Agentic AI seems to make middle managers obsolete. A psychologist (Irene Kraegel), a comms researcher (Craig Mattson), and an HR professional (Rachel Hammond) make visible what managers do that agents can’t.

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha made the case for eliminating middle management. Organizations, they said, need less hierarchy and more intelligence. And by intelligence, they meant faster flows of information. They noted that agentic AI will “coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.”

Their argument’s become the conventional wisdom in the large corporations that employ most workers today—companies like Block, GitLab, Microsoft, and Meta.

But what about the many, many other companies (99.9% of businesses today) that have fewer than 500 employees? Should they imitate their larger cousins and get rid of hierarchy?

Should you at your company swap your managers for BoodleBox agents?

This week on Mode/Switch: Second Opinion, Irene Kraegel and I talk with Dr. Rachel Hammond, a management professor and an MBA director about the costs of eliminating the managers. Our discussion follows three movements:

• History: Eliminating management isn’t as fresh an idea as it sounds. (Rachel takes us back to Max Weber and forward to the business computers of the 1980s.)

• Process: Agentic AI liberates managers from hours of filling out forms. But is this tech freedom fostering human heedlessness? (Irene notes the neurological imperatives of human connection in the workplace.)

• Formation: If we cut the middle rungs of the workplace ladder, how do we grow our people into the leaders our organizations need?

But for me, the central question emerges in a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Arvind Narayanan: is intelligence the same thing as power?

Sure, agentic AI can help us trade hierarchy for intelligence, bureaucracy for information. But are organizations more than the sum of their cybernetic flows? Are working communities more than the movement of information?

You might object that I’m leading the witness here with these questions. Objection sustained—if you hit play on the pod.

Cheers to all the humans, especially the manager ones!

Thanks for engaging Mode/Switch: Second Opinion with Craig Mattson & Irene Kraegel! Share this pod with 4 org leaders, 3 managers, 2 team members, 1 cat, and 0 bots.

Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join our podcast to discuss in-person mentoring and why your reasons for RTO matter.

It’s a relational paradox: nearness can isolate and distance connect. Understanding this paradox can help managers enforcing return-to-office mandates to capitalize on the “proximity effect” of in-person work.

Just getting people back in the office won’t automatically improve collaborative productivity or rebuild organizational trust. But paying attention to what brain researchers call “neural synchrony” suggests that in-person work can support effective mentoring and a more reliable team.

But it all comes down to why you want those brains syncing up.

I encountered a failure of neural synchrony while researching for my book Digital Overwhelm. One rising professional told me that after taking a remote job with a firm, she would laugh at a joke in an email but then see her coworkers’ faces on Zoom and think, Oh, they weren’t joking at all. Her experience showed how hard it can be to connect with coworkers while staring into the depths of a laptop screen. (It didn’t help that her boss never read more than two lines of her emails.)

Sure, it’s possible to exaggerate the power of neural synchrony. But Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join this week’s Mode/Switch Pod to argue that what happens when people work in the same location can catalyze stronger working communities.. Their just-released book, In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, shows how.

I reached out to Emma and Natalia this summer after seeing their New York Times article, which shared data from research on togetherness and work. Their research suggests that a huge benefit of proximity comes with mentoring. Their conversation on this podcast shows how mentoring does more than help rising professionals survive workplace bureaucracy; it also helps them become generous contributors to working community.

If you as a manager are questioning the sacrifices you’re making to show up at work, this podcast’s for you. This week’s conversation fully acknowledges the obnoxiousness of your commute, the expense of childcare, and the peculiar obligation to put on grown-up pants. (Emma’s confession of “marital disharmony” and her husband’s sometimes ambivalence about his commute may be worth the pod.) But the podcast also helps you recognize that the best motivation for RTO may be to support the wisdom and wellbeing of your team.

Regular listeners know that The Mode/Switch Pod features an intergenerational roundtable. I doubt there’s a topic that more requires intergenerational insight than the RTO vs. In-Person debates. I’m glad to be joined by my cohosts Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Z.

What can a TikTok dance tell you about your team member? Less than you think, says this week’s guest, Kylan Rutherford.

Podcasts like The Mode/Switch keep telling managers to try to better understand their team members. Get curious. Build empathy. Cultivate rapport.

What better way to do that than finding them on FB or TikTok?

Scratch that. Social media may be one of the worst places to get to know your team.

Or so says our Mode/Switch Pod guest Dr. Kylan Rutherford. He’s a social scientist who’s done work at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and he’s now the director of Normsy Labs, which uses AI to “transform toxic online behavior and build pathways to healthier digital conversations.”

The only way you’ll get to know your employee better is if you can access their finsta. Which you probably can’t. If you’re unsure what a finsta is, you’re in good company. Our intergenerational table was split on that one too, and Kylan brings everyone up to speed. Around the table: Gen X insight from David Wilson and me, Millennial tact from Josh DiMarco, and Gen Z skepticism from Alex Johnson.

If as a manager, you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “Well, my employee chose to post it, so why not check it out?” or “Following them online will help build rapport at work,” this conversation will give you pause. What you’re trying to learn on Insta, and what you’ll actually learn, Kylan says, will be widely divergent.

But here’s what you’ll come away from this podcast better able to do:

• Ask what an online signal tells you about a team member

• Grasp why some people disclose so much online while others don’t

• Stop treating an employee’s feed as their “real” self

• Discern when to make space for politics and religion in tricky workspaces

Managers, let me ask: Have you ever learned something about a coworker online that changed how you saw them at work? Let me know in the comments below!

You can learn more about Kylan Rutherford’s research here.