A Chief Growth Officer at a real estate tech firm recently told me about a challenge he was facing. A marketing director had left the company, and now he wasn’t sure what to do next. Should he hire a replacement? Or should he take this as an opportunity to grow the existing team instead?
Most companies don’t even consider that option–they just start looking for a replacement. But this exec had a good reason to pause. He pointed out that AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and GenStudio were changing how marketing teams work. Some of the things this director used to oversee—copywriting, campaign automation, even audience analysis—were being handled, at least in part, by AI tools. So did he still need the same kind of marketing leader?
That’s a big, strategic question, and it’s one leaders across industries are facing. When a key leader leaves, the instinct is to backfill, but what if the real need has changed? What if leadership itself is the constraint? What if AI or other shifts in the business mean the role should look completely different?
So in today’s episode, we’ll help you make **a smart, intentional hiring decision** using three key insights.
**First, Not Backfilling a Role Is a Strategic Choice, Not Just a Cost-Saving Move** – If you don’t hire, who takes on the leadership responsibilities? Your teams? Yourself? A mix? If you can’t answer that, you might be setting up the org for failure.
**Second, The Three Jobs of Management Define Whether a Leadership Role Is Needed** – A manager is only valuable if they create clarity, increase capability, or improve systems in a way that **multiplies** their team’s impact.
**And Third, AI Changes Work, But It Doesn’t Eliminate the Need for Leadership** – AI might automate tasks, but it **raises the bar for leadership** by shifting priorities, increasing complexity, and demanding new skills.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have a clear framework for making the right call—whether that means hiring a new leader, redistributing responsibilities, or rethinking the role entirely.
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On to our executive’s question.
I remember Eric Engelman, the CEO at the healthcare marketing company Geonetric, asking me basically this same question. They’d adopted Scrum on their two software teams in this mid-sized org. And sometime in the process, the Director of Software Development had left the company. So, after I’d worked with those two teams for a bit, he asked me, “So, should I replace that Director?”
I was originally brought in to help those software teams improve, and they were very effectively adopting and building on the training and coaching I was doing. They seemed to be working on the right things. They had clarity over their priorities. They were meeting their commitments and visibly improving their capability. And I could see them self-organizing to run experiments and improve their system of work.
So, my advice to that CEO was, “let’s wait and see.” A few months later, we had the same conversation—with the same outcome. That was pretty much the state of things until annual review time came around and Eric realized that the whole software org reported to him.
Now, to his credit, that caused him to rethink the whole annual review process rather than inserting a manager who’d be able to do performance reviews on all the software people. Maybe we can take up that topic in another episode. If you want to hear more about rethinking annual performance reviews, let us know in the comments or email
[email protected].
Back to the question at hand… In that org, it was the right call not to backfill for the Director of Software.
It’s important for our Chief Growth Officer to realize that if he decides **not** to backfill a level in a hierarchy, he’s really declaring either that he’s going to empower the next level down to do the 3 jobs of management—create clarity, increase capability, and improve the system—or that he’s going to take that on himself. Or some combination of the two.
In Eric’s situation, the teams were doing those three jobs rather well—better than a lot of the traditional hierarchy elsewhere in that company. So, not replacing the director mostly worked fine. Except for that one thing that the team wasn’t empowered to do themselves, namely the system around annual reviews. So, the CEO took that on himself (before transforming the whole company and its systems—but that’s another story).
I love that point–the decision not to hire a director means choosing to either empower the next level down or to take on the responsibility yourself. And I think the Geonetric example of effectively empowering the next level down is rare. It probably worked because of their strong adoption of some of the roles from Scrum, especially a dedicated role for creating clarity in the Product Owner and for improving the system in the Scrum Master. Without those roles in place and working well, no one has the responsibility to do those things. On a marketing team, for example, we hired individual contributors to optimize the site, or understand user behavior, or produce impactful content. Asking them to do the 3 Jobs pulls them away from doing their core role.
Mm hmm, and while Geonetric made the org structure change overnight, it wasn’t smooth sailing right away. To fully empower the teams, they had to figure out how to distribute the Three Jobs differently. To create clarity, they had to develop systems to align priorities across teams. From a capability standpoint, their CFO Chris ended up doing quite a bit of training for team level leaders to understand the team’s contribution to the financials. And it took them years to finally work out systems to do things like peer-based performance feedback, compensation decisions, and promotions.
Right, there’s no magic wand here. To be clear, we are strong advocates for empowered teams. Hearing the Geonetric story is what first caused me to say “huh, I should meet this Richard Lawrence character.” And Geonetric’s approach is **not** the only path to empowerment. We’ve also seen how management roles can serve a really valuable purpose, even with empowered teams. When managers are in place, they do the Three Jobs in a way that amplifies the capability of strong, empowered individual contributors and teams.
The strongest case for managers to exist in a modern organization is that when they do the three jobs well, they multiply the effectiveness of the teams and individuals that report up through them. In fact, to pay for themselves, a director needs to increase the value production of their org by the equivalent of 2-4 more individual contributors, so that can mean a need for a 10-50% bump in productivity over not having that leadership in place.
So hiring a new director is clearly the right move when they’re multiplying the effectiveness of their teams. Thinking about that through the lens of the 3 jobs…
If your people aren’t as clear as they could be about what to focus on and what success looks like, good leadership helps there
If there are capability limitations but they’re not raw short-term capability you could hire or contract for—they’re things like growing technical and leadership skills over time, getting budget, making the right tools available—that’s a leadership opportunity
If systems and structures are messy, and individual contributors haven’t shown ability or desire to fix them from the grassroots level in a self-organizing way, that’s a great spot for a leader to apply leverage.
Another marketing client is doing a fantastic job of amplifying their org’s capability by doing the Three Jobs particularly well. They recognize that AI isn’t just automating some of the tasks–it’s transforming the industry, and that shift requires strong leadership to stay relevant. In their context, they needed to start generating 4-5x more content than they did in the “Pre-AI” era. They weren’t just optimizing for traditional SEO anymore, they had to rethink how to show up in AI-generated results. They were excited to be adopting all of the cool new tools, but staying competitive meant doing the Three Jobs work–casting a vivid vision for how AI and other trends would shape their department, training teams to use it effectively while maintaining their brand voice, and streamlining systems so that teams could deliver with less bureaucracy.
AI didn’t replace leadership–it raised the bar for it. If one of those directors decided to leave, they’d almost certainly backfill with someone that could continue the effective leadership being done by the current team.
New tools can make you more productive, but they can also make you faster at doing the wrong thing or just be a distraction. So, yeah, leaders play an important role in helping teams leverage those new tools towards a larger purpose.
### **Closing Thoughts**
So before you backfill, step back. **Is leadership the constraint, or is something else? Who will own the Three Jobs? And how is AI shifting the game?** Make your decision strategically—not by default.
We’d love to hear from you—**have you faced a decision like this before? How is AI changing your team’s needs?** Drop us a comment, and if your organization needs help working through hiring or team structure challenges, visit [humanizingwork.com](http://humanizingwork.com/)—we’d love to help.
Thanks for tuning in, and see you next time!
