Nobody told managers the job had changed
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There is a conversation I have been hearing with increasing frequency over the past year. It happens in different organisations, in different countries, often with people who have never met each other.
A manager describes a moment with their team that did not go as expected. Not because they lacked commitment or experience. Because the questions coming from the room no longer resembled the ones they had learned to answer. Someone wanted to understand what artificial intelligence meant for their role. Another was looking for something to hold onto in the middle of yet another organisational change. Someone else asked whether an AI-generated recommendation could actually be trusted.
None of these were unusual questions. What struck me was something else. Very few of them belonged to the version of management most organisations had spent years preparing people for.
The role that quietly became something else
For a long time, becoming a manager meant learning how to coordinate work, allocate resources, make decisions and help teams deliver results. Communication mattered, but it often appeared at the end of the process, once the direction had already been decided. The manager’s job was largely to pass it on.
That is not what the job looks like anymore.
Mette Krogh, who works with senior leaders on communication and leadership across Denmark, described the shift with unusual clarity. “Years ago, being a good leader was to just robotically resell the key messaging from top leadership. Today it is much more diversified.” What she sees now is something fundamentally different from cascade. “Leaders are much more expected today to facilitate dialogues across the organisation.”
Dominic Walters, President of the IoIC, put it even more plainly: “The role of the line manager is to help people make sense of stuff.” Not to distribute information. Not to relay decisions. To help people understand what those decisions actually mean for the work they do every day.
That distinction sounds subtle until you consider what it asks of a person. Passing information downstream is largely procedural. Helping a team make sense of uncertainty requires judgement, curiosity, emotional intelligence and enough confidence to lead conversations where there may not yet be a definitive answer.
Nobody announced that transition. It simply accumulated, responsibility by responsibility, expectation by expectation, until the role that managers had been prepared for and the role they were actually being asked to perform had quietly become two different things.
What nobody prepared them for
Artificial intelligence has accelerated that gap, but it did not create it. Hybrid work, continuous transformation and the erosion of the traditional psychological contract had already been rewriting the nature of management long before AI became part of everyday organisational life. AI simply arrived in the middle of that transition and added another layer to a role already carrying more than most organisations had acknowledged.
What makes this particularly difficult is that the new demands are not simply technical. They are interpretive. Managers are now expected to help people navigate situations where certainty is genuinely unavailable, which is a different kind of work from the one most of them signed up for.
Monique Zytnik, who has spent years coaching leaders on communication, identified something that sits at the centre of this: “Certainty is one of the key things that we as human beings crave.” When organisations cannot provide it, in practice, that usually means people turn to the person closest to them: their manager. Who is often just as uncertain, and equally unprepared to say so out loud.
What Mette Krogh calls “authentic leadership”, bringing your own personality and identity into how you lead, is increasingly what employees are asking for. Not a flawless performance of confidence. A human being who shows up honestly in uncertain moments. That is also something most management development programmes were not designed to produce.
The uncomfortable counterargument
Not everyone in this conversation agrees on what the solution looks like.
Mike Klein, one of the sharper voices on the strategic purpose of communication, challenges what he sees as a profession increasingly defining its value through employee sentiment rather than organisational effectiveness. “We need to robustly challenge this line of thinking that internal comms is about how people feel rather than what they do. If it’s totally seen as palliative care for employees, organisations are going to decide it’s not worth the money.”
It is a provocation worth sitting with. Because Klein is identifying something real. If the response to the manager gap is simply to make people feel better about uncertainty rather than equipping them to operate effectively within it, then the function has not actually solved anything. It has just made the problem more comfortable.
But I do not think the choice is between empathy and performance. The organisations I have observed, and the practitioners I have spoken with for this platform, suggest something more nuanced. Meaning is not the opposite of performance. In conditions of genuine complexity, it is what makes sustained performance possible. People who cannot make sense of what is happening around them do not simply feel worse. They make worse decisions, take fewer risks and disengage from work that requires their full attention.
The manager who helps their team understand what an AI-generated recommendation actually means, when to trust it and when to question it, is not doing soft work. They are doing the work that determines whether the organisation can actually function in an environment where certainty is no longer the default.
Where Strategic Communication fits
This is where the contribution of Strategic Communication becomes something more consequential than most organisations have recognised.
Sam Drexler, who works on executive and internal communications at Google, describes the function in terms that go well beyond content production. His work, as he puts it, is to “coach leaders to translate complexity into clarity and focus the organization on the critical priorities.” But what stays with me from our conversation is something more fundamental: “You don’t want to make those decisions in a vacuum by yourself. You need trusted people around you, and I see communications people as a really important piece of that.”
Juliana Posada, who advises communication across Oracle Latin America, put it clearly: “Preparing managers, and helping them build strategic narratives that communicate with greater clarity and purpose, is something AI cannot replace.” (translated from Spanish by The Internal Voices)
What both are describing is not communication support in the traditional sense. It is helping managers develop the capability to lead conversations they were never trained to have. Preparing them not for announcements, which assume certainty, but for dialogue, which assumes complexity.
Mette Krogh put it in terms I keep returning to: “We need, as communicators, to support leaders in having that dialogue, ensuring that leaders are equipped to take some of the difficult, dilemma-filled discussions.”
Dilemma-filled discussions. Not cascades. Not key message frameworks. Conversations where the manager does not have the answer and needs to be able to say so without losing the room.
That is a fundamentally different brief for Strategic Communication. Not producing better content for leaders to distribute, but building the conditions under which leaders can actually lead in the environment they are operating in.
The transition organisations have not fully named
Perhaps the biggest leadership transition of the past decade was never announced. It arrived quietly, one expectation at a time, until managers found themselves answering questions no leadership programme had ever prepared them for.
That is why I do not think the future of management will be decided by who communicates more often or more persuasively. It will be shaped by who can help people make sense of complexity without pretending certainty still exists.
And that may be the most important shift organisations have yet to recognise.
Managers were never trained for this.
Yet this is the work they are now being asked to do.
Voices referenced: Dominic Walters (IoIC), Mette Krogh (MeandM), Monique Zytnik (IABC), Mike Klein (Strategic Magazine/IABC), Sam Drexler (Google), Juliana Posada (Oracle Latin America)