Manager Mentor
How do I align humans and agents on my dashboard?
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 aligned to the same priorities, goals, and metrics?
There’s been a lot of back and forth recently about the role of the manager in the age of AI. Some arguing for its demise. Others the reverse.
So let me be clear about where I’m coming from: managing a team is the one job AI can’t replace.
That’s because managers are responsible for execution. It’s black-and-white. Nothing is more important to successful execution than aligning every job role on the team to the priorities, goals and metrics on a manager’s dashboard.
What’s New
We’re half-way through 2026.
I know teams are piloting or trialing agents right now. I know a lot of people in sales so I hear about teams looking at agents to handle pipeline management for example. By the end of the year, about half of all teams will have some role on the team handled by an agent or agents.
It’s time to get ready: Agents shouldn’t be any different than people. Agents will need to play their position on the team, just like the people on the team.
On the highest performing teams, people can literally “hold” their box of responsibilities in their hands and know how to measure its success.
It’s the manager’s job to ask agents to show you their “box” of responsibilities and how it aligns to your dashboard.
Boomers could get away with a little alignment “drift.” Millennial and gen-z managers can’t.
Why this matters:
It’s an assumption of mine that all great managers understand that they have to have the best people on their team.
As the late great sales leader at Cisco Rick Justice reminded us at the company, “It’s a small matter of people.”
The best people on your team want to be the ones building and operating the agents — they know agents and bots are the future. Your people know the corporate ladder is dead, and all they control is their story.
And as a manager, you want as many people as possible on your team motivated to write a chapter of a best-selling story. It’s the key to discretionary effort and innovation.
In my research with millennials and gen-z, I found that today’s generation looks for managers who are consistent in the way they run the team. I identified Six Drivers of Consistency. Alignment is one of them.
I think alignment is the necessary first step in building a high-performance team — and what that means is both people and agents have to be able to “hold” their box of responsibilities in their real and virtual hands.
ARE YOU A CONSISTENT MANAGER?
Less than 2 minutes to score: Take the Self-assessment.
