What have your managers stopped doing?

According to Gartner’s latest HR research, 79% of CHROs say their managers are overwhelmed, and one in four managers would step out of management if they could. This is happening while most organisations are rolling out more AI to make managers more productive.

One likely reason: we add and never subtract. AI makes the reporting faster, so managers produce more reports. It drafts the feedback, so we ask for feedback more often. New tools, new dashboards, new rituals, and the old work stays in place.

And even when a manager wants to stop something, much of it isn’t theirs to stop. The approval steps, the review cycles, the reporting templates, the handoffs between teams that never quite work. A lot of that sits with us in HR.

Here’s an exercise to run with a few of your managers.

Step 1: List what’s been added. What’s landed on their plate in the last 12 months? New tools, processes, reporting, meetings, expectations from AI rollouts.

Step 2: Ask what they’ve stopped. Same 12 months. Most will have a long first list and a very short second one.

Step 3: Split it into two piles. For everything they’d like to stop, ask: is this yours to drop, or does the organisation require it? Their own habits go in one pile. Approvals, processes, policies, and broken collaboration go in the other.

Step 4: Take the second pile back to HR. That’s your list. For each item, ask who owns it, why it still exists, and what would happen if it went. Paste it into whichever tool you use (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot):

Here are processes and requirements our managers say they’d stop if they could: [paste list]. For each, help me figure out what it was originally meant to achieve, whether that goal still matters, and whether there’s a simpler way to get the same result. Flag which ones I could remove or simplify within a quarter.

Step 5: Protect the time you free up. Coaching, developing people, handling ambiguity, building trust. Put the freed hours there on purpose, or the next rollout will fill them.

Thoughts?