Coordination Was Never the Job

A CTO at a Fortune 500 company told me they had cut 40% of their middle management layer. It saved $15 million a year and Wall Street loved it. Then he leaned in. Projects were falling apart. Nobody knew who was making decisions. Engineers were talking directly to VPs who did not understand the technical details. They were slower.

"We eliminated the coordinators," he said. "But we forgot we still need someone to coordinate."

AI is very good at what a lot of middle management had become: status reports, progress tracking, routing, drafting. The companies cutting those roles are not wrong that the work got cheap. They are wrong about what the job was.

Two people, same work

Two managers from my training programs, names changed. Sarah had fifteen years of experience and was excellent at tracking projects, writing updates and coordinating teams. When the tools arrived she doubled down on exactly that, getting better at the very tasks the tools now do. She was laid off.

James did the same work. He asked a different question: if AI can do what I do, what should I be doing instead? Before, most of his week went to gathering status, writing reports and running coordination meetings, with about 5% left for decisions. After, reviewing AI-generated reports took 5%. Seventy percent went to judgment calls on priorities, conflicts and trade-offs, and twenty to building trust across teams. Same person. Different job. He was promoted to director.

Sort the week

This is the three kinds of work applied to a calendar. Some of the work got cheap and can be handed off. Some of it is still yours: the call between shipping now with known bugs and missing the window, when the model, the engineers and sales each want something different. And some of it is new: noticing when the automated report is wrong, knowing when to override a recommendation.

The exercise is blunt. Sort every task in your week into three piles. What AI can do. What AI can draft and you check. What only you can do. If most of your week is in the first pile, you already know what happens next. For each of those tasks, hand it off or turn it into a draft you spot-check, and move the freed time into the third pile.

The middle seat

The three seats put it this way: in the middle, your slow years are worth more than your output. Coordination was the output. The years of knowing when to push and when to back off, of reading unspoken context, of making calls with incomplete information, were the value all along. They just used to be buried under status reports.

The companies that eliminated those layers are learning they removed the connective tissue. The managers who survive are the ones who stopped defending the part that got cheap.

Adapted from The Middle Manager Paradox in The Forward View. Read the full issue.