I once had a manager who went to the extreme of dictating my emails. Not just what to write, but what to think, what to say, and what to do.
At first, I appreciated the guidance. Over time, I became detached. And I slipped into what I can only describe as minimum effective mode. I thought:
What's the point of putting real thought into this when it will be rewritten anyway?
Every email, recommendation, even the smallest of decisions.
My manager probably believed they were helping ensuring quality, reducing mistakes and staying in control. But obviously, the result was coming out the opposite.
Instead of building capability, they were building dependency.
Which brings me to a question every manager should ask themselves:
Are you a Gravity Well Manager, or a Ridge Manager?
A gravity well pulls everything toward its center.
As a gravity well manager, most, if not all, decisions gravitate back to you. The team becomes highly dependent on you, and eventually your capacity becomes the bottleneck.
A ridge works in the opposite way, pushing things outward toward the edges.
As a ridge manager, you set the direction, and define the guardrails. Then you let decisions flow to the team. Decisions happen closer to where the work happens. People take ownership, and dependency reduces.
Becoming a ridge can feel like losing control because you're handing decisions to people who may get them wrong.
But that's the point.
Those decisions aren't yours to solve anymore.
You're still there to step in when needed.
But your role shifts from making every decision to helping others make good decisions.
Less telling what to do. More teaching how to think.
Less answer-giver, more judgment-builder.
This is not new. But it becomes even more important today.
A few years ago, employees would ask: What should I do? And you would provide the answer.
Today, they increasingly ask: AI gave me three options. Which one should I choose?
Now you have three options to review increasing your work.
Many managers are unintentionally becoming bigger gravity wells. AI helps teams generate ideas, analyses, presentations, emails, and recommendations faster than ever, but the final decision still gets pulled back to the manager.
In fact, when I look back at that manager who dictated my emails, I realize the real issue wasn't control. It was that all judgment flowed through that one person. Nothing was allowed to leave the system without being validated by them.
Many organizations risk recreating that same pattern with AI.
There’s never been a better time to become a real manager. You are no longer the only person with the answers.
The real opportunity is in developing the judgment in the team to enable them to make more good decisions on their own.
When knowledge is available to everyone through AI, a leader's value shifts from being the source of answers to creating an environment where people can make good decisions without waiting for them.
And perhaps that's the lesson I wish my former manager had learned.
So ask yourself this:
- Are you pulling decisions in, or pushing them out?
PS: The Manager is a dispatch for managers navigating the gap between what they were told the job was and what it actually is. If this was useful, forward it to someone in their first management role.