Being a “manager” is definitely not cool any more. The post-COVID layoffs at most major tech companies focused on removing layers of management. As Mark Zuckerberg, already a champion of senior individual-contributor career progression, put it in 2024:
I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.
And now that AI is workplace-ready, that’s never been more true. Very small organizations are achieving what used to take teams of hundreds.
The most competent professionals I’ve met in my career are ambitious to be leaders, not managers, and almost everyone I know is suspicious of overly hierarchical organizations. All this has compounded to make being a manager something fewer people aspire to. But I think the skills that make someone a great manager have never been more valuable.
Because what actually IS management? Joe Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School defines it as:
Getting the confused, misguided, unmotivated, and misdirected to accomplish a common purpose on a regular, recurring basis.
Apart from maybe the unmotivated bit, didn’t he just explain what it takes to be good at deploying agents? Human management is about giving people the context, instructions, feedback, and frameworks to get great work done. Deploying an agent involves the exact same skills.
If you are a good manager, you will be good at using agents. If you think you are a good manager, but you are struggling to deploy agents, you may not be as good a manager as you thought. Take a look at that list. Are your agents confused, misdirected, or misguided? Maybe you aren’t giving them the context, instructions, feedback, and frameworks they need.
