As a manager (and sometimes middle manager) I’ve been thinking about how LLMs are going to change management. Not exactly your topic but close enough. Here’s my raw thoughts so far:
the main reasons you need management layers is coordination
one person can’t directly manage more than about 12 people effectively
past that point you need someone to hide some details for you
with ai though one director can manage more managers
normally coordination costs make it hard to manage more than 6 managers
llms may allow a director to manage 12 managers/teams by automating comms tasks that normally require process (meetings)
less meetings mean you can coordinate more work at once
this lets the org stay flatter longer, which reduces the amount of coordination hell
many manager tasks are house keeping
managers spend 80% of their time on house keeping so they have the info and org they need to do the critical work 20% of the time
some of the house keeping can be automated with llms
for example, no need to hear all the status reports if an llm can summarize them and pick out the bits you need to act on and hide the parts you can safely ignore, but still know about them and tell you about them if they become relevant
the human touch matters
humans respond to other humans
as a manager much of what makes you successful is your ability to lead, i.e. to get other humans to trust you enough to do what you tell them to do
llms are unlikely to be leaders in the short term unless they get way better real fast
llms are more like assistants; they lack executive function
understanding what llms can do for your people
you’re going to need to understand how and when your ICs should use llms to get their job done
you’ll have to identify when people are inefficient becuse they don’t use ai well and then help them learn to use it
this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out
Very interesting points, if I was still in middle management these things would be keeping me up at night!
One point I query is “this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out”—is it that different from the various types of tool introduction & distribution / training / coaching that managers already do? I’ve spent a good amount of my career coaching my teams on how to be more productive using tools, running team show-and-tells from productive team members on why they’re productive, sending team members on paid training courses, designing rules around use of internal tools like Slack/Git/issue trackers/intranets etc… and it doesn’t seem that different to figuring out how to deploy LLM tools to a team. But I’m rusty as a manager, and I don’t know what future LLM-style tools will look like, so I could be thinking about this incorrectly. Certainly if I had a software team right now, I’d be encouraging them to use existing tools like LLM code completion, automated test writing, proof-reading etc., and encouraging early adopters to share their successes & failures with such tools.
Does “no manager has done before” refer to specific LLM tools, and is there something fundamentally different about them compared to past new technologies/languages/IDEs etc?
I think the general vibe of “this hasn’t been done before” might have been referring to fully automating the manager job, which possibly comes with very different scaling of human- vs AI managers. (You possibly remove the time bottleneck, allowing unlimited number of meetings. So if you didn’t need to coordinate the low-level workers, you could have a single manager for infinite workers. Ofc, in practice, you do need to coordinate somewhat, so there will be other bottlenecks. But still, removing a bottleneck could changes things dramatically.)
As a manager (and sometimes middle manager) I’ve been thinking about how LLMs are going to change management. Not exactly your topic but close enough. Here’s my raw thoughts so far:
the main reasons you need management layers is coordination
one person can’t directly manage more than about 12 people effectively
past that point you need someone to hide some details for you
with ai though one director can manage more managers
normally coordination costs make it hard to manage more than 6 managers
llms may allow a director to manage 12 managers/teams by automating comms tasks that normally require process (meetings)
less meetings mean you can coordinate more work at once
this lets the org stay flatter longer, which reduces the amount of coordination hell
many manager tasks are house keeping
managers spend 80% of their time on house keeping so they have the info and org they need to do the critical work 20% of the time
some of the house keeping can be automated with llms
for example, no need to hear all the status reports if an llm can summarize them and pick out the bits you need to act on and hide the parts you can safely ignore, but still know about them and tell you about them if they become relevant
the human touch matters
humans respond to other humans
as a manager much of what makes you successful is your ability to lead, i.e. to get other humans to trust you enough to do what you tell them to do
llms are unlikely to be leaders in the short term unless they get way better real fast
llms are more like assistants; they lack executive function
understanding what llms can do for your people
you’re going to need to understand how and when your ICs should use llms to get their job done
you’ll have to identify when people are inefficient becuse they don’t use ai well and then help them learn to use it
this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out
we’ll probably get llms to help us do it
Very interesting points, if I was still in middle management these things would be keeping me up at night!
One point I query is “this is a totally new thing no manager has done before, but we’re going to have to figure it out”—is it that different from the various types of tool introduction & distribution / training / coaching that managers already do? I’ve spent a good amount of my career coaching my teams on how to be more productive using tools, running team show-and-tells from productive team members on why they’re productive, sending team members on paid training courses, designing rules around use of internal tools like Slack/Git/issue trackers/intranets etc… and it doesn’t seem that different to figuring out how to deploy LLM tools to a team. But I’m rusty as a manager, and I don’t know what future LLM-style tools will look like, so I could be thinking about this incorrectly. Certainly if I had a software team right now, I’d be encouraging them to use existing tools like LLM code completion, automated test writing, proof-reading etc., and encouraging early adopters to share their successes & failures with such tools.
Does “no manager has done before” refer to specific LLM tools, and is there something fundamentally different about them compared to past new technologies/languages/IDEs etc?
I think the general vibe of “this hasn’t been done before” might have been referring to fully automating the manager job, which possibly comes with very different scaling of human- vs AI managers. (You possibly remove the time bottleneck, allowing unlimited number of meetings. So if you didn’t need to coordinate the low-level workers, you could have a single manager for infinite workers. Ofc, in practice, you do need to coordinate somewhat, so there will be other bottlenecks. But still, removing a bottleneck could changes things dramatically.)