I thought driving maximum value and still having some capacity was ideal. Was I completely wrong?
I’m always teasing a particular friend of mine because they’re the top performer in their state and they truly (!) only work a four-hour day.
Apart from my utter envy of their work-life balance, it makes me think about how we’re approaching AI-driven workforce rationalisation.
My friend has loads of spare capacity. But the value they create? It’s in the $billions.
If you judged their value by how much of their capacity they were using, you’d be making a billion-dollar mistake.
But organisations might be inadvertently doing just that.
- BCG reported that 42% of regular frontline AI users save eight hours per week, yet 66% receive little guidance on what to do with that saved time.
- Gartner predicts that 30% of AI-related redundancies will need to be reversed by 2029.
We’re at risk of using AI to remove PEOPLE instead of removing WORK. And we’re creating CAPACITY without creating VALUE.
Removing low-value work creates capacity. But knowing where to redirect that capacity to create more value requires judgement. And whose judgement are we relying on?
- A desktop task-mapping exercise?
- By a consultant who’s never done the work?
- Signed off by an executive who’s three layers (and two decades) removed from the work?
- Or the middle managers who understand how the work actually gets done, where the value really lies and who can realise it?
They’re perfectly positioned to identify the work that should go, the capability that should stay and the opportunities to turn capacity into value.
Yet I wonder how many organisations are genuinely involving them in these decisions.
Maybe it’s because you’ve already made your middle managers redundant, in which case you might just have contributed to that Gartner prediction.
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B-Suite Leaders® Coaching Circle
We are about to go public with the coaching circle, which will start in January 2027. But before we do that, I wanted to give you early access.
Think of it like an inhouse development program, drawn from multiple organisations instead of just one.
We created the Circle concept for a couple of reasons:
- For individuals, we saw both an effectiveness and affordability gap between self-paced learning (where only the most disciplined people get results) and 1:1 coaching (which gets great results, but is expensive).
- For corporates, we recognised that inhouse programs take both sufficient numbers and HR capacity to pull together – and sometimes there isn’t enough of either to bother.
- In the gap are lots of middle managers – crying out for development that is either too expensive or too hard to organise.
We are only offering 8 places.
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Rebecca is Australia’s pre-eminent advocate for B-suite leadership – the expert in developing hi-impact B-Suite leadership at both a team and individual level.
Speak to Rebecca about:
- Individual and group coaching
- Team effectiveness and training
- People & Culture Advisory
You can reach her on [email protected]
