Will AI Make Mid-Level Managers Extinct?

Mid-level management is getting squeezed, and pretending it isn’t happening is the fastest way to become optional. In this episode Lone Rock Leadership co-founder Russ Hill digs into real-world signals, including high-profile moves and bold claims about replacing the traditional management hierarchy. 

He share why he doesn't buy the idea of “zero managers,” but does believe org charts will get flatter, with fewer layers and fewer mid-level roles. The winners are not the people with the fanciest titles. The winners are the leaders whose skills can’t be automated and whose value rises as the structure shrinks.

We break it down into three practical capabilities you can build right now: setting priorities and defining success with real clarity, building trust and strong networks across the organization, and leading people through change while leaning into innovation. Russ also share simple ways to build AI fluency without turning your life into a tech hobby, so you can speak the language of agents, workflows, and tools with confidence and make smarter calls as automation spreads.

If you want to stay relevant as AI in leadership and management transforms the workplace, listen, share this with a colleague, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. After you’ve listened, leave a review and tell me which of the three skills you’re working on this month.

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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!

Transcript

AI And The Manager Cut

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, we all know that AI is gonna radically change the way that our workforces look. But how many of our mid-level managers are gonna survive? And how are we gonna choose who stays and who goes? That's what we're digging into in this episode.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell. You cannot be serious! Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

It's time to end the confusion. Get the new book by the founders of Lone Rock Leadership. See why executives at Lockheed Martin, Cigna, Teva, Chili's, and so many other companies are praising Deliver. Why some leaders get results and most don't. You can download the first chapter right now and request two free copies shipped to you at LoneRock.io.

Growth Happens By Design

Jack Dorsey And No Managers

Bayer Tests Self-Directed Teams

Three Skills That Keep You

Build AI Fluency Without Geeking Out

What Gets Automated First

Final Warning And Share Ask

SPEAKER_00 0:55

I am certain that some of you, well, maybe a few of you at least, are thinking, Russ, why in every episode these days are you talking about AI? And trust me, I'm gonna get off of the topic here pretty quick. But it how can it not be at least a recurring theme right now? Because it's radically impacting our lives in so many ways. In the last episode, by the way, if you didn't listen to it, you ought to go back and listen to it. I talk about chapter two of AI, how the first chapter was about, you know, like uh asking for information, like, hey, uh help me with this recipe, or help me pick out, you know, supplements to make me not be so tired in the afternoon, or um help me write this paper or with this presentation. That was the first chapter of AI. Now we're in the second chapter, which is about teams of agents. It's about agentic power and being able to turn over the routine, the basic, the kind of monotonous work that we do in organizations and as individuals, turning that over to teams of agents, and technology is radically changing. It's it's like every day you're getting new developments with different AI tools. The only one that's not coming up with anything new right now is Chat GPT. They've been sitting over there like Facebook, not in it. You know, you know, like when was the last time Facebook innovated? Do you remember those of you that are old enough to remember when Facebook first came out? It was like, wow, so many cool new features and developments and tools and all of that. And then it's like literally the last 10 years, the thing hasn't changed. And it's the only it right now, it's only good for like uh, you know, major life announcements and then people over 60, right? And no judgment if you're over 60, but because it's just stagnated over there. And the same thing is happening with ChatGPT right now, but I absolutely don't think that's gonna continue. I think they've got way too much money, they've got too many smart people. They're gonna right now it's all about Claude, right? And I'm hearing a little bit of buzz lately about perplexity, and certainly ChatGPT will leapfrog that. They'll innovate. But the the long and short of it is these tools are developing very rapidly, and their impact on our organizations is pretty radical. It kind of depends on what industry you're in. Some industries and some organizations, you're taking it really slow. Like AI is the buzzword, and you're all talking about it, but you're not actually implementing a lot. Like it's all pretty much cosmetic. And you got to use those two letters, AI, in order to keep your job or to sound cool and a company or senior team meeting or offsite or whatever else. But when it comes down to it, you're not doing a lot. Others of you like dramatic changes. So in this episode, I'm gonna talk about which managers are gonna survive and why they're gonna survive and not only survive, but thrive in the age of AI. Before I get into it, welcome in to the Lead in 30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you a framework, an idea, some data, a best practice, an example to implement. Consider implementing in the way that you lead people. Nothing impacts your ability to lead people more or impacts your life more, your livelihood, your future, your growth potential, your income, your life at home. Nothing impacts all those things more than your leadership skills. And those can't be stagnant. Clearly. I mean, look how much the workplace has changed since COVID, and now it's just even faster. So we've got to really adapt and study and innovate and learn. If you aren't using outside help, you all, like I know that's what we do as a firm. By the way, I'm Russ Hill. I make my living coaching, consulting, senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest and most amazing companies. I'm one of the co-founders of Lone Rock Leadership, which is an executive consult, an executive team consulting firm and a leadership development, a leadership training company where we train leaders at scale. Lone Rock Leadership's the name of our company. Lone Rock.io is where you can find out more about our organization. Talk about scaling, growing, changing. Woo! Trying to keep up with our growth is awesome. We um we had a first quarter of 26 that was phenomenal. I'm not going to go deep into it, but um just, and it was by design. Growth doesn't happen by accident, it happens by design. If you came into the first quarter of 2026 on fire, like growing and scaling amazingly, it's because of the work you did in 25. It's because of what your where your attention was at the in Q3 and Q4 of 25. And the same thing's gonna be true in Q3 and Q4 of this year at the time I'm recording this, right? If you're listening to right now, whether or not you're gonna grow like mad, have an amazing second half of the year is totally dependent on what you're doing right now. And I'm talking about growth and success, both from an individual standpoint as well as an organization or a team or department or functional area standpoint. It's all what happens, and and you know how this works, right? What you're doing now affects three to four months from now. And then what that's how this all plays out, right? And and so it's the same thing with fitness or anything else, right? What what you're doing at the gym or in your exercise routine or your diet, that's not gonna have any effect on it's gonna have minimal effect. I shouldn't say no effect. It should, it's gonna have a minimal effect on how you look or feel today or tomorrow. But it's gonna have a massive effect on how you look and feel four weeks from now, eight weeks from now, right? And so the same thing is true in businesses. Anyway, in this episode, what I want to talk about is how uh well I won't I'm gonna give you a couple examples and then I'm gonna I'm gonna coach you on um some things I want you to be paying attention to. Okay, Jack Dorsey. Any of you know Jack Dorsey? Jack is the one who founded uh Twitter, he basically ran it into the ground after that. So Jack doesn't have the best track record, but those who know him um think highly of him. And um, and he ultimately obviously sold the company to Elon Musk, but he moved on to create this company called Block. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but it in the headlines, just several weeks ago, at the time I'm recording this, Block, the company, tech company that he runs now, cut 4,000 employees. They laid off 4,000 of their 10,000 employees. Jack Dorsey, who's the founder, CEO, he said it's permanent. It's not a layoff cycle. These are jobs that are gone. He said publicly, this is Jack Dorsey, he said publicly that AI should replace the traditional management hierarchy of organizations. Now, you all, as you listen to me talk about this, I'm not advocating this. I'm not suggesting Jack is right. I'm giving you one data point, one perspective. I'm gonna give you another one in just a moment. Okay? I'm just giving you some things to think about before we start talking about how you might process this or what your takeaways might be. So Jack said, hey, AI should replace the traditional management hierarchy. He only wants in his organization two to three layers between himself as the CEO and every employee. He says there what there were up to five layers on the org chart. Now he wants it at most two to three. His vision is that there'll be no managers, just individual contributors and some player coaches running these 90-day what he calls cycles, 90-day cycles. And 95% of the AI generated code in his organization, he's saying, well, in fact, I'm not gonna get into that, because who cares? It's a tech company and we're not talking code. So that's Jack, right? Now you can listen to that and go, yeah, I think that's how it's gonna look. I think most organizations are gonna get flatter, and I think that AI is gonna replace, some of you might think, yeah, it's gonna totally replace the traditional management hierarchy. I think that's crazy talk. I I we people have been saying that. We wrote about it in our new book, Deliver, right? We wrote about that that whole consensus mode. There were the these this revolutionary idea of, you know, we're just gonna make it a total hierarchy, or we're gonna remove the hierarchy in organizations. Everyone's gonna manage themselves. We give you multiple examples from Zappos back in the day when they were really innovating, coming on the scene to other organizations. We we write all about it, we share the data. I think that's like chapter uh two or three in our new book, Deliver, which by the way, if you haven't gotten it yet, you can download the audio version of it. You can listen to it in Spotify. I don't, we don't know why Amazon and Audible are taking forever on it. You can get the the uh the uh Kindle version or the uh hardback on Amazon. You can get it at bookstores, but the audio version is Spotify, by the way, if you want to get it. If you haven't gotten it yet, you're crazy. I know I'm biased. We're we're not, it's not like we don't make or break our year off of how many of those books we sell. In fact, it has like very minimal impact. Um we we write it to help people and and to really give you data and and make the case of what we're seeing. Anyway, in that book, we talk about that quote unquote innovative approach, eliminate all the management, and yeah, it doesn't work. So I totally think Jack's up in the night. There's no way AI is gonna replace the traditional management hierarchy. Are you insane? Uh but it will it dramatically affect it? Yeah, no doubt about it. A hundred percent. So Jack's like a lot of innovators going too far, leaning too far into the well, we're gonna get rid of all mid-level management. No, we're not. But we're gonna get rid of a lot, and organizations are gonna be flatter. And some of you, you're already seeing this, others get ready, and some of you it's gonna take a few years. Let me give you another example. Bayer, the pharmaceutical company, right? 160 years old, 100,000 employees. The CEO, Bill Anderson, eliminated a lot of mid managers across the entire company. He threw out 99% of this has like been written about. You can read it on X, you know, people tweeted about it, different things. There have been articles about it. Bill threw out 99% of the company's 1,400-page handbook. Like, I can't even believe they had that big of a like, oh my gosh. He replaced managers with these self-directed teams. And to give you an idea of what this looks like in an organization the size of Bear, these self-directed teams are like five to six thousand people. And many of us, in many organizations, that'd be like a business unit. And he cut 40%. So again, you know, Jack saying 100% of the mid-level managers are uh uh, you know, a high percentage. Bill cut 40%. I think that's gonna be far more closer to what's gonna happen broadly. 40% of management positions in the U.S. pharma division. It's about 12,000 positions. And um, and then he's asking the question. He's been quoted out there in the media saying, uh asking, can a large company run with nearly no mid-level managers at all? I say no. Um, but I do think it'll be radically different. Okay, let me get you to the three things. So so here's the kind of the takeaway. We could I could give you lots of different examples, quote you a bunch of stuff, but just go search AI for those examples if you want to dig deeper into it. Who's cutting mid-level managers and and what does it look like and what level of success are they having? That might be your prompt, you know, something like that. Um now let so we know that the organ organizations are gonna look different. If you don't agree with that, then go search AI. Maybe you don't have AI, you're not using it. All right, well, then please just step aside because you're about to get left in the dust, unless you work for an organization that moves at the speed of a snail. And uh and and and you're comfortable with that and you like not innovating, and that's all right. I don't know why in the world you're listening to a podcast like this. You're probably not, but anyway. So knowing that the marketplace is going to change and that that's all under debate, but that the typical organization is gonna look radically different. What can I do? What can you do? What can the people that report into us do to make sure that they not only survive in their management role, but they thrive? Three things. Here they are. Number one, managers will always not a robot, not a computer, not a bot, not an agent, a human, will always set the priorities and define what success looks like. Period. So if you are not good at doing that, we've been talking I've been talking about that in this podcast for a decade now. A decade. I've been telling you over and over and over again. When we first created Lead M30 back in like 20, 2006, maybe, the very first leadership competency we built into the very first training program we ever built was clarity. I'm telling you, clarity is the most important leadership skill. And the data backs it up. We are never going to the computer. Can't just think of, okay, here's where what's going to define whether or not this company success succeeds or not. No, you define the company, you define the department or function, and then you def you set the parameters, you define the destination, right? We um, oh gosh, there's so much I want to share, some stuff that we're innovating on that we're going to the market with shortly that I'm so stinking excited about. It's built into our accountability course. We call it Power and 30 or the Power OS Power Operating System because nobody likes the word accountability. What we're looking for really is for people to show up powerfully, to choose to be powerful in their life rather than choose to surrender and show up powerless. Anyway, um some stuff that we've got coming to the market um related to that that's just stinking amazing. I spent part of some recent weeks digging into that, and uh we're we're we're jacked about it, but we're working on it anyway. Um, yeah, the the the short version is the leader who knows how to set priorities, knows how to say not yet to certain things, knows how to create clarity, knows how to define success, you're good. If you don't have those skills, you better go buy our book Deliver. We've got a whole section, a part of the book on how to create clarity. Obviously, we teach it around our LeaderOS framework. Um you can you can get that for your mid-level managers, for your executive team. You can you can go through it for you know on your own, but um creating clarity. So the manager now has to set priorities and defines what success looks like, you're good. You're going nowhere. Number two, the manager who knows how to build real relationships and networks. Absolutely that is critical. If you are viewed inside your organization, if people on your team think of you as a great networker, you're a connector, you know how to build trust in a team, you know how to open up dialogue, you know how to work cross-functionally, you know how to break down silos, you don't get overly concerned about what your title is or what responsibilities are yours, you know how to connect and work uh horizontally across an organization, you're good. Your value is going up. If you're one of those people that works in a silo, you care a lot about the team that you work in, you don't really get outside and raise your head outside of your little world or bubble, and you're not known as a great collaborator inside your organizations, and you're not really looking at um the world or through at your industry or at your organization through more of a global perspective, you're yeah, you I I kind of want to say you're screwed, but that sounds mean or too strong. And so I don't want to say that. Um, I want to say you're in trouble. And you need you really need to adjust. And so that's number two. Number three, the manager knows how to lead people through change, is viewed as an innovator and somebody who leans into innovation, change, disruption. You're good. You're totally good. Yep. If you're the manager that leans away from that, that's viewed as defending the status quo, you're defensive, you really are great when it comes to the way we used to do it. Um, again, I'm not gonna say you're screwed because that's mean, right? We don't we just established that. That would be mean. So instead, what I'm gonna say is you're in trouble. You should be nervous. You've got to be innovating. Those of you, like if you're walking around the office, if you're saying out loud, you know, I'm not really good at change, you know what, I really don't know how like I'm yeah, I'm kind of behind on the AI thing. Shut up. Like, not really, not well, yeah, actually do. Stop saying that. People laugh, they smile, and they will remember that. You've got to be investing time. I'm telling you, less time scrolling the the the reels, less time watching Netflix or Amazon Prime, more time learning AI, more time digging into what agents are, more time in Claude, more time in Anthropic, more time downloading these tools, YouTube is I talked all about this in the last episode. How to lean into this. I gave you go into YouTube. I gave you some names of podcasts, I gave you some different things to dig into. And um by the way, I can add a few more things to that. Let me pull up. I'm just gonna, because I'm thinking about this right now, you all. Um, I've discovered like I've because I'm doing what I'm preaching, I'm practicing this. I I spent time in our last leadership team meeting um with our team talking about some of these things. They're like, oh my gosh, um, all these agentic tools and getting the connectors and MCP, is it MCP or MPC? MCP um coding and uh scrapers and skills files and all of these sorts of things. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you you've got to dig into this stuff. Okay, go over here and click on this for us. I'm on my phone right now. Limitless. These none of these podcasts are necessarily home runs. It's just like this one. I don't bat a thousand. Some of these episodes you like a lot more, others you're like, oh my gosh, that one wasn't that great. Same thing in this. Limitless is another podcast I've been checking out lately. I don't really love, like it's got some challenges, but it's called Limitless in an AI podcast. Two guys, they put out a lot of episodes. I'm liking that a decent amount. Um, I've talked about the all-in podcast in the past. Anyway, I'm not gonna go through all of it. You got you guys can search AI. Go find people on YouTube, subscribe to their channel. People that are talking about implementing AI in business. There's so many 90 80 to 90% of the podcast and the YouTube videos and the people out there uh uh it's crap. Um 20%, insanely good. So go find the 20%, and I want you watching a few YouTube uh YouTube videos every day or every week. I want you leaning into the future. I want you listening to certain podcasts. You don't need to know everything. Oh my gosh, this podcast is actually playing in the background. Okay, hit pause. Um you don't need to you don't have to have to geek out on everything, but I need you, like if you're not using Claude Co-work on a computer, I need you testing it out. I right over here, if you could see me, if we videoed this, you would see I've set up an I have a whole nother desk in my office now, my home office. You can't see it when I'm on camera, and it's just my AI desk. And yes, it has Mac minis, it's about to have another Mac Studio on it, and it's a monitor. I bought another monitor, another keyboard, another mouse. I've got a trackpad, I got all of it over here, and it's just AI. And I set it up with OpenClaw when that thing came out. I'm not advocating you do that. Like I'm in fact, I'm advocating you don't do that. But open claw uh, because I needed to be aware of it. I needed to be on the cutting edge of this stuff to be able to talk to our clients and executive teams. And then I dug into co work. I presented at our leadership team meeting recently. Recently, three decks that had a tremendous amount of data that I needed our leadership team of our firm to look at. I didn't build any of them. I mean, I did, but they weren't in PowerPoint. They were HTML documents that I actually shared on screen. They were totally animated with all kinds of stuff in it. And it was just me and Claude co-work building them out. And I told it to build this deck. And then I shared my screen, but it was actually an internet browser and zoomed in to where it looked like. No one knew that. It looked like a PowerPoint presentation. They were beautiful. And then I told Claude, save this presentation. The way we just built this, the colors, the fonts, everything. I love it. We've worked on this. Save it as a skill file so that I never again have to tell you what colors to choose, what fonts to choose, how I like it done. I don't ever want to have that conversation with you again. I want you to make a presentation that looks like this, the same way, boom, done. Now I've got that the uh in fact, I've got an agent in Claude all around presentations. It knows, I told you in the last episode, um, my version of Claude knows everything about our organization, our strategies, our growth, whatever, all these sorts of things, so that I can just talk to it about it. It's got it's got a whole, it's got a whole um skill file built around it. Anyway, this isn't an AI episode. I'm just telling you, all those things are me leaning in. It's the third thing I was just talking about: leaning into change, driving change, innovation rather than resisting it. So the three managers, the threat the managers who are going to survive and thrive in this day and age, they were gonna do three things. Number one, they create clarity, they know how to set priorities, they know how to define success, get people aligned to that, they will survive. Number two, the second thing, the managers who know how to build real relationships, develop trust, get people talking, they networked. We called it in the leadership reality report, network fluency, right? This being able to just build relationships, end-to-end leadership, these this top-down structure, this vertical, deep, top to bottom, it doesn't matter nearly as much as side to side. I'm telling you, that matters so much. You build it, you build those skill sets, you're good at it, you're gonna thrive. And the third one that's critically important is you are viewed internally and in the industry as leaning into change, driving it rather than resisting it. And you gotta, you, you just have to invest more time than ever on the side, on the weekends, on evenings, in the Uber, uh, at the airport, waiting at the gate, uh while you're sitting on the plane, whatever it is, you gotta lean into it. You don't have to spend gobs of time, but 20 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 30 there. And don't, if you're reading, I'm telling you again, if you're reading Harbor Business Review articles on this, you are gonna be left in the dust. If you're reading old traditional news publications, they are so far behind. You've got to be leaning into people that are innovating, literally because this information gets old like a month later. And I need you to show up informed and using vocabulary and terminology like I did in this episode, agents, teams of agents, skill files. Um I I need you, I need you using um repetitive tasks or schedule. I need you digging into these sorts of things. You need to know the difference between Claude co-work and Claude Chat. You need to know the difference between Claude and OpenAI and why open AI is being left in the dust, because open AI is still really good at creating an image, which no one gives a crap about unless you're in design or you're doing a fun little project on the side, and they're really good about asking what recipe you should cook on the barbecue next week. That's good for open AI. But ChatGPT sucks at enterprise integration and it can't do jack crap with agents, and the future is agents. Now, ChatGPT is gonna launch, they could, by the time you listen to this episode, they could launch the best product known to man and women and everyone. But uh so these are the sorts of things you need to be up on. So the workplace is gonna change. The number of managers, the layers in organizations, that's gonna go down. It's not gonna go to zero, it's gonna be greater than zero, but it's probably, if I had to guess right now, a year from now, it's probably gonna be 80. It depends on the organization, and no one can really predict the future. If I had to guess, I would say the number of mid-level managers and the number of layers in an organization a year from now, in most of corporate, I'm talking Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, even, it's gonna be 80% of what it is now. Maybe I'll look back and laugh and it will actually be 50%, but I think it's gonna be 80% a year from now. And then I think 12 months later, it's gonna be, it's gonna be cut again. We're probably gonna be about 50%. 50% of the layers of an organization and number of managers will exist two years from now. Might be 60, might be 70, but it's gonna keep reducing depending on technology. I might be too bullish on that, it might be 90% a year from now, but it ain't gonna be 100%. There's no way. Because growth depends on we know the recipe, right? We got to grow the top line and we got to grow efficiency and margin in order to compete. We got to do both those things. In order to do that, we're gonna be allocating a lot of this stuff, delegating it to agents. But it won't be the really critical work in the next 12 months. It's gonna be the repetitive, mundane stuff. There is absolutely no reason why you will be paying a human being. It's like my my lawn, right? So my lawn is mowed now by I I think I've told mentioned this before, uh maybe a year and a half ago, I went out and bought one of those AI lawn mowers. And they've been around for a while, but I felt like I was reading reviews and I was staying up on technology, and I thought, okay, I think they're now good enough. And for the last year, let's call it, this little robot goes out and mows our property. And it does a pretty darn freaking good job. It's not perfect. I still have to do quality control just like we're gonna do in the office, but um but it does, it it's a remarkable. And it and it anyway, so that's a mundane task that I don't want to do, and that I don't really want to. It's efficient to not have to pay a human, a landscaping crew, to do that as well. Now, uh is it are robots doing my whole property? No. We don't have a robot yet that can trim the trees and do the whatever and fix the irrigation and the all the sprinklers and all that sort of stuff. I gotta have humans do that. So I'm still paying a human for that. But the mundane thing of just actually running a machine along the grass to slice it, why in the world would I pay a human to do that now? Why, certainly, why would I do it? So the mundane, trivial, basic tasks will be the first to go to the robots and bots. And then, and so then it will gradually increase. And so, us as humans, what are we gonna do? How are we gonna thrive and survive? Well, I just spent 30 minutes telling you that. So we'll get off AI in some of these future episodes, but it's I just wanna, I just wanna make sure that you're up to speed on a lot of this stuff. Okay? I'm looking out for you. My job in these episodes is to really help increase your value as a leader in the current environment and looking into the future. And that's what I've been doing for over 400 of these episodes over the last however many years. And I hope you find value in it. And I'll talk to you in the next episode of the lead in 30 pods.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Share this episode with a colleague, your team, or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell.