Ben Brooks:
If I talk to a head of HR or a CEO or COO or CFO, and I talk to, you know, mid-market, 500, 5,000 employee, I bet you $10,000 that not a single one would say, “We’ve got a pretty strong bench, man.” Not even great. Pretty strong.
Most of ’em, like, it’s all over the place. We over-promoted people. People just do it ’cause they wanted to make more money. We never train people. We have no standard. So it’s a mess. And we use terms like leader and manager without contextually defining, what does that look like?
Steve Smith:
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Work Tech Weekly. I'm Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap.
Organizations have been promoting people into management for decades without ever agreeing on what a good manager looks like. Growth covered up a lot of that. Now growth is slowing and AI is speeding everything else up. Those old problems have nowhere left to hide.
My guest today is Ben Brooks, founder and CEO of Pilot. Pilot is a leadership development company that helps organizations build stronger managers through group coaching and development programs. Ben has been developing managers for more than a decade, and right now he's watching things that used to work start to break, including inside his own company.
In this conversation, we talk about why AI amplifies the management problems companies already had, and why leadership development does very little without solid management underneath it. We also get into why decisions have become the real bottleneck now that producing work costs almost nothing.
Ben is also candid about the hardest feedback he's gotten as a CEO, and what he's changing because of it.
If you're tired of AI swallowing every conversation about work, this one is a good reset.
Let's get into it.
Ben Brooks, welcome to the podcast, my friend.
Ben Brooks:
Glad to be here.
Steve Smith:
I’m glad to have you on, finally. I mean, you were on my guest list from day one, and you’re a busy guy. You got a lot going on. You have your own podcast yourself, and so you got things that are happening. What’s going on right now with you?
Ben Brooks:
Well, I feel like since I first got to meet you maybe a decade ago, every time we get together, I feel like we have a podcast-like talk. Expansive, humorous, good back and forth, and I’m hoping to bring that dynamic to our conversation today. And I do have a podcast called The Lift. It’s a weekly podcast to help executives, you know, understand how to activate change, how HR people influence the business to do the right thing with people and culture.
And the movable middle in management, we want them to see possibility about how they can change the place as well.
Steve Smith:
And so when you’re having those conversations right now, obviously kind of like management and culture are more up in the air now than they were, say, five years ago. What are some of the themes that are really kind of emerging in your conversations?
Ben Brooks:
Well, you know, we’ll certainly talk about AI ’cause it’s the rules.
Steve Smith:
You have to.
Ben Brooks:
You have to, right? Otherwise the AI police will come in. But you know, look, things are a bit of a mess everywhere, and that’s because things are changing everywhere. And you know, different boats, same storm, different industries, be it, you know, tariffs, geopolitical, consumer changes, inflation, you know, regulatory things, competition, fuel prices.
There’s a lot going on. And so we see every organization, independent of AI, facing a lot of needs to adapt or change. And then there’s also how AI is either a tailwind, a headwind, or sort of, you know, one of those, you know, things in the corner of an alleyway where the trash bags just float up in the air, which is, I think, where it is right now for a lot of folks.
But, you know, what we’re really seeing is that a lot of things that got covered over by growth are being exposed when the growth stops. And so there’s a lot of things about, you know, do we actually have a capable management bench? Have we aligned in how we work together? Do we have a shared definition of what a good leader is?
Do we know how to make decisions? Like, really fundamental things that no one wants to talk about, but they’re essential for a functioning org, even. Are we clear about what our strategy is and how we’re gonna win? So those are a lot of the things that are, you know, like they’re really fundamental things, but you’re actually getting to the core and the essence of what needs to be addressed.
Steve Smith:
Well, I guess I think what’s interesting is, like, those were always challenging, you know, themes and topics, but it seems like, you know, in the AI era, for better or worse, all of those things, even if you had them sorted once upon a time, you’re having to go back and either re-adjudicate them or reimagine them.
Are you seeing that come up in a lot of your conversations?
Ben Brooks:
Yeah, and just even, I can tell you, at my company, at Pilot, we’re about 50 or so folks, and I hired a new senior direct report last week, and I was explaining to her that despite the fact we’ve been in business over 10 years and have developed, you know, 10,000-plus leaders and worked with all sorts of different organizations, a lot of things that we had figured out are now breaking.
So there are things that I’ve just had in the back of my mind, like, oh, we don’t have to worry about this part around our statements of work and this part around this automation piece and this part around the role between sales and account management. Well, you know, from a system-centered perspective, there’s role, goal, and context.
And the context is everything that’s happening around us. And when the context changes, it changes the roles, and goals can be implicit and explicit. And then roles have responsibility, authorization, and accountability. And so basically, situational awareness, in the military, they say, is the number one thing.
If you lose situational awareness, that’s the fastest way to get killed or hurt, right? To not realize what’s going on. Well, everybody’s in a bit of a fog right now ’cause the world is moving faster than our brains can keep up with. And our brains like to fall back to something in the past ’cause it’s a predictable pattern that we can see and recognize, and we’re moving into these things that may be patternless.
And so what we’re finding is that our organization and many others, because this context is changing, we’re having to reassess who does what, what are the fricking priorities. I mean, things that even four months ago, in a nimble small business that we are, were really important are somewhat less important now, and things that weren’t even on our radar are now things that I’m spending a lot of time on.
And so it’s exciting. It’s exhausting. It’s confronting. And we have a much easier sort of speedboat to move around. We don’t have a big old barge or, you know, an aircraft carrier or a cruise ship, and we’re much more nimble. I can’t imagine these organizations that are trying to change, and it’s so difficult to steer.
Steve Smith:
So let’s dial it in a little more specifically to your company, Pilot. So, I mean, you built an entire company around scaling something that used to be scarce, good coaching. So what does that look like right now, when everybody has a phone with their AI app of choice loaded on there? And your AI chatbot will absolutely coach you.
It may do a terrible job, but the perceived value of coaching in some way is like, it’s ubiquitous and I can get it right here. Is that changing your business, and what’s your take on that?
Ben Brooks:
Yeah, I think we have always taken the point of view that, generally, at scale, one-on-one coaching is not the best intervention for measurement, quality, consistency. It doesn’t always bring the gains back to the organization or connect it with other colleagues or strategy or ways of working. So we’ve been focused on group development programs, group cohorts and manager involvement, and really bringing people together, which is a huge challenge for organizations.
All this return-to-office mandate is trying to have proximity, trying to have some sense of control, some semblance of connectivity or alignment. So what’s really changed for us is we don’t really look at AI as a substitute product or competition. And no, we haven’t lost any deals to anything like that, et cetera, but we’re leaning into the things that AI can’t do well.
Get someone to believe in something. Get someone to ask for something, get someone to raise an issue that they’re scared of raising. Get someone to give feedback, get someone to align, get someone to say, “I don’t wanna do this,” or to bargain on priorities. So I think the value we are seeing right now with the organizations is really helping to align and get their people defining, again, the situational awareness. What does good place and good people look like to drive a business strategy?
And I just was on with a publicly traded CHRO earlier this morning, and he’s like, “Look, we are killing it. Our stock’s up 3x, but we have no idea about what we wanna be in the future in terms of people. We have the business strategy, but our way around it is just buying some talent. But we’ve got a lot of industry-specific technical talent that we need to keep.”
Then we have sort of the legacy versus the new blood versus an aligned way of working, and I think that’s where organizations have never really figured that out. Generally, the military, certain law firms or management consulting, sometimes healthcare, you find these industries where ways of working get really nailed down, but in a lot of knowledge work, it is a hot mess.
And so I think that’s where organizations are bringing us in to say, “Help us codify when we’re at our best and also what we need for our business strategy. Help us get folks excited and aligned. Help us have people learn and try, and then help us reinforce it so that becomes the way that we do things.” So we’re working across a value chain that’s much larger than leader development or even coaching, but that can include 360 programs and emerging leader development programs and all the kind of things you’d expect in a talent management suite.
But we’re finding that the need is a lot more around stakeholder alignment. It’s around crisp messaging. It’s around getting people to want to do something versus have to do something. And so we’re advising a lot of the C-suite and helping to structure rollouts and change and things like that. And that’s where a lot of people are.
There’s a lot of pain people are willing to spend a lot of money on in those things, versus, like, what’s the answer in the chatbot, or what’s the coach gonna tell me? The answer to say, go to your manager and negotiate your priorities ’cause there’s too much to do, that doesn’t help, whether it comes from AI or a coach, unless someone goes and does it. It’s the doing of it that makes the difference, and that’s typically where things fall down.
Steve Smith:
Let’s talk a little bit about what the actual state of kind of management is and management competence is. And I think just to kind of set the stage very briefly for the people in our audience who maybe aren’t familiar with you and your background, Ben, you’re kind of a big deal. You were VP at Marsh McLennan, you were on the cover of HR Executive Magazine. You coach, for real, top-flight CEOs just in your own kind of private coaching practice, and you built this amazing company that works with a very impressive array of name-brand clients. So that’s the CliffsNotes version.
Ben Brooks:
And I’m funny and likable and I got a great beard. No, I’m kidding.
Steve Smith:
Exactly.
Ben Brooks:
Go on, Steve. Go on.
Steve Smith:
And, you know, where all the best Burmese restaurants are in...
Ben Brooks:
Yes, that’s true. Yeah.
Steve Smith:
Another thing in your favor. So what’s the state of management competence right now? Just like, it seems like there’s a lot up in the air, but what are you seeing? Is it making you hopeful, or is it making you doubtful?
Ben Brooks:
Well, I’m glad you brought this up, because as much as I’m a fan of leadership, that’s the luxury brand that gets all the attention, and management is really the fundamentals and the elegant essentials. You know, I learned in business school, management simply is the achievement of results through others, and that’s functionally a hierarchy.
It’s an organization, it’s leverage, and consulting firms have written white papers for about four decades. The secret to digitization is middle management. The secret to engagement is middle management, and it’s been all about management. And yet we haven’t really moved the needle on management, and yet what we expect of a manager is going up. You know, compliance has a bunch of things a manager needs to do, finance does, marketing, sales ops, the CEO, you know, player-coach roles, wider spans.
So the state of the manager in some ways is worse than it’s been in a long time. And yet, if you think of the people who are becoming real power users at leveraging AI in a variety of ways, they typically have a very strong managerial mind and toolkit, and they understand how to set expectations, give context, provide feedback, define priorities, redirect, problem-solve, encourage, hold accountable.
Those things are in short supply. We’ve valued a lot of technical skill, sort of the vertical skill. So if I’m a finance person, I get value ’cause I’m good with numbers, and if I’m, you know, an IT person, I get value ’cause I’m good with code or technology. But I think the integration, the horizontalization of organizations is really showing the gap in management capability.
So it’s not new, but it’s always like, “Well, we have a leadership problem,” which sometimes is Latin for “We need to fire people at the top.” That’s an executive management problem, not a leadership problem, ’cause leadership doesn’t exist just at the top. But leadership is a multiplier, and it needs something to multiply, and how we work and managerial capability is part of the thing you’re multiplying. Your strategy and your ways of working multiplied times leadership is success.
And so everyone goes, “Well, let’s just add more to the multiplier,” right? But what are you multiplying? And so I think what we’re seeing right now is, if I talk to a head of HR or a CEO or COO or CFO, and I talk to, you know, mid-market, 500 to 5,000 employees, I bet you $10,000 that not a single one would say, “We’ve got a pretty strong bench of managers.” Not even great. Pretty strong.
Most of ’em, like, it’s all over the place. “We over-promoted people. People just do it ’cause they wanted to make more money. We never train people. We have no standard.” So it’s a mess. And we use terms like leader and manager without contextually defining, what does that look like?
Because being a good manager in the Navy is gonna be very different than working at a New York City public health nonprofit, which is gonna be very different than being a sports trainer on the New York Knicks, which is very different than working at Pilot.
Steve Smith:
Well, and so you’re hitting on something that is, I think, incredibly salient right now. It’s like we’re seeing AI coming up through organizations. We’re trying to, you know, plug it into the world of work faster than ever. You also, in a lot of knowledge work, you’re seeing a ton of layoffs, and it seems like the ax is falling disproportionately on middle managers.
It’s almost like the line manager, the middle manager gets a bad rap. And so it just seems like there’s this tsunami of bad decision-making at the leadership level that is putting the management level under more stress than ever. Is that a fair observation?
Ben Brooks:
You know, I keep a group of Russian nesting dolls on my desk to remind me that, you know, the executives at the top are the big one, and the next one is the senior management. The next one is the middle management, frontline.
Steve Smith:
Yeah.
Ben Brooks:
And you know, when there’s dysfunction at the top, which may not be bad decisions, it may be lack of decisions, it may be, you know, sort of strategic ambiguity where we say, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna go digital, we’re gonna go global.”
But no one really understands what that means. Where are the trade-offs that are gonna be made? You know, “We’re gonna become a low-cost provider.” Like, how low, right? “We’re gonna balance profitability with growth.” So there’s a lot of this that’s less around bad decisions, but lack of a decision and lack of clarity.
And even if it is a bad decision, if managers had a union, woo, they’d be fit to be tied about what’s going on, about what’s expected of a manager, how they’re set up for success. And then from the bottom up, not just, you know, from the north, but from the south, employees. You know, Gallup estimates 70 to 80% of the employee experience and employee engagement score is from the manager relationship. The old HR line: people join companies, they leave managers.
So, dear God, they’re shaping the entire thing about retaining people and getting engagement and productivity, but at the same time, they’re the conduit for every corporate function that wants them to do something, yet they have their own goals and their own jobs and their own OKRs, KPIs, et cetera.
So I think the state of the manager is really rough. And that includes that we’ve never really done a good job of simply defining what a good manager looks like. You know, we’ll say, “Oh, it’s a manager level four in technology, so it looks like this.” And we don’t have this kind of unified standard across an organization.
And that’s part of what we’ve been working with a lot of our customers on, is you can’t have a manager competency set that’s 15 things. Our short-term memory holds three to eight objects. We try to keep it to six with our customers, and we often roll out manager standards.
We say, look, it’s about sort of people, plan, and accountability, and, you know, we have a six-part management structure that we roll out at companies. We say, first thing is you gotta have great people. You gotta cultivate really good people, exit the wrong ones. Develop, hire well, all that.
Then you gotta have a good team environment. So you gotta have, you know, cohesion, connection, safety, all these things. But then you gotta set clear direction. What’s the plan? What are the priorities, right? What’s expected? Then you gotta optimize resources. Who’s working on what? How are we gonna leverage vendors? How are we gonna leverage AI, right?
Then you gotta overcome obstacles and enable solutions. Problem-solve, push, escalate, whatever those things might be. And ultimately, you have to hold people accountable and drive results. You have to celebrate when it works well. You have to learn when it doesn’t. You have to reward people, sometimes exit them.
And that’s sort of the boundaries of that, which is not a bunch of stylistic storytelling. It’s not strategic visionary thinking, right? It’s not boldness, and it’s not these things. It’s these really fundamental things that you could actually see and observe as I’m talking about them in various roles.
And we’ve sort of over-scoped the management jobs significantly to be a lot more than they should be, and we haven’t made it easy to do the right thing around the six things I just described.
Steve Smith:
So, lemme make sure I’m hearing you correctly on this. Your take is that AI isn’t creating new management problems. These are the same management problems there always have been. It’s just amplifying them.
Ben Brooks:
Yeah, just accelerating, amplifying them, turning them from sort of arithmetic to geometric.
Steve Smith:
And I guess also maybe some of these problems that were not visible at a senior executive and board level now all of a sudden are being made abundantly clear. Is that also kinda what you’re seeing?
Ben Brooks:
Well, yeah, it depends on, you know, sort of data and connections and integration. But if you have someone who has been managed up to... I was just at a Fortune 50 company talking to a C-suite person, and they said, “I hate that everyone manages up to me. I never know what’s actually going on.” And some of these executives now are plugged into a CRM or something else, and they can say, “How many of our reps are, you know, gonna meet quota this year?” Or, “What is this?”
And so the democratization of the data upwards is a big change. But, you know, power, control, and authority is sort of what history’s written around. That’s politics, that’s all these things. And money is a lot about these things. Decision-making, though, is becoming a disaster.
’Cause the cost to produce now in knowledge work is going way down. Unfortunately, the cost to consume, no one’s managing, and that’s part of the manager tax. You know, someone at my firm sent me a nine-page memo about how to define a KPI that we’re using, and I said, “That’s eight and a half pages too much.”
You know, it wasn’t that it was bad quality, but it was slop in the fact that it was, you know, explaining how the sun worked when I just needed to know the time. And so we’re really having to focus on empathy, ’cause a lot of these reports and decks are going up. So executives in some ways get better data, but sometimes they get worse, because they’re getting 30-slide decks like it used to be.
And when I was a management consultant, we made a 1,200-slide deck we got paid a lot of money for. It looked like we worked our butts off, but now it’s about the crispness, understanding what’s going on, that consolidation. But then with all of this, because production’s moving so quickly, the log jam that’s always existed, especially in mature organizations, is decisions.
Who decides? At a growth company, everyone’s grabbing for power, and it’s a Wild West, but at most organizations, people are afraid of making the call ’cause they could upset their colleagues. It could go wrong, they could lose their job, all these things.
And conflict has been shown to be less the higher you go in a hierarchy, when it needs to be more. And so, decisions. Just today, about AI, I talked to this head of HR, and they said, “You know, what I realized is I was trying to do something in a dummy environment with Workday and their new tool. And I finally realized I don’t need to ask HR. They’re not the decision maker. I’m not using real data, and it’s not in a production environment, but they think that they’re the decision maker. And if I talked to legal, they’d probably say that they are, and someone else, the CISO, would say it’s theirs.”
So what we’re allowed to do or not do, what the priorities are, where we spend, who stays, who goes, which vendors we work with, it has always been murky. And if you’re in sales or account management, you know this. You find that everyone’s a decision maker, but really they might be a veto on the security council, but they’re not the one that holds the pen.
And so a lot of this is getting surfaced, ’cause if you’re in sales, you have to figure that out. Or you have to figure out, okay, I mean, with one of our customers, for SAP, eight people have to approve it. Now, they’re a Fortune 100 company, but, you know, it’s a disaster. Other times it’s like, here’s a POC thing. Someone signs it on a Friday afternoon on their phone, we’re good to go.
But imagine working somewhere and a senior person is saying, “Do this,” or, “Don’t do this,” but you actually know that that’s not what the org needs to do, or someone else told you differently. That’s really messy. And because we’re getting the production coming at us so fast, it is an absolute log jam around decisions, which is creating a ton of friction and drama at the management level.
Steve Smith:
So, you know, given everything that we have talked about with, you know, management dysfunction today, you know, colliding head-on with AI, if you were giving advice to a first-time manager walking into a job today, what would you tell them to succeed and thrive?
Ben Brooks:
They should assume they’re a terrible manager, and they should always assume they could be a better manager. They should be constantly investing in themselves, whether their company provides it or not. They should understand that they will get ahead if they make their employees successful. When you’re an individual contributor, you’re the star. When you’re the manager, you need to make everyone else a star.
You need to be a net talent exporter in your team, especially in large organizations. Let go of talent, internally, externally. Be the kind of person that’s a gem cutter, that cultivates people, and know that management is actually a superpower rather than a utility. It seems unsexy, but some of the most powerful executives I work with, you know, who get seven- and eight-figure bonuses, right, without much exception, all of them are very solid managers.
They know what the priorities are. They allocate the work. They align resources. They troubleshoot. They create a good environment. They’re not always great at all of it, but they know all of it. And so I think that’s part of it, is don’t get distracted.
You know, we, in edutainment, we wanna learn the cool thing. “I wanna learn how to be a storyteller,” or, “I wanna learn how to do cognitive computing.” It’s less fun to be like, “I need to tell someone that this work wasn’t good and it’s not what I wanted.” Or, “I need to tell someone that when they’re on video in front of our customers, they look like a knucklehead, and it’s below our brand standard.”
And that’s awkward. Or, “I need to realize that I need to let someone go, and I need to proactively guide them out or work with HR.” So those are the sort of, like, unsexy things. And I think everybody runs to what’s sexy, what’s fun. They want to be on the brand committee. They wanna do this. Nail the unsexy. Your career will accelerate.
Steve Smith:
So, Ben, you’ve been the coach in the room with executives who are visibly struggling. What’s the hardest piece of feedback you’ve ever had to give somebody who technically outranked you?
Ben Brooks:
You know, unsolicited feedback is like a fart in church.
And so it’s always about kind of reading the room and the relationship and the trust and the context. I always ask, you know, are they open to feedback? Ask the permission, right? Sometimes they say no, and I thank them for being direct.
But definitely, you know, favoritism was one of those, where I had to talk to a C-suite executive who was completely blind to their favoritism, but yet they made it very obvious. And it wasn’t related to me either way, favorite or not. But that was one of those things.
And, you know, that was a big challenge, because it felt like they were being pushed away from these people. They went to their weddings, and they vacationed together, and they go to the shore together. But that was one of those things that was really tenuous to deal with.
Steve Smith:
So what’s a piece of feedback that you received about your own leadership or your own company that actually changed how you run Pilot?
Ben Brooks:
So when we have colleagues depart, I think we do a very good job of parting on good terms. And we actually had a two-part episode on the podcast about how to fire people, and we do it quite well.
But we had a colleague recently depart, and we do exit interviews, and I run them as the CEO, with a standard script. We do ’em three weeks after people are gone, so there’s no weird power dynamics. We pay people for their time.
And so I had done a lot of analysis from a 360 exercise we did internally. I got feedback from my coach and our kind of virtual chair of our board, and then I had a direct report that had left and gave me feedback. And essentially, it was all triangulating to the same thing.
I need to be more directive, I need to be less tolerant, and I need to hold people more accountable. And you can see those are sort of three legs of the same stool. And they’re completely right, and sometimes I confuse my superpower in motivating and developing. These people are not my clients that I’m coaching.
These are people that have roles, and they’re in a hierarchy, and they’re being paid. And we don’t have anyone that’s a bad actor that needs to be fired or anything like that. We take care of the egregious things. But it’s taken me a lot to clarify some of those things, to say, “This is not at all what we agreed to,” or, “Where is this?” or, “Get this thing done,” in a respectful, you know, psychologically safe tone.
I wanna say, “Hey, let’s, like, work on this together,” or, like, “What do you think is getting in your way?” And it’s much harder for me to just do that, but it’s been tremendous growth in the last three or four months at the company.
And I told the whole company, “Here’s the feedback I got from these different people. I’m gonna be working on it. It’s probably gonna rock the boat. I’m probably not gonna get it right. I wanna calibrate, but if you see me acting differently, it’s not ’cause I’m on new meds or something. It’s that we got feedback and I’m taking it, but it’s gonna change things, and it might irritate you as well.”
But I’ll tell you, this is the sort of big-boy feedback that I needed, and I appreciate the forthrightness of that departing employee and the others who gave me all this feedback, because it’s making a huge difference in our company.
Steve Smith:
So one of the themes, I think, to kind of bring everything together, whether you’re talking about AI or not AI, you’re talking about line managers, senior leadership, talking about strategy or execution, the ability to have conversations, to offer feedback, seems like that’s really the crux of every issue that we’re talking about.
Ben Brooks:
If there are two people involved in any context, they’re misaligned. Anyone that’s married will tell you that’s true, or has a sibling or anything else. It doesn’t mean that we’re the enemy or anything like that, but the brilliant thing about the unique fingerprint of the 8 billion of us here on this planet is that we’re all unique, but that also means that we all have our own preferences, traumas, fears, desires, needs, neuroses, everything else.
And so, so much of this, we talk about the conflict or the hard conversation, which isn’t great, but the outcome you want is alignment. Maybe not even agreement. You know, agreement is like, you know, the Declaration of Independence. “We gotta go word for word. We’re gonna sign it and go fight the war.” You know, that’s like signing a contract, whereas alignment is close enough for jazz. I can get behind that.
And so I think a lot of what we talk about with conflict is sort of the remedy for extreme misalignment, but part of that upstream is always getting in sync and always assuming that you’re out of sync, and there’s an efficiency through the overcommunication, when we typically have an incentive to be like, “No, everything’s fine. We had a good meeting,” when people are totally unclear, they don’t agree, et cetera.
So I think rewarding that candor and that forthrightness is so key, because, ultimately, if you think about a skill that you can win at, there’s the threshold competencies. That’s the thing that gets you the job, that meets the requirements. The differentiating or distinguishing competency is the one that makes your brand.
And so if you can be the person that can get people aligned, that can help have the hard conversation, you’re gonna be in the 90th percentile in any industry, at any level, because as humans, we are wired to not do that very well. But it is fundamental in terms of people working together.
Steve Smith:
So, Ben, I’m gonna turn a Ben-ism back around on you.
Ben Brooks:
Oh boy. Is this one appropriate for a podcast?
Steve Smith:
Yes, it is. So this is a question that you ask in your meetings and conversations that I’ve learned and just quite blatantly stolen from you. So thank you.
Ben Brooks:
It is called leverage. In the corporate world, stealing is when you’re in school, that’s plagiarism. Leverage in corporate. Okay.
Steve Smith:
Okay, so, Ben, what about our conversation today has been sticky for you?
Ben Brooks:
There’s a lot here that’s sticky. I do think this idea of what is the advice to the manager and elevating the prominence and nobility of being a good manager is very sticky, and the need to think about the human factors of AI rather than the tokens and the integrations. What’s sticky for you, Steve?
Steve Smith:
I knew you were gonna ask that.
Ben Brooks:
Dammit, I’m the host. Get in your role. Role clarity. You got feedback around this? Dammit. Isn’t this what you do for a living?
Steve Smith:
You know what was sticky about all this for me, Ben, is that I just, quite honestly, I am so fucking tired of talking about AI. It’s just like, it has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and I think that it has distracted us from the things that are really important, definitely in the workplace.
And what was, I think, affirming for me about this conversation is that what we have in the workplace is not an AI problem or a technology problem. It is the same old problems that we’ve had. These are human connection, communication issues that are not new. And I think that by naming what the thing is, it makes it less scary, and it makes it a lot more solvable.
These are all problems that are absolutely solvable. And I don’t think that these problems are going to go away unless we name them and address them for what they are. But I think that it also makes this entire thing seem a lot less frightening and a lot more possible.
Ben Brooks:
We can get our hands around it, but fuck AI. It’s all about RP. Real people.
Steve Smith:
Ben, thank you so much for the conversation. It’s always great talking to you, and I look forward to this conversation, hopefully, in real life sometime.
Ben Brooks:
Glad to be here. Go be a great manager, everybody.
AI has made producing work almost free. It has done nothing to make deciding what to do with that work any easier.
Steve Smith:
That pressure lands on managers. They're wading through long memos that should have been a paragraph while waiting on executives who haven't made a call. And there's no clear standard for what good management looks like, because their organizations never defined one.
None of this is new. Unclear decisions and overloaded managers were around long before AI showed up. The difference now is speed. Problems that used to build slowly now build fast.
I found that more encouraging than I expected. These are people problems, and people problems are solvable. They take managers who are willing to have the hard conversation and make the call, even when it's uncomfortable.
The unglamorous parts of management are the ones that move careers and companies forward.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Work Tech Weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And I'll see you next time.
