{"id":51025,"topic":"ai","source":"Forbes","title":"What Middle Managers Need Most In The AI Era - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindyrodriguezconstable/2026/07/31/what-middle-managers-need-most-in-the-ai-era/","url_hash":"a895f4f9b283347040c515bafdd264bd6d5c8291","author":"","summary":"What Middle Managers Need Most In The AI Era Forbes","content":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. The cause was not front-line disengagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.\nThat is a specific accountability signal, and it points directly at the layer where most organizations have been most reluctant to invest: the middle.\nThree pressures, no additional support\nDDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025—drawn from more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries—found that 71% of leaders report significantly more stress than a year prior. Forty percent are actively considering leaving their roles. Leadership development ranks as HR's stated top priority heading into 2026.\nMiddle managers in 2026 are being asked to own AI integration for their teams while simultaneously navigating return-to-office friction and hitting performance targets that were set without any of these variables in mind. Each of those is a full organizational initiative. Companies are running them concurrently through the same management layer, with the expectation that the layer will absorb the load.\nA structural problem, compounded\nThe management layer was already contracting before these pressures mounted. Live Data Technologies documented a 6.1% decline in manager headcount in recent years, driven by AI-enabled delayering. Gartner projects that trend accelerates: through 2026, 20% of organizations are expected to use AI to flatten their structures further, eliminating more than half of middle management positions in affected firms.\nThe managers who remain after that compression will carry a broader span of responsibility: larger teams, more complex AI-human workflows, fewer management peers around them. The question of whether those managers have the skills to operate at that altitude—and whether organizations are doing anything to develop them—is not getting the investment the data suggests it requires.\nEighty percent of organizations, per DDI, lack confidence in their own leadership pipelines. That figure has barely moved in three years of consecutive DDI surveys, across periods when the composition of work itself has changed significantly.\nThe skills mismatch\nOrganizations have responded to AI's arrival primarily with technical training—AI fluency certifications, prompt engineering courses, platform adoption programs. Those investments are defensible at the individual-task level. They address the wrong constraint at the organizational level.\nThe tasks AI is absorbing—status tracking, routine communication, data aggregation, performance monitoring—are exactly the tasks that consumed management bandwidth and prevented managers from doing the higher-order work organizations actually need from them: strategic synthesis, coaching for growth, decision-making under genuine ambiguity, and reading the organizational context well enough to act on it.\nAs AI handles the transactional layer, what remains is the relational and cognitive layer. And that is precisely where most management development programs have historically underinvested.\nDDI found that leaders themselves identified \"setting strategy\" and \"managing change\" as their two greatest skill gaps. Only 22% of HR teams are currently prioritizing those areas in their development planning. Organizations are preparing managers for the tasks AI is about to make redundant, rather than the ones AI cannot replicate.\nWhat the transition actually requires\nThe move from manager to leader involves something more fundamental than skill acquisition. It involves how a person processes ambiguity, constructs a point of view, builds influence without formal authority, and sustains performance under pressure without treating every setback as a personal indictment.\nThose capabilities develop through sustained investment in the cognitive and psychological dimensions of leadership—an investment most organizations classify as optional, or defer in favor of more measurable training outputs.\nThe data suggests organizations understand this at some level. Leadership development has held the top-priority position in HR planning surveys for consecutive years. Eighty percent still lack confidence in their pipelines. The distance between the stated priority and the actual organizational capability reveals where accountability has stalled—and it is not in the HR function's ability to identify the need.\nThe accountability decision\nHigh-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave within a year if their manager does not regularly create growth opportunities, DDI found. That number compounds upward. Managers who are not developing become the ceiling for every person under them, and the accumulation of underdeveloped management ceilings is what an 80% pipeline-confidence gap looks like from the inside.\nThe $438 billion Gallup figure circulates primarily as a workforce engagement headline. The more precise read is that it is a management development accounting problem. The primary lever for improving workforce engagement is improving the capability, confidence, and working conditions of the people who manage that workforce.\nExecutives who treat the management layer as a cost center to optimize rather than a capability layer to develop are making a specific strategic decision. The data on what that decision costs—in attrition risk, pipeline weakness, and disengagement—is available and growing more specific each year. What organizations choose to do with that data, and who is accountable for the decision, is the question the surveys do not answer.","image_url":"https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/6a6d40a037b423f4d50912f2/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-08-01T00:44:20+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-08-01T01:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. 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The cause was not front-line disengagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.\nThat is a specific accountability signal, and it points directly at the layer where most organizations have been most reluctant to invest: the middle.\nThree pressures, no additional support\nDDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025—drawn from more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries—found that 71% of leaders report significantly more stress than a year prior. Forty percent are actively considering leaving their roles. Leadership development ranks as HR's stated top priority heading into 2026.\nMiddle managers in 2026 are being asked to own AI integration for their teams while simultaneously navigating return-to-office friction and hitting performance targets that were set without any of these variables in mind. Each of those is a full organizational initiative. Companies are running them concurrently through the same management layer, with the expectation that the layer will absorb the load.\nA structural problem, compounded\nThe management layer was already contracting before these pressures mounted. Live Data Technologies documented a 6.1% decline in manager headcount in recent years, driven by AI-enabled delayering. Gartner projects that trend accelerates: through 2026, 20% of organizations are expected to use AI to flatten their structures further, eliminating more than half of middle management positions in affected firms.\nThe managers who remain after that compression will carry a broader span of responsibility: larger teams, more complex AI-human workflows, fewer management peers around them. The question of whether those managers have the skills to operate at that altitude—and whether organizations are doing anything to develop them—is not getting the investment the data suggests it requires.\nEighty percent of organizations, per DDI, lack confidence in their own leadership pipelines. That figure has barely moved in three years of consecutive DDI surveys, across periods when the composition of work itself has changed significantly.\nThe skills mismatch\nOrganizations have responded to AI's arrival primarily with technical training—AI fluency certifications, prompt engineering courses, platform adoption programs. Those investments are defensible at the individual-task level. They address the wrong constraint at the organizational level.\nThe tasks AI is absorbing—status tracking, routine communication, data aggregation, performance monitoring—are exactly the tasks that consumed management bandwidth and prevented managers from doing the higher-order work organizations actually need from them: strategic synthesis, coaching for growth, decision-making under genuine ambiguity, and reading the organizational context well enough to act on it.\nAs AI handles the transactional layer, what remains is the relational and cognitive layer. And that is precisely where most management development programs have historically underinvested.\nDDI found that leaders themselves identified \"setting strategy\" and \"managing change\" as their two greatest skill gaps. Only 22% of HR teams are currently prioritizing those areas in their development planning. Organizations are preparing managers for the tasks AI is about to make redundant, rather than the ones AI cannot replicate.\nWhat the transition actually requires\nThe move from manager to leader involves something more fundamental than skill acquisition. It involves how a person processes ambiguity, constructs a point of view, builds influence without formal authority, and sustains performance under pressure without treating every setback as a personal indictment.\nThose capabilities develop through sustained investment in the cognitive and psychological dimensions of leadership—an investment most organizations classify as optional, or defer in favor of more measurable training outputs.\nThe data suggests organizations understand this at some level. Leadership development has held the top-priority position in HR planning surveys for consecutive years. Eighty percent still lack confidence in their pipelines. The distance between the stated priority and the actual organizational capability reveals where accountability has stalled—and it is not in the HR function's ability to identify the need.\nThe accountability decision\nHigh-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave within a year if their manager does not regularly create growth opportunities, DDI found. That number compounds upward. Managers who are not developing become the ceiling for every person under them, and the accumulation of underdeveloped management ceilings is what an 80% pipeline-confidence gap looks like from the inside.\nThe $438 billion Gallup figure circulates primarily as a workforce engagement headline. The more precise read is that it is a management development accounting problem. The primary lever for improving workforce engagement is improving the capability, confidence, and working conditions of the people who manage that workforce.\nExecutives who treat the management layer as a cost center to optimize rather than a capability layer to develop are making a specific strategic decision. The data on what that decision costs—in attrition risk, pipeline weakness, and disengagement—is available and growing more specific each year. What organizations choose to do with that data, and who is accountable for the decision, is the question the surveys do not answer.","excerpt":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. 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Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-08-01T00:44:20+00:00","content":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. The cause was not front-line disengagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.\nThat is a specific accountability signal, and it points directly at the layer where most organizations have been most reluctant to invest: the middle.\nThree pressures, no additional support\nDDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025—drawn from more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries—found that 71% of leaders report significantly more stress than a year prior. Forty percent are actively considering leaving their roles. Leadership development ranks as HR's stated top priority heading into 2026.\nMiddle managers in 2026 are being asked to own AI integration for their teams while simultaneously navigating return-to-office friction and hitting performance targets that were set without any of these variables in mind. Each of those is a full organizational initiative. Companies are running them concurrently through the same management layer, with the expectation that the layer will absorb the load.\nA structural problem, compounded\nThe management layer was already contracting before these pressures mounted. Live Data Technologies documented a 6.1% decline in manager headcount in recent years, driven by AI-enabled delayering. Gartner projects that trend accelerates: through 2026, 20% of organizations are expected to use AI to flatten their structures further, eliminating more than half of middle management positions in affected firms.\nThe managers who remain after that compression will carry a broader span of responsibility: larger teams, more complex AI-human workflows, fewer management peers around them. The question of whether those managers have the skills to operate at that altitude—and whether organizations are doing anything to develop them—is not getting the investment the data suggests it requires.\nEighty percent of organizations, per DDI, lack confidence in their own leadership pipelines. That figure has barely moved in three years of consecutive DDI surveys, across periods when the composition of work itself has changed significantly.\nThe skills mismatch\nOrganizations have responded to AI's arrival primarily with technical training—AI fluency certifications, prompt engineering courses, platform adoption programs. Those investments are defensible at the individual-task level. They address the wrong constraint at the organizational level.\nThe tasks AI is absorbing—status tracking, routine communication, data aggregation, performance monitoring—are exactly the tasks that consumed management bandwidth and prevented managers from doing the higher-order work organizations actually need from them: strategic synthesis, coaching for growth, decision-making under genuine ambiguity, and reading the organizational context well enough to act on it.\nAs AI handles the transactional layer, what remains is the relational and cognitive layer. And that is precisely where most management development programs have historically underinvested.\nDDI found that leaders themselves identified \"setting strategy\" and \"managing change\" as their two greatest skill gaps. Only 22% of HR teams are currently prioritizing those areas in their development planning. Organizations are preparing managers for the tasks AI is about to make redundant, rather than the ones AI cannot replicate.\nWhat the transition actually requires\nThe move from manager to leader involves something more fundamental than skill acquisition. It involves how a person processes ambiguity, constructs a point of view, builds influence without formal authority, and sustains performance under pressure without treating every setback as a personal indictment.\nThose capabilities develop through sustained investment in the cognitive and psychological dimensions of leadership—an investment most organizations classify as optional, or defer in favor of more measurable training outputs.\nThe data suggests organizations understand this at some level. Leadership development has held the top-priority position in HR planning surveys for consecutive years. Eighty percent still lack confidence in their pipelines. The distance between the stated priority and the actual organizational capability reveals where accountability has stalled—and it is not in the HR function's ability to identify the need.\nThe accountability decision\nHigh-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave within a year if their manager does not regularly create growth opportunities, DDI found. That number compounds upward. Managers who are not developing become the ceiling for every person under them, and the accumulation of underdeveloped management ceilings is what an 80% pipeline-confidence gap looks like from the inside.\nThe $438 billion Gallup figure circulates primarily as a workforce engagement headline. The more precise read is that it is a management development accounting problem. The primary lever for improving workforce engagement is improving the capability, confidence, and working conditions of the people who manage that workforce.\nExecutives who treat the management layer as a cost center to optimize rather than a capability layer to develop are making a specific strategic decision. The data on what that decision costs—in attrition risk, pipeline weakness, and disengagement—is available and growing more specific each year. What organizations choose to do with that data, and who is accountable for the decision, is the question the surveys do not answer.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/cindyrodriguezconstable/2026/07/31/what-middle-managers-need-most-in-the-ai-era/","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 5672 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 5672 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":5672,"summary_length":270,"usable_text_length":5672,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":5672,"summary_length":270}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/51025","export_markdown":"/api/items/51025/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/51025/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/cindyrodriguezconstable/2026/07/31/what-middle-managers-need-most-in-the-ai-era/"},"formats":{"full":{"id":51025,"title":"What Middle Managers Need Most In The AI Era - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindyrodriguezconstable/2026/07/31/what-middle-managers-need-most-in-the-ai-era/","source":"Forbes","author":null,"published_at":"2026-08-01T00:44:20+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.","full_text":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. The cause was not front-line disengagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.\nThat is a specific accountability signal, and it points directly at the layer where most organizations have been most reluctant to invest: the middle.\nThree pressures, no additional support\nDDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025—drawn from more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries—found that 71% of leaders report significantly more stress than a year prior. Forty percent are actively considering leaving their roles. Leadership development ranks as HR's stated top priority heading into 2026.\nMiddle managers in 2026 are being asked to own AI integration for their teams while simultaneously navigating return-to-office friction and hitting performance targets that were set without any of these variables in mind. Each of those is a full organizational initiative. Companies are running them concurrently through the same management layer, with the expectation that the layer will absorb the load.\nA structural problem, compounded\nThe management layer was already contracting before these pressures mounted. Live Data Technologies documented a 6.1% decline in manager headcount in recent years, driven by AI-enabled delayering. Gartner projects that trend accelerates: through 2026, 20% of organizations are expected to use AI to flatten their structures further, eliminating more than half of middle management positions in affected firms.\nThe managers who remain after that compression will carry a broader span of responsibility: larger teams, more complex AI-human workflows, fewer management peers around them. The question of whether those managers have the skills to operate at that altitude—and whether organizations are doing anything to develop them—is not getting the investment the data suggests it requires.\nEighty percent of organizations, per DDI, lack confidence in their own leadership pipelines. That figure has barely moved in three years of consecutive DDI surveys, across periods when the composition of work itself has changed significantly.\nThe skills mismatch\nOrganizations have responded to AI's arrival primarily with technical training—AI fluency certifications, prompt engineering courses, platform adoption programs. Those investments are defensible at the individual-task level. They address the wrong constraint at the organizational level.\nThe tasks AI is absorbing—status tracking, routine communication, data aggregation, performance monitoring—are exactly the tasks that consumed management bandwidth and prevented managers from doing the higher-order work organizations actually need from them: strategic synthesis, coaching for growth, decision-making under genuine ambiguity, and reading the organizational context well enough to act on it.\nAs AI handles the transactional layer, what remains is the relational and cognitive layer. And that is precisely where most management development programs have historically underinvested.\nDDI found that leaders themselves identified \"setting strategy\" and \"managing change\" as their two greatest skill gaps. Only 22% of HR teams are currently prioritizing those areas in their development planning. Organizations are preparing managers for the tasks AI is about to make redundant, rather than the ones AI cannot replicate.\nWhat the transition actually requires\nThe move from manager to leader involves something more fundamental than skill acquisition. It involves how a person processes ambiguity, constructs a point of view, builds influence without formal authority, and sustains performance under pressure without treating every setback as a personal indictment.\nThose capabilities develop through sustained investment in the cognitive and psychological dimensions of leadership—an investment most organizations classify as optional, or defer in favor of more measurable training outputs.\nThe data suggests organizations understand this at some level. Leadership development has held the top-priority position in HR planning surveys for consecutive years. Eighty percent still lack confidence in their pipelines. The distance between the stated priority and the actual organizational capability reveals where accountability has stalled—and it is not in the HR function's ability to identify the need.\nThe accountability decision\nHigh-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave within a year if their manager does not regularly create growth opportunities, DDI found. That number compounds upward. Managers who are not developing become the ceiling for every person under them, and the accumulation of underdeveloped management ceilings is what an 80% pipeline-confidence gap looks like from the inside.\nThe $438 billion Gallup figure circulates primarily as a workforce engagement headline. The more precise read is that it is a management development accounting problem. The primary lever for improving workforce engagement is improving the capability, confidence, and working conditions of the people who manage that workforce.\nExecutives who treat the management layer as a cost center to optimize rather than a capability layer to develop are making a specific strategic decision. The data on what that decision costs—in attrition risk, pipeline weakness, and disengagement—is available and growing more specific each year. 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Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-08-01T00:44:20+00:00","content":"When Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, the headline figure was $438 billion—the cost, in lost productivity, of a single-year drop in global employee engagement. The cause was not front-line disengagement. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and it pulled everything down with it.\nThat is a specific accountability signal, and it points directly at the layer where most organizations have been most reluctant to invest: the middle.\nThree pressures, no additional support\nDDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025—drawn from more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries—found that 71% of leaders report significantly more stress than a year prior. Forty percent are actively considering leaving their roles. Leadership development ranks as HR's stated top priority heading into 2026.\nMiddle managers in 2026 are being asked to own AI integration for their teams while simultaneously navigating return-to-office friction and hitting performance targets that were set without any of these variables in mind. Each of those is a full organizational initiative. Companies are running them concurrently through the same management layer, with the expectation that the layer will absorb the load.\nA structural problem, compounded\nThe management layer was already contracting before these pressures mounted. Live Data Technologies documented a 6.1% decline in manager headcount in recent years, driven by AI-enabled delayering. Gartner projects that trend accelerates: through 2026, 20% of organizations are expected to use AI to flatten their structures further, eliminating more than half of middle management positions in affected firms.\nThe managers who remain after that compression will carry a broader span of responsibility: larger teams, more complex AI-human workflows, fewer management peers around them. The question of whether those managers have the skills to operate at that altitude—and whether organizations are doing anything to develop them—is not getting the investment the data suggests it requires.\nEighty percent of organizations, per DDI, lack confidence in their own leadership pipelines. That figure has barely moved in three years of consecutive DDI surveys, across periods when the composition of work itself has changed significantly.\nThe skills mismatch\nOrganizations have responded to AI's arrival primarily with technical training—AI fluency certifications, prompt engineering courses, platform adoption programs. Those investments are defensible at the individual-task level. They address the wrong constraint at the organizational level.\nThe tasks AI is absorbing—status tracking, routine communication, data aggregation, performance monitoring—are exactly the tasks that consumed management bandwidth and prevented managers from doing the higher-order work organizations actually need from them: strategic synthesis, coaching for growth, decision-making under genuine ambiguity, and reading the organizational context well enough to act on it.\nAs AI handles the transactional layer, what remains is the relational and cognitive layer. And that is precisely where most management development programs have historically underinvested.\nDDI found that leaders themselves identified \"setting strategy\" and \"managing change\" as their two greatest skill gaps. Only 22% of HR teams are currently prioritizing those areas in their development planning. Organizations are preparing managers for the tasks AI is about to make redundant, rather than the ones AI cannot replicate.\nWhat the transition actually requires\nThe move from manager to leader involves something more fundamental than skill acquisition. It involves how a person processes ambiguity, constructs a point of view, builds influence without formal authority, and sustains performance under pressure without treating every setback as a personal indictment.\nThose capabilities develop through sustained investment in the cognitive and psychological dimensions of leadership—an investment most organizations classify as optional, or defer in favor of more measurable training outputs.\nThe data suggests organizations understand this at some level. Leadership development has held the top-priority position in HR planning surveys for consecutive years. Eighty percent still lack confidence in their pipelines. The distance between the stated priority and the actual organizational capability reveals where accountability has stalled—and it is not in the HR function's ability to identify the need.\nThe accountability decision\nHigh-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave within a year if their manager does not regularly create growth opportunities, DDI found. That number compounds upward. Managers who are not developing become the ceiling for every person under them, and the accumulation of underdeveloped management ceilings is what an 80% pipeline-confidence gap looks like from the inside.\nThe $438 billion Gallup figure circulates primarily as a workforce engagement headline. The more precise read is that it is a management development accounting problem. The primary lever for improving workforce engagement is improving the capability, confidence, and working conditions of the people who manage that workforce.\nExecutives who treat the management layer as a cost center to optimize rather than a capability layer to develop are making a specific strategic decision. The data on what that decision costs—in attrition risk, pipeline weakness, and disengagement—is available and growing more specific each year. 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