MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT AND THE AI

In case you are

-      founder or manager of a mid-size company which grew on your ideas only and all the staff is carefully listening to you or

-      CEO taking care not to be threatened by anyone from within or outside the company,

you should skip this article.

For some last years I am struggling to activate the sleeping tactical level within companies. The layers of middle-management should act as tactical level. In all sizes of companies, especially SMEs we usually have some strategic thinkers who brought the company to where it is and some operational staff led by middle managers.

TACTICS

Importance of tactics is clearly visible in fast growing companies. The strategic level has no time to deep into tactics and operations therefore a significant part of thinking and change set-up is on tactical level. The three main tactical tasks besides organising the operations and tactical outward actions are constant thinking of improvements on operational level, constant thinking of strategic inputs which they deliver to the top level and constant horizontal activities on improvements with their middle-management colleagues. A closer view into such a fast growing company reveals that those tactical activities are crucial condition for the company development materialisation.

Any average company would experience significant difference in its development if the tactical level would be activated – or in simple words – involved in thinking.

In short words, the tactical team should concentrate its efforts to think and develop together and to negotiate outward the company. Instead, the average team is not even a team but its members act individually while negotiating among them, doing incremental internal development and leaving outward communication at status-quo.

A closer look reveals that the average middle-managers are passive, avoid changes and they rather hide within operations in fear of doing mistakes or being responsible for something they do not feel comfortable with. It is better to do nothing than to do a mistake. Somewhere one can find even middle-managers who are pretending being active, which is even worse. Generally there are two main reasons for such situation. The first is fear of doing or saying something wrong, while the other usual reason is lack of teamwork spirit and confidence. Therefore they rather do important operational tasks instead to delegate them to lower levels.

Assuming that middle managers do not know theoretically enough about strategy, they for sure know practically all about operations. Just leaving their strategy abilities aside and concentrating on their operations management only, we can see that they occasionally give some input to operations improvement. It is easy to understand the potentials if this would be their primary task.

AI IS NOT JUST SOFTWARE

We are entering the age of artificial intelligence [AI] right now. So far an average company sees it as a sort of workplace automation, better, faster, generally more productive and accurate decision making. As far as we implement a model or two we are not far from this. But going deeper, understanding and building a more comprehensive system, it changes a lot more. Deep learning algorithms are directly and indirectly suggesting things we haven't been thinking about before. Higher level of human creative work comes onto the desktops. More fluid communication brings different type of organisational rules. Because the use of AI is becoming unavoidable and even more - the first adopters will win the competition; it is time now to think about the future work organisation. AI brings a new paradigm of competitiveness and organisation.

TACTICS AND AI

The tactical level will become crucial. Recalling the three actual main tactical tasks it becomes clear quickly what will happen.

In worst case the middle-managers will probably remain individually looking over their vertical segment of operations defending their position by negotiating with their colleagues. Supported by AI they will just be stronger and the lot of lost companies energy and resources will just be multiplied.

In optimal case the tactical – middle-managers will become a horizontal think-tank and their main task will be overlooking the whole system in aim of optimisations all the way from strategic directions to operations and vice versa. Leaving most of time-consuming tactical analytics and decision making to the machine will release huge creative potential of middle-managers. This together can bring the company into a really high spin. To achieve this, exactly the same methods can be used as we have been actually using for tactical level activation.