View RALI news and insights to keep up to date with the latest on trend developments relating to future leadership capability and experience requirements and the future world of work.
About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …
Career growth is a higher priority for Gen Z than work-life balance, workplace culture, and even salary, according to a KPMG survey of interns.
Just like other CEOs, Marc Rowan, the cofounder of Apollo Global Management, says “you have to take something away from” ordinary jobs.
Rideshare companies are vying to offer driverless services globally, striking partnerships to get robotaxis onto streets
We are all on a quest. The job role we fulfill or the products we sell are just the costumes and exterior wrapping. It turns out that the real destination of leadership journeys isn’t the product we are selling—it’s the finely tuned inner wisdom we achieve. And it’s usually pretty humbling. As T.S. Eliot wisely wrote in his poem Little Gidding, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
In the end, it’s less about the product, service, or experience that we developed and much more about what we learned in the process. And that’s whether you’re launching a project as a manager, completing a raise as an entrepreneur, standing up a division in a corporation, or selling your startup.
In 2017, Beri Meric watched the company he’d built double in size four years running—and then nearly collapse. He told me it felt like a near-death experience for the organization he’d poured himself into. In the middle of that unraveling, his Young Presidents’ Organization forum said something that he has never forgotten: He wasn’t the small thing straining to carry a big, fragile company. He was the big thing. The company was something he’d made and, therefore, could make again.
That reframe is an example of what I call “Inside Out” leadership. We tend to treat leadership as a performance staged for an external audience: Hit all your numbers, consistently grow sales, and all the while make it look effortless. But composure built on top of an unexamined interior will crack eventually, usually at the worst possible moment. Inside Out leadership starts from the premise that how a leader relates to their interior self is the alchemy for how they will relate to everyone else. Get that wrong, and no amount of strategic polish fixes it.
How to do it
Here are three takeaways that Meric shared with me about his Inside Out leadership crossroads.
1. Self-inquiry isn’t indulgent—it’s structural. Meric, founder of the leadership community IVY, has spent 16 years building cohorts, peer groups, and rituals designed to force leaders into continuous self-reflection, rather than assuming that they magically start out with heightened self-awareness. His own inflection point came from a shattering eureka moment that changed how he led. The lesson for the rest of us is that self-knowledge needs scaffolding. That scaffolding can be in the form of a recurring practice or community that interrupts the autopilot of external performance long enough for something honest to surface.
2. Lead with outcomes, then arrive at the inner work. Meric told me that when he’s talking to business leaders, starting with “get yourself right first” rarely lands. What works is starting with the result you want for your clients or your team and then tracing your steps back until you arrive at the question of who you need to be internally to deliver it. Inside Out leadership doesn’t require leaders to denounce their ambition but it does ask them to trace their ambition back to its source.
3. Treat the confusing middle as data, not shame. Meric’s most consistent finding, after asking hundreds of leaders what experience made them who they are, is that the answer is almost never a win. I can certainly relate to that. Instead, the pivotal moment that crystallizes most of our identity is the interaction or failure that could have broken us but instead became the material for constructing who we are as a person. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who championed the concept of psychological safety, calls these intelligent failures “an undesired result in new territory.” It’s not carelessness, but the essential residue that comes from taking real risks. When organizations punish the mess, they risk missing the growth hiding deep inside.
As AI absorbs more of the analytical and execution work leaders used to own, Meric expects the premium on this kind of interior, human-to-human work to rise, not fall—in the way live concerts have only grown more valuable in an age of infinite streaming. The instruments may be getting cheaper but people will pay for presence.
The next time your company or team hits its own version of Meric’s 2017, remember what Meric’s forum told him: You are not the small thing carrying the big thing. You are the big thing, so lead from there.
Owned by a retired history teacher devoted to preserving its past and charming character for nearly 40 years, it has an uncertain future.
A look at how OpenAI’s finance department blends strategy, AI agents, and judgment.
Global employee stress has reached a record high, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report. The report found that 44% of the world’s workforce reported significant daily stress.
The Negative Experience Index, which trac…
When people think of entrepreneurs, they often associate them with words like “go-getters”, “obsessed with growth”, and proponents of “hustle culture.” They might talk about the importance of mental health and well-…
Middle managers accounted for nearly a third of all layoffs in 2023, up from around 20% five years earlier. In 2024, Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organizations would be using AI to flatten their structures, eliminating more than half of their middle management positions. And that prediction is being borne out by the data. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that manager head count fell by 6.1% between May 2022 and May 2025, while in Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025 survey, “41% of employees told us that their organization has slashed management layers.”
There have always been periods when companies are laying people off. But there is something different about this latest round. Gallup data show the average number of direct reports per manager jumped from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, which is a near-50% increase since 2013. This means that the departing managers aren’t being replaced; their teams are simply absorbed into someone else’s span of control. To put it bluntly, it’s not just jobs that are disappearing, but roles.
Last year, I argued that companies should reimagine the middle manager’s role rather than getting rid of it. Some are doing that, but most are not—and if you’re in the middle of your career, with real experience behind you but too many working years ahead to simply wait this out, then you can’t afford to wait and find out what’s going to happen to your job. This piece is about what you need to be doing instead.
The problem with “getting back out there”
After any rejection, whether romantic or professional, the standard advice is the same: “Get back out there.”
Notice that this advice contains a hidden assumption: that there still exists. But increasingly, there is no there there. The coordination, reporting, and monitoring work that filled a middle manager’s calendar is being absorbed by AI. The traditional career ladder is disappearing, so the instruction to “Get back to where you were” points people at a target that has been removed from the map.
When a job disappears, you can wait for the market to come back. But when a role disappears, there’s nothing to wait for. So the way forward is not to search harder for the old destination. Rather, it’s to stop trying to recover the past, and instead start building the future. Here is how to do just that.
Run the recovery as a portfolio
The traditional mindset is to stake it all on a single bet: Wait till you land the equivalent role. But this is a mistake. Why? Two reasons.
First, nobody knows which roles will still exist in two years—not you, not the experts, and certainly not the companies doing the cutting. And when you can’t predict which door will open, putting everything on one guess is less a plan than a high-risk gamble.
Second, the single bet costs you money while you wait—every month it doesn’t land, savings shrink and the résumé ages—whereas small bets with immediate payoffs give you the chance to learn and potentially earn additional income. Each small bet tells you something about what people will actually pay you for, and which new direction has legs.
The solution is the same as it is for companies: Instead of staking your career recovery on a single bet, run the rebuild as an innovation portfolio—a collection of different bets with different risks and different payoffs, weighted to fit your circumstances. If you need income urgently, load up on sure things (fractional work, contracting, consulting in the domain you know cold) while keeping one genuine moon shot alive. If you have runway and appetite, tilt toward the bigger bets. The shape is yours to choose; what’s not optional is the spread.
This applies even if you still have the salary, because when your income, career, and professional identity all depend on one job in a declining role class, you haven’t avoided the single bet—you’re living it. That dependency can breed panic, and diversifying while employed is the best way to make your next move a choice rather than a scramble.
From titles to the things themselves
The instinct after a layoff is to keep introducing yourself by the old title. And when roles are stable, this makes sense; in such an economy, “VP of Operations” is an efficient shorthand that signals pedigree. But the same three words now name a role class in decline, and rather than pedigree and quality, they signal cost.
The fix is translation—breaking the title down into the skills and experience underneath it. You ran workshops: That’s training design. You onboarded new managers: That’s coaching. You untangled the vendor crisis nobody else would touch: That’s negotiation under pressure. Sit down and name them, one by one, with evidence for each.
Do this and you solve two problems at once. One is yours: After 20 years of the title answering the question for you, you may not actually know everything you offer. The other belongs to the market. Employers need to understand how you can help them, and they won’t do this work on your behalf. If the page doesn’t say “training design,” nobody infers it for you.
Learn the thing that took the job
The first two moves share a limit: They work with what you already have. The portfolio spreads your old skills across more bets. The translation puts new labels on your old wins. Do both perfectly, and you’re still offering the market the same person it just said no to. At some point, the rebuild needs something new in the offer. And the most valuable new thing is hiding in plain sight: learning to use the technology that took your role.
Displaced managers are not starting from zero. Getting good work out of AI is mostly a management problem—you have to know what to hand over and what to keep, you have to know what to double-check, and you have to know where things usually go wrong, and when to step in.
Lots of younger workers know the tools, but they’ve never run anything. Lots of managers have run things for decades, but they won’t touch the tools. The person who can do both—who can manage people and AI together—is someone the market is going to reward. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will test candidates for both AI skills and for AI-free skills like “problem-solving, evidence evaluation, and judgment without human assistance.” This is a huge opportunity for the middle manager.
Four steps to rebuild
Whether you’re rebuilding already or starting early, here are four steps you can start today
1. Diversify your portfolio—starting this week, with one new bet matched to your gap. Savings dwindling? Paid work this month, prestige irrelevant. Runway? The bet you’ve been circling. Still employed? Your salary is the sure thing—add one your employer doesn’t control.
2. Write the no-titles inventory. One page of what you can do, with evidence for each claim—and not a job title anywhere on it. Build it by translating wins: The workshops you ran become training design, the crisis you untangled becomes negotiation under pressure, the managers you onboarded become coaching.
3. Rebuild one workflow with AI. Status reporting, scheduling, budget tracking—pick a task you run, or used to, and rebuild it with AI tools. A lesson and a demo in one.
4. Teach what you built. Walk a colleague through it, run a lunch-and-learn, write a short post about what worked. Teaching turns private learning into public proof—and it’s the fastest way to become known for the new thing instead of the old title.
The canary in the coal mine
Middle managers are not outliers. Rather, they are early warning signs of a change that is coming to the world of work. As AI absorbs more of the coordination and analysis that define white-collar work, more professionals in more fields will discover that there is no “there” to get back to.
In a world where roles are disappearing, rebuilding stops being a crisis response and becomes a permanent professional competency—something you practice before you really need it. And the professionals who start now are the ones who will flourish in the future.
