Founders Are Sending Bots to Their One-on-Ones in Their Place. Execs Call It a Management Failure
Four CMOs in one advisory practice haven’t spoken to their founder in over a month. Here’s what was lost.
EXPERT OPINION BY VICTORIA WATTERS, MEDIA ENTREPRENEUR
A marketing leader starts a new job, sees a standing weekly one-on-one with the founder on her calendar, and accepts it. Five weeks in, she still hasn’t had a single conversation with him. It’s always an AI agent or auto-notetaker that shows up to record the call and file a summary.
The founder, feeling efficient, skims the recap. In doing so, he teaches his marketing head to expect nothing from him, a message that erodes their relationship and the company’s culture.
What automated one-on-ones signal
Julie Mossler, founder of marketing and communications advisory Common Fortune, has a front row seat to this dynamic. She currently coaches six CMOs and communications leaders. Four of them haven’t spoken directly to their founder in over a month, she says, even though that weekly one-on-one remains on the calendar the entire time.
“It signals to the employee that the relationship and the function they lead matter less than the information exchange,” Mossler says. The meeting is “where a manager builds their read on someone, gives context, and builds trust.” An agent “can capture the meeting and provide feedback bounded by what it has been trained to find important,” she says, “but it can’t substitute for the act of a leader showing up.”
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That missing presence “feels like ‘you’re accountable to me, but I’m not particularly accountable to you,’” Mossler says. It lands hard in marketing, a function that has historically been misunderstood and undersponsored inside the companies it serves. For a leader in that spot, the automated one-on-one is a red flag.
Output doesn’t equal business health
The logic behind this move is easy to spot. Founders who built their reputation on AI fluency start applying that same logic to their calendars, wiping out status updates to protect uninterrupted work hours.
“This behavior manifests in a tendency to treat management problems like optimization problems,” Mossler says. She sees “constantly changing priorities without acknowledging the cost of the pivot” and “an overreliance on output as the proof that an organization is healthy: if everyone is shipping, the system must be working.”
Source: www.inc.com
