You Already Know What Good Management Looks Like. You Just Don’t Have the Bandwith to Do it.

Your 1:1 starts in five minutes. You open the doc where you’ve to jotted down notes over the course of the month so you’ll have something to trigger your memory before the actual conversation. It’s unfortunately sparse. You mentally kick yourself for not being better at capturing notes. After a deep breath, you think: You know this person, you like them, there’s got to be something you can say. You rack your brain for what they’ve done particularly well or where they need to grow, but with only a few minutes to go, you simply can’t think of anything meaningful. So you’ve got a choice. Reschedule and promise yourself to be more prepared next time, or walk in with nothing.

There was a time when I’d hear a version of that story from a client and think: They just need to learn how to do 1:1s so that they’ll run more smoothly. They need a template to fill in, a process to follow, a list of questions to pull from. What I’ve learned from more than a decade of training and coaching managers and their teams is that knowing is not the problem.

You know what a good meeting agenda looks like. You know you should delegate the task that’s keeping you from more valuable work. You know you should give feedback and coaching instead of redoing work yourself. And you probably know how to do these things decently well. You've read the books. You've heard the podcasts. The gap isn't in your head, it's in your Tuesday, when the meeting is in five minutes and the doc is still blank.

None of this is complicated. And yet, it’s human nature to avoid it. We don’t have time between back-to-back meetings to come up with a thoughtful agenda, so we walk in cold. We can’t remember all of the tips and strategies for how to give feedback that lands, so we avoid the conversation. We “know” that if we delegate, it’s just going to come back to us anyways, so we don’t even try.

And then there’s AI, with all the promise to make us more efficient, more productive, and it does. But as managers, that’s not our only goal. Our job is to tend to the people, and having AI write a better email simply isn’t enough.

The good news is that AI can do much more than that. It can help us do the human parts of our job better by holding best practices, facilitating our thinking, remembering what we’ve forgotten, and streamlining the process. This isn’t cheating. It’s leveraging AI for what it’s best at while freeing you up to do what you’re best at.

So what does that actually look like in practice, not as a productivity hack, but as something that changes what you do on a real Tuesday?

Imagine, again, that its five minutes before your 1:1. You open your trusty AI and ask, “I’ve got a 1:1 with Mamie in five minutes. Help me prep an agenda.” The wheel spins for a few seconds, then produces a document ready to go. It’s structured the agenda according to the 1:1 best practices you’ve trained it on. It’s filled in the sections on Wins and Growth Opportunities with the comments you’ve shared with it over the past month. It’s populated thoughtful questions you can ask to stimulate conversation. You give it a once over, make a few additions and tweaks, and walk into that 1:1 fully prepared.

This is only possible with a trained AI that actually knows you, you’re practices and your team. Ask an untrained AI to help you prep a 1:1 and you'll get a bland agenda with nothing personal included. Ask one that actually knows this person, their patterns, what's come up in recent conversations, and how you like to run 1:1, and you get something specific enough to be useful. The advantage was never a smarter AI. It's your own context, built in.

None of this replaces your judgment or your relationships, the things people actually respect you for. It replaces the blank page at 11pm, the version of you that's too tired to find the right words, the delay that turns three weeks into six.

I'm walking through the unique ways managers can use AI to be more prepared and present in a free, live masterclass. Three identical sessions so you can pick whichever fits your calendar: Friday, Sept 11 at 2pm ET, Tuesday, Sept 15 at 1pm ET, or Thursday, Sept 17 at 3pm. Come see it in action. No pressure to do anything after. Just come, take what's useful, and see for yourself what a real AI partner feels like on the work that keeps slipping.