By the end of this year, 20% of companies will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle management roles. But the headline is hiding the real story: it's not managers disappearing. It's a type of manager.

The Coordination Manager — the one who spends 70-80% of her time on status updates, project tracking, and information routing — is being replaced by dashboards and AI digests. The Orchestration Leader — the one making judgment calls, coaching talent, and navigating stakeholder dynamics AI can't touch — is becoming more valuable than ever. The skills dismissed as "soft" for decades are now the only ones that matter.

This episode introduces The Two-Manager Split framework and four specific skills to build starting this week: directing AI work (not just using it), judgment velocity, coaching for capability, and building human-AI hybrid teams. Plus a one-week calendar audit that shows you which type of manager you're currently training to become.

Subscribe to the Protégé newsletter for weekly frameworks: newsletter.theprotegeproject.com