes to agents versus humans.

The more you tell your people about the way you think and make decisions, the more you build a sense of trust and fairness on the team. It also reduces “noise in the system” and keeps the team from speculating — which can only increase the sense of uncertainty in an era already defined by uncertainty.

Grade Your Management Consistency

Read more

Welcome to the Third ManagerMentor newsletter where I answer the 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026. These 50 Questions are a core component of the ManagerMentor learning and development system that I purpose-built for millennial and gen-z managers. Enjoy this free preview. Learn more here.

QUESTION #3: How consistent are you as a manager?

SUMMARY

Consistency is the number one reason millennials and gen-z recommend a manager — or don’t. My research identified six specific drivers of consistency that separate great managers from the rest. Today’s newsletter is about self-reflection: take a consistency scan of your team. Use the exercise to find out where to get better as a manager.

WHY: Here’s what’s changed

Millennials and gen-z know they can’t count on the corporate ladder the way their parents did.

They do not expect to spend their entire career in the same organization — that’s an idea boomers grew up with.

Instead, the best people today are already charting their own course — one chapter at a time, not one level at a time.

That’s why the #1 reason people leave a job today is a lack of opportunities for career growth.

This generation knows all they control is their story — and they’re looking for managers who can help them write it.

At its core, millennials and gen-z know a consistent manager increases the odds of being recognized and rewarded for exceeding expectations.

It makes sense when you think about it: in a world where so much is uncertain, consistency is the exact opposite.

WHAT: Consistency isn’t a personality trait; it’s a set of behaviors

Grade Your Consistency

1. Alignment — Every job role on your team must have a direct line of sight to your priorities, goals, and metrics — because that’s the only way your people can be recognized and rewarded for their work.

2. Accountability — The key to accountability is knowing who can make decisions — when employees can clearly see the buck stops with them, it inspires them to take risks and innovate because they know they control their destiny.

3. Mindset — Your people don’t have time to reverse-engineer your brain — they want to know how you’re wired as a decision-maker, because the way you think will directly influence who gets recognized and rewarded.

4. Process — The more your people know your team’s operating model, the less time they’ll spend wondering how you prioritize budgets and rewards — and the faster they’ll align behind your goals and focus on executing them.

5. Facts — A team can only have one, single scorecard of success — because facts truly empower people, giving them an extra step in confidence that their work has a foundation built on something real.

6. Listening — If something is keeping your people up at night, you need to know about it — because when you act on what you learn, it motivates your people to believe you have their back.

Think about the Six Drivers in three pairs — because that’s how they actually work together in the real world.

The first pair — Alignment and Accountability — is about what you owe your people to set them up for success. Alignment and accountability are bookends of a well-run team.

The second pair — Mindset and Process — is about who you are as a manager. This is the most personal part. It requires honesty and self-reflection.

The third pair — Facts and Listening — is about how your people experience you as a manager every day.

Think of it this way: the first pair builds the foundation. The second pair builds the manager. The third pair builds the way your people execute as a team.

HOW: Take a “Consistency Scan” of Your Team

For each of the Six Drivers, I’ve created practical toolkits that show you how to take action and develop yourself. Paid subscribers can access these toolkits and other resources in our L&D system.

But before you dive into the toolkits, start here:

The Consistency Scan is a one-question-per-driver exercise. Answer each question. Wherever you hesitate — that’s where you start.

1. Alignment

Publishing your priorities allows your people to clearly align their responsibilities to the reward system of your team.

Can everyone on your team connect their daily work to the priorities, goals, and metrics on your dashboard?

2. Accountability

The best people today want to own their work — but only you can set them up to do it. Knowing who makes decisions about budgets and rewards is the key to ending ambiguity and all the time it wastes.

Have you published the names of your decision-makers — and does your team know where the buck stops?

3. Mindset

Your people don’t want to waste time reverse-engineering your brain. The more you share about how you think and make decisions, the more trust and fairness you build on the team.

Does your team know your strengths and weaknesses as a decision-maker — and the steps you take when you have to make a tough choice?

4. Process

Process provides the consistent context your people need in order to see how their work aligns to your priorities — and stop wasting time wondering how things get done.

Can the people on your team describe how you set goals, allocate budgets, and evaluate performance?

5. Facts

Facts truly empower people — giving them an extra step in confidence that their work has a foundation built on something real. The best people want to be the standout player on your dashboard. And how goals are measured on that dashboard is the way your people will make their mark.

Does your team have one single scorecard of success — one source of truth everyone works from?

6. Listening

Nothing sends a clearer signal about a team’s commitment to career planning than your behavior. Your people are already talking among themselves. The question is whether you know what they’re saying.

Do you know what’s keeping your people up at night — and are you doing anything about it?

SEE WHERE YOU STAND

How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.

ManagerMentorAI • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026

QUESTION #2: How fast is managing changing? Buckle up in 2026.

SUMMARY

It is now inevitable that every manager will have a combined team of biological and digital people — and maybe half of all managers will in 2026. People are simply mind-blown at the speed of AI’s development — especially the idea that things called “databots,” “audit bots,” “quotebots,” “demobots” and so on will be sitting at the same table with humans at scale in 2026. The facts show where the market is — and why there is no time to waste. Get your

team ready.

WHY: The Most Important Year of Your Managing Career

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest that 2026 will be a year like no other for anyone managing people.

For the last 100 years, a manager’s job was simple to define: you managed people. Biological people. People with names, emotions, ambitions and career stories. That definition is changing — faster than most managers realize.

I’ve been listening to the questions and conversations about the future of managing this past year. Above all else, people are simply mind-blown at the speed of AI’s development. The question I hear most often isn’t “will agents replace my team?” It’s “how do I manage a team that’s half human and half digital?”

For the first time in the history of managing, the answer to “who is on your team?” includes both people and machines. That changes everything — how you set goals, how you measure performance, how you develop your people, and how your best people write their career stories.

Your job as team manager is to get your team ready for the change. These facts will help your team see what’s coming and anticipate the change.

WHAT: 10 Facts Every Manager Needs to Know

Fact 1: Half of all managers are already managing human-agent teams. It is now clear that every manager will have a combined team of biological and digital people — and maybe half of all managers will in 2026. AI agent deployment has nearly quadrupled, with 42% of organizations having deployed at least some agents, up from just 11% two quarters ago (KPMG, Q4 2025).

Fact 2: The job market has already shifted — roles are being redesigned. 67% of executives agree that AI agents will drastically transform existing roles within the next 12 months. 40% of job roles in Global 2000 companies will actively collaborate with AI agents as workflows are redesigned (PwC, 2025).

Fact 3: The #1 skill needed is not technical — it’s judgment. 73% of talent acquisition leaders say the skill they need most in 2026 is critical thinking and problem-solving — not technical AI skills. The value has shifted to people who can assess AI output, spot flaws, and know when to trust results versus override them (Korn Ferry, 2026).

Fact 4: Managing agents pays — literally. Workers with AI skills now command a 56% wage premium over those without in the same job. Productivity growth has nearly quadrupled in industries most exposed to AI since 2022 (PwC, 2025).

Fact 5: Human skills are becoming more valuable, not less. People management is up 138 occupations in job listings from 2023 to 2025 — one of the sharpest increases of any skill category. AI and machine learning is up 185 — but people management is right behind it (McKinsey, 2025).

Fact 6: Companies that invest in people to manage agents outperform. Companies reported an average 35% increase in productivity after integrating AI agents. Of those adopting AI agents, 66% report increased productivity, 57% report cost savings, and 55% report faster decision-making (KPMG; PwC, 2025).

Fact 7: Most companies are focused on access, not readiness. 84% of CHROs plan to upskill workers in AI — but follow-through is failing. While 77% of companies say they intend to launch upskilling initiatives, participation in adult-learning programs is flat or falling (WEF, 2025). Adoption without enablement isn’t enough.

Fact 8: New roles are emerging that didn’t exist five years ago. Companies are already hiring agent product managers, AI evaluation writers, and “human in the loop” validators. Jobs requiring AI skills are growing 7.5% even as total job postings fell 11.3% last year (Gloat, 2025).

Fact 9: The manager’s job is not being eliminated — it’s being elevated. Gartner predicts AI will flatten organizations, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions through 2026. The managers who remain will shift to strategic, value-add activities. The one job AI can’t replace? The manager who knows how to run a team of humans and agents.

Fact 10: 2026 is the year it goes into production. “2025 was a lot of ‘Let’s play with it, let’s prototype it.’ 2026 will be the year we put it into production.” — AI consultant Michael Hannecke (IEEE Spectrum, 2026). The window for preparation is narrowing.

HOW: Get Your Team Ready for What’s Coming

It's likely your team is already talking among themselves about the impact of agents and bots on team composition and responsibilities. One of the Six Drivers of Consistency is listening. Let your team know you're in touch with the pace of change — and create an opportunity for real dialogue.

Step 1: Share the Facts — Don’t Filter Them

Send the 10 facts to your team 24 hours before your next meeting — by email or Slack. Give them time to sit with the numbers before you're in the room together."

Tell your team: “I want you to read these before we meet. I want to know which fact surprises you most — and which one concerns you most.”

Step 2: Run the Team Discussion

Open the meeting with two questions:

“Which fact surprised you most?” “Which fact concerns you most?”

Go around the room. Don’t jump to solutions. Listen first. What you hear tells you exactly where your team is — confident, anxious, curious, or checked out. That’s your starting point.

Step 3: Make It Personal

Close the meeting with one individual assignment. Ask every person to answer this question in writing before your next 1:1:

“Given what you just read — what is the one skill you need to build in 2026 that you don’t have today?”

That answer becomes the first entry in their skills profile — and the first real career conversation you’ll have with them this year.

Read more

AI can’t replace managing. But are YOU ready for this career?

GRADE YOURSELF: How consistent are you as a manager?

Get your grade + biggest blindspot in 1 minute. No email required.

[ Am I Ready →]

Grade Yourself

Welcome to the first ManagerMentor newsletter where I answer the 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026. These 50 Questions are a core component of the ManagerMentor learning and development system that I purpose-built for millennial and gen-z managers. Enjoy this free preview. Learn more here.

QUESTION #1: IS MANAGING WORTH IT? 5 Reasons why it is.

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.

ManagerMentor • All Rights Reserved • The Culture Platform, Inc. • 2026

It’s hard to believe I’ve written a 50+ issues of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty, including more than 50,000 words, over the past year. I’ve also interviewed no less than 20 thought leaders. And thank you to the thousands of readers who are subscribers.

In the end, all this content has generated a lot of questions from managers out there in the real world. Maybe 250 questions, maybe more.

It makes sense managers are asking a lot of questions. More than 8 in 10 first-time managers get no formal training, according to a recent report. Readers of this newsletter know I believe the corporate ladder is dead in the face of AI reimagining work — and millennial and gen-z managers face questions from their teams that boomers never had to consider.

Managers need help — now.

It’s literally nuts that the vast majority of first-time managers get no training — it’s not hyperbolic to call it a manager crisis.

For one simple reason: this is the greatest time of change in corporate structure since the corporate structure was invented. Seriously.

As AI reimagines work, it’s now obvious that teams — beginning right now — will be part biological and part digital. Maybe 50 percent of all teams will be a combination of humans and agents by the end of 2026.

It’s the magnitude of change that makes managers so valuable to organizations today. As work is reimagined, it’s managers who will drive the execution of people-agent teams.

That’s why I believe managing a team is the one job AI can’t replace.

The joy of writing this newsletter this past year is the people I’ve met and the questions they’ve asked. The more I listened, the more I realized a newsletter is not enough to help millennial and gen-z managers.

That’s why today I’m introducing the first learning and development system purpose-built for millennial and gen-z managers coming of age in this moment in time.

My system is called the ManagerMentor. It’s a system because it includes a feedback loop.

It’s built around my research with millennials and gen-z into the future of managing and what it revealed: consistency is the number one reason why the next generation recommends a manager to their colleagues and friends.

And, it makes sense when you think about it: in a world where so much is uncertain, consistency is the exact opposite.

We’re a System, Not Just a Newsletter

The ManagerMentor is a three-part system :

Part 1: Framework — The Future of Managing is Now.

• Learn the Six Drivers of Consistency that separate great managers from the rest.

• Includes the ebook, How to be a Great Manager in the Age of Uncertainty.

Part 2: Feedback — See Where You Stand

• Most managers never get honest feedback about how they’re actually showing up — stalling growth.

• Includes self- and 360-degree assessments to understand your strengths and weaknesses as a manager and how consistent you are.

Part 3: Tools — Grow Yourself

• Weekly ManagerMentor newsletter: The 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026

• Access toolkits for the Six Drivers of Consistency to step up your game.

• And, 24/7 guidance with the ManagerMentorAI — ask it any question about managing.

  ---

I’ve so enjoyed writing this newsletter and hearing from people. All subscribers will continue to receive my twice-monthly newsletter Managing in the Age of Uncertainty — featuring my point-of-view on managing in the age of AI, as well as interviews with industry thought leaders.

As a learning and development platform, the ManagerMentor system will be a paid service. This is new for me, but I’m also excited to help.

• $9/month · $79/year subscription

• Founding Members ($99/year) receive immediate access to the 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026.

In the end, the corporate ladder boomers and gen-x climbed is gone. But my research with millennials and gen-z showed what’s taking its place.

The best people on your team are betting this chapter of their career on you.

I built this system for the manager who wants to be the reason their best people stay.

Thanks — Ron

A year ago we were talking about AI, but in short order the very nature of managing teams will never be the same — nearly 50% of all organizations will be part human and part agent this year.

I’m reposting an article I wrote last June for two reasons:

1. First, despite all the change, I wanted to remind readers of this newsletter that our humanness is ultimately what differentiates us — and ways to encourage it with your people.

2. Second, next week I’ll be launching something new here on . I realized a newsletter alone isn’t sufficient to help managers succeed with so much changing so fast — and getting so little training to do the job.

   ---

   ---

NEXT WEEK: Look for the ManagerMentor — the first learning and development system purpose-built for millennial and gen-z managers.

How to take advantage of your humanness.

Originally published July 16, 2025.

“You won’t lose your job to AI. You will lose it to someone using AI.”

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and the world’s champion for AI, routinely says these words to encourage people to try AI and find ways to incorporate this new technology into their work — and build an AI skillset.

As brilliant as Jensen is, I disagree with him. I may live the vacuum of Silicon Valley, but everyone I know is already using AI to get their jobs done. In a world where everyone has access to AI tools, how does someone stand out and get recognized?

I write about the impact of AI and the era of efficiency on career planning for millennials and gen-z, and how managers need to adapt — I don’t write about AI itself. It’s why I call this publication, “Managing in the Age of Uncertainty.”

The core philosophy of what I share here is based on one fundamental idea: the corporate ladder of the boomer era no longer exists to support career growth and advancement for millennials and gen-z. In the absence of the corporate ladder, millennials and gen-z know all they can control is their career story — and they look for job roles that lead to a best-selling chapter of their story which can’t be ignored when getting ready for the next opportunity to grow.

I like being specific with actionable, real-world recommendations for managers and the people they manage.

So this week I asked a cross-section of professional colleagues to help me develop “5 Tips Every Manager Needs to Teach in 2025.”

A theme exists in the 5 tips: As valuable as using AI is to doing a job well or better, the best way to stand out and be recognized is based on the very characteristics that make us human.

---

FREE Manager Self-Assessment

Tip 1: Relationships and Interpersonal Skills Still Matter

“I reflect on the importance of developing strong interpersonal skills, particularly for people who want to advance into leadership. I often joke that one of the most valuable things I ever studied was improvisation, both because it helped me develop the capacity to think on my feet AND grow in my capacity to communicate with other people. As we prepare for whatever impact AI is going to have on jobs of the future, I think that our ability to relate, communicate, and collaborate as humans will become an even more sought-after trait.”

Thank you, Josh Selo, CEO of the Bill Wilson Center.

“AI is changing how content is created, distributed, and measured. But the differentiators that will make you indispensable aren’t the tools -- they’re about judgment, taste, relationships and emotional intelligence.”

Thank you, Scott Brown, Partner at Cervin Ventures.

Tip 2: Proximity to Smart, Experienced People is Priceless

“Today’s youngest workers are missing out on something we had without even realizing it - learning by osmosis. When we started our careers, we sat in offices surrounded by people. All day long, we overheard how things were done. How leaders handle tough conversations, how deals were closed, how problems got solved, how certain customers (or bosses) preferred things, and an endless amount of quick questions answered and facts shared across the bullpen. You picked up on expectations, culture, strategy… without ever being in a formal training.

• “Don’t chase remote work just because it sounds flexible or convenient. Flexibility is great, but early in your career, proximity to smart, experienced people is priceless.

• “Take advantage of hybrid setups if you can. Even a couple days a week in the office can give you exposure and connection that accelerates your growth.

• “If you’re remote, be really intentional. Ask to sit in on meetings. Find ways to observe how people work and communicate. And make the first move in building relationships... it’s awkward, but it pays off.”

Thank you Amber Moore from TruVue.

Tip 3: Build Range at First, Don’t Specialize too Fast

“I found the best early-career marketers aren’t just great at one thing—they’ve experimented across disciplines, sectors, even career paths. Understanding how brand, product marketing, comms, growth, and content fit together will help you later in your career. Work for an agency once, but leave before you burn out. Work for a company once, but leave before you become soft and comfortable.”

Thank you, Scott Brown, Partner at Cervin Ventures.

“Enable your people to work cross-functionally in the organization or with external partners so they can grow their professional network of people who can be referrals for their next job. Additionally, this will also help them grow a broader understanding of the business as they work with more teams.”

Thank you Marina Villalpando Lemas of Connexting.

Tip 4: Understand Careers are Iterative Stories Now

“Your career will be iterative. Instead of one business career, look for ‘micro-careers’ where you reinvent yourself every few years. Think of yourself as agile software.”

Thank you Cindy Goodwin-Saks, Founder Valiant Leadership

“If you’re excited about building a career, don’t just do your current job—start doing the job you want next. That way, when it’s time for a promotion, you’re already the natural choice. A good manager will see and recognize your efforts. It’s perfectly fine to take a job that pays the bills, but life’s too short to settle for just a job.”

Thank you Neil Heller, Co-Founder Anonomatic.

Tip 5: Be a Curious Life-Long Learner

“Find mentors and peers you can learn with, not just from -- and invest in those relationships consistently. Be the person who follows through, elevates the team, and isn’t always looking for a quid pro quo transaction.”

Thanks again Scott!!

“A lot of that advice I give relates to how people approach work - encouraging curiosity and flexibility. I emphasize the importance of lifelong learning (there is no end point - cultivating curiosity helps with that) - and more often than not I am recommending a range of books that have influenced my style (from Dare to Lead to Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals).”

Thanks again Josh!

FREE Manager Self-Assessment

Manager Thought of the Week

“Young people today are starting careers where they have to actively fight for information, clarity, and connection - and that’s exhausting.”

This quote from Amber Moore really shook me — because I can see the truth in it. Remote work is exhausting, if you want to stay connected with people, not just projects. Information flows unevenly today, despite massive use of communication tools in the workplace. Priorities shift faster today than anytime in history. 9-5 is a thing of the past.

Managers: Please sit down with a member of your team today, this week, this hour and ask: What can I do for you since you do so much for me?

Leave a comment

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more