Thursday 10 September 2026 · 15:00–17:00 · Live online · Free
Attn Middle Managers: AI is coming for the half of your job you do best
Two hours on what is happening to project managers, product owners and team leads in the middle of Nordic technical organisations, and which part of the work will still be yours in three years.
Free to attend. Registration required. Live on Zoom.Why now
Your layer is being cut, and the roles that survive are being written differently
This part isn’t my opinion. It’s what the public numbers have been saying for about three years, and 2026 is the year it stopped being a trend and became the org chart.
The named examples are easy to find. Citi took its management layers from thirteen down to eight in the 2023 reorganisation. Google told its own people last August that it had 35% fewer managers running small teams than a year earlier, with many of them moved into individual contributor roles.
Here’s the part most people haven’t seen yet. The roles are coming back, and they’re coming back written differently.
- Operations leaders, rescoped from oversight to systems thinking.
- Regional and branch managers, from supervising a location to reading analytics and designing the customer experience.
- HR compliance, from enforcing policy to workforce strategy.
One requirement runs through every one of those rewritten job descriptions, and it’s the ability to lead by influence rather than by title.
Korn Ferry looked at the companies that cut too deep and landed on redesigning the leadership roles themselves as the fix, and their own survey found 41% of employees saying their organisation had slashed management layers, 43% saying their leaders aren’t aligned, and 37% saying the missing managers had left them feeling directionless.
So the question worth two hours of your Thursday is a narrow one. If the coordination half of your job is being handed to a tool, and the layer above you is being rebuilt around judgment and influence, which half of your job are you currently getting better at?
The visible half of the work got cheap. The half that held everything together never showed up in a report, so nobody thought to protect it.
The technical half was always the measurable one. Status, plans, documentation, the reporting line, the part of the week you could point at and say that is what I did. Stakeholder management, the relationships you keep alive across three teams, the work of getting people who don’t answer to you to move in the same direction, all of that sat in the same job and never appeared in a single metric. That was where the value was, and it was invisible. It’s also the half still standing.
Sources: Live Data Technologies (via CNBC, Jul 2025; Bloomberg, Mar 2024) · Gartner, Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2025 and Beyond, Oct 2024 · Gallup, Span of Control, Jan 2026 · Revelio Labs (via ATD, Mar 2025) · DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025 · Korn Ferry Workforce 2025 Survey · Fortune, May 2026 (Citi) · CNBC, Aug 2025 (Google).
It feels like you are squeezed in the middle
How many of these sound familiar?
- “Figure it out” was the whole handover I got.
- Ask two people on my team what the top priority is this quarter, and you’ll get two confident, different answers.
- My week goes on translating between what the executives announced and what my team can execute.
- The project is green in my report, and everyone working on it knows it’s red.
- I can’t hire, I can’t fire, I can’t move the deadline, and the deadline carries my name.
- I’m being chased for a delay that came out of a decision I escalated eight weeks ago and I’m still waiting on.
- The actions from the retro have been “in progress” for four sprints, and nobody says it out loud.
- My meetings are silent, and the conversation that mattered happens at the coffee machine ten minutes later.
- I ask how things are going and get “det rullar på,” and I’ve learned that carries no information at all.
- The last person who challenged the plan in public got called “not a team player,” and the whole room took the note.
- My project depends on five people who don’t report to me and don’t answer my emails.
- My proposal died in a meeting I wasn’t invited to, presented by someone who had read half of it.
- My technical argument was right, and it lost anyway.
- I rehearsed the hard conversation in the car and delivered the soft version in the room.
- I know exactly which conversation I’m avoiding right now.
Did you check four or more? This session is for you.
Register nowThursday 10 September. Two hours, interactive.Who this is for
Formal and informal leaders in the middle
Project managers, product owners, PMO leads, scrum masters, team leads and line managers. The people who translate strategy into execution and carry the weight when it gets lost on the way down, usually in a technical organisation somewhere between 50 and 500 people.
If you’re an executive looking at your middle layer from above, that conversation happens on 8 October in Gothenburg. Drop me a line at florin@florinlungu.com and I’ll send you the details.
Who is running this
Florin Lungu
Florin spent 12 years as a project manager and team leader inside Volvo and Renault. He knows how it feels from the inside, where your results depend on people who don’t report to you, priorities shift without warning, and the person making the decision has never done your job.
He left the corporate world and spent the next decade working with leaders and organisations across the Nordics, finding the same six structural gaps in every growing company he walked into. He’s writing a book about it.
Maxwell Leadership Certified · Cialdini Institute Accredited · ex-Volvo · ex-Renault
What I’ve been seeing
The part of the job that made you valuable is the part being automated first
Years ago I was running a gearbox software project at Volvo with a Japanese supplier on the line. My French colleague Guillaume was certain they’d understood the change we’d asked for, because they kept saying yes. I wasn’t so sure, so I asked them how they were going to implement it, and they described something completely different from what we thought we’d agreed. We put the line on mute and laughed, because one question had just saved us about six weeks of work and a serious amount of money.
Here’s what I know. A transcription tool would have captured that meeting perfectly. Every word, every yes, a tidy summary in my inbox before I got back to my desk. And it would have missed the whole thing, because the problem was never in the words.
That’s the line I want to look at with you for two hours on 10 September. The coordination layer, the status reports, the meeting notes, the backlog grooming, the documentation, the endless translating up and down, is being handed over faster than most people in the middle have noticed. It’s the visible half of the job. It’s also the half that’s easiest to give away.
What’s left is the work that was always harder and never got measured. Getting a room to say the difficult thing out loud. Making a decision stick after everyone has logged off. Moving work through people who don’t report to you (which is most of your week, once you look at where the hours go).
In June I ran this diagnostic live with a room of Nordic middle managers. Not one person said their authority matched their responsibility. Not one said the honest version of the conversation shows up in the room. Seventy percent said their team agrees on something and then nothing moves, and ninety percent said the same issue keeps coming back.
These are working observations from the field, not polished conclusions. I’ll show you the data, you’ll add yours to it live, and you’ll leave knowing where you sit.
Built from practice
What people said
“What sets Florin apart is his ability to translate complex leadership challenges into simple, structured frameworks that are easy to apply. His chain reaction from clarity to influence, combined with concrete 1% shifts, made the content both practical and relevant.”
Barbara Klein
VP, Passion for Projects Congress
“Several times throughout the session I smiled as I recognized the situations he described, combined with the simple, but powerful twists. I found the keynote really inspirational and I will use the learnings in my own leadership.”
Katarina Strömberg
President, PMI Sweden Chapter
“Working with Florin, I quickly realized how effective his approach was. I learned how to recognize and adjust my communication to fit the styles and needs of others, which has helped me connect in a more meaningful way.”
Marian Nijhof
Project Leader, IKEA
Before you register
One afternoon won’t future-proof your career
Two hours will show you where you stand, and it will give you something you can use in your next one-to-one. Building the half of the job that can’t be handed to a tool takes a process, and I’ll say more about what that process looks like when we’re together on the tenth.
You’ll leave with something either way.
What people ask
Two questions I get every time
Will it be recorded?
I record it for my own records and the recording doesn’t go out. If you want this session, join it live.
Is this another session about AI tools?
I won’t show you a single prompt. This is about what happens to your role when the visible half of it gets handed over, and what you do about that.
Register
Two hours, on a Thursday afternoon
Thursday 10 September 2026, 15:00 to 17:00 Stockholm and Copenhagen time. Live on Zoom. Free to attend, registration required.
Bring the thing you’re stuck on this week. You’ll get more out of it.
More to come.
Florin