Dispositions • Workforce & Talent • Strategic Risk
The Wall Street Journal: Where Have All the Managers Gone?
Source: The Wall Street Journal.
The analysis date above is the date of James's commentary.
James's take
The corporate flattening reported by the Journal raises a practical question as workflow automation and AI agents handle cross-tool coordination: which coordination tasks still require human judgment? My view is that mid-level administrative coordinators whose primary function is status updates, schedule management, and manual reporting across Jira, Slack, and Salesforce are particularly exposed. To stay indispensable, operators must transition from being human message-routers to designing and auditing agentic workflows.
Questions for your team
- Which parts of your role move status information between tools, and which require judgment or accountability?
- Which recurring reports or scheduling steps could become a defined workflow with clear inputs and outputs?
- Who will design, review and audit that workflow when routine coordination becomes automated?
- What skill would help you move from routing messages to owning the quality and reliability of the workflow?