Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

Parents: Tell your children to consider majoring in “managing.”

It’s like that moment in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is told the future is in “plastics”.

I’m serious.

Because I write this newsletter, many parents have asked me about jobs of the future, and what their kids should major in.

I keep telling people that the most important job in the future will be the one job AI can’t replace: Managing people.

For the last 100 years, 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 likely AI will erode or de-value functional excellence over the next few years.

Not all of it for sure. I’m confident sales will remain a predominantly human endeavor.

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 will be in the RAM of the bots, not people.

All of this change will have a tectonic impact on organizations: the traditional value ascribed to functional excellence for so many decades will lessen.

Why Managing: We Can See the Future Now

Unless we’re all replaced by robots, I think we can confidently say now that the organization of the future will be some combination of humans and bots. Real and digital people working together will be common place — we’ll be talking to the bots like they’re real people during meetings together.

I’m biased about the importance of managing because I believe managers have the most important role in a company: executing stuff. If one thing is certain about the future in the age of AI it is this: executing more stuff with fewer resources is the new normal. Productivity and efficiency, sometimes at mind-boggling rates, will be expected.

It’s managers who will be managing the real and digital people getting shit done.

The main point I’m making today is to think about managing as 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; to call the “shots”.

I’ve never really heard anyone say, “I want a career in managing of people.” For a long time, other roles in organizations mattered more. In the age of AI, that’s all about to change.

Every parent wants a kid who’s a great manager

I’m about to make what sounds like a scientific observation, but it’s just from my own career managing 5,000 people over four decades.

I think the best managers have uniquely human skills: Nuance, empathy, communications, intuition, integrity. They’ll be even more important helping to educate bots about their human teammates.

The data reinforces this: a Harvard Study showed that 85 percent of what makes someone successful at work are the result of “soft skills.”

If I were a college student today, I’d treat people management like the pre-med students treat biology — as the core curriculum, not an elective. Declare a second major in industrial psychology, organizational behavior, or communications. Take every course that teaches you how humans actually work: motivation, conflict resolution, group dynamics, influence without authority.

Here’s another reason to major in managing

Very few people are good at it.

You will stand out.

You will be recognized.

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.

Food for Thought: What’s Past is Prologue

I’ve been wondering how the typical dynamics of working on a team play out in the future: where real and virtual people have to agree on priorities, goals and metrics.

We’re just at the beginning of this transition. How will conflicts be resolved? How will trade-offs work? What happens when two “people” have the same results but only one of them can be recognized?

Humans have had trouble managing themselves. How’s all of this going to work with bots sitting at the table?

I’ll be sharing some thoughts about managing bots in future newsletters. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Message me.

In Summary: Principles of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty

• I left Cisco to answer this question with research and evidence: What does the manager of the future look like? What are millennials and gen-z seeking in a manager? Which behaviors, tactics, skills or processes matter? What’s it going to take to attract and keep the best people over the next decade? In short, how to be a great manager.

• Based on this research, the core philosophy of this newsletter is rooted in one idea: successful managers in this moment in time, for this generation of talent, need to be “career dot-connectors.” The next-gen doesn’t expect to spend their entire career on your team — that’s an idea boomers grew up with. A job on your team is like a chapter in a career story to the current generation. If you want the best people on your team, you have to connect the dots between roles on the team and the career opportunities of the people working on the team.

• What is the“Age of Uncertainty”? If the industrial age was about taking predictable steps up the ladder, the age of uncertainty is about finding or discovering the path of a career without any predictable steps, without an obvious ladder — it’s why being a career dot-connector will differentiate you as a manager.

• How to be a Great Manager in the Age of Uncertainty: Be a Career Dot Connector is available on Amazon.

• What kind of manager are you? Take my free self-assessment and learn about yourself.