The Focused Manager: Wired, but not Rearranged

This One Belongs to Managers

Managers know how to deal with change. When budgets get cut, a system gets replaced, or someone quits mid-project, managers figure out how to handle it. They are like shock absorbers, and they know it’s part of the job.

So it’s tempting to look at AI and see it as another change to absorb.

But this is different. Change used to arrive as a package. A vendor was selected, a budget and schedule set, and the manager’s job was to get the team through it. Absorbing change made sense because the decision had already been made. Managers made it work.

With AI, most managers aren’t getting a package with a spec, a training plan, and a rollout schedule. Nobody has decided how the workflow changes. That’s open, and the manager is the one positioned to decide. This isn’t a change to absorb. It’s a change to lead.

And that’s why this is the manager’s job.

Executives think about departments, service lines, and the business as a whole. Managers think about their people. They know who is struggling and who is on an upward trajectory. They know the potential that exists on the team.

Vendors think about use cases and subscriptions. Managers see the small things that make the business run. They know about the report that takes six hours of manual edits to get right, and the customer who stays because of a personal relationship.

Managers know how the operational systems really work. They have visibility into the strategy, yet experience the daily pressures firsthand. No one else has as diverse and intimate an understanding of the people, the processes, and the systems as managers.

The value of AI is created where the work gets done, the same place the motor ended up. A manager’s floor is the team, its processes, and its systems.

Rearranging all of that takes someone who knows all three. It takes the manager.
Most have not started.

Why Managers Haven’t Started

Starting is the hardest part. Three objections come up most often.

“I don’t know where to start, or which tool to use.”

There’s a lot of hype about which platform is best or which tool is hot. But most of that only matters to investors. For a manager leading a team, it’s more important to just pick one and start. If the company has a preferred tool, use that. If not, choose one and practice good hygiene. Keep all confidential data out of it and don’t give it access to company resources.

“My company bought a tool and told us to use it. Nothing changed.”

Companies bolted the electric motor onto the existing shaft, and nothing changed until the floor got rearranged. That’s the work of the manager. This objection is the clearest evidence that it is time to start.

“I don’t have time.”

This is true. Managers are too busy, and that’s the diagnosis. Nobody made time to rearrange a factory that was making money, and nobody is going to make time for managers to learn to use AI. AI is how you find the time.

Place a Small Bet

Making time for AI doesn’t start with a strategy or a proposal to the boss. Instead, it starts with a small bet. The manager identifies one place to try saving time with AI. But the place to look isn’t at the task level; it’s at the process level.

What are the regular processes that the manager or the team runs on a daily or weekly basis? These are things like the new request intake process, review cycles before releasing work, or weekly reporting. Managers who can’t put company data into AI can use it for their own routines instead. Look at processes such as weekly planning, catching up on industry news, or turning meeting notes into follow-up items.

Choose a process and walk through the steps. Identify one step in the process that takes extra time or often gets stuck. That’s where the first small bet goes. That’s where to put AI in the loop.

It might be a step that summarizes or reformats information. It could be drafting a report or pulling together the list of work to prioritize for the week. Whatever it is, work out how AI could make that step easier, faster, or better.

Before making any changes, state the desired outcome. For instance, if the goal is time, state how many hours the bet might save if it pays off. If it is an improvement in quality, state what that looks like.

Then, make the bet. Reconfigure the step to use AI. Not sure how? Ask AI. Set up the step, run the process with AI in the loop, and evaluate the results against the goal. It probably won’t pay off big, but it gets things moving. From there, make adjustments and make another small bet.

For example, a manager who spends half an hour each morning reading industry news might have AI do the scan overnight and create a short list that takes a few minutes to digest. The next bet can be about getting those items into the CRM, so staff know what clients are dealing with.

Keep Rearranging

One bet gets a manager started, but it won’t rearrange the floor. To do that, managers must keep placing bets and improving their processes with AI. Then they can invest their time and energy in the things only they can do.

This might be spending more time talking with key customers or building stronger vendor relationships. It can be improving cross-departmental collaboration, so work moves more smoothly across the organization. Or it can be spending extra time mentoring a high-potential employee and building a stronger leadership pipeline.

Managers are also leading their teams through this change. How the team hears their manager talk about it, respond to it, and use it will influence how the team uses AI. Bring AI use out into the open, and normalize experimentation. Managers should talk about what they’re trying, what is and isn’t working, and what they’re learning through it all.

Finally, managers must regularly update their boss about the bets they are making and what they are learning. The boss will want to know how steps are selected, how risk is managed, and what results these experiments show. The boss is accountable for those processes and can help keep the bets pointed at what the business needs.

How do managers lead through this change? By doing things only they can do, bringing their teams along, and engaging their boss.

The motor will get added. It isn’t a question of if, but when. Rearranging the floor is different, and that’s what matters. It starts with managers, and it starts now. The technology arrived. The value is still waiting on us.