AI didn’t replace leadership—it raised the bar for it.
When a key leader leaves, the instinct is to backfill the role. But what if the real need has changed? In this episode, we break down how to make a smart, intentional hiring decision using three key insights:
- Not Backfilling a Role Is a Strategic Choice, Not Just a Cost-Saving Move. If you don’t hire, who takes on the leadership responsibilities? Your teams? Yourself? A mix?
- The Three Jobs of Management Define Whether a Leadership Role Is Needed. A manager is only valuable if they create clarity, increase capability, or improve systems in a way that multiplies their team’s impact.
- AI Changes Work, But It Doesn’t Eliminate the Need for Leadership. AI might automate tasks, but it raises the bar for leadership by shifting priorities, increasing complexity, and demanding new skills.
Through real-world examples—including a tech company that thrived without a director and a marketing org navigating AI’s impact—we’ll help you decide whether to hire, restructure, or rethink the role entirely.
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Episode transcription
Peter Green
A Chief Growth Officer at a real estate tech firm recently told me about a challenge he was facing. A marketing director had left the company, and now he wasn’t sure what to do next. Should he hire a replacement? Or should he take this as an opportunity to grow the existing team instead?
Most companies don’t even consider that option–they just immediately start looking for a replacement. But this exec had a good reason to pause. He pointed out that AI tools like ChatGPT, and Claude, and GenStudio were changing how marketing teams work. Some of the things this director used to oversee—copywriting, campaign automation, even audience analysis—were being handled, at least in part, by AI tools. So, did he still need the same kind of marketing leader?
Richard Lawrence
That’s a big, strategic question, and it’s one leaders across industries are facing. When a key leader leaves, the instinct is to backfill that role. But what if the real need has changed? What if leadership itself is the constraint? What if AI or other shifts in the business mean the role should look completely different in the future?
Peter
So in today’s episode, we’ll help you make a smart, intentional hiring decision using three key insights.
First, not backfilling a role is a strategic choice, not just a cost-saving move. If you don’t hire, who takes on the leadership responsibilities? Your teams? Yourself? Some mix of that? If you can’t answer that question, you might be setting up the org for failure.
Richard
Second, the three jobs of management define whether a leadership role is needed – A manager is only valuable if they create clarity, increase capability, and improve systems in a way that multiplies their team’s impact.
Peter
And third, AI changes work, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for leadership – AI might automate tasks, but it raises the bar for leadership by shifting priorities, increasing complexity, and demanding new skills.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have a clear framework for making the right call—whether that means hiring a new leader, redistributing responsibilities, or rethinking the role entirely.
But first, a reminder that this show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations get better at leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit the contact page on our website, humanizingwork.com, and schedule a conversation with us if your organization wants to see stronger results in those areas.
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Richard
OK, on to this executive’s question. It reminds me of a story:
I remember Eric Engelman, the CEO at the healthcare marketing company Geonetric, asking me basically this same question. Geonetric had adopted Scrum on their two software teams; they were kind of a mid-sized organization; probably 80 people at the time. And sometime in the middle of that process, before I started working with them, the Director of Software Development had left the company. So, after I’d worked with those two teams a bit, Eric asked me, “Should I replace that Director now?”
I was originally brought in to help those software teams improve, and they were really effectively adopting and building on the training and coaching I was doing. They seemed to be working on the right things. They had clarity over their priorities. They were meeting their commitments; they were visibly improving their capability. And I could see them self-organizing– running experiments and improving their system of work.
So, my advice in that situation was, “Let’s wait and see.” A few months later, we had the same conversation—with the same outcome. That was pretty much the state of things until annual review time came around and Eric realized that the whole software org reported up to him. And he didn’t know what to do with that.
Now, to his credit, that caused him to rethink the whole annual review process rather than inserting a manager just to do performance reviews on all of the software people. And maybe that’s a thing we can take up as a topic in another episode. If you’re listening and you want to hear more about rethinking annual performance reviews, let us know in the comments or email us at mailbag@humanizingwork.com.
But, back to the question at hand… In that organization, it was the right call not to backfill for that Director of Software.
It is important for our Chief Growth Officer to realize that if he decides not to backfill a level in that marketing hierarchy, he’s really declaring either that he’s going to empower the next level down to do the 3 jobs of management—create clarity, increase capability, and improve the system—or that he’s going to take that on himself. Or some combination of the two.
In Eric’s situation, the teams were doing those three jobs rather well—better than a lot of the traditional hierarchy elsewhere in their company. So, not replacing the director mostly worked fine. Except for that one thing that the team wasn’t empowered to do themselves: that system around annual reviews. So, the CEO took that on himself (before transforming the whole company and its systems—but that’s another story).
Peter
I love that point–the decision not to hire a director means choosing to either empower the next level down or to take on the responsibility yourself. And I think the Geonetric example of effectively empowering the next level down is rare. It probably worked because of their strong adoption of some of the roles from Scrum, especially a dedicated role for creating clarity in the Product Owner and for improving the system, and, to a certain extent, increasing capability, in the Scrum Master. Without those roles in place and working well, no one has the responsibility to do those two things. On a marketing team, for example, we’re hiring individual contributors to optimize the site, or understand user behavior, or produce impactful content. Asking them to do the 3 Jobs pulls them away from doing their core role.
Richard
Mm hmm, and while Geonetric spread this over the whole organization and made some structural changes, literally overnight, it wasn’t smooth sailing right away. To fully empower their teams, they had to figure out how to distribute the Three Jobs differently. To create clarity, they had to develop systems to align priorities across teams. Without doing that top-down and hierarchically, from a capability standpoint for example, their CFO, Chris, ended up having to do quite a bit of training for team leaders to understand the team’s contribution to the company’s financials. And it took them years to finally work out systems for how to do things like peer-based performance feedback, compensation decisions, and promotions.
Peter
Right, there’s really no magic wand here. And to be clear, we are strong advocates for empowered teams. Hearing the Geonetric story is what first caused me to say, “Huh, I should meet this Richard Lawrence character. He’s doing some cool things over there.” And Geonetric’s approach is not the only path to empowerment. We’ve also seen how management roles can serve a really valuable purpose, even with empowered teams. So, when managers are in place, they’re doing the Three Jobs in a way that amplifies the capability of strong, empowered individual contributors and teams.
And the strongest case for managers to exist in a modern organization is that when they do those three jobs well, they do that. They multiply the effectiveness of teams and individuals that report up through them. In fact, just from an economic standpoint, to pay for themselves, a director needs to increase the value production of their org by the equivalent of maybe 2-4 more individual contributors, so that can mean a need for a 10% to even 50% bump in productivity over not having that leadership in place.
Richard
Now, to be clear, that’s a bump in productivity over not having leadership. Not over the current state. It’s not like the new person has to make things that much better right away. There’s a little bit of hypothetical thinking there. But that reasoning is important, to make sure you get the economic benefit from having the role. So, hiring a new director is clearly the right move. The opposite of what I advised Eric in their situation, when that person is going to multiply the effectiveness of their teams. Thinking about that through the lens of the 3 jobs…
If people aren’t as clear as they could be about what to focus on and what success looks like, we talk with a lot of our clients where people are struggling with conflicting priorities and good leadership helps untangle that.
If there are capability limitations but they’re not raw short-term capability that you could hire or contract for—they are things like growing technical and leadership skills over time, getting the budget you need, making the right tools available—that’s a leadership opportunity.
If systems and structures are messy, and individual contributors haven’t shown the ability or desire to fix them from the grassroots level in a self-organizing way, that’s another great spot for a leader to apply leverage.
Peter
Yeah, it calls to mind another marketing client of ours who is doing a fantastic job of amplifying their org’s capability by doing those Three Jobs particularly well. Now, they’re facing the same challenges related to AI, and opportunity really. They recognize that AI isn’t just automating some of the tasks–it’s really transforming the industry, and that shift requires strong leadership to stay relevant. In their context, they needed to start generating 4-5x more content than they did in sort of the “Pre-AI” era. They weren’t just optimizing for traditional SEO anymore, they had to rethink how to show up in AI-generated results. So, they were excited to be adopting all of the cool new tools, but staying competitive meant doing the Three Jobs work–casting a vivid vision for how AI and other trends would shape their department, training teams to use it effectively while maintaining their brand voice, and streamlining systems so that teams could deliver with less bureaucracy.
For them, AI didn’t replace leadership–it raised the bar for it. If one of those directors decided to leave, they’d almost certainly backfill, and they would look for somebody who could continue that effective leadership being done by the current team.
Richard
Yeah, AI feels like it changes everything, but new tools, whether it’s AI, the internet, a nail gun, a steam engine— go back as far as you want, they can make you more productive, but they can also make you faster at doing the wrong thing or just be a distraction. So, yeah, leaders play an important role in helping teams leverage those new tools and technologies towards a larger purpose.
Peter
Well said. So before you backfill, step back. Is leadership the constraint, or is something else? Who will own the Three Jobs? And how is AI shifting the game? Make your decision strategically—not just by default.
Richard
We’d love to hear from you—how have you faced a decision like this before? How is AI changing your team’s needs for leadership now? Drop us a comment, and if your organization needs help working through hiring or team structure challenges, visit humanizingwork.com and go to the contact page. We’d love to help.
Peter
Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time on the Humanizing Work Show!
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