Wisdom Wednesday: The Manager You Automated Was Never the Manager You Needed
- Christopher McCormick
- 10 hours ago
- 4 min read
Wisdom Wednesday: The Reckoning, Week 1
Four weeks. Four questions the leadership content industry keeps avoiding. No safe answers.
Christopher McCormick, Founder & CEO, Visionary Consulting
At 6:47 a.m., Devon opened the dashboard he used to build by hand.
For three years, the Monday status report was his. He pulled data from four systems, reconciled the numbers that never matched, and wrote the summary his own director actually read. It took most of Sunday night. Now an artificial intelligence tool built the same report in the time it took him to pour coffee.
Cleaner. Faster. No errors to chase down at midnight.
Devon stared at it for a long minute. Then he closed the laptop and "thought about" the nine o'clock meeting with a senior engineer who was quietly burning out, and realized he had no idea what he was going to say to her.
The question nobody scheduled time for
The tool didn't just save Devon four hours. It exposed a question he had never had to answer out loud: what was he actually managing before, and was any of it the part a machine could not do?
That is the question underneath every AI rollout in every management layer right now, and most organizations are avoiding it by talking about productivity instead.
A data point worth sitting with: Gallup's manager research, running from its original State of the American Manager work through its more recent frontline manager studies, has consistently found that the manager alone accounts for roughly 70 percent of the variance in a team's engagement. The same body of research finds that only about one in ten people have the natural talent to manage well, with another two in ten showing enough raw ability to grow into strong managers with real investment.
What the orchestra without a conductor already knew
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has performed without a permanent conductor since 1972. No single person stands at the front deciding tempo and interpretation for everyone else. Instead, a small rotating group of musicians, drawn from within the orchestra itself, leads the interpretive decisions for each piece, and the rest of the ensemble pushes back, adjusts, and commits.
The orchestra did not eliminate leadership. It eliminated the assumption that leadership required a fixed hierarchical seat separate from the work itself. The people doing the coordinating were also the people doing the playing.
Most corporate management structures assume the opposite: that coordination requires a permanent title, a direct-report line, and a weekly status report to justify it. AI is now quietly testing that assumption, one automated dashboard at a time.
The job was never the spreadsheet
Devon's report was never the job. It was the artifact that made the job legible to the people above him. Strip the artifact away, and what remains is coaching a struggling engineer through a hard quarter, setting context so a team understands why a priority shifted, resolving the conflict between two leads who both think they own the same decision, and building enough psychological safety that someone tells you the truth before the deadline instead of after it.
None of that shows up in a dashboard. None of it can be automated by a tool that summarizes data faster.
Question for you: if you removed every report, every status update, and every scheduling task from your managers' calendars tomorrow, would you be able to tell what they actually did with the time?
The org chart doesn't know the difference
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most organizations have never actually audited whether their manager population does the human work at all. The org chart cannot tell the difference between a manager who spends Tuesday coaching someone through a hard conversation and one who spends Tuesday reformatting a slide deck. Both show up as "manager" on the roster. Both draw the same range of compensation. Only one of them is doing work AI cannot touch.
A few honest questions surface fast once you look directly at this:
When was the last time this manager had a coaching conversation that changed how someone approached their work, not just what they were working on?
Can this manager name, specifically, what is keeping each person on their team up at night?
If a decision on their team went sideways, would people trust this manager to tell them the truth about what happened, including their own part in it?
Would the team notice, and mind, if this manager's role disappeared tomorrow and nobody replaced it?
Question for you: how many people on your leadership roster would survive that list?
The mirror
You may already know the answer for your own organization, and you may have been avoiding saying it out loud, the same way Devon avoided it until an AI tool did his old job better than he did.
The Revolutionary Leadership Series showed you five leaders who operated with almost no distance between deciding and doing. Harriet Tubman was not managing from a report. She was in the field. MacKenzie Scott's giving model works because she removed the bureaucratic layer between the decision to trust someone and the money reaching them. There was no management layer standing between vision and action in any of the five stories you just spent five weeks with.
AI is now offering every organization the same removal, whether they asked for it or not. The administrative layer is going. What is left is the part that was supposed to be the job all along.
The call
This is not an argument for eliminating managers. It is an argument for finally being honest about what the role was supposed to be, now that the parts that were easy to fake are gone.
If you lead an organization and you are not certain your management layer would survive the four questions above, that is the conversation Visionary Consulting exists to have with you. Not a reorg. A reckoning.
Where Vision Meets Reality.