Leadership Voyage
Leadership Voyage
S4E13: What it Means to Be a Manager in 2025
Text Jason @ Leadership Voyage
Jason discusses the WSJ article Your Boss Doesn’t Have Time to Talk to You and the HBR article AI Is Making the Workplace Empathy Crisis Worse.
Leadership Voyage is brought to you by Golden Mean Consulting Group, specializing in the training of new managers.
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Leadership Voyage
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Wherever you are on your leadership voyage, it starts here.[Music] Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Leadership Voyage, the podcast dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader. My name is Jason Wick. Very excited to continue here in season 4. We are already in September. How does the time go so fast? Unbelievable. But thank you for sticking through and listening to these episodes and upping your leadership game, sharing with those around you. It's a wonderful thing. Before we get into today's episode, I want to ask you all for a small favor. Uh this favor would be kind of back to the old days. Um, if you're listening and you've been listening and you have some opinions on the show, please feel free to rate the uh the episodes. Uh, give them four or five stars, whatever you think they are worth. I'd love to hear that and see that more. Also, um, comments on episodes are are great. Um, if we have any dialogue going, it would be wonderful. There's a very uh interesting dynamic going on in the world of management these days and that's what we're going to talk about. And I think the more we engage on the topic, the better. But please subscribe, please rate, do all the usual podcasty things that po that hosts are asking you to do. That helps this show reach others who've not seen it yet. And we're at a a pivotal moment, I think, in leadership and management with the the proliferation of AI. We're right on the doorstep of that. And um what does a manager mean in the workplace? A lot of really important topics. So, let's make sure that we're talking about this broadly and openly. We are already here in September, as I said, uh just uh after Labor Day weekend. I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend if you're here in the United States. And if you're not the United States, I hope you had a good weekend as well, of course. Uh I had a great Labor Day weekend myself. Uh we had a uh one of the kids' friends birthday parties over the weekend, which was nice. Uh just warm enough for the pool action, which is great. Uh out and about around town doing some cleaning of the uh the garage and some rearranging of the house. All those things that uh seem to come here and here and there, but it was uh it was a great weekend overall. Four weekend, four-day weekend for my children. They're back at school now after Labor Day weekend. Hope yours was great as well. And the topic today is actually an article that was passed to me over the Labor Day weekend by my former boss. And then I got up this week and got my weekly Wall Street Journal careers and leadership newsletter into my inbox. And it was the same headline as what my boss had, my former boss had sent over to me. And the title of the article in Wall Street Journal, which there's a link in the show notes, the title of the article is your boss doesn't have time to talk to you. And the title of the newsletter for Wall Street Journal this week is why your boss is always booked. And we've seen this continual shift in 2025 in particular away from the care about employees, right? And it is about the business results. And there's nothing wrong with wanting exceptional business results, but it's not a mutually exclusive proposition to say we need business results and therefore our care for people has gone down. Now, I'd like to summarize this article for you, as I do on occasion, and then I would like to throw in uh I don't know, a kind of interesting article that popped up on Harvard Business Review uh about empathy. And I think that these two pieces go together and it's just kind of a a state of where we're at, right? This podcast is about leadership and management. Quite often it is about um managers and specific tactical things that managers can do to help the lives of their employees. But the landscape is changing around us as it should, as it does, right? We're in a fluid work life that that the world, right, is fluid. Things are always evolving and changing and we have to handle those changes and adapt to those changes and we have really got to find our way as managers through these times and navigate them in a way that's good for ourselves as people and good for our people who follow us to help them thrive. I'm not very objective on this topic, right? But I do think objectively we can say that it is getting slightly harder for the vast majority of employees to thrive just based on the environmental changes that we've seen over this last year. So let's dive into this topic. Remember if you like what you're hearing or dislike what you're hearing, give the episode a rating. Give the show a rating. Make sure you're subscribed and then jump in and let us know. Let me know what you're what you're thinking right now. Maybe you're you're all for the changes going on around us and that's fantastic to hear these perspectives and viewpoints. Let's get to it. Let's engage in dialogue with each other. Okay, so here's the summary. It's from the Wall Street Journal business section, uh, August 29th by Chip Cutter and Lindsay Ellis. The title is your boss doesn't have time to talk to you. So in this summary, we're going to dive into this major shift that's happening in the work workplace that workplace that's highlighted in this article. Okay. The the gist of this article is that companies are cutting back on middle managers and instead of having a manager for every small team, we're seeing the trend of flattening hierarchies and creating larger teams with fewer supervisors. And the numbers uh they can be a little eye openening to be honest with you. According to Gartner, the median ratio of employees
has gone from 5:1
to 15:1. Are you hearing this?
5:1 was the average employee to manager ratio in 2017. We're now up to 15 to one. And this isn't just a thing that's maybe in a startup, right? We've got one person in charge and we've got 15 people. Amazon, Google, Bank of America, a lot of large companies are looking in their eyes to cut bureaucracy and be more nimble. and investors see fewer managers as a sign of strength and efficiency. Now, I grew up with a family that owned a small business, right? I have seen the fruits of American business on families, on people. I'm all for it. I love seeing success stories. So, don't interpret me as anti- capitalist, okay? But here's what's interesting to me. Anytime you see, particularly in the case of publicly traded companies, I think is the most visible investors wanting to see more efficiency. I always raise an eyebrow and make sure to take some note because you've seen over and over again throughout the last couple of years, particularly in the tech industry, that as layoffs occur, investors love that. And I will just say that's frustrating to see that dynamic because we're all engaged in the world of work to find meaning, to support our families, to support ourselves, to do things that are valuable and useful. And it is frustrating to see that investors like layoffs, investors like fewer managers because it's such a toplevel metric without a narrative. By the way, you've heard me over and over. I'm a huge fan of mutually exclusive things, right? If you lay off people, are you automatically more nimble? If you have fewer managers, did you automatically reduce bureaucracy? Culture determines bureaucracy and how nimble you are, not numbers. Of course, if you have 500 managers for a thousand people, you're going to have some more bureaucracy. But if you have fewer managers, it doesn't mean you're automatically streamlined and efficient. So I always have a little bone to pick with those points. Right? In the article, there are some things to call out here about the significant changes. And this is for managers and employees and an example in the article that's called out about this different model of how managers might interface with their teams. Love to hear your thoughts. So for managers, we're at a place where they are well beyond capacity, 15 to1 ratio. As someone who's individually managed multiple teams at once and has, you know, for a long part of my career had like 10 or 11 reports, I can understand that. I think a double-digit number is quite a bit, especially if you have a certain standard as a manager of what you want to give your people. And when you're in charge of multiple teams, of course, that's an entirely different dynamic. I've experienced both. But in this case, we're talking about managers plates are just they're not just full, it's heaping over at the top and falling off the sides. As stated a minute ago, they have three times the number of people. They're really struggling to keep up with their duties. And I love to think of manager as a mentor and a coach and a guide, right? Not just the person who checks on the KPIs, not just the person who makes sure everyone has the right assignments, but they don't have the time for mentor, coach, and career guide anymore. In many cases, managers right now, they're just feeling like they're pushing work forward and they can't focus on developing their employees. What's the portrayal of employees right now? Well, in this article, bosses are busy, so employees have to be more proactive. We're expecting the people to be high performers, stealth selfstarters, people who can manage themselves. If they're looking for guidance, look to your peers who are more experienced and senior. That personal connection that many employees, especially millennials, right? Especially millennials have come to expect from their managers is disappearing. knowing what is going on with your employees lives outside of work. It's a thing that is disappearing. Okay. And so we've talked about this new model. Instead of talking daily and regularly, you know, having uh frequent check-ins, we're talking about managers becoming more advisory. Sometimes an example called out in this article is coaching hours. So you have uh office hours where people can come in but the workers manage their own projects and find their own solutions. For those of you who checked in in season two, uh Liz Wisman, you know, who I I adore, right? Fantastic researcher and a great model for so many of us. In that episode, we talked about impact players and what it feels like in this artic. What's an impact player? Someone who who takes the ball as far as they can. They do what needs to be done. They go beyond the job description. It's not what the org chart says. It's what the the project needs. These are impact players. But check it out. When I talked to Liz, this isn't your average employee. These are the people who stand out. And so, here's what I think is interesting about the dynamic. Businesses are characterizing their environment in a way that I just said, right? 15 to1 ratios. People need to be more proactive. They need to manage themselves and all of that. Those are great things to shoot for. But on in the side that Liz has presented, that's the exceptional uh person. There's even a quote in this Wall Street Journal article, someone talks about you don't need someone to spend a lot of time to manage Michael Jordan. And you know, frankly, I I'm bastardizing that that quote a little bit, but hey, listen everybody. There was one Michael Jordan, right? There have been thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who have played professional basketball in the United States and across the world. There's only been one Michael Jordan. So, let's not pretend that we only hire Michael Jordans here. I know companies love to say that. They love to say they have high standards and that makes them feel great and looks great and marketable and I think that's fine, right? When you give a manager 15 employees, you're not going to give them 12 Michael Jordans. So why does this all matter? There's a tangential article that I ran across and it's from August 20th. So, just a couple of articles in close proximity to each other, but it's about the relationship between artificial intelligence and empathy and how we're often delegating human- centric activities to AI like uh customer service agents who are feigning empathy because they're a computer program, right, to human beings and how it's actually making the an empathy crisis in the workplace. And they actually showed when they um when they surveyed uh senior leaders about empathy, senior leaders value empathy uh less than they used to a year ago. So there's been a drop in the importance and value of empathy in the workplace from leaders. Okay. So when you look at this CEOs who agree empathy is undervalued dropped 28% compared to last year. They'd say it's nice to have. It's not a need to have, but the people who work for them disagree. And the numbers in this Harvard Business Review article say that it's called AI is making the workplace empathy crisis worse by Toby Lester, August 20th of 2025. And so, here's what concerns me about the big picture. And hey, I'm a guy with a podcast who's, I guess, sitting here complaining about the changes we're going through, right? Makes me sound really old. But I'm okay with taking this stance. I'm going to take my stance and you can too. Between the drop in empathy, the change in the manager ratios and what the manager does, the idea that most people might be impact players when they really aren't. I come back to this cascade I talked about in the last episode. Managers influence engagement and an engaged workforce is what leads to an effective organization, exceptional results and profit and revenue. The studies suggest all this. I get the world's changing. We'll see where this all how this all ages in a few years. both my take and the changes of many organizations out there. But what we're saying is let's make managers le less effective by sheer numbers which we already can tell you will make the employee workforce less engaged. And then we're delegating customer service to chat bots. And the customers are the ones who provide our revenue. The studies show, folks, I'm not making this stuff up. I have an opinion, right? But the studies show that an engaged workforce is what actually leads to customer satisfaction. And so we're we're creating an interface now with AI talking to the customer rather than the human beings who are engaged projecting that enthusiasm and engagement onto another person who is buying from the company. And so this recipe, I think, is really interesting because I fear that it makes today's 10-year low employee engagement scores potentially be the high benchmark for the coming years. We would all love to see a rebound in employee engagement, but if we ignore the formula that creates it, we shouldn't expect it to get better. And I guess that's my point. Invest in your managers. Give them the chance to uh be able to support your employee. Sorry if you can hear my dog barking in the background. Invest in your managers. Give them the opportunity to support their people, which engages your workforce, and let those folks interface with your customers and give them a great experience. And you'll stand out. you'll stand out amongst the competition. Let me know what you think, folks. Maybe I'm out of touch. Maybe my opinion's old. Let me know. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this whole topic. We're in the middle of the storm as it's changing around us, right? We're it's changing around us. It's a fascinating time to be working. Let's see where it all goes. But let me know. Jump in. comment on this episode episode, excuse me. Send me an email at startyouvoagegmail.com. startyouvo voyage@gmail.com. Comment whatever you see. Let me know. I'd love to hear what it's what you're thinking. But until next time, everybody, take care.[Music]