Building Bench Strength When the Entry Level Changes

We heard recently from a leader whose organization was changing how it sells and how it builds relationships with customers. On the surface, it had nothing to do with technology.

In the process, the job of the people leading their front-line teams had changed underneath them. The skills that used to make someone good in that role were still needed, but they were no longer enough. Those leaders were now expected to coach their people, to influence without relying on authority, and to make decisions without all the information they would have liked to have.

None of those expectations existed in the role a few years ago.

That shift is one of the clearest things we’re hearing from organizations now. 

Change, transformation, and AI adoption are no longer arriving as separate initiatives. They’re arriving together, and the result is that roles are being redesigned while people are still in them.

The Skills Moved Up the Ladder

When technology takes on more of the routine work in a role, what’s left tends to be the part that requires judgment. That’s true at every level, and in many ways it’s a good thing. People spend less time on tasks that a tool can do and more time on the work that actually needs a person.

But it raises a question that most organizations haven’t had to answer before. If the job increasingly runs on judgment, where does someone learn that judgment in the first place?

Where Judgment Has Come From

For most of us, the answer has been the early work. The reports nobody wanted to write, the first drafts, the reconciliations, the routine calls, the work that was tedious and occasionally thankless. It was also where people got their hands dirty and learned how the business actually worked. 

You learned what a normal number looked like by seeing a few hundred of them. You learned what a difficult client sounded like before you were the one responsible for keeping them.

That foundational knowledge was built early in a career, usually without anyone setting out to teach it. People learned it simply by doing the work.

Many of those tasks are now the easiest to automate or reshape, and for good reasons, but that doesn’t mean development has to stop. It means the learning that used to come with the work may now need to be designed on purpose.

Thinking a Few Years Ahead

This is worth thinking about now, while the shift is still early. In the first year, the efficiency gains are what everyone notices. The effect on development takes longer to show, often not until someone needs to step into a bigger role.

That’s when bench strength becomes a practical question. When the next role opens, will the people who would normally step up be ready for it? If they’ve built their experience differently than earlier generations did, organizations will want to be confident that they’ve still had the chance to develop the judgment the role requires. Some may find that keeping another person on, and investing in their growth, was the better long-term decision.

This connects directly to succession. We wrote last month that succession is a practice rather than an event, and that building a leader still takes about as long as it always did. That practice depends on a pipeline. As the work that has traditionally fed that pipeline changes, it’s worth deciding deliberately where the next generation of leaders will come from.

The same shift affects promotions. Deciding when someone is ready for the next level has always been a judgment call. When levels are shifting and the peer group someone used to be measured against has changed, readiness can be harder for a person to demonstrate and harder for a leader to recognize. It may be worth revisiting how readiness is assessed, so that promising people aren’t overlooked simply because their path looks different.

What We’re Still Working Through

We want to be honest that this is a question we’re still working through, and we don’t think anyone has fully answered it.

For a large organization, carrying early-career talent can be framed as an investment. For a small or mid-sized business, that case can be harder to make. When a tool can do the work, the cost of a person learning to do it is easy to see, and the value of having that person ready in three years is harder to put a number on.

There’s also a human side that deserves attention. Many of the people entering the workforce now are approaching AI with hesitation, and much of that comes from a concern that there won’t be jobs left for them. That concern is worth considering seriously. The organizations that answer it well will be the ones that can show early-career people where and how they’ll learn, not only what they’ll be asked to do.

Where Organizations Can Start

There isn’t a single answer, but there are a few places organizations can start.

• When automating or redesigning a task, ask what it has been teaching the people who did it, and decide where they’ll learn that now.
• Name the judgment a role depends on, so it can be developed deliberately rather than assumed.
• Treat apprenticeship as a design choice. If early-career people are going to gain institutional knowledge, someone has to be responsible for passing it on, and it has to be built into the work rather than left to chance.
• Revisit how readiness for promotion is assessed when the shape of the role has changed.

The common thread is intention. In the past, much of this happened on its own because the work itself created the learning. Going forward, it’s more likely to happen well when someone plans for it.

Where This Lands

Leaders are being asked to coach, to influence, and to decide under uncertainty, often all at once. Those skills can be developed, and they’re worth investing in.

The harder part is making sure today’s early-career people get the chance to build the same skills, even if their path looks different from the one their managers took. That’s work we’ll keep doing alongside our clients.

AJO partners with organizations on leadership development, coaching, HR consulting, and career transition, including helping leaders and teams prepare for roles that are still taking shape.