Manager Mentor
How do I synchronize work between agents and people?
Series: 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026
Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:
How do I keep agents and people moving in the same direction?
My favorite part of managing people always centered around getting the team on the same page to try something new.
There’s lots of metaphors about “rowing in unison”; “skating to where the puck’s going”; “running a tight ship” — these all exist because it wasn’t always easy to get people on a team to stop doing things and start doing new things.
Now that it is a given that most teams will have agents in 2026, managers have an added level of complexity to coordinating execution beyond just people.
What’s New:
Here’s why: everyone knows how to use AI assistants like Claude or Gemini.
But AI assistants respond to prompts. Agents make decisions.
An AI assistant is reactive. You prompt, it responds. Claude doesn’t independently do things between our conversations — it is waiting for me.
On the other hand, an agent is proactive and autonomous. It’s running in the background, executing tasks, making decisions, taking actions in systems — without waiting to be asked.
When a team asks an agent to take on pipeline management, for example, it’s a serious decision.
It requires the same degree of coordination as creating a new job role on a team, building a job description, and hiring the right person.
Except an agent isn’t a person.
Why this matters:
With an AI assistant, humans are always in the loop.
With an agent, the human has to design the loop. Humans set up the goals, guardrails and feedback mechanisms up-front. Agents are executing the loop 24 hours a day. It’s someone’s job to make sure the output of the agent is delivering what was promised.
That’s why I firmly believe that agents need to be managed by people — and why I believe people who are great at managing teams of people and agents will never have their jobs replaced by AI.
And here is what else is important: the best people on your team want to be the ones managing the agents for you.
Every manager has to exit 2026 knowing how to accomplish two things:
How their team designs an agent’s work.
How the best people on the team manage the agent’s work
SEE WHERE YOU STAND
How consistent are you? Take the Self-assessment.
How: Master the Quarterly “Synch Meeting”
My research showed that millennials and gen-z want to work for managers who are consistent. One of the Six Drivers of Consistency in the learning and development system of the Manager Mentor is “process” — how a manager consistently operates and runs a team.
