A COACHING STORY
A General Manager with twenty-six years behind him and thirteen ahead asked me whether he was next. Here is what I heard beneath the question and why every board planning an AI restructure should hear it too.
A General Manager sat across from me recently and asked, very quietly, whether he was next.
He has given twenty-six years to his company. Nobody handed him the title. He earned it the long way, one promotion and one sleepless quarter at a time. He has thirteen working years left, a family that depends on every one of them and a chief executive who has told him, with great confidence, that the structural change is here.
The plan, as it was explained to him, is very tidy. The manager who reports to him can be replaced by AI. The assistant manager’s work can go to a young executive. The executive’s work can go to an intern. As for the General Manager himself, he is to absorb what his manager used to carry and to train the AI that will do the rest. He told me he is not especially comfortable with these tools. He also told me he could not say so to a single person in the building.
Then he looked at me and said, “Coach, does this mean I am also going into redundancy?”
I want to tell you what I heard beneath that question, because I am hearing versions of it more and more often now, and almost none of it is reaching the boardroom.
WHAT THE SPREADSHEET SAW
From the top of the organisation, the logic looks perfectly sound and I want to be fair to it. Boards everywhere are being shown the same slide. Back in 2024, Gartner predicted that through 2026, one in five organisations using AI would remove more than half of their middle management roles. Parent companies read those forecasts. Chief executives are asked what their own number is.
The General Manager was fair about it too. If a job is genuinely repetitive, he said, then fine. Let the tool have it. He had no quarrel with automation.
His quarrel was with a picture of his department drawn by people who had never sat inside it. On the structure chart, his manager is a box with a title and a cost. In real life, that box is holding up a great deal more than the chart can see.
THE PART OF THE CAR NOBODY ADMIRES
He gave me an image I have not been able to put down.
The middle of an organisation, he said, is the shock absorber between the tyre and the body of the car.
The tyre meets the road. Machines, customers, deadlines, the supplier who did not deliver, the shift that walked out. The body carries the passengers. Strategy, the board, the promises made to shareholders. Between the two sits a layer whose whole purpose is to take the impact, so that neither end feels the full force of the other.
These are load-bearing jobs. They turn a strategy deck into something a supervisor can act on at seven on a Monday morning. They also do work that appears in no job description. The conversation with a team leader whose mother is in hospital. The quiet fix before a customer notices. The judgement call about which instruction from above can safely wait a week. None of that is written down, so none of it appears in the business case for removing the role.
Take the shock absorbers off a car and it still drives. For a while, it may even feel faster. Then every pothole goes straight into the chassis.
WHERE THE WEIGHT GOES WHEN THE ROLE DOES NOT
This is the part I wish every chief executive could hear in his own words.
When a load-bearing role is removed, the load does not disappear. It travels upward. In his case, it landed on a man who now carries his own job, his manager’s job, a technology he is still learning and the heaviest thing of all, which is the feeling in the department. He told me that managing emotions has become a bigger part of his week than doing his actual work.
The development plans his team built over years now sit in drawers. The promises made in appraisal meetings are still remembered by the people who heard them. Good people are quietly updating their CVs. When this was raised further up, the parent company’s view was that resignations were welcome, because the company would not have to pay severance.
I understand that arithmetic. I also know what it teaches the people who stay. The first to leave are usually the ones with options, which tends to mean your best. The ones who remain learn that a promise in this company has a short half-life. That lesson is rarely written into the savings forecast, and it is very expensive to unlearn.
The General Manager cannot show any of this. He is the GM. The department reads his face before it reads any memo. He also suspects that his chief executive feels threatened too, which means he cannot walk into that office and say, plainly, that this will not work. So he says nothing, and carries it home.
WHO DECIDES THESE THINGS IN SUCH A HURRY?
He asked me that, and it is a fair question. My honest answer is that it is usually frightened people. Most of them are intelligent, and most of them are doing their best.
Ronald Heifetz at Harvard drew a distinction decades ago that I find more useful every year. Some problems are technical. Expertise can solve them and the people with the problem do not have to change. Others are adaptive. They can only be resolved when people change their beliefs, habits, loyalties and sense of who they are. His warning is that leaders under pressure tend to treat adaptive challenges as technical ones, because technical fixes are quicker to approve and easier to announce.
Swapping a role for a tool is a technical fix. What this company is facing is adaptive. It is about a twenty-six-year identity, a psychological contract with hundreds of people and trust that took a generation to build. Apply a technical answer to an adaptive problem and the problem does not go away. It goes underground, and comes back later with interest.
When I look up that chain, I do not see villains. I see a parent company answering to a market. I see a chief executive answering to a parent. I see a General Manager answering to everyone. Fear travels down a structure just as efficiently as strategy does. Often it travels faster, dressed up in the language of transformation.
WHAT A COACH CANNOT PROMISE, AND WHAT HE CAN OFFER
A coach cannot tell a man in that chair that he is safe. Nobody in that building knows, and reassurance from someone who does not know is just a kinder form of dishonesty. He deserved better than to have his arm patted.
What a coach can do is help a frightened leader separate what has been decided from what is only feared. It is also possible to find the ground that is still his to stand on. Fear tends to blur those things together, and a blurred map makes a capable person feel completely powerless.
These are the questions I would put to any leader sitting where he sits.
What do you know for certain, and what are you predicting? Write the two lists separately. The second one is usually much longer, and much louder.
What does your twenty-six years know that no tool has been trained on? Name it before someone else puts a price on it for you. The relationships, the history, the knowledge of where the bodies are buried and which fires are only smoke.
If you are training the AI, who decides what it must never be allowed to decide? The person who teaches a system the workflow is also the person best placed to show the organisation what the shock absorber actually does. That is not a small role. It might be the most important one in the building right now.
What is the smallest true sentence you could say to your chief executive? It does not have to be “this cannot be done.” It could be “here is what this role carries that we have not costed. Who will carry it?” That is not resistance. It is the information a good CEO needs and a frightened one is not being given.
“What did this role absorb that we never wrote down?”
A WORD TO THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE READING THIS
Before you sign the next structure chart, ask one question that no spreadsheet can answer. What did this role absorb that we never wrote down?
Don’t ask the consultants. Ask the people one level below the role and the people one level above it. Then ask yourself whether your General Managers are hiding their fear from you because they believe you need them to look certain. If you are being honest, ask whether you are doing exactly the same thing with your board.
AI will take a great deal of work out of the middle of our organisations and some of that is overdue. But the middle was never only work. It was where the organisation took its hits, so that the people at the top could keep steering and the people at the bottom could keep moving.
You can remove the shock absorbers. The car will still move. It just stops being safe to ride in, and the passengers always notice long before the driver does.
It begins, as it always does, with a leader willing to ask what a role carries before deciding what it costs. Please comment so others can learn from your exprenice.
S. Neroshan Silva, MCC. Written from the coaching room, in Ratmalana.
