Photo by Ayşegül Aytören.
You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s bad and only getting worse. The Grace Hopper Celebration was cancelled on basically no notice. Microsoft announced voluntary exit plans for about a quarter of its global workforce. And Marissa Meyer made headlines this week for the dual win of being mom-shamed while mom-shaming others. This is fine, and the flames climb higher as you sip your coffee. We understand why taken as a whole, you might see markers of further decline along an already downward trajectory. But we don’t think that’s what’s happening.
Many of you know, our work happens in seasons. Typically on for eight weeks, off for three, an occasional vacation with the kids, and then the cycle repeats. Our favourite in-season weeks have us in conversation with up to 100 bosses at a time. As you can imagine, that many bosses across a variety of industries and geos have a lot to say about the state of work. So when the work-related headlines get dark, it’s nice for us to be able to gut-check.
Do the public tone and the private tone match? Taken as a composite, what are we hearing from the managers working inside these organizations? Are we on the way up? On the way down? Or a secret third thing?
The public tone and the private tone agree that it’s hard right now. We just wrapped three full days of in-person work with execs and every single one of them needs to get more sleep and needs more time to unplug. Ditto for our bosses in digital programs. The public and private narratives also agree that AI has permanently altered work. Some things are much faster. Some things are much slower. And some things are a total mess. But orgs are getting better at spotting signal. And faster at decommissioning noise. And those closest to the goals, the work, and the tooling (ahem, managers) are having an easier time being heard on where/when/which use cases make sense.
The biggest public/private narrative divergence is around the role of managers. Tech barons spent the better part of the past two years publicly and loudly laying off middle managers, decreeing that their work didn’t matter, and constructively dismissing them back to IC roles by fiat. In a case of everything-old-is-new-again, Zuck and the Meta team did a 2026 speed-run repeat of the 2009 Google Project Oxygen findings on workplace effectiveness. And, unsurprisingly, found the same result. That managers still matter and are crucial if you want high-performing teams. No matter how loud you scream.
Oh, and one other place the narrative diverges. After years of being the industry punching bag for inefficiency and waste, you might expect managers to be pretty bitter. In private conversation, they aren’t. We don’t know what to tell you. We understand why they would be. But they aren’t. A hundred bosses need you to hear that, by and large, they like their jobs. They enjoy their colleagues. They are solving meaty challenges. They are growing. They are learning. They are having their own career inflection points. They are architecting those inflection points and that growth and that learning for their teams. And also, they need to get more sleep. But they have a few open roles and the interviews are promising. Help hasn’t arrived yet, but there’s a glimmer on the horizon.
A noun and also a verb
Notice the places where the private tone has begun to drift from the public storytelling. We think the penny just hit the bottom of the well. And if we’re right, you’re going to want to pay close attention to what happens next.
The fashion of the last few years has been to treat human beings as a cost to be mitigated, instead of a competitive advantage to invest in and double down on. Here’s our prediction: in the next 12 months (and earlier the closer you are to tech) the pendulum will swing back towards attracting, engaging, and retaining talented, opinionated employees, and away from relying on fear to keep them quiet and compliant.
Part of what makes this possible is that the terms of art are stabilizing. The use cases for AI are clearer, as are the hallmarks of giant wastes of time, and that means we are starting to get a handle on how to invest, and manage, and staff against new capabilities. Part of it is also that speed-running the stupidest versions of management has played itself out for this cycle and orgs are rediscovering what actually works. And, speaking of what actually works, if we’re right about this then there’s some work you’ve gotta start doing right now.
Get ready
It’s been a few years since the talent market was hot, at least outside of the trillion-dollar extinction-scale AI shops, so let’s start with a reminder of what that feels like. It feels like optionality. As an employee doing individual work or management work, an active seller’s market for talent feels pretty good. Your current employer has an incentive to keep you around because you’ll be difficult to replace. Other prospective employers have an incentive to understand your abilities, priorities, and preferences so that they can construct a compelling invitation for you to join them. Salaries always matter and so does career growth, and flexibility, and glassdoor reviews not being a raging tire-fire. But, empirically, employers invest much more in those things when their employees have options.
Those options don’t show up all at once. Some companies see the pendulum sooner than others, start to beef up their hiring efforts, start to engage in more direct sourcing from competitors instead of just wading through applications, start to talk about “we should find a Director-level role for Sasha.” Some people’s LinkedIn feeds tip sooner than others from layoff announcements, to job postings asking for referrals, to a wall of “Congratulate Sasha on their new role. 🎉” Your own org can be sitting still while this happens and no alarm bell will start ringing, no lights will start flashing. In the early days it will take a deliberate act of attention to look for it, and some people will spot it before others.
So, in all of this, you’ll need to read the room. Even if we’re right about this prediction, we might be early for you. You’ll have the best sense of where your own industry is in this inflection point, and where your own org is within its industry. When you’re trying to catch a swinging pendulum, there is definite risk to jumping too early.
But there is no risk in being ready. The reason we push leaders, and ourselves, to stick our necks out on predictions is one part because it forces us to crystallize our intuitions and hold ourselves accountable, fine. But it’s mostly because it helps you pick your head up and get ready, rather than sit it out. In investment-banking preschool, baby investment bankers are taught that missing the 10 best trading days in a 30-year span cuts your return in half. Careers don’t fully work that way — there’s much more ability to make your own luck, to re-open closed doors — and still it holds true that careers are often made in the moment when the right opportunity finds a person ready to take it. Teams aren’t the stock market either, and still it’s true that smart investments can pay off for years.
Get set
Bosses, the first thing this means is that you will be able to start asking for things again. Asking for headcount, or budget. Arguing for salary changes, or promotions for your team. You’ll still have to do your job, to be clear. You’ll still have to make sure your team is working on things with impact, that their impact is visible and meaningful to other teams, that your own boss understands how you’re prioritizing and allocating effort. But two years ago your senior team might understand all that and still tell you to do it with half the team and some magic AI pixie dust. In 2027, a senior team that understands the impact your team makes will take those needs more seriously.
So what does your team need? If you’re like a lot of the bosses we talk with, your team might have been hunkered down and grinding through a lot of the last 18-24 months, maybe longer. How are they doing? If they’re overworked, where do you need permission to hire and where do you need permission to put work down? Do they need training, or time off, or headcount and budget of their own? If you suddenly had to fight to retain someone right now, first of all: would you? And if so, what would it take? Once you’re clear on that, ask yourself if you’d rather be controlling the narrative on that spend, or shoving it into a doomed, last-minute counter-offer.
And, while we’re at it, what do you need? If you knew that the market was about to change, and there was about to be more opportunity flowing in various ways, what would you do differently now to prepare?
Does your LinkedIn tell an accurate story about who you are today, and what kind of opportunities might be interesting to you? Like sure, yes, AI has made a real mess of recruiting. But remember that in a hot market, employers will actively source for roles — do you want them to find you, and if so, will they?
Do you have requests of your own that you’ve been sitting on? Changes in mandate, career direction, access to and investment in your own growth? Does your own boss know? And have you talked about it recently, or was that years ago and you’ve been just quietly hoping that they’ll remember when times change? Is that conversation even still representative of the things that are important to you today?
A wave of those opportunities is coming. Opportunities for individuals, for bosses, for teams and whole organizations. We know that it might not feel that way in your neck of the woods just yet. But remember that the folks predicting the other thing, predicting the collapse of human employment and the elimination of most of their employee base, have been so galactically wrong that they’ve spent the last six months on mealy-mouthed apology tours. Like their predictions about the metaverse, and NFTs, and creeper glasses, what they’ve shown is that they can get a lot of press for their vision of the future. That doesn’t mean we have to buy it.
As you get yourself and your team ready for 2027, you’ll have to decide. Whose predictions do you believe enough to plan on. What predictions are you making of your own. And if we’re all right, what then?
— Melissa & Johnathan
